The literati are like aliens. Some are cute. Some are hostile. All talk funny, and all require diplomatic outreach. (Daniel Nester recently described this phenomenon in his riotous, depressing takedown of the New York poetry scene, “Goodbye to All Them.”)

I here present the strategies I have observed and developed at literary gatherings, in hopes that you, reader, will not someday find yourself lying on a couch in a grungily chic neighborhood of San Francisco at 4 a.m., claiming, along with a bald, 13-year-old Norwegian you’ve just met, to be a Macarthur Fellow.

1. Describe a poet as “entirely disreputable.” Utter the judgment with sorrowful certainty. Utter it knowing full well that your interlocutor adores this poet. Observe her grow dubious—is anyone “entirely disreputable”?—and then uncomfortable—what does it mean for her to adore an entirely disreputable poet?—and then tragically determined—she understands her mission will be restoring faith in aforementioned disreputable poet. Express your solidarity with her cause. Then get her number.

2. Demand whether something even EXISTS anymore. This trick works equally well for concepts (i.e., patriotism) and objects (i.e., peanuts).

3. Variation: Demand whether something—patriotism or peanuts would be appropriate here—isn’t just BEGINNING, whether what we’ve seen thus far isn’t just the PROTOTYPE of what we THINK we’ve been seeing.

4. Clarify that you’re totally ignorant of something. Just make sure it’s nothing important. Declare your ignorance in a confident manner, so as to seem rakish.

5. Shock and allure interlocutor from (1) by quoting an entire sonnet from the supposedly disreputable poet. Quote it really loudly, so that the entire party pauses to observe you.

6. Err in your quotation. Err in an embarrassing yet metrically impeccable fashion. This will disorient your audience such that no one will dare correct you. Consider replacing two consecutive syllables with “pizza” (“My heart leaps up when I behold / A pizza in the sky”), four consecutive syllables with “hurdy-gurdy” (”I think that I shall never see / A hurdy-gurdy, or a tree”), etc.

7. At some point in the recitation—a point no sane person would consider touching—start weeping. Be sure interlocutor from (1) is standing nearby so she can comfort you if she is so inclined.

8. Exit, very slowly. Continue weeping for the duration of your exit, even if you must utter uncharacteristically banal comments (”Is it still raining?”).

9. Leave an ethereal reminder of your presence. A skull will do.

So we can say: “The ‘neutral’ or ‘unmarked’ tune is that which the words would assume for an average voice in a given dialect when no special emphasis is given to the line, providing there were absolute agreement between different readers about the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation.” Just because there can’t be absolute agreement doesn’t mean that very often we don’t have such close agreement that we begin to sense the possibility of a perfect tune.

This implies to me, against much that is fashionable in literature today, that it does make sense to talk of people being able to read poetry better than others. There is no need for this to be in the least anti-democratic, because my statement also acknowledges that other interpretations will yield other tunes; but there again the notion of a better or worse reader will arise.

I needed to take such trouble over what may seem a minor point because I couldn’t reform the description of prosody unless I could put into it some secure-ish notion of the melody of a given poem. My prosodic reform begins with a redefinition of what a poetic stress is. All poetic music in any language, just about, depend upon duration, stress (or rhythm), and melody (intonation). Stress seems to happen in an instant of time that we may click with our fingers. Duration is its paradoxical bedfellow because everything that makes a syllable seem to carry a heavy stress takes time to happen. I have given many lectures testing out the following definition of stress before audiences, mostly by playing them the same blues song and asking them what causes a certain syllable to carry stress. As much as possible, I don’t influence their replies.

By common consensus we find at least one or two, often more, of the following elements as reasons why we think a syllable bears a stress. The basic model to bear in mind is like this:

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

… past of stress stress pause future of the stress

From everything audiences say the following can be factors in making us think a stress is heavy or light:

1. The sound: pitch (melody), duration, loudness, and voice quality. Since the stress happens in a notional instant of time – without content – duration is also the element that gives stress its content.

2. The main assignment of the position of a heavy stress is from abstract metrical pattern (if used) – or other poetic forms of patterning – plus linguistic factors, including the natural individual word-stress, the main information focus in the sentence (very important), syntax, etc.

