My friend Maya told me about this guy who tried to hit on her by making fun of her weight and then kicking her under the table.
I said, ‘That’s an interesting strategy, I always wondered if a strategy like that would work.’
Then I thought about my own strategy, which generally involves waiting for something to happen and not forcing things on the other person.
I felt like my strategy was fucking stupid and just as terrible as that other guy’s. READ MORE >
Lance Olsen is the author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction. He acts as Chair of the Board of Directors for the Fiction Collective 2 and teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. What follows is a conversation with him about his newest book, Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing.
Q: Would you talk a bit about the book in relation to its title? Why the words “architectures” and “possibility”? What about the phrase “after innovative writing?” Are we now in a post-innovative literary world?
A: Let me take your last two questions first, and argue that the history of writing (think Petronius’ Satyricon, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Ulysses) has been, not one of dogging conventions, but of continuously undoing them, experimenting with and beyond them, continuously redefining them, exploring the boundaries of the writerly act, of how we might tell our narratives—and hence ourselves, our worlds—differently. So-called conventional acts of writing, then, are the uninteresting detritus of literary history. Innovation is where literary history takes place.
If that’s the case, then contemporary experimentalists are not only continuously in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Hence my pun in the title on the word after.
And so to your initial question: for me, innovative writing represents a possibility space where everything can and should be attempted, challenged, thought, where every architecture should be explored. In other words, we’re talking about the ideology of form here. Another way of saying this: meaning suggests meaning, but structure suggests meaning as well. To structure one way rather than another is to convey, not simply aesthetic preference, a matter of taste, but a course of thinking, a way of being in the world, that privileges one approach to “reality” over another. One of the jobs of the innovative is unceasingly to challenge the dominant cultures’ narrativization of “reality,” to remind us that there are always other ways to construct the text of our texts, the texts of our lives, always the possibility of effecting change in both.
To write within the innovative, then, is much more than a creative choice. It’s an ethical imperative.
Punchline
by Nick Courtright
Gold Wake Press, April 2012
96 pages / $12.95 Buy at Amazon or Powells
The title of Nick Courtright’s full-length debut suggests a book of jokes. However, the well-wrought poems in Punchline undermine these expectations. The joke is actually on all of us, the poet included. In Punchline, Courtight peers beneath the surface of the joke of existence, to see if he can better understand the comedian, the joke-writer, or the Grand Master of Ceremonies, if any of these exist.
Courtright’s revelatory odes to the mysteries of philosophy and science come right out of the visionary tradition, though they are filled with enough irony and self-doubt to avoid soapbox crankery (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In fact, it is Courtright’s embrace of the principles of uncertainty that give these poems life and beg us to re-read them, in order to be interrogated by them again and again. Courtright has the cold, hard stare of the soothsayer; it just so happens that everything in his world appears to be out of focus.
She dreamt that I was living
in the basement of a cathedral.
To visit me
she had to climb through a window
and then through an air duct
with Rabelais’ catacomb bones.
The church was actually
a monastery in the Tatra mountains
where the monks made
ale and goat cheese.
No, that’s not right.
I was being held
against my will
in the basement
of a megachurch in France
and I was getting
the Hansel & Gretel treatment.
One day during her crawl
she overheard
the women in the laundry room.
They speaking in English badly.
They cackled in French.
They were anti-Semitic in Hungarian.
They got tricky and discussed my fate
within the cult in Slovak.
She saw one hooded auntie open
the washing machine door
but what the woman dragged out
was not laundry.
Angelology is the study of angels
she said, lowering herself
into my cell.
But those women are not angels.
Sean Edgley is a native of the San Francisco area currently getting his MFA at City College of New York. He has spent several years working and traveling in Europe and Asia, and these experiences inform much of his writing. This spring he has poems appearing in Literary Bohemian, Lyre Lyre, and Promethean. He is currently working on translations of contemporary Korean poetry, as well as a futurist screenplay set in China, inspired by Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.
These samples are from an ongoing series of Internet based digital videos. These seemingly infinite looping videos articulate the Internet as space of viewership that is increasingly becoming a platform to represent, archive, and reproduce the real. The content within these digital tableaus are based from the contents within drawings I create before documenting/repurposing them into the aforesaid videos. There is no physical (institutionalized) space that is designated for exhibition exclusivity for this body of work, as they may be viewed anywhere the Internet or a computer is available.
[Click images to view]
*Finite_Skin uses a zoom user interface which allows a viewer to explore the details of the drawing.
Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound
by Jeff Alessandrelli
Ravenna Press, 2011
66 pages / $11.95 Buy from Ravenna Press
One of the first things readers of Jeff Alessandrelli’s Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound will notice is the fact that the back cover contains biographical material for both the author and Erik Satie; upon opening the book, the front matter contains acknowledgments from both men as well. The collection’s copy and front matter signal, it would seem, a playful engagement with identity and proper nouns. Specifically, Alessandrelli conflates himself, the speaker of his poems, and Erik Satie in such a manner that all three personalities become intimately entwined. The book’s first iteration of the list poem “A Game of Numbers” twice addresses this melding:
