Celebrating Robert Gluck's Elements

cover art by Joe Brainard

In September, while I was in New Hampshire helping my sister Linda get ready for her wedding, Robert Glück and a host of eager readers and friends were celebrating Ithuriel's Spear's republication of Gluck's Elements** (originally published in 1982 as Elements of a Coffee Service). This republication was partly sponsored by many former participants in Bob's long-running writing workshops, once held at Small Press Traffic, and then later in his home.

photo: Francesca Rosa; Bob reading at The Green Arcade

Elements of a Coffee Service, now Elements, was written in the context of the Bay Area writing scene in the 1980s, a scene characterized by lively and contentious debates over literary experiments and their social, political and aesthetic values. During a time when the self, narrative, and representation were considered debased literary tools for innovative writing, Robert Glück and Bruce Boone asserted their potential critical and imaginative value for a socially activist and experimental queer writing. Rather than attempting to describe, from outside, the whole world, New Narrative writers explore specific local communities, blurring textual and social realities, while making offerings to and demands of their readers, who, as a result, become participants in the text while the text extends into the world. New Narrative, then, develops as a performative textuality, calling into being and speaking to and from a community and its future.

New Narrative grows out of a dialogue, a friendship between two gay men who share an interest in Frank O’Hara. Invoking the social or collective implied in narrative in his “Long Note on New Narrative,” Robert Glück explains how New Narrative has an intimate origin in friendship and community; it begins not only as a response to the provocations of Language Writing and the insufficiencies Glück locates there, but takes place in the context of the friendship between Glück and Bruce Boone that began in the 1970s. Glück writes that “to talk about the beginnings of New Narrative, I have to talk about my friendship with Bruce Boone” ("Long Note" 25).

 Located in relation to emerging gay and lesbian identity-based movements in the context of the 1970s, New Narrative responds to movement poetry’s demand for representation and what Boone called “the vigor, energy and accessibility that mark so much of the new Movement writing of gays, women and Third World writers” (“Remarks” 29) and Language Writers’ disparate but new formal experiments intoxicating and agitating the poetry community of the Bay Area.

All of this is on display in Elements' stories--"Sanchez and Day," "When Bruce was 36 (Gossip and Scandal)," "Safety," "Sex Story," "The Dinner Party," "Chaucer," "Night Flight," and "Violence."

Each piece is rich with detail, prose that invites us to pause, to take pleasure in the writer's artistry, to laugh, to be astonished, and moved. The first story “Sanchez and Day” uses a first-person narration in the past tense to tell a story of fear and violence as the narrator describes walking his dog, Lily, and encountering four men in a Chevy pickup who start yelling “faggot” and “fucking faggot” and throw a beer can at him. The narrator and his dog run from the men and manage to escape, finding refuge in the location of another “other,” a produce market run by a Thai family. But this short piece does more than recount a straight forward story of a narrowly escaped gay bashing. This four-page story’s ostensible main narrative–the story of the violent homophobic attack by the four men– is interrupted by a number of devices. An interruption occurs through an interpellation of the reader via the construction of a narratee, “You’ll understand my fear because television has trained us to understand the fear of a running man” (12). The encounter with the four men is further suspended by a collection of several memories–of the speaker’s mother’s childhood, an uncle’s funeral, a memory of something the speaker’s mother said when she was nearly sixty as well as memories of homophobic violence inflicted on gay friends. The reader’s attention is called also to songs playing in the background of the produce market run by a Thai family into which the narrator runs. Furthermore, the construction of the text is underscored by the production of a fantasy ending, an ending that is itself dissevered through an analysis of it. Lastly, the reader is left with a closing manifesto: “And what I resolved was this: that I would gear my writing to tell you about incidents like the one at Sanchez and Day, to put them to you as real questions that need answers, and that these questions, along with my understanding and my practice, would grow more energetic and precise” (15).  This manifesto reinforces the story’s social embeddedness, its political dimensions and implications, both for the narrator and his auditors. 

Here's an excerpt from another piece, "Night Flight":

 

         A ceiling of low clouds domesticates the light, slanting and yellowing it. A promise of rain. That interior light brings distance and near into sharp focus, make the stop sign, telephone pole, the bland pueblo-faced building across the street and the hills beyond--makes them accurate, brings them to a point. Lily jumps on my bed to put herself in the path of some affection, curls into her tail and dozes off. Then the twilight gives it s intensity to the streetlights while my house fills with the sweet metallic artichoke scent--smell rather--the artichoke intact in its steamer suffering a medieval torture.

