Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist

We spent the long Labor Day weekend on the western shore of Lake Tahoe. I plunged into its icy waters everyday for four days in a row. Even after 15 years of returning to the lake, I never tire of the view and the many hues of blue it flashes.

An additional pleasure this year included gobbling up Dodie Bellamy's the buddhist from Publication Studio. The book begins with a bang--the details of which I will leave you to discover for yourselves--as it unleashes its garrulous alchemy, turning Bellamy's blog posts on the fireworks and subsequent fallout from a relationship with "the buddhist" into a book that pushes all kinds of literary/aesthetic/social boundaries, all the while maintaining a running commentary/meditation of and on its coming-into-being. Boundaries and how they get pushed around, wadded up, shoved aside, pierced, pummeled, and sometimes, maintained, are always central to Bellamy's writing.

For lots of different reasons, I tend to keep some pretty firm walls between different parts of my life, but I revel in how Bellamy and most New Narrative writers mess with these walls and what they have to do with writing. 

Bellamy is unafraid to parade and take apart what Sianne Ngai has called "ugly feelings." She names their gendered/political frameworks:

This is what I was getting at in my post on public display and operatic suffering--an in-your-face owning of one's own vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don't see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power. To deny behaviors and experiences gendered as weak or "feminine" is not feminist or queer, it's heteronormative to the hilt. Like Kathy Acker, I long to quiver and terrify in the same gasp (35).



Image from Belladodie website. Bellamy googled "operatic suffering" and this is the first image that came up. (I love that all the participants appear to be women!)




Bellamy's book is full of a wide array of references to writing, the writing community, to other writers, artists, film-makers, musicians, and an array of Hollywood films, to spirituality, meditation, the death of Bellamy's mother, academic interview committees, Buddhist sex scandals, Ambien, Culver City hotel stays, and more. I love that this book includes a whole host of images, some taken by Bellamy and others snatched from elsewhere (like the one above).

Here's one of my favorite passages:

Hotel Retreat Day 6

The nightgown I brought with me is getting funky so I bought another one at the Nordstrom Rack at the Howard Hughes Center. Being a Princess and the Pea type person, I cut out the tags so they wouldn't scratch my delicate nature as I slept.

You gotta love the middle, WARNING: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE tag, and its lame attempt at a comforting afterthought: ALL FABRIC CAN BURN. Like they're trying to convince you that this nightgown isn't particularly flammable—it's more of an existential thing, more like every time you go to bed you're in danger of combusting into yet another Anima Sola, running through the night, heartbroken over the buddhist, engulfed in tonguey orange flames. She must have bought her nightgown at Nordstrom Rack too (100).

The Buddhist begins with its title all in capitals on the cover but by the time the book closes, the buddhist has shrunk to all lower case. The book begins with engorgement and ends post-sex, "with printed love" (145). But, it takes awhile to get there. Throughout the book, Bellamy suggests that she will stop writing about the buddhist, as here:

...that's what it feels like with the buddhist, those final musculature contractions of a dead thing. I'm tired of writing about him. Back in the early days of New Narrative, when we were all wanting to be in one another's work, I complained to Kevin, why don't you write about me, and Kevin said he didn't write about me because writing was an exorcism, and he didn't want to exorcise me. Writing about the buddhist here has been a sort of  exorcism, but the time for that has passed--no more soap opera narrative for this blog, time to return to random bleeps of experience and observation (39).

But of course, he keeps turning up, however much he is denied and/or newly buried:

"The unhooking from the buddhist now feels complete; I'm ready to open the door and step out into the rays of my sunlit future" (49).

"I wish I could erase the buddhist from my consciousness, I'm sick of thinking about him, but my writing brought him into my life, and it seems he's going to stay there in spirit, if not in flesh, until the writing's through with him" (56).

"So, I'm saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here" (71).

"Based on this blog, I'm sure it sounds like I talk about him all the time, but I don't. I was feeling melancholy about the whole situation today--and there it was again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I've shaken--like the eternal return, it comes back again and again, its quality essentially unchanged. When the longing strikes, I get this romantic sense that the buddhist is feeling it as well..." (104).

