The Poetry Project december 2016 / january 2017 Issue #249 The Poetry Project december 2016 / January 2017 Issue #249 Director: Stacy Szymaszek Managing Director: Nicole Wallace Archivist: Will Edmiston Program Director: Simone White Archival Assistant: Marlan Sigelman Communications & Membership Coordinator: Laura Henriksen Bookkeeper: Carlos Estrada Newsletter Editor: Betsy Fagin Workshop/Master Class Leaders (Spring 2017): Lisa Jarnot, Reviews Editor: Sara Jane Stoner Pierre Joris, and Matvei Yankelevich Monday Night Readings Coordinator: Judah Rubin Box Office Staff: Micaela Foley, Cori Hutchinson, and Anna Wednesday Night Readings Coordinator: Simone White Kreienberg Friday Night Readings Coordinator: Ariel Goldberg Interns: Shelby Cook, Iris Dumaual, and Cori Hutchinson Friday Night Readings Assistant: Yanyi Luo Newsletter Consultant: Krystal Languell Volunteers Mehroon Alladin, Mel Elberg, Micaela Foley, Hadley Gitto, Jessica Gonzalez, Olivia Grayson, Cori Hutchinson, Raffi Kiureghian, Anna Kreienberg, Phoebe Lifton, Ashleigh Martin, Dave Morse, Batya Rosenblum, Isabelle Shallcross, Hannah Treasure, Viktorsha Uliyanova, and Shanxing Wang.

Board of Directors Camille Rankine (Chair), Katy Lederer (Vice-Chair), Carol Overby (Treasurer), and Kristine Hsu (Secretary), Todd Colby, Adam Fitzgerald, Boo Froebel, Erica Hunt,​ Jonathan Morrill, ​Elinor Nauen, Laura Nicoll, Purvi Shah, Jo Ann Wasserman, and David Wilk.

Friends Committee Brooke Alexander, Dianne Benson, Will Creeley, Raymond Foye, Michael Friedman, 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; New York Council for the Humanities; Poets & Writers, Inc.; Poets for the Planet Fund; The Robert D. Bielecki Foundation. *Anonymous Donors; Harold & Angela Appel; Russell Banks; Martin Beeler; Bill Berkson & Constance Lewallen; David Berrigan & Sarah Locke; Mei Mei Berssenbrugge & Richard Tuttle; Rosemary Carroll; Cassie Carter; Steve Clay; Todd Colby; Peggy DeCoursey; Don DeLillo & Barbara Bennet; Murial Dimen; Rackstraw Downes; Ruth Eisenberg; Stephen Facey; Raymond Foye; Mimi Gross; John S. Hall; Jane Dalrymple-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; 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 New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Contents

Letter from the Director 4

Notes from the Project 5

Paul Blackburn & an urban ecology of poetry by Marcella Durand 8

Art: George Schneeman 10

Poetry: Ari Banias 12

Calendar 16

Anselm Berrigan interview on interviews 18

Reviews 22

Community Letters 29

P u z z le 31

Cover image by George Schneeman

Untitled 1 (Heart Attack), 2005 Collage on cardboard 4 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (11.4 x 14 cm) Colby College Museum of Art Gift of Katie Schneeman, 2011.030

The artwork on page 10 is used by permission of Katie Schneeman and courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York.

2016-17 3 Letter from the Director

Hello Good People: it’s nearing the end of How the Marathon Works who have a longtime connection October as I write this, my annual letter to The Poetry Project and/or the about our annual gathering of 150 poets The Marathon is, of course, our signature Downtown arts scene (poetry, music, and performers, the 43rd New Year’s Day benefit event. Tremendous audience, film, dance, but poetry in particular); Marathon Benefit Reading. Or another volunteer, and artist support has made it poets who are actively participating time-marker is that the election is 14 days so. As an event, it exaggerates what we in the NYC literary arts scene by and 13 hours away. I’ve been following the want each reading during the season to giving readings, publishing books, political commentary of David Levi Strauss do— to provide a site of collective agency, organizing readings, editing journals, and somehow his insights have buoyed me and create a communal and generative etc.; and/or performers who have never enough to expect a decisive Trump loss on space for the audience and the poet to participated in a Marathon before. November 8th. I can’t help but think of this experience new work. The Project receives Marathon, no matter who our next President many requests to perform in the Marathon, • Each year we feature 30 to 50 first- is, as an opportunity for communal and we feel fortunate that so many people timers, which means that many who remembering, in the sense evoked by this want to help us meet our fundraising goals. performed in prior years aren’t going to passage from Alice Notley: We only have 150 spots and a seemingly be able to participate again. If you are unlimited artistic community to draw from. invited one year, it doesn’t mean that Poetry Here is some basic information about our you will get invited every year. This is It is the Human difference selection process. not to be taken personally! Though we’ve forgotten But we are poets • The Marathon is a curated event, i.e. • Lastly, reading is just one way of We must not forget That we are poets not run open-reading style where participating in the event. There Ever again people can sign up. Invitations are volunteer opportunities (about are issued by our Programming 100 are needed) to help sell books, from Close to me & Closer… (The Committee, which is comprised of food and drink, assist in checking in Language of Heaven) Poetry Project staff, a few board readers, etc. We deeply appreciate your members, plus all of our series support and your understanding of the A high goal for the Marathon is to make the coordinators. effort it takes to present this feat of a “Human Difference.” I hope you will join fundraiser. for what will surely be a historic Marathon • The final schedule consists of during our 50th Anniversary celebration! people who are in one or both of the –Stacy Szymaszek following broad categories: performers

GIANT NIGHT: THE POETRY PROJECT AT 50

This season marks the 50th Anniversary of The Poetry Project! While we are approaching the entire 2016-17 season as a giant celebration, “Giant Night” is a platform of 7 events that are retrospective, yet encourage us all to future-think our way into new lineages, pedagogies, and ways of seeing.

Winter and Spring platform events are: December 14: UMBRA: A Living Archive, March 1: The Omniscient Tape Recorder, Part 2, and March 6: Learning at the Project. The celebration will culminate with a gala in late April to honor poet and former Project Artistic Director Anne Waldman, whose first book title Giant Night we have borrowed in homage. Look to the next issue of the Newsletter for details, and be sure to tune in to all late-breaking news by signing up for our weekly e-blast on our home page at www.poetryproject.org.

UMBRA: A LIVING ARCHIVE

UMBRA was both a literary collective and literary magazine founded by Black writers and artists living in New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1960s, many of whom participated in proto-Project readings and influenced the formation of The Poetry Project. Scholar Tonya Foster joins The Poetry Project in celebrating the work of UMBRA poets. This evening traces the influence of Lorenzo Thomas, Calvin Hernton, Norman Pritchard and David Henderson on younger poets and artists they influenced, locating UMBRA’s history in print and in person, past and present. With Tonya Foster, David Henderson, Ammiel Alcalay, Genji Amino, Jace Clayton and others TBA.

Spring platform events are: March 1: The Omniscient Tape Recorder, Part 2, and March 6: Learning at the Project. The celebration will culminate with a gala on April 27 to honor poet and former Project Artistic Director Anne Waldman, whose first book title Giant Night we have borrowed in homage. Look to the next issue of the Newsletter for details, and be sure to tune in to all late-breaking news by signing up for our weekly e-blast on our home page at www.poetryproject.org.

4 Winter Notes from the Project

David Antin (1932-2016)

We were greatly saddened to hear of the passing of poet, critic, and performance artist David Antin. There will be a memorial piece in the next issue of this publication. We were fortunate to host a remarkable talk by him in December 2014 where a main theme was living with Parkinson’s disease. The event was a launch for his book of selected talks, titled How Long Is the Present (University of New Mexico Press). You can listen to the audio from that night on The Poetry Project’s SoundCloud page at soundcloud.com/poetry-project-audio.

Emerge-Surface-Be Fellows Announced!

In this fourth year of the Emerge – Surface – Be Fellowship, we were thrilled and honored to receive so many applications. The range and depth of the work illuminated how exciting this moment is for poetry in New York City, and reaffirmed our commitment to supporting its emerging poets. Choosing three fellows and six finalists was an extremely challenging task for our mentors, but they did it! It’s an honor to announce that Jayson P. Smith will be working with John Godfrey, Sasha Smith will be working with Marcella Durand, and Nicole Shanté White will be working with r. erica doyle. The finalists are Desiree Bailey, Marina Blitshteyn, Marwa Helal, Justine el- Khazen, Christopher Soto, and Chloe Zimmerman. Congratulations to everyone!

End of the Year Appeal

The Poetry Project has been a public forum and home for the most restless and challenging creative minds of the past 50 years. We’re a scrappy arts organization run by poets. And we are proud that we’ve thrived on a shoestring budget with our core values intact: devotion to poetry as a way of life, supporting poets, inclusivity, curiosity, and community. By being subscribers, members, past-donors, readers, writers, and attendees, you have made it clear to us that you care about what we do, or we wouldn’t have survived for a half-century! Please consider making a tax-deductible end of the year donation by visiting poetryproject.org and clicking the blue donation button in the right hand corner, or sending a check to The Poetry Project, 131 E. 10th St. New York, NY 10003. Your gift will help the Project sustain its legacy, plan for the future, and nimbly respond to the present.

DONATE YOUR TIME OR YOUR THINGS TO MARATHON 43 DURING OUR BIG 5-0!

Feeling generous as the holiday season approacheth? Well, it’s the perfect time to let your generosity shine upon The Poetry Project! January 1, 2017 marks the 43rd year of our Annual New Year’s Day Marathon, which features approx. 12 hours of readings and performances by over 140 poets, dancers, musicians, and performers. All funds raised at our New Year’s Day Marathon go toward putting on The Poetry Project’s 65+ readings/events per season and— most importantly— to support the honoraria of the 130+ poets and performers who give us reason to host these events in the first place.

And where does your shining beam of generosity needeth most shine, you ask?

1. Volunteering. The Poetry Project staff needs your help— along with at least 119 others— to make sure our most prized, annual fundraiser runs smoothly, in order, and on time! Volunteer shifts are 2 hours in length and, in exchange for your time and hard work, you’ll receive free admission for the day.

2. Donations. We’d be ever grateful for any donation of beer, wine, and/or baked goods to keep the audiences going throughout the day. We’d also love to hear from publishers (big and small!) who’re interested in donating books and/or chapbooks to our well-browsed and shopped Parish Hall bookstore.

If you’d like to contribute in any way—as a volunteer, food, beverage, or book donor—please contact Laura Henriksen at LH@ poetryproject.org.

See you at the 43rd Marathon!

2016-17 5 The Poetry Project’s 50TH ANNIVERSARY PRINT PORTFOLIOS

The Poetry Project has published this limited edition (50) of portfolio of prints to celebrate our 50th Anniversary.