3. In actual performance, 1 and 2 are combined with how important the meaning of the word is and how important is its emotional significance. A stress is a moment when we think we have unified the sound, the meaning, the emotional significance, and the functioning of the word within the sentence, into a single moment when all these come together into a single “beat”.

4. In practice, this gets more complex than I have time to go into. For example, audiences always agree that the pause after the word “Blues” affects our sense of how stressed the word is. How quick the syllables are before counts; how quick they are afterwards counts. The fact that “Blues” is part of the title (meaning) or that it is “blued” in the singing (emotional significance, plus voice quality) are part of the reasons why we think it is stressed. And so on.

5. All that is unified in the beat needs time to develop in the past or the future of the stress, or otherwise we have no time to make the comparisons which tell us whether a word is high or low in pitch or in loudness, important in meaning, emotionally significant, and so on. The past of the stress and the future are therefore read back both ways by the mind on to a single moment when we think the stress had occurred in the immediate past.

–––––––––––––> <––––––––––––––

past of the stress stress pause future of the stress

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

6. All this boils down to saying that the stress is the smallest moment in a poem when we perceive the developing artistic form. For poems I’d define form principally as a unity between sound, meaning, and emotional significance. I accept that forms are never perfect: again, I’m not reactionary. But someone has to explain why an audience when it sings along knows exactly at what moment to clap and knows when it gets the beat slightly “off”. It is not a moment of exact mathematical interval between the beats, but a much more mysterious interval which depends upon a formal perception.

7. Edgar Allen Poe thought metrics was like mathematics. In a way so do I, except that it is a mathematics of durations and pitches which has to take account of our emotional response to meaning.

Once stress has been redefined, it can also be seen as the sliding point where the instant of time through which the sounds have passed is united with duration. That is, it is also the moment when we unite the individual (and ineffable) instant of form into the ongoing processes of form. And we do that by reading durations of time both ways (past and future) on to that instant.

You can think of the instant as quantum-like if you wish. This is why I keep saying “notional instant” and “instant” – it’s an ancient philosophical problem whether we can bring an instant of time into consciousness. We can’t.

Then we may build up a hierarchy of formal development in the poem, considered in its ideal (ineffable) formal perfection:

The stress unites change (notional instant) and flow, but has to be anchored down in time before we can appreciate this. We anchor it in the syllable. The syllables unite into words and poetic lines, phrases, sentences, cadences, stanzas, and so on. Again, described in ideal perfection, the poem would then meet the Romantic poet’s ideal: the union of the part (stress) with the whole (the poem) within the one form, a form which gives “delight”.

Of course poems never do this perfectly and much experimental poetry is designed to allow them to do it as little as possible, by forbidding closure. But the forbidding of closure presupposes closure, so that avant-garde forms or art are always in tension with traditional forms; and much of their interest stems from that. We are, however, in a new era of space-time mathematics and our descriptions of the human mind are, in tandem, changing. This doesn’t mean that the human mind itself has changed much, perhaps….

Love,

Doug

Tue, July 2, 1996

Dear Anselm

You asked me to describe the basic themes of Poetry and Narrative in Performance: it’s a very dense, technical book, so I’m just going to describe those themes which relate to poetry, not to fiction.

My central concentration is upon the idea that a poem has a possible infinity of meanings depending upon the individual response of readers. Allied to that, does it make any sense to say that a poem has a particular music natural to it – since, again, a multitude of readers when reading it give it a different music? Is it elitist to say that any reader’s version of the poem is superior to anyone else’s and is even the poet’s own version subject to this? Such an ideology fits in with all manner of other kinds of philosophy which are currently fashionable: multi-culturalism with its insistence that no-one’s culture can be challenged without taking up an elitist or power-driven position; anti-foundationalist philosophy, which states that there are no truths external to language and to our individual expressions of them: that both truths and the “self” therefore are social constructions and have no warrant outside language.

This line of philosophy starts with Wittgenstein, and runs through Heidegger, Derrida, to people like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. Rorty, in particular, has promoted a new form of pragmatic philosophy which ran very hot at the time I wrote the book – and even today the new philosophy books bought by the American Library in Paris carry that stamp: they’re about Nietzche, Dewey, Rorty, and “anti-foundationalism”.