Bellamy is aware of this constant return, of course, and works it as much as it works her. She includes in the book a section in which Colter Jacobsen, artist, friend and publisher of the buddhist, remarks upon this recurrence:

Colter added:
I thought of you when i read this [a quote from Proust]...I hope I wasn't insensitive when I said that i like the constant return in the blog of the buddhist. It was also meant to be an observation that while you are editing the buddhist blog, it also seems to be growing....I think it is brave and vulnerable....I think people appreciate this because we can so relate to it; there's always someone in our life whose relationship was left unresolved and complicated and so much time is spent weighing what happened...till it becomes almost and abstraction. (129).

I think Bellamy's constant return to the buddhist makes for a kind of abjection that is uncomfortable for the reader. Our identification with it might not be uncomplicated; or we might deny any identification with it. There's something particularly interesting to me in this display and working with and in this space of abjection; it is all about discomfort, distances, contagion. It seems to be the source of writing, writing as intense content but also intensive formal practice and investigation, abjection and writing that both undoes and remakes a person and a person's work.

Here are some other selections from the book:

Of course it ended badly. Recently I tried to smooth things over with The Buddhist. It was disastrous. Bradford Nordeen on my efforts: 'Aren't these awful experiences best when they're funneled into the work so that heartache is turned into a piece, made productive? That piece is written (and lovely) so why on earth would you get back into the sandbox?" Bradford's referring to the 1000-word story/memoir I recently completed called "The Buddhist," a piece so obscene it makes my soul blush. 1000 words sounds right; I have no desire to write any more "real" writing about him. I enjoyed working with brevity--layering subtlety into such a raunchy, blatant blip. I even created a character arc for the protagonist, just like they do in real fiction. The "now" takes place within a few minutes, but the content extends and swirls way out, the now being like the eye of a tornado, and everything else racing around that. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how personal or vulnerable my subject matter, at a certain point in writing it all boils down to formal concerns, I become this slightly mad biologist panting to herself as I pin a butterfly, alive and writhing, to a cardboard background. Of course I'm thinking of Nabokov here. Is 1000 words and a community who's been entertained for 5 months worth the pain?  And, yes, there was pleasure as well. It was like being in a cult, a strange narcissistic Buddhist sex cult. I wouldn't have passed it up for the world (34).


Throughout I've tried to use my babbling about loss and betrayal as an opportunity to refine and promote a political/aesthetic position (49).

...after poopooing divisions, I made a distinction between blog writing and Real Writing. That's a hard one, for I don't know what I'm doing here, why I'm putting all this energy into these posts. I think of poets who speak of their 'writing practice,' meaning it's all part of the process; they don't separate out precious, discrete poems as real work and letters and journals as lesser work. Thus the fetishization of George Oppen's daybooks for example. I've always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets' insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they're such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny? My posts are too slight, too femmy, too sloppy (I'm a compulsive reviser), too easy. So Rainer's right: I'm conflicted (73).

This section follows a passage Bellamy quotes from Helen Molesworth's "Me, You, Us: Eva Hesse's Early Paintings." Bellamy writes:

Art writing doesn't get much better than this--Molesworth's willingness to engage in such a personal, intimate relationship with Hesse's work, while never losing her analytic eye. This idea of the image looking back feels key here. It's as if the effort made to create a work invests the work with its own personhood--an otherly personhood that stares back at its creator, a stare fed by the psychic bleeding of the creator, that results both in relief and a slap of the uncanny. If the work doesn't stare back at you, you haven't invested enough energy in it. The buddhist once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion. I don't know what religion is for me. Writing is my calling (80-81).

Dear Potential Readers out there: This books looks back and it is calling to you!

Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brandon Brown in the Condensary Reading Series

Saturday night, after work at the library and after working through confusing carpooling plans, Camille Roy and I practically flew across the Bay Bridge, traffic having wondrously evaporated; We missed our exit, but were back on track in a moment, arriving in Oakland for the Condensary Reading Series, hosted by Jack Frost and Zack Tuck, just as it was beginning. The house was jam-packed. Brandon Brown read first though I hesitate to call what Brandon does reading. It is more of a performance. As an audience member, you're always a little unanchored, never quite sure where the performance begins or ends, or when Brandon is improvising, or when he's reading what's on the page. His references traverse a whole array of sources--Greek texts, pop culture, politics, the body, sex, appetite, hip hop, poetry, the personal. This is all part of the pleasure of Brandon's writing, writing that Camille described as juicy, or was it, tasty?  It is great stuff, raw and intricate, bawdy and scatological, high pitched and searing.



photo by Camille Roy


Here's a bit of what Brandon read:

STAR WARS
Ugh, I would never go to Burning Man in a million
years. You guys have fun with that one. The window
for my going to Burning Man shut tight
in 1983 when I turned five and my cerebral system started
sloughing off the gilt pillars of progress.
Given the Tarkovsky-shot brain death I’ve suffered
since, I don’t need to fiddle mushrooms under a Pepsi
sign in Nevada. What little pop sensibility still fires
bursts via pre-Homeric river-rhythm mimic.
My performance reviews just barely adequate. My chapbooks
barely streaming across the scarred surface of a heaving prosthesis.
I’m talking about the Internet, and I’m referring to Burning Man. Okay,
I’ll go to Burning Man. So I can blaze in an incendiary nostalgic
anti-Jacobinism, since Burning Man is a nationalist display of
saturated mores. You know how that band Crass made flyers in 1978 that read Germany got Baader-Meinhof, England got punk? If I wasn’t busy packing the back of the Saab with psilocybin and Ciroc I’d bend over a Xerox, engrave the relevant apodosis: America got Star Wars. Both Burning Man and Star Wars express something fundamentally true about our culture ,which is that given the choice between collective activity ensuring the lessening of worldwide violence in the name of equalite, we’d rather burn one and wallow in the most gloriously degraded archetypal representations of such violence history has ever considered. Germany got an organized cell of native revolutionaries determined to stage a protest which would induce true trauma to the ruling classes and still engage the sympathy of the ruled. England’s poor and wayward bourgeois youth faced a literal crisis, a bifurcation by which cultural choice was demanded between fealty to the party of order or insurrectionary semiotic praxis. In the United States, if you were white and loaded and could tear yourself away from listening to Fleetwood Mac’s catastrophic LP Rumors for three hours you were most likely either watching Star Wars or waiting in line to watch Star Wars. I know you think this is an empty and raunchy satire. Actually, like every other white and wealthy person born between 1958 and now I’m deeply, disarmingly, madly in love with Star Wars. Rumors too.


PIGS

I would never hold hands with a pig.
But as a vitamin-deprived crackerlet,
my rearers were obsessed with a symbolic
play in which the little stubs hanging off
my palms were pigs. Doing typical pig shit too.
Going to the market. Gumming roast beef.
Slurping trash out of a trough like it was lamb
kidneys in shallot sauce. I’m not above seasoning
my own shapeless chemical dinners with a
little pork product. Inhaling sodium ennui glutamate.
Listening to the lachrymose squeals of an angered
Kardashian, luving its peal across the bereft
orchard of my machinery. But I am going to
call a pig a fucking pig. This blonde Franz-type
stalks the halls of my office building.
He nods up with his whole cleft so I can see
the breezy blonde hairs inside his snout shake.
Sparkling honky eyes. He licks his lips
spying spine. Hot lard for a cold
baton. Wild boars still roam the woods
of Marin, but in the streets of Athens
all you can see are pigs. Saying something sort of
shitty to a garbage collector. I got a ticket for smoking
on campus and the pig thanked me, handing
over carbon copy. Smudging my enduring
dermal affability. I grabbed his tail and pulled
it Botox taut. That’s not
compost staining the wrinkles in my fingers, pig.
It’s what degrades this beautiful salt-lick
I put clothes on every day: white but pig-hating,
full of lovable rancor. It smells a little yesterday.
Backdated fish. Big potato. What goes
in the garbage. Cognac for pigs.




