Killian's Read ...

“JUST PERFECT NOW”

“He is the poet of heartbreak, and the shadow figure enslaved by the more vigorous and together figures in his life, like Olson or Creeley, feeling himself hardly human in his pale remnants of a life.”

Itstory

The post that exists to push other posts down, mimicking history.

Image Nations

The country that agrees to stop being the theater of other people's pleasures.

Crimson Datum

The end of the fashion for hose comes ill to the hosier.

Dept. of Monday

Silence is the pornography of the terrible.

Wear a Flower

Going to San Francisco this weekend for the event below. If you're in or around the Bay Area, hope to see you at ATA on Saturday.

SATURDAY, JULY 7, 2007. 8PM $10
THE NEW TALKIES: hijacking Hollywood
Live Film Narration
presented by kino21

Our Neo-Benshi Cabaret finds its way back to ATA, where it all started at Other Cinema in 2003 when intrepid writers and performers first tried to revive a latter day art of live film narration.

Since then the neo-benshi format has caught on from coast to coast to become a vehicle for taking over scenes from feature films by muting them & re-directing the images with words alone. OK, and maybe some musical and editorial embellishment, too.

Tonight's program will include cuts off Brandon Downing's new DVD, Dark Brandon, which uses a subtitled form of neo-benshi. Then the cinema will leap off the screen propelled by these overdubbers extraordinaires featuring concocted narration to scenes from the following unsuspecting films:

*Amanda Davidson Firestarter

*Rodney Koeneke The Golem

*Wayne Smith Darling

*Stephanie Young Vive L'Amour

*Jen Nellis Poison

*Konrad Steiner Minority Report

*David Brazil The Man Who Wasn't There

The Poetry of Rolex

Just spotted this ad for Rolex. (It's a picture of international piano sensation Lang Lang with the tag line: "Some people create poetry without ever PICKING UP A PEN.")

A poetry without poems. Cool.

Correction for Ad Dept.: we still use quills.

Yeats the Blogger

"I print the poem and never hear about it again, until I find the book years after with a page dog-eared by some young man, or marked by some young girl with a violet, and when I have seen that I am a little ashamed, as though somebody were to attribute to me a delicacy of feeling I should but do not possess. What came so easily at first, and amidst so much drama, and was written so laboriously at the last, cannot be counted among my possessions.

On the other hand, if I give a successful lecture, or write a vigorous, critical essay, there is immediate effect; I am confident that on some one point, which seems to me of great importance, I know more than other men, and I covet honor."

--from The Bounty of Sweden (1925)

The Book of Ocean

Maryrose Larkin launched her new The Book of Ocean at a reading with Catherine Daly and Donna Stonecipher in Portland last Sunday.

Stonecipher opened, kicking off with her poem in the latest issue of New American Writing, an “Inlay” piece that inserts in its middle a quotation from Elaine Scarry (“Daydreaming originates in the volitional.”) The poem’s an extended riff on the interplay between the architect’s ideals and the cities that keep falling short of them, an image of the distance between the world as we find it and the structures we want it to fit: “Facts are finite, but ideas feed on facts to achieve infinity.”

She continued with a generous selection from Souvenir de Constantinople, a “love poem to travel and the exotic” that creates a sort of Cornell box-like travelogue out of a distinctly Continental nostalgia for the sensual East, all magic lamps & antimacassars & “thousands of intermediary perfumes.” The writing pushed off from the pasteboard Orientalism to a point where the veracity of the representation took a back seat to its metaphoric possibilities, so that Constantinople and the tourist, the everyday “home” self and the longing for self-estrangement (“I wanted to be translated but O, not translatable”), resolve into an algebra where desire equals exactly desire, or its ornate little markers, the souvenirs of having once been subjunctive.

Catherine Daly, who just sold her vintage 'Stang to buy 100 ISBNs for her new i.e. Press, read a number of poems from her number of books, many of which showed a powerful attraction to the pleasures of the list (especially of food items), the tongue-twister, and the politically allusive disruption of words from their usual orders of sense and sound. The work Daly read from suggested a poetics of abundance, where any formal economy of the poem is a by-product of the generative procedures used to assemble the words (a walk through the aisles of a grocery store in Joshua Tree, CA; tongue-twisters tweaked and looped through voice recognition software.) She performed one longer piece from a book with the poems designed to be read top to bottom or bottom to top, at your will, laid out in such a way that by the time Daly got near the end of her selection, we were suddenly moving back up among familiar phrases in their reverse order, a clever tweak to the usual sequential hegemony of the page and also a formal enactment of that perennial mythic puzzler, the ouroboros. Catherine Daly, who just sold her vintage ‘Stang to buy 100 ISBNs for her new i.e. Press, read a number of poems from her number of books.

Maryrose Larkin began from the beginning, taking us through the first of the six books folded inside The Book of Ocean. “Book of Natural History” opens with a poem, “brief gravity,” that served as a kind of origin tale for one of the collection’s governing interests: the problem of placing ourselves—the self—in a natural world that presents itself simultaneously as an object of science (Newton’s apple, “a force based on the world”) and the subject of myth (Eve’s, “only to have been here/invested with the character of a sign”). I noted a lot of play with the concept of “bodies”—the envelope of skin that seems most intimately ours, the masses that gravity forces into relation, the objects that light bounces back from, making color, and the cold balls of hydrogen or whatever that fill the heavens but also inspire thoughts of its emptiness. They’re short poems of laurasian-sized ideas that treat the page as an energized field of space and space as “the infinite assemble of distance.” Here’s one Blogger shouldn’t skew too bad:

[Is Muscle and Fragile]

Is muscle and fragile

Is difficult stung breathe and dialect is ochre in love

Is texture truant chronicles verge

If the body is the text an atlas of crimson invisible if

—Maryrose Larkin, The Book of Ocean

Dept. of Degentesh

"Do you want your life to change?

