Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (poems), Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (poems). He designs and publishes NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
Take a Saturday evening—or make a bookmark for tomorrow’s hangover—to read the new Collagist, featuring the Gabriels Blackwell and Durham; the four names of Mary Jo Firth Gillett; the three names of Tina May Hall, Emily Kendal Frey, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Alan Michael Parker; another Parker named Jeff, who’s called in to introduce that classic double punch of P’s, Mister Padgett Powell; and a bunch of other people who don’t fit into the moronic cleverness of the earlier clauses, including: Doug Ramspeck, Jennifer S. Cheng, Anna Clark, John Madera, Stacy Muszynski, and Angela Stubbs. Good stuff. Kudos to Matt Bell for another great issue!
Dreaming of writing a breezy pocketbook bestseller called HOW TO HAVE FUN WITH CONTEMPORARY NONSENSE, I had my dream thankfully interrupted by the discovery of the mighty Ron Padgett’s Creative Reading (1997), which is sort of a better, richer, funnier, and broader version of my idea, involving a lot less instances of the phrase “Derridian play as model for invisible friendship” (yeah, I know, sorry in advance, hypothetical sorry, snow sorry, slur saw reed) and a lot more about how strange and terrific all reading can be. And how meeting up with that fact makes you a better reader and enables you to have fun with all kinds of reading, even the nonsense. Best of all, Padgett’s book is available for free by clicking the link above. It includes lots of great, clear and easy-gaited strategies for messing around with the stuff you read, which makes it an ideal text for teaching and/or quoting in the presence of family members who have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, ever. It’s full of poems, tidbits, cut-ups, cool stuff. It’s basically about letting your mind be playful and less scared. Less scared of nonsense and of the nonsense at the root of language’s conceit, the ticklish arbitrariness of all abstract communication. Here is a blurb:
After a brief discussion of common reading errors that can be used creatively, the central chapter of the book, “Creative Reading Techniques,” suggests exercises that make reading an adventure, highly interactive, and imaginative, using both classic and modern literature in ways that blend reading and writing. Along the way, among other things, the book talks about the influence of typography, movies, and television on reading, the joys of misunderstanding, the music of Spike Jones, skywriting, Dada poetry, reading in dreams, the way words sound in the reader’s head, and the setting in which text is read.
There’s also an awesome appendix about skywriting. Tell me if this doesn’t remind you of anything:
Terrific new Sixth Finch. Alabaster, abandoned Cadillacs, a big fat flying snooze, white as a long sleep, a horse snow-starred with blood, and that’s just the first few. Plus great visual art. Check it out!
Way back in the comments on Danika Stegeman’s poem “Panacea,” a discussion started about “moves” in contemporary poetry, and I mentioned that I’d seen the poet Elisa Gabbert start pretty awesome discussions about “moves” on her own blog and on the Ploughshares blog. Then she posted the following comment: “Hi Mike, I have definitely talked about moves before, moves I like and moves I don’t like and my own signature moves, but haven’t made a real list, certainly not a comprehensive list, certainly not the DEFINITIVE list. Let me know if you want to collaborate on a list of moves for HTMLGiant.”
Well, I thought that sounded like a terrific idea. So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of “contemporary poetry,” the nebulousness of calling something a “move,” the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on, but hey: dancing is fraught with peril too, and no one’s managed to stop me from doing that. So here we go. 41 moves. With mildly related pictures! In no particular order! Please argue and add in the comments. Many thanks to Elisa Gabbert for the bulk of the work on this list.
Poeteevee is a new online poetry video series curated by A. Lee Abelson. First two readers are the magnificent CAConrad and the legendary Eileen Myles. Check it out.
Two handsome looking new full-lengths from Letter Machine Editions: Iowa, a crow-dark novel by Travis Nichols, and Texture Notes, a sort of glassblower’s cartographic adventure by Sawako Nakayasu. These are available together and right away at a discount. With these books and other books available or forthcoming from Anselm Berrigan, Renne Gladman, Farid Matuk, Sara Veglahn, John Yau, Julianna Leslie, Aaron Kunin and Peter Gizzi, Letter Machine Editions definitely looks like a smelter to watch. Here’s a random bit from Iowa to give you a zing:
The memories true or not against him seem to be turning to steam, as I turned, all the while thinking of chewing out alone eventually through the ghostly meats … Multiple murders of crows in the budding trees waiting to send the lilac sky to black, or every once in a while to bend remembrance gone on at the waist into coughing too long into the night.
From HOBART email:
Happy New Year one and all!
As is pretty much our way, we’re running a little late, but the January issue of Hobart web is online now. We’re kicking the year off strong, including:
* Fan Fiction in the voice of Kobe Bryant, by Karl Taro Greenfeld
* Sad, Sad, Sad, by Stace Budzko
* Three Stories, by Amy L. Clark
* The Turtle, by Matthew Lansburgh
and the first half of an interview with Laird Hunt, by Jim Ruland.Dig in and enjoy and thanks, as always!
http://hobartpulp.com/website/
Thanks to John Sakkis for the heads up. Click here for the full list of SPD’s Top Selling Poetry of 2009, and click after the break for the Top 20.
1 FACE by Sherman Alexie (Hanging Loose Press)
2 BREAKING POEMS by Suheir Hammad (Cypher Books)
3 ZAATARDIVA by Suheir Hammad (Cypher Books)
4 THE MAN SUIT by Zachary Schomburg (Black Ocean)
5 CLAMPDOWN by Jennifer Moxley (Flood Editions)
6 THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU by Frank Stanford (Lost Roads Publishers)
7 YOU ARE A LITTLE BIT HAPPIER THAN I AM by Tao Lin (Action Books)
8 RADI OS by Ronald Johnson (Flood Editions)
9 SCARY, NO SCARY by Zachary Schomburg (Black Ocean)
10 HUMANIMAL: A PROJECT FOR FUTURE CHILDREN by Bhanu Kapil (Kelsey Street Press)
Want to hear people read drunk sonnets and other things? Here are some places you can hear them soon on the West Coast:
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 21st: SEATTLE, WA
Daniel Bailey + Evelyn Hampton
7PM @ Pilot Books: 219 Broadway E, Seattle, WASUNDAY NOVEMBER 22nd: PORTLAND, OR
Daniel Bailey + Matthew Simmons + TBA
7PM @ Ampersand Books: 2916 NE Alberta St., Suite B, Portland, ORMONDAY NOVEMBER 23rd: ASHLAND, OR
EMERGENT FORMS: A 21st-CENTURY READING SERIES
Daniel Bailey + Lacey Hunter
7PM @ Bohemia Gallery: 552 ‘A’ St, Ashland, ORWEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 25th: OAKLAND, CA
Daniel Bailey + Chelsea Martin + Bucky Sinister + more
6PM @ Caldecott Office Space: 5251 Broadway, Oakland, CA
Via Boing Boing, here is an awesome photoessay by Russell Davies on playfulness originally delivered at the Playful conference in London. From the essay:
Everyday Pretending is something you do with a bit of your brain, with the edges. It’s a thing of inattention, not concentration. Compare, for example, the Theory Of Fun piano stairs with Greyworld’s tuned railings. The stairs thing is fun and it makes a point, but it would drive you mad after a while, there’s no subtlety to it, no joy in the discovery, nothing hidden, it’s all on the surface. It’s that totalising instinct of so many ‘brand’ people – make things obvious, make things clear. There’s a parallel in the maniacal world-building instinct of games people – leave no detail unturned, offer no escape from the vision … We don’t need many cues to help us pretend. We’ll find meaning in the noisiest noise – just give us a tiny signal and we’ll come up with a message.