north gives flesh to wind

Hello friends! Feel like reading some poems about escapes, power, mythology, wolves, queens, and secret agents? If so, please consider purchasing north gives flesh to wind by yours truly and published by Little Red Leaves. It's a gorgeous hand-sewn, cloth-covered chapbook with a water-color cover by Liz Schendel. There's also a plethora of other hand-swen chaps at LRL which I am sure will intrigue and surprise you! 

Null Set by Steven Seidenberg

Spooky Actions (for which I am an editor) has published a new book by Steven Seidenberg titled Null Set. It's a hand-stitched chapbook in three sections with an accordion-fold cover with art by Sarah Hobstetter. 

It's a gorgeous book with gorgeous (though sometimes disruptive, energetic, troubling ) poems which I really do think you should read! Intrigued? Click here to go to the Spooky Actions site! 

Want a copy for reviewing purposes? Send me an email! 

Caketrain! Issue 11!

Throats and ears

Last night's reading at Small Press Traffic was great! Lourdes read from Yolotl and it was the first time I had heard her read a good portion of the text aloud. I have read Yolotl several times now (full disclosure: I, along with my wife and co-editor Ammie, published Lourdes in our Spooky Actions Books chapbook series) but hearing the poems arc and dive through the air to my ear reminded me how much poetry is an experience of the body. Lourdes includes throats in many of her poems, insisting on the body, so that I began paying more attention to both the sounds emitting from her throat and the way that these waves of sounds are actually things themselves too.

A beautiful poem can be read horribly, but when a gorgeous poem is read by someone so that the poem comes to life with the reader's voice, wow--there is definitely some magic there. If you live in the Bay Area definitely keep an eye out here and here for other readings!

Lourdes with her book Yolotl

Small Press Traffic reading in S.F. on 9/15!

I am really happy to announce that Spooky Actions Books (which I co-edit) will be releasing yolotl by Lourdes Figueroa on September 13th! To see the beautiful original cover by the fantastic Hanae Rivera, click here. And if you like what you read there, please come by Small Press Traffic's reading on September 15th at:

Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street, SF
5pm, reading starts at 5:30pm
$6-10

Here are the readers! 

WENDY TREVINO

Wendy Trevino lives in Oakland and works in San Francisco. Her first chapbook 128-131 was released by Perfect Lovers Press in June 2013. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Abraham Lincoln, the American Reader, Armed Cell, The Capilano Review, Hi Zero, LIES and Mrs. Maybe.

NICOLE TRIGG

Nicole Trigg lives in Oakland, works at Small Press Distribution, and is the author of a chapbook, Double Cup. She recently collaborated with strangers to make the literary magazine Birkensnake 6, and critical writing is forthcoming in Jacket2.

LOURDES FIGUEROA

Lourdes Figueroa was born in Yuba City, California during one of the trips her parents made from Mexico to the USA when they worked in the campo tilling the soil for tomatoes. She grew up in the betweens of everything not from here and not from over there. She is a native of limbo nation. Lourdes is a proud 2009 and 2011 VONA alum. Some of her work has been published in the SF Poet’s 11 2008 & 2010, an Anthology of poems selected by Jack Hirschman, and also in Generations: a journal of ideas and images. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing focusing in poetry at the University of San Francisco. She currently works as an interpreter, translator, and advocate. Lourdes believes in your lung, your throat, your tongue. She has a new chapbook, yolotl, coming out through Spooky Action Books. She will be reading poems from this.

Song for my home

Bees, a pickup, cold bottles of beer, pocket knives, all to appease those in a system which is essentially a song, a coveted cauldron, a bit of old-story-fluff skidding through the days and nights, always involving whoever it can. People most of all, and almost all of the time. Plural of which is generation, insisting as it were, on the very altar itself, for some control to balance the unending progression of this, this, this, over and over until an altar may as well be the front sofa. Grass is a little taller here, a little golden, and the light strikes upon your eyes just right to blind about 30% of the populace. 5% of the populace are writers (of which a small percentage is also blind) and are happy to describe events to those who have long ceased caring. So next time you’re there, maybe for that weekend-rated vacation, maybe to look at old-timey shit, and a woman cocks her head, points it your direction, just walk away and stop breathing; grab a coffee with the non-dairy creamer at the R&L minimarket, and walk the fuck out. You may not hear it, but parts of your ears do, and it is nothing that can be resisted long—it is a dirge thrummmming, demanding, just a piece, just you, just your hands and knees.

a long day of pillaging...

Remnant

Longboats are crashing into the shore, spilling raiders, who are interested in careers in finance, in social reform, in proliferating methods to raise test scores all the while searching for footholds in the steep pages of the New York Times. Even as we, looking back, want to find our ghosts, the revenants who will condemn us and thus allow us a place in the stupid story—and yet what we find is again only the bright purple flowers that only bloom for two weeks in our back yard, our spouse’s bare feet which tap as she speaks, a dead bee, and all these pieces exploding out booming, shifting between meaning something and not. What I want is probably not even worth it if I can imagine it; it’s just another trap. So if you imagine a time, say “now” or “25,000 years ago” an eight-hour span dissipates into itself, into you, into the idea of Vikings returning to camp after a long day of pillaging. 

a quick rough poem...

