The Poetry Project December 2015 / January 2016 Issue #245 The Poetry Project December 2015 / January 2016 Issue #245 Director: Stacy Szymaszek Managing Director: Nicole Wallace Archivist: Will Edmiston Program Director: Simone White Bookkeeper: Carlos Estrada Communications & Membership Coordinator: Laura Henriksen Workshop Leaders (Fall 2015) Edmund Berrigan, r. erica Newsletter Editor: Betsy Fagin doyle, Montana Ray and Natalie Peart, Juliana Spahr Monday Night Readings Coordinator: Judah Rubin Box Office Staff: Catherine Vail, Mel Elberg, Sam Robison Wednesday Night Readings Coordinator: Simone White Interns: Mel Elberg, Tori Ortega, Cori Hutchinson Friday Night Readings Coordinator: Ariel Goldberg Newsletter Editorial & Design Consultant: Jen Stacey

Volunteers Vivian Bauer, Anya Bernstein, Anjali Desai, Katie Ebbitt, Mel Elberg, Micaela Foley, Cori Hutchinson, Zac Kline, Anna Kreien- berg, Phoebe Lifton, Ashleigh Martin, Tori Ortega, Isabelle Page, Batya Rosenblum, Erkinaz Shuminov, Viktorsha Uliyanova, Natalia Vargas-Caba, Shanxing Wang, and Emma Wippermann.

Board of Directors John S. Hall (President), Katy Lederer (Vice-President), Carol Overby (Treasurer), Jonathan Morrill (Acting Treasurer), Camille Rankine (Secre- tary), Kristine Hsu, Jo Ann Wasserman, Claudia La Rocco, Todd Colby, Erica Hunt, Elinor Nauen, Laura Nicoll, Adam Fitzgerald and David Wilk.

Friends Committee Brooke Alexander, Dianne Benson, Will Creeley, Raymond Foye, Michael Friedman, Ted Greenwald, Steve Hamilton, Viki Hudspith, Siri Hustvedt, Yvonne Jacquette, Gillian McCain, Eileen Myles, Patricia Spears Jones, Michel de Konkoly Thege, Greg Masters, Ron Padgett, Bob Holman, Paul Slovak, John Yau, Anne Waldman and Hal Willner.

Funders The Poetry Project is very grateful for the continued support of our funders

Axe-Houghton Foundation; Committee on Poetry; Dr. Gerald J. & Dorothy R. Friedman Foundation, Inc.; Jerome Foundation; Leaves of Grass Fund; Leslie Scalapino – O Books Fund; LitTAP; Poets & Writers, Inc.; Poets for the Planet Fund; *Anonymous Donors; Harold & Angela Appel; Russell Banks; Martin Beeler; Bill Berkson & Constance Lewallen; David Berrigan & Sarah Locke; Mei Mei Berssenbrugge & Richard Tuttle; Rosemary Carroll; Todd Colby; Peggy DeCoursey; Don DeLillo & Barbara Ben- net; Murial Dimen; Rackstraw Downes; Ruth Eisenberg; Stephen Facey; Raymond Foye; Mimi Gross; John S. Hall; Jane Dalrym- ple-Hollo; Kristine Hsu; Ada & Alex Katz; Mushka Kochan; Susan Landers & Natasha Dwyer, Katy Lederer; Glenn Ligon; Gillian McCain & Jim Marshall; Jonathan Morrill & Jennifer Firestone; Eileen Myles; Elinor Nauen & Johnny Stanton; Eugene O’Brien; Ron & Pat Padgett; Lucas Reiner & Maude Winchester; John Sampas; Luc Sante; Simon Schuchat; Susie Timmons; Jo Ann Wasserman; Sylvie & June Weiser Berrigan; and David Wilk. The Estate of Kenneth Koch; members of The Poetry Project; and other individual contributors. The Poetry Project’s programs and publications are made possible, in part, with public funds from The National Endowment for the Arts. The Poetry Project’s programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The Poetry Project’s programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. The Poetry Project

Contents Letters from Director and Program Director ...... 4 Notes from the Project ...... 5 Four Poems: Krystal Languell ...... 9 Photo Essay: Kaia Sand ...... 13 Interview with Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris...... 17 Calendar of Events...... 20 Reviews ...... 23 Crossword Puzzle ...... 31

Cover Image by Kaia Sand: “I was crime …. I will be poetry” (Lagoa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

2015 3 Letters from the Director and Program Director Letter from the Program Director: Simone White

Dear People: If you missed the kickoff event of our 49th season, the release of Eileen Myles stunning I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems and reissue of Chelsea Girls (an audience in the Sanctuary of 525, the largest in recent memory), not to worry! Programming continues into the real New York winter this December and January with a wide Letter from the Director: artistic community to that many who performed range of readings, special Stacy Syzmaszek draw from. Here is some in prior years aren’t going events, workshops and basic information about to be able to participate experiments to keep your Dear All: it’s New Year’s Day our selection process. The again. If you are invited spirits high and the rest Marathon planning season! Marathon is a curated event, one year, it doesn’t mean of you warm for at least My letter for this issue i.e. not run open-reading that you will get invited two hours. I won’t list all always serves as reiteration style where people can every year. This is not to be this terrific stuff here – and reminder about how we sign-up. Invitations are taken personally. We need you can find the complete plan it. The Marathon is, of issued by our Programming to conduct our benefit in a calendar in these pages course, our signature benefit Committee made up of manner that best suits the and at poetryproject.org event. Tremendous audience, Poetry Project staff, a few organizational needs of each – but please mark your volunteer, and artist support board members, plus all year. Lastly, reading is just calendars for highlights like has made it so. As an event, of our series coordinators one way of participating the memorial reading for it exaggerates what we want (positions that rotate every in the event. There are Bill Kushner, readings by each reading during the 2 years). The final schedule volunteer opportunities Prageeta Sharma, Montana season to do— to provide consists of people who (about 100 are needed) to Ray, Brian Fuata, Jim Dine, a site of collective agency, are in one or more of the help sell books, food and Susie Timmons & Patricia and create a communal and following broad categories: drink, assist in checking Spears Jones, Che Gossett, generative space for the performers who have a in readers, etc. It’s also a poets on (ESP) TV taping, audience and the poet to longtime connection to an opportunity to meet or a mold-breaking Master experience new work. I’ll The Poetry Project and/ catch up with other writers/ Class with Ammiel Alcalay, also add something directly or the Downtown arts artists and support the and what we hope will be from our mission statement: scene (poetry, music, Project’s mission. We deeply a lively exchange of ideas to create an opportunity film, dance, but poetry in appreciate your support and and proposals about the for public recognition, particular); poets who are your understanding of the persistence of what’s been awareness and appreciation actively participating in the effort it takes to present this come to be known as the of poetry and its relationship NYC literary arts scene by feat of a fundraiser. “white room.” & MORE. & to other arts. giving readings, publishing you decide. But please make The Project receives many books, organizing readings, –Stacy Szymaszek your way to the Parish Hall requests to perform in the editing journals, etc.; and/or one chilly evening very soon. Marathon, and we feel performers who have never fortunate that so many participated in a Marathon –Simone White people want to help us meet before. our fundraising goals. We only have about 150 spots Each year we feature 30-50 and a seemingly unlimited first-timers, which means

4 Winter Notes from the Project John Perreault 1937-2015 homepage (poetryproject.org) and sign restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, Many Poetry Project Newsletter readers up to receive our weekly email. Scroll breweries, wineries, and individuals; are familiar with the work of poet, to the bottom of the page, and look to books and chapbooks from art critic, and artist, John Perreault. If the right. publishers big and small; as well as you aren’t, he was the art critic for The any donations—think memberships, Village Voice, and from 1975 to 1983 Donate your Time Or Things to gift certificates, a pair of tickets to a he was Senior Art Critic and Art Editor Marathon #42 performance—to include in our raffle, at The Soho News. His books of poetry Feeling generous as the holiday season which was quite a hit last year! are Camouflage (New York: Lines approacheth? Well, it’s the perfect time Press, 1966); Luck (New York: Kulcher to let your generosity shine upon The If you’d like to contribute in any way— Foundation, 1969); Harry (Toronto: Poetry Project! January 1, 2016 marks as a volunteer, food, book, or raffle Coach House Press, 1966). His fiction the 42nd year of our Annual New prize donor—please contact Laura was collected in Hotel Death and Other Year’s Day Marathon, which features Henriksen at [email protected]. Ta l e s (Sun & Moon Press in 1987). at least 12 hours worth of readings and performances by over 140 poets, See you at the 42nd Marathon! His obituary in the New York Times dancers, musicians, and performers. notes, “For the Poetry Project at St. All funds raised at our New Year’s Day End of the Year Appeal Mark’s Church-in-the Bowery, he Marathon go toward putting on The If you see the Project’s logo in the recited a long poem, “Hunger,” as Poetry Project’s 65+ readings/events corner of an envelope (and/or a link color slides were projected on his back. per season and—most importantly— in your inbox) we hope you’ll open He also did a series of street projects to support the honoraria of the 130+ it. There is a good story inside, and with Vito Acconci and, with Hannah poets and performers who give us an appeal for a year-end contribution Weiner and Eduardo Costa, organized reason to host these events in the first to The Poetry Project. By being the Fashion Show Poetry Event, which place. subscribers, readers, writers and featured clothing made by Andy attendees, you’ve made it clear to us Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Alex Katz And where does your shining beam that you value what we do, and have and other artists.” of generosity needeth most shine, you been doing since 1966. Keep the love ask? coming by considering a fully tax- Alexandar Alberro provided an deductible year-end contribution in account of the models in his essay on 1. Volunteering. The Poetry Project whatever amount is significant to the event, which we found via Kaplan staff needs your help—along with you. Your gift will help the Project to Harris: “Perreault had Anne Waldman, at least 119 others—to make sure sustain its legacy, plan for the 50th the famous poet, dress in an outfit our most prized, annual fundraiser Anniversary, and build opportunities consisting of two unites of long hair runs smoothly, in order, and on further into the future. Given the that could be tied as a veil over the time! Volunteer shifts are 2 hours in possibility that you are too eager to face, separated and tied under both length and, in exchange for your time wait for our appeal letter, you can arms as sleeves or joined again at the and hard work, you’ll receive free make your contribution now by visiting bustline as a hairy mini dress.” Thank admission for the day. http://www.poetryproject.org/donate- you for the expansiveness of your now/. Thank you! work, and rest in peace, John Perreault. 2. Donations. We’d be ever grateful for food and/or drink donations from local

2015-2016 Poetry Project Fellowship for Emerging Writers The Project’s open call for submissions for Emerge-Surface-Be, fellowships for NYC-based emerging writers, just closed. Poet-mentors Lee Ann Brown, Tracie Morris, and Tan Lin, will spend the next few weeks reading applications and deciding who they would like to work with. Each fellow receives an $2,500 award, 9 months of one-on-one work with their mentor, inclusion in Project programs and more. Check the next issue to learn the names of this season’s fellows! Weekly E-Newsletter If you would like to receive up-to-the- 2015- 2016 Poetry Project Staff Pictured above (L to R): Nicole Wallace, Simone White, Laura minute announcements about Project Henriksen, Betsy Fagin, Ariel Goldberg, and Stacy Szymaszek. Not pictured, Monday Night news and events, please visit our Readings Coordinator Judah Rubin. Photo by John Priest.