 

        Bruce and I spent a strange afternoon. He wanted a black leather jacket. Denise, myself, and other friends approved of his decision and Bruce's ex-lover viewed it a little anxiously, which seemed propitious. Bruce rarely buys anything, fearing that one purchase will lead you to the next and so on--like S/M where you must always raise the ante to achieve the same degree of pleasure until you become a different person and not necessarily  the one you intended (75).

______________

My story begins with light and ends with the body. Bruce tried on one of the jackets and something surprising happened. The jacket was beautifully made. The Mongolian lamb, buttery and yielding, said touch me. 'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep: The black looked deep and rich but its statement was power--death if you prefer--saying don't touch me: a mixed message at the heart of glamor. Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep! Certainly Bruce is a handsome man. Tall, slender, fine featured as a lemur. The black lent intention to his grizzled black hair and slate blue eyes. Visit him, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing. It heightened his tan, his good skin. It drew a frame around his handsomeness and advertised its availability. And may this storm be but a mountain birth. The addition of power rerouted the tenderness I already felt for Bruce. Bruce became a sexual object and the new direction was sexual appreciation. May all the stars hang bright above his dwelling. I encouraged him to buy the jacket (90-91).

         

Still fresh and powerful three decades after its original appearance, this generous collection of investigations deserves new readers, and new readers, you want this book.  You can get it here:

Elements by Robert Gluck   http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780983579144/elements.aspx

30th anniversary edition published by Ithuriels Spear Press http://www.ithuriel.com :  Jim Mitchell Publisher; F.S. Rosa Project Manger

part of the audience

Here are some photos from the book launch at  Green Arcade Bookstore SF  Wed., 9/15/13 Patrick Marks owner  http://thegreenarcade.com


 

Bob with former workshop participants



Notes

Boone, Bruce. “Remarks on Narrative: the Example of Robert Glück’s Poetry.” Afterword.  Family Poems. By Robert Glück. San Francisco: Black Star Series, 1979. 29-32. Print.

 



Gluck, Robert. “Long Note on New Narrative.”Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Ed. Mary   Burger, Robert Gluck, Camille Roy, Gail Scott. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004. Print.

 

**About the change in title, Gluck notes: "We dropped of a Coffee Service from the original title of Elements: I got tired of saying it and no one else seemed to remember it.

 

 

 

 

Languell, Prevallet, and Levistky in New York

 A Sunday Afternoon in New York

photos courtesy of Marie Regan

 

Ages ago now, back in early August, Sunday, the 11^th, I had the good fortune to attend an end of summer poetry reading in Red Hook at the home of Caroline Crumpacker. The event was held outdoors in the backyard. Emily Abendroth and I hitched a ride from Bard with Kristen Prevallet who read along with Rachel Levitsky and Krystal Languell. There was much greenery and late afternoon heat (things that stand out to someone used to the Bay Area’s August chill and sandy yellow hillsides). There were lovely things to eat and drink as words emerged from mouths into air and ears. The crowd of attentive listeners included many: Joan Retallack, Stephen Cope, Jonathan Skinner, Hoa Nguyen, Marie Regan, Sam Truitt, Emily Abendroth, Tim Casey, Cole Heinowitz, and many others I’m forgetting or whose names I do not know.

Stephen Cope and Cole Heinowitz

First up: Krystal Languell read from her new book Call The Catastrophists from BlazeVox. Here’s a few pieces from her collection:

Excuse Me If I Break my Own Heart

My body wants to build another body that was ever afraid of a chain letter / that gets excited about the weather. My body wants to play but doesn’t want to choke. The last good fuck my body is still waiting for it with a mouth open to express hunger sign says our lost | your gain my body, too, is awake / unemployed, interested in petty theft. My body watches too much wish-fulfillment reality television. Grabbing onto a manufactured boy guarantees vanilla passage my body wants its identity stolen / its jewelry pawned. It stares into the mirrorback and nothing happens outside its hailing / snowing and no adversity is to blame for this lack.

A process occurs when you give up your language and start calling things by new names but there’s not a term for how new phrases infiltrate your reflex it starts with gutturals and when you try to give it up try to back out the primal language dialects but you will understand shouts of surprise from the last place to wipe clean. 

