Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape

2011-03-23T10:42:00.005-06:00

In 2004, I took a leave from film school in Ireland and went on tour with the band Califone-- with Solan Jensen, some cameras, and microphones.

The film is called Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape.

It is a 68 minute documentary comprised of Califone performances and interviews from Bologna to Belgium, Chicago to Seattle.

It was produced by Basement Light Pictures and has just been released by IndiePix Films.

This is the trailer:

Get the film here.

New Episode of Rabbit Light Movies is up

2010-12-30T20:40:00.001-07:00

Laynie Browne | Sommer Browning | Michael Earl Craig | Emily Kendal Frey

Noah Eli Gordon | Arielle Greenberg | Aimee Nezhukumatathil | Alice Notley

Michelle Taransky | C.D. Wright | Rachel Zolf | and....

the new trailer for Asteroid, a feature-length poemfilm forthcoming June 2011 from Zachary Schomburg.

click here

Fall Tour

2010-09-24T11:53:00.003-06:00

Dear friends:

I'm going on a reading tour this October 2010. Solan Jensen will accompany me on banjo. Jaswinder Bolina, Abraham Smith, Farid Matuk, and Mathias Svalina are on board for several dates apiece. I hope I see you.

Thursday October 7 2010 at 8pm: Atlanta, GA (with Jaswinder Bolina / Beep Beep Gallery / 696 Charles Allen Drive)

Friday October 8 2010: Tuscaloosa, AL at 7pm (with Abraham Smith & Jaswinder Bolina / Little Willie's / 2350 Fourth Street)

Saturday October 9 2010: Water Valley, MS at 7pm (with Abraham Smith & Jaswinder Bolina / Bozart's Gallery / 403 N. Main Street)

Sunday October 10 2010: New Orleans, LA at 7pm (with Abraham Smith & Jaswinder Bolina / Antenna Gallery / 3161 Burgundy Street)

Tuesday October 12 2010: Lafayette, LA at 7:30pm (with Abraham Smith /Blue Moon Saloon / 215 E. Convent Street)

Wednesday October 13 2010: Baton Rouge, LA at 7pm (with Abraham Smith /Chelsea's Cafe / 2857 Perkins Road)

Thursday October 14 2010: Dallas, TX (night off with friends)

Friday October 15 2010: Houston, TX at 8pm (with Abraham Smith & Farid Matuk / Amadon's Crib / email jmw for details)

Saturday October 16 2010: Austin, TX at 7pm (with Farid Matuk/ Hoa & Dale's / email jmw for details)

Sunday October 17 2010: Marfa, TX at 7pm (with Farid Matuk / Marfa Book Co. / 105 S. Highland)

Monday October 18 2010: El Paso, TX (with Farid Matuk / UTEP MFA workshop visit)

Tuesday October 19 2010: Las Cruces, NM (NMSU MFA workshop visit)

Thursday October 21 2010: Boulder, CO at 7pm (with Jake Adam York / UC Boulder / Norlin M549 5th Floor)

Sunday October 24 2010: Boise, ID at 8pm (with Mathias Svalina / Pengilly's Saloon / 513 W. Main St.)

Monday October 25 2010: Reno, NV (night off in the biggest little city in the world)

Tuesday October 26 2010: San Francisco, CA at tba (with Mathias Svalina, Claire Becker, Juliana Leslie / details coming)

Wednesday October 27 2010: Ashland, OR at tba (with Mathias Svalina / Southern Oregon Univ. / details coming)

Thursday October 28 2010: Portland, OR at tba (with Mathias Svalina / Bad Blood / details coming)

Friday October 29 2010: Seattle, WA at 7pm (with Mathias Svalina / Pilot Books / 219 Broadway East / Upstairs)

bomb inteview

2010-09-08T14:55:00.001-06:00

Where I make fun of myself for even having a blog.

Part I and Part II

Califone Film is nearly done

2010-08-27T18:10:00.001-06:00

Film: Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape

a film about Califone on tour

68 minutes

Directed by Solan Jensen & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

coming late 2010

Poets on Teaching

2010-06-24T15:06:00.002-06:00

Poets on Teaching

Essays by:

Kazim Ali, Rae Armantrout, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Dan Beachy-Quick, Bruce Beasley, Claire Becker, Jaswinder Bolina, Jenny Boully, Joel Brouwer, Lily Brown, Laynie Browne, Stephen Burt, Julie Carr, Joshua Clover, Matthew Cooperman, Oliver de la Paz, Linh Dinh, Ben Doller, Sandra Doller, Julie Doxsee, Lisa Fishman, Graham Foust, John Gallaher, Forrest Gander, C. S. Giscombe, Peter Gizzi, Lara Glenum, Kenneth Goldsmith, Johannes Göransson, Noah Eli Gordon, Arielle Greenberg, Richard Greenfield, Sarah Gridley, Anthony Hawley, Terrance Hayes, Eric Hayot, Brian Henry, Brenda Hillman, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Christine Hume, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, Kent Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Karla Kelsey, Aaron Kunin, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Dorothea Lasky, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Ada Limón, Timothy Liu, Sabrina Orah Mark, Dawn Lundy Martin, Kristi Maxwell, Joyelle McSweeney, Christina Mengert, Albert Mobilio, K. Silem Mohammad, Fred Moten, Jennifer Moxley, Laura Mullen, Sawako Nakayasu, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Hoa Nguyen, Jena Osman, D. A. Powell, Kristin Prevallet, Bin Ramke, Jed Rasula, Srikanth Reddy, Barbara Jane Reyes, Boyer Rickel, Elizabeth Robinson, Martha Ronk, Emily Rosko, Prageeta Sharma, Evie Shockley, Eleni Sikelianos, Richard Siken, Ron Silliman, Tracy K. Smith, Juliana Spahr, Sasha Steensen, Peter Streckfus, Cole Swensen, Michael Theune, Tony Trigilio, Spring Ulmer, Karen Volkman, Catherine Wagner, G. C. Waldrep, Mark Wallace, Tyrone Williams, Mark Yakich, Jake Adam York, Stephanie Young, Timothy Yu, Matthew Zapruder, Andrew Zawacki, and Rachel Zucker

little spiel

2010-06-11T10:50:00.003-06:00

What's American about American Poetry? here's my spiel.

Rabbit Light Movies #11!!!!!

2010-05-31T15:41:00.003-06:00

Episode #11 is here

29 new movies! 31 new poets!

John Beer | Eula Biss | Joel Brouwer |

Julie Carr | Joel Craig | Patrick Durgin |

Monica Fambrough | Judith Goldman |

Sarah Gridley | Terrance Hayes | Christine Hume |

Claudia Keelan | Sandra Lim |

Dawn Lundy Martin & Ronaldo V. Wilson |

Peter O'Leary | Donald Revell | Lisa Robertson |

Michael Robins | Jennifer Scappettone |

Zachary Schomburg | James Shea | Carol Snow |

Kerri Sonnenberg | Peter Streckfus | Tony Trigilio |

Leila Wilson | Allyssa Wolf |

Lesley Yalen & Natalie Lyalin | Matvei Yankelevich

Poets on Teaching

2010-05-13T16:24:00.003-06:00

Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook is coming in August from University of Iowa Press.

Featuring 99 essays by 101 contributors: Kazim Ali, Rae Armantrout, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Dan Beachy-Quick, Bruce Beasley, Claire Becker, Jaswinder Bolina, Jenny Boully, Joel Brouwer, Lily Brown, Laynie Browne, Stephen Burt, Julie Carr, Joshua Clover, Matthew Cooperman, Oliver de la Paz, Linh Dinh, Ben Doller, Sandra Doller, Julie Doxsee, Lisa Fishman, Graham Foust, John Gallaher, Forrest Gander, C.S. Giscombe, Peter Gizzi, Lara Glenum, Kenneth Goldsmith, Johannes Goransson, Noah Eli Gordon, Arielle Greenberg, Richard Greenfield, Sarah Gridley, Anthony Hawley, Terrance Hayes, Eric Hayot, Brian Henry, Brenda Hillman, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Christine Hume, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, Kent Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Karla Kelsey, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Dorothea Lasky, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Ada Limon, Timothy Liu, Sabrina Orah Mark, Dawn Lundy Martin, Kristi Maxwell, Joyelle McSweeney, Albert Mobilio, K. Silem Mohammad, Fred Moten, Jennifer Moxley, Laura Mullen, Sawako Nakayasu, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Hoa Nguyen, Jena Osman, Kristin Prevallet, Bin Ramke, Jed Rasula, Srikanth Reddy, Barbara Jane Reyes, Elizabeth Robinson, Martha Ronk, Emily Rosko, Prageeta Sharma, Evie Shockley, Eleni Sikelianos, Richard Siken, Ron Silliman, Tracy K. Smith, Juliana Spahr, Sasha Steensen, Peter Streckfus, Cole Swensen, Michael Theune, Tony Trigilio, Spring Ulmer, Karen Volkman, Catherine Wagner, G. C. Waldrep, Mark Wallace, Tyrone Williams, Mark Yakich, Jake Adam York, Stephanie Young, Timothy Yu, Matthew Zapruder, and Rachel Zucker.

