Brandon Brown on Disaster Suites

See Brandon's discussion of Rob's book here.

More & Forthcoming on Disaster Suites

You can read Thom Donovan's review of Disaster Suites in The Poetry Project's December 2008/January 2009 Newsletter here:

In it Donovan writes, "Halpern allegorizes lyrical poetry’s complicity
with an entire global network of social disasters which include Katrina, and even become determined by Katrina (Rob’s book was begun immediately after the storm, and completed as the first draft of a manuscript following the death of his close friend and colleague, kari edwards; Disaster Suites’ cover also features drawings, drawn rom memory by the artist, after photographs of homes devastated by Katrina), but also encompass movements between sites, and beyond site itself towards all that is being made invisible, occulted by the fatal abstractions of capital."

Earl Jackson also tells me that he is at work on a long article on Rob's Disaster Suites and his beautiful and challenging earlier book, Rumored Places (Krupskaya). We look forward to it Earl!

Don't Miss Disaster Suites

Disaster Suites is Rob Halpern's latest book published by Palm Press. Colter Jacobsen's Katrina (after Misrach)--Memory Drawing, detail, 2006, graces the cover.


I hope to have more to say about this book when time opens up for me later this summer. Or at least, promises to. But in the mean time, do, read it.




Never has disaster been so stunning.

The scission is exact. An architecture is scaffolded and razed. At once. Desire. Despair. Lyrical undressing of abomination.



Whenever I try to com-
Municate love dis-
Appears said Monica

Viti as Valentine it was
La Notte Antonioni's
Very hot picture so pl-

Ease monitor my hearts
And mind what he
-avenly difference boasts

Of thickness these
Accidents produce me
-mbranes peeling off in-

Ternal selves skins we
Watch all this emerging
Out of the deep too deep

To name inside my rec-
Tum is yrs there
Being no other place

For false members
To go where nothing can
Name these things I

Stink of value ends
Produce yr views

---don't do it for my experience.

The book closes with the lines:

In words with no future we seek portals

Holes and faults hew new relations quicken
Chasing that persistent and ongoing

---no!

A "we," a negative affirmation, abraded words. Here's another one with which to break your heart:

This one wants to be the one to break
The story poems don't break open
Stories someone said as if I couldn't

Hear a word the thing makes here it
Says 'breaks' instead of meaning this
One thing the poem wants to be

Meaning stories making things to
Break the thing our things can't mean
As if all this were really breaking

--what goes unheard sings only of want.

In the essay at the back of the book entitled "Post-Disaster," Halpern writes:

Unlike the death of any one, disaster is what we hold in common as a community, despite its not being here for us to share as a site for communion. In one of his late aphorisms on Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin suggests that Les Fleurs du mal was the first book of poems not illuminated by starlight. I think the stars are extinguished in Baudelaire because the poems successfully dispatch all sanctioned coordinates of progress and meaning as soon as those coordinates become the pegs upon which capitalist production hangs its own hat. In becoming unmoored, the poems list without a star map, without a guide. They become fateless. And yet this is how the poems resist the death-in-life prescribed by a new world of commodities that have themselves taken the place of the stars in a darkening universe. Baudelaire's poems are without destiny as they resist this disaster by courting their own at once promise and catastrophe, opposites persisting in and thru one another.

There's an echo of chaos theory here. Maybe the lyric "I" of these Disaster Suites is an example of what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers call a 'dissipative structure,' that is, a form of provisional and unstable order that emerges as an effect of ever-increasing disorder and dislocation. In the context of our own catastrophe, there are many such structures--NGO's, drug cartels, suicide bombers, al-Queda itself, or even the modest Guatemalan evangelical churches in San Francisco's Mission district--faulty bulwarks against the systematic fallout of the system that produced them. Is it useful to think of the lyric "I" in similar terms? Or would that amount to another bad alibi for lyric disabled agent of entropic drift?

