To(morrow)night in Manhattan (Athens, San Francisco)
Demosthenes Agrafiotis with John Sakkis
Wednesday, October 6 at 7:00 PM
at Poets House, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY
This evening marks Ugly Duckling Presse’s release of CHINESE NOTEBOOK by Greek poet and visual artist Demosthenes Agrafiotis. John Sakkis, one of Agrafiotis’s English-language translators, joins the poet for a performance and discussion.
Also featuring a screening of the short film “Chinese Notebook” by Michail Palaiologou and Demosthenes Agrafiotis.
Agrafiotis is visiting from Athens, Sakkis from San Francisco.
You can just get off at Chambers St.
Or hop in the car and head for 3B (below).
Of course, Anne Carson and David Shapiro are reading at the Poetry Project at the same time. Then again, you could always go to the Poetry Project this Friday for David Lau and Douglas Piccinnini.
Gabe Durham vs. The Internet
Ben Marcus Rhett Faber Gabe Durham on Jonathan Safran Foer Franzen the other Mary James Robison:
“The Time I Tried to Defend Jonathan Franzen on the Internet”
microtomorrow: walser & co @ triple canopy (177 livingston)
Robert Walser: The Microscripts, with Susan Bernofsky and Rivka Galchen
Saturday, May 22, 6 p.m.
177 Livingston (downtown Brooklyn)
$3 donation [unofficial rebate: free book from Walser & Co. if you go and comment below]
Walser biographer and translator [and writer and superhero] Susan Bernofsky teams up with writer Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances [and, in the May Harper's, "From the pencil zone: Robert Walser's masterworklets" (subscribe already]) to introduce stories from and about Walser’s enigmatic microscripts, late texts written on scraps of paper in a millimeter-scale hand, which will be published on May 25 by New Directions and Christine Burgin Gallery.
Stories, a trivia quiz with prizes [!], larger-than-life secret manuscript pictures [!!], and a German penmanship lesson [!!!].
Advance copies of Microscripts [hands up the most beautiful $25 book ever published: heavy paper, full color, plus they actually glued a live microscript to the front cover, tucked elegantly beneath the decoy jacket like so: READ MORE >
notnostrums ISSUE 4
Poems (and aphorisms) by 
and art throughout by Ben Estes which doesn’t rhyme with tees. Or DVDs:
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April 20th, 2010 / 4:02 pm
April 20th, 2010 / 4:02 pm
Barbaric AWP: WWWWD in Denver?
If I weren’t going to AWP–and I’m not–this is what Walt Whitman would do:
WEDNESDAY AHSAHTA / OMNIDAWN READING Michelle Taransky, Ben Doller, Elizabeth Robinson, Dan Beachy-Quick, Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover, Rusty Morrison, Bin Ramke, Gillian Conoley, Hank Lazer, Laura Moriarty, and others.
UPDATE (thanks to the great Kate Greenstreet): the AHSAHTA PRESS 35th Anniversary Reading (Sandra Doller, Brigitte Byrd, Kate Greenstreet, Brenda Iijima, Susan Tichy, Lance Phillips, Rachel Loden) is at 10:30 on THURSDAY 8:30: opening of the Book Fair: mad dash from the Agnes Fox Press (see Amy McDaniel’s chapbook, Selected Adult Lessons, above, and look for Phil Cordelli’s chapbook and a broadside by Hailey Higdon) / Invisible Ear / Skein / Minutes Books (Seth Landman’s The Wild Hawk the Sea will be there; Rachel Glaser’s Heroes Are So Long and Mark Leidner’s Willie will not) table to the Factory Hollow Press (new titles by Christopher DeWeese and Katie Perry as well as the Disco Praire Social Aid and Pleasure Club Antholgy, above center, which I predict will be by far the hit of the fair) / Notnostrums (When You Think Of It DVD!) / Pilot Books (Emily Pettit’s What Happened To Limbo) table. For Pettit’s HOW (Octopus Books), WW will go where everyone will, to the table of tables, Table X Commune (Belladonna, Canarium Books, The Cupboard, H_NGM_N, Forklift Ohio, Futurepoem, Leon Works, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press / Aufgabe, Lumberyard, Octopus Books, Poor Claudia, Sidebrow, Ugly Duckling Presse.)