Selenography | On Wonderland & Waste

2010-01-31T11:04:00.008-07:00

Selenography by Joshua Marie Wilkinson with Polaroids by Tim Rutili.

On Wonderland & Waste by Sandy Florian with collages by Alexis Anne McKenzie.

Both for $30!

Episode #10 of Rabbit Light Movies

2010-01-21T10:16:00.001-07:00

Books are out

2009-12-31T16:47:00.003-07:00

Iowa by Travis Nichols and Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu are out. Buy them both for $20.

dec/jan

2009-12-13T10:26:00.003-07:00

Got a late start. heading to Nashville for the night. Onto Athens.

Bringing "A." Then JP and PA via train. Then back and to Athens. Genji finally went up. It couldn't have been moonbright, young Mr. Lincoln. Iowa & Texture Notes any day now.

January=Savannah and Raleigh, and back to Chicago to mix audio for the Califone movie 1000 years later. Teaching a Carson lecture and a Flood seminar. And finishing the index for poets on teaching. It's already 37 pages.

Writing now on kapil, celan, giscombe, keene, young, moxley, nakayasu, lacoue-labarthe, et al.

If you want something to watch--the 1934 version. wept like fool.

chin chin, happy new year / decade.

Readings Coming

2009-09-14T22:16:00.004-06:00

[thanks for coming in Kenosha, Oberlin, Brooklyn, Chicago, & Cambridge this week]

Coming up

January 16, 2010: Raleigh, NC

February 11, 2010: Cincinnati

March 3rd, 2010: Iowa City (Prairie Lights Bookstore)

March 5th, 2010: San Francisco

April 10, 2010: Denver (at AWP)

May 15, 2010: Fayetteville, AR

July__, 2010: Minneapolis

interview

2009-08-24T20:59:00.001-06:00

new one here

Poets on Teaching

2009-07-30T10:23:00.002-06:00

The anthology of short essays on teaching poetry I've been working on is coming out from University of Iowa Press next year.

Contributors include: Kazim Ali, Rae Armantrout, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Dan Beachy-Quick, Bruce Beasley, Claire Becker, Jaswinder Bolina, Jenny Boully, Joel Brouwer, Lily Brown, Laynie Browne, Stephen Burt, Julie Carr, Joshua Clover, Matthew Cooperman, Oliver de la Paz, Linh Dinh, Ben Doller, Sandra Doller, Julie Doxsee, Lisa Fishman, Graham Foust, John Gallaher, Forrest Gander, C.S. Giscombe, Peter Gizzi, Lara Glenum, Kenneth Goldsmith, Johannes Goransson, Noah Eli Gordon, Arielle Greenberg, Richard Greenfield, Sarah Gridley, Anthony Hawley, Terrance Hayes, Eric Hayot, Brian Henry, Brenda Hillman, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Christine Hume, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, Kent Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Karla Kelsey, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Dorothea Lasky, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Ada Limon, Timothy Liu, Dawn Lundy Martin, Joyelle McSweeney, Jane Miller, Albert Mobilio, K. Silem Mohammad, Fred Moten, Jennifer Moxley, Laura Mullen, Sawako Nakayasu, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Hoa Nguyen, Jena Osman, Kristin Prevallet, Bin Ramke, Jed Rasula, Srikanth Reddy, Barbara Jane Reyes, Elizabeth Robinson, Martha Ronk, Emily Rosko, Prageeta Sharma, Evie Shockley, Eleni Sikelianos, Richard Siken, Ron Silliman, Tracy K. Smith, Juliana Spahr, Sasha Steensen, Peter Streckfus, Cole Swensen, Michael Theune, Tony Trigilio, Spring Ulmer, Karen Volkman, Catherine Wagner, G. C. Waldrep, Mark Wallace, Tyrone Williams, Mark Yakich, Jake Adam York, Stephanie Young, Timothy Yu, Matthew Zapruder, and Rachel Zucker.

Requited

2009-07-10T12:57:00.001-06:00

new journal: Requited

Reading: July 31st in Chicago with Joan of Arc

Episode #9

2009-06-12T10:41:00.001-06:00

New Episode of Rabbit Light Movies

Reading on Wednesday at 7:30pm

2009-06-07T08:33:00.005-06:00

At Danny's (Damen & Dickens) in Bucktown, Chicago

with Dorothea Lasky

Whispering

2009-05-11T18:49:00.002-06:00

The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth is out

Order Chapbooks Now

2009-03-16T10:39:00.009-06:00

Order Now -- both for $16

Sara Veglahn's Another Random Heart

Anselm Berrigan's To Hell With Sleep

Letter Machine Editions

Books & Chapbooks of 2009

2009-01-09T10:54:00.044-07:00

There Are Birds -- John Taggart
glad stone children --Edmund Berrigan
jam alerts -- Linh Dinh
19 names for our band -- Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Rogue Hemlocks -- Carl Martin
Old With You -- Lily Brown
The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls -- Eleni Sikelianos
The Location of Things -- Barbara Guest
Archaics -- Barbara Guest
10. The Open Skies -- Barbara Guest
Who Opens -- Jesse Seldess
Folding Ruler Star -- Aaron Kunin
Quill, Solitary APPARATION -- Barbara Guest
hughson's tavern -- Fred Moten
The Sonnets -- Ted Berrigan
Considering how exaggerated music is -- Leslie Scalapino
Macular Hole -- Catherine Wagner
Sun -- Michael Palmer
Disclamor -- G.C. Waldrep
20. The Blue Stairs -- Barbara Guest
Waltzing Matilda -- Alice Notley
To After That (Toaf) -- Renee Gladman
Francesca's Hair Grows -- Renee Gladman
For Love -- Robert Creeley
Bohr's Model (manuscript) -- NEG
Slide Rule -- Jen Hofer
Sleeping and Waking -- Michael O'Brien
Undanceable -- Merrill Gilfillan
the totality for kids -- Joshua Clover
Margaret & Dusty -- Alice Notley
30. Moscow Mansions -- Barbara Guest
Code of Flag Behavior -- David Antin
The Countess from Minneapolis -- Barbara Guest
Things are Happening -- Joshua Beckman
The Cloud Corporation -- Timothy Donnelly
Three Poems -- Stefania Heim
Nineains -- Ethan Paquin
poems -- Fred Moten / Poems -- Jim Berhle
Versed -- Rae Armantrout
After Lorca -- Jack Spicer
40. Admonitions -- Jack Spicer
The Turler Losses -- Barbara Guest
Freely Espousing -- James Schuyler
Magic City -- Yusef Komunyakaa
Maximum Gaga -- Lara Glenum
The Tree of No -- Sandy Florian
Duende -- Tracy K. Smith
The Home Book -- James Schuyler
Great Stories of the Chair -- Ted Berrigan
This Elizabeth -- Lesley Yalen
50. Lullaby -- Christine Hume
Tuned Droves -- Eric Baus
Some Kinds of Poems -- Graham Foust
The Method -- Sasha Steensen
Biography / Quilts / Musicality -- Barbara Guest
Slip -- Christopher Stackhouse
Day of Answers -- Laura Goldstein
Ghosts are Hope -- Cole Swensen
June -- Lynn Xu
Decreation -- Anne Carson

60. Hotel Winter -- Sarah Green

The Viral Lease -- Mathias Svalina

The History of a Lake Never Drowns -- Julia Cohen

The Cupboard, on a Rainy Day, Knows the Rules for a Game.... -- Mathias Svalina

One Neither One -- Shane McCrae

Take It -- Joshua Beckman

Night Scenes -- Lisa Jarnot

Jelly Roll -- Kevin Young

Recyclopedia -- Harryette Mullen

The Cuckoo -- Peter Streckfus

70. Lining -- Lisa Fishman

Mobius Crowns -- Dan Beachy-Quick & Srikanth Reddy

Kabba Loom -- Lisa Fishman

Star in the Eye -- James Shea

Poemland -- Chelsey Minnis

The Book of Frank -- CAConrad

The Book of nature -- Regan Good

Get the Fuck back into that Burning Plane -- Lawrence Griffin

Classification of a Spit Stain -- Ellie Ga

Apology for the Book of Creatures -- Dan Beachy-Quick

80. Plummet -- Chris Nealon

Iowa -- Travis Nichols

Texture Notes -- Sawako Nakayasu

The Grand Piano Part 1 -- Bob Perelman, et al.