2015 5 In Memoriam Stephen Rodefer (1940 - 2015) new neighbors, colleagues at rest in eternal dialogue. “My father is a sphinx and my mother’s a nut. I reject the glass. But I’ve been shown the sheets of sentences and what he was To articulate in such failing words, Really like remains more of a riddle than in the case of most humans. albeit words of love, the life of a So again I say rejoice, the man we’re looking for master of phrase would bring him a Is gone. The past will continue, the surest way to advance, sly smile and some editorial joy. But But you still have to run to keep fear in the other side.”* go read for yourself, from VILLON to Four Lectures, from The Bell Clerk’s A man of words, of excesses, lover of Stephen was devoted to his writing Tears Keep Flowing to Left Under A clothes, lover of love, Stephen Rodefer above all else. He was a brilliant Cloud, go read his everlasting word, his was born November 20, 1940, in passeur of thought and beauty, taking imprint on us, his mark on the world. Bellaire, Ohio, to Dorothy and Howard on L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, reinventing Rodefer. The youngest of three, brother Villon, working on traditional themes “Underneath you wear a flowing red to Rik and Judy, Stephen was raised and form while always pushing well robe, and I am an adoring suitor. My on the hilltop, athletic with a racquet, beyond. In recent years, he took to his name is love, my dead body will be the springing into the world from the prolific brush, generating and showing rising sun, the day will last forever. I shadow of the family factory. He died an arsenal of language paintings, the have always carried with me an urge in Paris on August 22, 2015, at home art of wordplay. of great melancholy, like a black cloth amongst the trappings of his genius, gardenia. It is an inheritance of heart exhausted books and wild paintings. Stephen leaves behind many clusters and nerves. Here the maestro himself of friends made around the globe, puts down his pen.”** He was educated at Amherst College interspersed networks coupled by (BA), SUNY Buffalo (MA, ABD), and his life, his narrative. He is survived *Pretext from Four Lectures (1982) by SFSU (MFA), going on to foster the pen by three sons, Benjamin (with Stephen Rodefer of so many others, teaching around the granddaughters Melina and Natalie), world at the likes of UC Berkeley and Felix, and Dewey, and now beats his **Show a Little Emotion, for the San Diego, University of Cambridge drum beside his fourth, D(ear) J(esse), granite from The Bell Clerk’s Tears so missed during his final stanza. Our Keep Flowing (1978) by Stephen (Judith E. Wilson Senior Fellow), the father’s sons, progeny of verse. Rodefer Pratt Institute of Art, and San Francisco State. At Père Lachaise on September 2nd, Felix Brenner was born to Stephen and a group of family and friends paid an Summer in 1973, raised in Berkeley, emotional tribute educated in Northern California, and to the poet, the now lives in San Francisco with his father, and the wife Jackie. friend. Comrades from London Photo Courtesy of Felix Brenner. provided lapel pins with Fuck Death–a language painting by Stephen for guests to wear. The sentiment’s appeal was confirmed when the Père Lachaise attendant asked for one afterwards and was seen wearing it as she walked the grounds and met with other funeral parties. His wry words provide a crisp opening flirtation to his

6 Winter In Memoriam Bill Kushner (1931-2015) said—or in Bill’s case every street is Bill had a heart attack and died loaded with it—jam-packed, exciting, I first met Bill at the Poetry Project instantly hitting his head when he pornographic, to the point, optimistic, in a workshop run by Maureen Owen fell. I went to his apartment to gather funny bursts of bright reflected New in November of 1981. Bill would have his belongings as quickly as I could York City life and light. It’s a miracle been fifty, me thirty-two fresh from because the landlord, anxious to get of perfect pitch, it really is. There is Philly. I was lucky because I never a rent controlled apartment back, a Bill before Head, and a Bill after it. take workshops and Maureen’s got was ready to throw everything out. Before, he was ashamed and hiding, me writing, which was what I wanted There was a lot of blood. Someone showing up at a nephew’s Bar Mitzvah it to do. I’m one of those who thinks had thrown a blanket over it, but the with a woman on each arm, suicidal he can go it alone, but Bill had a need dried flowing surpassed the edges. although when he did throw himself in to be writing in private and public, His flip flops by the bed were stuck in front of a car, the driver swerved. After, putting words into the silence, and it. Walking back and forth so much I he accepted who he was and only got workshops kept him sharing, learning finally knocked one of them loose. happier and, if it’s possible, hornier. “I and collaborating, something he did wrote with a hard-on,” he said, “my till the end of his days. When I first His unpublished papers and notebooks dick dipping in red ink.” At the time saw Bill, I think it was the first time filled three twenty-seven gallon plastic Bill was writing Head, I saw him at the everyone else was beginning to see containers, each so heavy they were Gaiety, a porno movie theater on Third him too because his incredible invisible almost impossible to pick up, writings Avenue near Fourteenth Street; he was yearning was about to become visible from the sixties and seventies, stuff in the front row in the light of the giant on the printed page in a remarkable written on the backs of flyers and screen, head bent intent on getting his book of poems Bill was writing called receipts; he wrote on anything where thoughts down on paper writing while Head. He was soon to appear, kind he was when the spirit moved him. I in the seats all around him men in all of like Venus in her shell, a poet fully collected all his books and put them the stages of dress and undress were formed from the streets of New York. into boxes to be handed out later at having shadowy sex. I was there for fun his memorial on November 16 at the or love but stopped what I was doing The last time I saw Bill, two weeks Poetry Project. Night Fishing, his and watched him. before he died, we took a walk. first, is sexually closeted. His next Walking was part of our friendship. In book Head is anything but. Every It started to piss Bill off that people Philly we’d walk from Independence rift is loaded with ore just like Keats liked Head so much. “I wrote other Hall past City Hall out the parkway to the art museum; in NY from the Met through Central Park, or MOMA, or Chinatown, or, as Bill grew older, more and more staying in Chelsea closer to home. Bill was tired. We sat on several benches, lingered at a farmer’s market, then over to the galleries. In his later years he carried a plastic bag with his wallet, keys, pen, notebook and what he was reading in it. I thought someone would snatch it, but no one ever did. He wrote in his notebook, “I thinkle a lot,” and chuckled, “That’ll keep them guessing.” I told Bill I was stuck, had stopped writing sonnets. “Write a line for every block you walk,” he suggested: “Fourteen blocks and you’ve got it.”

photo by Ted Roeder 2015 7 stuff, ya know.” And he did. His kid growing up during the Depression apartment was full of all his books in the Bronx. and I carefully gathered them. Love New! Uncut, where the sonnets continue. He Bill, the youngest child and only son of from Dreams of Waters, That April, In the Russian immigrants who never learned The Post-Apollo Press Hairy Arms of Whitman, In Sunsetland English well, made the vernacular With You, and Walking After Midnight divine, what was everyday he sent to where the spirits of an expansive heaven. He was a hoarder though. A Whitman and a playful Dickinson year ago, he stayed with me while guide him, and he leaves the gay his apartment was being cleaned and themes he struggled so hard to own to painted. Like a vacation, he lounged write about childhood, dreams, visions, around naked reading a book by Alice a loving mother and a father who never Notley that he’d found, a signed copy spoke, beginning to address that silent of A Culture of One inscribed to father with longer flowing poems. me, which he took and kept reading, leaving it only to write in his notebook. Bill liked Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, When I went to his apartment to teach Frost, and his two main squeezes, him how to cook healthy food after Whitman and Dickinson, and, of his first heart attack, he opened the course, every New Yorker from O’Hara door naked. At readings he took off Once you step in between these lines, and Schuyler to the present day young his clothes and for photos naked as his you know you’ve reached home: heart- and old, not too many Beats though, poems, the day he was born, innocent and-mind, the body-and soul of why poetry matters. though he did have Orlovsky’s Clean as Eden before the snake comes. — Al Young Asshole Poems, and there was Corso, and many books of workshop mentors: As I cleaned and gathered his Poetry $18 978-0-942996-86-9 Notley, Mayer, Carey, Owen, Godfrey, belongings, getting ready to leave, I and Lewis Warsh who encouraged kept looking for that plastic bag with Issa Makhlouf Bill to write Head and published it. In his last notebook and my Notley in it, Mirages Nothing For You, I read this inscription: but they weren’t anywhere to be found. “for Bill Kushner, my fellow historical I think Bill took them with him. figure on the Lower East Side & the World, w/ affection & respect, Ted Don Yorty has two published Berrigan.” And then there was Glad collections of poetry, A Few Swimmers Stone Children: “For Bill, the sexiest Appear and Poet Laundromat, and one poet in NYC, best, Eddie B.” I even novel, What Night Forgets. He lives in came across the first draft of my New York City. novel, a draft I didn’t remember from the eighties. Where I’d written, “I started,” he crossed out and wrote, “I Translated Alicia F. Lam was shocked,” changing my ambiguous In Mirages, Issa Makhlouf mingles three weak syllables into a successful thought, observation and meditation to anapest growing into recognition. develop themes of travel and absence, violence and beauty to question nature, I asked him once if he ever thought its creatures and mysteries. about meter. “Never,” he said with a Poetry / Translation $18 978-0-942996åå-83-8 grimace, but Bill didn’t have to because he was meter, innate and/or started by his two older sisters who got him to The Post-Apollo Press read, write, jitterbug, waltz and rumba, 35 Marie Street Sausalito, CA 94965 and sing along to Stardust and Stella by www.postapollopress.com Starlight, songs whose yearning lyrics Bill longed to write, just then a little

8 Winter Poetry: Krystal Languell

(I had a system) (it worked)

(I did not then have New York City)

(I did not have (a net-work) (city cousin) (inheritance) (savvy))

(I stapled) (could learn by working)

(long arm stapler) (copied Adobe Suite in the back of mentor’s van)