 

Working the System

It means tackling
the old arranged network
from inside,
resisting iteration

You are:
                trills
                a cinched & neat parade salute
                patriotic pleasant ruffles
                perked and almost open.

On occasion, battle will be necessary.
Take it as another fluid affair, a natural
extension. Make it look easy.

Meanwhile, people you used to know
will overcrush, pursuing a miracle.
Needing your heart.

Understand, delicate?
Be careful not to doubt your own ascendance.

It means the din of words to be ignored.
Become expatriate. Calculate exact,
then ignore examination. Exit,
rather, exculpate yourself.

Kristin Prevallet read next from AlterBody and her Trance Poetics book, a new edition of which, I think, is coming out.  Read an excerpt from her compelling and engaging work here.

Excerpt from Braided River by Kristin Prevallet

Kristen Prevallet and Hoa Nguyen

Last and in the position of honor in celebration of her new book, The Story of My Accident is Ours from Futurepoem, Rachel Levistky took us into early evening.  Here are two pieces from this powerful and arresting book.

From Almost Any Angle

We woke into the world—
All at once and all one way like characters you’d see in a science fiction movie, without parents, cloned for the purpose of replacing the organs of the rich, or jailed indefinitely and repeatedly for our childbearing ability. We had the appearance arriving whole, the sets of our features predetermined and complete.

Defined by limitation—
We were kept away from history by serial clearances: slums, streets, the poor, then the rich, then the home, then the street, then the neighborhood, then the mall, and then the mall. (The mall.)

We recognized each other—
We communicated by way of a vacant look in our eyes and sophistication in our speech when we had the energy to speak. We were not quite like creatures in zombie movies that were popular again in our time. We didn’t join in the common cause of destroying one another, or making another more like us. We lacked killer instinct. We doubted the necessity, that what we were should be reproduced or multiplied. We were ignorant of what we were, uncertain about the ways we did have, what they were and how they’d come to be.

What we knew better than what we were and the ways we had was all that we were strange to. We were strange to the ways of smiles—smiles possessed by the ones on television, big and radiant, infused with all the light in the room from which their image was cast, smiles worn by the ones outside in front of the church, placidly making their way through those who’d get in their way of smiling and smiles exchanged by the two who were passing each other, in a case where one is walking down a sidewalk and another is driving in order to deliver a package from a truck.

We did not intent to be unfriendly nor dour though I can see (now) we have often and legitimately been so perceived. At one point in time I imagine we could not have been perceived any other way. Left by ourselves we did not know how else to be. We were made, mostly, all one way.

 

Caroline Crumpacker and Rachel Levitsky

Rigid Bodies

The body we wore when we came into the world in which we found ourselves was not our body and we did not know its ways. Some of us were sensitive to noise and some of us were easily stimulated by sex. Some of us liked to dress like smiling people on television. Some of us followed lovers around and some of us waited for lovers to come. Some of us wanted to be touched only one way and some of us found pleasure in being touched all kinds of ways. Some of us switched back and forth and some of us stayed the same. Some found it painful to be one way but not another; some found it painful to be any other way; some found pain to be the case any way at all.

In the times of which I speak in the world into which we woke, the State, committed to all people and to all things, enabled, in the manner of removing roadblocks, loosening safety regulations and forgiving discouraging tariffs, the research and corporate development of a variegated technology, a not very neatly packaged popular science, that allowed bodies and their parts to change and interchange. In this we began to witness a veritable mechanics for the animal body, outfitted into so many easily procured consumables. More still, the State made ecstatic way for the industry and its products, lubricating pipes, opening ports, stimulating sales. The technology thus encouraged, we watched it sail easily along otherwise static packed channels that branched out to a complicated and oft unanticipated grid which had before our times been expanded and now reached into each and every crevice, gaudily lit by enormously tall aluminum orbs, permissively read from above by thundering satellites, electronically measured from below. Chaotically wrapped or convincingly boxed or left out naked and raw, dividing and subdividing away from conglomerated mass beginnings into a multiple, many tiered, in itty bitty and chunky parts, mixed scale system; and trading in pieces sized unevenly, big, medium, small, and value pack; and sorts, prize-winning, genetically modified, state-of-the-art, economy, deluxe, exclusive, naturally derived, certifiably organic. Each size and sort is allowed to randomly find its way into a well-suited locale, insuring every class of population a security of supply, efficiently delivered in terms of speed, if not quality or safety, like so many other combustible goods that tumble into the markets of our world.