I’m not reactionary about this: I believe 100% in the multi-cultural attitude and almost entirely (with one vital reservation) in the notion that truth is a socially constructed entity which is difficult, perhaps impossible, to extricate from its imprisonment in language. However, if no one reading of a poem is better than any other reading (an obvious nonsense), then all my own readings of my own poems are as good as any other readings! And if that were true, I could never improve either my reading or my writing of my own poems. And if a given reading is superior there would have to be, I think, some generally shared notion of what a good reading consists in. The idea of an external standard of truth comes very near us then, though it is not quite reached. I am more interested in the fact that we nearly reach it than in the fact that we don’t finally do reach it; and that is a difference between me and the anti-foundationalists.

So I have this reservation: there is a crucial distinction between describing an experience and performing it. There is a similar distinction between trying to fix Truth into a single description (which would be wrong) and half-sensing a perfect truthfulness as a possibility hidden within our actions (performances). The first kind of Truth would be dogmatic and religious; the second kind is a non-existent entity which nevertheless seems to guide us – a real mystery in fact.

If I describe my “self” I see it as a social entity: if I “perform” my “self” by being it, it is something more mysterious. Similarly, if I try to describe the tune of a poem I can’t without seeking a consensus in society about what tune it should be. If I perform the poem, then, for that moment, there is only one tune that I’m trying to make. The description is public and subject to all the problems of truth as socially constructed. The performance is private, interior, and almost indescribable. In poetry, by “performance” I mean that moment when the poem is first written down (created), or read out loud by a reader or “performed” silently in the reader’s head.

What I have done is to get different readers to record performances of the same poem by reading into linguistic machinery with electrodes round their necks. The results basically give a graph of:

1. the rise and fall of the voice (the intonation)
2. plus the speed at which the sounds travel (duration)
3. plus the presence of any pauses in the reading
4. plus the patterns created by those stretches of sound when the larynx (voice box, adam’s apple) is continuously sounding (during the speaking of vowels and voiced consonants) and those other shorter moments when unvoiced consonants occur. In the following words, I have underlined the voiced parts when the voice-box is sounding:

buzzing wasp

Try it: b and z make your voicebox vibrate, w is made only with
the lips and air, and so are sp.

The significance of point 4 is that we are able to make the tune of a song or a poem only when the voice box is sounding: it is in the throat that we make the fundamental frequency of the voice, and it is in higher parts of the vocal apparatus that we make all the higher frequencies. The ear chooses to regard only the fundamental frequency as the tune. This has been much neglected in the study of poetry, in my view. Stretches of continuous voicing affect the pace of a poem and also such questions as the continuousness of a held thought or awareness. My favourite line to show this is from Wyatt:

So unwarily was never no man caught
With steadfast look upon a goodly face…

where the whole of that first segment shows up as continuously voiced and helps to convey an expression of continuous rapture at the sight of the beautiful face before the word caught raps at the end of the line to catch our attention back again. (The w, by the way, is strictly unvoiced but the nasalization of the n can just about maintain the voicing while the lips are forming the w.) The role of voicing in a poem is never talked about by anyone, but I believe I have shown it is complex in its effects.

So I’ve made all these recordings and compared the results from the different readers. They were asked not to read “dramatically” but to feel for the neutral music of the words. There is, in fact, some old work by a German linguist, Sievers, showing that it is possible to identify the neutral music.

Then, in some of my experiments especially, I have asked audiences of, say 20-30 people, to identify the “best” readings, so that I can escape, as much as possible, my own subjective, “elitist” judgments about which are good and which are bad readings. This is the social consensus I’ve talked of.

I have then developed a complicated method for comparing the graphs of these “best” readers and measuring them against those of “worst” readers. The basic results are these:

(a) It is important first of all to make sure there is a broad consensus
about how to interpret the meaning of a poem

(b) If a poem is orthodox metrically, inexperienced readers generally find it
easier to decide what tune to give it.

(c) When performing orthodox, clear poems, the “best” readers tend to
create markedly similar tunes. The “worst” readers typically read
with a flat intonation or give a unorthodox interpretation
of meaning. This does not alter (c).

(d) Talented alternative versions of the tune are possible, but will be
perceived as “dramatic” or unusual in some allied way.