Wonder of Birds -- Joanna Klink

How Void of Miracles -- Kristina Hummel

On "Sad Songs and Waltzes" -- Graham Foust

The Activist -- Renee Gladman

The Opening of the Field -- Robert Duncan

The Comedy of Errors -- Wm. Shakespeare

90. Titus Andronicus -- Wm. Shakespeare

On Love and Barley -- Matsuo Basho

Water-Damage_ _ _ _ _ a map of three black days -- Bhanu Kapil

Roseland -- Dana Ward

The Moth Poem -- Robin Blaser

The Grand Piano Part 2 -- Barrett Watten, et al.

Nude Siren -- Peter Richards

Rabbit Light Live

2008-12-16T22:23:00.004-07:00

Sara Veglahn / Arda Collins \ Hoa Nguyen / Srikanth Reddy \ Noah Eli Gordon / Sarah Gridley \ Lily Brown \ Christopher Stackhouse / Lisa Fishman \ Abraham Smith / Richard Meier \

Rabbit Light Live

Saturday February 14th. 9pm.

New Wave Coffee.

2557 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Chicago

Free.

New Rabbit Light Movies

2008-12-01T09:35:00.003-07:00

New Rabbit Light Movies: John Keene (below), Philip Jenks, Eleni Sikelianos, Lily Brown, Laura Goldstein, Patrick Culliton, Richard Meier, Nicole Wilson, Nathalie Stephens, Ed Roberson, Lisa Fishman, Susan Scarlata, Dan Beachy-Quick, Ben Doller & Sandra Doller,

Timothy Yu, and Abraham Smith.

JOHN KEENE

xmas eve

2008-11-24T08:49:00.002-07:00

in case you want to order xmas gifts that will be a couple months late

here & here

Thank You, Kalamazoo

2008-11-17T09:10:00.002-07:00

We had a wonderful time in Kalamazoo. I hope you got a copy of the amazing broadside

that Nikki did. Thanks, Adam and all who came from near and far.

Hölderlin

2008-11-10T20:31:00.004-07:00

You need this. New from Omnidawn. Imagine a poet

being a supreme influence on Adorno, Rilke, Derrida,

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lacoue-Labarthe--

who also roomed with G.W.F. Hegel. That's this.

Chernoff & Hoover's translations are wonderful.

Get it here.

Thank You, Lambs

2008-11-07T20:51:00.002-07:00

Thank you all so much for coming to the Poetry & Chicago Convocation.

One count put the audience at 135. I was stunned with gratitude.

Thank you all who came, listened, and visited with the poets.

Jen Karmin, Lisa Fishman, Lily Brown, Quraysh Ali Lansana, John Keene, and Abe Smith

all read extraordinary work. And I read a poem by the President-Elect.

It's been a surreal week in Chicago. Thanks for sharing in it. Now to bed.

Friday November 7th, noon - 3pm

2008-10-26T11:07:00.011-06:00

Poetry & Chicago Convocation

Free & Open to the public: Friday November 7th at Noon in the Simpson Multi Purpose Room on Loyola's Rogers Park Campus.
6 poets will give short talks on their work, a lunch will be served, and the poets will read from new projects.
Red Line to Loyola Stop; and the Simpson Living Learning Center is on the Corner of Sheridan Rd. and Winthrop Ave. It's called the Multi-Purpose Room right on Sheridan Rd.

Lisa Fishman

Quraysh Ali Lansana

Robyn Schiff

John Keene

Jennifer Karmin

Abraham Smith

Fayetteville, Arkansas

2008-10-16T09:37:00.004-06:00

Going on down...

RLM on Wave's Political Poetry

2008-10-15T11:02:00.002-06:00

Jaswinder, Ana, and Nathalie (preview) are here

send yourself a gift in the future

2008-10-06T19:31:00.001-06:00

here

mesh figures

2008-09-30T08:44:00.000-06:00

up soon on Mesh Works

Reading next Sunday in Chicago

2008-09-26T09:05:00.002-06:00

Poetry Readings by Catherine Wagner and Joshua Marie
Wilkinson
Sunday, Oct. 5, 6:30 p.m.

Announcing the third poets-passing-through Sky
Apartment Poetry Reading, where Lisa Fishman, Rick
Meier and others live: 7618 North Eastlake Terrace
#3, Chicago, 60626. (It's at the north end of Rogers
Park, next to the lake off Sheridan, between Howard
and Rogers, top floor. Red Line to Jarvis, walk toward
lake and up; or bus 147 to Howard; walk to lake & up.
The building has a pagoda-style entry-way to walk

through; our unit is the front one on the left.)

Light refreshments provided; everyone welcome. The
poetry will start promptly at 7.

Catherine Wagner is the author of Macular Hole (Fence
2004), Miss America (Fence 2001), and various
chapbooks, recently including Bornt (forthcoming,
Dusie, 2008), Articulate How (forthcoming, Big Game
Books, 2008) and Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha,
2008). She edited a portfolio of unpublished poems by
Barbara Guest for the recent triple issue of Chicago
Review on Guest's work. She teaches at Miami
University in Oxford, Ohio, where she lives car-free
with her five-year-old son Ambrose.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of three books,
and two more are forthcoming: The Book of Whispering
in the Projection Booth and an edited collection of
poetry and conversations between young poets
and their mentors. Both are due out this spring. He
lives in Rogers Park and teaches at Loyola.

February 2009

2008-09-20T15:22:00.001-06:00

February 2009

2008-09-20T09:37:00.000-06:00

RIP

2008-09-11T07:58:00.003-06:00

Reginald Shepherd (1963-2008)

I only met Reginald one time, in Atlanta, but he was very kind to me. He will be missed.

new movie

2008-09-09T08:47:00.001-06:00

From a new chapbook coming out with Cinematheque Press: Poem for Mathias Svalina

Friday November 7th 2008: Save the Date

2008-09-05T11:50:00.003-06:00

At Loyola we've been approved to for our "Poetry & Chicago" Convocation
featuring brief talks, lunch, and readings by

Lisa Fishman
John Keene
Robyn Schiff
Jennifer Karmin
Quraysh Ali Lansana

with special guest Abraham Smith

When: Friday afternoon November 7th, 2008
Where: Loyola University Chicago, Lake Shore Campus (Rogers Park)
What: Talks, Readings, & Lunch
How much: Free
Open to: General Public, Students, All

The premise of the convocation was to invite five poets to Loyola to talk about Poetry AND what their other work is in/on: whether fiction, activism, publishing, collaboration, environmental work, community outreach, farming, archival work, &etc.

Each of the five "Chicago Poets" will give brief talks about how their work influences their poetics, their projects. We'll break for a catered lunch, and each of the five poets will read from their work--and our special guest Abraham Smith, visiting from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, will also give a brief reading.

Please spread the word & save the date.

Rabbit Light Movies

2008-08-17T14:49:00.005-06:00

I've updated Rabbit Light Movies. A bit more user-friendly I hope.

Also, lots of new movies for the December Episode #8: Abraham Smith, John Keene,

Lily Brown, Nicole Wilson, Patrick Culliton, Eleni Sikelianos, Ed Roberson, Dan Beachy-Quick,

Susan Scarlata, Ben & Sandra Doller, and a number of others.

on Harriet

2008-08-04T11:20:00.001-06:00

Travis Nichols posted a little piece on Rabbit Light Movies on Poetry Foundation's
Harriet Blog. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/

Thanks, Travis!

Rabbit Light Movies--Episode #7

2008-07-06T21:43:00.004-06:00

Click here for new short movies of

John Keene & Christopher Stackhouse, Juliana Leslie,

Johannes Goransson,

Sasha Steensen, Michael Rerick, Claire Becker, Anthony Hawley,

Mary Jo Bang,

K. Silem Mohammed, and Matthea Harvey.

http://www.rabbitlightmovies.com

Episode #7

the so-called up audial now

2008-06-14T14:26:00.001-06:00

reading last february when it was so freezing in Chicago with Betsy.

Harp & Altar

2008-06-13T10:14:00.003-06:00

you can now go to the new Harp & Altar and so you should.

so ill

2008-06-11T13:36:00.002-06:00

Click this Manual Labors button

sleep suckatash

2008-06-07T11:52:00.002-06:00

"What would they say if they knew

I sit for two months on six lines

of poetry?"

--Niedecker

The Battlefield, The Moon, The Where I Love You

2008-05-17T12:21:00.003-06:00

I'm leading a 4 week reading group with some undergrads and grad students in Chicago this June.