Thus, body mechanics became available for purchase in every sphere—for elegant fortunate bodies that is, and for we generally less so there were back alleys, corner stores and country borders. Word of available modification was spread by advertisement on trains and by show and tell in what was left of unpoliced dark corners (park) before the rising of an unfriendly, invasive sun. Future consumers were made less strange to the fluids and blood and guts of it by graphic and moving pictures on television and live demonstrations at the club.

The world, in which had once stood a society and now stood something else, had accommodated and absorbed these technologies quickly, but was not able to do this so very peacefully when it came to certain classes of bodies, certain body types and certain exchanges. Inversions of hormones, genitals and vocal cords, generated a rabid violence onto the death by the practitioners and purchasers of upgrades to skin, hair, chin and breasts, and from those who had gone by a swallow from scrawny to buff, or by a pinch from fat to thin.

What I am describing refers directly to the beginning of the story when I said one could not oppose this thing. To oppose these mechanics, their divisions and tangled convolutes of distribution, would mean being against ourselves as a people who consumed and needed to consume as a means of living in this world, managing our suffering as a thing ever attached to the body of our life like an abandoned starving nursing child, who belongs to us and whom we love as though we could love ourselves. Absolute or even partial refusal on ideological grounds would implicate us as being unmoved by our very own suffering. Which we are not.

Rachel will be in the Bay Area reading for Small Press Traffic in October. Don't miss it!

October 6, 2013
RACHEL LEVITSKY
HERIBERTO YEPEZ
Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia Street, SF
5 pm

Robin Tremblay-McGaw and Auto Fairy on Joan Retallack and Alterity

The recent edition of Litmus Press's Aufgabe features poetry in translation from Quebec and is guest edited by Oana Avasilichioaei. It also includes a section of Essays, Notes, and Reviews, edited by E. Tracy Grinnell, erica kaufman, and contributing editor Jamie Townsend. This section includes work by:

Cover art by Mie Olise

     Pierre Joris
     Robin Tremblay-McGaw
     Judith Goldman
     Gregoire Pam Dick
     pablo lopez
     Dorothy Albertini
     J. C. Vischer on Gail Scott
     Catherine Mavrikakis and Nathanaël





You can read my contribution "Questions, Read-Thrus, and Alterity in the work of Joan Retallack: An Interview with Robin Tremblay-McGaw and Auto Fairy" here:

Questions, Read-Thrus, and Alterity in the Work of Joan Retallack: An Interview with Robin Tremblay-McGaw a...

Yedda Morrison's Darkness and Conceptual Poetry

 

 Yedda Morrison’s Darkness

In early June I ran into the lovely Eléna Rivera and she asked me what poetry I’ve been reading and I told her about Yedda Morrison’s Darkness, a book I’ve had on my desk and near my bed since it came out.  In Darkness, Morrison takes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), specifically the Signet Classic mass paperback version and in an interesting détournement, erases much of Conrad’s excessive, soaking wet colonialist and highly gendered discourse and world view, and thus returns the world, the earth, to itself, absent “man” that long stand-in for “the human.”

Conrad’s Marlow explains how as a boy he had “a passion for maps” and eventually “a hankering” to visit “the biggest, the most blank” continent, Africa (223). Marlow admits that it “was not a blank space any more….but [then asserts that it] had become a place of darkness,” where “earth seemed unearthly” (256). Of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe writes that it situates Africa “as a metaphysical battleground devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the worldly European enters at his peril.” Here Kurtz encounters and becomes part of “The horror! The horror!” Heart of Darkness uses exquisite language to unfurl a problematic tale, one that exemplifies a claim about Marlow’s storytelling style: while

the yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut[,] …Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze (220).

Heart of Darkness communicates much about the time in which it is written, telling us little about Africa and the Congo and more about “the outside,” the tale and its teller and the world in which he lives, revealing western colonialist fantasies and the deployment of real violence fueled by those fantasies and the lust for power and pillaged resources.

Morrison’s intervention, her erasure, rewrites the novella, unmaking its colonialist, gendered discourse.

What’s left you might wonder.

Reader,  something amazing! In her erasure, Morrison has accomplished something akin to what Richard Feynman suggests is the feat performed by the scientific imagination: “One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard before. At the same time the thoughts are restricted in a strait jacket, so to speak, limited by the conditions that come from our knowledge of the way nature really is."

