Grandness upon ye a rich rich feel to have somethings kept to me now by kept to others, or the possibility of, firstNote on Tundrabeing done up at present by the lovely DoubleCross Press folks, now, as have just heard down the grapevines, my o n e to be done nicely, also hand bound, also individualized ( no mass churns out into the economy or brusque product without soul power ) by the always-already cool people over at Inpatient Press. o n e, pieces of which were put up there back in March , co-won their 1st chapbook alongside Dorothy Howard's Troll. All but two of the chapters of o n e are free to be seen smeared atop the internet, but the entirety of this calm, and stable line of poems will probably arouse me a tear dropped. Excerpts from o n e over at: Opon Excerpts from o n e over at: N/A Excerpts from o n e over at: Gesture August the month wherein these two vessels unfurl themselves at greater bodies of who knows what.
/ These dudes / /
Brent House has a couple of searing vast intimate pieces ( these 'Pastoral' pieces initiate the temporaral/metonymic/scene inventory-mounded from attributes/ objects/people heaped capable by shared characteristics, the intrinsic surrealism and shock of sense that H. Crane, Rimbaud do leaves one in awe, then critical, then awe again, then reverence, + euphoria, synaesthesias that skew out new behaviors, tint, prismatic standard, + formally organic/Duncan more with smirk/cummings with more intent, + lamentation takes these expanses as their valid field, as do supplications, these templates invoked ) in the newer, skinner, more frequent Kenyon Review, do it to it, get at it, and snatch it up or go the Vander library to read it for free as this dude did, dude. Other poem, other 'pastoral' poem of. / Found this poem-vid-poem over at Moving Poems, wanting to make a vid-poem-vid for 'Note on Tundra' soonly from DoubleCross Press:
'...I wake among walls...'
June, again, again. Settled to it rickshaws of the shuttled, the cacophony here, good god the sorrow, stationed downtown where simple walk is moves beset upon by all sides, near the river, the river side quiet and brackish, the other commerce and completely transient and until, this quadrant, this quadrant is vacuum, is IED, where people go to from. CMA done, Bonnaroo done. Opposite side river here. / Now got them 'Ulysses S Grant.' chunks ( separate hanging land & projections ) over at the Lynchian Gobbet. Check out my melodies. Heard 'Bring Out The Body The Suit Is On' is over with Rain, Party, & Disaster Society and forevermore. Read it in like ten seconds if you got it to spare.
If you got it to spare.
/ If you got it to spare, / If you got it to be spare make it spare,
Teensy nug of a piece over withThe Rain, Dance, & Party Society, not the rain-dance-party society. Small sci-fi thing about China ( & thus us, that relation of resources, as with Interstellar, in which textbooks then are corrected to account for the non-propaganda of competing nation's resources down to their self-annihilation/depletion ), survival training in space, resource endurance, linguistics, terrestrial finitude, all the things that run out and the manner in which we wrap qualitative things in our lives around them to gather context ( thus made unreal by an irrational/incorrect relational gauge ), but the idea is I think just bombed up tightly in the title - "Bring Out The Body The Suit Is On."
**Space/spatial music by FEMALE CENOBYTE'S DESCENT INTO KOMODO GARDEN
/ Next organized readings in town - M a y 28: Poet's Corner, Scarritt-Bennett Center, Vander adjacent - Fondren Hall, Brenda Butka, 7pm M a y 29: Lyrical Brew, Vander Barnes & Noble, Chrstina Stoddard, Elizabeth Townsend, Donika Ross, 7pm
Gobbet, RC Miller type, has gratuitous foresight, amongst Lynchian bound, scariest Mr. Eddy, mad sax solo, slow zoom VHS real estate shots, lightning cell transformation prisoners, and voided musics dialogue at the party when really I'm there right now prowess, by with some of my horizontalities, "Ulysses S Grant." - "Separate Hanging Land" + "Projections," may exist outwardly, as old as time the horizontal is seen, nothing subterranean. Mid-June is the word on when. *** the whole movie /
And this Boston Review 'Discovery' prize winner by Jenny George is a gem to me of the motive kind, the moving, bustled, furtive one, at once immersive but open at its tips (the manner in which I sometimes remember Brazil's cover), entrance with connective harkenings to what is its context, arrival conduit. *** Here is that w h o l e movie
/ M i s s e d readings: Eastside Storytellin' 59 with Chance Chambers, Lilly Hiatt, May 5**** Eastside Storytellin' 60 with Matthew Leavitt Brown, Dewveall, May 19***** (* Dang, sorry Chuck) U n m i s s e d readings: E t A l. Poetry Readings with Ericka Suhl, Tiana Clark( Kristi Maxwell, alas, was not able to make it )
Long awaited Word For/Word 25, is released for your catching. Dig.
