GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY: SARA WINTZ ON LIZ WALDNER’S “PLAY”
Sandwiched somewhere in between the recently published Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, and the amazing trajectory of Ugly Duckling Press Publications, newcomers Lightful Press released their first book late last year: Play, by Liz Waldner.
Play details a sequence of otherworldly occurrences in a land of language play. And it does so in a very theatrical format. From its letterpress cover to the dialogue among its lines, Play contains a multitude of language tableaus that encourage readers to experience poetic form in a tactile and performance-oriented way.
Waldner suggests performance, by bending her poetic text closer to graphic score, through typographic designs, closer to script, via dialogue, and closer to dance through rhyme and repetition, and overt stage directions, like: “I say, don’t I know you from somewhere?/Who are you?/(song&dance ensue)“.
8 Comments
February 13th, 2010 / 2:20 pm
February 13th, 2010 / 2:20 pm
Sean Lovelace—
Bought Xbox 360 yesterday. My distant cohort said, “Are you going to get the literary games?” What are the literary games?
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What’s Cool Changes
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YcIw09qBc
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
I drank martini after martini while they “workshopped” their poems.
We extend the language.
We take our gin warm and neat.
I am writing this on a cocktail table in dim light.
My voice had a terrifying whiskey tone.
Speaking in public, be quite drunk, be manic, be very well prepared.
Planting words in you like a grass seed.
Let me sleep in your bed.
If someone burns out your eye I will take your socket and use it for an ashtray.
Fool!
You do drink me.
I sounded a bit drunk—but those things do happen.
A lot of people wish it would rain. I know it might sound strange.
Some borrowing:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnFcoE_YtNA
(I really love the “here’s one of my old 45s on a record player” genre of Youtube videos.)
More and so much more. READ MORE >
Behind the Scenes & Random / Comments Off on A lot of people wish it would rain. I know it might sound strange.
February 12th, 2010 / 4:59 pm
February 12th, 2010 / 4:59 pm
“The Situation”
Mike Sorrentino
Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino calls himself “The Situation” because his abdominal muscles, per his perception of them, are so extreme in their contour and firmness, that it has become, well, a situation. To refer to oneself in not just the third-person, but as an incident, is freaking awesome. I was immediately drawn to Mike very early on in the show because of his difficulty with women. Despite the hot tubs, Korbel, body lotion, and other courting paraphernalia, he never quite scored. Here, a neurotic man under a sheath of muscle. In the season finale, he makes out with roommate Snooki — a sad letdown to a season full of potential snatch, in which two scratched hearts (he was quickly rejected by Sammi after a brief window of interest) mend each other with the wet gauze of tongues. I was actually subdued by their awkward, tentative compassion, as it was very sad.
NO SMOKING
i forgot until *after* posting this that i once smoked a cigarette with martin amis outside a PEN event. nice guy, rolls them by hand.
When Stephen King’s wife radically rerouted his career by pulling the manuscript of Carrie out of the trash, she had to clean the cigarette ash off of it before she could read it. Later on he said that his pace as a writer slowed down for years when he quit smoking; without the nicotine, his pace was simply slower.
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Premium Rump Round, now with FREE TICKET CONTEST
I’ve gotten so used to thinking about The Rumpus as one of my go-to sites, and linking to something of theirs in damn near every web round-up I do, that I’ve nearly forgotten about the days when I used to put posts together that focused exclusively on them. Let’s do that now.
Top of the site: an interview with the painter Caris Reid; funny Woman Elissa Bassist on “How to Move to San Francisco.”
And in Books Stuff: Virginia Konchan reviews Catherine Bowman’s The Plath Cabinet; Andrew Altschul on Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music; Catherine Brady on Eric Puchner’s first novel, Model Home; and that Steve Almond piece about self-publishing that I linked to yesterday.
All that and more. But hey, here’s something else important: New York folks, on March 11, Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott will be lecturing on “Writing From Experience,” something he damn well knows something about, at the LGBT Center on West 13th street. $30 reserves you a space, and you can buy your ticket here, but there’s also one free ticket up for grabs, and you can win it by leaving a comment on this post. From Stephen: comments can be “about anything at all, it could be why they should get it, what their project is about, or just random thoughts about the weather.” He’ll be looking over the thread and will choose the commenter whose post somehow says “Yeah, I’m worth giving free shit to and spending two hours with.” So, yeah. Happy Friday!
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PS- Art by Ryan Lauderdale, who has a show opening at Red White Yellow gallery in Houston on March 13th.