photo courtesy of Camille Roy


Following Brandon's raucous reading, Jocelyn Saidenberg began hers by saying that after Brandon's performance, she felt like the "straight man," though she is neither. The work Jocelyn read from is new; in "Silent Resistance," she writes through/with Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, attempting to occupy that "impossible subject position" that is Bartleby's. We heard several sections from this new project and the writing throughout is precise, the syntax elastic, abject, and exquisite. I look forward to reading more from this tantalizing project.


Silent Resistance

On the Dead Letter Branch, or, Sheep


At dusk, the gray zone of my disappearance, drugged by a still unknown drug, the hour that mourns the loss of day, cast down, but I go, neither melancholic nor stupid, I am the dawn, faceless possibility, impersonal, slipping beyond my form into the dazzling light of a world that says “no” to depth. At this moment, this dusk that is dawn, I am named as such, named as one. I had been given notice, as all subordinate clerks, myself named one, were given notice. After scores of years of reading through undeliverable correspondence, no one more suited to this avocation than I, vested with that authority to open and read the dead letters, I am to be removed. Not a rumor, not whispered speculation, is yet my sudden removal, due to an incoming administration, all posts, save the ex-clergy, are being removed. I would have rather to have declined their offer, but they have already asked that my keys be returned. I am the most trustworthy dead letter man handling the dead letters, yet I am to be removed, most likely today.

I was hired for my ability to decipher handwriting. To sound out the correct intention, to sleuth a destination. Stiejt Kanedeka means State of Connecticut. I could smell it. The rest we fed to the flames. Faithfully I have sorted through them, lived through them, the unreceived, prone and silent, I have worked, burned cart loads yearly. By nature and misfortune, prone to a pallid hopelessness. Within I have found rings, infolded in paper—the finger it was meant for molders in a grave. I have found bank notes, sent as swift charity to whom it would not relieve, who nor eats nor hungers anymore. I have read pardon for those who died despairing, hope for those who died unhoping, good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. I have read just enough, nor more than necessary. A business so fitted to me. I have sorted the mail of the bereft, errands of life who speed yet faster to death. My surrogate hand unsealing, tender and mild and serene, continually. Now suddenly, I am to be removed from circulation. This my home, my eternal dusk, invaded only by shadows, I am cast out. Where, as formless, who, as unrecognizable, when, am I capable of such exit, how to break the bonds of such weariness, tiredness, this silent disaster, a figure without form. This event will have happened. I repeat: I am to leave my post in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. I am to leave as if possible to publish myself, even as an anonymous dead letter man, as an instinct, unformed and atmospheric, as if I come or go from without, as if this could be thought, formed. I am as weather shadow cloud, and as weather shadow cloud, I depart.

Celebrating the Re-Publication of Bruce Boone's The Truth About Ted!

Dear Readers---Lucky You! Now, thanks to Steve Orth and Lindsey Bolt of Summer BF Press, you too can have your very own copy of Bruce Boone's The Truth About Ted, complete with a new cover by Colter Jacobsen. You can buy a copy from them, here.

photos courtesy of Gerard Koskovich

On Friday, July 29th, a crowd of Bay Area writers and Bruce Boone enthusiasts gathered in an elegant historic home on Guerrero Street as we fêted Bruce and he read the entirety of The Truth About Ted, a new narrative text originally published in 1984 by exempli gratia of Berkeley.

I am a big fan of this slender but significant text. Years ago when I worked at Meyer Boswell Books on Mission Street, I was lucky enough to stumble upon an original copy at the very cool store next door, Bolerium Books. Thank you Bolerium Books!  The Truth About Ted performs a multitude of storytellings, desires, interpretations, readings and misreadings. It is poignant, smart, and funny. If  you are interested, you can read a short critical piece on it here.


