FANCY is awesome. Here are 3, go there for more.
Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Ito
New this week from Action Books, another important and blood-baked translation, a sublime meld of grotesque and giddy, which takes its mistakably blunt (and therefore, reversely compelling, and then compelling) title in reference to the author’s actual daughter, Kanoko:
Killing Kanoko
by Hiromi Ito (translated by Jeffrey Angles)
$12I want to get rid of Kanoko
I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko
I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples.
“KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in finetranslation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, HiromiIto. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies anddelights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures–fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats.”-Anne Waldman
Some poems:
“Father’s Uterus, Or The Map” on Action Yes.
“Harakiri” on Nerve.
Once again, Action Books delivers a much needed translation of a major foreign poet, getting these English versions into our bodies.
Uncategorized / 8 Comments
December 14th, 2009 / 1:56 pm
December 14th, 2009 / 1:56 pm
Rain Taxi Benefit Auction
BOOKS by
Diane Ackerman, Paul Auster, Nicholson Baker, Charles Baxter, Gabrielle Bell, Richard Brautigan, Robert Olen Butler, Thomas Frank, Neil Gaiman, Jaime Hernandez, Steve Martin, Harry Mathews, Lorrie Moore, John Porcellino, Edward Sanders, Gertrude Stein, Dara Wier, David Wroblewski, Adam Zagajewski
BROADSIDES, CHAPBOOKS, and SPECIAL ITEMS by
M.T. Anderson, Jan Brett, Stephen Dixon, Russell Edson, Brian Evenson, Robert Hass, Gerard Malanga, Paul Metcalf, Alice Notley, Wang Ping, Donald Revell, Buzz Spector & Marjorie Welish, Nathaniel Tarn, James Tate, Anne Waldman, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop
Blake Butler—
Nick Ripatrazone brings an in-depth and very excellent close reading and analysis of William Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid” at Quarterly Conversation: “The word snow—and its variations—appears 181 times within the 79 pages of “The Pedersen Kid.” The repetition transfers snow from word to thing: snow is overwhelming and smothering, equal parts plot, character, and theme. The word appears in the second sentence, and it completes the initial thought of the story. It is a Faulknerian convention, a trope in the tradition of adventure novels. Snow is omniscient but transient, gone come spring.”
2
A Sunday Writing Prompt: Beneath
I found myself stuck yesterday, looking at the last few lines of a scene, sure about where the story goes eventually, but not sure where it was supposed to go right then.
I decided to reexamine the scene I had written from a different angle. I decided to look at what was going on beneath the scene.
And I don’t mean metaphorically. I went beneath the scene and decided to try to describe what was happening within a character’s foot. Maybe I’ll keep it. Maybe I won’t. Something happened, though.
Here’s the exercise: find a scene or write a scene. Read it or reread it. Start again. Describe what is happening beneath it. The apartment below. Under the dirt. Deep within the lower extremities of a character’s body. At the opposite end of the Earth.
Maybe that scene is more interesting. If so, throw out the original. Maybe the scene makes meaning in the juxtaposition between itself and the scene above it. Incorporate one into the other. Maybe nothing will be there. Hey, at least you spent some time writing. Good for you.
Ken Baumann—
Understand, David. I don’t give a shit who writes and who doesn’t.
-Robert Penn Warren to David Milch, context here. (thnx, M. Bell)
Take It Easy with Just Two Links for Sunday Morning
The New York Times has Helen Vendler on the new John Ashbery collection, Planisphere.
And The Olive Reader, the blog presence of Harper Perennial, has yours truly on what he wants for Christmas.
And that’s all that is happening in the world today. Good morning!
My Own Top 3
A couple days ago, I sent out an email asking a fairly large group of writer, editor and publishing friends to send me their nominations for “top 3 books published this year.” I told them to interpret “top” any way they chose to, and to feel no pressure to expound on their choices in any particular way. The plan is to publish a large list of all the Top 3 lists next week (so far I’ve received 20 contributions, and they’re still coming in) but yesterday I kicked off the festivities early by posting one response by Zak Smith in advance of the full list. Today I’m offering up my own selections, prefaced by a short explanation of the way I chose to interpret my own injunction to choose the “top” books of the year.
I spent large swaths of 2009 struggling with fiction, especially novels, while also struggling to write one. (Anyone see a relationship between those two facts? … Didn’t think so.) Here are three novels that challenged and expanded my notion of what a novel could, should, or ought to be, but more important than that: they provided me with enormous entertainment and edification. The three are vastly different, but each is, I think, a work of startling interiority, and this seems to be what I needed in ’09. Each book in its own way offered me succor and deliverance from the confines of myself, by offering up for a getaway space the extraordinary confines of some other self, and I returned from each readerly excursion in better shape than when I left.
Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin.
The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell.
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker.
ALSO: A special shout-out to My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which has a 2008 © in it but didn’t really surface until early ’09. A massively important book and instantly among the most important and treasured Collecteds I own.
45 Comments
December 12th, 2009 / 12:18 pm
December 12th, 2009 / 12:18 pm