We are reading the new printing (3rd!) of

The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

by Frank Stanford

It's been lovingly reprinted by Lost Roads, Susan Scarlata, with a great new introductory note by Forrest Gander, written just this last March 2008, and with the brilliant preface by C.D. Wright.

My new copy (a meager $20) just came from SPD today. Summer is on.

An interview with the best press in the world

2008-05-16T17:26:00.003-06:00

Marty Riker talks to Devin Johnston of Flood Editions in the first TRICKHOUSE:

DJ: "The future holds a crumbling economy, endless wars, and some good books from Flood Editions. In the next two years, we will publish new books of poetry by Lisa Jarnot, John Taggart, Andrew Joron, Jennifer Moxley, and Graham Foust, as well as a novella by Fanny Howe called What Did I Do Wrong?, told from a stray dog’s perspective."

What You Now Need, You Do

2008-05-08T14:39:00.003-06:00

Dorothea Lasky's Tourmaline it is only 3.50$ USD. Get thee one now.

Also, the Jay Wright Tetrad from Dalkey, Flood, & LSU:

The Guide Signs

Polynomials & Pollen

The Presentable Art of Reading Absence

Music's Mask & Measure

***

New interviews with Nathalie Stephens & Tyrone Williams & Abraham Smith & Karen Volkman & Renee Gladman are forthcoming.

Wednesday Reading in Chicago

2008-04-27T10:32:00.003-06:00

Reading on Wednesday night at The Book Cellar in Chicago with Richards Fox & Meier

and others I think too. It's in Lincoln Square. Brown Line Train to Western stop should

put you two blocks away or so.

Wednesday April 30th

7pm

The Book Cellar

4736-8 N. Lincoln

Chicago, IL 60625

2008-04-06T21:40:00.003-06:00

Lug has gone into a second printing in just two years. Thank you, everybody who found one.
The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth will be out early next year.

Thank You, Friends

2008-03-31T09:27:00.002-06:00

For those of you who put us up and put up with us: beginning in someplace called Lamar, Pennsylvania (in the snowfall), and ending up back in Chicago last night ten or so days later.

Between: New York City, Amherst (Nat), Hadley (Diana), Northampton, and Belchertown (Paul! Max!), to Cambridge (Chris, Mick!, Mr. Bell & Ms. Capps, and the wonderful Jon W.)-- DC: Rod, Scotty, Mark W., Albert--Richmond, wow; Athens, Sabrina, Karla, Lara, Danielle, thank you all; and ATL: the Clermont, Rubot, Ceballos, Tony, Zoe, Bruce; Tuscaloosa: Joel, Robin, Peter, Abe, Brent, Friedrich, the bar-hoard, CB, all. Then we went home through something called "Kentucky" (our 17th state in 9 or so days). Thank you everybody, all, thank you.

here

2008-03-29T08:36:00.001-06:00

reading in Oakland earlier this month (thank you to the amazing Andrew Kenower)

2008-03-19T09:05:00.002-06:00

some books for some classes this fall & summer

The Handbook of Poetic Forms

Complications

Next Life

Some Notes on My Programming

Seismosis

20th Century American Poetics

AWE

2008-03-11T22:13:00.001-06:00

go here awhile to see my interview with Dottie Lasky

Thank you friends

2008-03-09T20:20:00.003-06:00

Thank you: Denver, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Oakland, Ashland, PDX, Seattle, & Bellingham. 12 readings, 9 cities, 8 days. Everybody who helped put stuff together, put word out, sent emails and flyers, and texts, and telegrams. Those who had us in their homes and classes and galleries and churches and basements and arms. Everybody who came and said hello and took us out and got books and asked for signatures and pictures with your children. Everybody who cleaned up afterwards and drove us all over cities we don't know. Thank you everybody who dropped a line afterwards, old friends, new ones, teachers, heroes, siblings, hilarious daughters, pets, Wookie the cat, little blossoms, librarians, all of you who took part, came, listened, read with us, and laughed when we fucked up or shared words later. A billion thank yous. Sleeping & grateful.

Readings Forthcoming

2008-01-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

And coming readings:
January 31st in NYC for AWP: 7pm, East Coast Aliens (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)
***
February 19th in Chicago (Hyde Park) for Series A 7pm with Betsy Wheeler

February 29th in Denver (house reading in capitol hill) with Sasha Steensen

All of the following are with NEG, we'll each read a bit, and also together from Figures
March 1st in San Diego (with Sandra & Ben Doller)
March 2nd in Los Angeles
March 3rd in Santa Cruz
March 4th in Oakland (house reading)
March 5th in Ashland, OR at Southern Oregon University
March 6th in Portland, OR at....
March 7th in Seattle at Open Books
March 8th in Bellingham, WA (house reading)....
***
March 22nd in NYC with David Shapiro
March 23rd in Amherst at Amherst Books
March 24th in Cambridge (with Joshua Bell & Ashley Capps)
March 25th in DC at Bridge Street Books
March 26th in Richmond, VA at Chop Suey Books
March 27th in Athens, GA (VOX series with Karla Kelsey)
March 28th in Atlanta (at Emory University)
March 29th in Tuscaloosa, AL (at University of Alabama)
***
May 12th in NYC at Poetry Project

Of the Year

2007-12-30T11:15:00.001-07:00

Books of 2007

Collected Prose by Rae Armantrout, Singing Horse.

Next Life by Rae Armantrout, Wesleyan University Press.

Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton, Tarpaulin Sky Press.

Necessary Stranger by Graham Foust, Flood Editions.

AWE by Dorothea Lasky, Wave Books.

In the Pines by Alice Notley, Penguin.

The Sorrow and the Fast of It by Nathalie Stephens, Nightboat Books.

Music's Mask and Measure by Jay Wright, Flood Editions.

***

Albums

You Follow Me by Jim White & Nina Nastasia, Fat Cat Records.

In Rainbows by Radiohead, Radiohead.

None Shall Pass by Aesop Rock, Def Jux.

White Chalk by PJ Harvey, Island

I'll Sleep When Your Dead by El-P, Def Jux.

The 8 Diagrams by Wu-Tang Clan, Motown/Universal.

Hands Across the Void by Tiny Vipers, Sup Pop.

In Our Nature by Jose Gonzalez, Mute.

***
Movies

No Country For Old Men by the Coen Bros.

Margot at the Wedding by Noah Baumbach.

I'm Not There by Todd Haynes.

3:10 to Yuma by James Mangold.

An Unreasonable Man by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan.

xmas

2007-12-15T18:50:00.000-07:00

This is what you should get everybody for xmas.

Jay Wright's Music's Mask and Measure new from Flood.

A new Episode (#6!) of Rabbit Light Movies (featuring 6 new movies!) will go up in January 2008.

Rabbit Light Movies Online

2007-11-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

Rabbit Light Movies is now an online journal and running and up for you. Until forever.

The Brand New Episode #5 is on, featuring:

Stephanie Young / Chuck Stebelton / J'Lyn Chapman / Jaswinder Bolina / Joshua Poteat / Catherine Wagner

Former Episodes are up too, and include these treasures:

Julie Doxsee / Lily Brown / Eric Baus / Kate Greenstreet / Sawako Nakayasu / Andrea Rexilius / Joshua Marie Wilkinson / Zachary Schomburg / Nathan Bartel / Allison Titus / George Kalamaras / Jon Woodward / Sommer Browning / Mathias Svalina

Please give a visit and feel free to spread the word.

Email rabbitlightmovies (at) gmail (dot) com to be included on the episode updates, if you like. Or just frequent the site.

Something New & Special

2007-11-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

Something new & special is coming....

Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape: a film about Califone

2007-11-16T23:42:00.001-07:00

Shapiro: Poetics

2007-11-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

David Shapiro: When I think of Jacques Derrida improvising, as we called it, I think of him first as a Jewish poet. First of all, this was a way of teasing him, and he never denied it when I continuously used this locution with him. He was a poet of skepticism and merciless reading. He was the father of a poetry, and he fathered many texts that can be only thought of, like One-Way Street by Benjamin, as poems. Perhaps his readings are the most traditional Talmudic learned commentary. But his genius is often that of haggadic man, as I call him, not Soloveitchik's famous lonely man of hallakah. The loneliness of Jacques is seen in the vulgarizations about him" (148).

From "An Exchange With David Shapiro and Four Poems." An interview conducted by Ben Lerner and published in the excellent Eleven Eleven: A Journal of Literature and Art. Volume IV, 2007.

Jaswinder Bolina Tonight! 7pm! November 15

2007-11-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

THANK YOU, ALL WHO CAME TO THIS LAST NIGHT--You are wonderful, all fortythousand of you!

Jaswinder Bolina is reading poems at Loyola University Chicago!