Thanks to Bruce's friend Gerard Koskovich (about whom you can find out more here), you can watch this short video of Bruce reading.





Congratulations Bruce and thank you Lindsey and Steve.

Poetry at the Headlands Center for the Arts

Last Sunday, a classic Bay Area summer day (foggy-turned-sunny-in-late-afternoon ), Kathleen Fraser and I headed out to Marin for a reading at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Miraculously, the reading started on time, and equally miraculously, we arrived with some time to spare. The place is stunning and since it was the Summer Open House, there were a good many people there visiting artists' studios and eating the organic chef-prepared food at the cafe.

The reading happened on the second floor in the East Wing of Building 944. I wish I had my camera with me! The room is enormous and light filled; the walls were, I think,a kind of wasted white with yellowed cracks running all over them and the ceiling still had its decorative tin work which had been sand-blasted and left unpainted, a gun-metal gray.

Here's what the Headlands' web site says about the site's history:


Originally inhabited by the native Miwok, the area was used for military installations for more than a century before the army withdrew in 1972 and turned over the land to the National Park Service. This combination of wilderness and urban environments is a fulcrum for Headland's creative investigations into the relationship between human and natural systems.




The Headlands Campus Headlands is housed in a cluster of nine historic, 1907-era military buildings at Fort Barry. Residency studios, offices and public rooms are located in two four-story former army barracks and feature 13-foot ceilings, large windows, oak balustrades, maple floors and redwood wainscoting.


Since 1985, Headlands has renovated these remarkable historic structures through granting commissions to artists. Major American artists, including Ann Hamilton, David Ireland, Bruce Tomb and John Randolph, have designed and supervised the renovation of the public rooms in our main building.

In 1998, artist Leonard Hunter and architect Mark Cavagnero led the award-winning rehabilitation of a nearby 1907 Army storage depot, which now houses the Affiliate Artist program studios.

_______________________________________________________________
The Reading featured a number of writers, including some I know such as Brian Teare (who is finishing up his residency at The Headlands before moving to Pennsylvania to teach at Temple University) and Elise Ficarra of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University (though I had never heard Elise read her own work before this), and a bunch more--Maw Shein Win, Emily Meg Weinstein, Emily Jane Wilson, Steven Gilmartin, and Genine Lentine--all entirely new to me.

While the acoustics and the great many people moving about made listening sometimes difficult, the audience of 50+ people found much to enjoy. I asked some of the writers whose pieces I most responded to, to send me some of their work, and they did. Here they are for your reading pleasure.

The first is a poem by Brian Teare who prefaced his reading by saying that he had been reading Robert Creeley and Wang Wei on top of one another, in part, as a way to work on cutting or opening up his work.

The Natural World

i.

past the decommissioned fort
past the former nike missile site

past the abandoned battery
past the empty gun platform

past dugouts lined with concrete
sandbags
                 the ocean

ii.

living in former military housing my body

occupies space designed to mold a soldier’s
into one mess hall bunk latrine landscape

war-born they planted invasive eucalyptus
to hide the fort man-made forms a camouflage

wounding the cloth that held their bodies

iii.

each evening the house leans shadow
against the ridge we curl into the way

during a different war without trees
to shade their names soldiers did too

ocean on the other side of our sleep


The next excerpted piece is by Steven Gilmartin, a Bay Area writer who was once a student of Kathleen's. Steven has been translating Emily Dickinson's work into German and then back into English; he has also translated Cesar Vallejo, though the work he read on Sunday was from a piece on the Hoover Dam. He describes the writing as "a condensation of a significantly longer work-in-progress, as yet untitled, that had turned into more of a work-not-in-progress." Steven noted that "the reading really helped me sharpen the piece and has renewed my interest in working on it and developing it further." Let's hope so!



Untitled

The area that drains water into the place where the dam will be built is called the watershed.
—James E. Kelly and William R. Park, The Dam Builders


Birth of the New
Positioned using front loaders and lifted with the aid of a wire matrix, art deco lips are installed on either side of the canyon.