These questions activate the nonsite of these suites.
---Rob Halpern


Here's what some other people have to say about Rob's book:

A paradox sets these disquieting and beautiful Disaster Suites into motion. They produce a music— missing in the count now counts as one — reaching for the disappearance of the very conditions that make it audible: war, so-called natural catastrophe, a public sphere where there is no / Public. As in the songs of William Blake and the sci-fi novels of Octavia Butler, these Suites sing against their own beauty and their seemingly perpetual present — which is why they seem so strangely archaic and futuristic at once. In complex patterns of meter and rhyme, Disaster’s lyric “I” summons its own kind of “counting” (prosody) against the physics of finance or exchange. Yet the music which results can only be heard — the drowned and the bombed — in between and against the other tracks that Halpern intricately lays down: the singing of capital, the burble of mass media, the daily noise of bodies who work, shit, fuck, and love. This stunning book has almost single-handedly made me love contemporary lyric poetry again.
—Sianne Ngai



It’s hip to be deaf to the larger sounds of our time because the hip want a party, not THIS WORLD as it is! Fuck THAT! I want THIS poetry where the atonal crisis wails and sputters. Negotiate with yourself, it’s your life, in our world, at the line, and the next line of Halpern’s amazing book. Gross profits and grotesque guilty pleas align with the knife here. The stress of our injuries, you can feel your body ache while reading, now leave us to it Halpern, you’ve done your job better than anyone else could! I’m grateful for these poems.
—CA Conrad, author of Deviant Propulsion

Goings On and Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence

There has been so much going on in the Bay Area of late--Rae Armantrout and Laura Sims at Small Press Traffic and then Rae and Lisa Robertson in Berkeley on Saturday the 7th. Erica Kaufman & Brandon Brown will read at David Buuck's house on March 12th. This Friday the 13th, Small Press Traffic hosts Stacy Szymaszek and Craig Santos Perez. Ariana Reines and Barret Watten will be reading at 21 Grand Gallery in Oakland on Sunday March 15th.


But, Dear Readers, deadlines and the frantic pace of life keep intervening with my attendance......

Here's what I have to offer you today. I have been enjoying dipping into Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence published in 2007 by Leon Works. Her sentences are elastic. You'll want to follow them and her everywhere. Tisa will take you on a tour of engravings, illustrations and paintings (by S.H. Grimm and Willliam Hogarth among others), tv (Regency House Party), texts (work by Gaston Bachelar, Giorgio de Chirico, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Claire de Duras, Trin T. Minh-ha, Virginia Woolf, Emile Zola and others).






from the PREFACE:

Black figures in Eurocentric literature, film, and visual art are rarely presented without being given a distinct, racialized function, the import of which often goes largely undisputed, if not wholly unacknowledged, simply because the power of saying, of naming and describing it, has been withheld. The explanation for their presence and their function is hidden in plain sight, a double-sided sleight of hand between the maker and the subconscious, and between the maker and the receiver of the work. This sleight of hand intrigues me. Like watching two people (lovers? spies?) silently mouthing words to each other from across a crowded room, my comprehension of the message occurs surreptitiously. I know things I'm not supposed to know. I see without seeing, and witness an open secret, in a roomful of people where I am not the only one with such eyes.

But, as with lovers and spies and secret codes, we're conditioned not to look too long or too closely at how or why these figures do what they do, how they might perpetuate or debunk myths around race, sexuality, storytelling. We simply minimize, as needed, their effect on the environment (narrative), and on us, by shielding them, hand to eye, from our view.

The writings in this collection reflect the shifting landscape of racialized narratives, and interrogate this silent contract between maker and reader/viewer. --Tisa Bryant

In prose highly attuned to the resonances of language, Bryant exposes these figures and their effects on the environment, on narrative, on us as participants in and co-creators of this environment.

Here are a couple of short pieces from the book. I encourage you to get a copy of the book for your own. You can, at Small Press Distribution, here.

