Avant

Dryden's Coach (Restoration Snap)

“And so much for Mr. Dryden; whose burial was the same as his life, variety and not of a piece: the quality and mob, farce and heroics: the sublime and ridiculous mixed in a piece; great Cleopatra in a hackney coach.”

—George Farquhar

Dept. of Monday: The Saunter

“A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another.”

Finance from the Oracle at Delphi

Economy is Yahweh.

Mosses to a New Manse (Peter Culley in Portland TONIGHT)

Poet Peter Culley’s in Portland tonight, appearing in conversation with local “Eco-Baroque” artists Bruce Conkle and Marne Lucas. The event is hosted by the back room; if you haven’t been to one of their unique shindigs before, this is a good one to explore, with a special “pay for whatever you eat and drink” rate.

the back room hosts a conversation with
PETER CULLEY, BRUCE CONKLE & MARNE LUCAS
*TONIGHT* JULY 21, 7 PM
Mandarin House, 120 SW Ankeny, 2nd floor (the atrium space across from the Skidmore Fountain, home to “famous hand-strung noodles” and excellent food and cocktails)

Seating is limited; email thebackroompdx_at_gmail_dot_com to reserve a seat.

12 or 20 kevins

“But good and bad are terms I pretty much grew out of once I moved to San Francisco, the birthplace of the provisional and the contingent.” “I think it was 1991 when I realized that the writer has no role in the larger culture. Succeeding developments have only hardened this condition, but it is still something of a surprise, rather like the man who can’t remember he has now only one hand.” “I lack discipline and yet, I don’t believe in it much.”

Status Update

Sort of like this.

Summery Metempsycosis

“And therefore though this soule could not move when it was a Melon, yet it may remember, and now tell mee, at what lascivious banquet it was serv’d.”

Doubled Whisper

“It will be seen eventually that this whole memoir, with its talk of Communes and revolutions, will be about integrity: that is, political, philosophical, social, poetic and spiritual integrity, for they are all intertwined, and all will have to incorporate a vivid sense of what our own death will mean to our ideals—how rich a story it makes.”

—Douglas Oliver, Whisper ‘Louise’

Word of the Day

“prepone.”

Ron links to news about the world shedding 6.4 languages every hour, but we’ve got “prepone.” Almost.

Poets in Contest

What poetry needs is its own game show. A show staged like a cage match, where two prominent poets face off with their best material. It should open with a Baroque quartet, be hosted by a suave & brainy “cool professor” type with good hair, and include a slinky Vanna White who draws alphabet blocks from a velvet bag to see who goes first. The poets should sit in puffy chairs, wear vivid colors and glasses on neck chains, and look indifferent to the air time. Wait …

Distinguishing the Boroughs

Kevin Killian on Charles Bernstein, Frank O’Hara & Brion Gysin.

"Dark Brandon" on YouTube

If you haven’t spent time inside the structured intensities of Brandon Downing’s incomparable film collages, do yourself a favor this Fourth and see how much America has to be thankful for. Start with “The Ship (I)” and cruise into the sun from there.

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.

American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson

Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman enter the blogosphere, with a whole age in train. (With help from Benjamin Friedlander.)

Tangent Reading this Saturday, 6/27: Cynthia Sailers, Dana Ward & Stephanie Young

Stephanie Young and Cynthia Sailers lift off from the East Bay to read with Cincinnati’s Rilke, Dana Ward, this Saturday in Portland for Tangent. The stars line up like this only sometimes—come see.

Tangent presents
SATURDAY, JUNE 27 at 7 PM
CYNTHIA SAILERS, DANA WARD & STEPHANIE YOUNG
Clinton Corner Café, 2633 SE 21st Ave. Portland, OR

CYNTHIA SAILERS is the author of the poetry collections Lake Systems (Tougher Disguises, 2004) and Rose Lungs (Atticus/Finch, 2004). She is writing a dissertation on perversion and group psychology. She is currently in private practice as a therapist in San Francisco and works at a publicly funded clinic in the Mission, where she leads a process group for women. She serves on the board for Small Press Traffic and is expecting a new book, Ladies of Leisure, in June from Cy Press.

DANA WARD is the author of a couple of books that just came out in 2009—Roseland (Editions Louis Wain) & the Drought (Open 24hrs). He lives in Cincinnati, edits Cy Press, & works as an advocate for adult literacy at the Over-the-Rhine Learning Center.

STEPHANIE YOUNG lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry are Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 2008) and Telling the Future Off (Tougher Disguises, 2005). She edited Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and her most recent editorial project is Deep Oakland.

Style and the Stylized

I’m late to the parade on Edwin Denby, but glad I finally got there. Almost everything he says about dancing translates to writing, or any of the arts involving humans, because he’s really less interested in this or that piece than in art as a kind of teaching of living. The Denby ethos includes clarity, sincerity, unpretentiousness, enjoyment, youth, unselfconsciousness, expression over perfection, and individuality within a collective of others allowed to develop as individuals. Part of the fun of reading his reviews of performances over half a century gone is the way he connects dancing to other registers of life—movies, lindy-hopping at the Savoy, basketball games, musicals, that new billboard in Times Square—so that everything seems part of one thing: “Civilization is really a great pleasure.” More O’Hara than Ashbery, but you can see how Denby set the stage for both.

Here’s Denby on the “stylized”—the artifice that paradoxically makes everyday life more visible (and makes individual “style” accountable to collective social life.) He’s talking about motion, but it’s not much of a jump to move from there to poems.

“What is a ‘stylized movement’? It is a movement that looks a little like dancing but more like nondancing. It is a movement derived from what people do when they are not dancing. It is a gesture from life deformed to suit music (music heard or imagined). The pleasure of watching it lies in guessing the action it was derived from, in guessing what it originally looked like, and then in savoring the ‘good taste’ of the deformation.”

—Edwin Denby, “On Meaning in Dance,” July 18, 1943 in Dance Writings