(a folder with pouch of disks)

(I am no astronaut looking back at the globe) (am planet-life)

(ultimate earthrise) (very much planted, stationary)

(other systems w/ code and formula) (mine: exhaustive / vertical)

(I am no astrolabe) (or astrocyte) (glue cell)

(then came time)

2015 9 (My sister was this) (she worked)

(She did not then have spirit gear)

(She did not have (property of) (points) (bonus / combat pay))

(She worked in bulk) (she still does)

(My system) (lacked) (style)

(it was bulk) (memory says (twenty) (in a list) (a mile))

(fight the mill) (the job) (jog on tread) (pestle metaphor)

(My apology) (for (space) for (wind)) (the long walk I took)

(the arroyo (yes) (I followed the arroyo)) (and my guts) (mutinied)

(My sister (she) drives on the ice) (without difficulty)

(and (here) (comes) (climate)) (to place) (your life) (in context)

(The policy was private) (after all)

(five x five x five (sometimes four)) (foraging postage)

(I didn’t think) (I swam alone) (kept secrets)

(Automated how I live) (not established (with trim))

(Besides) (in the library basement) (mispronouncing) (attn morale)

(was another inch (routine)) (crates drip (meltdown) from cold storage)

(Congressional Record)

(for a few dollars) (Later) (later) (the bulldozer) (as usual)

(Later the policy) (became matter) (coursing)

((a note) (a dial) (a photo) left inside the screen door) (Pause)

(to set aside) (that work you do (only scalar quantity))

10 Winter (It did not (account)) ((frantic nature) into (common surprise))

(A goal to be everywhere) (live a life in every house along the highway)

(Its vast imaginary) (What about after survival)

(What about (other) (twists) (other funded) (her agenda))

(The business of) (double agency (It preferred neutral) (when the nest) (burned))

(I would) (keep (at) (the))

(keep on about) (a little sporting) (a whistling tune)

(What its own self (a priori) (dictated) was host (needs to depart))

(It (the game of prizes) having cash in sight) (What prestige in gaze (on)looking)

(Her victory (having oversold the pitch)) (then connected) (or)

Krystal Languell is the author of the books Call the Catastrophists (BlazeVox, 2011) and Gray Market (1913 Press, 2016) and several chapbooks, including Diamonds in the Flesh, a collaboration with Robert Alan Wendeborn, (Double Cross Press, 2015) and a collection of interviews, Archive Theft (Essay Press, 2015). She’s published the feminist poetry journal Bone Bouquet since 2009 and has been part of Belladonna* Collaborative since moving to NYC in 2010. She has received fellow- ships and residencies from The Poetry Project and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and is employed by Pratt Institute.

2015 11 Photo by Kaia Sand: “Not everyone has a price” (Vila Autódromo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

12 Winter Photo Essay: Kaia Sand as Rodrigo Toscano once put wind); and a rua é tua (the Poetry in public space can manifest in infinitely many it. New to Rio de Janeiro, street is yours). Sentences forms: as inquiry, engagement, critique or resistance. Our but bringing our particular such as Coisas belas são engagement with language, even when misinterpreted, areas of research (poetry, difíceis (Beautiful things maps our lived experiences as it maps our landscapes oil, Olympics), we form our are difficult) are ambiguous and streets. Poet Kaia Sand is currently living in Rio de own, idiosyncratic audience, and provocative, as well Janeiro, Brazil and has been documenting language she’s attuned to particular as a possible alternative encountered in the landscape as the city is transformed in references and likely slogan for the upcoming Rio preparation for the upcoming Olympic games. mistaking plenty of others— Olympics. Upon our arrival in Rio the city as a book. While the creativity of misprision de Janeiro this August, one local artist suggested A similar sentiment is Poetry is sometimes we quickly noticed to us that the phrase was depicted in the language, referenced explicitly. One poetic language painted merely a naïve claim of Todo Mundo Mente, Menos of the most compelling throughout the metropolis personal exemption, we Eu (Everyone Lies, Except examples of this is the on walls, doors, benches, read it more as a political Me), which we found expression Fui crime, serei and ledges. Everywhere we critique of blame and scrawled across the city: on poesia (I was crime, I will walked, the city’s surfaces responsibility. Indeed, a temporary plywood wall, be poetry). The phrase is formed pages. We were the another friend surmised that a Clear Channel billboard, painted across the city. interlocutors, passersby, the phrase had something and the back of a seat on a We’ve seen it on a park curious readers of our new to do with the corruption city bus. bench alongside the Lagoa city. Since we first began of Eduardo Cunha, the Rodrigo de Freitas, a researching Landscapes of speaker of the lower house We were particularly aware much-polluted lake and site Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry of Congress. The right- of the poetic qualities of the Rio 2016 Olympic and Public Space more wing politician and rival of of the language on the rowing competition; as than a decade ago, we have President Dilma Rousseff streets of Rio. Soundplay well as in a middle-class remained attuned to how has been implicated in is underscored in escrevo, neighborhood in Botafogo, poetry claims public spaces, the Lava Jato corruption ecqueço (I write, I forget); where the language often and how we might wander scandals involving Brazilian sinta a vento (Feel the appears astride other art. as the inadvertent audience. oil giant Petrobras, a mess A month or so into our of cold cash, questionable stay, we learned that this construction contracts, language connects with and crooked politicians. the pixação (also written Cunha has been accused pichação) tradition in Rio de of receiving millions of Janeiro and São Paulo, so dollars in bribes. An online named because in the 1930s search reveals plenty of and 1940s, politicians would examples attaching “não paint the streets using tar, fui eu” to Cuhna, whether or piche. as a tactic, as a nickname (Eduardo “Não Fui Eu” One of the most-repeated Cunha), or as a direct patches of language quote. The ambiguity of the around the city is Não Fui phrase, and the way context Eu. Such an ambiguous, informs it, foregrounds how melodic phrase creates an language in public space ongoing test for how we, as can showcase an uneven newcomers, might encounter cultural terrain, Photo by Kaia Sand: “I was crime, I will be poetry “ (Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

2015 13 Most recently, we found it One of those occupants, passed abundant language justice does not become a written on a staircase in the Heloisa Helena Costa scrawled on the recent ruins business counter or a puppet Vila Autódromo favela in Berto, faces an impossible of Vila Autódromo. Most theater). the western zone of the city situation. As a spiritualist of this language articulated near Barra da Tijuca. The in the Candomblé tradition, resistance. Vila Autódromo, with its staircase ascended to open she is daughter of Nanã, abundance of social writing, air; the building that once a goddess on whose land Creativity abounds, provides a stark example surrounded it was reduced she lives and cares for. On with one panel reading of how the language is to mounds of rubble. It was 18 October 2015, Heloisa “OLIM(PIADA),” the written with multiple a staircase to nowhere, but and other occupants of Portuguese word for joke audiences in mind, fortifying also a monument to erasure. Vila Autódromo invited the (piada) nestled inside a neighbors in their acts of resistance, speaking to “This language articulated resistance.” the power brokers, and communicating to those coming in solidarity. As we public in for a Candomblé word for Olympics. One wander Rio de Janeiro, we Rubble is everywhere in Vila ceremony to bless the still-standing two-story amble as active readers of Autódromo because the Rio lagoon as they continue house had two phrases poetic, political language government is demolishing their standoff with Rio scrawled in spray paint making claims on public and people’s homes to make Mayor Eduardo Paes and across its front “Quero community spaces. way for Olympic structures the Olympic development ficar / Vamos lutar!!!” and high-end hotels. he’s spearheading. Dressed (“I want to stay / We will –Kaia Sand with Vila Autódromo, a small, mostly in white, they fight!!!”) and “Não Deixe contributions from working-class favela along danced and drummed, then a Vila morrer!” (“Don’t let Jules Boykoff. Sand and the Jacarepaguá lagoon, led a processional to the Vila die!”). Another takes Boykoff, who co-authored was founded as a fishing water’s edge where they on an epistolary form: Srs. Landscapes of Dissent: village in the 1960s. While released large bouquets of Desembarcadores cuidem Guerrilla Poetry and Public 90 percent of the occupants white flowers to drift into para que a justica não vire Space (Palm Press 2008), have left, about fifty people the lagoon. As we walked um balcão de negocios nem are working on its updated are steadfast, refusing to through mud made from um teatro de marionetes. reissue. budge. the previous night’s rain, we (Sirs, Take care so that

New from Litmus Press ACTUALITIES FABULAS FEMINAE A poet-Artist collAborAtion by A poet-Artist collAborAtion by

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14 Winter Photo by Kaia Sand: “I was crime, I will be poetry” (Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

2015 15 Photo by Kaia Sand: “the street is yours” (Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

16 Winter Interview with Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris

Williams had it, was good way—I cannot escape my In the exploration of borders and boundaries of poetry, I can think of no better guides than Jerome Rothenberg and enough as far as it went, “native internationalism,” Pierre Joris. They both graciously agreed to participate in a but for me there was always if I’m permitted a punning discussion of what’s happening in poetry at the moment– the wider world, and my oxymoron. poetry as outsidered, what identity can mean, where and roots, like Williams’ for that why boundaries are eraected and dismantled. matter, went back to other I’m in Europe right now, places, other times. The and your mention of “walls” Following are excerpts from an email exchange I had with disparity, if that’s what it and “borders” immediately Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris that we hope will serve was, was brought home to resounds: if the major to inspire further conversations. –Betsy Fagin me, in a conversation with political and cultural effort BF: I originally approached boundaries erected and Donald Allen, shortly after for the half century after you both in hopes of crossed? How seriously do his big anthology appeared. World War II was to break generating a discussion we defend our borders and What I carried away from down walls and create an around international why? I’m asking what sound that was Allen’s telling me open European space, this poetry, poetics and poetry like political questions, that I was, in contrast to the seems to in great danger communities and I just have and they are, but I feel like poets in his book, part of right now. The wall between a few symbols of what’s related, relevant patterns and an “international school” the two Germany’s may happening at the moment answers can be reflected of poetry. That description have come down in ’89, that keep coming to mind: in the microcosms of our stung at first but I later grew but meanwhile some wall, border/boundary, poetry worlds. to love it. fifty new walls have been refuge. One thing I’m built: hundreds of miles curious about and would JR: For myself the issue of PJ: In a strangely or not so of them, from the Spanish like to examine is how the an international or global strangely inverse movement, “possessions” in North current poetry scene here poetry came alive in the I saw myself ab initio as Africa to Denmark! Walls in the U.S. interacts with or late 1950s and still more an “international poet” and borders are right now as is immune/oblivious to this so in the 1960s, while the in continuous exile and an area of investigation for political moment: border great event for many of us as nowhere at home given geographers, philosophers, walls (U.S., Gaza Strip, poets was the emergence of that I chose to write in my political scientists, economists—and maybe it national(istic) focus is of little help– is time for poets to make thinking about these actual either in matters of politics or of culture, walls reemerging at a time when we also believe including poetry ourselves to live and work in the real? fantasy? world India/Pakistan, Ireland, the “new American poetry,” fourth language and moved of global accessibility via Cyprus, N./S. Korea, E.U. in which I also played an from Europe to the U.S. internet and social media. etc.), efforts to exclude or active if still subsidiary in 1967 (though I did keep accept refugees (Syria) and part. For the American side on moving, as the song In the U.S. unhappily it migrants, newly opened of it we experienced the says…). German, French feels right now as if much boundaries (Cuba). emergence and assertion and francophone poetries thinking, or rather, much of a poetry that drew were there from the start. If bickering that passes for Maybe we can start off strength from the culture in the late sixties I had one thinking, has to do more by discussing what these and language in which we aspiration, it was to become with identity squabbles, images can mean or shared most immediately, an… American poet, and personal, ego-identities represent in relation to the an American moment that so I intensely studied and using perceived and often contemporary avant-garde seemed sometimes to tried to imitate Ginsberg imagined walls as fake poetry scenes we know and obliterate the traces of other and Williams and Olson hindrances to vault over, love. What are the borders contemporary languages to enter that “American while neglecting to analyze around poetry right now? and cultures. Being “in grain.” Doesn’t seem to or engage with actual walls, Where is refuge? How are the American grain,” as have worked out exactly that borders, barriers at the level