Illustration
S.H. grimm, Drolleries
June 14, 1771
Print Collection
Lewis Walpole Library
Yale University

An old woman in a humble cloak stops, thunderstruck, at the sight of a euphemisitic "lady of fashion," emerging from an avenue of lindens.

Behind her trails a black page in ornate suiting, a plumed turban on his head, her lapdog tucked in his arms. He, too, is the mark of fashion among such of the period, who promoted their charms within sight of the well-heeled.

The lady's hair is teased to an exaggerated height that rises into the trees. At the summit of her coiffure sits a ribboned hat. The old woman must lean back and scope with her hand cupped around her eye in order to take it all in. Her wrinkled hand reaches for her heart in dismay. Her mouth drops open.

"Heyday!" reads the caption. "Is this my daughter Anne?"

************************************************************************

Negress Clock Case
Paris, CA. 1785
Bronze, Marble
Hillwood Gardens And Museum,
Washington, DC


"The bust-size figure of the negress is elegantly dressed with a feathered turban and bejeweled with earrings that would have activated an ingenious clock mechanism. In pulling the right earring, the hour would have appeared in the right eye. A pull to the left earring would have indicated the minutes in the left eye. A model of this clock made by the clockmaker Furet was delivered to Queen Marie Antoinette at Versailles. Before its delivery, the clock was exhibited in Furet's window shop where flocks of passersby stopped to contemplate it in awe."

Here's what a San Francisco Bay Guardian Reviewer had to say about Unexplained Presence:

Investigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant's Unexplained Presence takes up "black presences in European literature, visual art, and film." Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.

Biting Midge: Works in Prose by Kathy Lou Schultz

Kathy Lou Schultz’s Belladonna chapbook #115



Biting Midge: Works in Prose begins with a quote from Bob Perelman: “To think in sentences leads to novel specimens of desire.” In Biting Midge, Kathy Lou Schultz is indeed thinking and writing in sentences that desire.


From “Dear”:

“She said, ‘These are the two lips that I use to speak to you in the evening. They cover my pretty white teeth.’ This impressed me. My needs were simple: a pillow to lay my head on at night, and an approximation of myself to help me know my location....At night I say, ‘Will you hold me?’ and she says, ‘Not tonight honey, it’s too hot.’

At night I form myself to her body after she falls asleep.
At night I invent a childhood.
At night I lie awake in my little box.”

The book begins with abjection, hunger, and an exploration of the body. It introduces a thematics of entrances and exits that haunt each of the pieces: “The outline of my body is an approximation of what enters and exits. The container is full of memories that I carry from place to place, but do not discuss with my lover.”

In the author’s notes at the back of the book, Schultz writes that “these poems are dedicated to the cities of San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Memphis in which I have found both respite and trials.” The book includes “Dear,” “Or if she would fly apart,” “Extra extra,” “Blood,” “At First Blush,” “World Without End,” “Happy Birthday, America,” ‘Story About a Man,” “Monument,” “The Unplanned,” and “Left.”

One of my favorite pieces in this slender book playfully joins the body, sex, gender, journalism and giants of modernist poetry–some more well known (Eliot, Pound, Williams) than others (Loy). I reproduce it for your reading pleasure here:

Extra extra
for Jessica and Aliki

Boys learn best at a room temperature of 68 degrees; for girls, it’s 74
degrees. I read it in the newspaper. When I read something in the
newspaper I write it in my book and then I learn it. Writing is different
than speaking: like all that cacophony in “The Waste land” (bawk! bawk!
Who can stand it?) is different from Williams, who read the newspaper.
Williams built a city out of language and then the people had nowhere to
live except under the peaked roof of the capital “A.” Mina Loy wrote: “We
might have given birth to a butterfly/ With the daily news/ Printed in
blood on its wings.” An old geezer once said, “Make it new!” Calm down,
geezer, the boys are reading your poems day and night, all the better to
be erudite, and I’ll try to be a better friend. Right now the new and the
news are standing on the corner in short pants singing, “Extra! Extra!
Read all about it!”

And so you should! You can find Belladonna books here.