All prints are signed and numbered by the artists. Prints can be purchased as a full set for $1,000 or individually for $250.

All proceeds support The Poetry Project’s programs!

The launch event, co-presented with The Song Cave, will take place in the Parish Hall on Friday, November 11 at 8pm.

See our event calendar for details.

Frank O’Hara and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) at The Living Theater, 1959 Jonas Mekas C-print, signed & numbered edition of 50 9×14

Untitled, 2014 Teeth Dice, 1967 Mary Manning Simone Forti C-print, signed & numbered edition of 50 Archival pigment print, signed & To order email info@poetryproject. 9×14 numbered edition of 50 org, call 212-674-0910, or 9×14 visit poetryproject.org under “Publications” to order online. Untitled, 2015 Galaxy of Litter, 1989 Amy Sillman Cecilia Vicuna Archival pigment print, signed & C-print, signed & numbered edition of 50 numbered edition of 50 9×14 9×14

6 Winter December 2016 Master Class

WRITING TRANSLATION / TRANSLATING WRITING Master Class with Pierre Joris 1 Session | Tuesday, 12/6 6-9PM Location: Neighborhood Preservation Center (232 E 11th St, New York, NY 10003)

This masterclass work- & talk-shop —Writing Translation / Translating Writing — probes our approach to “creative’ (qua “original”) writing by inverting the traditional relationship of original text & translated copy, thus re-inscribing the activity of translation as core process of the act of writing. While starting as a public conversation, students will soon be simultaneously involved with writing & with translation from a language of their choice into English in a range of forms proposed by their own practice & cultural background.

Poet, translator, essayist and anthologist Pierre Joris has published some 50 books, most recently, Barzakh: Poems 2000–2012; and Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 and 2: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. He lives and works in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte. They are currently at work on Talvera: A Millennium of Occitan Poetry (Poems for the Millennium, vol.6).

Spring 2017 Workshops

CONTROVERSIES IN POETRY: ZAUM — BEYONSENSE, TRANS-SENSE POETRY, TRANS- LEGISLATING THE WORD AND THE WORLD RATIONAL LANGUAGE LEARNING FROM TRANS POETS Workshop with Lisa Jarnot Workshop with Matvei Yankelevich 10 Sessions | Saturdays, 2-4PM | Begins 2/4 5 Sessions | Tuesdays, 7-9PM | Begins 2/7 Location: Neighborhood Preservation Center (232 E 11th St, New York, Location: Neighborhood Preservation Center (232 E 11th St, New York, NY 10003) NY 10003)

Are poets unacknowledged legislators? Does poetry make nothing The Russian Futurists posed a utopian project for poetry to happen? Should poets be picking roses or agitating on the front overcome linguistic barriers through a new language of personal line? These are the questions we grapple with as we dip into the and indeterminate meaning. What can we hear, learn, and write long history of poetical warfare (Catullus’s invectives, Ezra Pound’s from reading foreign voices trans-rationally? Can the zaum part of World War II radio speeches, Ed Sanders and the Investigative a text (the untranslatable) be translated, and if so, how? Translation Poetry Group’s The Party: A Chronological Perspective on a also attempts to overcome the boundaries of time, nation, linguistic Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn’s difference. By revealing our biases, prejudices, received literary “Rolling Stock: A Chronicle of the 80s”, Kevin Killian’s “Activism, notions, Translation — as process, procedure, and metaphor — Gay Poetry, AIDS in the 1980s”, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and calls on us to make crucial aesthetic and political choices, thus Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Vanessa Place’s “Miss Scarlett,” CA recuperating our volition and agency in the encounter with the Conrad’s “From Whitman to Walmart,” Kenneth Goldsmith’s authority(ies) present in any given text. Through a wide range of performance of Michael Brown’s body, Cathy Park Hong’s “There’s zaum practices we'll explore the generative aspects of translation a New Movement in American Poetry…” and more). We will and "mis-translation": how translating might open up new reserves observe, analyze, and see what it’s all about. We will also write of language for us to mine; how it might loosen our grip on our poems, invectives, rants, and well-reasoned arguments inspired by own "voice" and let in others; how our own language might affect our readings and discussions. our encounter with a foreign or faraway voice. We'll examine several zones of freedom and choice available to the translator as Lisa Jarnot is a gardener, homeschooling mom, and author of agent, far from a silent medium for a text, and we'll experiment several books of poetry and a biography of Robert Duncan. She with homophonic translation, revelatory redactions, variations on lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her husband and daughter. a theme, and devious deviations, translating against contemporary taboos with wild interpretations and trans-creations.

Knowledge of a foreign language is not required. Some reading of exemplary and theoretical texts will be assigned.

Matvei Yankelevich's books include the long poem Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), a poetry collection, Alpha Donut (United Artists), and a novella in fragments, Boris by the Sea (Octopus). His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook), and (with Eugene Ostashevsky) Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received the 2014 National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse, and teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

2016-17 7 Paul Blackburn & an urban ecology of poetry

As a city kid, as an early and been seen, in many extending written at the barest point unattractive spaces, the devoted ecological activist, forms, in cities and colonies and of the year? Just outside spandrels thrown off by urban and as a poet at first it was in an international system as a the Brooklyn Botanic [the development and existence, the difficult for me to see how to whole. It then does not surprise correct title] Gardens, already backyards, the “barren, littered me that the complaints in Convent write, particularly with ecology Garden [or Brooklyn or the East a precious and artificially embankments.” He is “grateful” in mind, into the human Village...] echo the complaints of constructed space, are that “men tend you” (again, environments with which I the commoners, since the forces people burning the remnants in interesting contrast to the was most familiar. Freighted of improvement and development, of everything spun off by manicured space of the Botanic by the traditional binaries of in those specific forms—an the “system,” revealing the Garden), “still will rake your city/country, nature/human, amalgam of financial and political reality of what we leave strange leaves, your strange civilization/wilderness, I wasn’t power which is pursuing different behind, what we add to our leavings.” initially able to apprehend, ends from those of any local environment, how we truly The spaces where the city community, but which has its own explore or articulate the and specific internal rationale— organize our spaces, which falls apart into abandonment complex values, poetically or are in a fundamental sense includes abandonment, neglect, is where natural systems ecologically, of city spaces. The similar, as phases of capitalist mountains of garbage, plastic may today operate most idea that the city— with all its enterprise. (pg. 292) bottles spinning endlessly in the powerfully— like Chernobyl, humans and all their various ocean, gleaning. where the worst of human negotiations— might actually activity has led to a resurgence be as much an ecosystem as So, I’ll move from there, And then, I hear echoes of of animal life, or for a more any other ecosystem was, holding Williams in mind, Shelley (from “Julian and gentle example, the Gowanus has been and still is very toward Blackburn’s poem, Maddalo”): I love all waste / Canal, where one may see controversial. That’s where Paul “Meditation on the BMT,” And solitary places, where we alongside asphalt crumbling Blackburn in his innovation in which Blackburn seems taste / The pleasure of believing into rainbow-sheened water of form and subject— the city almost to respond directly what we see / Is boundless, as scented with benzene, egrets, and the details of such— was to Williams’ perceptions we wish our souls to be.” osprey, and the shapes of fish a huge influence in my own of the city’s formidable under the murk. But that’s development of an urban “forces of improvement and Blackburn too I think saw not to ignore the species ecopoetics. development.” I’ll read the first in waste a different sort of who continually shadow our two stanzas: insight into why humans are so existences, driving us crazy These ideas aren’t completely very alienated from our own in their symbiotic reflective new, of course, and for environments. “Poor Brooklyn behaviors— the rats, feral cats, Here, at the beginning of the centuries, humanity has been new season soil” he laments, cockroaches, mosquitoes, ticks, trying to separate itself (very before the new leaves burgeon, deer, and coyotes. problematically) from where on poor american earth we came from and where we either side of the Eastern Parkway poor sickening houses At this point, some are now. Raymond Williams, station poor hurricanes of streets, both conservationists may likely in his great book, The Country near the your subterranean and your public think how crazy I am to find lives go on and the City, aptly identifies the Botanical Gardens ecological value in the detritus anyhow, beneath pastoral as a forever vanishing they burn trash on the of industrialized existence, embankments, laying refuse that is a refusal, with point, each pastoral poem barer than ever our sad, civilised alienated, uneasy, un- but “Meditation on the BMT” referring to other pastoral poem refuse. reflective citizens, who will be is such a clear-eyed capture just preceding— never quite in less un- of human/nature at its basest/ the here and now, but rather a 1 coffee can without a lid happy, more contented and vacant, barest: to pee against a crappy looking back, a reaching behind 1 empty pint of White Star, the if they wall. If we can identify it, and in what turns out to be after all label relieve their bladders against some articulate it, then perhaps we crappy wall or other. a deeply conservative poetic faded by rain can accommodate and work mode. Williams also identifies around/against that bare winter 1 empty beer-can In that stanza is a world of the city as not much more than 2 empty Schenley bottles urination against a neglected a capitalist space of acquisition complexities— almost the wall surrounded by waste. 1 empty condom, seen from entire history in microcosm and transaction: Direct quote: 1 nearly empty train This too is part of nature, empty of American inhabitance, the more perhaps than the botanic I am then very willing to see uneasy citizens who need garden requiring constant the city as capitalism, as so after all solitude, abandoned pruning, pesticides and mowing many now do, if I can say also empty spaces— the “crappy wall” just a few blocks away— where that this mode of production (and I don’t think I’ve ever one has to pay to enter and began, specifically, in the English seen a more stunning use where peeing outside is most rural economy, and produced, empty of “crappy”)— on which to definitely prohibited. there, many of the characteristic Repeated often enough, perform natural functions, and effects—increases of production, even the word looks funny. within whose refuse is a deep physical reordering of a totally Blackburn was so very good available world, displacement of refusal. Even more, Blackburn at those juxtapositions, at customary settlements, a human does not condemn, instead he weaving deep history and How many contrasts are held remnant and force which became ays, in ode-like form, O I love profundity, held within poetic a proletariat— which have since within these two stanzas you, to these conventionally