2015 17 of one, of, more accurately, to separate the national/ the concept of borders, to the “nomadic” poetics I of of many “we’s,” as citizen (who belonged inside realize (and a quick glance developed in various essays, they affect communities the border) from the alien/ at the real borders, at the but I believe it is also world-wide. And world- non-citizen (who belonged multidimensionality reality central to Jerry’s project in wide has to be the focus; outside the border.) of borders will help) that his writing, translating and “national(istic)” focus is of borders are: anthologizing. I think that little help—either in matters This means that one is we would both agree that of politics or of culture, never inside “safe” borders, 1. Always porous: by it is this cultural richness including poetry. one is always on territory definition they have holes that can and does renew that is both familiar and in them to go through, poetry in a day and age In this sense it may be foreign, with signs, signals, or they can be vaulted or when poetry is all too easily useful to reexamine the very languages we know and circumnavigated; shoved into the margins concept of border. Even the don’t know, i.e. with an of the socius. The violence word is not unambiguous as ongoing need to learn 2. They are not abstract Amilhat Szary speaks of a quick etymological tour to read new signs and lines but actual spaces; they is both the actual violence (something that behoves poets to undertake) tells us: in Spanish and other “one is never inside “safe” borders, Latin languages such as French, the word “frontera/ one is always on territory frontière” goes back to military vocabulary, i.e. that is both familiar and foreign” a violent face-to-face, a confrontation. In English the “border / boundary” languages. That is where are territories in themselves against the “other” in the complex insists more on the we live, the territory we (at times even specific various nation-states— markers (boundary stones), live in and on and which ecosystems: see the rabbits essential thus to support concrete incarnations of an we can simplify, reduce to and plant-life between the an organization like Black abstract border-line, while one common parlance or German walls); Lives Matter, or the various also calling up the notion of language only if willing to pro-refugee movements in being bound, linked—which falsify the real to create a 3. They are mostly mobile: Europe and elsewhere—and puts both sides of the border comforting fiction. Now which means they are also the cultural violence into play and insists on poetry, I would suggest, everywhere inside a given implied by necessarily connectivity rather than on has always been a foreign “national” territory (and why complex identities. separation. language and thus one of its not, inside a given “mental” core invitations has been to territory) and not only at its It is too easy to think of Today’s borders are not push the reader into learning edges. internationalism as an simply separators between a or many new, ways to interest in or liking of countries one crosses with read and discover other, This characteristic, as “foreign” books, poets, etc. the help of a passport. stranger world(view)s. In Anne-Laude Amilhat We have to move beyond the Borders touch and involve this sense, much harm has Szary suggests in her book idea that we’ve done our job the totality of the territory, been done by an approach Qu’est-ce qu’une frontière by importing a few foreign not only its edges, i.e. to poetry that insists aujourd’hui, makes them masterpieces, translated into the place where they primarily on its perceived into “violent spaces, because accessible English, and that separate sovereign nation- role in locating and fixing one can find oneself in fact do little more than states. The border thus no identity—which too often as if imprisoned in this satisfy a need for exoticism, longer as fixed (natural or becomes a solipsistic intermediate space, the i.e. internationalism as a artificial) immaterial line of reinforcement of sameness crossing/traversing of which peeping tom titillation to separation, but as a moving, and excludes otherness, never ends.” see how the neighbors are mobile space that is a mixed or better, othernessess, by doing it. territory in and by itself— creating or recreating real or Now, this may be personal mixed in that it immediately imaginary borders between to my own history and Earlier I criticized identity contradicts what was ab self and others. To avoid this development while being politics of/in U.S. poetry origine its ontological claim: it may be useful to rethink theoretically core to and I confess that it is

18 Winter somewhat distressing to same realm of in-between- no less) to compose the Sacred and Poems for see how unaware many ness, of uncertainty, of Technicians of the Sacred as the Millennium, volumes current young practitioners multiplicity, of non-unity. It an assemblage of traditional 1 -3 , the latter with Pierre seem to be of much of the would be very instructive and outsidered poetries Joris and Jeffrey Robinson. boundary-breaking work right now to reread or read from Africa, America, Asia, Recent books of poems done by the two or three for the first time the vast Europe, and Oceania, and include Concealments and previous generations. Be oeuvre of Edouard Glissant, to put those in the context Caprichos, A Cruel Nirvana, that in terms of the recent both the poetry and the of the newest and most A Poem of Miracles, and discussions on conceptual essays as an insightful experimental poetry that we Retrievals: Uncollected and poetries, where the fact that correction to over-simplified ourselves were then creating. New Poems 1955-2010. His this kind of work is at least nationalist identities. Here’s I thought of poetry—the most recent big book is a century old and was not a quotation: most inbred and localized Eye of Witness: A Jerome recently invented in NY or of languages or language Rothenberg Reader, and LA goes mainly unnoticed. “Fixed identities prove arts—as the field in which I Barbaric Vast and Wild: Or, just as surprising to me harmful to the sensibilities could provide a difference, An Assemblage of Outside is the neglect or ignorance of contemporary humans taking nothing for granted and Subterranean Poetry of the amazing work done involved as they are in a and opening my mind – and from Origins to Present toward a “multicultural” chaos-world and living ours—to everything. But the has just been published as (maybe better the “internal in creolized societies. A real trick here was also to volume 5 of Poems for the international”) poetry going relational identity or a keep my own doings open Millennium. Scheduled for back to, say, someone as rhizomatic identity, as to question. The major steps 2016 is _A Field on Mars: radical as Gloria Anzaldúa, Gilles Deleuze called it, in the overall project went Poems 2000-2015_, to be who forty years ago defined seems more adapted to the from Shaking the Pumpkin published in simultaneous herself as a “Shiva, a many- situation. Difficult to admit, (traditional American Indian English and French editions armed and legged body with but it fills us with anxiety poetry) to A Big Jewish by Presses Universitaires de one foot on brown soil, one to question the unity of Book (“from tribal times to Rouen et du Havre. on white, one in straight our identity, the hard and present”) to the Poems for society, one in the gay unbreachable core of our the Millennium series that Poet, translator, essayist and world, the man’s world, the personhood, an identity Pierre and I launched in the anthologist Pierre Joris has women’s, one limb in the closed on itself, afraid of middle 1990s. As the work published some 50 books, literary world, another in the otherness, associated to expanded my name for it most recently, Barzakh: working class, the socialist, one language, one nation, evolved from ethnopoetics Poems 2000–2012; and and the occult worlds.” one religion, at times to and the domain of the oral Breathturn into Timestead: one, race, tribe, clan, one and indigenous to what I’m The Collected Later Poetry Anybody writing today, well-defined entity with now calling omnipoetics, of Paul Celan. With Jerome anybody trying to come which one identifies. But we as a grand assemblage or Rothenberg he edited Poems into a poetry that wants to have to change our outlook collage of “everything.” for the Millennium, vol. 1 go deeper than the toxic on identity, as we have to My latest workings in that and 2: The University of MFA-mix of identity and change our relation to the regard are Barbaric Vast California Book of Modern confessional, should be other.” and Wild, just published and Postmodern Poetry. familiar with the term and as volume five of Poems He lives and works in Bay concept she promoted: JR: What Pierre does for the Millennium, and Ridge, Brooklyn, with his Nepantla, the Nahuatl word here is to provide some an expanded version of wife, performance artist for the in-betweenness, specific markers for the Technicians of the Sacred (in Nicole Peyrafitte. They are for being in the middle of circumstances in which we progress) along the lines I’ve currently at work on Talvera: different things, languages, find ourselves right now— just described. A Millennium of Occitan cultures, etc. As Maria the latest installments in Poetry (Poems for the Fránquiz put it: “The world what has been for many of Jerome Rothenberg is an Millennium, vol.6). is in a constant state of us an ongoing struggle. For internationally celebrated Nepantla.” Or looking myself “the real work,” as poet with over ninety beyond America, the Arabic Gary Snyder named it, began books of poetry and twelve word I used as title of my in the late 1960s when I assemblages of traditional latest collection of poems, was given a free hand (by and avant-garde poetry “Barzakh” points to the a commercial publisher such as Technicians of

2015 19 Calendar of Events

All events begin at 8pm unless otherwise noted. Admission $8/Students & Seniors MON 12/14 $7/Members $5 or free. Visit poetryproject.org for more information. The Poetry JERICHO BROWN & MONTANA RAY Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and advance notice. Jericho Brown’s poems have appeared WED 12/2 poetry collections including the recently in The New Republic, The New Yorker, RODRIGO TOSCANO launched A Lucent Fire: New and Selected and The Best American Poetry. His first & MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI Poems (White Pine Press.) She served book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the Rodrigo Toscano’s newest book of poetry, as a Mentor in the first year of Emerge- American Book Award, and his second Explosion Rocks Springfield, is due out Surface-Be at The Poetry Project, and is a book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, from Fence Books in the spring. His Senior Fellow at the Black Earth Institute, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award previous books include Deck of Deeds, a progressive think tank. She has taught and was named one of the best books of Collapsible Poetics Theater, To Leveling workshops at The Poetry Project, Poets the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The House and in a variety of academic and the Academy of American Poets. He is an Disparities. He lives in the Faubourg community settings. She is a lecturer at associate professor in English and creative Marigny (seventh ward) of New Orleans. LaGuardia Community College. writing at Emory University in Atlanta.