Distant solutions

Summon this sun to math, to a small speck

open to fault; a hero can’t travel

this relative distance. Queens, embedded

with boys cheat the North of its wanton joys,

open their mouths wide for geese to escape.

This is the here-ness that is everywhere—

caesura infinitely flat, only

known as summed breath hurtling into glacial

teeth, into a cloud, into the throats who

ring the North, never offering warning.

two books from compline... lovely!

Next Big Thing

Questions:

What is the working title of the book?


So far it’s In the heart is a forest. There have been much shorter versions (Forest everywhere) and a longer inverted version (In the center of the forest is a heart), but the current title has stuck around the longest.

Where did the idea come from for the book?


It started with a book called Grimoire by Own Davies which is an academic history of spell-books. Around the same time, I had gone on a hike with this ecology-minded long-distance runner, who made the point that in some sense there is no more “natural” landscape as airborne manufactured-particles have touched everything. So that got me thinking about cities. Not in the sense of cities bad, forest good, which I think is kind of a played-out binary and anyway not very accurate, but rather as grown systems with underlying, sometimes hidden, patterns—which is kind of how a lot of magical systems theoretically work. There’s a structure there, but at the same time, these structures have grown organically from specific cultures. Egyptian magic looks a lot different than Hoodoo from the American South even though everybody at the time was borrowing from Egyptian iconography to lend authenticity. Anyhow, I live in Oakland, so in a way every city is Oakland to me. So I started thinking about Oakland, and cities in general, as mythological landscapes, and went from there.

looking at Lake Merritt

What genre does your book fall under?


Lyric pastoral maybe? Slipstream poetry is what came to mind, but then I began to suspect that all poetry is really slipstream, and that that label only works for fiction where borders are perhaps a little more stable.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?


Well, there’s a lot of animals in the poems (foxes and wolves recur) and there’s sort of an us, so maybe it could be filmed sort of shaky cam first person-plural, and there could be some talking animals (but it would be really brief, and they wouldn’t say much). There’s also a series in the book called The North gives flesh to wind which is about power structures, insistence, and mythologies surrounding the North wind where there’s a cast of characters including the North wind (kind of an abstract sovereign), a boy, geese, fur, secret agents, whistling, girls, a Queen with a math-skirt, wolves again. So I think that James Coburn could voice the North wind. He was great in Affliction. That also took place in sort of a mythological cold north.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?


"It’s in the trees, it’s coming."


How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?


The first draft took about two years—I write slowly and non-methodically, which is, like, a one-two punch if your goal is to not put out coherent book-length manuscripts. Which, sadly, is not my goal, but maybe rather a gaol. Actually, that’s too strong a word, it’s just how I write (a lot of unconnected stuff between pieces that work together). Which is okay as a lot of that writing never meets anyone but me, but sort of acts as the dream-life for the poems that I actually send out.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?


Well the book starts with two epigraphs—one from Kate Bush and one from Wallace Stevens. I don’t think those two would get along, but there it is. Some other poets that have a lot of influence are: Jack Spicer, Elizabeth Willis (one of my teachers at Mills), and Lisa Jarnot (whose Night Scenes is one of my favorite books of all time).

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?


Well, you know, some of the poems have been picked up by magazines but I haven’t really started sending it around as a book. I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Thanks to Eric Baus for tagging me for this.

I tag: Sara Mumolo, Nik De Dominic, David Harrison Horton, Reb Livingston

All streets end there

 

end in a place, that is

once I met you there

or rather right here.

Here, where we first

met forever smells

like cedar-smoke,

every street ends

in smoke so when

I kissed you, our

lungs collapsed

into gravity and

escape velocity

to other streets

which take longer

to end here, there

I mean, that place

where we met

and had to leave.

for Ammie

NEXTOPEMS

Hey writers! If you are interested in the intersection of electronic media and poetry, take a look at NEXTPOEMS' mission and submit your work!

Micro review of Scared Text

Thoughts on ScaredText by Eric Baus

I love this book. I’ve read it twice, and have thought about how to talk to others about it. Really, I’ve thought about how to assure other people that they in fact should absolutely read it. This is a little difficult because Eric’s book is somewhat like a unicorn: you have to approach it with an open heart, and it will certainly reward you.  I should mention here that while there are plenty of creatures in Scared Text (bees, snails, doves, beetles, eels, elephants, and others) there are no unicorns. Anyway, here is the best way I can describe why you should go out and read this collection:

There’s a syndetic structure to Scared Text—a cross-referential of not only phrase, but of tone and ideation.  Baus chooses to begin his text with “Glass Ear” which itself begins, “Approach the smallest ghost after he has turned his back. A buzz of definition surrounds him” and concludes with “There is no such thing as ‘there is no ghost.’” In a way, this describes the book: there is indeed a “buzz of definition” which surrounds it. Yet like some weird poem-fractal, this buzz surrounds nothing—it scales all the way down to the sentence and unfolds with equivalent coherence to the entire book.