Lake Shore Campus, Rogers Park

Quinlan Life Sciences Building, Room 412

7pm

Introduced by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

The reading is free and open to the public.

Jaswinder Bolina is the author of Carrier Wave which was selected by Lyn Hejinian for the Colorado Prize. He is a graduate of Loyola

University Chicago and the University of Michigan.

"The super agency of Carrier Wave makes a slap-stick of language’s tendency toward opacity as well as a revelation of its tendency to be transparent. And somehow, thankfully, Jaswinder Bolina has given us a—gasp—fun book. It sparks."—Dean Young

"This, Jaswinder Bolina’s first major volume of poetry, is a brilliant invention. With a delight that in no way denies the desperateness of the palimpsested circumstances in which the world is embedded, Bolina bears witness to ‘the crooning / of our life and times. // The compacted units / The impenetrable whole.’ In that last phrase, of course, we hear an echo from George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, where he speaks of ‘the pure joy / Of the mineral fact // Tho it is impenetrable.’ But if he has Oppen’s sense of the unfathomable nature of what exists, he also displays in his work a polycultural erudition that bears comparison with that of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Jaswinder Bolina is a bard, and his Carrier Wave is a magisterial achievement."—Lyn Hejinian

Red line train to the Loyola stop.

Willis's Niedecker

2007-11-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

"Niedecker's poems sometimes function as glosses to her reading, reintegrating biographical and historical elements with the literary, tracing a thought or poem back to its sources in living things, whether it means acknowledging, as Erasmus Darwin did, the metaphorical links between animal and vegetable existence, or invoking the life-context of another writer as a "source" of his or her work. Literary sources receive the same treatment as oral text and hearsay. The title of her collected poems T & G is a condensation of Lawrence Durrell's "tenderness and gristle," and throughout her poems one finds acutely condensed references to the biographies and works of major writers—as in the deceptively simple phrasing of "Who Was Mary Shelley?" with its phenomenal attention to the periphery, to what is left out, the historical invisibility of women's work. "

From Elizabeth Willis's essay "Who Was Lorine Niedecker?" from the Academy of American Poets Website.

Gordon: Poetics

2007-11-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

"I guess if I owned a robot, I’d want that robot to know it was a robot."

from Noah Eli Gordon's interview by Thomas Fink.

Willis: Poetics (lyric)

2007-11-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

“It seems doubtful that any contemporary poet could make the form [of lyric poetry] newer than it was in the hands of Sappho or Dickinson” (225).

[In our contemporary moment], “lyric stands in for a variety of confessional verse in which subjectivity goes uncomplicated and unquestioned—including the work of poets who avowed experimentation after L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E aesthetics were being assimilated into the academy in such a way that they represented the new ‘serious’ verse. But in this instance lyric is being used to describe essentially narrative, epiphanic verse, which couldn’t be further from the concerns of the lyric, even as it is defined by the most conservative academic sources” (227).

“Lyric is conventionally defined first by length (under one hundred lines and usually less than fifty), but even the stodgiest sources then acknowledge other more mysterious qualities: its privileging of sound over meaning; its difference in time signature; its divergence from mimesis. It overlaps with, rather than opposes, the aesthetics of ‘language’ or ‘post-language’ writing…” (228).

“Anywhere from Aristotle to Dickinson to Lorca to Spicer it has been acknowledged that the lyric poem comes not strictly from within but from elsewhere; it is not self-expressive except to the extent that ideas of self or voice are never entirely absent from the tonal shadings of language. To overcome the inherited structure of the everyday—the quotidian clock—the lyric poem must catalyze the mind. In this context Pound’s metaphor of the dynamo makes sense; it ‘blasts’ apart and reconstructs something alternative to literature’s received ideas. In spite of its machine imagery, it is a human construction” (228-229).

“In the slipperiness between reality and imagination it leaves a trace of the apparent impossibility of its own emergence into words” (229).

“The work of the modern and contemporary lyric is not to unify or commodify or even represent human experience but to stress language in such a way as to evoke an alternate experience for its readers, not an objective correlative to a universal experience but an engagement in the process of find out. It overwhelms, captures, and resists the mind” (229).

“Motivated by a force that is vocalized but not wholly comprehensible, the lyric insists on being heard in spite of the fact that it cannot make itself fit conventional codes of meaning. To whatever extent it employs everyday discourse—and even the more esoteric discourses of politics or religion—its aim is to pint outside any accountable meaning, to provoke the reception of an excess of meaning. ‘Lyric’ does not suggest an inattention to the material aspects of language or to the possibility of double voicing by which works of art can critique their own formulations” (229).

“Northrop Frye connects the lyric with a movement out, from one reality to another. Edouard Glissant calls this wandering ‘errantry’ and claims for it a relation to poetry or a ‘poetics of relation.’ Wandering, in this instance, is not being lost, although there is no clear sign of exactly where one is…In poetry, wandering is the essence of negative capability. It accounts for the elision among Emily Dickinson’s pronouns and the wayward movement in her diction from center to circumference—a gesture that mirrors her rejection of Romantic subjectivity and espousal of modern Possibility” (231).

“Wandering does not necessarily stem from a lack of ground but often signals a shift in ground: it is part necessity, part will, part cultural structure. A discovery without a quest. The poetry of this trajectory—this poetry ‘of relation’—is off-center. It is not the domain of the clinically perfect metaphor or virtuous technique. At times it delights in its own bewilderment. It has the mark of the almost apprehended, the barely understood” (231).

“Because of its ambition for transformation, the late lyric resigns itself to loss and failure, recognizing its own inability to repair or redeem it. In this it is monstrous, threatening” (232).

From Elizabeth Willis's essay “The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric” in Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Ed. Mark Wallace and Steven Marks. University of Alabama Press, 2002. 225-235.

Armantrout & Hejinian: Poetics (Religion / Lyric)

2007-11-13T12:24:00.000-07:00

Lyn Hejinian: Since we are talking about origins, meanwhile, we are inevitably also talking about time. The concept of 'lyric time'--arrested moments in which accumulated time resides (or, to be more cynical, bubbles of time, as it were, suspended glistening in a ray of light)--doesn't seem relevant to your work, even though, if forced to do so, I might possibly characterize you as a lyric poet. Do you think, for example, of the Garden of Eden story as 'timeless'? or do such stories share time in some way with other elements in your world and your work? I could imagine an argument that would put time at the heart of religion, naming 'time' as that which reconnects. This argument would base itself on the etymological source of the word 'religion,' which is from the Latin verb, relegere--'to gather up again,' 'to collect again,' but also 'to travel through again,' 'to sail along again,' which suggests that religion as interrelatedness is a (temporal?) process.

Rae Armantrout: Is that what religion means? Then it's a lot like metaphor--'to carry across.' I think that in the moment when a connection is made, when a and b are linked, there can be a paradoxically brief sensation of timelessness. (A pleasurable confusion, perhaps.) And that's one thing the work of art can do, perhaps especially the 'lyric poem.' I suppose I like the sensation, but I also, perversely, like to foreground its contradictions and impossibilities, the conjunction of brevity and timelessness, for instance. Maybe this recapitulates, in more abstract form, my fascination with and resistance to religion.

So am I a lyric poet? Obviously not if that means someone who writes first person poems about personal feelings as if there could be impersonal feelings. If it refers to someone who writes relatively short poems in which sound is important, I might admit to it (though I don't like to admit to things). You're right, though, to suggest that I also undermine the vaunted graspability of the lyric. You can hold the various elements of my poems in your mind at one time, perhaps, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at each other. (112)

Rae Armantrout. Collected Prose. Singing Horse Press, 2007.

Armantrout: Poetics (cartoons)

2007-11-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

"Of course, there is a lot of cartoon imagery in my work, some of it taken from television. For some reason, the cartoon figure functions as a symbol of subjectivity for me; it represents mind miniaturized and (oddly) anthropomorphized. I find cartoons more frightening than cute. They're often a shorthand way of embodying subjectivity and its contradictions" (119).

Rae Armantrout. Collected Prose. Singing Horse Press, 2007.

Todorov: Poetics

2007-11-12T08:24:00.000-07:00

"First, poetics: what it studies is not poetry or literature but 'poeticity' or literariness.' The individual work is not an ultimate goal for poetics; if it pauses over one work rather than another, it is because such a work reveals more distincly the properties of literary discourse. Poetics will have to study not the already existing literary forms but, starting from them, a sum of possible forms: what literature can be rather than what it is. Poetics is at once less and more demanding than criticism: it does not claim to name the meaning of a work, but it seeks to be much more rigorous than critical meditation" (33-34).

Tzvetan Todorov. The Poetics of Prose. Tr. Richard Howard. Cornell University Press, 1977. Originally, in the French, in 1971. Can this really be out of print?