Magdalena Zurawski is the author of Susie Timmons was born in 1955. Poetry Montana Ray is a feminist poet, translator, Companion Animal (Litmus, 2015) and is her game. She prefers to maintain a low and scholar. The author of 5 chapbooks and The Bruise (FC2 2008). Her commentary profile, and regards prose as the ultimate artist books, her first full length collection on aesthetics in the age of Ferguson, FEEL form of procrastination. A collection of of poetry, (guns & butter), is available from BEAUTY SUPPLY, can be found online earlier books entitled Superior Packets Argos Books. She’s also a PhD student at Jacket2.org. She teaches literature and (Wave Books.) Stacy is her only friend. in comparative literature at Columbia creative writing at the University of Georgia University & the mom of Pokémon and lives in Athens (Georgia). FRI 12/11 enthusiast, Amadeus. LARA DURBACK & ALDRIN VALDEZ MON 12/7 Lara Durback is a poet who has been living WED 12/16 ALEJANDRO MIGUEL JUSTINO in Oakland for 10 years. She has published JIM DINE & DOROTHEA LASKY CRAWFORD & ORLANDO WHITE books collectively under NoNo Press and Jim Dine Jim Dine is the author of the Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford is a Mess Editions. She is a founding member books Welcome Home Lovebirds (Trigram poet, video artist, and game designer living of the new press collective Material Print Press, 1969) and Poems To Work On: The in Brooklyn, NY. http://amjc.tv Machine at the Omni Commons in Oakland. Collected Poems of Jim Dine (Cuneiform Her book is forthcoming from Publication Press, 2015). Ron Padgett writes, “The Orlando White is the author of two books Studio Oakland. same verve that drives his paintings of poetry: Bone Light (Red Hen Press, drives these poems, and added to it are a 2009) and LETTERRS (Nightboat Books, Aldrin Valdez is a Pinoy painterpoet. They wonderfully goofy playfulness and a no- 2015). He holds a BFA from the Institute grew up in Manila and Long Island and holds-barred, slightly scary exhilaration. of American Indian Arts and an MFA currently live in Brooklyn. They have been Arp, Schwitters, and Picabia, move over.” from Brown University. He teaches at Diné awarded fellowships from Queer/Art/ College and in the low-residency MFA Mentorship and Poets House. Their work Dorothea Lasky is the author of four program at the Institute of American Indian has been published in Art21 Magazine, books of poetry, most recently ROME. She Arts. ArtSlant, BRIC Blog, The Cortland teaches at Columbia University’s School of Review, In the Flesh Magazine, and the Arts and lives in New York City. WED 12/9 Uncompromising Tang. PATRICIA SPEARS JONES FRI 12/18 9pm & SUSIE TIMMONS POET TRANSMIT Patricia Spears Jones is poet, cultural Poet Transmit engages in the connections critic, playwright and author of four major between poetry, transmission, and

20 Winter performance. The project was launched Heroes Are Gang Leaders, Jibade-Khalil editor at Kinfolks Quarterly. by artist/curator Victoria Keddie as a way Huffman, Serena Jost & Dan Machlin, to explore textual practice and modes of Amy King, Jaamil Kosoko, Ben Krusling, Kristen Gallagher’s most recent poetry transmission. Writer/artist Cat Tyc acts as Dorthea Lasky, Denize Lauture, Karen collection is We Are Here (2011). Since co-curator, exploring the potential of poetic Lepri, Kimberly Lyons, Filip Marinovich, then: her chapbook Florida, (Well Greased projection and how it exists in expanded Andriniki Mattis, Jonas Mekas, Jennifer Press;) “Dossier on the Site of a Shooting,” fields of time. This project is inspired by Miller, Thurston Moore, Carley Moore, a multi-platform digital work on GaussPDF, John Cage’s statement that “Poetry is not Sade Murphy, Eileen Myles, Martha Oatis, reviewed by Paul Soulellis in Rhizome; prose simply because poetry is in one way Edgar Oliver, Dael Orlandersmith, Trace “Untitled (Rosewood Trip),” text with or another formalized. It is not poetry by Peterson, Wanda Phipps, Arlo Quint, screenshots, in Printed Web 3. She is reason of its content or ambiguity, but by Church of Betty, Camilo Roldán, Bob Professor of English at City University of reason of its allowing musical elements Rosenthal, Tom Savage, Ryan Sawyer, New York–LaGuardia Community College in (time, sound) to be introduced into the Danniel Schoonebeek, Sarah Schulman, Queens, New York. world of words” (Silence, June 1961). Purvi Shah, Evie Shockley, Nathaniel Poet Transmit focuses on artists who use Siegel, Yvette Siegert, Emily Skillings, WED 1/6 alternative methods of recitation or engage Jesse Smith, Pamela Sneed, Sara Jane “WHITE ROOM” in the elements of music in their process. Stoner, Christina Strong, Nurit Tilles, Edwin “We are, thus, insistent on something Torres, Tony Towle, Anne Waldman, Nicole structural: at most of the readings we With live performances by Nina Sobell with Wallace, Lewis Warsh, Simone White, attend, the room is mainly white. This is Laura Ortman (WMAT), Stephanie Barber, Martha Wilson, Emily XYZ, Don Yorty, Jenny true even when the readers do not identify Jen Liu, Giovanna Olmos, Mahogany L. Zhang and more tba. as white. This is true even when the Browne, Cathy de la Cruz and James readings happen in urban areas with an Sprang. The event will be broadcasted Tickets available the day of for: $25 General other-than-white majority. We’re also fairly live, both within Parish Hall and online via / $20 Students + Seniors or in advance for confident the mainly white room defines livestream. $20 most of the readings we didn’t attend, that it defines any number of different ‘schools’ FRI 1/1 2PM - 2AM MON 1/4 of writing, from anything that might The 42ND ANNUAL NEW YEAR’S DAY DESIREE BAILEY possibly call itself experimental to anything MARATHON BENEFIT READING & KRISTEN GALLAGHER that might call itself lyric. From Vanessa The New Year’s Day Marathon is the Desiree Bailey was born in Trinidad and Place to Tony Hoagland, a mainly white Project’s largest fundraiser and provides Tobago and grew up in Queens, NY. She room. From Brown University to University support for what we do best – serve has received fellowships from Princeton of Iowa to Holy Names University, a mainly as a public venue for the substantial in Africa, the Norman Mailer Center, and white room. From the 92nd Street Y to presentation of innovative writing! Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and is the St. Mark’s Poetry Project to the Omni a recipient of the 2013 Poets and Writers’ Commons, a mainly white room.” Featuring: Hanif Abdurraqib, Julia Alsop, Amy Award. Her work is published or is –Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young, “The Vyt Bakaitis, Jennifer Bartlett, Jim forthcoming in Callaloo, Best American Program Era and the Mainly White Room” Behrle, Rijard Bergeron, Felix Bernstein, Poetry, Muzzle, Blackberry and other Edmund Berrigan, Jennifer Blowdryer, publications. She is currently the fiction The reasons for this are what this Stephen Boyer, Marie Buck, Lonely “HOW DO I GET A READING?” Christopher, Yoshiko Chuma, Jace Clayton, CAConrad, Joey de Jesus, Ted Dodson, Participation in all series is by invitation from the series coordinator. It helps to Thom Donovan, Maggie Dubris, Douglas be familiar with the Project’s schedule and what the current series coordinators Dunn, Andrew Durbin, Christine Elmo, are interested in (see page 5). While the series are curated, we are always Ed Askew Band, Betsy Fagin, Farnoosh CURIOUS. If you want to get our attention, mail your books and poems to Fathi, Carolyn Ferrucci, Cliff Fyman, the office at 131 E. 10th St. NY, NY 10003 or email us at info@poetryproject. John Giorno, Philip Glass, John Godfrey, com. Your email will be forwarded to the series coordinators. Coordinator appointments change every two years to ensure diversity of perspective. Nada Gordon, Stephanie Gray, Janet Hamill, Diana Hamilton, Laura Henriksen,

