Adam Robinson—
The Sakura Review is looking for work. It’s a really beautifully made journal. Check it out.
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THE TRANSPARENCY OF CAPITAL
(hat tip to “kashi butterfield”)
Sunday Service: Allyson Paty & Danniel Schoonebeek Poems
TORCH SONG: HOLY DAY
Our woman of black knees
in the dirt she is singing
sweetheart spit your teeth
into my hand and for you
I will play the finest rattle
•
The gossip about god was
he’s a woman drinks rotgut
no camisole sees the veins
in his husband’s eyelids says
hallelujah this is all my fault
TORCH SONG: SLUMGULLION
We come from low country we say
when thunderheads growl that’s god
talking to himself when lightning
strikes your mother down in a field
that’s god saying I’ve got a question
•
The furrow belongs to the crows now
no last stalk no cornhusk doll to march
through town and hang from the door
of the landlord who says shut her out
should the wheat ghost come to yours
TORCH SONG: CHANTEUSE
Hair teased out like a flame
an old standard (for the crowd)
got a feeling cause I’m blue oh
lord it disgusts me heartache
all this spectacle and prayer
•
There are nights I suspect
I will find you your fingers
sear at the tips a music box
in your hands your refrain
will no one turn this crank
Torch Songs is a collaboration between poets Allyson Paty and Danniel Schoonebeek. Colliding the form of the torch song in American music with the aubaudes of ancient Japanese female poets, each torch song is formed by joining together two five-line poems that the poets write in response to each other.
Allyson Paty is from New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, The Awl, DIAGRAM, Boxcar Review, and elsewhere.
Danniel Schoonebeek’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Rumpus, Tin House, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere.
Five Albums For Saturday [2]
I did this sort of post last month. Thought I’d do it again.
It’s Saturday. I’m reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine issue #6, which opens with a special section devoted to three chunks from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Michael Davidson offers the first contribution in the issue, which he begins by making a distinction between the two ways that Stein scholars tended to categorize her work (granted this issue came out in 1978, but the categories still seem to be pretty paradigmatic examples of orthodox Stein interpretation): on the one hand, Davidson argues, her writing is seen as all play, deriving strictly out of her early research work with William James and automatic writing and later invigorated by Cubist formalism; on the other hand, her writing is seen as hermetically Symbolist, concerned with encoding sexual and biographical information in complex little verbal machines which contextualize their own environments. Both views, Davidson says, operate on either side of a referential paradigm: one wants her to mean nothing and the other wants her to mean intrinsically. But what makes Tender Buttons so vital, Davidson argues, is not the strategies by which meaning is avoided or encoded but how each piece points at possibilities for meaning.
I like this argument. It’s not about meaning vs. meaninglessness, it’s about exploring the possibilities engendered by the confounding nature of the text.
Anyway, here are five albums (plus two extra bonus albums!) I’ve recently been spinning, which I thought you might find interesting (hint: if you click on the artist and title it will take you to the magic place):
We Are Already There: Gretchen E. Henderson’s On Marvellous Things Heard
On Marvellous Things Heard
By Gretchen E. Henderson
Green Lantern Press, 2011
91 pages / $12 Buy from Green Lantern
The pupil…having fallen sick, was dumb for ten days; but on the eleventh, having slowly come to her senses after her delirium, she declared that during that time she had lived most agreeably.[1]
Chicago-based Green Lantern is a non-profit press helmed by Caroline Picard and other artists, focused on bridging contemporary experience with historical form. The Press brings forth “emerging and forgotten texts” within a cultural climate where the humanities must often defend themselves. You may recall their notable release of last summer, Erica Adams’ utterly innovative The Mutation of Fortune. Blake Butler wrote in March, 2010: “Green Lantern Press is simply making some of the most beautiful, singular limited run book objects of anybody in the pack. If you haven’t browsed their catalog recently, it’s overflowing: such a wide range of things to dig in, from new translation of Rimbaud, to art space phone books, to indexes and collection, so on.”