Not unlike the way any of us is both produced and restricted by the language in which we find ourselves, Morrison is constrained by Conrad’s language and also the page of the mass paperback. But she takes this constraint and uses it to reveal the earth as both teeming and still, a place where there is “starred darkness” (108),  “breath        
         steam                               silence” (90),

  “sunshine                    
                                           rotten   
                                air” (37),

and                     “dusk               
                                                             rising
  to swell” (131). 

Darkness, light, shadow, and ivory, in their dislocation from the initial first-person plural and then third person narrator, are unmoored from their 19^th Century cultural frameworks, and come to mean otherwise. But, because Morrison’s source text is Heart of Darkness, this isn’t quite accurate. Her aim doesn’t seem to be to erase the history and context of this language (as if that were possible or, even, desirable), but rather her Darkness both marks these things and to some degree, if momentarily in the space of the pages of her book, returns darkness to the earth as an unvalenced force, a fact.  The text exposes the rich and threatened natural world that is overshadowed, overwritten, run over by human beings. So fraught with its racialized symbolics, Heart of Darkness, has always been about  the white men it is focalized around. Who knew there was so much of the natural world in Conrad’s  text? Morrison’s excision of the human, the specific subjectivity of the white western man (who is, of course, in Conrad’s text juxtaposed with African men and women—both white and black)—underscores the excessive presence of this subjectivity in Heart of Darkness. Morrison’s Darkness offers another possibility, “rose,   


                                 wilderness                                                 











lightless
                          sunshine” (98).

But let me be clear, Darkness does not paint a rosy portrait of an earth liberated from the human.

The book closes with an earth hanging in the balance,

                               “black bank of clouds,      tran-
quil waterway
earth flow                                overcast sky—
                                              immense darkness"

offering both a kind of hope (“tranquil” and “flow”) and a glimpse of the unknown future (“overcast” and “immense”).

At the same time, her text makes present our current predicament:

                                                             wilderness

withered;

                                                  consumed

                            Ivory?

                                             mud                                    bursting

                                                                                               tusk

                                                             ground

                                         fossil,

                                                                          fossil

                                    fossil      

                                                                                             (81)

The book is so powerful in part because we cannot help but be reminded of our own rapacious desire for ever more fossil fuels and our disregard for the land that produces them. Additionally, it is impossible to talk about this text and to ignore the recalcitrant ways in which racism persists, particularly in the wake of the murders of TrayVon Martin and Oscar Grant, and so many unnamed others.

I love Morrison's Girl Scout Nation, about which you can read here on xpoetics, yet when I first opened Darkness, I was intrigued but not sure I would find enough there to keep me reading these painterly pages, words in a font that appears sometimes blurry, edged and shadowed from the brush marks of the white-out or liquid paper. But the text has a power, a momentum in the beauty, dare I say, melancholy that emerges in the midst of this “profound stillness,
                  worn,
 hollow,

                                            night                      flicker
tiny flame” (80) where “dark eyes look      out


                                                 creatures


                                                                                 deep catch
    of     breath” (126).

The earth –“loose of the earth/ earth to pieces”—and all its creatures are , in fact, as always in some places more than others, vanishing, under erasure, on the brink.  It is as if we glimpse it most powerfully precisely at the moment when it seems as if it is slipping away.

Whatever the battles raging right now on Facebook and on the Web and in publications and at parties and readings about conceptual writing, here is a work that locates itself in the company of such writing.  The verso of the title page of Darkness informs us that “pages 3-8 were enacted as a 30-foot wall painting as part of the Not Content event curated by Vanessa Place and Theresa Carmody at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 2010” and that excerpts are included in I’ll Drown My Book, an anthology of women’s conceptual writing.  This text, like M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (mentioned in Bedient's essay cited below) is rich with affect, moving. Each takes source texts that document and enact problematic discourses, discourses that have real and lasting material effects on people, on the planet. These authors use their source texts, perform critical interventions in these texts, and create out of them something wholly new. In its own way, each tells a story that cannot be told. What is earth without human beings? How might it speak? What did the slaves thrown overboard for the purpose of collecting insurance money experience? Who can tell this history? How can not telling tell?

from Not Content

All of this is complicated. And “conceptual poetry” and “the poetry of affect” too are complicated, hard to reduce so that on one side there are “life values” and on the other “emotionally neutral methods.” (see Calvin Bedient’s “Against Conceptualism."). I don’t find much in this glib give and take between Vanessa Place and Ben Fama: Authors on Artists: Vanessa Place Talks with Ben Fama about VanessaPlace, Inc. except careerism. But there’s lots to feel passionately about in work like Zong! and Darkness. And really, we do know that labels and categories are often applied after the fact, and only partially useful, and often misleading.

