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If You Like It Naughty

Poetry. The anthology GURLESQUE: THE NEW GRRLY, GROTESQUE, BURLESQUE POETICS brings together eighteen poets of wide-ranging backgrounds, united in their ability to push the aesthetic envelope through radical, femme, Third Wave strategies, and pairs them with visual artists who do the same. At the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital–perhaps viral–new strain of female poetics: the “Gurlesque,” a term that describes writers who perform femininity in their poems in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking the grotesque to shake the foundations of acceptable female behavior and language. Built from the bric-a-brac of girl culture, these works charm and repel: this work is fun, subversive, and important. (New Release — order from SPD)

Presses / 6 Comments
February 24th, 2010 / 10:58 pm

Sean Lovelace

penta-gram

1.) Weather by David. “Blue skies but covered with streaking thin masses of white clouds.”

2.) Probably the most glow “new” Andy Warhol book here.

3.) The PEN/Faulkner Award finalists announced today. Tao Lin is not on the list and that is fucking cocksucker horseshit fuck. Fuck. Sherman Alexie (the Man we all be-sweet-on) and that snarky L. Moore book are thick, gray, cement-like children educated in Switzerland. I mean goooooooooooold.

(The PEN is America’s “largest peer-juried prize for fiction” but I thought that was American Idol.)

4.) The Heavy Rain reviews drizzle on in now. Dripping.

5.) Will someone do something about contributor notes? Jesus H Lard. If you are 1.) trying to get laid, 2.) have the self-esteem of an ID badge, 3.) ever owned a dog, 4.) have a spouse you very, very, very much love, got it, you are in love, the real thing, you can’t believe you found this supportive, caring…5.) have once in your life been president of anything, 6.) have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

OK this is cool. And this.

But if not…just tone it down, I’m trying to read over here.

Thanks

Web Hype / 46 Comments
February 24th, 2010 / 6:49 pm

Adam Robinson—

Laura Ellen Scott gives 21 writing tips, including, “13. Write what you know, especially you white people out there” and “17. Italics, italics, italics. Especially for flashbacks.” This is the sort of sharing the Internet was invented for.

Jimmy Chen

Brian Dettmer’s Altered Books

Brian Dettmer, "Key Monuments #4," Altered Book (2009)

I really enjoy Brian Dettmer‘s altered books, in which cut-out negative spaces inside books are layered together in their original binding to create, or more accurately, excavate, hidden visual and physical worlds. Gladly, the postmodern reflex of facetious appropriation is not the fancy here, but rather, a austere “classical” sense of intricate sculptural negation which brings to mind Michelangelo’s La Pietà or David, whose manifestation were through an aggregate of chronic and gentle subtractive layers. This idea of god or man buried under marble is similar to the newly discovered compositions buried, incidentally or arbitrarily, between the pages of encyclopedias and historical books. Put simply, the truth is in there. To see more, visit his flickr or website.

I Like __ A Lot / 10 Comments
February 24th, 2010 / 5:12 pm

Nick Antosca

KILL KILL KILL

hi it's me

I had an interesting morning. Early this morning I sat down at my computer to write and realized that my computer had eaten, or I had deleted, ten pages that I wrote yesterday.

Stage Fright

Here’s a serious question. I’m 32. I’ve been reading here and there for a few years now. When I was young I had bad, migraine-inducing stage fright. But recently I’ve been fine. I’ve read in front of hundreds of folks without an iota of sweaty palmage or trilling voice. Then, today, I read in front of 10, maybe 15, people, and I was quaking in my boots. You could freaking see me shaking. AND, I wasn’t even reading my own poetry, rather some of my favorite poems by Yusef Komunyakaa.

So, what gives?

I wasn’t intellectually nervous, but my body at that moment said, fuck you. Why? Do any of you have stage fright moments or tips to share?

Random / 64 Comments
February 24th, 2010 / 2:27 pm

Sean Lovelace

Back Flash: Margaret Atwood

–like she’s pretending to write a story but really examining plot, the art, the control, all that writer shit. It’s like a trick and a lesion.

–Yes, I know. But it’s a book I’m saying, not just that story.

–Well, people only know that plot story. It’s a trick, you know, meta, but a legion, sort of supposed to teach you—like with Buddha, a Kola. You could use it in class plenty.

–You mean a Koan.

–Yeh, a colon. A story not about the story. Sharp as a cat’s eye. Lorrie Moore did it and then Grace Paley, too.

–No, no, you’re off-focus. Forget the plot picking. I’m saying it’s a book. Atwood did a whole flash book. It goes out of print because so many people think flash fiction is the lining of a diseased lung. Well, it was coughed up and won the Booker. I don’t know how these things work.

–You mean Fletch?

–No, no, phlegm, not Fletch. Just read the book, if you can find it.