Employees
From the Department of Labor’s Employee Analysis Section: “High-altitude dryland shelf-perch types ‘think things through’ but then rise with a loud whir and a ringing, high-pitched call. This almost never develops into true musical production, for the type is easy to locate. Rapid turnover can be achieved by following the gravity dam model. The type remains an ideal worker profile and, given the current economic climate, is rather easily obtained.”

Construction: An Oral History
Too many got fried in the early months. You’d come to a point were your brains just about dropped out of your ears. The boys in the hole would haul in almost blind from dehydration, and dumb after acres of hub-tendered concrete. That would set the signal punks scrambling; it’s what you got for history. They’d put your name in and off you’d go about their business.

We learned there’s a vocabulary of industry where words are sure-fire and mighty. They range far as rivers and pool on the tongue, looking out calm and pretending their gazing purrs. Big-cat words. Their mouth runs like heaven just decided to descend and do nothing but power their cities. And you’ve got to work blind, sensitive to tone like an animal, and just as easily confused. But then it comforts you and you lie in it.

The high-scalers would rappel down the canyon face then pull themselves back up like furious spiders. You could hear their shouts above the dynamite sculpting, the jackhammers, dodging stripped rock, crescent wrenches slipping and plummeting, drill steel come unslung, bodies of men cascading through beds of air...

It was good, tho, when the sound rang down the backbone, with the magic from on high--those stiff, flat, endless desert gravel lodes, but swung there as if shot slow-mo from the finger of the god of wet, superheating high mix, low mix. And if you were buried, there were plenty more. Was what was conveyed to puddlers and the rest by well-graded shifters.

Contractors
Contractors’ profits were monumental and required the most sophisticated pneumatic excavators, hydraulic movers, and concrete-placers available. And, as they’d done for generations, executives danced after-hours to the more traditional payroll deduction reels and company scrip breakdowns.

Natural Correspondence
Letters addressed to the hydraulic engineers flowed in from Nature. Her handwriting was hard to decipher, but “Assume a virtue if you have it not” was one of the fancier constructions. This brought a possible corollary: “No one can be natural anymore.” Who knew that Nature would be such a quoter. But the consensus was she was cryptic. Or a whiner. The idea that she was a stone cold bitch was also popular.


The next piece is an excerpt from Elise Ficarra's poem "Endangered Species." Elise explains that the piece "was written as part of a collaboration with the installation artist Karrie Hovey on the Vanquishing Terrains Broadside exhibit that will show at Intersection for the Arts in May 2012. Part of the text will be excerpted for a traditional 11x17 broadside, and the rest feeds into a "21st Century" conceptual broadside, which will be an installation made by Karrie Hovery, Evelyn Ficarra (composer and sound artist) and me."

Endangered

faint points of light signal black beyond the sky’s pale din 
my body a plot of land  a boat slowly plows  dark water   
i am making a boat of sinew and flowers 
shards of bone pinked with salt       
a boat i curry across a desert  
a sky boat a worn path    a vector’s fertilizing force


  i become a butterfly in a time of limited options    
            my body a sordid chrysalis of rust and limbs 
             it isn’t easy giving up human form
 condors stick their bald heads into my cavern and feast 


we do not remember our initiation to wings
ants’ tippy feet plucking our honey
the carapace we chew through  
carrying our terror our thoraxes taut mechanisms of flight 
we row the sky 
zig    hop &
zag    

     turn

                                              scattering light into color

buildings push us into smaller vacancies
insuperable quarries  


 when we can do nothing we become a colony   

           

Last but not least, is a tiny little bit of a poem entitled "PRAISE SONG FOR A STATE OF MIND THAT NO LONGER FEELS VALID OR, A VALEDICTION: FORBIDDING DISCOURAGING PATTERNS OF THINKING," by Genine Lentine.

In March, all I could was write praise songs to you.
Now, it's more like this: "A Praise Song for What no Longer Matters."