Barthes & Agamben: Desire

2007-11-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

"One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring" (188).

Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes. Hill and Wang, 1977.

***

"There is nothing simpler and more human than to desire. Why, then, are our desires unavowable for us? Why is it so difficult for us to put them into words? It is so difficult, in fact, that we end up hiding them, constructing a crypt for them somewhere within ourselves, where they remain embalmed, suspended and waiting" (53).

Giorgio Agamben. Profanations. Zone Books, 2007.

Badiou: the 15th Thesis on Contemporary Art

2007-11-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

"15. Mieux vaut ne rien faire que de travailler formellement à la visibilité de ce qui, pour l’Empire, existe.

15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognises as existent."

From Alain Badiou's "Fifteen theses on contemporary art" in Lacanian Ink 23.

Žižek: a poetics

2007-11-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

"Today, we seem effectively to be at the opposite point from the ideology of the 1960s: the mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, and so on, are taken over by the System; in other words, the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channeling the subject's spontaneous impetuses is left behind. Nonalientated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all directly serve the system, which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics. Especially in the domain of poetic art, this means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying one's innermost emotional turmoil, desires, and dreams. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with disgusting emotional exhibitionism--insofar as the standard notion of 'poetic spirit' is the ability to display one's intimate turmoil, what Vladimir Mayakovski said about himself with regard to his turn from personal poetry to political propaganda in verses ('I had to step on the throat of my muse') is the constitutive gesture of a true poet. If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene of a close friend opening his heart, spilling out all the dirt of his inner life. Consequently, one should totally reject the standard opposition of 'objective' science focused on reality and 'subjective' art focused on emotioanl reaction to it and self-expression: if anything, true art is more asubjective than science. In science, I remain a person with my pathological features, I just assert objectivity outside it, while in true art, the artist has to undergo a radical self-objectivization, he has to die in and for himself, turn into a kind of living dead" (135).

From Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters: a Plea for Ethical Violence" in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Adorno: "Cultural Criticism & Society"

2007-11-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

"Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation" (34).

Theodor W. Adorno. "Cultural Criticism and Society." from Prisms. Tr. Samuel and Shierry Weber. MIT Press, 1997.

Rae Armantrout: Poetics (Hope / Negative Capability)

2007-11-10T15:29:00.000-07:00

Tom Beckett: We're on the cusp of a new century, a new millennium. What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

Rae Armantrout: Trying to answer this question makes me feel a bit like a politician. "Building a bridge to..." etc. My poetry isn't built on hope. I don't know what it is built on, but it isn't hope. I guess I could say this: Right now the audience for serious poetry (of any kind) is small. It seems as if what most people expect from poetry is a kind of ego-tonic. They want to identify with the speaker of the poem as one might identify with an action-figure. (That may show just how powerless people are feeling). I don't think this was always what people wanted from poetry "Ode On A Grecian Urn," for instance, doesn't make you feel particularly empowered. You don't say to yourself, "I'm just like that. I appreciate antiquities!" So here's my wish--I wish people would stop looking to poetry for confirmation of what they already feel (or wish they felt) and that they would instead rediscover "negative capability." Or, to put it another way, I wish that, in art and politics, people would seek a power other than that of voyeuristic identification. (133)

From Collected Prose by Rae Armantrout. Singing Horse Press, 2007.

Adorno on Kafka

2007-11-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

"Nowhere in Kafka does there glimmer the aura of the infinite idea; nowhere does the horizon open. Each sentence is literal and each signifies. The two moments are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart and out of the abyss between them blinds the glaring ray of fascination. Here too, in its striving not for symbol but for allegory, Kafka's prose sides with the outcasts, the protest of his friend notwithstanding. Walter Benjamin rightly defined it as parable. It expresses itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off" (246).

Theodor W. Adorno. Prisms. Tr. Samuel and Shierry Weber. The MIT Press, 1997.

Lyn Hejinian's Poetics: Serial and Long Forms

2007-11-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

"Poetry is an ongoing project; it must be so if it is to be accurate to the world. Long forms of any kind, and serial forms in particular, emphasize this fact. Serial forms also permit one to take the fullest possible advantage of the numerous logics operative in language. These logics provide us with ways of moving from one place to another, they make the connections or linkages that in turn create pathways of thinking, forming patterns of meaning (and sometimes of meaning's excess, incoherence).

The terms of the series are in perpetual relative displacement, in a relationship that may be, and sometimes should be, upsetting, disruptive. Each element in the series recasts all the other elements. In this respect the serial work is dialogic. It is also heuristic.

I've been much influenced by several passages from a letter that Jack Spicer wrote to Robin Blaser: 'The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tired to teach us--not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing as good or bad poetry. There is--but not in relation to the single poem. There really is no single poem...Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live along any more than we can...Things fit together. We knew that--it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never to be judged by itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone'"(167-168).

Lyn Hejinian responding to Dubravka Djuric's questions on the occasion of Djuric's translation of My Life into Serbian in 1990. From The Language of Inquiry. University of California Press, 2000.

Jacques Roubaud's Note on Poetics

2007-11-07T22:23:00.000-07:00

1. The question of verse still arises because

2. Poetry has not disappeared.

3. To be sure, it has all but disappeared from what is called the "media" (diverse and ephemeral variants of what Mallarme called "newspapers") but not from publishers' catalogues (there are even some publishers--small, to be sure, but still publishers--who devote most of their effort to it).

4. Nor has poetry entirely disappeared among those who call themselves poets (there are some).

5. Finally, it can be verified that verse still exists in poetry, which still exists.

6. This also means that the sometimes considerable effort expended to conceal its existence by giving it other names (the text of the novel, for example) have not really borne fruit. (165)

[It goes up to 19.]

Jacques Roubaud. "A Brief Note." Tr. Arthur Goldhammmer. In Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman. The New Press, 1999.

Catherine Wagner's Poetics

2007-11-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

Zoe Ward: There are times when I feel acutely uncomfortable reading your work. Resentment, self-doubt, the mental prisons we build around us, it all comes crawling out of an extremely fragile and corporeal meshwork in your poems. You’re sick like we’re all sick, but because you’re able to bring that sickness so openly into your work, it becomes irreproachable -- something to assimilate, to make beautiful or worthy. Can you talk a little about the extremes of feeling in your work, with lines like: “If any of you die I don’t know / I’ll kill you bunch of / Pretend you left me for dead / Then I am good enough and loved you enough / Please shut up now”?

Catherine Wagner: I found when I went crawling after the things I shrunk away from saying, that led me somewhere where I discovered something, so I started to try to go to where I felt uncomfortable. Not sure I think it’s irreproachable or worthy to present the sickness, if it’s sickness.

That poem was written while I was staying in the house of a poet whose son had died when he was just cusping adulthood -- had died not long before. I did not know the son, and didn’t know the poet or his wife, the mother of the boy, well at all. Had just met them. I couldn’t sleep and thought I could feel the presence of the boy, and thought I had no right to have this feeling, and felt annoyed with myself for just slightly enjoying it. I could sense myself congratulating myself on having this paranormal experience, and I was disgusted when I thought about the ratio of my stupid little ghost story to the rage and grief that the parents upstairs had had to suffer. There is an attempt I sometimes catch in my writing to build up the representation of the self, to self-present in a self-congratulatory way. Always when one talks about one’s own perceptions there is this risk of adoring one’s own perceptions, which is embarrassing (I’m thinking of the self-loving tone in the voice some people get when they talk to Teri Gross on “Fresh Air”) but that is not the main problem with it; that adoration has to have a thumb pushing it down hard; it is not to be borne; and it also won’t go away, it keeps rising up. It drives me crazy, so that I feel as if I’m always rounding on what I’ve just said and saying Bullshit. It’s like a tiger (though that’s too heroic and glamorous an image) that’s trying to go somewhere, but has to turn back all the time and growl to scare back the annoying other creature that’s following it. I wish I could go somewhere but I think a lot of the time I’m just roaring at the annoying creature and that ends up being what the writing is about.

From Zoe Ward's interview with Catherine Wagner in the June 2007 Issue of Bookslut online.

Rae Armantrout's Cheshire Poetics

2007-11-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

"I was saying that I discovered Williams (and the other Imagists) early on and was very much moved by them. By what, though? I would say now it was by their attempt to make the object speak, to put things in dialogue with mind and somehow make them hold up their end of the conversation. This is both an important project and a doomed one. The world enters the poem only through a kind of ventriloquy. Thing and idea don't really merge, as the poets themselves knew. That red wheelbarrow is essentially separate from the 'so much' that depends upon it. But there is so much poignancy in that gap! It is as if the Imagist poet wants to spin around suddenly and catch the world unaware, in dishevelment, see it as it is when we're not looking. And how can we not want that?" (55)

From Rae Armantrout's Collected Prose. Singing Horse Press, 2007.