“cry, a very loud cry,                                           soared slowly in the opaque air” (67).

 

Sources:

Achebe, Chinua."An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'" Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness in Three Great Tales. New York, Vintage Books.

Feynman, Richard. The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1964.

Morrison, Yedda. Darkness. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2012.

Check out Yedda's website here.



 

Stephanie Young from her Small Press Traffic Reading Earlier this Spring

Of late, xpoetics posts have arrived slow as molasses as my grandmother used to say. It's been a busy spring and now already, a busy summer. I was out of town the first weekend of June when Stephanie Young and Stephen Motika rocked the Small Press Traffic kasbah. Stephanie and Stephen have agreed to share some of their work, and here we begin with Stephanie's delicious excerpt from AVE VIA.

from AVE VIA

At the beginning of this century Caroline Bergvall collated the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno as translated into English and archived in the British Library through May 2000. You’ve heard this before. In the middle of the journey of the first decade of this new century, high-risk adjustable rate mortgages were aggressively marketed to those who could least afford them. It’s a familiar story. In 2011 the foreclosure rate in Oakland was more than double the national average. That year I couldn’t write any poems. Not one. No music. That year the rental market in San Francisco spiked by 10-20%. I wrote in sentences instead. That one. These. This isn’t an argument about form. 90% of foreclosures in Oakland fell in 3 zip codes: 94601, 94603, 94605. The oldest and most diverse. Primarily low and moderate income. Latino and African-American. The neighborhood known as. Formerly. Owner occupied. It’s well known. Common, current, habitual, ordinary, it came in waves. In 2012 Oakland rents went up by 11%. I woke to find we could no longer afford to live in the neighborhood where we continued to live, in a large, slowly disintegrating house where the cost of rent had not increased since 2003, a situation that could not last forever. That had. For now. I was lucky. The vacancy rate was 1.7%. I was hardly in exile. Nothing about our situation had changed. For a long time. 94609. We could no longer afford to live there. And yet we did. In a shadowy wood. Plus a yard and shed. A sort of cloud hung over verse. I worked with it, in the classroom. In the shadow of. A transit village. I couldn’t write any poems. Student loan surpassed credit card debt. 70% of all faculty were adjunct. You’ve heard this before. This isn’t an argument about form. I forgot how. I had gone astray. Bewildered, lost, way off course. We lived there. We continued to. Not one. No music. Nothing about our situation had changed. But it did feel strange. The situation had. Around us. Feelings. I didn’t know how to go forward, and couldn’t find my way back. The awkward adolescence of middle age. The first phase entered construction. The right path appeared not anywhere. “damages of the profession.” In a slowly disintegrating house. A situation that could not last forever. Real estate bloggers named it the most exciting city. Forbes. A tech cluster. It’s well known. Common, current, habitual, ordinary, it came in waves. Along the way I attended Keith Hennessy’s Turbulence (a dance about the economy). I turned 39. I was lucky. On 36^th Street between Webster and Telegraph. Ave. Awe, ave, welcome, as the century picked up, took shape faster, farewell, adieu, 11%, 12, the house across the street went for $500,000, backed up against the freeway, I moved towards the collected lines of Bervall’s poem, Dante’s, Via, iced coffee, I was hardly in exile but it did feel strange, something moved me there, within the lines, the neighborhood, as improvisational structure, as age would have it, I moved within the situation of the poem, a fine wide street, instrumentation, the awkward adolescence of middle age, the action of coming to, a familiar story, from its language, with a certain shape in mind, a dance about the economy, “wherein” “for” might crescendo for a while, slowly overtaken by the idea of wood. Hardwood floors. We lived there. We couldn’t. We did. I imagined the points of this compositional score in the shape of a pentagram. A passage of entrance or exit. I was thinking of work by Pauline Oliveros. That music. Later I realized I’d mistaken one shape for another.

