Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. He is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader, Come Back Donald Barthelme, and co-editor (with Eva Talmadge) of The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. With Jeremy Schmall he makes The Agriculture Reader, a limited-edition arts annual. He lives in Brooklyn.
This just showed up in my in-box. I think it looks promising. I like that the focus is on critical discourse rather than “reviewing,” which all too frequently (esp. in Poetry Land) seems to exist merely to generate blurbs and perpetuate the general circle jerk. Not that I’m opposed to people going to bat for each other–but praise without analysis is worse than just intellectually bankrupt. It’s boring. This, on the other hand, looks as if it won’t be boring or intellectually bankrupt, and therefore, I am all too glad to tell you about it. Or, rather, to quote huge chunks of the press release at you, and thereby let it tell about itself:
ON
Contemporary Practice 1
ON Contemporary Practice gathers writing about the practices or poetics of one’s contemporaries. While these writings may be highly anti-categorical or “hybrid,” they are ultimately for the cultivation and extension of critical discourse.
ON primarily publishes essays on contemporaries that investigate a poetics or practice. It does not publish reviews of individual poems, chapbooks, performances, etc. It also does not publish poems. ON’s editors will consider all submissions but will not provide extensive editorial feedback toward publication.
ON is edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger. If you would like to submit to ON please write the editors at oncontemporaries@gmail.com. ON welcomes all unsolicited materials which pursue the below guidelines. For more about ON’s editorial positions, please see the first issue’s editorial, “For a Discourse”.
Contents of Issue #1:
Taylor Brady, Brandon Brown, CAConrad, Jason Christie, Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Eli Drabman, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Alan Gilbert, Brenda Iijima, Andrew Levy, Edric Mesmer, Sawako Nakayasu, Tenney Nathanson, Richard Owens, Tim Peterson, Andrew Rippeon, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Dale Smith, Suzanne Stein, Ali Warren, Katie Yeats
on
Arakawa/Gins, Taylor Brady, CAConrad, Michael Cross, Beverly Dahlen, Michael deBeyer, Mark Dickinson, kari edwards, DJ/Rupture, Thom Donovan, Belle Gironda, Brenda Iijima, CJ Martin, Emily McVarish, Yedda Morrison, Hoa Nguyen, Sawako Nakayasu, Julie Patton, Lauren Shufran, Suzanne Stein, Dana Ward, Ali Warren
Purchasing:
Small Press Distribution
1341 Seventh Street
Berkeley, CA 94710-1409
Tel. (800) 869-7553
www.spdbooks.org
published by:
Cuneiform Press
214 N. Henry Street
Brooklyn, NY 11222
www.cuneiformpress.com
Today at Dennis Cooper’s Den of Awesome, we learn all about the poet Steve Richmond.
Hey
Hey, I woke up today!
And there was the sun again
shooting in through the shades
and spearing me in the eye!
And the clock! Still alive!
and the rug was not on fire!
and the lawn! The trees! The gutter!
All there! Once again!
Today!
with ‘obama’ as president my writing will increase in viability, i believe
Happy Actually Having a Future Maybe, Instead of Definitely Being Totally Fucked!
Here’s one for the road-
A link to this blog turned up in my inbox this morning, with an attached note addressed to me and my little sister: >>This is my first cousin Arnold’s daughter. I never saw her. I do not know what this means. Can either of you explain it. You can tell me when you get here if you have no time now. Love, Grandma<<
Okay, let’s play the game. You’ve just woken up. You’ve clicked through and read the blog, and watched the video. You pretty much get what they’re up to (e.g. miscellaneous corporate nerd stuff). So……..keeping in mind that your goal here is not to snark your heart or out, sow confusion, or express derision, but rather to communicate just enough meaning to satisfy the person who asked the question……..H0W DO YOU EXPLAIN THIS TO GRANDMA?
Tao Lin has posted three short stories by Matthew Rohrer and reprinted a Tara Wray story from Pindeldyboz 3. Plus don’t forget R.B. Glaser’s modern classic: “Butt Teen,” which has been up since the site launched I think.
As much fun as this is to watch, it was even more fun to watch live.
(via Small Beer’s Gavin J. Grant at the Bookslut blog)
Sci-fi fantasy person Jeffrey Ford answers three questions at How to Write Stories About Writers:
About studying with John Gardner:
We didn’t bother with the Moral Fiction bullshit when he was teaching me, he was trying to show me how to edit and talking to me about irony and suspense and the things that make a good plot. I have somewhere a sheet of paper on which he wrote out for me the rules of the comma. He told me his theory of teaching writing, he said, “I can’t make you a writer, but I can show you some of the pitfalls and problems you’re going to face in writing and how to get around them. This is stuff that if you stuck with it you would probably learn, yourself, but I could save you five or ten years.
Yes, friends, there’s a new issue of NO: A Journal of the Arts out. It’s #7 and it’s–as mentioned above–awesome. The first poem in it is “Treatment,” a poem by Heather Christle, which I was lucky enough to hear HC read at The Lucky Cat in Brooklyn last Friday. There are collages by Keith Waldrop, printed in glorious full-color; excerpts from Richard Foreman’s notebooks (“I make things so that I will have to explain–to myself–what I have done.”); and new work from folks such as Rae Armantrout, Ann Lauterbach, Kate Colby (with what I think is an erasure of Thomas Hardy), Thalia Field, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, and many more besides.
Here’s a short poem by C.D. Wright from the issue-
Back Forty Poem
a barn held up by a pitchfork
surrounded by field on field
of wildflowers, butterflies,
cow pies, beyond which,
the snake-infested woods
the high-voltage fence
the big-stripe inmates
+
And here’s two lines from Ann Lauterbach’s “Ants in the Sugar (Blanchot/Mallarme)”
arousal from stupor lifting its head
to be silenced and to begin again
+
And now since I can’t find any of Waldrop’s collages from the issue online, here’s an entirely unrelated one that he did with Clark Coolidge-
Friends, here is the first of what I hope will be many and several “field reports” on the current state of Jeopardy! from my friend Danielle, who is the most incisive Jeopardy! watcher I know. Her socio-critical critique of Alex, the contestants, and everything else about the show is so dead-on and so consistenly furious, the only question you’re really ever left with is “why is she still watching something she hates this much?” The answer is simple: because Jeopardy! is one of the greatest television shows of all time. Danielle’s preferred forum for Jeopardy! studies is a live, collaborative environment resulting in a spontaneous, non-documented performance (that is to say: we sit on her couch, we watch Jeopardy! together and make fun of it, while trying to time our insults such that we can still keep pace with the game). Therefore, we are very lucky to have this record of her work.
“The Jeopardy! I’m Watching…”
…is like this bizarre, Lynchian masterpiece. Someone behind the scenes here was like “Hey how can I create some kind of embedded storyline that involves mining three nauseatingly awkward characters for all the pathos they’ve got” and his coworker was like “Well, we’ve got those contestants…” and the first guy said “Hey what if they had like a REALLY bad therapist?” and the coworker was all “I think I might have just the guy for the part…”and the past week or two have been like this long, dragged-out pilot episode of New Jeopardy! I mean, someone put these people out of their misery! Through some miracle they’ve managed to make it through the saddest life ever long enough to finally be on jeopardy, which is like at the very top of their list of stupendously compromised hopes and dreams, and then as soon as that first commercial break is over…POW! Sayonara LOSER! But the characters are like real weirdos. Not quite like Dennis Hopper wearing a gas mask weirdos, but not quite not like that kind either.
D.