(e) If a poem is very experimental in its prosody, inexperienced readers
may mess up in reading it. Again, this does not alter the convincing
evidence from (c) that it does make sense to talk of a neutral tune for
a poem, providing the reader knows how to interpret it.

People sometimes think I’m being Platonic: claiming that there is a perfect tune that arises within the performance like an Ideal form. In fact, I believe that this perfect tune is ineffable, which is the same as saying it doesn’t quite exist. Nevertheless we sense it as a possibility.

These community centers are multi-disciplinary and multi-purpose spaces. Musical and theater performances, art exhibits, and literary readings take place in the same spaces as meetings to organize political demonstrations for Filipino WWII Veterans’ benefits, and for the tenant rights of this gentrified city’s low income Asian elderly. A couple of our activist and artist hot spots are South of Market (SoMa) and the new I-Hotel rebuilt in our former Manilatown, wedged between the Financial District, Chinatown, and North Beach.

And always, as with most Filipino gatherings, there’s food, and lots of enthusiastic picture taking. The vibe in the place becomes nothing like monotone automaton reading from behind a podium, eyes glaze over literary event; it’s more like a Philippine palengke, or bustling marketplace.

One of the challenges or experiments I have taken on as the readings co-curator for PAWA is bringing Filipino American and multicultural authors and literary figures from outside of the Bay Area and our local writers together and into our Filipino extended family gatherings.

In July, we featured Randall Mann and Kristin Naca, who had never met each other, and who ended up realizing that they were the boy and girl versions of each other. Randall read mostly from Breakfast with Thom Gunn, and Kristin read from her forthcoming Bird Eating Bird (which won the 2008 National Poetry Series and mtvU Prize). We brought in Kundiman fellow Debbie Yee, and Spanish poet Mariano Zaro. I was a little anxious that our readers would think the atmosphere was not formal, prestigious, or “literary” enough; you know how you want to die of embarrassment when you bring your new boyfriend into your crazy family’s gatherings? Well, that didn’t happen. The mix was fabulous. The writers were pleased. The audience loved them. In the meantime, I had to remember; the last time I saw Randall read was at Joe’s Barbershop (an actual barbershop) for the excellent Barbershop Reading Series, curated by Michael McAllister. Prior to this, Randall told us, he read in a motorcycle club. Anyway, you can see video and photos here.

Just last week, we brought in Oliver de la Paz and Joseph O. Legaspi, and they were joined by local poet Mari L’Esperance and Filipina classical guitarist Theresa Calpotura. Edwin has used McAllister’s writers and musician format as our model, and I think this works well. I mentioned something during my introductions about the Xicano/Latino tradition of Floricanto, or Flor y Canto (Flower and Song), what I have been introduced to as celebrations of Latino literature, and the inclusion of song in literature. As this post is going way long, let me end by first saying that Joseph rocked mad shoe game, and that Mari said something I really appreciated about her elegiac poems, that poetry is a place where we can address darkness and loss in meaningful and substantial ways. Absolutely. Videos and photos are here.

He was the exact same age as me but when I came to town in the poetry world he already had everything – a book from a big press with a Larry Rivers cover called Living at the Movies and parts of his Basketball Diaries had been published in Paris Review while he was still a teenager. He came to the Poetry Project when he was in high school to meet the older poets – Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman who themselves were in their 20s then. It was unimaginable to me, Jim’s kind of youth. And that he was famous from then on.

Jim had a rock star moment too (I watched him singing “people who died” on you tube last night and I thought he looked maybe uncomfortable) and he was a better than fair monologist which he was doing and everyone was doing somewhat in the time that we toured. Lila Wallace sponsored the tour and the idea was that a famous poet and a younger or less famous poet would go out there together and the pleasure of doing this with Jim far out shadowed any feeling that I should be he who had such a different life from mine.

I had met him already a few times before our tour which is not to say the two of us were in some bus together. We met in city to city, from gig to gig. We read together a bunch of times was it. In San Francisco where I had read many times before and usually to mostly gay audiences I discovered that there was a massive straight scene there too. Who knew. Jim brought them out. So definitely some nights I felt a little buried by the scene he drew though other nights I felt I was “the winner” but Jim always read longer, that was one of the hallmarks of a star, to be comfortable with that. To know that people expected it. He was sweet. I mean he was obviously sharp too. But the sweetness wasn’t a performance it was true. And it’s just a great gift to give five or ten readings with another writer if you admire their work. Which I did. I kind of remember him getting on his knees in some reading at St. Mark’s Church and in that poem he said he was asking permission.

