Intro for Chris Nealon, Portland, 5/15/10

Rumors of the death of the poet-critic have been greatly exaggerated, and Chris Nealon’s here tonight as living proof. They make nice across the hyphen, that “poet” and “critic,” but often the join conceals a hostile standoff. In one corner there’s the poet, all subjectivity and trill; in the other, the Parnassian pro, dispassionately assessing the field.

Once upon a time, good poet-critics smoothed the rift by drinking. Chris, I think, provides a healthier alternative. Across his critically informed poetry and poetically shapely criticism, he’s found a way to put his lefty-right brain to work on two sides of the same theme: the fizz that occurs when you drop a stray self into history.

It’s a sharp, capacious, burning sort of remedy. The self in his equation can be anyone from Hart Crane to “Alanis’s ex-boyfriend”; the historical surround can be ’50s muscle mags or plummeting derivatives markets. Along the way there’s space made for Seleucids, Olivettis, Walkmans, JiffyLubes, Israelites, Tyvek and Lukacs; Art Song and techno; Marxist smarts and “pure despair.” To re-purpose a line from Yeats:

O poet swayed to music, O critic’s glance,
How can you be the disco and the dance?

Open your notebooks and prepare to learn from the many-minded Chris Nealon.

Intro for Brandon Downing, Powell’s Books, 3/14/10

Here’s the intro I gave for Brandon Downing at his Powell’s reading in Portland on Sunday.

Brandon Downing is the author of The Shirt Weapon (“You are a blue rat caught/In a black dog’s jaws”) and Dark Brandon (“Through a discount centre entryway. I come/Into piano spotlight”). He’s also the bricoleur veejay genius splicer behind “Dark Brandon/Eternal Classics,” a DVD which paradoxically convinced cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling “to pay attention to a poetry movement” again.

I don’t think we’ve had the full measure of Brandon’s genius though till now, with the coming of Lake Antiquity. Lake Antiquity is the first book of poems I’ve seen that thanks Italian flea markets, vampire seductress comics, a famous British archaeologist, and several brands of glue stick. (He credits especially “the durable, glorious Scotch/3M Clear.”) There’s something durable and glorious about Brandon’s creations, too. He sinks a deep shaft into the cultural junk we’ve amassed and sold off, then draws up radiant artifacts from the mulch. Brandon’s “voluptuous assemblage” of text and image reminds me that all the best modern artists were wastemakers at heart, less towering Romantic creators than cheerleaders for things passed over, urging us to see the overlooked with new eyes.

Through Brandon’s, history runs like a film at 30 centuries per second; antiquity’s a Hollywood backlot of mobile exteriors; and modernity becomes an extension of chromolithography, all those thousands of mass-produced lines—poetic and otherwise—cross-hatched into something grandiloquent, personal, hilarious, lyric, novel, ingenious, and strange. I’m learning from the treasures that come up from Brandon’s lake all the time, and I hope you starbound twenty-first century types will, too. Please to welcome Brandon Downing.

Intro for Macgregor Card, Powell’s Books, 3/14/10

About 45 pairs of ear turned out to hear Brandon Downing and Macgregor Card at Powell’s on Hawthorne Sunday, including those of local poets Jules Boykoff, Lisa Ciccarello, Allison Cobb, Jen Coleman, Gale Czerski, Donald Dunbar, Emily Kendal Frey, Lindsay Hill, Drew Scott Swenhaugen, Kevin Sampsell, Zachary Schomburg, and Wayne Craig Pernu of Portland lit rock act The Telling. Here’s the intro I gave for Macgregor. It missed the secret Dante/Futura font messaging Gary caught, but he did open with some Spasmodically awesome Dobbell.

Macgregor Card’s first name is Macgregor. Just stop for a second and think how cool that is. It suggests a kind of inborn gift for names, which extends to his legendary journal, The Germ—one of the last print journals to matter before print got precious and luxe—and continues with his debut full-length collection, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poets Prize.

Besides being one of the best names for a book of poems ever, Macgregor’s title carries a whole theory of poetry in miniature. Isn’t it one of the poet’s duties to treat English like it’s foreign? To make the mother tongue feel new and strange? Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but I’m inclined to Macgregor’s view that they’re more secretary than CEO, transcribing the minutes that get into the file marked History.

Many of the poems are made from lines Macgregor’s exchanged over the years with the poet Karen Weiser, so there’s an element of correspondence, too—poetry as a product of friendship and social exchange. And the fact that the title’s borrowed from Sydney Dobbell, an obscure Victorian Spasmodic, points to a certain light-handed responsibility to the past—poet as rememberer and recoverer, amnesia’s wordy enemy. People, do your duty to la lengua and please join me in welcoming Macgregor Card.