Author Spotlight / Comments Off
February 24th, 2010 / 1:32 pm

Nick Antosca

SAMPSELL WEEK (3): A READING @ A READING (PART DEUX)

[part one is here]

There’s a little girl sitting in the children’s section of Skylight Books reading a picture book; she looks about six or seven. (Too old to be reading a picture book. What the fuck? I was reading Bunnicula by that age.) I’m sitting in the back of the audience, so I can see into that section of the bookstore. Kevin Sampsell, who is reading from A Common Pornography, can’t. He doesn’t know that the little kid is listening to him read about the time he had manual sex with a stranger in the back of a porn shop.

Kevin Sampsell corrupting small child (courtesy Sabra Embury)

Threefer

The Rumpus has a long interview with Paula Fox.

Okay, this one’s actually two, but I stole them both from Bookslut, and “fourfer” sounds stupid. Therefore, (2a) everybody’s homeboy (that is, Bookslut’s and ours) Michael Schaub is interviewed at Willamette Week. (2b) Anarchist news dot org has an interview with Eric Hazan of La Fabrique, the French publisher of The Coming Insurrection, which I have read a lot about and plan to own by the end of the day today.

Question: What is the reason for the resurrection of the communist idea?

Eric Hazan: People feel that there is no longer a choice between the Right and the Left, but between ways of getting out of capitalism. That’s the key question. If it remains in the domain of ideas, one can only go round in circles. For me, thinking about communism isn’t heading towards a political organization, but towards practical reflections.

And finally, the other day I was trilling about having finally received my copy of The Axioms of Religion in the mail. What I did not understand was that the 1977 edition, attributed to Hobbes and Mullins, is not in fact Mullins’s original work as edited by Hobbes, but is rather a wholesale revision by Hobbes of the original work. As such, he rightly credits himself as the primary author, and it’s not clear where and to what extent he is quoting or paraphrasing Mullins, whose writing is the actual locus of my interest. Also, after reading the intro and the first chapter, it’s clear to me that Hobbes is an incredibly annoying–though basically well-meaning, and only unintentionally racist– propagandist for his own weird notion of the Baptist cause. His edition, published during the (brief) heyday of the Carter administration, is basically designed as a primer to introduce the Baptist faith to a general American audience that, at the time, apparently needed a documentary special to explain what it was to be “born again” after Carter declared himself so. What a difference a generation makes! Yikes. Anyway, I want to read the real, original Axioms of Religion by E.Y. Mullins, which has apparently been out of print since 1908. HELLO INTERNET ARCHIVE. THANK YOU PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. I recommend the B&W pdf version, which is easier to load than the full-color one, and all you really lose is the yellowness of the scanned pages. Very, very excited to start reading this. Soul competency, here I come!

PS- As long as we’re all careening toward some weird conversionary episode, Mathias Svalina and I were talking the other day about Xian-era Bob Dylan. I was talking about listening somewhat obsessively to Shot of Love but he said the real action is on Saved. They’re both pretty amazing records. Have you ever seen the original cover art for Saved? It’s so hardcore that they actually switched it out after the first edition of the album, for this kind of crappy picture of BD playing live. But I still think Shot of Love would make a better poster.

Random / 24 Comments
February 24th, 2010 / 12:08 pm

Ken Baumann

Kevin Sampsell Week (3): A Reading at A Reading

Kevin Sampsell: Small Press Champion. That’s the title on his business card. Kevin works with Powell’s. The title on the card doesn’t lie: Future Tense, Kevin’s own small press, is vibrant and energetically handled; at the beginning of the reading I caught Kevin talking about his catalogue with a Skylight employee. Oh: Skylight Books, 7:30 on the 9th. That’s when & where Nick, me, Sabra & Ned met Kevin, and first heard him read from A Common Pornography.

I sat down. Kevin set up his laptop, he had said something about a slideshow. And he started: not having read ACP yet, I was impressed and warmed by the calmness instilled by the text, and Kevin’s performance. He gave equal weight to each line, each section–death, masturbation, house fire, girlfriends and ‘real girlfriends’–all was given its due. It’s as if Kevin had managed to pull up & present to you not the best or the worst moments of his recollected life, but the most poignant. And somehow he achieves a soothing equilibrium; I laughed a lot. The sentences, his delivery: all intoned with grace. That’s what Kevin Sampsell is: graceful.

The slideshow contained mostly happy but all weird-in-that-old-polaroid-way captures. His family was shown, and shown again. His old girlfriend. Yearbook photos. Kevin had really broad shoulders when he was ~12. Immediately intimidated.

Afterwards he invited Nick & I, with a few others, to join him for dinner. Dinner was a long table laid full of bread at an Indian restaurant. I sat kind of far away from Kevin; near the end of the meal he came over and sat, wanted to talk. Again: graceful. The night wrapped up late, we parted, not before Kevin & his fiancee invited me to Portland and Kevin gave me free books.

Hmm. Hard to wrap this up because it was all so damned nice. KS, his friends, his future wife, the reading… Oh: I’ll end with this. A friend promised to send me a DVD filled with Kevin’s old slam poetry performances. Kevin Sampsell Video Day, coming soon. :)

p.s. I’ll take Egon and smile. (see Nick’s post)

Author Spotlight / 1 Comment
February 24th, 2010 / 9:47 am