2015 21 discussion attempts to understand. In Bible, won a 2015 Lambda Literary Award. released in the summer of 2015. response to the findings of Spahr and Diana lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Young, we’ll grapple with audience, in Pratt Institute. January 15 is the official Niina Pollari’s first book, Dead Horse, writing, to put forth some proposals. release of Cage’s chapbook, The Husbands, was published by Birds LLC in 2015. She is on Occasional Remarks: Prose Chaps and also the author of two chapbooks and the MON 1/11 Audio Tracks. Chapbooks will be available translator of Tytti Heikkinen’s The Warmth OPEN READING for purchase at reading; audio download of the Taxidermied Animal (Action Books, Open readings have always been an available online. 2013). integral part of The Poetry Project’s programming. They provide a time and Jane DeLynn is the author of the novels WED 1/27 space for writers of all levels of experience Leash, Don Juan in the Village, Real Estate FRANK LIMA: to test, fine tune, and work out their (a New York Times Book Review “Notable INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL IN POETRY writing and reading styles in front of Book of the Year”), In Thrall, Some Editors Garrett Caples and Julien Poirier a supportive audience. Reading time Do, as well as the collection Bad Sex Is host a tribute to New York School poet is approximately 3 minutes. Sign-in at Good. She was a correspondent in Saudi Frank Lima on the publication of his new 7:45pm. Arabia for Mirabella and Rolling Stone and selected poems, Incidents of Travel in during the Gulf War and has published Poetry (City Lights). With David Shapiro, WED 1/13 articles, essays, and stories in a number of Ron Padgett, Tony Towle, Wendy Xu, Susie DOT DEVOTA & ANNE TARDOS anthologies and magazines in the US and Timmons, Guillermo Parra, Vicki Hudspith, Dot Devota was born in St. Louis and abroad. Her musical theater works have Bob Holman, Tim Keane, Filip Marinovich, travels full time with her partner Brandon been performed at the Brooklyn Academy and more. Shimoda. Author of The Division of Labor of Music, Encompass Music Theater, and (Rescue Press), And The Girls Worried Theater for the New City. FRI 1/29 Terribly (Noemi Press), The Eternal Wall CHE GOSSETT & STEFFANI JEMISON (Bookthug), MW: A Midwest Field Guide WED 1/20 Che Gossett is a Black trans/femme (Editions19\). Her latest work is a dated ELAINE EQUI & GINA MYERS theory queen in an open relationship with book about a woman trapped in a woman’s Elaine Equi’s latest book is Sentences academia and an in an intimate relation body who finds the love of her life and and Rain (Coffee House Press.) Her other with ideas. They have published work watches a lot of news about war. collections include Click and Clone, in the anthologies Queer Necropolitics, Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems, Captive Genders and Trans Studies Reader Anne Tardos is the author of nine The Cloud of Knowable Things, Surface volume II. books of poetry and several multimedia Tension, Decoy, and Voice-Over, which performance works. Among her books are won the San Francisco State Poetry Award. Steffani Jemison’s work has been The Dik-dik’s Solitude (Granary, 2003), I She teaches at New York University and in exhibited nationally and internationally at A m Yo u , (Salt, 2008), Both Poems (Roof, the MFA Program in Creative Writing at venues including the Museum of Modern 2011), and NINE (BlazeVOX, 2015). She is The New School. Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Drawing the editor of Jackson Mac Low’s Thing Center, LAXART, the New Museum, of Beauty (California, 2008), 154 Forties Gina Myers is the author of two full- the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, (Counterpath, 2012), and The Complete length collections of poetry, A Model Year the Studio Museum in Harlem, Laurel Light Poems [co-edited with Michael (Coconut Books, 2009) and Hold It Down Gitlen, Team Gallery, and other venues. O’Driscoll] (Chax, 2015). A Fellow in Poetry (Coconut Books, 2013), as well as several Her publishing project, Future Plan and from the New York Foundation for the chapbooks. She lives in Philadelphia where Program, commissions literary work by Arts, Tardos lives in New York. she works in higher ed communications. artists of color and has published books by Martine Syms, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, and FRI 1/15 MON 1/25 Harold Mendez, among others. She teaches DIANA CAGE & JANE DELYNN ERICA AMLING & NIINA POLARI at Parsons The New School for Design, the Diana Cage is the author of five books and Eric Amling lives and works in New York Cooper Union, and the School of the Art editor of three collections of fiction and City. His debut book From the Author’s Institute of Chicago. essays. Her most recent book, Lesbian Sex Private Collection (Birds, LLC) was

22 Winter Reviews Other Archer And later: Lee Ann Brown In “June Full Moon Song of Presses Universitaires de Rouen et Accumulation,” she asks, “If Frank How can I free associate du Havre, 2015 O’Hara had been a mom / How would organically anymore Reviewed by Gina Myers he have written this psalm?” And the feeling is perhaps it would look exactly How can we treat a child thusly “Generous, generative, [and] like this. permission-giving” is how Lee Thrust of this argument Ann Brown describes the work of The largest section of the book, “The Bernadette Mayer in the editor’s note Wondrous Field,” is written for and Helps us to imagine how of the 25th anniversary edition of with her daughter Miranda Lee Reality Sonnets, published by Brown’s own Torn. Chronologically, the poems How can there be poetry Tender Buttons Press. And the same in this section range from before could be said for Brown’s own work in Miranda’s birth to her twenty-second After such stillness after the shock Other Archer, a new collection from month. As Ted Berrigan said in an Presses Universitaires de Rouen et interview, “Most poets are experts At moments such as these, it feels du Havre. Running over two hundred in paying infinite attention to their like words fail us. For Brown, it pages, this English language collection own speech. One must likewise be seemed impossible to return to published by a French press should cognizant and heed the language poetry, something that clearly gives serve well to introduce a new audience which reels about everywhere else.” her so much joy. But it is exactly to Brown’s exuberant, life-affirming And here Brown is cognizant of and the joy and love for language that work. delights in the language reeling around shines throughout Other Archer, that her, especially as she gets to witness indicates there is always a way back. Divided into five sections, Other and participate in her daughter’s Archer, gathers poems written over acquisition of it—from “Say You Say,” In the book’s postface, series editor “a dozen or so years” of Brown’s where her daughter’s first word is Christophe Lamiot Enos writes, “Other “quest for a family,” she explains “cah-tah,” to “K-T-I-CAHHHH” in Archer, offers a fascinating narrative, in the introduction. They pre-date “Dear Reality,” to the realization that one that is potentially of interest to her finding her partner and continue Miranda can say anything in “Miranda anybody, in any language, even: The through pregnancy, marriage, Is Two.” story of how language is attention paid childbirth, and child-rearing up to her to our surroundings, our conditions, daughter’s eleventh-and-a-half year. As A number of poems in this section ourselves also, potentially everything such, the book brims with life and a move quickly from topic to topic and everyone.” Other Archer, serves joyous energy. as if a young child is speaking. as a wonderful reminder that source Whether it is Brown transcribing her material for poetry is everywhere if Throughout the collection there is daughter’s speech or crafting her one just pays attention. a characteristic New York School own free associations doesn’t matter. playfulness demonstrated through The melding of voices that occurs is ______wide-ranging poems that include reminiscent of other poets who have acrostics, songs, lists, haikus, and incorporated their children’s speech The Book of Feral Flora collaborations. The poems incorporate into their work, such as David Shapiro Amanda Ackerman overheard phrases and play with with his son Daniel, and further Les Figues, 2015 homophonic translations—the way drives home the lesson to “include Review by Adjua Gargi Nzinga arrows becomes eros becomes air everything.” Greaves rose, or sorrows to sore rose, and archive to arc hive. The work is As these poems serve as a document Seemingly moreso than others permission-giving in its generosity of the years 2000-2012, there are beside it, this book is waiting for and inclusiveness. In “Beauty Supply,” also bleak moments alongside you on a shelf somewhere. A beastly Brown writes: the joyousness that pervades the green humming against a digital collection. Brown includes poems orange awaits you. A semi-matte “Include everything in poetry” that address September 11, 2001 and coverstock of computer-generated skin Even the things you think are nothing the devastation following Hurricane awaits you. Inside, an apothecarian Katrina. In “Consider the Removes,” architecture awaits you. All manner Like the way the new white snowflake she echoes Adorno: “No poetry after of flickeringtricksters await you. Decoration waves its wild tentacles ______.” Earthwarmth awaits you. Earthwrath, against the high blue sky too.

2015 23 righteous indignance at its rigid and Tr uly. broken colorism, and in the next offered the sweet conceptual relief of imminent Our quests are parallel and its goal to expose this very failure of intertwined. I have lived with this framing {?} book—not yet read every word—but ______scoffed, she knows you don’t lived with and made it alive. Its poetics Both thrilled toward a creature name the child until you’ve gotten to of utmost porosity model the ferocity comprehension of subjectivity. More know them all languageusers wield. I need you to and more there is a need within to It was far too easy to become the know it is as powerful as it looks. You know the creature self, and somewhere Vandemeer of my imagination. This are powerful enough to withstand its in that craving, flora may make must just be what nature does if you energy. Likely you will doubt me. Rage. themselves known as an aid in this. let it. Curse me. That’s fine. An admirable The promise of a wilding recreation {It’s all unschool it’s all unschool it’s all and respectable response. for an industrialized self through this unschool} slow and supple statue company, these The language {REDACTED: Below you will find: First, my early breadgivers, these calmest—these UNAUTHORIZED APPROPRIATION} musings created at a distance; Second, decorative—beings. spilled from my citymouse self before I my mind broken open by reckless knew that it was prophecy. engagement; Third, my first attempts to I am the Review. communicate this experience outside I AM THE ANCIENT ADOLESCENT This body was so pissed, SJ! And myself. Fourth, where we are now— iamstraightupcontagiomaniawatchout the decision was that if we have to fresh clarity. i am the softest way possible destroy bacterial invaders when all we I am paratext. want to do is create something about Finally, before we enter I am also the things others have said another creation, it’s going to be on a REVIEWproper, a word about I am also the past. battlefield made of wet witch dreams, evolution| consent | appropriation: I {I am also first whispers from this where the only thing destroyed will be may be wrong about this book. dream realm.} Destruction, and in both of those first My debt sick cement weary terrible days of convalescence, I would {I AM LUSH WITH THE ABUNDANCE convalescent mind dared read about plant-sisters living inside OF THE ETERNAL DRAFT} my a whale during the day, and at night I debt sick cement weary would lay my chaos head on the pillow come learn with me, dear audience convalescent body to to sleep and know that I probably wouldn’t be able to, but that if I was, The title’s promise dream emerges in LET THIS DEADLINE WILD ME then I wanted to have the most feral an instant—Serene and rogue at the INTO A FERAL HEALTH THAT WILL dreams possible. margins, developing autonomous avant PROTECT AS A TRUER MEDICINE garde suppleness, the floral beings Those nights were excruciating and within It was the most generative dare, exhilarating: Throughout—I think?—I beast and I assure you the effects have been slept in flickers, dreaming that I was staggering. having insomnia. And in the morning with abandon. When procured by a I would leave the bed with all this new reader for promise alone, a title may whale songs only please information from dreamland. flicker through enchantments and voidlight only please tauntings as the dream of it waxes and plantspeed only please the boundaries seem to have blurred wanes. Amanda Ackerman’s The Book ANNIHILATION, AUTHORITY, irrevocably of Feral Flora scintillatingly promised ACCEPTANCE. plantlife allowed to gleefully transgress I mustn’t forget to be clear about the The Book of Feral Floral is a trickster following— a most fundamental taxonomic divide The 2015 Bulletin of Wilderness and their perceived order and stasis, Academy is a trickster. {REDACTED: but UNAUTHORIZED APPROPRIATION} and then within its material object Damnit, Ackerman, you tricked me flickered into a structural account of with my own trick. ______this floral ferality. Just like Richard The I Broke Myself Too Beautifully Hardack “Not Altogether Human”: Wilderness Relocation Session Alien Abduction Pantheism and the Dark Nature of is Lewis Warsh the American Renaissance (University Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015 of Massachusetts Press, 2012) in an Review by Ryan Nowlin instant promised the catharsis of immanent

24 Winter “Our poetic tradition is purgatory” —Phillipe Sollers MASTER CLASS: A BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR US

