Due to a technical problem, audio was only captured for the first portion of the reading, featuring Matt Longabucco's reading and part of Olivia's. Apologies to Brendan and Erin!
Here is Jared’s introduction of the poets:
These three poets share a sort of charming morbidity vertigo effect at play in their writing – death-sensitive poems that laugh as much as they leer.
Christine Kanownik has the rare ability of truly funny people to make the people around them funnier. Her sense of humor is energetic but also patient, like a jeweler examining the facets of a gemstone except with jokes: she can play the straight man or the comic with equal adeptness and I often have found myself in conversation with her carrying a comical conceit well past my expectations to discover unmined funny dark corners inside the joke in a sort of ‘leave no man behind’ kind of way. It reminds me a little of that Hopkins adage about loading every rift in a poem with ore if Hopkins was more fun at parties. Her poetry has a similar kind of patient rambuctiousness - her poems tend to be long and willing to ride for a while a phrase like “life doesn’t care” or “leave work early” for a while in a way that is both mordant and fatalistic but also endearing. She writes “I can say the thing and its opposite and this will all turn out the same… my name doesn’t rhyme with anything. My life is a rhyme. My life is not a rhyme. I cannot see you from space. It is all fine and will be fine / this time.” I love the way she uses that final line break like a sort of gut punch punchline so the poem is both comforting and totally not. Christine had a chapbook We are Now Beginning to Act Wildly from Diez that sold out in about a minute and has been a great friend of our shop and we’re thrilled she’ll be reading here.
J Hope Stein is a pretty mysterious character and when I talk to the, um, poet person who is J Hope Stein about projects of hers such as her reading series slash blog slash journal slash publishing outfit Poetry Crush she talks as if these entities existed in a way before and without her, like they’re frequencies out there in the ether and she’s just this person from another world inadverte ntly tuning in and focusing on them. I want to credit her for her great ideas in this space but I feel like she may slip away as if the ideas took place in her other life… but I really do credit her a lot! The poetry crush project, for instance, is so admirable in the way that the crush is clearly her own overpowering crush on poetry and creativity but also how her energy and support and openness brings to light and celebrates other people’s crushes on each other. Also, how much more positive and sexy and fun to participate in a community of mutual crushing than like influence or advocacy or something dead like that – though of course crush also has something pretty violent. Her work – not only the pretty preposterous ee Cummings lampoon website eecattings – brings to mind Sianne Ngai’s fascinating exploration of cuteness and cuteness is partly about a performance of weakness, being crushable and how part of loving cute things is wanting to violate or destroy them. I think this is sort of at play in her work, which is often wondrous and scary. I think of a poem of hers like “The Inventor Dreams of a Woman” from her chap Mary (dancing girl) where she writes
“There is laughter in the grass, said the Inventor, there is loss in the grass and enough dead ants to fill a dump truck.” His pinky ambled in her mouth-tickled her gums & the back of her throat-scrambled an egg inside her & the woman felt a deep discussion in her psoas but still no laughter. Or “between fingers between buttons between snowflakes big as bulbs we share a monster somewhere”
I guess we’re three for three tonight with charming morbidity vertigo with Diana Arterian visiting us from the west coast, where she’s getting her phd at usc and busily editing books for Noemi, Gold Line and Ricochet. Diana is the author of the soldout UDP chap DEATH CENTOS which cobbles together the many famous last words into unsettling small poems that have the effect of someone constantly saying goodbye, and constantly standing at the door threatening to leave but not leave, until you want to say “go already!” but then immediately want to take it back. We know that the words are actual last words of famous dead personages so the poems have the effect of leveling the field so everyone’s words have the same voice, the same volume in a lurking holocaust cloud -- but then the lines themselves are often witty in a comforting, uncomfortable, sort of horrible way. It’s very potent stuff that veers always metaphysical as when a poem “Last Words of the Condemned: On Innocence” veers from “Something very wrong is taking place tonight. I am innocent, innocent, Innocent.” To “We are Innocent.” I wrote that phrase holocaust cloud and thought of Reznikoff’s HOLOCAUST book that lineates the testimony of survivors and I think there’s something similar in the way Diana cuts her lines, how the linebreak as a transformation of words into poetry has this effect of adding this ineffable aura of mystery, hauntedness, relentlessness, turning normal reality into slow-motion apocalypse. Here’s a brief quiet example from her poem “saysh”:
Before bed
I take the dog out again
then stand and watch
as she barks at the trees
in the dark yard
The Albertine Workout #45
Unfortunately, only the first half of the reading was successfully recorded, featuring readings by Jackson Meazle and Sam Truitt.