/ Lylas show went very smoothly with tarmac sized headphones booted up to the back computer in the tiny light spill, look for these fat cats around Nashville, be following them because they sneak their shows in and sink back into the night, guerrilla with a 'u.' The experiential aspects of their live playing far outweighs the what would probably be less intuitive, less rambunctious takes recorded. Thanks to the sound guy at Stone Fox for letting me bootleg and the Lylas gents for agreeing. As 'P i d e r IV, THE VIGOROUS ISSUE, comes together Lylas will buoy our poets to stain dim layerings rested atop us, that which we breathe but do not see. / This is exactimundo for poetry place land people communities citizens quotes and quandary - Davy Knittle's "Simple Machines."So are more of Davy's things. Like. Like. Heavy appreciation for Alaskan Alyse Knorr's pieces in the newer Caketrain, they are off rail, heartened (perhaps eerie, but necessarily so via content, unlimbering upon these topics calls forward a solitude, an isolation, the conjuring of the notion of space filled by nothing but our being in it, ya know - Space), bared with a kind of trust and whimsicality (at the very least grammatically, formally, and structurally) that lets me slide with it, enough to keep hidden some things from me, enough for me to want to spend more time, to re-read, recommend. *musical agreements - Lower Dens new guy Escape From Evil yah. /
/
Unmissed readings
4/20, Vander Alumni Reading, Vander // Melissa Cundieff Pexa harnessing with glove an imagistic materiality to pave along a lyric, biblical, layering / linger on the sex ( not language ) / "...future ex..." / "...my mouth a hook my lips sewn to the air…" / WORM WINGS BEAK MOUTH FRAGILITY (uniform uncallused being) / informality ahead, "sky's clear edge" / "horse batting dust out of its eye" is memory you are being / Unique though formed from pastiche but inventive from bondages of form / firmly situated temporally-spatially but they become violated by with logic to extend beyond to capture… not beginning poetry…Not Beginning Poetry… her poetry does not begin poetry but becomes poetry (that origin situation where outset is parallax, indicated of change and measure) / "the sun like a burst fist" / or soft poetry tradition form / CHAIRED / the body, is more, the body, "someday I will die from you like a stitch dissolved into you…" / Zachary Greenberg, no more of this arrival, amidst the body of the the things, the bodies of the thing, "paperless street: - 'all the wet paint is not wet today' (that churned toss as up against is with, as light shines even the light device, so a closed, intimate, adjacent knowing) / MATISSE poems / "she that does no answer to rudder will answer to rocks" a continuous arrival, processions of processions, a certain amongst as lay, or with, or comfort, or common to be easy but still outside from us, away, at a distance as seeming, or seen, Kaplanesque, "us together shutting the fuck up…mouth full of stones…with swallowed faces" / better interactivity of reading I've seen, honesty, creativity, interactive measure, so too with Mr. Fiction Matthew Baker.
4/24, Wyatt Prunty, Adam Vines, Parnassus // The wisdoms, goodness, the wisdoms shooting from this reading. Prunty, a gracious, imposing aura and height, does not talk long with strangers, though mentioned Proust and the texture of language toward instigating/sustaining physical/emotional states as a different factor from fiction, as a mandatory one of poetry / a rhythmic storytelling, of good fiction "swallowed oceans of air…that when he woke he could not close his hands"… as a DYLAN THOMAS / an old easy true, & certain ease to agree, a prose poetry to narrative with a longstanding, long taking strength / again the alignments of comedy and not quite its opposite, its cures in poetry - certainty in the gravity, the gravity of the thing, these two ends of an arc splitting forms fiction/poetry / as where poetry can have peripheral, narrative, listings, anecdotes, details, context framing-re-framing, contextless, surreal, definitions, redefinitions fiction must present and enact some of these things or it is failed - poetry is a thing whose presence and realization indicates a lack of nothing / "some smoker working backwards from his light", "which now you join", exact ruminating calm, attached, dialogue enters to spine a humor, "the modesty with which thieves touch objects they mean to take…that is my business…"/ Vines had wanted to chat up compositional methods as he had stated his as tangible to the point of refusing to type into his computer poems on their way to becoming them, wanted to mention the Wordsworth detail I heard that he would walk and compose in head and walk until the thing were composed, the duration of the walk tied to the work of the composition of the poem / curt, honesties, intentional-grip, a similarity to HOCKNEY / alabama coltrane black snake / "seams of…" regional mythos, bioregionalism, bend toward place, elegy, storytelling (that south), holds memory to mold it / KIN, "black contracting," "history of flaws…"
5/3, POETree Event, Porch Writer's Collective, The Skillery, Ciona Rouse, Chance Chambers, Tiana Clark, Walker Bass, Christina Stoddard, Kana Kavon + Alita Barry, Patricia Alice Albrecht, Leslie LeChance. Thought missed about hal of the event, was good to see everyone the rest of were, Chance, Ciona, Leslie, Walker. What sun, what amidst moving and packing cardboard boxes and a few beers in the middle. Much thanks for the initiations of the season to curtain the outdoors with poetry flags - "I should have been a pair of ragged claws. Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
Missed Readings
4/24: Lyrical Brew; really wanted to make this reading, though poetry scheduling conflicts are ambivalently spiked with regret/absence and enjoys/attendance. Dave Wright, Anne Charlton, Edgar Kunz.