3 Comments
November 11th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
November 11th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 1: Happy Hour
Midtown Skin Essay Series with Parts 1-5
WINTER 2011-2012
1. Happy Hour
The sound from exhaling smoke is everywhere. People breathe with their hearts as rain clouds come from New Jersey. But they do not fall. The sky is gray and empty of a future. Women cruise through revolving doors into catalogs of private romance. Men linger with their fantasies for a moment, on the curb, outside of the brokerage firm. The bosses wait together for their car service, placing bets on who will fuck at the VP afterlounge. Lincolns in line stretch down the blocks past marble stairs and hedges. These cars are thick and black and they do not forgive. At this hour, corporate art can sneak into our souls. The markets change over to Asia. All through Manhattan, the people are killing their day lives. Captains of Industry are embracing their moment of blindness, at the intersection of work and sex. Everyone follows a different path to the gratification called home.
***
Cumera obscura
There is a moment when a human being walks into a camera’s view which, devoid of any narrative we might honor it, is simply that, a moment, a dot on a timeline as a bee’s stinger suspended above a meadow. Yet it is profound, the semblance of immortality. The same camera which killed painting is insentient, judgeless, uncaring — yet turned into an ethical machine, as we appoint it objectivity, the auspices of “what happened” via residual files inside a memory card smaller and smoother than a cat’s tongue. We expectantly look and point at shapes similar to us, no longer inside the camera, but displayed on screens by signals detached from the original event, now portrayed in numbers, binary code, recollated into bands of color, thru four channels, or something, physical parameters we barely understand like the spill-shaped universe itself. And here, somewhere in a parking lot, in the western hemisphere, at some point in this current century, two people displaced light’s refraction, inadvertently asserted their contours, the man observing the evolutionary pause of his member’s intraface with his partner’s mouth, how funny and endearing that act is, and multiple men weeks or months or years later would semi-emotionally reappropriate these images by funneling them into their minds, to the smaller universe between their synapses, forever lodged in some lobe in their brain, some desperate corner, the original event now something greater, surgically deeper. This is porn.
The Disinformation Phase
The Disinformation Phase
by Chris Toll
Publishing Genius Press, 2011
68 pages / $12.00 Buy from Publishing Genius Press
Rating: 8.0
I bought The Disinformation Phase basically because I liked the cover. Then I found out that was actually a good piece of criteria to go on: its author, Chris Toll had made it. It’s a collage of unlikely portrait-sitters, kind of like his poems, which paradoxically at once seem made at home and extraterrestrial, like alien-worshipping cult flyers; you wonder if someone really believes all this.
READ MORE >
10 Comments
November 10th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
November 10th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
How to Say It — Lit Scene Edition
If Paris Review Daily is running some of your shit…
Don’t say: I am going to be published in The Paris Review!
Say: Paris Review Daily is running some of my shit.
If your boyfriend is printing out copies of your poems and distributing them around Portland on his fixed gear bike…
Don’t say: I have a book coming out!
Say: My boyfriend is printing out copies of my poems and distributing them around Portland on his fixed gear bike.
If your agent is showing your novel to Melville House…
Don’t say: It’s all happening for me!
Say: Nothing. Or maybe post a picture to fbook of your baby looking at its first tree, because somehow that is less annoying.
If you’re still talking about Breece D’J Pancake…
Don’t say: Breece D’J Pancake.
Say: Ryan D’J Breakfast Taco.
If you just wrote 10 million words of your novella…
Don’t say: Just hammered out 10 million words of my novella!
Say: Let’s go see A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.**
If you (or your protagonist) are engaged to be married…
Don’t say: My fiancée.
Say: Anything else.
If you (or your protagonist) are a sophomore in college…
Don’t say: During the Spring of my Sophomore year,
Say: Anything else.
If you really dig a book…
Don’t say: This book is a gut-punch-face-ripper-offer-slayer-thrasher.
Say: Anything else.
**Please! No spoilers, folks. Really excited for this.