8 Winter Marcella Durand form that, while innovative, secretly, green sprouting CAT-933 Originally delivered as a talk joins content just organically shamelessly in Oregon 6- on September 26, 2016, at In.On. enough not to outweigh this winter, making a Or About the Premises: A park in my kitchen, making the clarity of Blackburn’s Here was an urban phenomenon Celebration of the Work of Paul spring for a moment in apprehensions. my kitchen I observed almost every day— Blackburn hosted by The Poetry a crane shoving the dirt of Project at St. Mark’s Church “Meditation on the BMT” that, instead of eating Manhattan island around— but and Lost & Found: The CUNY is one poem that I chose to him what to make of that? Before Poetics Document Initiative. discuss with an ecological I have watched reading “The Watchers,” or Many thanks to the organizers, sensibility, but over and over him grow “Meditation on the BMT,” how moderator Stacy Szymaszek and Blackburn’s acute perceptions could I have understood how my fellow participants, George of life even within the most Or a larger poem like “The to understand that dirt, which I Economou, David Henderson, interior of spaces is evident in, Watchers,” where he situates had hardly even known actually Basil King, Carolee Schneeman, for example, a smaller poem a Civetta Link-Belt within a existed under all the concrete, Simon Smith and Robert Vas like “The Routine” where he continuum of human history. as something to write into— Dias. chronicles the green shoots of Again, like the word “crappy,” that the dirt I saw was actually an onion within his refrigerator this seemingly unpoetic object the grains of so much that had ripping up the street becomes occurred right up to this point, Marcella Durand’s chapbook, Each day I open my an indelible element of a all the plants, trees, people, Rays of the Shadow, a collection cupboard great poem that reworks form dust, trash, waste that had gone of interlinked poems based on & the green shoots of my into a page-space that can ahead of me standing there, the alexandrine, is forthcoming last onion accommodate a much fuller watching that crane shove that this Feburary from Tent Editions. have in the dark grown spectrum of civic experiences. dirt around as part of the larger higher Another chapbook, The Garden process of forever rebuilding the of M, is currently being translated city and watching it fall down A perverse & earth / debris / & by Olivier Brossard into French fairly final pleasure schist, the stud/stuff of the island/ again. And what is more natural and will be published in that I love to watch him is moved by this than that process? December by Joca Seria Editions. stretching himself PASCO

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2016-17 9 10 Winter The art work of George Schneeman (1934-2009) was shown at the Fischbach Gallery, Holly Solomon Gallery, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Istituo Italiano di Cultura, the Pavel Zoubok Gallery and at numerous museums in the U.S. and Europe. It graces the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Colby College Gallery of Art, among others.

Recently Poets House mounted a large exhibition of his collaborative work with poets. Schneeman was a friend of the downtown arts community and The Poetry Project for more than 40 years, and his art was frequently featured on the cover of this publication, as well as many Project flyers and posters.

During this 50th Anniversary year, the Project continues to remember and celebrate George Schneeman’s spirit, art and grace. You can view his work at georgeschneeman.com.

2016-17 11 Poetry

V I VA R I U M

The chameleons look like miniature robots made of paper.

I wait for my phone to light up.

You said you were moving somewhere very far from here.

Rain tormented, irregularly, some thin sheet of metal just outside the window;

a beginner practicing snare drum.

Something again about waiting.

What motherfucker is it

hangs on my shoulders from the inside, kicking my ribs.

Rugs in the living rooms of the houses I visited

as a teenager, as a kid. A mom who insisted

we remove our shoes before stepping on the clear

plastic runners laid over cream-colored carpet.

Faces I will never see again, hideous sateen couches.

I must go slowly toward you

by going alongside you, you say.

Later, there will be another word for this.

Not the black eyes of a snake

that looked in a direction that included me.

Not the white and yellow patterned body of a

python the circumference of my thigh.

White stickers slapped on the tanks read

proven male tailless females

The stippled scrotum of a pink gecko smushed against glass.

A man emerges from the back room with a giant lizard

clinging to him like a drowsy toddler.

Beside the register, three plastic bins of live mice

huddled in wood shavings.

When we drove along the coast, deer cropped

the grass “peacefully.” The sudden urge to hurl one of those

12 Winter Ari Banias enormous pythons at them. Inside me some holy and unaccountable force that cannot be detached entirely from its source.

One pillow under your head, two under mine; a lover who ruined Maryland, red sauce, certain songs; the brother you speak of seldom.

Sand dollar whose sand falls out slowly on the dresser.

Unrelenting grey of a highway underpass.

Shouted where no one listens, precisely because no one listens, that sort of privacy.

A turtle repeatedly butts its head scrambling against plexi that rattles like plastic dishware against itself.

Awake long after you’re asleep, I think the I is a ladder the self climbs out of its hole. One chameleon suspended by its spiral tail from a twig.

In the parking lot, a woman behind me won’t reverse to make room for me to reverse.

She wants to just sit here; fine, I can sit here.

For you I have thunder inside me for years.

Great willingness to bow into the wind and into the tremendous force of your palm.

The particular hollow metal note of your trunk when it slams with its extra clink a sound whose brokenness I will come to remember as I will the voice you use to show kindness to your nervous black dog

I walk alongside now.

2016-17 13 GAY BARS

| Best Friends Club | Hideaway | Chameleons | Just Us |

Somewhere in Time | There | The Edge | Nevermore

| Someplace Else | The Other Place | Utopia | Cell Block |

The Other Side | My Sister’s Room | Crossroads | Sugar Shack

| Lion’s Den | Stage Door | Maneuvers | Questions |

Tramps | Legends | Brothers | The Flame

| One Love | After Dark | Heads Up | Panic |

Buddies | Innuendo | In Between | Out of Bounds

| Backstreet | Masque | Wild Card | The Odds |

Club Detour | Vice Versa | Outskirts | Above and Beyond

| Uncle Elizabeth’s | Five Cent Decision | Chances R | The Park |

The Right Corner | Paradise Inn | Temptations | The Trapp

| Bambi’s Bottoms Up | Manhole | Charmers | Blendz |

Alias | Alibi’s | The Backdoor | Faces

| Touché | Temple | Nutbush | Club Try |

Monkey Business | The Closet | Hush on Congress | Why Not III

| Bubby and Sissy’s | Drama Club | Different Seasons | Oz |

The Eagle | SideKicks | A Man’s World | ‘Bout Time

| Equals | Exhale | Esquire | Exile |

R House | Ain’t Nobody’s Business | Heaven | Crazy Fox

14 Winter PUBLIC LIFE

The roses in the Bank of America parking lot clumped on a landscaped island spent heads nodding to the ongoing, know.

At the ATM the set of terms I hesitate at—

Empty Burger King bag I kick for no reason

People standing in the small blob of a locust tree’s midday shade

A dog barks because another dog barks

—I press agree to make go away.

Ari Banias is the author of the book Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016) and the chapbook What’s Personal is Being Here With All Of You (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). His poems appear in Boston Review, The Offing, Poetry, A Public Space, as part of the exhibition Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects, and elsewhere. Ari lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

“Gay Bars” is reprinted from Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016).

2016-17 15 Calendar of Events All events begin at 8pm unless otherwise noted. Admission $8/Students & Seniors $7/ Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, Members $5 or free. The Poetry Project is wheelchair accessible with assistance and and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. advance notice. For more detailed information about St. Mark’s and accessibility, He is a Callaloo Creative Writing fellow, visit poetryproject.org or call 212.674.0910. a writing fellow at Yale University, and a columnist for MTV News. His first FRI 12/2 WED 12/7 collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t A Semblance of Humor: Robert Glück & Luc Sante Worth Much, was released by Button Poetry Karen Davis, Cathy de la Cruz & Jes Tom Robert Glück is the author of eleven books, in 2016. Cathy de la Cruz is a filmmaker, performer including two novels, Margery Kempe and and writer born and raised in San Antonio, Jack the Modernist, a collection of stories, Texas. Currently she resides in New York Denny Smith, prose poems with Kathleen City where she teaches Creative Writing to Fraser, In Commemoration of the Visit, and, WED 12/14 kids and is also a Contributing Editor for most recently, Communal Nude: Collected GIANT NIGHT: UMBRA: a living archive Weird Sister, where she writes the column, Essays. UMBRA was both a literary collective “Funny Feminism.” Her first collection of and literary magazine founded by Black poetry, Libido is forthcoming from Spooky Luc Sante’s books include Low Life, writers and artists living in New York’s Girlfriend Press. Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Lower East Side in the early 1960s, many Darlings, and The Other Paris. He teaches of whom participated in proto-Project Karen Davis has been tearing up writing and the history of photography at readings and influenced the formation of backrooms and independent theaters for Bard. The Poetry Project. Scholar Tonya Foster years, lost count. It’s been a wild ride. joins The Poetry Project in celebrating the Short on rehab, long on self-doubt. Join work of UMBRA poets. This evening traces Karen for her first abbreviated set since last the influence of Lorenzo Thomas, Calvin Friday when she monologued at her latest FRI 12/9 Hernton, Norman Pritchard and David roommate, Tina Slatter, on proper bathroom Torkwase Dyson & Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts Henderson on younger poets and artists etiquette when you got a clogged drain and Torkwase Dyson has traveled to Africa and influenced, locating UMBRA’s history in no wire hangers in sight. South and Central America to participate print and in person, past and present. With with artists and activists on human Tonya Foster, David Henderson, Ammiel Jes Tom (they/them) is a weird queer stand- rights issues of natural resources, historic Alcalay, Genji Amino, Jace Clayton and up comic with but one goal: To hurt the visibility, and spatial equality. Dyson distills more. feelings of The Oppressor. Born & raised in the language of architecture and landscape San Francisco and now established in New architecture to generate an idiosyncratic York, Jes Tom is a fresh voice in stand-up language that is both meditative and comedy, gleefully providing the nonbinary structural. MON 12/19 queer Asian American radical cyborg Mare Liberum & Kaia Sand perspective that everyone never knew they Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is the author of Mare Liberum is a collective of visual wanted. “Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the artists, designers, and writers who formed Mecca of Black America”. She has received around a shared engagement with New grants and awards from Creative Capital, York’s waterways in 2007. The collective is the Whiting Foundation, the Rona Jaffe currently led by Jean Barberis, Ben Cohen, MON 12/5 Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. Dylan Gauthier, Sunita Prasad, Kendra Aziza Barnes & Marwa Helal Rhodes-Pitts organizes projects through Sullivan, and​ Stephan​ von Muehlen. More Aziza Barnes is blk & alive. Her first The Freedwomen’s Bureau. information at: http://www.thefreeseas.org.​ chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the This event is co-sponsored by the Kaia Sand is the author of A Tale of Exploding Pinecone Prize and published Belladonna* Collaborative. Chaplets by the Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost from Button Poetry. She is a poetry & readers will be for sale for $5 each. its Puff, Remember to Wave, interval, and non-fiction editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, a co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes Callaloo fellow and graduate from NYU’s of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member Space. She works across genres and media, of The Dance Cartel & the divine fabrics MON 12/12 dislodging poetry from the book into more collective. Sara Larsen & Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib unconventional contexts; she documents Sara Larsen is a poet living in Oakland, work at kaiasand.net. Marwa Helal’s poetry has appeared CA. Her previous book, All Revolutions or is forthcoming in Apogee Journal, Will Be Fabulous, was released by Printing Day One, The Offing, The Recluse and Press in 2014. Other chapbooks include Riot Winter Tangerine. She is the winner of Cops en Route to Troy (Little Red Leaves SUN 1/1 3pm—2am BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Textile Series), Merry Hell (Compline Press; The 43rd Annual New Year’s Day Marathon Prize, a Cave Canem fellow, a Brooklyn Materials Press), and The Hallucinated Benefit Reading Poets fellow, a mentor in the New York (Cannot Exist), among others. The New Year’s Day Marathon is the Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Project’s largest fundraiser and provides Program and received her MFA in Creative support for what we do best — serve Writing from the New School.