He was very tall. He kind of merged a catholic thrill and a rock n roll thrill and a poet thrill all in one shameless gesture. On our tour Jim had a very neat trick which it took me a while to uncover which was that he would be reading from some book that he had read from many times and suddenly he would look up and tell us some other detail about the same subject. It was so fresh these moments of pure performance when something simply occurred to him and he decided to share it. But when I bought the book I discovered that THOSE LINES WERE IN THERE! He simply delivered them as if they were impromptu and returned to the text with another grade of attention in place now and the reading was refreshed. A device like that explained his staying power. Still at first I struggled with whether this gesture was false or not. I was wanting to be pure. It was like watching anyone reading the same poem again and again. Or on other occasions I heard Jim tell the same story again in order to set up a poem.

There was a sense I finally got from him that this was a job and he had the chops to do it well. He did it with such ease. He did it like it was raw. Which was an amazing gift. I stepped into his wake for a few minutes this evening and on the way a group of us had wondered if he had any family. They’re Irish I suggested. How could he not have siblings. A bald middle-aged man almost magically introduced himself to us then as Jim’s brother. Though you’d never know it he laughed seeing his own grey suit and bright tie. We told him we were poets and the man said he never had any difficulty imagining Jim as a writer. But the rock and roll stuff seemed wrong. He was an altar boy you know and Jim would be shaking up on the altar. He didn’t like it at all being up there. And that’s what I saw. In the music he look kind of exposed.

The act of performing writing is quiet, after all. It’s very private in a way. No matter’s who’s out there. And the jokes or agreements we might have with ourselves about what’s real and what’s performed we keep to ourselves finally. He was great poet and performing artist and the difference between the two only Jim knew.

I’m trying to cure myself of the blogging late in the month syndrome PARTICULARLY because this month is my last month of blogging. To get to the quick of it I think well why am I not blogging now. Well because I have a new book and I’m obsessed in a way that figures directly on that reality so I’m not blogging directly on my new book so I’m not blogging. But that’s crazy because I think one intimate aspect of blogging is figuring out how to write about what you are doing. I just had my book party. How was it? Good! I’ve thought before about an anthology I don’t want to edit called TOUR in which poets and writers but I think I prefer it be all poets contribute their tour stories. I love this idea. I also love the idea of blogging on every aspect of a poet’s career, creating kind of an encyclopedia of what one of our careers is. I’ll do the book party right now. I just received a piece of mail from Nathan who was at the party and I kind of gasped at how quickly his mail got to me – two days from event to event. Since New York mail has been pretty bad and I am the last person to say this in print or disparage the US postal service because I am a DAP (daughter of an American Postal worker) I am happy to report on its goodness. The goodness also reflects on time passing –two days since the party. Time to report. People who weren’t there say how was your party. I say this: it was intimate in pace. It’s a thrilling detail I’ll share. The party took place at ArtBook@x which is a temporary bookstore project of DAP – coincidence! It’s true, this DAP means Distributed Art Publishers. They have an office and have also had a bookstore or do at PS1 but in the last year they have done the coolest thing which is to have book parties in temporary spaces – a little boutique in the east village will in the evening move the clothes racks aside and DAP will roll the bookshelves in and the party begins. The party ends, they roll the shelves out. And now the project has grown big. They rolled the bookstore itself in for year. It was Sept. 10^th, a Thursday night in Chelsea which felt like the opening night of the art world and the crowds as I walk slowly towards my death (the party) reminded me as they always do of day of the locusts in which all the characteristics of humans are quickly gone and it seems to chomp on itself the organism of the crowd. Quickly I stepped in to the somewhat cavernous garage-like space of the store. The doors to the street remained wide open throughout the two hours of the party and I greeted Skuta and Rick and err the woman taking the pictures and then friends began to trickle in. They seemed a little scarce at first and I resisted the impulse to ask them if this was okay. The idea had been that people were going to many other parties in Chelsea so this would be one of them for them. I don’t know if it really worked that way. Maybe. A little. Mostly it was like people were coming in from the rain. They would kind of shudder about “out there” cause it was a monstrous crowd that night. It had just gotten cold that day. Fall had truly begun. So everyone commented on the weather too. Do I have anything else to say? Yes, my point. Which was that the space was so big and people came in so slow actually really heating up towards the end so that I was actually able to talk to everyone. I thought is it okay that there’s really a lot of room here for everyone. People seemed relieved by this uncrowded event. And somehow in the 8:15 830-ish range where a little tiny reading moment was supposed to occur there was a nice crowd, a moderate but a good crowd of people I knew and other people I knew had already come and gone apologizing because they couldn’t stay for the reading part and I have received emails to that effect. Every event these days is surrounded by messages of all sorts. I have a note from Maureen explaining that she couldn’t come at all and I will respond accordingly on facebook. Quick can operate in support of slow. So I’m just saying that by the time Jeremy and Chris introduced me and said things I was finally up on that mysterious round stage that I couldn’t imagine earlier and the room felt like some odd seminar of friendship or some cult or a reading but more like being a weatherman of this particular small storm to say that I was so glad you came and then I felt it was over already the whole rest of the tour I just have to do it now, get on the plane and get off, read the book but the party is the part you have with your friends like a christening or a baz mitzvah and it just kind of swelled and was done. Across the room I saw at least one person who didn’t say hello. I thought well that’s odd or maybe not. It happened slow everything and then it was quick. And then it was done.