Adorno to Benjamin: on Kafka & Film

2007-11-01T21:46:00.000-06:00

"Thus it seems to me that with his banal allusion to film, Brod has here hit upon something far more precisely than he could have imagined. Kafka's novels are not screenplays for experimental theatre, since they lack in principle the very spectator who might intervene in such experiments. They represent rather the last and disappearing connecting texts of the silent film (and it is no accident that the latter disappeared at almost exactly the same time as Kafka's death); the ambiguity of gesture lies somewhere between sinking into speechlessness (the destruction of language) and the emergence from the latter in music--thus the most important contribution to the constellation gesture-animal-music is certainly the depiction of the group of dogs and their silent music-making in the 'Observations of a Dog' [story by Kafka], something I would not hesitate to compare with Sancho Panza" (70-71).

From Adorno to Benjamin, Berlin. December 17th, 1934. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Harvard University Press. 1999.

Lacoue-Labarthe's Mimesis

2007-11-01T21:39:00.000-06:00

"For as the passage to poetry [from painting] reveals, speculation (the mise-en-abyme, the theoretical reduction) does not happen all by itself. It remains fragile. And, in fact, if the entire operation consists in trying to go one better than mimesis in order to master it, if it is a question of circumventing mimesis, though with its own means (without which, of course, this operation would be null and void), how would it be possible to have even the slightest chance of success--since mimesis is precisely the absence of appropriate means, and since this is even what is supposed to be shown? How do we appropriate the improper? How do we make the improper appropriate without aggravating still further the improper? If one must become more of a mimetician than the mimetician 'himself' (who?), how can we ever be done?" (95).

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Edited by Christopher Fynsk. Introduction by Jacques Derrida. Stanford University Press. 1989.

Adorno's Artworks

2007-10-31T19:18:00.000-06:00

"Artworks share with enigmas the duality of being determinate and indeterminate. They are question marks, not univocal even through synthesis. Nevertheless their figure is so precise that it determines the point where the work breaks off. As in enigmas, the answer is both hidden and demanded by the structure. This is the function of the work's immanent logic, of the lawfulness that transpires in it, and that is the theodicy of the concept of purpose in art. The aim of artworks is the determination of the indeterminate. Works are purposeful in themselves, without having any positive purpose beyond their own arrangement; their purposefulness, however, is legitimated as the figure of the answer to the enigma. Through organization artworks become more than they are. In recent aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of écriture has become relevant, inspired probably by Klee's drawings, which approximate scrawled writing. Like a searchlight, this category of modern art illumines the art of the past; all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writing. If no artwork is ever a judgment, each artwork contains elements derived from judgment and bears an aspect of being correct and incorrect, true and false" (124).

Thoedor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. Tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor. University of Minnesota Press, 1997 (originally in 1970).

Adorno's Rilke

2007-10-31T18:32:00.000-06:00

"In lyric poetry, as in philosophy, the jargon acquires its defining character by the way it imputes its truth. It does this by making an intended object present--as though this object were Being without any tension toward the subject. That makes it, prior to all discursive judgment, into untruth. The expression is sufficient unto itself. It discards as an annoyance the obligation to express a thing other than itself. Beyond its difference from that thing, which may already be nothing, and out of thanks, this nothing is made into that which is supreme. Rilke's language still stands on the edge of all this, like much that is irrational from the era prior to fascism. It not only darkens, but it also takes note of, subconscious material, which, slipping away from thingly rationality, protests against it...Lyric poetry permits itself any metaphor, even the absolutely unmetaphorical, as a parable. It will not be disturbed by the question of the objectivity of those things that are allegedly suggested to the subject by its emotions. Nor will the lyric be disturbed by the question of whether the words, gathered from culture, at all cover the experiences whose objectification is the central idea of such lyric. Therefore, because it blunts itself against the truth and exactitude of its words--even the vaguest would have to be smuggled in as something vague, not as something definite--this lyric, as lyric, is already bad, despite its virtuosity. The problematic of that to which it claims to elevate itself, the problematic of its content, is also that of its form, which makes believe it could be capable of transcendence, and in that way becomes mere appearance in a more fateful sense than that of the aesthetic" (85-86).

Theodor W. Adorno. The Jargon of Authenticity. Tr. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Avital Ronell's Theories of Stupidity

2007-10-30T15:40:00.000-06:00

"The other motivation for a meditation on stupidity involves Gilles Deleuze. While I was resolutely not learning the Tai Chi vocabulary, Deleuze had ended his life. In the memories and papers that remained, Deleuze, it was reported, had called for a thinking of stupidity: no one had ever produced a discourse, he was remembered to have said, that interrogated the transcendental principles of stupidity. I received this call as an assignment--when I write I am always taking a call, I am summoned from elsewhere, truly from the dead, even if they are my contemporaries. Nietzsche and then Levinas have said that no one can be contemporaneous with the other, not really. So, in a sense, I took my cue from Deleuze. On a more banal register, I had just left Berkeley and I thought I should really think about what that experience had meant to me, maybe figure out why some of those folks and institutions had rated so unaccountably high on the national scoreboard for university learning. Anyway, to get back to him, Deleuze had left some puzzling traces, including what he wrote in his book on repetition, where he figures bêtise (stupidity) as 'l'indéterminé adéquat de la pensée' and the 'genitalité de la pensée.' I've got to admit, that sounded kind of sexy.

"There was yet another call, on an internal call-waiting system. It was Beckett. I remembered having read an interview, a pretty famous one by now, in which he said that Joyce tended toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist, but I'm working with impotence, ignorance. That's what he said; it really stuck with me, in fact, it signaled a stupendous break-through. At once simplifying and complicating the whole itinerary, it belonged together with the times he says, 'I don't know why I told this story,' or the avowal in 'Texts for Nothing': 'I don't try to understand, I'll never try to understand anymore, that's what you think, for the moment I'm here, always have been, always shall be, I won't be afraid of the big words anymore, they are not big'" (32-33).

From Avital Ronell's Stupidity. University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Ronell's Hauntings

2007-10-29T08:46:00.000-06:00

"A translation of Dichtung, 'Dictations' implies that writing always comes from elsewhere, at the behest of another, and is, at best, a shorthand transcription of the demand of this Other whose original distance is never altogether surmounted" (xiv).

"This ethics--provisional, restless, untired--has little to do with the ethics you'll find in your philosophy books or in the works of a science or a discipline; nor will it appear as a moral sentiment. Nonetheless, it is an ethics of the haunted. Haunted: this means that thought is not thinking beyond its time but in its time. Haunted writing writes on this limit, which is that of our time...What haunts existence, now, in our time, is linked to the 'domestic' dimension that can never be domesticated. This is the definition of hauntedness, whether we are speaking of the categorical imperative or of Goethean command systems: it does not belong to the economy which it haunts. Hauntedness allows for visitations without making itself at home. Nonetheless, I am talking about a visit, which is to say: a relation has been opened to another text which manifests itself without presence yet with infinite nearness. Henceforth, one is on assignment, somnambulizing, taking dictation from a text of the Other" (xviii-xix).

From Avital Ronell's Dictations: On Haunted Writing. University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Lacoue-Labarthe on Celan

2007-10-28T13:04:00.000-06:00

“Especially in his late work, prosody and syntax do violence to language: they chop, dislocate, truncate or cut it. Something in this certainly bears comparison to what occurs in Hölderlin’s last, ‘paratactic’ efforts, as Adorno calls them: condensation and juxtaposition, a strangling of language” (12).

“I believe these poems to be completely untranslatable, including within their own language, and indeed, for this reason, invulnerable to commentary. They necessarily escape interpretation; they forbid it. One could even say they are written to forbid it. This is why the sole question carrying them, as it carried all Celan’s poetry, is that of meaning, the possibility of meaning” (13).

“What should we think of poetry (or what of thought is left in poetry) that must refuse, sometimes with great stubbornness, to signify? Or, simply, what is a poem whose ‘coding’ is such that it foils in advance all attempts to decipher it?” (14).

“My question asks not just about the ‘text,’ but about the singular experience coming into writing; it asks if, being singular, experience can be written, or if from the moment of writing its very singularity is not forever lost and borne away in one way or another, at origin or en route to destination, by the very fact of language. This could be due to language’s impossible intransititivty, or to the desire for meaning, for universality, that animates voices divided by the constraint of a language that is itself, in turn, only one of many. Is there, can there be, a singular experience? A silent experience, absolutely untouched by language, unprompted by even the most slightly articulated discourse?...if singularity exists or subsists despite all odds…can language possibly take on its burden?...These questions pose neither the problem of solipsism nor that of autism, but very probably that of solitude which Celan experienced to what we must justly call the utmost degree” (15).

