Jessica Bozek, Nathan Hoks, Alexis Pope and Katie Peterson

Instead of a standard introduction (and because they were in the middle of the poem-a-day April National Poetry Month challenge), Farrah and Jared collaborated on a new poem that they read to begin the reading. Here it is:

 

FELIX HOLT SCATTERPLOT

By Jared White & Farrah Field

We do not live in reality we live in ourselves so it is us spooking us.
Maybe the Girl Scouts will give us an Empathy Badge.

Pencils sharpened into grief. Almost until.
This poem was found not heard.

Spooky weather.
Your stanzas are paragraphs your columns are pillars

from the Bible. World War Z arrives in dispatches,
the light of the contagion switching from yellow to blue.

The director films under a pseudonym.
I love your forward slashes.

Populated loneliness. We took a tour of your scenic face.
Survivors are guilty. With a sick stomach

you were parading me around. Thumpadee thump thump
thumpadee thump thump look at your morals go.

Bozek’s boxes, Hok’s hawks, Pope’s pop-ups, Peterson’s peet moss.
Pigeon feather and the bird flocking down the page.

That’s not testimony, that’s a poem!
This allegory points nowhere but the gap sparks

low amperage, high voltage.
I painted the sunset and photographed it with a black lens.

Up comes the tale of the tentacle monster.
Just another person made out of person parts.

Inside your ears there are flowers.
Stealth death drive sex talk elegant brutality

because we can talk, we can lick
and who cares what it tastes like, it’s like we are speaking

what we touch with our tongue. Hentai. Hallucination.
My friend Sarah orders food at drive-thrus

and eats only a couple of bites.
Illustrations of the dilemma

the paranoia of dreams. Dark experience.
In the blue snow there is plenty of context for feelings.

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Opening of Eric Amling's LIFE COACH exhibition featuring readings by Ben Fama and Jenny Zhang

Titles and descriptions of collages by Eric Amling:

Voted Best Void 2014 , collage on paper

Extraordinary Drama with an Eye, collage on paper

Vice Versa, collage on paper

Yes, You Are Interrupting Something, collage on paper

Has a Night-Life, collage on paper

Freudian, neo-Freudian, anti-Freudian, Jungian?, collage on paper

Spoiler Alert, collage on paper

Tumor at Zuma, collage on paper

Performers Must Eat, collage on paper

It Is Bored, collage on paper

Office Temps Cut Loose, collage on paper

Dirty Towel, collage on paper

Beach Baby, collage on paper

Arbitrary Mantras, collages on paper

Leisure #4, inkjet print

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Ekoko Omadeke, Jen Currin, Steven Karl and Rachel Levitsky

Instead of a standard introduction (and because they were in the middle of the poem-a-day April National Poetry Month challenge), Farrah and Jared collaborated on a new poem that they read to begin the reading. Here it is:

WE SUCKED EVERY LIVING ACTUAL BEING INTO OUR DREAMS
By Jared White and Farrah Field

 

According to Ekoko seven bikes were not enough
This youth is not enough
Youth stuff pith math booth
Climbing the stairs of the talk balloons

I raised my hand but no one called on me
I turned in my homework before it was assigned
The homework I assigned would not be finished 
Recycling, sea foam, lime, thumb,

go, moon, mountains, mist of a wizard,
leave of and sleeve of
We wait backstage with Rachel and whisper
the Martians are coming 

the Martians are here with us
in the room built by our grandmothers
The firefighter climbed the fire escape
and everyone stopped to watch

I punch out my hat
Steven said the record was skipping
Every word makes one face smile
When I touch your foot it feels like Virginia

Jen drives you to the airport I want to go to Mexico
I have a theory about the Indignados
In our love poem I stood behind an ampersand
In our love poem we shared water from a reusable container

In our love poem I lost my keys and had to borrow yours
Is this a poem or a novel
Is this an essay or a foreword
The entire class will all crouch down in the bathroom

We will listen to the stories and tell your folks to shove it
We will listen to the stories and tell your folks I’m sorry
We will listen to the stories and tell your folks you loved them
There are no words to express such condolences