OK, if that GIF is too annoying, just tell me, and I’ll take it down. Would be a shame, tho.

Adrian Matejka’s second book of poems, Mixology, was published as part of last year’s National Poetry Series, and I’ve finally gotten around to picking it up and checking it out. I knew Adrian very briefly when we both lived in Carbondale, Illinois, in 2001. He had a radio show on the local independent station WDBX (then 700 watts; since upgraded to 3000), and he asked me to come on the show and read some poems. I’d done this sort of thing before, on a poetry show on Madison, Wisconsin’s indy station, the venerable WORT. But Adrian’s show was a little different.

When I arrived at the studio, Adrian explained that while I read my poems, he was going to play music in the background. In other words, he was to be the DJ, and I the MC. Frankly friends I freaked. As we got into it, though, I found myself really enjoying it. I would never claim to have skillz as an MC, but fortunately Adrian’s an excellent DJ, so the end result didn’t sound half bad.

I think.

I could be wrong.

I’m probably wrong.

I’ve many times before and since thought about adding music, or still or moving imagery, or other sorts of aesthetic enhancements, to my poetry reading schtick. Doesn’t it seem like kind of a no-brainer, in this age of collage, pastiche, inter- and extra-disciplinarity? Studio artists are all over this; the Venice and Whitney biennials are always full of film, sound, text, dance, and theater in addition to painting, sculpture, and photographs. Yes, surely, yes yes yes, there are many poets who mix, collaborate, boundary-cross, draw, dance, sing. But be honest: If, when you go to a poetry reading, the reader says just a sec, I gotta fire up the laptop projector / plug in the mp3 player / unpack my sax / put on my costume / etc., don’t you cringe a little in anticipation, hoping s/he isn’t about to make a fool of him or herself? Don’t you? I do. Why do I?

Anyway, my thanks to Adrian for making me feel like Rakim for that one hour in Carbondale, long ago. Here’s a poem from Mixology. Actually, this is the version that was in Prairie Schooner. It’s a little different in the book. Is it cool that we just like post all sorts of copyrighted material on here, bosses? More mixology, I guess.

WHEELS OF STEEL

I got me two songs instead
of eyes—all swollen and blacked

out like the day after a lost fight.
Two jigsaws spinning, buzzing

the backdrop for woodshop
or emcee, bar mitzvah or afterset.

It’s Run DMC rocking without
a band, but not without me.

Two rims spinning after the car
stops. Baby, I’m the little lenses

in the bifocals if they were on pulleys.
I’m the Wizard of Oz if Oz

was a fish fry in July. Call me
Master of the Cracked Fingers.