16 Winter as a public venue for the substantial thefool.us. Their current project, Support. Publishing titled Love, Diamond. Her presentation of innovative writing! FM, is a crowdfunding platform to help second solo exhibition “Elephant Memory” trans and gender nonconforming people in was at Ramiken Crucible (NY) September Featuring: Hanif Willis Abdurraqib, Jaye jail and detention raise money for bail and 18- October 16 on the Lower East Side. Bartell, Jennifer Bartlett, Jim Behrle, bond. They live in Los Angeles, where they Rijard Bergeron, Anselm Berrigan, Emily are developing Support.FM with Jodie. Brandt, Marie Buck, CAConrad, Chia-Lun Chang, Church of Betty, Cheryl Clarke, Cecilia Gentili has worked at the LGBT MON 1/30 Todd Colby, Lydia Cortes, Joey de Jesus, Center, Apicha CHC and currently serves Isabel Sobral Campos & Mary Walling Francesca DeMusz, Ted Dodson, Marcella as the Assistant Director of Public Affairs Blackburn with Che Chen Durand, Andrew Durbin, Will Edmiston, at GMHC. She was a contributor to Isabel Sobral Campos’ poetry has appeared Mel Elberg, Ernie Brooks with Peter Trans Bodies Trans Selves and is a board in Bone Bouquet, Gauss PDF, Horseless Zummo and Jeannine Otis, Betsy Fagin, member at Translatina Network. She is Press, and the Yalobusha Review. In Dia Felix, Jess Fiorini, Foamola, Tonya very passionate about advocating for her collaboration with Small Anchor Press, Foster, Ed Friedman, Hafiza Geter, John community, and mostly for transgender No, Dear recently published her debut Giorno, Che Gossett, Adjua Gargi Nzinga women with a Latino background, sex work chapbook, Material. She is the co-founder Greaves, Whit Griffin, Anna Gurton history, drug use and incarceration history. of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series Wachter, Lonely Christopher, Laura and Assistant Professor of Literature at Henriksen, Chanice Hughes Greenberg, Montana Tech of the University of Montana. Tony Iantosca, Baz King, Martha King, Ben Krusling, Rachel Levitsky, Phoebe WED 1/18 Mary Walling Blackburn works in New Lifton, Matt Longabucco, Brendan Lorber, Mike Lala & Lucy Ives York City. In 2016, the work handles Filip Marinovich, Shelley Marlow, Yvonne Mike Lala is the author of Exit Theater and is handled by optics (the lazy eye), Meier, Jonas Mekas, Sharon Mesmer, (2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected contaminated logics (diagrams), and politics Tracie Morris, Dave Morse, Eileen Myles, by Tyrone Williams) and a few chapbooks (the Miscreant Class). All is amputated/ Edgar Oliver, Dan Owen, Penny Arcade, including In the Gun Cabinet and Twenty- shaped by the Capitalocene. Walling Simon Pettet, Tommy Pico, Reno, Ariel Four Exits (A Closet Drama). www.mikelala. Blackburn’s work and writing have been Resnikoff, Bob Rosenthal, Sarah Schulman, com featured in Afterall, BOMB, Cabinet, Purvi Shah, Pamela Sneed, Patricia e-flux journal, Pastelegram, and Grafter’s Spears Jones, Sara Jane Stoner, Steven Lucy Ives is the author of five books Quarterly. Taylor, Nurit Tilles, Edwin Torres, Tony of poetry and prose, including The Towle, David Vogen, Asiya Wadud, Nicole Hermit (The Song Cave, 2016), a collection Che Chen plays guitar in the band 75 Wallace, Lewis Warsh, Simone White, of aphorisms, lists, dreams, and games. In Dollar Bill and makes sound with various Martha Wilson, Wendy Xu, Don Yorty, summer 2017, Penguin Press will publish instruments/things in other spontaneous Jenny Zhang, and more TBA. her first full-length novel, Impossible Views and ongoing configurations. He currently of the World, about the travails of a young runs the label, Black Pollen Press, which curator. has published works by Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros and Yoshi Wada. The label MON 1/9 will release composer Catherine Lamb’s Open Reading shade/gradient on LP in early 2017. Open readings have always been an integral FRI 1/27 part of The Poetry Project’s programming. Justin Allen & Diamond Stingily They provide a time and space for writers Justin Allen is a writer and performer of all levels of experience to test, fine tune, from Northern Virginia. He has written and work out their writing and reading for Mosaic Literary Magazine, The Studio styles in front of a supportive audience. Museum in Harlem’s Studio Blog, Lambda Sign-in at 7:45pm. Literary, and ARTS.BLACK among others. Since 2015 he has been performing in artist niv Acosta’s episodic work DISCOTROPIC. He lives in New York City. WED 1/11 Kenward Elmslie’s The Orchid Stories Diamond Stingily is a writer and artist The Song Cave presents a new edition of from Chicago, Illinois living in Brooklyn. Kenward Elmslie’s out-of-print masterpiece, Her journal from when she was eight years The Orchid Stories, with a night of readings old was published through Dominica from the book, featuring John Keene, Ann Lauterbach, Michael Silverblatt, and Anne Waldman. “HOW DO I GET A READING?”

Participation in all series is by invitation from the series coordinator. It helps to be familiar with the Project’s schedule and what the current series coordinators are interested in. FRI 1/13, 8:30PM While the series are curated, we are always CURIOUS. If you want to get our attention, mail Grace Dunham & Cecilia Gentili your books and poems to the office at 131 E. 10th St. NY, NY 10003 or email us at info@ Grace Dunham is a writer and prison abolition activist from New York City. Their poetryproject.com. Your email will be forwarded to the series coordinators. Coordinator first chapbook of poetry is available at appointments change every two years to ensure diversity of perspective.

2016-17 17 Anselm Berrigan interview about interviews

At the end or October, I met up with Anselm Berrigan to talk about the upcoming release of more people writing. And at WHAT IS POETRY? (JUST KIDDING, I KNOW YOU KNOW): INTERVIEWS FROM THE POETRY PROJECT the same time New York isn't NEWSLETTER (1983–2009) with Wave Books. Enjoy the resulting interview in the Newsletter affordable. Lower Manhattan about an anthology of Newsletter interviews! isn't at all affordable the same way. People aren't moving to this neighborhood and then Betsy Fagin: What is that? issue, so they were still coming. people like Akilah Oliver or going to the Poetry Project I'm fond of the interview as a Brenda Coultas, all of these because it's right there. There Anselm Berrigan: These are the form and I like interview books people who show up in the isn't the same kind of schism proofs of the interview book... I when they have a little bit of book, Edwin Torres. They're between uptown and downtown thought I would... obviously you life to them. I found out a lot sort of ready to tell things and that there used to be. There can't sit and read it, but I can... about my father from this book, to say things and they're not in isn't the same sense of class Talking in Tranquility which a position of being talked to so division that was worn less B: This is not the way I planned is a book of interviews with frequently in public that they've lightly from what I can tell. The this interview. Wait. This is cool. him that came out 7 or 8 years got a rap they've pre-prepared mid-80s is roughly the point at When is it going to be done? after he died – around the time or anything like that. And then which the Lower East Side gets that I started writing poems you do find out certain things. divided into the East Village A: We're working on and really thinking about the You find out that Ted Greenwald and the area below Houston, by permissions, photos, photo art more particularly –and and Lorenzo Thomas knew real estate forces, and people credits, some final permissions so there's this way that I've each other really well early on start getting priced out. Now for some of the interviews... always looked at interviews as a in the 60s, or you find out more there are more places to go to potential source for information particularly about the overlap have “community,” however B: You know what? I'm not from poets specifically. I between say UMBRA and the one chooses to define that. I going to look at this... If I just thought if we have enough good downtown scene and how that think it's a slippery term at this look it's going to eliminate my material we can make a book was filtered back and forth point. questions. that will be useful and show through certain individuals. a side of the Project's history And you find out how rowdy The thing about the interviews, A: It looks like it'll be ready to made of people talking, which and competitive the Project was there don't actually start go to print before the end of the is sort of what invented the in its early days. being longer interviews in the year and that we'll have copies Project in the first place. Newsletter until you get a few of back in January or February. B: In its early days. Not now? them in the 80s and they really Though it will be released B: I was reading through a lot kick in in the 90s. Earlier on officially in the spring, copies of the interviews yesterday and A: Not in the same way. People the Newsletter wasn't actually will be circulating and out and what struck me is that there are much more internal, or long enough for them, and I about in the early part of 2017. were a lot of moments that indirect, about their standards, think that people lived in such came through in the interviews and maybe not even aware they close proximity to one other B: Back to my first question... I where people were really might have them sometimes. that it maybe wasn't quite as hear you're doing an interview working out their poetics by necessary. book. Why are you doing it? Let talking to each other. What's B: I was wondering about me interview you about your interesting to me about that how the interviews reflect on B: And it came out really interview book. also is seeing what relationships the state of the Project also frequently at the beginning exist: ah, they knew each other, because looking through the didn't it? A: I was interested in doing they hung out and talked, I early interviews, at least what's this book back when I was didn't know. There's a question online, it was very intimate A: It came out – maybe it came Director of the Project in 2004- in there somewhere. – a really close scene where out a little more frequently at 05 actually. Back in 2004-05 people were together and knew the beginning, but when it was we put together a photocopy A: It's true. And that was one of each other and now maybe... a 4 page newsletter, when it of everything that had ever the things that was of interest What's your sense of that? I first started, I think it still came been in the Newsletter that to me too, starting with the fact feel like there's that thing that out every 2 months because was an interview or interview- that certain people who had we keep going back to that the it was about the calendar. like, because I wanted to see been around the Poetry Project Project was this site, a central Everything revolved around if there was a book there. My a long time had just never been site that helped make these the calendar and letting people suspicion was that there was, interviewed until they were relationships happen and helped know what was going to be and that even if it was unlikely interviewed in the Newsletter. people develop their craft and happening and then there was to get published any time soon Or had rarely been interviewed. their thinking about poetry this kind of bulletin board of it would be fun to put the and now? Now what is it? I'm notes, news, events, people manuscript together. I knew B: At all? curious about whether that still coming and going, things like that in the 90s there were a happens. that. If somebody left town, that lot of good interviews, and A: At all. Like John Godfrey was noted. at the time, Marcella Durand or David Henderson or Ted A: It’s like that still, to a degree, was editing the Newsletter and Greenwald. And then moving but there's all this other stuff One reason why it was putting an interview into every forward a generation or two, to consider. There are way interesting to me to put this