[While they last, titles from The Song Cave (see below) and a few copies of the new artists' printing of Lewis Freedman's Catfish Po' Boys will be at the Factory Hollow/notnostrums/Pilot Books table.]
Two of the best panels promise to be in the opening time slot, 9-10:15. WW would probably go to The Networked Poetry Classroom. (Chris Hosea, Eric Baus, Dorothea Lasky, Mathias Svalina, Michelle Taransky. This panel will examine key issues at the intersection of 21st century technologies and age-old poetic concerns. We will consider how Wikis, blogs, social networking, Moodle, Google Docs, and podcasts are changing the way high school and college students are studying and writing poetry. What happens to assumptions about originality and authority when students collaborate? Can Web 2.0 technologies help students hack unfamiliar texts and forms?) tho he wishes the CLMP Panel—Face Out: Maximizing the Visibility of Emerging Writers. (E. Tracy Grinnell, Rachel Levitsky, Matvei Yankelevich, Rebecca Wolff. A discussion about how small presses present and market experimental work by emerging writers—work too often misunderstood as possessing the least market potential.) was at another time.
2 p.m. Dewclaw Issue 2 reading (Dorothea Lasky, Jen Tynes, Blake Butler, Mike Young, etc.)
Thursday night is truly barbaric (Wave/Canarium/UDP/Octopus, Historic Falcon, Tarpaulin Sky/etc ft. Gordon Massman(!), Action/Litmus/NightboatFC2, Horse Less/Lost Horse, Keyhole, Dogzpank) but WW would definitely go hear Jane Gregory (whose Some Books is going to take some storms by storm) et al at Samples: A reading from 9 poets (The Song Cave / Shearsman / Flim Forum / Woodland Editions / EtherDome Chapbooks / Instance Press represented by READ MORE >
About, Blue Books, Canopy Canopy Canopy
If only I’d read about HTMLGIANT, then I would have already known about Triple Canopy. I was about to ask why didn’t I know about Triple Canopy, and there it was: Catherine Laceyº recommends Triple Canopy. Catherine also recommends Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, one of the best blue books [some others are Benson's Blue Book, Gass' On Being Blue, Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks (and Max Richter's The Blue Notebooks), and Kharms' The Blue Notebook (not to be confused with Vvedensky's The Gray Notebook or Josep Pla's The Grey Notebook, which is green in German)] which is great because Joshua Cohen’s essay on Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian [to be confused with Russian, Midnight, etc] Blue just appeared in Triple Canopy 8, “Hue and Cry,” which also has Molly Springfield’s must-read Inside the Mundarium, from which the above image is taken. Up next, Lucy Ives‘ collage and prose poem Everglade: “A story in which I explain”
I’ll say it again: Triple Canopy, Triple Canopy, Triple Canopy.
ºThanks, Catherine! (I see you discovered The No School University of School; might I recommend The Elephant and Butter?)