Maybe everything matters.
Maybe, as Agnes Martin says, Fate is Kind.

    I no longer have my copy of her Writings.
    But I think what is Kind here
    in German was Freundlich
    Friendly. Fate is friendly.
    I have lent and given the book
    to many friends so I would have some company
    in sclaing this althletic proposition
    This book now costs $450 used on Amazon
    so only by unforseen grace will I come
    into a copy again myself.
    When I first read this book,
    it felt like a manual for the forsaken,
    and I figured I alone
    needed its strict consolations.
    Then it started cropping up in stacks
    in Spoonbill and Sugartown,
    and soon people were quoting passages to me
    and now the book has its own Facebook page.

Anyway, what if I say:
"A Praise Song For What I thought Mattered, but Doesn't Now"
with the parenthetical subtitle, (which does not negate its mattering once,)

or "A Praise Song For What Seems to Matter Now, but Won't in One Week,"

or "For What You're Afraid Will Happen, and Will Actually Happen,"

there's more to this poem but you will have to wait for it to appear elsewhere!

All-in-all, a satisfying way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

from Spicer's Love Poems

I know summer isn't over and that the Giants have had some success in recent years though I'm unsure about what is happening in baseball right now....I reveal my lack of baseball enthusiasm, I know. However, I do know that I quite enjoy Spicer. A little film made by Cole Heinowitz and shared on Facebook has sent me here and I'm sending you here too!

Love Poems

1.
Do the flowers change as I touch your skin?
They are merely buttercups. No sign of death in them. They die
    and you know by their death that it is no longer summer.
    Baseball season.
Actually
I don't remember ever touching your back when there were
    flowers (buttercups and dandelions there) waiting to die.
    The end of summer.
The baseball season finished. The
Bumble-bee there cruising over a few poor flowers.
They have cut the ground from under us. The touch
Of your hands on my back. The Giants
Winning 93 games
Is as impossible
In spirit
As the grass we might walk on.

2.
For you I would build a whole new universe around myself.
    This isn't shit it is poetry. Shit
Enters into it only as an image. The shit the ghosts feasted on
    in the Odyssey. When Odysseus gave them one dry fly and
    made them come up for something important Food.
'For you I would build a whole new universe,' the ghosts all
cried, starving.

from Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian's My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.  Go to the book to read more!

after * life

lush limb cells squander nothing in moving into hickory or baobab or palm atomic frisson of epidermis becoming wave, pulp, iron that learns to be tong for barbecue or pan to fry up fish, fish whose scales were bone or finger nail what erotic cellular migrations riff the body now bodies thoughts beam nest fodder synapses across universes scatter



[RTM. from Language & thinking writing prompt 06.05.2011]

The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics

Xpoetics rarely posts announcements of upcoming events. There are just too many of them.


However, there are a few exceptions, and here's one that I'm tremendously excited about. Joan Retallack will give the inaugural talk in The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics here in San Francisco on Friday night May 27th at 7:30 pm in Timkin Hall at CCA, 1111 8th Street. Admission is $8-15 (Members Free). You simply can't miss this one!


The Leslie Scalapino Memorial 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.



Joan Retallack’s most recent publication Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d / (Roof Books) was named by Artforum as a best book of 2010. Other poetry includes Memnoir (Post-Apollo, 2004), How To Do Things With Words (Sun & Moon Classics, 1998), Afterrimages (Wesleyan, 1995), and Errata 5uite (Edge Books, 1993), chosen by Robert Creeley for the Columbia Book Award. Her critical books include Gertrude Stein: Selections (2008) and The Poethical Wager (2004)—both from University of California Press. Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) was co-edited with Juliana Spahr; MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack (Wesleyan University Press, 1996) won the America Award for Belles-Lettres. She is a recipient of a Lannan Poetry Award, two Gertrude Stein awards, and National Endowment for the Arts funding for an artist’s book project—Westorn Civ Cont’d, An Open Book. Retallack lives in the Hudson Valley where she is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.