In his latest book of poetry, Alien Master Class with Ammiel Alcalay Abduction, Lewis Warsh incorporates 1 Session – Tuesday, 12/15, 6-9 pm and/or reconfigures the myth of Location: The Neighborhood Preservation Center (232 E. 11th St.) “extraterrestrial visitation” so that it $95/$75 Students conveys other unintended meanings. One of those meanings suggests an Register online by visiting http://www.poetryproject.org/sign-up-for-workshops/ in-between place like a purgatory or or call 212-674-0910. Due to limited class space of 15 seats per workshop, a kind of non-place where the subject is exhausted by his own resources. reservations are required and payment must be received in advance. Financial The poems in this book are grounded assistance is available. in a tradition of realism whereby crucial experiences are recounted with “Each person signing up for this class will be asked to send me a list of their objective distance. In “Superficial own essential sources: 15-20 books you consider important for yourself, and Things,” the poem which opens up another 10 that you are unfamiliar with but think you ought to become familiar the collection of Alien Abduction, with. In addition to using these lists as a reference point for the session and our a reference is made to something discussion, we will talk through relationships between a set of diverse sources Rousseau reportedly said, though that I have come to find essential. By reflecting on various stages my own work has gone through (different kinds of writing, different functions of writing, the we never get to know exactly what need to be informed by many different kinds of reading), we will explore how that was, other than the fact that it poetry and knowledge come together and drift apart.” can result in “a fat lip.” As the title of “Superficial Things” suggests, Ammiel Alcalay’s recent books include Islanders, and neither wit nor gold: from the possibility of inherent value in then. He is the initiator and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics meaning cannot be separated from the Document Initiative, a series of student and guest edited archival texts emerging act of arranging language into minute from the New American Poetry. particulars. What sort of material practice is free from ideological bias? Maybe it’s best to follow the accents “ I am he who boarded a plane to streets of Paris of the projected intelligentsia proffered Athens (1969) and I am he who An emergency call from the school in “Dear Communard”: “So there’s pauses to catch my breath on the nurse went unheeded no sense of completion and only an landing (1995).” Within the context occasional/ Word crossed out, deleted, of the poem, this seems to suggest a The connectivity of thought in the ‘no completion’ seems/ to be the order “discontinuity” of narrative, sort of sentences throughout this poem may of the day.” like the “missing time” which alien not always be immediately apparent, abductees report to have experienced. but when read as a totality they elicit Perhaps a hit song by Dean Martin, In the aforementioned paratactically a very plausible if not palpable sense “Memories are Made of This,” arranged poem, the sentence becomes of unease that what is happening might provide the soundtrack for a the predominant mode of presentation. elsewhere could occur anywhere. Lewis sojourn out of the city in the poem, The etymological root of parataxis Warsh as a poet takes himself out of “Hello Stranger.” Warsh’s poignant is “soldiers standing side by side.” the work. His methods of inquiry pay “preoccupation” with his and other Likewise, sentences standing side by fealty to the objects of his desire, yet people’s memories of a place seems side are not subordinated to a larger in this matter of the visible everything negated by his sense that “[his] words narrative form/frame nor are they is a trap. Hence, the reportage of “Dark seem to stand for something else.” thrown together at random. Another Study” calculates a tubular darkness. Still, what remains intact after some instance whereby Warsh creates tonal The trade-off is: “We can trade distancing occurs are the images dissonance through parataxis would identities for a few hours and you can themselves: “The scene is frozen in/the be the poem “Dark Study.” The feel what it’s like to be me.” back of my mind, like/shredded lettuce autonomous meaning of each sentence left out in the cold” or this lovely in this poem is heightened, questioned, This brings me to the title poem, image, “Each leaf might/be a map of changed by the degree of separation or “Alien Abduction,” which is organized light/in paradise–out the car window/ connection that the reader perceives as a grid of materials in nine parts, at night.” with regard to surrounding sentences. each respective section is addressed For instance, to a mysterious other within the For Lewis Warsh pastiche is a critical given context of an unnamed city. tool for describing opaque distances. There is something we don’t know This organizational principle proves Take for example, the curious line about that’s happening elsewhere to be a viable apparatus for arranging from “Attachment, Detachment”: A photo by Weegee of a corpse on the a sequence of poems. The opening

2015 25 stanza begins as such, “The line fast through the lines of the poem–– the sand in a terrycloth windbreaker, of least defense has melted away.” down the page––until the words fill telling everyone not to swim out too Throughout this poem, one can see a your mind with color.” This would far, but Susie Timmons kept swimming restless intelligence moving laterally suggest that the poems in Alien out as far as she could. I would follow and deeply through a poetic process Abduction are constructed to emit her out, and as soon I caught up with which dates back at least to Warsh’s colorful signals sort of like a Brion her, we would start laughing and swim 1963 serial poem, The Suicide Rates. A Gysin inspired “Dreamachine.” Thus, back. landscape of desire is evoked, where any possible circumstance of language starting a new life with another person is a possible circumstance of poetry. Sometimes I imagine Timmons as a is no more significant than eating or Finally, in Alien Abduction one can mysterious camp counselor, leading her drinking; yet the thought of leaving find the occasional rejoinder indicative cabin on nature hikes in the afternoon always enters into the picture, as it of Warsh’s frame of mind as in this like, “We are the Spanish Harps,/ We does in this stanza: line from “Difference”: “There’s certainly hope you like us./ We are a difference between being with the Spanish Harps,/ Vwing, Vwing, Brackish water cascades from faucet to someone and being alone, but I can’t Vwing.” Kind of impish and funny, cupped hands and then disappears into tell what it is.” a singer whose each line unfolds drainage system of old-fashioned tenement its strangeness into focus, and as it apartment. Don’t complain. ______happens you wonder, how long have You can love someone without lying. I been here with you at the Club You can love someone with equal Superior Packets Hibiscus? Forever? But even as she intensity. You can sink into the Susie Timmons guides you in, making you laugh, it’s sickness of infinitude and Wave Books, 2015 clear that she has more in mind. It never return. Review by Laura Henriksen will not be a simple trip to the Club Hibiscus. The nature hike will not go as Another factor impacting the way one I had this dream The Poetry Project planned. reads Alien Abduction is the quick, was a beach and I was a lifeguard. deft movement from line to line, as There were weird military-looking The curiosity in Timmons’ poems, shown in this line from “Attachment, structures in the water, like a version their questioning, is not with a Detachment,” “Fast––you must move of Fort Tilden, and I was standing on childlike sense of wonder, but with an awareness and a sort of knowing recent gazing backward I wish time would and burn you up, baby, if I may be so bold sadness. Often they ask what would slow down it have been like to be someone else, It was just back then, recently, there’s no and what made that so impossible? division detergent. “She gathered up her telegrams and/ between my present and my childhood set them apart// More emeralds. I wish I’ve always been myself, same as I was ______I were here/ I wish though that I were After talking to you I felt better, did you you.” Timmons confronts the complete feel awful? Life in a Box is a Pretty Life pain of trying to live—in New York Dawn Lundy Martin or wherever—when your worth is To be large and happy like the sun/ with Nightboat Books, 2014 measured by your ability to accumulate ne’er a dread nor worry! Review by Karen Lepri wealth. “every day is an ‘Ill Day.’” she writes, “I have the career I have always/ These poems all feel like worlds to There is no worse open secret in this wanted// it’s called// mañana” she me, full and complex, but even in their country than the ongoing, systemic writes, a fuck-you to being defined by tremendous fullness there is something violence against black men, women, how and how well you labor. “On the unifying and steady. Superior Packets and the gender non-conformant. wall of my new office, no windows.” spans 30 years, and yet there’s this Whether from the location of the consistency to it. Not an unchanging prison cell or the body itself, how Timmons challenges ideas of success in consistency, but more the consistency do you undo these mechanisms of poetry too—how that doesn’t represent of days becoming a life, who you are, containment, unmap their coordinates? a clean break from grosser forms of who maybe you’ve sort of always been. Dawn Lundy Martin’s Life in a Box is competition. She doesn’t describe The poem I just quoted from is “For a Pretty Life resists any x-ray-like read being an artist in New York as some Eileen,” about talking to Eileen Myles on the unknown. It scrambles any easy perfectly equitable utopia. “I wish on the phone, and in Inferno, after science of the insides, the in and the while I was watching I wasn’t jealous of getting off the phone with Timmons, into, the innate, the inmate, even the her./ I kept thinking she’s not as good Myles writes: intimate lyric itself. “We are told about as I am, but because/ she seems better, excavation as an ideal,” as Martin bares everyone’ll love her more, I guess/ Susie’s true work is her voice. I don’t personal trauma interlaced with the she’s the new one now, they’ll be really mean it in that corny craft way, but the institutional, these “Filament traces in glad to get rid of/ me, BACKWARD poetry erupts from a place that sounds the historical body.” Yet Martin hacks ACCULTURATION.” just like her. And she plays it. It’s this at this historical construction of the crazy incredible body, her work. She abjected black body, and destroys the But none of this is ever separated from brings the feminine to an all time low usual path to trauma’s interior. The the phenomenological experience of then she just stands there and screams. book’s ultimate success is forgetting being in the world, sometimes wishing You can’t help laughing at her work in or disappearing the abject, holding up you were someone else, wishing you all its purposeless bravery. It reminds “Hair, a spare mass of grief.” had done different things, even as you me of children’s books, then suddenly wish you didn’t wish that. Or even turns all romantic or Marxist obscure; In the speaker’s grip, the reader just wondering for a minute what abject. By being small but everlasting. touches the eerie massiveness of it would have been like not to have Like a bright crazy battery. grief and rides its shifting voices and sacrificed whatever it was you ended desires from race science to Carrie up sacrificing along the way. “I want Susie Timmons is as great and as true Mae Weems’ photography to the to speak French/ don’t want to study it/ a poet as any poet can be, imagining poet herself. Reflecting on blackness hurts my teeth, to be so ignorant/ of all a world and giving it away, swimming as an experience of containment not the rooms in this/ magnificent palace./ out too far, permanently ahead, only from without but within, Martin Ice skating. You should/ know how! yearning, fucking around: writes, “Capacity dominated / their You might need to use/ that skill to get entire / being. Shaped // citizens away, make your getaway.” Yet even in all I ever wanted the only thing I ever determined men’s lives.” The period those moments of wonder and doubt, wanted between “being” and “Shaped” stalls she can stand in the snow and be sure the one thing I ever wanted out of life the desire for “Body as concavity. that most of it really won’t matter, was to be King of the People As excitement. As instigator.” This something like total satisfaction won’t “excitement” is where Martin trips us ever be achieved, but that’s not the end: Burn incense to be like you. up—dare I say, joyfully, in this book wear Tyrian Purple. retire early as in her previous Discipline—with winter won’t be here forever, but all I ever wanted the only thing I ever the speaker’s will to shed the skin, I don’t feel like I want to tell myself a lot of wanted the “living form that is bark,” the cold lies about what’s going to happen when the one thing I wanted out of life metal box, and to lick its walls. She spring comes was to feel you up pushes: “Here’s the thing about being a life’s going too fast, and with all this prisoner, it’s transformative.”