“Time goes/Left and right and crushes things”: a belated coda to Natalie Lyalin Week
Today was a good day for poetry. [Today too: Heather Christle typed my favorite poem from P&HPH.) I had the pleasure of typing Natalie Lyalin's "All the Missing Children Go to Florida" in the comments section of last week's NLW: SUPERMACHINE post. A dwarf in a week shouldered by GIANTS (Amy, Blake), super Seths (Landman, Parker) and other guests (Erin McNellis' Noö review), my post shrank from showing and was tall on telling. Calling SUPERMACHINE Issue One "one of the best first issues of a journal I have read in a long time" was not overstatement, however, but its opposite. In fact, I would venture that most of my posts here (and elsewhere; indeed, most posts on many blogs anywhere) are marred by such short circuitry. I wish I were better at blogging, that I could rise to criticism and its callings (e.g. Justin Taylor on this blog and Matthew Zapruder on that one), but for now I will stick to telling what I like and save showing for another day. Here's something I like: Natalie Lyalin had poems in the last two debut issues of poetry journals that, like SUPERMACHINE, left me unable to suppress understatement, Model Homes (June 2007) and Invisible Ear (January 2008). Four more things I like about poetry today:- Wolf in a Field is back! "[Back to the basics of what we are saying, here are three poems by Tomaz Salamun. Translated by Michael Thomas Taren]“
- jubilat 17 has the best cover yet (a photograph by Matthea Harvey), poems by Salamun, Dawn Lundy Martin from Discipline (a book to look forward to in 2011), Johannes Goransson, Arisa White (author of Disposition for Shininess), Kenneth Patchen, Ben Lerner, Joanna Klink, G.C. Waldrep, and Matthew Zapruder, as well as an excerpt from Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary (and a related interview with Kimiko Hahn) and a score for a Piotr Sommer poem which you can hear on the website (“Overdoing It”).
- I spent the morning immersed (for the nth time) in the poem that gave the magazine its name, Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, pausing at noon to finally finish Elena Fanailova’s breathtaking The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), which last week won Three Percent’s 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. One of the translators (Stephanie Sandler was the other), Genya Turovskaya also translated another volume (Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting) in UDP’s unparalleled EEPS Trilogy, which you can now buy for 33% off (the middle volume, Dmitry Golynko’s As It Turned Out was also masterfully translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebecca Bella, and Simona Schneider).
And Turovskaya herself, as it turns out, has a terrific poem in SUPERMACHINE Issue One, which I reread this afternoon. More telling, maybe even some showing, after the endpaper:
READ MORE >
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March 18th, 2010 / 8:25 pm
March 18th, 2010 / 8:25 pm
Natalie Lyalin Week (3): SUPERMACHINE
Supermachine Issue One (launch party in New York tomorrow) is one of the best first issues of a journal I have read in a long time. Tomorrow I will talk about the issue at large. Today, a teaser: the openings of the three Natalie Lyalin poems therein.
ALL THE MISSING CHILDREN GO TO FLORIDA
We leave milk trails for them. We say,
follow this milky trail and we will find you.
I WANT TO LEAD ALL THESE LIVES
Someone is always screeching. In the distance husbands bring
Home orange flowers. There is orange flavored Ceylon and a
Mysterious powder and the metal oven door. [...]
TWO SMALL VAMPIRESDear heart, we ate snow today.
Something happened to our country.
Three fearless peasants try and fight us.
We make our way inside always.
See also Natalie’s poems in 6×6 #19. And, above all, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat. Go and get ‘em.
Poets in New York
Wednesday @ KGB Bar @ 7 // The Corresponding Society // launch for Correspondence Issue 3 // readings by Christian Hawkey, Sonia Farmer, A.E. Wilson, Jody Buchman, Ben Fama, & Adrian Shirk, all overseen by Lonely Christopher –> Thursday @ The Invisible Dog from 7-11 // SUPERMACHINE // ISSUE 1 LAUNCH PARTY // music by Body Actualized Control –> Friday @ The Poetry Project @ 10 // Heather Christle & Andrew Dieck ! –> –> Saturday @ POETRY TIME AT SPACE SPACE @ 8 // HEATHER CHRISTLE & MATVEI YANKELEVICH !!–> Sunday @ Zinc Bar @ 6:30 // Corina Copp, Robert Dewhurst, Maggie Nelson ! ! !
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSEverywhere!
Ugly Duckling Presse, celebrating ’17 Years of Ugly’ with events (opening is tomorrow) and an exhibition at PS1, has a new website, where you can browse new (Karen Weiser’s To Light Out, Carlos Oquendo de Amat’s 5 Meters of Poems, Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch’s Ten Walks / Two Talks) and eminent/imminent (Ben Fama’s Aquarius Rising, M. Kasper’s Open-Book, and Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry Is Not a Project) titles.