One song spins forward, the other
back to repeat itself: Every day

I’m hustlin’. Every day I’m hustlin’.
Baby, I’m the layaway payment

on a Ferris wheel. My songs orbit
parking lots and rent parties

like the crazy lady’s eyes
when she finds out her lover man

already left. One of my songs
spins backward, while the other

plays forward like sugar mixing
in to make the grape. My songs

are the pinwheels for this parade
of moonwalks and uprocks.

Get ready for the fifth annual Printers’ Ball, the completely free, open-to-the-public print festival taking place this coming weekend.

What is The Printers’ Ball, you ask?

Officially, The Printers’ Ball is “one of the largest celebrations of print culture in the country,” which in my fantasy includes people wandering around wearing ink-stained paper dresses and tuxedos. Apparently that’s not far from the truth. The organizers—folks at Poetry magazine, Columbia College Chicago and the Center for Book & Paper Arts–tell me there will be an origami ball gown made of recycled magazines, poet-trees, paper statuary and lots of activities that “take print back to its roots”. In short, it’s a paper-lover’s paradise.

Come on down and get your hands dirty making paper and rubber stamps, or stay clean and watch book binding, letterpress, silkscreen and offset printing demonstrations. Lazy bones are invited to sit around and drink microbrew beer at readings sponsored by the participating publications.

Find out more about it and watch some sneak peak preview video at The Chicago Poetry Calendar.

Check back next week for a report and pictures from the field.

Details:

The Printers’ Ball (not to be confused with the Printer’s Row Lit Fest)
Friday July 31
5:00 to 11:00 pm
Columbia College of Chicago – Center for Book & Paper Arts
Ludington Building
1104 South Wabash Avenue
Chicago

Hi again, Harriet! By the way, I’m the media assistant here at the Poetry Foundation. I’ll be posting until the end of the summer, when I’ll leave to begin a PhD program in Comp Lit at Northwestern, where I’ll work on classical and contemporary poetry.

When I began taking poetry workshops in college and forming an inkling of what contemporary poetry was up to, one of the books that most excited me was Matthea Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form: not only because I loved its surreal lyric landscapes, but I was dazzled by its use of zeugma, a “yoking” (the Greek translation) of two words modified or governed by one word, although that governing word only makes logical sense with one of the two at a time. Picture a cart with oxen hitched up and pulling on both sides, and compare with how the lines break here, from the beginning of “Paint Your Steps Blue”:

It is spring & people are out repainting their front steps
Glacier blue because this village is closer to the glacier than
The volcano emits a tiny rumble & drools lava once every few
Years go by & its followers grow fat with having nothing to
Fear here is of the icy-&-slowly-approaching variety

Zeugma, besides being fun to say, delightfully interrupts any smoothly rhythmical reading of the poem, and reminds me of loosening threads in fabric with a stitch remover. A common image in Pity the Bathtub is glass, and Harvey’s poems equate the formation of glass with the poetic process itself—raw material must soar to a certain degree before it forms to perfection, or at least completion, in a mold. From section two of the title poem:

. . . it is because he works with glass
That he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable
(she does not love) he knows how to take something
Small and hard and hot and make room for
His breath quickens at night

So I was very excited to read, see, and listen to Harvey’s latest project; in collaboration with the Miró Quartet, she composed a poem to be read with Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5. The poem hauntingly describes girls in a glass factory, making thermometers, portholes, and, most interesting, a glass girl. Listen to the performance, recorded at the White Pine Festival as part of the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Radio Project, and read the poem, including five original photographs that serve as titles to the movements of the collaboration.

Coincidence or consequence, you might wonder, about the Glass/glass connection? When asked about beginning the process of collaboration, Harvey says, “I listened to the CD of the music over and over again and started writing down random images. The first thing that came to me was an image of floodwater going over the banks, and then I started picturing these girls dancing around and pouring liquid from one thing into another and that sort of turned into a glass factory, I think because of the name of Philip Glass.”

This initial association blossoms into a meditation on boundaries and creation; the strains of the music correspond to rising temperatures, the high heat of melting, and the low notes of formation. And the images provide an intriguing mental backdrop on the stage shared by poem and music. In a Bookslut interview, Harvey says, “My poems are friends with paintings,” and this poem is further proof of the weight images and words bear on each other.