 

With reverence or from the Old Norse kept in check, frightened, restrained, disciplined, fit

 

Ave

 

In the manner or way of a grandfather, bird, bird,

A formal expression of greeting

Birds, small birds

 

In the journey of our life

And in the hour of our death

 

Ave acuatica

Ave cantor

Ave de corral

Ave del paraiso

Avefria

Ave marina

Ave migratoria

Ave de paso

Ave pasajera

Ave rapaz

Ave de rapina

Avestruz

Ave zancuda

 

98^th

81^st

73rd

Seminary

 

35^th

Fruitvale

23rd

 

14^th

Lakeshore

Grand

 

Piedmont

Telegraph

San Pablo

 

Ave.

 

the trees that lined them then

the pre-wood trees

 

the avenues

in pre-dawn light

 

I awoke to find

 

three cranes

 

on every side, a hospital

a hospital complex

 

more than 600 workers hidden from view

and a new 478-space parking garage

 

water flowing underground

 

 

*

 

within a forest dark

within 30 days

 

 

*

 

I found that I had strayed into The Forest, an American horror film, The Forest, a Portuguese film, The Forest, an Australian film, The Forest, a Cambodian film, the Forest, an Indian film.

 

I woke in wonder in literature sunless and dusky—an 1871 play, a 1903 novel—

 

The Forest.

 

 

Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry are Picture Palace and Telling the Future Off. URSULA of UNIVERSITY is forthcoming from Krupskaya. She is a founding and managing editor of Deep Oakland, and co-edited, with Juliana Spahr, A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pans-and-a-machine-gun Feminism

Two Hot San Francisco Events on the Horizon

 S M O K' N  H O T   E V E N T S!

Saturday, June 15th, 7:30 PM

NEW DIALOGUES: Writing Sound/Playing Words
An evening of improvisations with music, silent acting, speaking and whispering voices, composed verse, and urgently ringing the bells. with Bruce Ackley, Clark Coolidge, Carla Harryman, Jon Raskin, Roham Shiekhani, and Crystal Pascucci.

John Raskin and Carla Harryman

 

 

 

Organized by Jon Raskin, and informed by his ongoing collaboration with writer, Carla Harryman, the evening will feature writers Harryman and Clark Coolidge, and music groups led by Raskin and Bruce Ackley.

The composition of words has always played an important role in the development of Rova members’ musics, and the Harryman-Raskin project demonstrates significant correspondences between the media. Coolidge and Ackley have threatened to perform together for years, and bassist Lisa Mezzacappa is the perfect co-conspirator to complete the trio. Clark will be featured both as a poet and drummer

 

 

Clark Coolidge, early San Francisco Days

 

7:30: Ackley/Coolidge/Mezzacappa Trio
Clark Coolidge – drums, poetry
Bruce Ackley – woodwinds
Lisa Mezzacappa – bass

Clark Coolidge attended Brown University, where his father chaired the music department. After moving to New York City in the early 1960s, Coolidge cultivated links with poets Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Often associated with the ‘Language School’, his experience as a jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects (including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac and movies) informs his writing. Recent works include A Book Beginning What and Ending Away, and 88 Sonnets, Fence Books. Coolidge currently lives in Petaluma.

Lisa Mezzacappa is a San Francisco Bay Area-based bassist, composer, and musical instigator. An active collaborator and curator in the Bay Area music community, she leads her own groups Bait & Switch and Nightshade, and co-leads the ensembles duo B., Cylinder, the Permanent Wave Ensemble, the Mezzacappa-Phillips Duo, and the Caribbean folk band Les Gwan Jupons. Lisa has released her own recordings on the Clean Feed, NoBusiness, Leo, Evander, Odd Shaped Case and Edgetone record labels, and has recorded as a sideperson for the Tzadik, Kadima and Porto Franco labels. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, film/video, sculpture and public music/art.

 

8:30 Carla Harryman & Jon Raskinwith Crystal Pascucci and Roham Shiekhani

Carla Harryman is the author of seventeen books, among them the prose diptych W—/M—forthcoming from Split Level Press in 2013; Adorno’s Noise, a collection of conceptual and experimental essays (Essay Press, 2008); and a sequence of essays in  The Grand Piano, a multi-authored ten volume work about art and culture in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1975-1980, (Mode D, 2011). Her Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally. Recent work in performance includes the “re-performance” of Theodore Adorno’s 1959 lecture “Music and New Music” at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, Germany (with music composition by Jon Raskin) and the publication of  Open Box, a music and poetry collaboration with Jon Raskin (Tzadik, 2012). She is co-editor of  Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006), and the editor of Non/Narrative a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory (2011).