FREE Glaser or Leidner chapbook: snow cancelled in Brooklyn, SUPERMACHINE not
An outpost from the brave folks of Outpost Lounge, 1014 Fulton St:
Just wanted you all to know that our reading absolutely STILL ON for tonight.
After a bit of witchcraft and snow cursing we have a 100% confirmed lineup!Matthew Yaeger
Holly Melgard
Michelle Taransky
Ryan Doyle May
Joey Yearous-AlgozinTo reward your dedication to the art of language we offer the promise of coffee/wine/beer/maximum love vibes and a basketload of karma. SEE YOU SOON!
Anyone who storms the snow for this gets a free minutes BOOK with mention of this post. Choose from Rachel B. Glaser’s Heroes are so long and Mark Leidner’s Willie, shipping soon, complete with snow blank covers to make your own tracks in, like so: 
or so 
or so
Poet of the weekend Michelle Taransky, who’s treking north with Lauren Ireland (add Absent and Sixth Finch to the list in the last post) to read in the also not cancelled notnostrums/Noö/SIR! reading tomorrow night at 7 at the Montague Bookmill, will be taking names, but you can pre-claim by adding your address below or send it to minutesbooks AT gmail DOT com.
SoandSo goes on and grows
Just over a month after Brian Foley posted here about a call for submissions for the first issue, SoandSo Magazine already has an archive (brimming over with Luke Bloomfield, Lily Brown, Michael Ford, Jim Goar, Jennifer Militello, and more, like a video, “Poem for Johannes Göransson,” by Joshua Marie Wilkinson.)
The second issue is–somehow–even more So. (More poems too, 2 to 3 per poet, many long–and good–enough to stretch the bounds of what this reader can take in on a screen. Moreover, the issue strikes me as being just the right size for an online journal.)
Ana Bozicevic, author of the sterling Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky), leads off with “About A Fish”: “the kind of poem / in which you hold, in the garden / a red umbrella out against the heat-storm of cicadas.” Joe Fletcher, whose Sleigh Ride (Factory Hollow), is well worth taking, follows: “During meals we like / to discuss prior meals.” I find much to admire in just about every poem in the issue, but the ones I keep returning to are the final poem, Franz Wright‘s faintly Walserian, “With Bacovia,” Amy King’s alliterative “Tiny Tacos” (“I’m going to get a tin book, / lose ground and fake the world.”) and “Dali Dolly” (are there 24 more?) and three by Douglas Piccinnini, whose “Tiller,” “Soft Highway” (after the break), and “Bodkin,” comprise my favorite group of poems online since Jane Gregory’s in notnostrums 3:
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February 25th, 2010 / 12:51 am
February 25th, 2010 / 12:51 am
TV = Today Vote NEON KNOME
Two Via Goodjobbbbbbbbb. Today’s Version:
Don’t let the mouth-breathers win!
Vote for the Neon Knome!!!
” Neon Knome is a new short cartoon created by Ben Jones of Paper Rad and PFFR“:
- “I have a very small wallet, everybody. So it’s hard to see.”
- “Hello. I am the narrator. Welcome to the New Dark Age.”
Also, less timely, but relevant for those going to New York this Friday:
FEBRUARY 16 – MARCH 18, 2010
THE ASSEMBLED PICTURE LIBRARY OF NEW YORK CITY
CLOSING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 6–8pm
Esopus Space is pleased to present “The Assembled Picture Library of New York City,” a collaborative exhibition and workspace environment organized by artists Robin Cameron and Jason Polan.
The exhibition will provide free and open access to hundreds of images from the collections of Cameron and Polan. Visitors are invited to come in during gallery hours (Mon/Tue/Thu from 12-5pm) and use these images—which include manuscripts, advertisements, prints, original drawings, and more—as raw material for their own artworks, which will be displayed on the walls of Esopus Space for the length of the exhibition. Polan and Cameron will also create a book featuring visitors’ artworks, The Assembled Picture Library of New York Book, that will be available at the closing reception on March 18.
Written on the walls of the Sunday Book Review
Exclusive (mirror) image of the Times Sunday Book Review reading Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever.