Like great poetry, glass both magnifies and reflects objects and subjects. Or, as Harvey writes in “Self-Portrait with Glass Ball, 1936” (in a series of poems about Max Beckmann paintings):

If only I had looked
into that third eye—for though it had no ties to visions
it knew my heart, was my heart.

Which is a reason to be grateful for other art forms that use words well (the last Atmosphere CD, for instance), and even more grateful for the little magazines, the ones I used to think would get driven to extinction by their no-capital-expenses, no-dead-tree counterparts on the Internet. Today I think instead– with no disrespect to this blog’s sister magazine– that the best “little magazines” are where I go when I want to read contemporary poetry and, at the same time, escape poetry fatigue, escape the problem of having to judge a new book or an author almost as soon as I crack the cover: magazines give poems, not poets, and they let me enjoy new poems one or two at a time.

Here, then, are three very good new little magazines, two out of three, I ought to admit, published by people I know: The Hat, from New York, is all poetry or prose-poetry, with an eclectic verve in which we might detect New York School origins. It leads off with Nico Alvarado-Greenwood’s joke pseudo-cento (”When I have fears that I may run out of bacon,/ I sing of brooks, of bloosoms, birds and bacon.// Bacon, friends, is delicious. We must say so”), in which the pleasure involves spotting the sources (I got all but one), but it then opens into more complex delights: Becca Klaver, whose name I recognized as an organizer of poetry events at the U of Chicago, contributes the haunting-flirtatious “Fabulists in Love” (”All talk was pillow talk, on our backs imagining glow-in-the-dark stars”). Ange Mlinko, whose poems make more and more sense the more you reread them (without abandoning their bizarries) has a troika, including “Colostrum in Lent.” John Olson, also a novelist, offers highly colored, even jeweled, prose poems. And Andrew Sage, whose name I had never seen before, makes a beautiful, slightly old-fashioned poem (John Koethe came faintly to mind) with riffs on the children’s classic The Snowy Day.

The Laurel Review has been going for a while (its scope is American, its address Missourian) but I only found out about it when its editor, the poet John Gallaher, sent me the current all-poetry issue. It’s all over the place, in terms of styles and sources (though I suppose it excludes avant- and “new formal” extremes) and that’s the pleasure in reading it: it’s got Laura Kasischke, whom I almost always like, and Arielle Greenberg, whom I always read and whose discursive epithalamium here I found startling and moving, having once been asked to write an epithalamium myself. I did it, but hers is funnier, more profound, and better: “You know now this is what marriage is strung from, all these fragrant, rippable leaves at the start,/ and how easily it can be moved to a bad neighborhood with no taxis,/ so then you just stop going out except to the one place to eat you really do love.” Among writers I didn’t know, or didn’t previously follow, I liked Dana Roeser’s halting semi-narrative excursus; Cynthia Cruz’s terse, raw, rhymeless sonnets (”I have this fever,// I can’t tell anyone. But I promise I will/ Love anyone// Who will talk to me”) and Arthur Vogelsang’s “Arthur Rimbaud.”

And, and, and, and finally: The Poker, edited intermittently and smartly by the poet Dan Bouchard, this tightly made and graphically unpretentious journal has on its board Jennifer Moxley and Douglas Rothschild and Kevin Davies, and if you recognize those names you know what kind of avant-garde has graced and still graces its pages; you may not know what other sorts of delights are in the current issue, number nine– prev. unpublished letters from James Schuyler and George Oppen; a wonderfully snarky experiment in writing for an inappropriate audience by Juliana Spahr, whose recent poetry has certainly been her most interesting; a four-page poem by Laura Jaramillo that includes the spot-on sentence “The problem with Marxist-Leninsts is they ask you/ constantly/ to make films for the revolution”; Charles North, from New York, whose poems don’t turn up every day; George Stanley, from Vancouver; and, um, a couple of poems by me. But that’s not why it matters. You can read more about older issues of The Poker, and click on a link to email the editor, at this website for Duration Press, though I’m not sure the PO Box listed still works: I strongly advise you to email the editor instead, and he’ll tell you where to send your (I think it’s still) $10.

And if you’ve read this far, you might want to know that I am blogging intermittently at my own new site, connected to my new book of criticism; if you have read this far and you’re in NYC, you might want to see me read tomorrow, June 3. And if not, enjoy whatever litmags you get.