ISSUE 58 FREE Star Maps: Lamoureux and Lin Explore Varying Cosmos

ART Dapper Chap Quarterly POETRY Shira Dentz, Kate Hall URBAN FOLK Julia Douglass, Michael Jackson, Brownbird Rudy Relic, Alan Semerdjian, BOOG CITY Alexa Woodward, Kathy Zimmer A COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER FROM A GROUP OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS BASED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY’S EAST VILLAGE ISSUE 58 FREE Star Maps: Lamoureux and Lin Explore Varying Cosmos BY TIM PETERSON field of the page for composition in a manner book has to do with how questions of authorship space which, as the previous quotation suggests, Astronomy Orgonon not unlike Robert Duncan, with the movement and space are somehow larger—more unknown is an intertwining space. Mark Lamoureux of language sometimes initiated by a visual and mysterious—in the age of infinite digital In this strange book, which doesn’t often BlazeVOX Books imperative, sometimes a function of where it falls media and with Lin’s recognition of ituated at the intersection of science within a musical phrase. At other moments the how someone might approach this and religion, Mark Lamoureux’s poems form is driven by anaphora, employed in acts of question through the personage of Sin Astronomy Orgonon are odes to naming and renaming as a function of desire. The Heath Ledger. outmoded belief systems, provisional acts of book is conceptually thinking-through that perversely, and provisionally, rich too; in the best Mark Lamoureux’s formal and conceptual resurrect such systems, exploring their usefulness modernist tradition, in an almost pragmatist way. In this cosmology, the poet attempts ingenuity are a pleasure. Constantly each poem, a riff or improvisation upon the name a preposterous creating his own organic forms, he employs of a star, narrates the poet’s own experience as exfoliation of existing somewhere in a middle distance of affect, concepts that the field of the page for composition in a combining romantic yearning for heavenly bodies collapse upon with self-wounding pastiche like a “bleeding themselves in the manner not unlike Robert Duncan. thing” that “lies down / in marble arms.” The attempt to carry out writing engages in acts of beseeching or prayer their mutual contradictions. Lamoureux’s writing There is, of course, the need to mourn which evoke intimacy and awe, yet at other is informed by a sensibility both erudite and the death of Heath Ledger, and as times it sounds like a late version of Baudelaire’s autodidactic, and his copious, Wasteland-like members of the spectacle there is no way disgusted cultural critique. Such volatility and “Notes” sections at the end of each segment we can avoid doing so. Nevertheless, ambiguity are the result of Lamoureux’s signature in the book are almost as good as the poems. Lin’s mourning is a strange and productive strategy: a way of employing lush, archaic diction Between their bizarre titles and the sense of tribute indeed, since it implicitly plays upon in clotted paratactic arrays: “jumbo shrimp boat humor that informs many of the observations, they the actor’s name to address questions of plasticine: festive camphor votive / denies egress don’t illuminate references so much as complicate space and inscription. If writing is, at the to the ibis.” or obscure things further, offering a glimpse into end of the day, always about archiving or The speaker we can hear in the writing a background of connections the poet is making keeping a ledger, then Lin shows us how corresponds to the author’s voice yet is between different discourses. I get the sense this bookkeeping can only take place sometimes also possessed by external presences from some, like the extensive quotation about on the “Heath,” that place of wandering in the act of naming or describing. On the one how to construct a homunculus from semen, where King Lear went mad and declared himself look like poetry except in a few places that Lamoureux’s sense of humor includes an a “bare, forked thing.” where “whiteness could not be memorized” enjoyment of their oddness and in some cases Yet, rather than putting things forth in traditional or “BECAUSE IT OR HE WAS YOURS, you also their excessiveness. theoretical or poetic terms, Lin detours online are purple / although nothing purple was Understanding this humor is, I think, central to space back onto the page, presenting something distilled,” Tan Lin has momentarily attuned us to understanding the odd but extremely valuable that is simultaneously a collage and simulation of the Heath of inscription without celebrating or lyric affect of Lamoureux’s poetry, which at the “Heath” writing both produces and wanders condemning it. Instead he has given us a mood times displays a quality that might come across through. Samuel Pepys, the famous 17th-century for what cannot be mapped, or what can only as dramatically narcissistic or moping (by