Andrew Weatherhead
http://www.andrewweatherhead.org/
I was born in Chicago. I have friends everywhere.
two things (just links really)
1) Pop Serial 2 will be online in its entirety this Thursday and is being occasioned with a reading in Chicago (also Thursday) hosted in conjunction with (everybody’s favorite) New Wave Vomit.
2) The Paris-based journal Her Royal Majesty has coolly redesigned their website and started an internationally-minded lit blog. Excited to see where this goes.
Alternative Names for “The Guggenheim”
The Googleheim
The Googleshine
The Google Doctrine Display
Maker’s Mark presents “The Guggenheim”
The Gigglebutt
Gmail Chat
The Guggenhymie
The Guggenwop
The Windowchime
The Bitchenheim
The Windowbitch
The Googlehymen
The Bitchhymen
The Hymenbitch
The Hymenbond
The Boddington’s Pub Ale
The window maker READ MORE >
Ben Mirov’s Vortexts: Release Party + Review
The first time I met Ben Mirov he asked me to “pound it” after I said something funny and ever since then I’ve been sort of unequivocally on-board with Ben Mirov and what he does. I’m glad what he does is poetry. His first two books I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010) and Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) are books I recommend to people ceaselessly and re-read often for enjoyment, relaxation, and inspiration. Now he has this bright yellow chapbook called Vortexts to be released by Supermachine this Friday alongside Ben Fama’s likewise brightly-colored New Waves from Minutes Books.
5 Comments
June 1st, 2011 / 7:08 pm
June 1st, 2011 / 7:08 pm
My hometown Borders got closed
They were selling everything, including the bookshelves. (This is how any number of blog posts begin.) There were people in large hooded sweatshirts on corners waving signs that said “80-90% off,” and, in the store’s windows, there were giant yellow banners saying the same thing. I went on the third to last day. Large sections of the store were roped off, like the cafe area and the music section (though that section had been irrelevant since 2005 anyways). People wandered around aimlessly, looking totally lost, which was really the only way to inhabit the store since the selection had been so thoroughly decimated it was impossible to look for anything specific.
Bookshelf Special
80% off is no joke
“Tape for the Turn of the Year” by A.R. Ammons
I’m not really sure where A.R. Ammons stands or will stand in “the canon.” Despite receiving numerous major awards and grants during his lifetime, he remains (I think) more of a footnote than a figure in 20th century American poetry, a sort of weird bastard of Whitman’s transcendentalism, Stevens’s imaginative powers, and Williams’s colloquial rhetoric. In fact, the most precise criticism I’ve read concerning Ammons is in comparison to Stevens, when M.L. Rosenthal writes, “There is a great deal of feeling in Ammons; but in the interest of ironic self-control he seems afraid of letting the feeling have its way [as Stevens does].”
This is definitely true of Ammons. He often writes very “poetic” passages about existence or nature or humanity’s place in nature, only to undercut them with a moment or realization that points to the arbitrary nature of nature, or, frequently, the absurd immateriality and uselessness of poetry itself. For example, on one page of his book-length work, “Tape for the Turn of the Year,” he writes:
8 Comments
May 1st, 2011 / 5:09 pm
May 1st, 2011 / 5:09 pm
those guys who want to be one guy: an interview with HUMAN 500
HUMAN 500 is Jerimee Bloemeke, Henry Finch, and Jeff Griffin — 3 poetry students at Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Their first release is a chapbook called Luxury Arcana, which was authored by the three of them, though not in the split-chapbook kind of way. It’s its own thing — a collaborative consciousness, fractured and polymorphous. It’s structured in sections, but the sections often differ in physical orientation (i.e. sections are upside down relative to each other), so the very act of left-to-right, front-to-back reading is not applicable or possible. There’s a number of ways to approach the construction and the poems themselves reflect what’s going on formally as they reference each other, repurpose lines and images, and are full of subtle discoveries. It’s a book that’s almost impossible to read the same way twice, one that I’ve returned to many times, and one that continually excites me in its exploration of collaboration, consciousness, and the physical space that a book occupies.
For a sense of the tone/affect, here’s one of my favorite pages:
This is the whole story. How she doesn’t look at me across the table. I stare at her sequence. I’d love it if she could get me some rows. Some beautiful beautiful rows.
Pigeons bust up and I nearly lose it. I fall up the stairs, one more tumble to make my point. She follows me and I’m telling her, You should go home with me. She’s looking at me now. I may be laughed at along the highway but not here. Let’s get lit and do drugs because as long as I hauled them here I’m going to give them to you like anthologies. It was torture spilling my drink while kissing you to ballads.
Trivial, selfish, frivolous. This is some really low motive, man. She returns with a full glass of whiskey and I’m thinking I need to hear some Lefty Frizzell and if that’s a dress she’s wearing I’m totally going to lose it.
For the interview, I emailed questions to Jerimee, Henry, and Jeff and they responded using the same collaborative process in which the book was written.
cool fun new stuff in NYC
TONIGHT: Eileen Myles / Jon Leon / (our own) Nathaniel Otting
8PM — 390 Seneca Ave. (Entry on Stanhope), Brooklyn, NY
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94J_oSwggFI
THURSDAY, APRIL 28TH: Brian Kalkbrenner / Dan Hoy / Amy Lawless / Maggie Wells
6:30PM — The Strand, Union Square
best video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbVx52tKulg
NYC: cool thing at the PL this Tuesday
Periodically Speaking hosts SUPERMACHINE and 6X6 (UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE) magazines—
Ben Fama and Matvei Yankelevich in conversation with
(and readings by):
Macgregor Card
Corina Copp
Dorothea Lasky
Founders of influential literary mags 6X6, SUPERMACHINE, and the former GERM, with writers they’ve published over the years, discuss the past, present and future of literary publishing, after brief readings.
Tuesday, April 12 · 6:00pm – 7:30pm
DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building @ 5th Ave & 42nd Street
New York, NY
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