18 Winter book together is that when person is asking questions to things for different reasons. the book. you start to get the interviews direct the conversation or to The book begins with this in the 90s, particularly when give the person room to speak. interview which has been B: Why? Lisa Jarnot was editing the It's a conversation with an printed in a couple of places A: Because the book has a Newsletter circa 1996-98, the understanding that one person otherwise, which is Charles chronological order, but each interviewers are talking to may be going to do most of the North basically coming up interview is a self-contained specific people who've been talking, but that person has with a list of questions about piece. And there's a lot of around the Project for a number been invited to do so. And then New York, about the New circularity– things that get of years and getting them to there's the chemistry factor. York scene, about the Poetry referred to early on come back talk about both the present There has to be some fluidity Project a little bit, but about again, people come back again, and what's led them to the between the two people or poetry in New York in general the FBI comes up in funny present. That's when you get there has to be some tension at the time. It was originally ways... these interviews with David and that's actually interesting – for a British magazine and all with John, you get an interview that comes up in a of couple his questions were addressed B: That's funny. with Bernadette Mayer which cases. Most of the interviews to Paul Violi who I guess was is a second interview with her. are actually two people in a going to answer them, but then A: Ed Sanders had something to There had been one in the room talking to each other and the questions were actually so say about the FBI in relation to early 90s when the Bernadette I came to the conclusion that detailed they took care of the Allen Ginsberg and in relation Mayer Reader came out and I an interview like that, a live answers themselves, so Paul to the files kept on certain included both of them because interview, is a conversation that didn't have to do any work. people, himself included. Then they do different things. There's becomes writing. The problem That's a really nice piece, it sets Ron Padgett has something an interview with my mother with the email interviews, for the stage. It's also where the else to say about the FBI later around that time too. There's me, is that they're often two title of the book comes from: in relation to the research he an interesting interview with people writing to each other What is poetry (just kidding, I was doing when he was writing Victor Hernández Cruz that gets but working parallel to one know you know). That's a one his memoir of his father, who into aspects of his development another, constructing an affect of a kind piece, none of the was a bootlegger in Oklahoma in New York and how one could of conversation. other interviews are like that. while Ron was growing up. Ron become a poet by, in his case, requested his FBI file through coming over from Puerto Rico The interview book goes from But then early on there's the Freedom of Information and then dealing with English 1983 to 2009. I had to draw also this really fine, concise Act. At first they sent it to him and Spanish together and a line at 2009 even though interview of Paul Schmidt by with something like the vast working his way forward from there were some interesting Tim Dlugos. Paul Schmidt's majority of it redacted, and there. There's a lot of history things that came later. And I talking about his translations then he got them to release a in there, but it's live history, left out some other things that of Rimbaud and Khlebnikov in little more information. But it’s talked about in terms of a were very short just because advance of a reading he's going they did things like redact continuum that's always leading structurally they also didn't to give, and in a very short names of his family members, to and through now, and the quite hold up in the context space he works through some things he obviously already question of what are we doing of an interview book made of really interesting questions knew. It was silly. now. The interviews felt and relatively longer interviews. and details about translating, feel active to me. At that point Vicki Hudspith did this really and about translating difficult There are little bits like that but the Project is getting up to and great series of 16 super-short work in particular. I have a soft you also get a lot of glimpses past 30 years old, so there's phone-call interviews in the spot for that also. I quite like of the Project in the 60s, you been enough history for that late 70s and I tried to figure Ken Jordan's interviews with get them from different angles, to be a tangible part of the out what to do about them. I Bernadette and David Rattray. and you get some things that conversation on several levels thought they either all have I really like Dale Smith's move back into the 50s. There's without it being self-serving. to be printed together or they interview of Lorenzo Thomas. a really lovely silent interview can't go in. The problem is that There's a really great interview of Samuel Delaney, so he's B: What do you think makes a some of them are really terrific that Marcella does with Will interviewing himself, and good interview? Also, what's and then some of them are Alexander. It's possible that I'm he's talking about listening the difference between an not. Some are just so brief they gravitating to those right now, to Auden on the radio in the interview and a conversation, or don't go anywhere and a couple in answering the question, and 1950s as a kid and then using an interrogation? that I really wanted to work saying I don't have a favorite, that as a way to jump forward are slightly incoherent, but I because these interviews are and talk about some things A: That's a good question. I did think if they were all published of the type that may slightly that are current at the time of actually make a point of leaving together on the website that alter whatever one's idea of a the interview. So in my sense out most interviews that were would make a really interesting conventional interview in the the book has a shape that done via email – that kind of piece. There's this really weird context of the Poetry Project isn't exactly narrative, but interview that purports to be a moment where she calls up Newsletter might be. if you believe that narrative conversation, but is often just Robert Bly and he declares that can have a kind of circular two people sending long emails if plants could write poems B: Ah yes, I see. Tell me more. formation moving forward in back and forth to each other. I they'd write prose poems. How do you feel about that? a book that is an assemblage found that those did not hold And then what happened? of oral materials, I think it has up very well in the context of B: Do you have a favorite that. And in that sense can a book of interviews, most of interview in the book? A: Actually the funny thing is be read as a set of stories and which are two people in a room that “and then what happened” sub-stories that coincide with having a conversation and one A: No, it's too hard to say. I like is the problem in talking about history by adding to it and

2016-17 19 New Omnidawn Fall Poetry Molly Bendall Watchful 6” x 9” 80 pages 978-1-63243-021-2 $17.95 “A zoological refraction, Watchful asks how we see from within the structures we’ve built to separate ourselves from other animals.”—Cathy Wagner Elena Karina Byrne Squander 6” x 9” 80 pages 978-1-63243-022-9 $17.95 “This is Byrne’s deepest exploration of language yet; there’s no one writing like her and her voice is an essential one in American poetry.”—Victoria Chang Jennifer S. Cheng House A 6” x 9” 128 pages 978-1-63243-023-6 $17.95 One of Publishers Weekly’s fifty “books we predict will make a splash” “investigates the tones and textures of immigrant home-building by asking: how is the body inscribed with a cosmology of home, and vice versa?”—Publishers Weekly Jean Daive translated by Norma Cole White Decimal 5.5” x 7” Pocket Series 144 pages 978-1-63243-028-1 $11.95 “Cole has captured all the spare force and all the uncanny grace of Daive’s ground-breaking poetry in phrasing that renders the whole both immediate and inevitable.”—Cole Swensen Rebecca Gaydos Güera 6” x 9” 72 pages 978-1-63243-024-3 $17.95 One of Publishers______Weekly’s fifty “books we predict will make a splash” “Edgy, energized, and sexually frank, this debut collection explores identity, representation, and racial and gender exploitation through the image of the güera, Mexican slang for ‘white girl.’”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Robert Andrew Perez the field 5.5” x 7” Pocket Series 64 pages 978-1-63243-029-8 $11.95 One of Publishers Weekly’s fifty “books we predict will make a splash” “Perez’s debut addresses the perils of love in an age of persistent angst, or the virtues of love from a persistently anxious mind.”—Publishers Weekly Martha Ronk Ocular Proof 6” x 9” 80 pages 978-1-63243-025-0 $17.95 One of Publishers Weekly’s fifty “books we predict will make a splash” “Ronk’s ekphrastic pieces on black-and-white photographs wring insight from the smallest compositional details.”—Publishers Weekly John Wilkinson Ghost Nets 6” x 9” 120 pages 978-1-63243-026-7 $17.95 “As a long time admirer of John Wilkinson’s poetry, I cheer the arrival of Ghost Nets (his first US book). Wilkinson’s intelligence nettles, yet his compassion soothes.…—it’s a masterpiece!”—Jennifer Moxley For additional info visit: www.omnidawn.com

20 Winter messing with it and correcting collective history of the Poetry poets interviewing poets who Anselm Berrigan has been a it. And occasionally running Project. Because that's a history are 10, 20, 30 years older, volunteer, workshop leader, from it. that has a lot more instability and those gaps are where the Artistic Director, Monday night to it than the organization now questions are being directed series coordinator, Wednesday B: Is there anything else you gives off, in that it's 50 years old from, and that's part of the night series coordinator, want to say about the book or and has this sort of institutional reason why so many of the occasional secret random event about putting it together? quality to it which is both useful interviews are expansive in their organizer, reader, and audience and irritating. I guess that examination of things, or at member at and for The Poetry A: I'm only working with lends itself to a definition of least opening their arms widely Project. what went into the Newsletter. significance. to try to take on a number of I wasn't interested in subjects at once. Because these commissioning new interviews B: Standing the test of time are poets talking, they're going to go with it, I didn't want to – printing things in books... to take on a lot of subjects do that. I didn't want to create I think those stapled and anyway, they're mostly people material for the purposes of the mimeographed things were who’ve trained themselves to book. If the book was going pretty beautiful though. I like speak and move across an array to work, it needed to work in the quick and fast, I like that of materials. For a lot of these terms of what was already, what transient quality. It's not like folks, talking and conversation had already been made and that anymore, but it is. You was where ideas got put in play, happened for the Newsletter. know how the Newsletter gets where they got mapped out, It was necessary to honor the put together (laughs). It's the where things that are called constraint that is the printed same. I hope it has the same poetics now flowed through, Newsletter. Because the job of underlying energy... though it mostly took place in the Newsletter editor is a rather the poems. difficult one, for the most part, A: One thing that's very I was aware of how much work different now, generally In that sense the interview book goes into a single interview speaking, in my sense of is a way to get a little closer actually: reading, researching, “American poetry,” is people to what some of these writers thinking of questions, arranging are so much more accustomed were and are thinking about the time, getting to the place, to and dependent on different in relation to making their doing it, typing it up, editing it, notions of poetics, of having an work. For some people that's cutting things to fit the space, articulation for their work that's talking about composition going back and forth with the outside of their work or that's and for other people that's interviewee, all that... I want the alongside of their work or that talking about sources; for book to strike a certain balance they lead with before the work others that's talking about some between recognizing that all of can begin to breathe. So the combination of both. For some these materials come out of this rap about the work gets given a folks it's about moving over relatively small publication that certain kind of sanctity. here and talking about their has always been done on the life and talking about their fly and that has served a slowly, That's something that the earlier work and how that slides into steadily growing audience over waves of people who were allowing the writing to happen, the course of more than 30 around the Project regularly when it can happen. The way years. I think it's just over forty were suspicious of, were that John Godfrey talks about years. I think the first issue was against, or deemed academic. doing his very intense work in the early 70s. And it is academic, but you can as a nurse driving around the make a case that what's changed city in the 90s in particular, But then also recognizing that about experimental poetry in into the 00s, and maintaining taking the interviews out of the States over the last 20-25 his writing practice through the Newsletter and putting years is that it has become more this very intense schedule that them into a book makes for comfortable residing inside had him up at 4:00 or 5:00 in a different kind of reading of certain academic zones. I the morning on most days. experience and a different kind don't necessarily think that's That exists there. It doesn't of structure. That's why this entirely a negative, but I do exist anywhere else. He's not book is not a reflection of the think there are some problems going to sit down and write an Newsletter specifically so much there that haven't really been essay about it. Maybe he will as it is a gathering of voices that looked at very closely. A lot of someday, I don't know. John, were given room to speak in folks are very willing to stand I'm not trying to put any ideas the Newsletter originally, and on that ground of specialization into your head. But I can still do I think there's enough weight without examining it. this interview knowing that he there to make a certain kind is going to read it, which is nice, of book that has a number of And so it’s interesting, at that's a real thing about the different functions and an odd least to me, that the interview Poetry Project. singularity to it. There's a part book is largely a set of cross- of me that believes a book of generational conversations. It's B: Yes. interviews is the best way to not entirely that, but a lot of start to get inside the odder these interviews are younger