Here are Jared's introductory notes for the reading:
I was thinking today while reading the poets about Zukofsky’s pretty memorable lines from A when he writes about his poetry as
“An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music”
I don’t love Z’s idea especially since it suggests poetry caged or even getting crushed in this sort of cinematic torture chamber like the garbage compactor in Star Wars.
But I think it’s a nice way of thinking about the readers tonight.
I was reminded again of these lines when reading JM, who’s visiting from the bay area, where he’s is editor of a great small chapbook press called Gas meter Books, Jackson had a line “I’m writing because I have a new turntable ribbon” sort of suggested to me record player meets the typewriter ribbon, speech meets music.
Speech suggests clarity, meaning, the human and music is sort of numinous and abstract. But what about nonsense speech? Political music?
JACKSON MEAZLE
In an interview with miller Williams, Jackson posed the question
Did you ever have a notion that it was impractical to write poems, or does the poem’s strength lie in its impracticality, its mystery?
Line collage, slyly inserted inside a poem, a “hate Haiku”
please take away / from me this / lacquered placard
poetry as subtraction.
Thick strain of wounded romanticism and mythic dream quest,
“a wolf cruising an empty castle
“we were talking astral figures and sand / that’s the kind of worry I need”
“I even made/ my ghosts/ visit daily”
“Walk the line/through a ring of fire/ Rudderless”
“I was going to write my poem for one whole year”
a lot of hearts in his poem “when the heart is ripped from the body” “no face for the heart / lover no option to buy” “the kiss, if we are home, sprouting from the healed heart”
Jackson has an entire chap in homage to Henrich Heine in which this moment takes place. Heine is of course a capital R romantic poet par excellence whose poems are known as much as the words of famous schumann and schubert artsong lieder, who wrote (Aus Meinen Grossen Schmerzen)
Out of my own great woe
I make my little songs
I love the dramatic understatement and then the treasuring of the little. Jackson as a publisher of little books is himself a sort of a champion of the possibilities of the little. We’re so excited to have him here tonight.
--
SAM TRUITT
In his new book DICK: A VERTICAL ELEGY Sam deploys some of the same lyrical mythopoetry / troubled affect
“I am the four crows on the phone line outside the kitchen window – eight eyes ready to play servant to paranoiac trances in which time’s suspended in spiritual spasms indistinguishable from the ineffably beautiful moment that precedes an epileptic fit”
I think in DICK this is Truitt’s solution to Zukofsky’s dialectic of music vs speech: to create and cultivate “paranoiac traces”: poignant, shifting, unstable, flitting in the in between, near illegible speech, whispers.
DICK is Dramatic and wild, overgrown, a thick dollop of mystery – a book littered with morse code that translates as nonsense (or is it a cypher?), teeming with empty/fill in the blanks acronyms, sometimes in military phonetic alphabet: “facts explode. Faces. PFM. Or what we are ignites what we are-metal wings on a stump flung into ECP. To Lose, sucking rubber, our faces. Or whiskey delta we are on the back of a monitor, our collaborator. It’s a sphere face in. A black sun sucking Alpha.”