Scared Text as a plastic whole reads almost tactilely. Because there’s no narrative or symbolism or allusion it must be read exactly as itself.  And it pulses. Words and phrases don’t so much as echo each other, as they pneumatically pull on one another; perhaps another way to imagine this is to see the entire text as a network with certain characters (and I use this term loosely) like “Minus” and “Iris” along with some others as well simultaneously occupying multiple locations. Scared Text does a really neat thing for me: it somehow points to a way of non-local non-sequential cognition, as if the entire text should be read simultaneously if only our minds could become so elastic. 

The Grand Piano -- Holloway Reading Series

This Friday, November 18, at 6:30 The Grand Piano will be read at the Holloway Reading Series at Cal Berkeley in 315 Wheeler Hall, the Maude Fife Room. The Grand Piano is "AN EXPERIMENT IN COLLECTIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY ... a multi-volume, collaborative work centered on the rise of Language poetry in San Francisco in the second half of the 1970s." Should be a notable reading!

Three of my favorite things! Poems, indices, comics together in one post

Never have I had the pleasure of labeling a post with three of my favorites: poetry, libraries, and comics. Yet thanks to Eric Baus, I can do so today. Eric's post at Jacket2 "...explores the poem as index, bibliography, catalog, or otherwise arranged list."

Of specific interest, Eric writes:

I am interested in what the arrangement and interplay between selected materials suggests as well as how indexical forms often point to the hidden, the unacknowledged, the invisible, the partial.

This is a topic that fascinates me as well. I am curious about syndetic structures. What rules act as their structure, what atypical forms might an index utilize and how might one use this creatively, and how do they look when they are evolved/automated as with somefolksonomies? These are just some ideas to play with you listen though the post, which can be read here:

https://jacket2.org/commentary/back

If you have patiently read thus far wondering when the comic angle was going to appear, then, first, thank you, and second, be sure to scroll down to Alice Notley's recorded poem which uses comic book titles to exist as both the poem and non-alphabetized concordance. Mar-vell-ous!

Brief review of Maureen Thorson's Applies to Oranges

Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Maureen Thorson's Applies to Oranges is an excellent first book of poetry. The oranges, spiders, ships, and Zeniths almost become recursive magical traps looping the reader into the speaker's longing. Some poems were stronger than others and some seemed to rely more on surprising language than content or structure, but even with this slight criticism, A to O is one of my favorite poetry books this year. As well, it's from Ugly Duckling Presse which consistently publishes lovely editions, and this collection as a book is really well-designed and looks great in its dark blue and orange letter-pressed cover.



View all my reviews

Just finished the first quarter of a new manuscript...

...and it feels terrific (and cetainly took long enough...).

Here's a poem from Somewhere there is a forest

O floor, O foothills. Languor
holds deep here, this tight
fitness of your mouth to mine,
cursive of your tongue
caught in my indecision, perfect
as quarks as photo emergent
as birth in its soup; soon wreckage
becomes what it is so nothing needs
be what it ought not; nothing
ought to be here in me but
the grace of your sweat, tender
looks, hips rolling yonder.

This one is a bit romantic I think. Anyhow, there are 24 more in this section, "The Book of the East;" now comes the fun part of sending these out, while finishing writing "The Book of the North."

from Somewhere There is a Forest

Scuttled rubbish and lightened
ardent valse of Autumnal
flux. Muscled runners flit by
chests a’heaving sculptural
as a kingdom of blood of
future joy, of future love
dense as close collapsing stars.

Jacket #38

Excellent article on Jack Spicer and print culture by Graham Foust in Jacket #38. Here's a taste:

"As in a detective story, the reader is incorporated into Spicer’s poems, and it seems that Spicer’s ideal reader is one who is able to rewrite, recreate, and continue the textbook rather than follow it to the letter. Spicer’s electric poetics aren’t a power trip, as he maintains that even the poet herself remains only a co-author. This process is impersonal, as is Poe’s, but Spicer’s impersonality goes one step further into the Outside by insisting that metaphors are not for readers or writers, that they are not, in fact, “for humans” (Vocabulary 300). Spicer does not seek to predetermine his effects, but rather is affected and afflicted by ghostly figures; in turn, he sounds the stories of these invasions."

And if this gets you going, then be sure to check out Mr. Foust's reading on Thursday December 3 at Studio One Arts Center. To read more information about the upcoming reading and an interview with G. Foust, there's more here.

small, new poem from a mss hesitantly titled "somewhere there is a forest"

O quilted leaf, pneumatic
limbs of noisy light. I am
piercéd! Cumulative questions
loft into lilting conflict.
Electricity has lost
its watch and seven small winds
sweep the elms, speckled greenly.