2016-17 21 Reviews

The Tortoise of History chosen accurately and, as when devotion he shares with his the endlessly Anselm Hollo riding a motorcycle, with the wife, Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, contradictory Coffee House Press, 2016 adequate amount of fear. He focus his attention on that human heart Review by John Godfrey is also movingly gentle, even which does not cause him sweet. He lived a domestic life indignation. for grand abstractions Anselm Hollo (1934-2013), with the woman he loved and Born in 1934: Hollo, Berrigan, Finnish born, assimilated wrote undomesticated poems. but She Who Must Be Obeyed Kyger, and also John Weiners American, won honor and He reasons in a few words. She Who Laughs at Your Jokes and Amiri Baraka. Dissidence, love from me for his long and He will not reason-out all the love them both as one revolt and bohemian deep body of work. His work way. His “precise non sequitur” as best you can alternatives were socially in particular, and that of his accustoms the reader to Hollo’s expensive risks in the 1950s. generation, has led to the synaptical completeness. (conclusion of “Wildly Tangled”) Study them for how they assimilation of new freedoms And inhabit their times, the better to that young writers might Dominant parts of Hollo’s this me years ago inhabit your own. presume without knowledge character are the elegiac and says the cigarette of their heritage. Anyone who the indignant. These effects has not yet surveyed his work, have power in proportion to lame old prick in the next seven days acquire how literate the poet is. In Hollo blurs into hills John Godfrey is the author the book under review and one they exude love of loving above, light has brushed of 14 collections of poetry, of the several, non-identical most of the time, the shit. That including The City Keeps: selected collections. Notes on means, for him, coming back poetic, what? Selected and New Poems 1966- the Possibilities and Attractions to his live surroundings, to the 2014 (Wave Books, May 2016). of Existence, selected from un poco cheek He has lived in the East Village of charms and puzzlements of best rest desert flame on Moss 1965-2000, is convenient. intentions, where sense and Manhattan since the 1960s. — Corvus (1995) and Rue Wilson compassion arise. Wisdom. or shyly dream Monday (1999) represent him inspiring tufts at his most rigorous mastery The Tortoise of History (2016) of ideas of the sonnet he contains poems of Hollo’s best drummer, remember LOOK furthered, inspired by his rigorous style and last, simpler (conclusion of “Broken Solmaz Sharif poetry brother, Ted Berrigan poems of intimacy. He is old, Flowers”) Graywolf Press, 2016 (born later in the same year). has been stricken and foresees Review by Sara Jane Stoner his death. In the end, looking Of the very brief mysteries: There is something naked Hollo writes in real time. His deep yields milder, laconic about the human cost, self-awareness and natural returns. There is a valedictory WHY NOT put the book mark value, and urgency of this mindfulness come into note. As a note of character, at the wrong page book—beyond the obvious focus when you read him indignation gives way to explanation that comes with chronologically. He believed gratitude. in his “one continuous poem.” Concrete, seed of an reckoning its subjects: war in anecdote, and metaphysically Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran; the One sees that for all his Standing apart to conclude the mischievous. American language of war; technical freedom, erudition book is “Hipponax, His Poems,” the interminable prosecution and rebellious mischief, the real collected only once before in a “Reading Joanne Kyger” is of individual and massive esprit of the continuum is the small edition in 1995. Hipponax a poem of sober sentiment. injustices in the name of commutation of his character, was a poet in Ephesus in mid (Kyger is surely his sister in the “war on terror”; death, as it is – it always seems to stay 6th century BCE, known by poesy.) Hollo desists from so many deaths, intimately “is” – into poems, in a hu- reputation as brilliantly impious jacking the poem up craftwise imagined; displacement; and manly precise way. Pound and and rude. Only fragments, in writerly vanity. But note how loss, of meaning, culture, and Williams taught him standards shreds of papyrus, remain of the last two lines, “on memory individual freedom. LOOK feels of clearly defined writing and the poems themselves. Hollo gardens/ in your brain,” reflect like a formal and substantial open-ended scholarship. He arranges the fragments in three back over the sober feeling with answer to so much poetry of learned freedoms of laying sets. They perfectly suit his cosmic spice and modesty. the present, particularly that the poem out, of meter, of the own proverb/aphorism/expletive which seeks to more literally patch construction of poems. manner (see Near Miss Haiku My favorite poem, “Rides engage the politics of war, He was predisposed to learn (1990 ) and the “Some Greeks” with Bob Creeley,” does the racism, and sexism: Sharif the vulnerability of digging section of Corvus). His preface Hollo migration masterfully: embodies the lyric with the deep. His is a Williams-like to the poems is scholarly and anecdote, admission to the kind of intelligence, feeling, and regimen: 1) Look deeply at full of his high-casual style. the natural world, without writing process, meditation, perspective that allows her to image, to “let’s get real.” This structurally wield a conceptual sentimentalizing it; 2) Look A third of the poems are short, poem includes: strategy and vocally extend deeply into your interior the migrations simpler, but with the individual’s experience to world, however saddening and the capacity to take the reader and the poem takes you a broader shared experience, conflicted the discoveries; and to enhanced complications. to a love of the kind wisdom while constantly pushing the 3): Report in words that are Intimate surroundings and the refuses to abandon

22 Winter end-goals of formal acuity or procedures and violence that imagistic beauty through and substantiate it, even as the beyond aesthetic satisfaction. poet works to torque or flay its meaning—laying out a kind of LOOK takes its title from exegesis of the conditions for New Publications a word lodged in the U.S. her experience of feeling. Here: Department of Defense’s detained by airport security Dictionary of Military and and subjected to a physical Associated Terms, a 5,900 search, the speaker’s heart SYMMETRIES: term volume that is accessible gone still, inactive, becomes online. The word “look” in this a mine designed to delay its THREE YEARS OF dictionary defines “a period detonation; her existence ART AND POETRY AT during which a mine circuit within the “American Dream” DOMINIQUE LÉVY is receptive of an influence.” is not “home,” but something 2016 The rhetoric of this definition with a classification that’s An anthology of complacently masks the reality been lowered, a version that’s poems for art that human beings, most lesser, incomplete, even legally frequently civilians, are the coercive to violence; her life “influences” that commence in this context, “satisfies as this “period,” which is actually drag,” which (working from the a murderous explosion. (N.B.: D.O.D.’s dictionary) is the force The U.S. remains absent of a phenomenal atmospheric from the list of signatories resistance to the force of an JOEL SHAPIRO on the most comprehensive explosion, but also reads as 2016 U.N. mine ban, known as the indicating this life as a kind Includes poems by Ottawa Treaty of 1997.) Sharif’s of imitative performance Ange Mlinko and wielding of this Department of supposing a fictitious “real.” Peter Cole Defense language throughout the book, set in small caps The layering of subjects, the and found as titles and poetic investigation of power within poems, constitutes a and experience through multiple conceptualism grounded, unlike interdiscursive meanings so many conceptual poetic makes these poems critical projects, in the consequences spaces for embodied thinking, of its abstraction. Redeployed exemplified by the title poem, in small caps throughout the as well as “Break Up” and book, these words operate like the long penultimate elegy to poetic fulcrums, interruptions, her uncle, “Personal Effects.” WILLEM DE KOONING retributions, and misfires as These poems are formal, but AND ZAO WOU-KI they are re-contextualized, entirely agile, spontaneous; 2017 redefined, and personalized, they are pointillistic in their Includes poems by meaningfully homed in material evocation of affect Cole Swensen and intimate relationships, spaces, and structurally sweeping in and encounters. Here, from their claims and revelations; Diane Ward “Deception Story”: they are recursive and effortful, returning to feel again, think After explaining what she again. In the language of official will touch, backs of the hands at or semi-official documents the breasts and Sharif assembles the rhetorical buttocks, the hand goes and material conditions of her inside my waistband and my heart Iranian-American identity, and goes dormant. more broadly, passive and A dead fish. The last active American complicity in female assist I decide to hit on. My the violent oppression of human life in the American beings near and far: Dream is a downgrade, Whereas it could take a mere draft as long as 16 seconds between of home. Correction: it satisfies the trigger pulled in Las as drag. Vegas and the Hellfire missile landing in Mazar-e-Sharif, Incorporating this both after which they will ask mundane and militarized Did we hit a child? No. A language into a poem about the dog. they will answer themselves self’s affect or “disposition,” The poems unfold and that self is shaped and defined draw through into critical by this language and the intersections of optics

