Treat

Not All Bad

“As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father.”

The Pleasures of Attention

 “Conjures the taste of the maraschino cherry from my father’s Manhattan on my childhood tongue and all that it intimated about the catastrophe of masculinity.”

 (Joining Gertrude Stein and G.F. Handel as accountants of the repeats in “desire’s circuitry” is sweet, too.)

The Waste Land in Comic Sans

Since I found it, I keep thinking about Morgan Myers’s posting of The Waste Land in rainbow Comic Sans, most dissed of all fonts. Herodotus tells the story of the pharaoh Psammetichus, who left two newborns with a shepherd, free from language, to find out what their first “natural” words would be. I’d like to play Psammetichus to someone with The Waste Land, and see what came of a blank-slate reading of “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” in canary Comic Sans. Shantih!!!

Dept. of Monday (Tsvetaeva Edition)

“Property is      water”

(Taken from “Poem of the End,” one of the best breakup poems ever written, even in translation. It’s the one with Tsvetaeva’s famous “All poets are Jews,” and the less-quoted but maybe still better “listen/to this flesh./It is far truer than poems.” “An Attempt at Jealousy” isn’t too shabby on the breakup front, either. In case there’s anyone out there looking for great breakup poems on a cold fall Monday.) 

New Tangent

Still warm from the afterglow of Karen Weiser and Anselm Berrigan's reading, Portland hosts Rachel Zolf, David Wolach, and The Oregonian’s intrepid poetry columnist, B.T. Shaw, tonight at 7 PM. The economy’s reached out and toppled the Clinton Corner Cafe, kind host to Tangent for the past four years, so the action’s transported to the green new Open Space Cafe, at SE 28th and Holgate, in the Brooklyn neighborhood. So Rachel can feel right at home.

B.T. SHAW lives in Portland, where she edits the Poetry column for The Oregonian. Her first collection, This Dirty Little Heart (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), won the 2007 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Portland State University and the Independent Publishing Resource Center (despite her wariness of staplers).

DAVID WOLACH is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and an active participant in Nonsite Collective. His most recent books are Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2010), the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), the full-length Hospitalogy (chapbook forth. from Scantily Clad Press, 2010), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). A former union organizer and performing artist, Wolach’s work often begins as site-specific and interactive performance and ends up as shaped, written language. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking.

RACHEL ZOLF’s poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her fourth full-length book, Neighbour Procedure, was released by Coach House Books in 2010. Previous collections include Human Resources (Coach House), which won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Masque (The Mercury Press), Shoot & Weep (Nomados), from Human Resources (Belladonna books) and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks). Born in Toronto, Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.

Anselm Berrigan & Karen Weiser in Portland this Fri. 10/15

Karen Weiser and Anselm Berrigan light out for Portland this Friday, 10/15 to read at the swank “near Mt. Tabor” demesne of Jen Coleman and Allison Cobb (street address in sidebar). Both have new books to read from (Karen and Anselm I mean, though Allison’s got one, too). Fun starts at 7 PM, “poet snacks”-inclusive. Bring self, drinks, friends.

Dept. of Monday

“'Our chief business at present,' said Marlborough, 'is to subsist.'”