Tangent Intro for Cynthia Sailers, Portland, 6/27/09

Some poets are sitars, others are symphonies. The sitar poets push lines out into time at varying speeds, shaping attention into pattern through flying scales and overtone clouds. The symphonic poets tend to build their effects through counterpoint and harmony, arranging diverse notes and ideas into chords. Tonight let’s recruit Cynthia Sailers for the symphony. The home tone in Cynthia’s poetry might be the rub between individuals and the groups they belong to. Her writing sounds the fraught process of what she calls “self fashioning modern languages to a private life,” working to tune the collective’s demands to the music of inner desire. The dominant note would be aggression—the group’s favorite tool—and the subdominant a saving hedonism that turns pleasure and perversion into improvised means of resistance, the tyranny of mundanity “… held under the teeth of a nourished abandon.” Please pick up a drink, put down the groupthink, and abandon yourself to the sounds of Cynthia Sailers.

Tangent Intro for Dana Ward, Portland, 6/27/09

Dana Ward’s poetry reminds me of that arcade game where you have to steer a grapple over a pile of soft toys. The object is to get the claw to drop on the prize you want, then carry it off to the chute. In the real game, the toy seems a little sad once it comes down the chute—it never looks as good as it did when it was part of that colorful assortment behind the glass. In Dana’s version, the claw never has to drop; you get to keep moving the grapple over a beckoning surface of feeling and detail and variegated cultural reference that doesn’t force you to choose between Jay-Z and Alice Notley, or Caravaggio and John Lydon.com. After a while, the meaning of the poem seems less about grab and capture than the pleasure of motion itself, which is also the beauty of being various and contradictory and alive. “I can see,” Dana writes, “how the words haven’t changed me but my/affectations have changed/like a firefly alters the neighboring particles.” Neighbors and fireflies, let’s get altered together with Dana Ward.

Rod Smith Tangent Intro, Portland, 5/23/09

“Excuse me officer, I thought
you were a shape-shifting rat.”

If there were some messy Planet of the Apes-like apocalypse, and this were the only line of Rod Smith’s to survive, the gorillas and chimps would still have a lot of Smith to love. They’d get a taste of his Johnny Rotten-meets-Bugs Bunny attitude to authority in all its wily disguises. They’d get the carefully careless attention to sound that marries “excuse” to “sir” and “rat” to “thought.” They’d have the surprising misdirection of a “shape-shifting” rat, which lifts our officer out of the billy club and badge department of a thousand B-movies and deposits him somewhere more lunatic and sinister, where power is rubber and slips under doors or into grammar. Which is why I’m glad Rod’s there to meet it when its head pops out the other side, looking like Ted Baxter or George W., and there’s Rod set to wing it with “the back-slap/of facticity,” that pathos apes most hate. Rod’s work is always reminding me that optimism is an American disease, but humor is its birthright, and if you turn it just the right way it shoots coyote juice in the policeman’s good eye. Please welcome “Best Poet of Washington D.C. for 2008,” Rod Smith.

Brandon Brown Tangent Intro, Portland, 2/28/09

For Brandon’s Tangent reading in Portland on Saturday:

For a long time now, Brandon Brown’s righteous careen through poetry has been a model to me of how much the art can be. Curator, crooner, translator, blogger, linguist, scholar, Jam of the Year nominator, study group joiner, and all-around renaissance all-star, Brandon reminds me how “poetry” is really just shorthand for “people,” and how people are really just nodes in a debate about Aeschylus that lasts past 2 AM.

Earlier this year, Brandon helped out at a poetry fundraiser by transforming himself into “Dessert Storm,” a one-man mobile whisk-and-pastry unit that delivered emergency confections to listeners at the break. It’s a typical Brandon Brown effort, “dessert” being maybe like one of those scribal slips that goes viral across the centuries, or infects a bad translation, until the sweet you thought you wanted turns out to be the Sahara abutting Dad’s broken storm door.

That’s not such a bad analogy for tradition, as it gets handed down to us with key letters doubled or knocked out, but I wouldn’t have thought of culture or letters or Saharas in quite that way without Brandon there with a whisk and a lexicon to show me. Ladies and jihadis, let’s rattle the Sanskrit for San Francisco’s own Brandon Brown.

Alli Warren Tangent Intro, Portland, 2/28/09

Tom Fisher, Alli Warren & Brandon Brown gave one of the best readings I’ve been to in Portland on Saturday, bringing down the variegated house with poems in the form of email apologies, wolf teats swollen with political allusion, and bathrooms in secret perpendicular to Levinas. Intro for Alli:

So far as I can tell, Alli Warren sprung fully formed from the head of Santa Cruz. Whatever magic first pulled her up the 101 has since distributed itself across many chapbooks, readings, parties, direct-to-cassette recording sessions, and after-hours banjo jams. I love Alli’s poems for their bruised and vulgar eloquence, like Dante’s but with God and the Italians left out. The Emperor appears sometimes, but only to be taken down, and it’s the whole ethos of the take-down that Alli seems to take on in her work, connecting the everyday language of the BART taunt or advertorial surround to the larger geo-political horn honking that makes up our episteme’s grammar. Alli’s poetry helps me to imagine what it would sound like to honk back. I’m glad she’s made it up the I-5 to bring the noise for us—please welcome San Francisco’s favorite parthenogene, Alli Warren.