4/23: Poet's Corner at Scarritt Bennett (Vander) w/ Jamie Collins. Straight up walked in as the last word of the reading sizzled out, sounded like "…gorge…"
Upcoming Readings
Check Chuck Beard's run down of things litty to do around Nash, and check
5/19 E t A l. Poetry Readings, Kristi Maxwell, Ericka Suhl, Tiana Clark. Free, 8ish.
E t A l. III went swimmingly, absolutely swimmingly, Andrea, Spencer, Gary careened along a velvet arc for and upon us all, those sweet faces that showed and unknown and known and talked to and untalked to. Thanks to them coming out to have the night for us, may I return the favor in any way I can, physical labors included, valet services across the country perhaps.
Next E t A l. reading will be an astonish triad of readers - Visiting poet Kristi Maxwell(!), whose TO INSIST ON THE 'SOMENESS' OF EVERY ASSEMBLAGE has embedded itself into my subconscious since the day I read the word 'someness' then bootlegged it in .pdf is one of the coolest contemporary poetics works I've lately read/heard about ( + J. Frost's Martyr, Young Americans ); Ericka Suhl and her EXHALATIONS took my lungholds last I heard excerpts at last October's Regenerates event; Tiana Clark, nashvillian poet whose fervored, intimate, genuine, honed form structure but turning within pieces are a joy to be covered with. I am first provoked then you can too.
/
Unmissed - the 2nd year MFA reading, Vander - Saw em all read, Anders the mesmerizing storytelling orations, certainty with lived experiences in a body contained, skin against the cold by mountain the peaks of which hurt or red the skin with the water clear and fish and torture in the fire by seasons there; Birdsall felt amongst the fiction most successful fiction as her common, urban, manner of tale betrayed exactly what she intended, a comedy of absurd and real and vice-like perturbations, attendance the fact that fiction most successfully runs at comedy ( uncertainty franticly ) and poetry toward frightening declarations ( pedagogy ); Theo U. his straight line narrative arc, fish in the sea man on the boat sensory tale was like a summer free and laborious all body, lived binaries, minimalist non-existensial solipsisms were refreshing I thought, a bit quick paced in delivery but such the manners of a mass reading and perhaps youth (though 4+1 years is what I heard as inside joke ); Simon H. had it, the inside dope on the actions and processes of the bad men, the good ones, the straightening and crooked dedicated ones, imagery smashed up the scene as it might should, and the suspension from the will to explain ( and thus over explain, by which fiction is most commonly established, framed, given order, order being the thing that fiction takes that poetry does not sustain ) arc and direction to the bursts of captivating prose, this new, this unknown, and appreciated.
/
Also sort of half saw the Literary Death Match at The Stone Fox, then sort of had to duck out early from the Literary Death Match, did see Tiana Clark who gave a brave bracket of words to the entirely packed house, what a turnout to the thing, though I heard she did not take the entire thing home. Also caught, apparently along with the rest of the scholastic Vander crews, the Jane Hirschfield reading. Now here a containment, a restraint that operates along the lines of two primary creases - compression and the narrative assumption (or hope, or lean toward ordering, or audience/reader intuition of such relation of linearity of parts, accessible syntax in the tradition of acts I, II, III…). Compression in the sense of tibetan, koanesque, haiku, more bucolic, bare, contemplative erasure of explanatory details for the ruminating immersion of being in the processes ( had mentioned as much as admiration toward Gary L. McDowell's newer work & trajectory/impulses ) of signposts, of blips by which we see, and are given idea of, the entirety of the radar. There is an ease, a joy, a folding back from these into 'active rest' ( meandering, groping, ogling, ownership from look/examination, a stopping or slowing when the mind begins to separate from order into what cerebral syntax/subconscious provocations - I saw a guy on the street do a similar back take at a lady's booty yesterday, we almost collided me watching him watch her back portaits, this still fresh in my mind ), putting the lemon tree actually in the poem a la Spicer in the imagist manner. All in all a fun reading, though, company had mixed reaction as a re-entry into poetry readings around town, perhaps my developed contextual barometer is off now, sludged. Whatever.