Yes, I want to quit my high-octane day job in order to spend winters snorkeling and diving from a small island in Thailand, spring and fall in New York doing nothing or touring the world reading poetry, and the summers in Finland at yoga retreats. Meanwhile I will become a person of quiet renown in the right avant-garde music and literary circles for both my unprecedented talents and my incredible beauty that seems only to increase with age. I will also bear three or four children without pain and manage to give them all the emotional and financial support they need without ever sacrificing a moment of time that I need for myself. And I will have many devoted lovers concurrently without inspiring the slightest jealousy among any of them. Oh, and I will never be sick or tired or grumpy again after l buy the Lower East Side and cordon it off with a huge ice wall in order to raise my parrot colonies within it.”

Squelching Dissent

Word on the Northwest street is that poet, political scientist, and Portland professor Jules Boykoff will be on the radio tonight (OPB, 91.5) at 8 p.m., immediately following Fresh Air.

He’ll be talking about the history and ongoing suppression of political dissent in the U.S., hors d'oeuvre to his nearly-no-longer-‘forthcoming’ Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States from Oakland's venerable AK Press.

Go Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Name That Poem (Fin)

... T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets. Eliot’s in such bad odor that I thought anything good in the quotation from Helen Gardner below (that's Dame Helen Gardner to you and me), writing about Eliot in 1949’s The Art of T.S. Eliot, would get obscured if the poet’s name were in it.

True, there’s the assumption of a truth apart from the language used to express it, also in bad odor. And we’re right to smell it—Gardner’s a Christian with a capital ‘C’ (the only kind of reader who ever seems to tingle at the Four Quartets) and her take on the poem bleeds quickly into apologetics. (That lapse into “the way and the life” is vintage Gardner.)

But it’s a good quote that fits a range of poetries of the ‘other’ twentieth century. That the problem of truth isn’t so much what it might be, but how we would recognize it as such were it to exist, is neatly expressed here, along with the operating hypothesis that still underwrites our formal experiments: that the process the reader undergoes in deriving a meaning from ‘difficult’ verse—and that the poet undergoes in writing it—mirrors the way we arrive at meaning in “the life in which we find it.”

Time is cruel to literary critics. I.A. Richards peeled the names off poems so his Cambridge undergrads could encounter the actual words. That went all haywire later, and has its obvious limits. But I wonder how much sager criticism would sound if we subtracted the poet under discussion. Just for the sake of experiment.

Name That Poem

“The whole poem in its unity declares more eloquently than any single line or passage that truth is not the final answer to a calculation, nor the last stage of an argument, nor something told us once and for all, which we spend the rest of our life proving by examples. The subject [of the poem] is the truth which is inseparable from the way and the life in which we find it.”

No MSG

Where rhyme would never fly, assonance slips lazy verbal patterning under the radar.

Assonance: the MSG of modern American verse?

Nexium

KNOWS mahogany from maple.

KNOWS to measure twice, cut once.

DOESN'T KNOW acid reflux may be damaging his esophagus.

S.N.A.F.U.

The U.S. Navy drove a small fleet of warships up the Willamette last week for Portland's centennial Rose Festival, then threw them open to the public so the citizenry could see what they pay for.

The citizens got treated, on the Friday afternoon I went, to a 70-minute wait in line; a cumbersome registration process that required photo I.D. and selection of a specific ship to tour for no discernible reason; a single X-ray machine run by a single soldier doing ‘take off your belt and hand over those nail clippers’-level bag searches at a rate of about 8 persons an hour; a couple-three dozen soldiers in fatigues and mirrored sunglasses cradling machine guns at every point of interface with the public; and the cancellation of several tours when the wait stretched past the ship’s operational hours.

If the point was to generate some feelgood p.r. for the Navy, the Navy fell down bad. They did a good job though of teaching you how it feels to be a potential security threat in one of those fatigues and mirrored sunglasses sort of places the U.S. staffs so generously. Go Navy.

High/Low

NYC HIGHS

1. Autoharp.
2. Astoria.
3. Uzumaki (as performed by Nada Gordon).
4. Canyon Passage (as watched with Dark Brandon).
5. Dogsitting world's greatest pit bull outside the Park Slope Food Co-op.


NYC LOWS

1. Discovery in 90-degree heat of pressing civic need for frequent & reliable North-South subway line between Brooklyn and Queens.
2. Lack of sufficient time among Astoria's Greeks.
3. Difficulty in persuading poets to visit Portland.
4. Dawning realization of having become annoying in persuading poets to visit Portland.
5. Leaving.

Go East

Off the grid for a while, finishing up my neo-benshi piece for the event below. If you’re in or around NYC on May 30, I hope you’ll come.

NEO-BENSHI BEAST UNLEASHED ON THE EAST!
WEDNESDAY, MAY 30 @ 8:00 pm
Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church (corner of 7th Ave. & 10th St.), New York

The Japanese term benshi means “film-teller,” and benshi narrators thrived in Japan and Korea in the silent era, describing, voicing, and even expanding the films for audiences. “Neo-Benshi” originated in the Bay Area poets avant-garde, and has become something of a sensation. This 2-hour program of ‘hit’ Neo-Benshi performances includes West Coast masters Roxanne Hamilton, Stephanie Young, Rodney Koeneke, and Mac MacGinnes, along with NYC's own Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Elaine Equi, and Vincent Katz followed by a program of short films by Abigail Child, Brian Kim Stefans, Neo-Benshi co-creator Konrad Steiner, and Brandon Downing.