We were eating in a restaurant that served only seeds
The art was entirely in the presentation
Eventually a tree grew with many bushes hiding behind it
We could never tell what kind of tree it was

a belladonna, a phantom limb, a coconut
The names carved on the trunk were middle names
ones on passports ones no one knew
I can’t respond to emails except in these poems

The accident of my birth is that it was no accident
Even silence makes a noise
When you are parents you will understand
We have something terrible in common

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Lynn Xu, Sampson Starkweather and Joshua Edwards

Here are introductory notes from Jared:

We are joined tonight by three global citizen poets, Lynn Xu, Sampson Starkweather  Joshua Edwards  

This particular pairing made me think further about the relation of poetry, mythology and performance. I’ve done a lot of thinking about mythology in relation to sam’s work, since I wrote the introduction to the book … I remember even before knowing Sam getting a sense of something ambiguous and volatile in his self-presentation as a poet ‘who lives in the woods alone’ and that became the seed for my intro to his book: a sort of pastiche on the Legend of the Poet as a sort of Sublime Vagabond

I began with a description of the 3 lives of a poet as Shattuck describes Rimbaud:

‘his biography, his myth, his verse –where they coincide is what we identify as the poet.

From my vantage I have a similar sense of Josh and Lynn, with their peripatetic travels – Mexico, California, Stuttgart, Nicaragua, Marfa – and their extremely sublime press Canarium (I love how the tiny addition of the –ium from the name of Josh’s great journal Canary  - I always thought it seemed like a sort of gloss on the idea of an avant garde, a canary in a coalmine turned it into the Canarium, a sort of enormous cathedral. And their covers are totally sublime.

I know to them perhaps this just seems like normal life but I think of them in their lives and work as performing the role of poet as pilgrim and host in a way that is enviable and exciting to witness and is worthy of emulation.

Lynn:

The mexico we are still young from/ faking our own deaths / as children, shaking our futures / before your eyes

Josh

We celebrate landscape, deride technology, and try to keep other foreigners out of our photographs, except for the ones meant to show how much stranger than us other foreigners must be.

--Their work becomes at times an invitation, not least the recent photo-essay of the performance walk they took Werner Herzog- style partly together from Galveston to Marfa across the changing texas landscape past a lot of open space and a lot of roadkill.

Josh:

“On a journey I become my questions”

Here’s a similar sam quote

“He wrote like he was diving into the ocean to see if the sea ever ends.”

Sam asked me to dilate for htmlgiant last summer and I produced a mock-mini-epic of a obituary in which Sam stood in for the death scenes of Rimbaud, Lorca, Spicer, Bolano, and a sort of Philip K Dick character / Jeff Bridges in Tron, transmogrified into pure information, as his “last four books” emerged posthumously over and over.

Overhead, Sampson Starkweather read his books on the screen of his transom-window, writing in steam with his fingers on the glass with its fogged vantage of Mars. No myth is written all at once. And then, of course, the singularity, much delayed, in that year of sixes, when the upload was complete and the mind inside the machine became indistinguishable from the image of the body outside. (The heart in the machine is green too.)

Lynn in her DEBTS AND LESSONS similarly writes “I am Baudelaire Rimbaud I am odilon Zip myself in to the flower suit blow smoke into the sky”. The “For so-and-so” gesture, writing a poem to acknowledge the relationship. Even the title suggests this complicated mixture of being tied down and unburdened, life as a process of self-education. The book is teeming with Rilkean angels so that even the self is a society.

Mythology at its worst is a sort of distorting mirror into celebrity and selfish behavior. At its best, a kind of life performance, a gift, a tightrope walk. Mythology transforms reality.

Wandering towards and away from home at the same time, wandering as discovery. Poetry as wandering. Poetry as discovery.

Josh writes of art he admires as suggesting “home without associations”. Risky and hopeful.

What these poets share is a sense of mythology as an entrance to a pro-social space, one that is grounded in magic & friendship & mutuality & collaboration & Sweetness. Poetry as travelogue, poetry as hospitality, poet as family.

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