2015 27 outside apartment windows.” In an Disability Theory, “It is as if disability Moving between these positions, and interview Martin remarks there is no operates symbolically as an othering between discourses, is perhaps how freedom in this book, but “There is other. It represents a diacritical marker this work aims “To close the distance writing and then there is this cut, this of difference that secures inferior, between the abject and bliss.” This whelm”—the window of the poem marginal, or minority status, while hazardous drive begins with the title’s cracked open. It is surely never so not having its presence as a marker “pretty” and thrives through testing simple as to say, the writing gets us on acknowledged in the process” (6). discipline’s lure. She writes, “An the outside again, because the body, alignment is an affection,” as in it like any house or box, stands for what When my turn came going around the affects you and it likes you. In Martin’s transpires inside. table, I recalled being in elementary writing, ideal beauty or pleasure school and having to see a “specialist” bottoms out. With a keen eye to the ______to assess if I had a learning disability. bottom’s nefarious abuse, Martin During the testing, the specialist points to an underground route, a wild Shorthand and played tapes of conversations and leak, “A desire to rip the bottom out of Electric Language Stars ambient sound while she asked me experience—these bodies, they say, are Stephanie Gray questions. When conversations were ungovernable.” Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2015 too discernible—when they did not Review by Thom Donovan become part of the background The book’s deft movement between noise—I could no longer concentrate broken lines and long ones, a perfect I know but I don’t care on the specialist’s questions. Following “poemy” moment and a hard crack on Then I know but I don’t see the tests, which determined that I had the ear (say, “Trauma sack”), harbors Now I see but I don’t know an “auditory processing” disability, no romanticism. Instead it insists on I care but I don’t care my parents were determined to keep how aesthetics are born out of the —Blondie my disability off my “official record” politics of racism, capitalism, and and to teach me to hear “normally.” unfreedom. One of many marquees I heard your tone from way back here As late as college, I still remember reads, “WHEN WE ARE INSIDE THE in the diner, even with my back to you, the disability making itself present PRISON / WE CAN ONLY THINK OF even though I didn’t know what you at crucial moments. During a job BEAUTY.” Through Martin, we see were saying, but I knew what you were orientation the summer following that thinking “life on the inside,” the saying. my freshman year, for instance, I prison that structures the very way —Stephanie Gray became hopelessly confused when some of us walk “free,” blows the asked to carry on two conversations metaphor of containment to terrifying This past spring I taught a course on simultaneously while performing a proportions that implicate anyone “The Poetics of Disability.” On the series of simple tasks, to the surprise beauty-struck. first day of class, I asked the students of my coworkers. The reader’s shock at “PRISON”’s to define “disability” and, if they capital paradox filters through wished, to describe any ways that they What is the relationship between Martin’s own ironic grammar and identified as disabled. In prompting disability and aesthetics? And to message: the students, I acknowledged the whaae to answer them for myself. A dead fawn under machinery. I am risks of “coming out” as disabled, and I wonder sometimes if we do not the machinery. Am also the end of the that there were many urgent reasons become poets because we don’t sentence. In heat, they want me, also to not to do so. Going around the table speak “correctly”—“normally”; lap at their crotches saying thank you there were a range of responses. which is to say, because dominant because their syntax wants definition Some identified as disabled through uses of language are not “ready-at- of this body. All the colors. a particular impairment, while others hand,” but rather present themselves referred to disabilities that were less as “conspicuous,” “obstinate,” and I’s innocence denied, definition denied, visible and recognized: for instance, “obtrusive” (Martin Heidegger’s parole denied, again and again. At the taking prescription medications for terms)? To write in this case is to push end of Martin’s figurative sentence, depression and ADD; having grown up against the limits of language’s we reach bottom and face a poetic up with a developmentally disabled “official” usages; those policed and space of dissonance: “I dig into it, open sibling; not being a native English guarded carefully by those with power. space, and fall through other side, to speaker in the USA; having brown or So many poems I have written, looking black sound, a black stone, familiar black skin. back on them, are attempts to listen, thieves, Urdu or the last language we to hone my attention, recalling a state spoke before mother’s milk.” Through Following from this exercise, we spent of concentration against the constant the poem, we arrive at the unmapped, a good deal of time unpacking how distraction and confusion to which my the un-sensible jumble before “body” race and gender-based oppression auditory processes necessarily tend. has a name. Alongside Martin, we take intersects with ableism, whereof, Disabled within and before language— up the surge of being, “heads hanging as Tobin Siebers writes in his book by the embodied, social condition that language is—perhaps one discovers somewhat presumptuous about making Focusing on Gray’s specific expressions and uses of language that reference to Steph’s impairment in this embodiment, and speculating on how resist the current sensual regimes review—both that she would want me that embodiment may have shaped of our domination, control, and to and that I could describe it with her poetics, does not adequately subjectification. At the very least, one any degree of accuracy—I solicited a address much that I value in this work. brings to the foreground the extent to description from her in her own words. Namely, its indelible senses of humor which the built environment depends This is what she wrote me: as well as its ability to transport one on the regulation and containment of “holosensually” (Fred Moten) through linguistic difference. So.. I guess technically it’s called a a synaesthetic discourse of the senses. “sensory neural hearing loss” which With the loss of the ‘lower registers’ Approaching Gray’s newest collection, means I may hear all the sounds but the powers of sight become acute, and Shorthand and Electric Language not hear the very highest pitches. this seems a reason why we must read Stars, the reader is situated in a Which means I might not understand Gray’s films and poems in tandem, as space that is as intensely aural as all the words without reading lips. the stills from her films which appear it is visual and dialogic. In many That’s why I joke sometimes but kind in Shorthand encourage us to do. of the poems, Gray will reiterate a of mean it when I say if I could “casey- Concomitantly, the ears see and touch, certain word or phrase, exhausting kasem-ize” everyone’s voices, I’d be prompting the reader to consider how its “aspects” (Ludwig Wittgenstein). able to hear everything. If everyone the senses enable certain spatial and There is something pleasant about this had a low voice and enunciated clearly social practices while restricting others. purposive exhaustion, which resembles and there was no background noise I’d In many of the poems, a voice lifts off a practice common to New York School probably hear 100%. NY is loud and the page. This voice is light-hearted, poets of making lists, as well as the for some reason most rooms I seem yet sarcastic. In its tonalities I often “insistent” grammars of Gertrude to be in are high ceilinged with a lot hear the gallows humor and hopeless Stein and her imitators. However, I of echo. The other joke I make is that hope of someone raised in Upstate read these poems more specifically, I can hear pretty well in all the places New York. It pokes fun at other poets through a communication problem/ you are not supposed to talk, namely and the culture of New York City. It process. In their slippage, they get at two: libraries and church. If I could hold cares not for distinctions between mishearings that most hearing people all my meetings and hangouts there I “low” and “high” culture, reserving the have experienced routinely, especially would! poem as a space where head-bangers navigating an urban environment. They and literary theorists can collide. I also explore the problem of context— Gray’s poems attend the ways take these collisions to be a crucial the cultural-bodily situatedness that we communicate through the part of Gray’s promethean project, of meaning production. Entering foregrounding and creative use of her whereby she steals the fire of poetry conversations with only partial impairment. They also amplify the and cinema as a form of class warfare, information; having to glean aurally, fact that to understand can determine re-appropriating their forum, their to fill-in the missing parts; watching survival, where hearing loss makes tenuous authorities, for her own agency for contextual clues, what Erving one more reliant upon visuality in an and the agency of her communities— Goffman calls “cuing,” more closely. urban environment, and being working from Buffalo, NY to Flushing, Queens Gray foregrounds mis/hearing and mis/ class, a woman, and gay undoubtedly and no doubt elsewhere. contextualization, pressing a “[s]ecret tend to increase the possibility of the collusion between what you meant and experience of precarity. Revisiting a When I come to the end of many of what you ended up saying” (62) into New York (School) aesthetic very much these poems, I find myself starting at the service of composition. given to problems of contextualization the beginning, puzzling at how Gray and the “indexical present” (Adrian got from point A to point B. The poems Anyone who has spent any time with Piper), Gray’s writing and filmmaking don’t move syllogistically, but through Steph knows that communication with challenge the stakes of her elected the improvisation of a psychological her can be a challenge, depending on aesthetic genealogy. The compulsive process. Sometimes they are diaristic, the circumstances. I recall years ago, indexing, naming, and (cognitive) recounting events from the day. when she attended the reading series mapping of an urban space—the signs Sometimes they are more structural, I used to host on the Lower East Side, and sounds of such a surround— even procedural. Many of them are PEACE on A, that she told me she loved proceed from an orientation through about knowing (and what one doesn’t the series because she could hear the precarity and risk where “[s]yllables or can’t know, for lack of information). readings so clearly, attributing this to emerge from disaster” (44) and often “[W]hat did you know that I didn’t the acoustics of the space, which had “silence alone protects” (37). Here, “[e] know the last time I stepped through low ceilings and ample furnishings. I very low note gone high would make here not knowing that you knew it all have also been in spaces with Steph me die” (62) because sound conditions when you were written. […] I didn’t where it was not easy to communicate, the “good life” and what lives are know that you didn’t know that I knew because sounds tended to get lost “worth living” in an ablest society. you knew everything” (30; my ellipses and bounce around more. Feeling and brackets). This is part of their

2015 29 mystery and charm—that they put us in a position of not knowing, or of only coming to know recursively, through multiple readings of the poem. “[B]asking in ambient bummers” (44), hearing “all the notes extended glamorous and echo-y” (82), they are messily revelatory, and what they reveal most of all is the drama of a psychological and social process that extends from mis/recognition, mis/ hearing, mis/articulation. Mis/hearing, in Gray’s poetry, provides a permission to world-make with others through BAX 2015 contingency, to prefigure through what might otherwise Best American be taken as “mistake.” Experimental Writing Guest Editor, Douglas Kearney The best new experimental writing Last Issue’s Answers “The permission is on every page here. The best annual experience where space is held for radical experimentation is in this book. Thanks to the editors for really keeping it real.” —CA Conrad, author of Ecodeviance $40.00 hardcover • $19.95 paperback • ebook also available

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This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Congratulations to last month’s winner: Chuck Stebleton from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. wesleyan.edu/wespress Save 30% when you use discount code W301 on your web order

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