Roham Sheikhani is a poet, actor, and a playwright. Since 1986 he has worked with diverse groups, including DARVAG, Night Letter Theater, and Shotgun Players. Since 1986 he has collaborated with artists Harryman and Raskin, as well as James Cave, Woody Woodman, Amy Trachtenberg, Erling Wold, Lauren Elder, Sydney and Arthur Carson.

Crystal Pascucci , cellist/composer/improviser. Before relocating from the east coast, she worked in new music ensembles and studied under improvising masters, Robert Black of the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Anthony Braxton. Pascucci’s current personal projects include Opera Wolf and Wild Hen. She recently performed the works of Roscoe Mitchell at Yoshi’s Jazz Club, participated in the 2012 Outsound Summit Festival and has presented a solo set at several Bay Area events. She performs regularly with Lisa Mezzacappa’s String Band, the Electro-Magnetic Trans-Personal Orchestra and Oakland Active Orchestra, which performed at the 2013 SF Switchboard Festival. www.crystalpascucci.com

Center for New Music
55 Taylor Street
San Francisco
www.centerfornewmusic.com

 

 

The Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics is an annual lecture series with a focus on critical analysis of innovative poetry, essays, plays, and cross-genre work primarily by women poets. The Series invites contemporary writers to present their work in the spirit exemplified by Scalapino’s own critical writing and editorial vision as publisher of O Books.

June 23, 2013

at Timken Hall, California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street, San Francisco CA

event begins at 5pm
lecture at 5:30pm
$6-10

 

PETAH COYNE

Petah Coyne is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer. Some of her works are in the permanent collections of museums and galleries such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Her most recent solo exhibition at the Mass MoCA (May 29, 2010) features large-scale mixed-media sculptures along with silver gelatin print photographs. Coyne layers wax-soaked materials such as pearls, ribbons and silk flowers into large sculptural forms, often incorporating taxidermy birds and animals.

“The works in this largest retrospective of the artist’s work to date range from her earlier and more abstract sculptures using industrial materials to newer works made of delicate wax. All of Coyne’s works take inspiration from personal stories, film, literature and political events. Coyne takes these sources and applies a Baroque sense of decadent refinement, imbuing her work with a magical quality to evoke intensely personal associations. Together these diverse yet intimately connected periods of Coyne’s practice make evident an evolution, which highlights the artist’s own blend of symbolism alongside an innovative use of materials including black sand, car parts, wax, satin ribbons, trees, silk flowers, and taxidermy.”
- Mass MoCA

“Coyne belongs to a generation of sculptors—many of them women—who came of age in the late 1980s and forever changed the muscular practice of sculpture with their new interest in nature and a penchant for painstaking craftsmanship, domestic references and psychological metaphor.”
-Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

LESLIE SCALAPINO

Leslie Scalapino (July 25, 1944 – May 28, 2010) was born in Santa Barbara, California and raised in Berkeley. She traveled throughout her youth and adulthood to Asia, Africa and Europe — including Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, India, Mongolia, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere — and her writing was intensely influenced by these experiences. She published her first book, O and Other Poems, in 1976. In 1986, she founded O Books, dedicated to publishing innovative works by young and emerging poets, as well as prominent and established writers. She also taught writing for nearly 25 years at various institutions, including Bard College (16 years in the MFA program), Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of Arts in San Francisco. She lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, CA until her death in 2010.

Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose inter-genre-fiction, plays, and essays. In 2010, the year of her death, she published five books: The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom (The Post-Apollo Press); Flow-Winged Crocodile and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear (Chax Press), two plays published in one volume; The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books); a collaboration between Scalapino and artist Kiki Smith; and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books), which is a pair, or preceding volume, to The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom. This same year, she also released a second edition of Crowd and not evening or light (O Books). Scalapino’s It’s go in horizontal/Selected Poems, 1974-2006 was published by University of California Press at Berkeley in 2008. Other books of Scalapino’s poetry include Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night (Green Integer), a collection of eight years of writing; Zither & Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press); The Tango (Granary Press), a collaboration with artist Marina Adams; Orchid Jetsam (Tuumba); Dahlia’s Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction (FC2 Publishers); a reprint of the prose work Defoe by Green Integer; and It’s go in/quiet illumined grass/land (The Post-Apollo Press). A revised and dynamically expanded version of her essay book How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets in 1989) was published by Litmus Press in May 2011.