We’re still expecting a Sunday Web Trawl, Justin.
18 Comments
February 13th, 2010 / 3:09 pm
February 13th, 2010 / 3:09 pm
Michelle Taransky, Supermachine
My favorite post-Kenyon Review Blog Heather Christle post, “Poems are machines + evolution = the bliss of redundancy,” is still out there, “working some things out,” like Williams’
A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.
No matter that Williams was echoing Valery. His equation works. Q.e.d. Michelle Taransky’s poems, which are massive (or super) machines made of words. Q.v. how even the most winn(ow)ing poem,
It’s My Business
I have made the choice
To choose a particular
Way of operating the business
in her Omnidawn Poetry Prize-winning (and now Offending Adam Book of the Month) BARN BURNED, THEN is a window into the workings of the book (=factory of excitement) at large. Easily among the best first books of poetry to come out last year (Taransky read with Marina Temkina, the author of another, last night in New Yorkº), BARN BURNED, THEN will, as with other Omnidawn titles, be available from SPD eventually. In the meantime, you can order direct from Omnidawn (or Powell’s) or (of course) another (follow the link in A Compulsive Reader’s recent appreciation) and read new Taransky poems in the afore-awesome GlitterPony as well as in my favorite place to go, Wolf in a Field and to stay (tuned): SKEIN Seis.
ºI dropped the ball on an alert for that one (where Sarah Dowling whose first book is just out from Snare Books also read) so know that you can catch Taransky on Friday, 2-26 at Supermachine (this Saturday: Uljana Wolf, Stampson Starkweather, &c) with Holly Melgard, Matthew Yeager, and Emily Pettit. If you go, you can carry home your copy of Supermachine Issue 1 with new poems from Natalie Lyalin (& massive company), whose Pink and Hot Pink Habitat stands on the same short list (with Christle, Taransky, Temkina, Yankelevich, etc.), in a Supermachine tote.
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February 10th, 2010 / 8:58 pm
February 10th, 2010 / 8:58 pm
Happy New York (Part II)
Whether you are in NY or not, tomorrow is the last chance to see Herbert Pfostl‘s ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES. (Sad NY update: I was too late–for too long–with this post. More on Pfostl in the future. One week left to see Jerk.)
Justin’s book-buying success story made me happy for so many reasons that only some will surface in this roundabout (not to say failure) fable. Here’s to making Book-Buying: A _____ Story, a regular column. Until that category’s been added, I’ll continue with two of the many poets from my last post (on the Poetry Project New Year’s Reading, featuring a cast so deep I could draw on it all year and not touch bottom): namely, John Coletti and Arlo Quint.
I’ve only read one of Coletti’s three(?) chapbooks and haven’t read a word by Quint, but I’m as excited about the former’s new book as CAConrad is (“Few things make me as happy as a new John Coletti book!” via Rust Buckle’s facebook page) and about the latter’s new chapbook(s?) as I am by just having discovered that CAConrad was born on January 1. It’s final: Poet of the Year. I say this, aware of all the reasons not to say such a thing, let alone in caps, partly in homage to New Directions’ Poet of the Month (1941-1943; the envelope pictured came with the 1942 boxed set I found at Grey Matter Books), READ MORE >
Happy New York (Part I)
I don’t think the Rust Buckle Books (more on these in Part II) bee
r can logo (below) is by Brian Calvin, but seeing it reminded me–via Flood Editions, where Calvin’s heads (Half-Mast, 2001, and Killer, 2006) can be found on Graham Foust’s Necessary Stranger (2007) and A Mouth in California–that “Head”, his show at Anton Kern, closes on January 16.
I’m sure New Yorkers themselves go elsewhere (where?), but “Goings On About Town” is still my first stop to find out what I get for living where else. Although there’s always an abundance in ART (the above BRIAN CALVIN, WALLACE BERMAN – Jan. 9; “FROTTAGE” – Jan. 17) and MOVIES (Tati–tonight, Trafic–at the MOMA: see also, under ART, OROZCO) that I wish I wasn’t missing, rarely does READINGS AND TALKS make me want to move.