Del Ray Cross Intro, Portland, 10/4/08

For Del’s Tangent reading in Portland on Saturday:

I am slowly learning there are persons for whom poetry has no glamour. One reason the news seems so fantastical to me is Del Ray Cross. I met Del in 2001, at a reading he’d organized in a Financial District pizza shop to celebrate 2 years and 10 issues of SHAMPOO, one of the earliest online poetry journals—online anythings—I was ever aware of. The magazine calls its contributors “SHAMPOO Stars,” and that night there was a summer skyfull of them lined up to take the mike. Somewhere in the mystical process of watching names turn into persons, and books into voices, and poems into windows on a flesh-and-blood social world of friendships and parties and pizza and gossipy hazards, I resolved to be lurker no longer and step into the light. I introduced myself to Del, bought a copy of Cinema Yosemite, and promptly discovered inside another fresh world where streetlamps resemble lit ants and “Eating spinach makes my teeth squeak.”

The adventure’s continued with books like Lub Luffly—best title for a book of poems, ever—and Ein frishes Trugbild (A Fresh Mirage), which lets the Germans in on the fun of Del’s poetics of ludicrous constructs, where the pleasure of being a recording mind moving through sexy urban time is glamour enough for us all. Lubs and Lufflies, please welcome Del Ray Cross.

K. Silem Mohammad Intro, 12/1/07

For Kasey's Tangent reading in Portland on Saturday:

In darker moments, I fear my one claim to fame will be as the torso with the pea coat in Kasey’s author photo on the back flap of Deer Head Nation. Then I riffle through the pages and think there are worse ways to go. It means I’d be a small, fragmented part of the thrilling sonic fragments that shimmer into poems like “Cosmic Deer Head Freakout,” “Hey Boo Boo,” “Experience in Bakeries” and “e:LK S@LIVa.” It means my pixels would enjoy proxy contact with an oeuvre that includes the brainy dexterities of Hovercraft and the goofed-up dressage of A Thousand Devils. Mostly though, it means that for as long as people read and keep caring about moving the whole poem thing forward, I can say I was there, in a pea coat, when one of the kindest writers of this notably unkind age was finding the groove of our pathos in ass pants and Xanax and terrorized diabetic robot elk saliva. Portland, put your tentacles together for K. Silem Mohammad.

Thank You, Nada

Three years ago today, Nada Gordon delivered the introduction below at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC. Introductions are one of the most neglected currencies in po biz, an instant of glory in an art that offers few. Thanks Nada, for mine.

To frame my comments about Rodney Koeneke's work, I'd like to begin with a somewhat extended epigraph from E.W. Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, published in the early 1830s:

The dancing girls appeared in a cloud of dust and tobacco smoke. The first thing about them that struck me was the brightness of the golden caps upon their tresses. As their heels beat upon the ground, with a tinkle of little bells and anklets, their raised arms quivered in harmony; their hips shook with a voluptuous movement; their form seemed bare under the muslin between the little jacket and the low, loose girdle, like the belt of Venus. They twirled about so quickly that it was hard to distinguish the features of these seductive creatures, whose fingers shook little cymbals, as large as castanets, as they gestured boldly to the primitive strains of the flute and tambourine. Two of them seemed particularly beautiful; they held themselves proudly: their Arab eyes brightened by kohl, their full yet delicate cheeks were lightly painted. But the third, I must admit, betrayed the less gentle sex by a week-old beard; and when I looked into the matter carefully, and the dance being ended, it did not take me long to discover that the dancing girls were, in point of fact, all males.

Omaha native and San Francisco resident Rodney Koeneke is the author of Rouge State, which is the best title ever given to a book of poetry. Rodney, from the perpective of what he calls "the bruised Sargasso of white male sexuality," clearly empathizes with "pussyboys," girliemen, and femi-whatevers everywhere. In Rouge State, he madly liberates the once-vitiated template of the lyric, slotting in his own gorgeous, irreverent prosody, making poems that are not only zippier than pinheads but really the zippiest thing since zippers.

You can distinctly hear the echoes of the footsteps of the ghost of Théophile Gautier, in his trademark yellow waistcoat, walking his lobster through the grand opera of these poems. They are deeply dandified "hostile melodic situations," as "brazen as mariachis" and "fecunder than succotash." They are "delicate lorgnettes" that can see all of history happening at once, and "mentholated curlicues" full of "pterodactyl dactyls" and "hot pink verbs."

