Gustaf Sobin's Luminous Debris

Still on this. (The rest live under “books.”) Sobin’s Collected Poems just came out with Talisman House. His career gets an old-skool-thoughtful treatment by its editors, Andrews Joron and Zawacki, in the latest Jacket. Luminous Debris is a smart, moving throwback to the era of amateur archaeologists and Victorian belle-lettrists, with their “delectable valleys” and “fanciful curves” and Romantic attachments to their data sets. For all his hostility to our placeless postmodern global moment, Sobin reads the prehistoric record like a species of postmodern poem, alive to the absences, elisions, fragments, and traces that restore our earliest ancestors from silence to the fragile contours of memory. Who bu...mor

Luminous Debris is a smart, moving throwback to the era of amateur archaeologists and Victorian belle-lettrists, with their “delectable valleys” and “fanciful curves” and Romantic attachments to their data sets. For all his hostility to our placeless postmodern global moment, Sobin reads the prehistoric record like a species of postmodern poem, alive to the absences, elisions, fragments, and traces that restore our earliest ancestors from silence to the fragile contours of memory. Who but a poet like Sobin could see Stone Age arrowheads as “hyphens” connecting predator and prey, or an ancient quarry as the “inverted grammar” of a missing city? His prose turns Ionian pottery motifs into “the calligraphy of Logos” and place names into “breath shreds … endowed with all the material attributes of objects.” If Sobin occasionally makes prehistory sound like a giant example of slow poetry, rearguard and hectoring and nostalgic for a lost authenticity, he also recovers from the dull-as-dirt discourse of professional archaeology an “imminently semiotic” précis of our own condition here at the bleeding edge of human history.

The New Newer Metaphysicals

Good to see Nicholas Manning up and blogging again, only this time from London.

Star Studies

Giant thanks to Tom Fisher and Sam Lohmann for being last night’s first, brave iteration of the Habsburg Lipps. Good hearing work by Erik Flores and remarkable solo guitar from Dave Bow, whose songs carried some of the charge of Oregon’s own Tim Hardin. Enjoyed meeting Cheyenne Glasgow, too. Got home past 11 to spot the fire-twirling troupe who practices for Burning Man in the park near my house. This spring they were marching through a thin steady rain, hoops and wands unlit. Last night they were in full blaze. This must mean something good.

Jamalieh Haley and Donald Dunbar are doing great things with a living room and all the writers, singers, painters, visual artists, box wine & PBR imbibers it’ll fit. You can check for who’s next last Tuesday of each month at If Not For Kidnap Poetry.

"Pretty Sweet Line Up, Kidnap Lovers"

I’ll be reading some poems this Tuesday, 7/27 with local fictioneer Erik Flores for July’s installment of If Not For Kidnap Poetry. On top of sonic surprises by musician/Portland Mercury contributor Dave Bow and photographs by Cheyenne Glasgow, you can catch the debut of my new poetics percussion ensemble, The Habsburg Lipps. Here’s the announcement from Jamalieh and Donald:

July brings you a pretty sweet line up, Kidnap lovers. Poet Rodney Koeneke and fictioneer Erik Flores. You will also be serenaded by Dave Bow, who I happen to think is a pretty skilled musician (not to mention his superb writing skills). There will also be photographs up by Cheyenne Glasgow. Come hear! Come see!

RODNEY KOENEKE is author of the poetry collections Musee Mechanique and Rouge State. Rules for Drinking Forties, a chapbook, appeared from Cy Press last year; another, Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren), appears from OMG! Press this year. His work has been anthologized in Bay Poetics and in Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, forthcoming this fall. He’s read and performed at The Poetry Center, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the de Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Small Press Traffic, the Pacific Film Archive, The Smell, and the Bowery Poetry Club, among others. He lives in Portland, OR where he helps curate the Tangent Reading Series and blogs mostly about poetry at Modern Americans: www.modampo.blogspot.com

ERIK FLORES was born in San Francisco, California. He earned his MFA at the Queens College Writers Workshop and resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife and daughter. His new book, From the Neck Up, recently came out on Eldrecko Press. He also performs weddings.

Take a sneak peek at CHEYENNE’S stuff here.

Please drop by if you have the chance. Don’t forget to bring a dollar or two to donate for the drinks and talent!

Incoming: SATURDAY, AUGUST 14 Rodney Koeneke, Jesse Lichtenstein & Erika Recordon Market Day Poetry Series @ St. Johns Booksellers, high noon

Out of Office Reply (Informal)

Peaches and Bats Noon Saturday

I’m reading poems with Joseph Mains and dan raphael this Saturday, July 10 at 12 noon at St. Johns Booksellers, next to the St. Johns Farmer’s Market in North Portland. It’s the launch for Peaches and Bats #6, the Portland-based poetry zine edited by Sam Lohmann, who’ll read some work by contributors who can’t be there.

Peaches and Bats is one of those hand-sewn, handheld lit delivery devices that was supposed to wither with the rise of the Internet, but keeps putting out blooms (Try!, Mrs. Maybe, Satellite Telephone, Abraham Lincoln, Poor Claudia, etc.) via stapler, Paypal, and day job copy machine access, plus lots of editorial energy and love. Print: the new samizdat.

Fourth of July

“But his creative contributions to the insurance business could hardly have been made so successfully later if he had not had this early familiarity with the basis of insurance theory. He was at home with it from the first because his devotion to Emersonian doctrine led him to see, in the truths revealed by statistical averages, the expression of the Universal Mind, operating in the experience of many individuals.”

—Henry Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music

"Come Into My Amazing Yard"

BOMB does Brandon Downing.