/
Next Readings around town -
4/20, monday - visiting world champion slam poet Xero Skidmore, The Post, 6-7:30
4/20, monday - Matthew Baker, Melissa Cundieff Pexa, Zachary Greenberg, Alumni, Vander, Furman 114, 7-8
4/24, friday - Anne Charlton, Edgar Kunz, Dave Wright, Lyrical Brew, Barnes & Noble, Vander, 7-8
Deerhoof happened merry well joyful correct naive, Mercy, jazzy broke fragment knowing. / More limbed the body of the nashpo these days such that attendance is a wee bit more difficult to come by, thus missed and unmissed. Unmissed the "Losing in Gainsville" reading which saw the cozy, zen airportish The Post host four writers, three of which read from their works of fiction, one from his collection "The Dead Wrestler Elegies." It was a nice night from the rain, these touring readers from Curbside Splendor Publishing ranks, plus our local Susannah Felts with accents and smiles. W. Todd Kaneko was a soothed figure dredging the depths of my youngblood days affiliation with wrestlers and myth, formations of drama, realities, physical forms of gender, reps of gender, talk. James Tadd Alcox, Brian Costello read his portion with super grand intensity, rushed over with it over food eccentricities, a psudeo-bio tale of the pizza buffet, in repetition, then mentioned the steer is more toward comedy with fiction and toward certainty and prolificacy with poetry, seems to have agreed.
Missed Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway reading. Check this vid, she gets out their like a dignitary. Missed Vanderbilt's Jamie Quattroreading.
Unmissed the reading Irene Mathieu reading, that's not an 'Irene' as in goodnight-Irene, but diacritic, with emphasis, augmentation. I am saying that she read youthfully to an older audience, moving gracefully among her work to us. As in Cole Swenson, as in some phantom structure of composition, as in drawing from labor acts then producing, a vocabulary for the world, not a world for the vocabulary as she derived poem titles from medical avenue studies, informing as she went, calm grown tone, even, with unexpected (for the context, and its posteriori, experienced versions) unexpectednesses. /
Lyrical Brew reading was a smash time, all dense among each other Tiana Clark, Bill Brown, Walker Bass, Jeff Hardin. Was happy to be audience to that show, packed in as it was. Energy does not allow me elaborate on it but notes thusly: Tiana Clark: "confessional, expulsion, that formal structures have escape, out of vestiges (what does not split from cohesive structure - all leaps from prompt) / syntax enacted at phrasal / sentiment / sentence level (this traditionally traditionalist depth / operative pounce) (epi-bio-poetics) / t h a t propulsion, fervent among, potent by representational framework (turns well inside normative language - why - thats how things mean to her) // BB: "mesmeric, movement as time in collaboration / pace of historicity, that is almost unforgiven, trauma has a pace to it, its pace oscillates with our connective tissue, our collaborations of living with others / held that way: with emotive, resonant - that's what lie is, how lie is, but here is not, from / from at least voicelessness given volume, redemptions, therapy, tao te ching" // Walker Bass: "nature analogies/ poetry strays to have been enabled to do so, trees do not stray, they toward, forward / USE EVERYTHING / everything can be tree like as a shy thing, shying from everything to relate all to tree" // Jeff Hardin: "Form ought to be fun…whose whole/wholessness / 'wind-nudged' / every moment / disconnected / miraged narrative / 'for which I am awake' / pronomial / 'no one dies in their own mind and heart' / 'Is ever you?' / 'does our noise ever fill the sky/' (slivered end, amputated, sliver, off to wide inarticulation / honesty" / Next ones for us Nashpo / Tue, 3/31 - Christina Stoddard book release Hive, @ Parnassus Books, 6:30pm Wed, 4/1 - Poetry Sucks! + Third Man Books, Janaka Stucky, Daniel Pujol, Laura Birdsall, Lee Connell, et al. + musics, @ Hail, Dark Aesthetics (off Gallatin Ave.), 7pm Fri, 4/3 - Emerging Writers Series, @ Howlin' Books, 7:30pm *** Sun, 4/12 - E t A l. Poetry Readings, Andrea Spofford, Spencer Connell, Gary L. McDowell, @Dino's (off Gallatin Ave.), 8pm