The figure of the dandy, of course, most lately born into the media as the overcommodified metrosexual, represents the perfect union of the masculine and feminine principles, and is most often clothed in fine fabrics of oriental origin. Indeed, the attars of the mysterious "east" soak into every crevice of Rodney's poetry but laced with pungent irony and historical awareness, so that the story of an odalisque is also the story of how our own tabula rasa get written all over with learned desires:

We spill in the world into genders,
fall out like dirty turpentine
from an upset coffee cup --
at first abductees of the harem
refusing silk pillows and gold-tipped cigarettes
then gradually learning to simper and sprawl...

By example, his writing answers the rhetorical question that one of the poems poses: "How to negotiate the mare incognita of preconscious verbal data without pissing off the vagina dentata its excretions will have to pass through?"

Although replete with bagatelles and monkeyshines like "Got Rilke?" and "the jewel is in the logo/ the jew/ is in the Logos," they also drip with a kind of comic lament at the extreme trivialities and decadence of our time, its "dry transnational orcs" and " glitzy manufacturies of consent." To paraphrase Donovan:

Histories of ages past
unenlightened shadows cast
down through Rodney Koeneke
the crying of a manatee

down through Rodney Koeneke
the crying of a man.....

Vincent Katz Intro, 10/13/07

I'm behind on reading reports; plan to catch up soon. In the meantime, here's the intro for Vincent Katz from his Tangent reading with Diana Michener and Jim Dine on Saturday. Thanks to the Portland press--and the growing poetry community here--the joint was jammed.

The crystalline insouciance Vincent Katz achieves in his poems spills into his criticism, translations, art writing, and stunning work as editor of the literary magazine Vanitas. Katz makes The New York Times into poems, and makes Sextus Propertius sound as current and urgent as The New York Times. The first time I saw Vincent read, he was providing the voice for a jewel thief in one of Frank O’Hara’s favorite ‘30s films. That aura of New York and elegance, the shine and honk of the urban that Vincent carried for me then has never dimmed, and I’m glad that tonight he’s here to export it to Portland. Please welcome Vincent Katz.

Kevin Killian Intro, 8/9/07

Here's the intro I read for Kevin Killian last night at Tangent. (Matthew Stadler introduced Dodie.) Reading report to follow.

I can’t think of San Francisco anymore without thinking of Kevin Killian. He’s like the Sam Spade or Rice-A-Roni of poetry. Spend any time in the Bay Area, and before long you can’t see Kevin’s name without hearing the clang of the cable car. (*Ding ding dinga dinga ding!*).

Since I moved to Portland, I’m learning how to share Kevin with the rest of the world. For at least 7,506 unsuspecting Americans, he’s simply Amazon reviewer number 101, whose dazzling and occasionally acid reviews of everything from corporate gift baskets to glow-in-the-dark body jewelry, big budget movies to criminally under-read small press poetry, may be the most important conceptual writing project of our time.

Kevin’s also just returned from a V.I.P. reading engagement at Art Basel 38, the so-called “Olympic Games” of the art world. I guess like jazz or David Hasselhoff, Kevin’s had to go to Europe to find his true measure of glory. (Shame on us.) He’s just published a kind of Jamesian lamb-among-the-lions account of his trip to Switzerland, called “Diary of a Nobody.” In it, he stalks a pretentious art luminary paparrazi-style; recruits the passing talent to perform in his plays; and, as always, takes time to get the pulse of whatever the youth are up to. (There's not a being on the planet more generous to younger writers than Kevin is.)

Kevin’s zippy dissection of Art Basel reminds me of all the things I love about his work. His writing makes art seem sexy—that Kylie Minogue, Pollock-in-denim kind of sexy, the kind of sexy we usually reserve for movie stars and pop idols, but why? Why can’t Donald Judd shine just a little like Wynona? Why can’t high be low?

Kevin probes the unsettling erotics of fandom like nobody else I know. His work explores the way celebrity has of exposing our most intimate fears and desires publicly, almost collaboratively, in the ritualized obsessions of the superfan, the collector, the Amazon reviewer. Kevin’s writing, itself so often collaborative, is also a brave experiment (really a mercy mission) to make poetry sexy again. He treats the frumpy act of placing words on the page as if it deserved all the razzing, glamour, adulation and scandal that the famous get, even the B-list ones, and even at its most satirical, I’ve never read Kevin’s work, or seen it performed, without feeling somehow larger, like being a poet is an important and totally hot kind of thing to be.

Kevin, you’re not a nobody. You’re an Alp, and we’re thrilled to have you read for us in Portland.