way diarist who recorded The Great Fire of London in be mapped endlessly, and shows us what of James Wright) if one did not also understand what today would be called “real time,” appears poetry (unlike exposition, critique, or praise) upon the Heath in the Project Gutenberg does best—poses situations as a question. Electronic archive only to disappear under What is the thing we live and write in today? It Lin’s mourning is a strange pages and pages of Gutenberg disclaimers, is the Heath, but what is the Heath? and productive tribute indeed, urls, and access protocols. These “functional” Alan Ramón Clinton is the author of the brambles are strangely echoed by the book’s scholarly monograph Mechanical Occult: since it implicitly plays upon screen shots of Heath Ledger, Jackie Chan’s Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of the actor’s name to address Green Tea, J. Crew, copylefts and copyrights, Politics (Peter Lang) and a volume of poetry, search results, HTML code, and RSS buttons. Horatio Alger’s Keys (BlazeVOX Books). He is questions of space and The oscillation between high and low tech a lecturer at the University of Miami. continues with a section of inscription. handwritten notes on pieces of paper and index cards how influenced he is by the pathos of someone from students in Lin’s poetry Douglas Piccinnini like Morrissey. The overall impression one is left workshop—they are condensed Bushwick, Brooklyn hand, Lamoureux’s speaker becomes like an with after reading this book is of a sensibility biographies, the opposite of the My Notebook is in Your Car orgone cloudbuster, attempting to influence with enormous performative range, a voice with sprawl which comes from the the mythic and emotional polarities of now- impressive dexterity donning a feather loa. minute by minute recounting of unreachable entities from a distance “As though Tim Peterson is a poet and critic living in Heath Ledger’s death which the ionosphere were that wall/ you once Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and editor of ends the book. One is led blasted humans from.” On the other hand, EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts. Peterson’s book to wonder here what is more Few things you can do over it attempts to narrate in a visceral way the Since I Moved In received the Gil Ott Award mysterious, the proliferation of that you can do over experiential process of what Wilhelm Reich from Chax Press. A new chapbook of poems is a life/death beyond previously to reach completion. calls the “individual who is unarmored and forthcoming from 2nd Ave Poetry. unimaginable proportions, in a therefore in contact with nature inside and sort of Muybridgian blog, or a Say, like a drop from this cup added outside himself.” Lamoureux accomplishes this B Y A L A N gnomic biography which merely from some other cup which is no longer our friend. by filtering experience through a colloquial, lists the cities one has lived in? anonymous “you” (“try to walk when you have But this is a false opposition RAM Ó N C L I N T O N But continuing to wave the broom at darkness. no legs”) reanimating this anonymous pronoun Heath since, for Lin, all inscription is as placeholder for, alternately, the star being Tan Lin infinitely variegated yet also part We re-live the feel the cool the air the park addressed, a beloved, a reader, and the Zaesterle Press of the Heath, which is equally sliding over the stone wall, for it is night speaker himself, where “up in/ your throat the y autographed copy of Heath, which everywhere and nowhere. The god/ hovers.” At any given moment it’s difficult was addressed to me and sent through “Disco” Operating System is this and sweating through the last year of life. the discern the direction of address, “No words Mthe mail even though I have never met “disco but what I mean by this This quiet, distilled by a sudden honk, for the speech in/ the light as it falls on you.” Tan Lin, is signed “Tan w. Heath.” I point this out is an orphanage in Australia drags its thick hair over our baldhead. Throughout the book, Lamoureux’s formal and because it deliberately places the authorship of or a homeless shelter club in conceptual ingenuity are a pleasure. Constantly the text, and authorship in general, in question. New York in the meat packing creating his own organic forms, he employs the What makes this question worth exploring in this district.” We all dance in this SCHWERVON’S new CD low blow out NOW on olive juice music! www.schwervon.com d.a. levy lives www.olivejuicemusic.com each month celebrating a renegade press Tues. July 28, 6:00 p.m., free P-Queue/Queue Books (Buffalo, N.Y.) • www.p-queue.org Readings from José Felipe Alvergue, Stephen Collis, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, and Stephanie Strickland, and collaborative poetic- visual arts projects from Mark Stephen Finein and Erica Lewis.

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