The text perforated with Shakespearean stage directions “exeunt alarums” “exeunt omnes bearing torches” … (I kept waiting for the “exit pursued by bear”)
Literally clotted with language, syntax, dots and dashes that take on a physical reality
“Full stop. Over which, like a turnstile, we retch
Shades of Philip K Dick here, a suggestion of paranoia as a state of epiphany or prophesy or truth-telling.
“Like a vast statue, motionless, inert –except an enormous glaucous panopticonic eye unblinking guides in total awareness the birth state”
A book about the Kennedy assassination, it is a book which discreetly does not mention name
The exoskeleton of the book – Shakespeare + Camelot + cryptography - suggests a diffused NSA-ed angle on Barbara garson’s macbird but the actual experience of reading, instead less narrative and more, as Chris Krauss suggests, SCULPTURE, something like the end of the movie the Matrix, when the world itself reveals itself as a scrim of code language.
--
JOHN COLETTI
Here is a sample of John Coletti’s poetry
flicker by bedside
thick water sunlight curb
crushed re-crushed rock
He writes lines that are very discrete and laconic so his poems build up like piles of dense pebbles in a way that might seem superficially cowboy-masculine in a kind of thumbnail stereotype but in practice John’s work complicates this with a pervasive aura of mystery and aural luxuriance so we get lines like “poodle silhouette of sunshine” or word combinations like “earshell stillness” and “sheep distance”
I’m not sure why I zero-ed in on three examples of a formula animal + abstraction but I think there once again is something in this technique, a sort of synthesis of music and speech that is arrived at through invoking human as animal, how we can experience ourselves as animals- as if the answer to Zukofsky is to flip the argument: not straining upward at music, but at speech – the music of conversation - from a subhuman perspective: a lower limit music, upper limit friendship.
--
Elizabeth Fodaski book is called document which suggests some of the same concerns about what a poem is and what it does or documents. Is it something to teach with – document is etymologically linked with docent ? (Liz is a teacher at St Anns) Evidence legal or medical?
In the title poems she offers a kind of slant explanation: “DOCUMENT suggests the oblique task / mastering the world by compression or, / to free the engine of its customs / without insulting the material by which it came / I want neither to sing of roses /nor to make them bloom”
So is this to say poetry as neither music nor speech? Her poems bounce along in a bright andante pace powered by these sorts of paradoxes; poetry as apotheosis or as con job: “In gesticulating histrionically to his captive crowd, the speaker shed his former self and walked away a new man, part worshipped idol, part empty carapace.”
Our new assistant Samantha and I were talking over this book this afternoon and she was struck by the way the form cuts rapidly from a far-off perspective of distance to a close up point of view that is focused and intensely personal.
There are poetic echoes that seem both serious and jokey – Robert Duncan gets punked into “often I am permitted to return to a waxing salon” or Walt Whitman “what is a blade of grass compared to the inner workings of an inner city”
I love how that ‘inner city’ takes on a sort of Saint Augustine quality suggesting the city inside the self. And then where poetry fits into this.
How does poetry fit into a community. How does the community inform poetry. What does it mean to exist in that communication between these forces.
“Mailbox is an oxymoron” she writes.
In a poem called ‘friends and neighbors’ that tunes into the sheer weirdness of being a person among people she moves toward the assertion
“this has nothing to do with aesthetics everything to do with proximity and silence”
and yet the book offers at the same time a sort of mystical faith in words:
“It occurs to you that your language can alter everything”
The last poem is called “Life Sentences” which is a pretty lovely double entendre by the way. Near its end is the amazing line that gets both this sense of affect and irony and possibility “I love you the way I love the “double rhythm of creating and destroying”
So I think maybe all these poets are showing the solution to Zukofsky’s little poetry deathtrap: to let the mechanism such as it is collapse, to let poetry get smooshed and to appreciate the destroyed/created splatter as that lovable thing that poetry.
Due to a tech issue, audio was only recorded for the performance by Nalini Abhiraman.