2016-17 23 and politics, war and sustains herself through the Although I am interested in errors, it seems, shares something individual life. In her labor reading of these poems, perhaps it is more accurate to say profound with the shape of of looking, redefining, and through her repeated physical I wrote a book that failed–and not this book. Bhanu Kapil tackles re-contextualizing, Sharif engagement with and delivery in the interesting vulnerable way the novel form in Ban en that books sometimes fail–but in brings things closer together, of the grief, violence, anger, this other way –‘the way of the Banlieue and, through thematic linking mutual but different and lived knowledge that her species that isn’t registered or reverberations and a deliberate devastations, suturing together reading of them both demands described; that does not emerge.’ approach to structure, inflicts the violence’s effects on the and expresses. Sharif’s answer Ban’s corporeal message individual, their extended was, simply, “I can’t.” I am The semi-autobiographical in errors, failures, and family, the perpetrators of thinking about the power in speaker of Bhanu Kapil’s Ban fragmentation. that violence, performing this poet’s admission; that what en Banlieue forms a distinction the bending and hashing she brings to these poems in between “the interesting In the world of this work, the of time and space that I performance is unsustainable, vulnerable” variety of failure novel is a form and the body is believe is one of poetry’s though that word feels safe in and her speaker’s error-laden a form and both forms can fail. most important definitional comparison to her ongoing act struggle to cohere, register, A novel is an approach to story, powers. Concomitant with this of bravery and generosity in emerge through a novel-like and the writer fills its form with manipulation of time and space giving herself to what these vessel; this distance between sentences. In the case of Ban en is the shifting “you” of this poems contain, giving the artful vulnerability and the Banlieue, this project features book: a lover, present and lost; feeling to the grain of her desperate, passionate false- approach after approach to a beloved and/or mistrusted voice. In the poet’s admission, starts of the novel forms a the story, colored by a critical stranger; an interrogator; the and in her book, is the full central tension in Kapil’s book. intensity to capture, to register inhabitants of the replica truth that what these poems fully the essence of Ban among plantation home of America, describe cannot be escaped As a work that shares the the poetry of performance and with their white-soap-washed or survived—when so much necessity of hybrid forms autobiography, among real- hands, their circles of concertina contemporary poetry seems with Kapil’s previous books, world martyrs: Blair Peach, wire; an inmate of Guantánamo to function toward its own Ban en Banlieue meshes Nirbhaya. Writing, in its filling, named Salim, a reference to sustenance and extension, this poetry, fiction, performance, in its bulk, forms a body. How Salim Hamdan; an uncle killed book, in part, so fully desires autobiography, biography; does the living form of the by war; a reader, somewhat an end. beneath the breaks in narrative, novel, this “infantile bank,” fill equally anonymous and known; repetition, fragmentation, and itself? Kapil’s speaker describes anonymous veterans and Sara Jane Stoner is a writer, perspective shifts, we are told “a book that repeats a sentence casualties. Simultaneously, editor, and teacher working that this is the story of a brown until that sentence recuperates within this numerous “you,” we on her PhD at CUNY Graduate girl walking home from school its power to attract, or touch, read a complex brutality and Center, and her first book, in London, 1979, April, and in other sentences.” A form filling tenderness that sees to, and Experience in the Medium of the first moments of a race riot, itself through magnetism and implicates, something that tries Destruction, was nominated for a lies down on the ground. This momentum. Kapil’s speaker, to approach us all. Lambda award. is Ban. Ban, simultaneously, is accumulating, draws attention — also “looping the city… a warp to structural and thematic After I saw Sharif give a bone- of smoke” and “both dead and fragmentation and failure. hollowing reading at her launch Ban en Banlieue never living: the part, that is, Nevertheless, these breakdowns at the Asian American Writer’s Bhanu Kapil of life that is never given: an and misfires do justice to the Workshop in July, an audience Nightboat, 2015 existence.” The essence of Ban, spirit of Ban–we cannot fault member asked how the poet Review by Zoë Bodzas the speaker. Our impression of NEW FROM TRIPWIRE

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24 Winter Ban feels blurry but visceral and make Ban an amazing book. another’s power; it asks what to cultural images, so that a that seems right. I feel grateful that Kapil Muni home is in womanhood, when question about “the secrets of came anyway, as the color and one’s body may grow too much finches” might summon To Kill Structurally, Kapil builds a light that a novel contains. I one way, too little another, a Mockingbird when it follows tension between a meticulously transmit this light: to you. Can unsuitable for patriarchal this jury of white specters sectioned and subtitled you feel it? I am sending it right power’s standard of woman. above a groundhog. The women novel and the actuality of now!!!!” If Ban en Banlieue There is no place to return to who “squeeze through / the its fragmentation. At first, falls shy of complete portraiture when home, as assigned, is thin mirror of Hollywood” there is a semblance of an and embodiment, then this imagined against you. have “birds make gowns for outline-like backbone in the is one vibrant product of its them” (Cinderella) while also novel. However, the speaker’s efforts: an emission of light Sinclair’s preoccupation is “slurping at their cocktails for impassioned editorialization through the speaker’s voice, personified in the character the last scraps of pomegranate,” and tireless reworking a hotspot within a sprawl of of Caliban, a native islander likening glamorized, feminized soon challenge the readers’ glowing notes for a novel. In its and the son of a witch and the luxury to the fruit that brings expectation of story: there is accumulation of approaches, its devil in The Tempest. Caliban, Persephone captivity. overlap, there is repetition, repetitions and fragments, its whose words introduce three there is fragmentation, there network of image and theme, of the five sections of the Sinclair writes in the are non-linear skips between Ban en Banlieue suggests the book, is forced into slavery aforementioned essay that reality and surrealism, present, power of reincarnation, a new by Prospero, an exiled duke “being a woman was the past, and never. Here are the life possible in each enumerated of Milan. Caliban is both original site of exile.” The approaches, many of which the attempt at expression; though vengeful and privy to another speaker in poems like speaker labels “failures.” That we are told that this work is full description of his island, which “Elocution Lessons with Ms. said, the array of attempts also of errors, the body of the novel he calls an “isle full of noises,” Silverstone,” may be “that opens the reader to a collage- and the body of Ban leave their sometimes “a thousand girl too furred in dialect,” like interpretation, a productive full impression on the ground. twangling instruments” and, at differentiated from “the girls chaos, a cumulative but critical other times, voices. In an essay —b londe / and burning to a vision of disparate parts, as Zoë Bodzas studied creative for The Poetry Foundation, bitch-fever.” Language, too, is per the epigraph’s warning: writing and linguistics at “Gabble Like a Thing Most part of this exile, where high “One thing next to another Hamilton College and now lives Brutish,” Sinclair recounts school boys “hissed about / doesn’t mean they touch.” The in Brooklyn. how her preoccupation with your dick-sucking lips.” Sinclair disparate parts are true at the — Caliban emerged from a sense herself wields language with same time, without sharing a of likeness with his plight, that musical deftness to highlight skin, without a need for the Jamaica and her house growing what she wants, working cohesion of story. Cannibal up was “borrowed space, that through assonance and rhyme Safiya Sinclair [they] could never truly be to connect this vulgarity Is this a novel of failed University of Nebraska Press, [themselves] there.” between “hissed,” “dick,” and approaches or one of 2016 “lips” in that instance and “As resurrection? How can a body Review by Yanyi Luo Like Caliban, Sinclair’s speaker if. Fishlips” in another. Sinclair of writing effectively contain is forced to engage and uses phrase length and the the body (non-body) of Ban Cannibal begins with an respond to the imaginations of rhythm of words to the same and its precariousness? In a epigraph about its title: the American whiteness, patriarchy, effect, where the sibilance of collection of sentences that same historical root for the and Eurocentrism. Her lines “Virgin falling through / your do not touch, a late section of term “cannibal” also created are often rich with reference to silence // your sky impaled” is the novel ends with both an “Caribbean”— the Carib the images and logic systems jammed by the hard, stopped offering of failure: people of the West Indies, of those cultural powers. She sounds of “mouth a crooked I feel bad for you, having read whom Columbus imagined ate doesn’t name exactly what Valkyrie.” This music welcomes this far into the nothing that human flesh. This serves not she’s critiquing: rather, she uses the dialect of “wadder” and these notes are. / And must be. / as a reminder of West Indian images and metaphor to reveal “priddier”; this music calls Neutral. / Stupid. / Bland savagery but the history of its whole patterns of violence; she for the inventions of “bitch- and then bright, searing imagining. In Cannibal, Safiya builds arguments and likenesses fever” and “mastabatorium.” immolation: “Just as skin is Sinclair works inside and through amplifying associations Combined with her skill in bland and eases off the bone at against this imagination that with proximity. In “America the choosing images, the effect the least touch. / Or tongue. / others and oppresses whole Beautiful,” a black groundhog for the reader is a tightness Of flame.” populations. is asked to stand in judgment between melody and meaning. before twelve white men in The flame that “eases” bland The first poem of the dark cloaks. In the tradition of As the book captures these skin from the bone offers a collection, “Home,” speaks Groundhog Day, the groundhog many lenses of identities, it sense of the body’s ultimate longingly of remembering that is supposed to determine the is tempting to conclude that transience beyond the worldly, “wild conch-shell dialect, // beginning of spring by its Cannibal is therefore Sinclair’s imperfect mundane–an black apostrophe curled / tight actions, but in Sinclair’s version, personal lyric, a collection awareness that the answers on my tongue.” This longing, the groundhog is reduced to only possible through a careful may simply be inexpressible this homesickness, is not what mere performer under the white assemblage of individual in language. This “failure” you think. Home is not Jamaica. men who each ask a question experiences. Yet, what to explicitly communicate Home is not the body. Cannibal “for which they’ve long Cannibal reveals in its storm Ban’s essence in its entirety asks what home is in a colony, chosen an answer.” Sinclair is the imagination required necessitates a different channel: when one’s life is contingent on brings cultural images closer to exile someone else; that “I feel ashamed that I could not