Ever abbreviated (possibly defensible in print, but why all the white space online, where this week there were three total readings–no talks–compared to eight pages of movies?), the section is never more so than in its annual capsule announcement of the reading of the year:
A hundred and forty poets and performers, including Penny Arcade, Yoshiko Chuma, Steve Earle, John Giorno, Taylor Mead, Judith Malina, Jonas Mekas, Eileen Myles, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, gather for the thirty-sixth annual marathon reading at the Poetry Project.
What about the other 130 plus poets (from Ana Bozicevic to Magdalena Zurawski) and performers (Philip Glass) and performers (Ostashevsky)? Is there another reading anywhere that, thanks to the Project’s own Arlo Quint (and Emily XYZ) covers every letter? But I guess I shouldn’t quarrel with an alphabet that begins with Penny Arcade and ends with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Indeed I would have gone to hear the listed Ms alone: where else could you find Mead (who turned 85 on New Year’s Eve), Malina (b. 1926 in Germany, godmother of the American avante garde), the Lithuanian born Mekas (godfather of same, turned 87 on Christmas Eve), and Myles (the only Presidential candidate who’s written a speech about Robert Walser?), not to mention Machlin, Marinovich, (Chris) Martin, and Mesmer, among Many More (see list-in-progress, with links, after the leap), in one audience, let alone on one stage?
CAConrad, the poet of the year if ever there were one (when’s the last time anyone had books as good as Advanced Elvis Course and The Book of Frank come out in the same year?), has an anecdote about the most memorable line from the 2005 reading in the comments section of this to-be-revisited list. Can anyone give us some highlights from yesterday’s event? Will anything else in 2010 approach this gathering in sheer skylight? READ MORE >
20 Important Books in Other Languages; or, “a list always growing longer”
A post re:– neither repost nor riposte–Blake’s wichtige Liste and (only at first) about Infinite Jest in German. Maybe a chair is a good metaphor for who gets translated. Have you been translated? Have the Important Writers on Blake’s list? And not 25 because Saramago, Ouredník, and Zizek are already others, Ben Lerner’s a poet, Aase Berg’s both, and I’ll write about poets in translation and translation in poets at an other time.
Not sure if anyone went there during all the well DFW grammar talk (thanks, Amy), but imagine translating, say, Oblivion. Good that one of Wallace’s German translators, Ulrich Blumenbach, did just that, presumably (it first appeared in 2006), while whittling away at Infinite Jest, which took him six years and has had, as Unendlicher Spass (literally, the less Shakespearean Unending Fun), endless success: ten times the expected five grand copies have been sold since it appeared at the end of August, on the heels of Infinite Summer, which the publisher, KiWi, has translated too, as 100 Days of Infinite Jest (in German–it ended on 12-1).
In an interview with Der Spiegel, Blumenbach (pictured–in German) regrets that the author never answered his many questions, “a list always growing longer”: it seems Wallace had grown weary of taking translator’s queries, and, according to The Complete Review’s useful paraphrase of a slippery summary (still looking for the original source), considered the Spanish La broma infinita (tr. Calvo and Covian | Mondadori, 2002) and the Italian Infinite Jest (Nesi w/ Villoresi and Giua | Einaudi, 2006) and apparently other attempts (anyone know more?) to have “all failed, more or less.”
In a warm war, France is responding with (900 pp. of) Vollmann’s Rising (not translated by the great Claro, see below, who did six previous tomes, but by one Jean-Paul Mourlon, translator, it seems, of Jimmy Carter and Hilary Clinton). There’s also German Vollmann (3 titles), Spanish Vollmann (3 more), Japanese Vollmann (2), Greek Vollmann (2), and Czech Vollmann, all (not counting the French) with only one title (Butterfly Stories) repeated.
American Genius is only a Great American Novel for now (does it even have a British publisher?), despite Tillman’s first book of stories, Tagebuch einer Masochisten, having appeared in Germany in 1986, four years before her first collection in English, READ MORE >