“there is no ‘poetic experience’ in the sense of a ‘lived moment’ or a poetic ‘state.’ If such a thing exists, or thinks it does—for after all it is the power, or impotence, of literature to believe and make others believe this—it cannot give rise to a poem. To a story, yes, or to discourse, whether in verse or prose. To ‘literature,’ perhaps, at least in the sense we understand it today. But not to a poem. A poem has nothing to recount, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is that from which it wrenches away as a poem” (19-20).

“but the poem’s ‘wanting-not-to-say’ does not want not to say. A poem wants to say; indeed, it is nothing but pure wanting-to-say” (20)

“a poem is always involuntary, like anguish, love, and even self-chosen death” (20).

“at the height of singularity, singularity itself vanishes and saying suddenly appears—the poem is possible” (21).

“How does it happen that in poetry, out of poetry, all is not lost, that a possibility of articulating something still remains, if only in stuttering, if only in an incomprehensible and incommunicable language, an idiolect or idiom?” (23).

“The question of poetry’s possibility—and Celan never asked another—is the question of the possibility of such a wrenching. The question of the possibility of going out of the self” (32).

“The Unheimliche, estrangement, is estrangement of the human taken in this sense. It affects existence, undoes its reality. The Unheimliche, despite what Celan’s formulations imply, does not open up an other domain. It takes us ‘outside the human,’ but opens up a domian ‘turned toward that which is human.’ Experience itself, but ‘made strange’” (48).

“the Unheimliche is essentially a matter of language. Or that language is the locus of the Unheimliche, if indeed such a locus exists. In other words, language is what ‘estranges’ the human. Not because it is the loss or forgetting of the singular, since by definition language embraces generality (this is a frequent refrain, and an old motif derived from so-called philosophies of existence); but because to speak, to let oneself be caught up and swept away by speech, to trust language, or even, perhaps, to be content to borrow it or submit to it, is to ‘forget oneself’” (48).

Key: “The interruption of language, the suspension of language, the caesura (‘counter-rhythmic rupture,’ said Hölderlin)—that is poetry” (49).

“Poetry occurs where language, contrary to all expectations, gives way. Precisely at inspiration’s failing” (49).

“Poetry is the spasm or syncope of language. Hölderlin called the caesura ‘the pure word’” (49).

“In effect, then, poetry says existence: the human. It says existence, not because it takes the opposing course to discourse of because it upsets the unheimlich turnaround, the catastrophe of language (the catastrophe that is language); poetry is not a catastrophe of catastrophe. But, because it aggravates the catastrophe itself, it is, one might say, its literalization…This is why poetry does not take place outside art, in some elsewhere supposed to be the other of art or of its strangeness. It takes place in the ‘strange place’ itself” (51).

“To speak to the other being or thing—to address him or it, is to let what speaks in him or it occur, and accept this word in the very heart of the poem (in its ‘immediacy and proximity’) as the gift of the other. It is to prepare, ecstatically, for the ‘presence’ of the other within oneself; to let intimacy open up” (64).

“To speak to the other being or thing—to address him or it, is to let what speaks in him or it occur, and accept this word in the very heart of the poem (in its ‘immediacy and proximity’) as the gift of the other. It is to prepare, ecstatically, for the ‘presence’ of the other within oneself; to let intimacy open up” (64).

“In this sense, the poetic act is ecstatic. The exorbitant is the pure transcendence of being. It follows that the poem, as a questioning, is turned toward the open, offered up to it. And the open is itself open, after a fashion, to u-topia, to the place without place of the advent. To put it in other terms, the poetic act is catastrophic: an upsetting relation to what is an upset, in being, in the direction of no-thingness (the abyss)” (67).

“Poetry as Celan understands it is…the interruption of the ‘poetic.’…The task of poetry seems to be tirelessly undoing the ‘poetic’; not by ‘putting an end’ to figures and tropes, but by pushing them ad absurdum…In the highly rigorous sense the term has in Heidegger, poetry would thus be the ‘deconstruction’ of the poetic, that is to say, both of what is recognized as such (here there is a closely fought confrontation with the poetic tradition) and of the spontaneous ‘poeticity’ of language” (68).

“what poetry wants to rid itself of is the beautiful. The poem’s threat is the beautiful, and all poems are always too beautiful, even Celan’s” (69).

From Poetry as Experience by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Translated by Andrea Tarnowski. Stanford University Press, 1999 (originally in French in 1986).

Badiou's Poetics

2007-10-26T08:26:00.000-06:00

“The poem itself is affirmation and delectation—it does not traverse, it dwells on the threshold. The poem is not a rule-bound crossing, but rather an offering, a lawless proposition” (17).

“the modern poem identifies itself as a form of thought. It is not just the effective existence of a thought offered up in the flesh of language, it is the set of operations whereby this thought comes to think itself” (20).

“Poetry makes truth out of the multiple, conceived as a presence that has come to the limits of language” (22).

“The mystery is, strictly speaking, that every poetic truth leaves at its own center what it does not have the power to bring into presence” (23).

“Every poem brings a power into language, the power of eternally fastening the disappearance of what presents itself” (24-25).

Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005.

Agamben's Genius

2007-10-25T23:53:00.000-06:00

That is why the encounter with Genius is terrible. The life that maintains the tension between the personal and the impersonal, between Ego and Genius, is called poetic. But the feeling that occurs when Genius exceeds us on every side is called panic -- panic at something that comes over us and is infinitely greater than what we believe ourselves able to bear. For this reason, most people flee in terror before the part of themselves that is impersonal, or else they seek hypocritically to reduce it to their own miniscule stature. What is rejected as impersonal, then, can reappear in the form of symptoms and tics that are even more impersonal, or grimaces that are even more excessive. But more laughable and fatuous than this is someone who experiences the encounter with Genius as a privilege, the Poet who strikes a pose and puts on airs or, worse, feigns humility and gives thanks for the grace received. In the face of Genius, no one is great; we are all equally small. But some let themselves be shaken and traversed by Genius to the point of falling apart. Others, more serious but less happy, refuse to impersonate the impersonal, to lend their lips to a voice that does not belong to them. (14)

Giorgio Agamben translated by Jeff Fort. "Genius" from Profanations. Zone Books, 2007.

AWE

2007-10-18T13:45:00.001-06:00

go here forever

http://www.birdinsnow.com/

Midwest Tour October

2007-09-27T10:08:00.001-06:00

FALL TOUR

All dates are JMW & NEG; those with asterisks are also with Joyelle McSweeney & Johannes Goransson.

Friday October 5th: Ft. Wayne, Indiana*: the Co-op at 1612 Sherman Street (7:30pm)

Saturday October 6th: Athens, Ohio: house reading

Sunday October 7th: Muncie, Indiana: The MT Cup (7:30pm)

Monday October 8th: Kalamazoo, Michigan: on campus at Western Michigan Univ.

Sprau Tower 10th Floor (8pm)

Tuesday October 9th: South Bend, Indiana: on campus at Notre Dame; Hospitality Room, Reckers, South Dining Hall (8pm)

Wednesady October 10th: Oberlin College (4pm) and Cleveland Poetry Center (7:30pm)
(but if we happened to be in Chicago tonight, we'd be at the amazing Danielle Dutton at Danny's)

Thursday October 11th: Buffalo, New York: Rust Belt Books (7pm)

Friday October 12th: Oxford, Ohio: on campus at Miami University (8pm)*

Saturday October 13th: Cincinnati, Ohio*: Publico (8pm)

Sunday October 14th: Chicago, Illinois: Myopic Bookstore in Wicker Park (7pm)
1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue,2nd Floor

Saturday October 20th: Ann Arbor, Michigan: Shaman Drum Bookshop (7pm) with

NEG & Selah Saterstrom

Saturday November 10th: St. Louis, Missouri: house party (tba) with Mathias Svalina & ZBS (are you down??) & hopefully a special local guest.......(details coming)

****

Spring Dates on the westcoast for early March and on the eastcoast for late March are coming

Interviews

2007-09-24T09:53:00.000-06:00

Interviews with friends & strangers:

with Richard Siken

with Eleni Sikelianos

with Catherine Wagner

with Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

with Barbara Guest

with Ben Lerner

with Danielle Dutton

with Aesop Rock

with The Predator

with JMW

goodnight

2007-09-20T22:47:00.000-06:00

"The day he read The Book of Questions, in the clinic, he wrote this two-line appeal:

'STILLNESS, boat-hag, ferry me through the rapids.
Eyelashfire, light me on' (2:170)."

Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2001.