2016-17 25 the mechanisms required to with precision long down nineteen poems full of the name, a clean holy name. This isolate and ensnare people in the page or broad across it. strangest birds, the wettest slim, dank work is charged an oppressive system might We touch these eight folded realms, the hypnotoxic villainy through with the arid and blur together and are not sheets, this supple card of ominous storybook rule. We spirit deadening electricity of quite different in how they covering gently slicked with have awoken from a dream full Leader — monstrous Leader exiled women, immigrants, a clamor of rainbow bodies of galliformic fowl acting so — a predator serene in the and colonized peoples from writhing up against one much like ourselves we wonder autonomy of his fascism. Here their own homes, though they more central, hydroponic, at the delineation of species we are in a muck distinct from are enacted differently. When and arboreal than the rest. — here where a conceptual our own ruinous zeitgeist; the speaker of “Home” was We catch glimpses of slight biomass of body and being where ours insists upon its struggling to remember and twin metals puncturing the promise and seem to smother perversions of justice and find home, she meant a place preciousing object at its core and obliterate previously known progress, no such concerned where she is truly free, not in order to hold it so and feel scientific classification. This hang-wringing strains the longing for the one that was at once that this work is fable. book is a world of dirt long telling of this world. We read given to her. “Home was a This work is fable, and we hope damp, of eggs like jewels. It is Sáma and sift tentatively place I carved out in my head,” perhaps it is also talisman, for a world of delicious confusions through the nourishing detritus Sinclair says in “Gabble Like a if the dire gloom of our own and frightening familiarities. offered in these pages, sift Thing Most Brutish,” “where disorienting reality can be It is a world where the erotic hungrily through the margins the words were always the right broken by a literary object, this chaos of some unknown of this fringe-borne place. Here words, where I could speak is just the sort of narrative gem intimacies reveal that be blood days, and a flimsy in English or patois, could through which the light of our we wanted to feast on / each hardness, and paws beginning formulate a song or a self.” Murderous Epoch of Rigorous other first wanted to put our own to thunder, and coins pressed Cannibal puts into poetic action Insanity is refracted and the / limbs in our bodies bite into our into your / temples & cheeks & elbows / and knees crack every Sinclair’s understanding of the story of our times made plain jaws. joint between our / teeth we were imagination as the first site of by the home Fable makes of hinged teetering / between upright Here we waft through the violence and the first site of the extremes to which we fear and indirect flight. bottom of a world and pledge freedom for the self. we are headed — extremes Here laughter is leather and anew to call upon its depth- our broken collective feels, yet titles often rest inside the works birthed gifts to guide us up Yanyi Luo is a poet and critic which we are still unable and to which they refer, sometimes out of the dungeon state We of based in Brooklyn, New York. unwilling to name in unison. skimming the surface 2016 CE must — for now — — So we hold Sáma’s creation sometimes calling out to us call home. With this work close — in heart in hand — as from deep within. Sáma has — in a textvoice “our” “candidates” “debate”. roiling with adjacencies — The Year We Turned Dragon We read and reread before and In these worlds, a concentricity cast the terror of context into Metta Sáma afterwards hoping perhaps this of crows envelopes a speaker’s intoxicating relief trusting us Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, dive into Sáma’s dreaming is community with diaphanous all to quest through a kin-like 2016 the one that will lift us out of wings. In these worlds, chaos of scarce punctuational Review by Adjua Gargi Nzinga these our poison veils. suddenly a voice tells us my markings and find our ways Greaves words once ink now pebble toward the urgent making Waking from The Year We and boulder roll from the of new — and honorable — Metta Sáma writes like a palette Turned Dragon (Yo-Yo Labs, page. From another voice we Lands. knife sunk sure into a vat of 2016) we stagger toward a learn Before Leader took me dreaming, the substance lain page of our own and try to into his / mouth I had my own Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves find a way to talk about these is an artist primarily concerned

nEw fRoM non-SEqUITUR RESTLESS conTInEnT wInnER of ThE 2014 LESLIE ScaLaPIno aja couchois Duncan awaRD foR InnovaTIvE woMEn PERfoRMancE wRITERS “The first thing to grow isn’t always Khadijah queen pretty,” writes Aja Couchois Duncan, but the teeth of survival go for exquisite “In this brief (as in a legal summation) jugulars in this debut collection: images of Khadijah Queen revives the political oceans below our skins, deserts swimming absurdist experimentalism of Adrienne in desire, and always, always, a vast and Kennedy, pushing drama to the limits of genre. Objects, ideas, frightening hunger. These poems hiss with life, the sharp edge and human body parts are driven to the same ontological plane, of alphabets that won’t be tamed. My heart almost can’t bear precisely the post-human condition in which we find ourselves: such precision; Duncan’s split tongue pierces the page. Such teetering at the boundaries of epistemology. —Tyrone Williams gratitude is a stunning gift. —Deborah A. Miranda December 2015 | $15 | ISBn: 978-1-933959-29-0 May 2016 | $15 | ISBn: 978-1-933959-19-1

www.LITMUSPRESS.oR g Distributed by Small Press Distribution: www.SPDBooKS.org

26 Winter with postcolonial ethnobotany of is not / I’m speaking of what existential reckoning. and provoke us, her readers, to working in the mediums of I know / not of time / but of all The book collects work from imagine a response worthy of scholarship, archival gesture, and instants / not of love / no / yes / the poet’s final decade, and her vision. language. no. concludes, hauntingly, with The poet describes scenes — lines she left written on the Matt Longabucco, a former of desire and loss from the blackboard where she often curator at the Poetry Project, is perspective of her inner space, composed her work. She writes, the author of the chapbooks The mostly concerned with how a “I want to go / nowhere if not / Sober Day (DoubleCross Press, Extracting the Stone of sense of self fills and empties, down into the depths.” Such are 2016) and Everybody Suffers: The Madness: Poems 1962-1972 builds toward meaning or her stark poetics. In the essay Selected Poems of Juan García Alejandra Pizarnik drifts toward the anonymity of cited above, she quotes André Madero (O’Clock Press, 2014). (trans. Yvette Siegert) creaturehood and death. Here’s Gide, who once watched Artaud — New Directions, 2016 all of “Daybreak”: Review by Matt Longabucco read poetry alongside a crowd left speechless by the event. Naked and dreaming of a solar One of those books you know night. / I’ve lain through animal Afterward, Gide wrote, is going to mean something days. / The wind and rain erased we felt ashamed to take up our to you the moment you pick it me / as they might a fire, or a places again in a world where up, as if it somehow emitted poem / written on a wall. comfort consists of compromise. a signal whose transmission Pizarnik, it’s clear, would like is powered by an unthinkably Elsewhere she writes, us to look up from her poems pure resolve. Another review I am not the one who speaks. It is with the same shamefaced of this volume praises its lack the wind, which makes me flail my recognition, and if she’s of an introduction, the better arms, which makes me think that occasionally playful (especially the chorus of chance, shaped by to allow long overdue English- in the latter parts of this book) this flailing, are words that come she is unrelenting in both her speaking readers to come to from myself. Pizarnik’s poetry without intensity and her insistence Language, as poets who pare that intensity is the mode of what the reviewer considers it down this severely often the distracting details of the our true existence. (In a rare notice, is an alien presence reference to contemporary poet’s biography attached. Too — it passes through us, and late — Pizarnik’s suicide at 36 culture, Pizarnik writes a poem our personalities are subject to another woman gripped by inevitably travels alongside her to its unpredictable action. work, and if we grant her the thanatos, Janis Joplin.) For her, This is especially visible in the it’s all or nothing, or rather, all agency she deserves, we must experience of madness, which deduce she wanted it that way. and nothing, the paradoxical appears repeatedly in these canceling of the self by its All her life she worshipped poems, as both a hollowing-out writers like Rimbaud, own longing and imaginative but also something requiring exertions. Again and again she Lautréamont, and Artaud, of violent removal (this book’s whom she claimed (in her 1965 takes interiority to its limit — title, one of Pizarnik’s, refers she appears to be both the “I” essay “The Incarnate Word”), to the medieval practice of These poets, and a few others, and the “you” here: are linked by having annulled — drilling into the skulls of or having tried to annul — the mental patients to relieve their A mournful vision, splintered, distance society imposes between symptoms, as memorably of a garden of broken statues. poetry and life. depicted by Hieronymus Bosch). Your bones ache on the brink of In poems of great nuance No wonder one of Pizarnik’s morning. You split open. I am recurring images is the doll, an warning you and I warned you. and force, Pizarnik records You disarm. I tell you and I told object that alternates between her lifelong obsession with, you. You undress. You divest. and questing towards, the uncanny animation and sudden You come undone. I had predicted utmost edges of invisibility and slackness. “Nothing more this. All of it dissolved, suddenly: extinction, places where those intense than the terror of losing no birth. You carry yourself off, imposed distances vanish and a your identity.” Then a hundred you overtake yourself. Only you voice may approach and expose pages later, “Nothing more know this jarring rhythm. Now the emptiness hidden near the dangerous than to need help for gathering your remains: you and actually get it.” Then I flip collect them one by one, and heart of speech. the great tedium, where to leave back to the beginning: “Help them. If I’d had it close at hand, I Pizarnik was a Russian Jewish me not to ask for help.” Poems would’ve traded in my soul to be immigrant born near Buenos written across years dramatize invisible. Drunk on myself, on Aires. While looking to her a running internal conversation music; drunk on poems and (why French heroes, she worked with all the resolutions and not just say it) the void of absence. beside and joined a generation reversals of Shakespearean In a ragged hymn, the tears rolled of Argentinian giants: Julio soliloquy, and the act of asking down my face. Why doesn’t for help — acceding to the anyone say anything? Why the Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, great silence? Silvina Ocampo. She traverses world others deem constant in exchange for their aid, or a spare and idiosyncratic Those last questions emerge refusing such consolation at landscape: from a tumultuous but a place / I didn’t say a space / I’m the risk of disintegration — is principled solitude to challenge speaking of what / I’m speaking one crucial hinge in Pizarnik’s

2016-17 27 Art: Katharine Betty (KB) Jones

KB Jones “Chair,” 12” x 12” watercolor on paper, 2015

Errata: apologies to KB Jones, whose “Chair” was poorly handled in the previous issue.

28 Winter Community Letters

As true now as it was when Ron Padgett wrote it in the first newsletter back in 1972, “Readers are invited to contribute information interesting, relevant or useful to poets and friends of poetry.” Share your news and views here by emailing [email protected].

This issue hosts notes from Corinne Fitzpatrick and Maureen Owen.

When trying to reconcile the disparately profound emotional responses to witnessing my dear friends’ city hall marriage on the morning of October 12, and learning of David Antin’s passing later that evening, I was comforted by thinking that David himself is exactly the writer to turn to. His mind could hold it all. I had no idea who he was when I signed up for his “Vis 111 - The Structure of Art” at UC San Diego, where he taught for more than twenty-five years. (As I recall it, every potential minor or major in Art and Art History had to get a B or higher in his five-times-a-week combo academic and studio course in order to enter the department; he was the gatekeeper.) His lectures were, as you might imagine, long, meandering, capacious— ricocheting across history and the news of the day and perhaps what he ate for dinner (and who was there, and what they talked about, and the drive home) the night before. I learned the foundations of art history that quarter, but more importantly I learned that knowing is at its finest when curious, tangential, hop-scotched, funny, extemporaneous. I have never taught a class without teaching David Antin’s work, because when I think about what I most want to pass along, and what I most want to revisit again and again, it always comes back to tuning.

-Corrine Fitzpatrick

2016-17 29 everyone has lost a memory

she pokes me as the altar boy hoists a long poled crucifix “look Jesus has a broken arm”

the snapped forearm swings rhythmically on it’s pinning

Marilyn Monroe never takes her gloves off through the whole performance the other singer has to do all the finger snapping

time to get out the thread the swishing of a detail veers perhaps our brains do all the guesswork winking

we see the nose and upper mouth piece of the iron war mask fastened with tiny latches shaped as doves

& know heat thick & soundless baffles the leaves but

the tree shades itself

for Bill Berkson 6/16/16 1939-2016

-Maureen Owen

30 Winter Word find

WORDS HIDDEN IN THIS PUZZLE ARE TAKEN FROM ARI BANIAS’ POEMS ON PAGES 12-15.

AGREE BROKENNESS CROSSROADS EQUALS EXHALE EXILE FLAME FORCE HEAVEN HIDEOUS HIGHWAY KINDNESS LEGENDS LOCUST MANHOLE PRIVACY PROVEN REASON ROBOTS ROSES SATEEN SELDOM TORMENTED UNRELENTING

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