‘Tis happening, friends! Not only are your favorite fiction and non-fiction books available in electronic formats—but now—your favorite books of poetry are rapidly becoming available in e-book form, as reported by The Associated Press in the Seattle Times.

Part of the challenge is the devices themselves, with screens varying in size and feel from Apple’s iPad touchscreen to such smaller, standalone devices as Amazon.com’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. The e-book editions for Random House and other publishers will commonly include a reader’s note that suggests the proper font size for a given device.

Some works are especially challenging, like Anne Carson’s collection “Red Doc,” in which poems begins at various points on a given page. Random House decided on a fixed format, according to McCloy-Kelley, who says that the text “cannot be enlarged without a pinch and zoom,” meaning it can only be changed on a touchscreen. The verse of the late Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, who sometimes used extra spaces between words, proved so difficult to set accurately that English-language translator Daniel Mendelsohn settled for an e-book edition admittedly much different than what appeared on paper.

“You have to accommodate to a new medium in order to survive,” says Mendelsohn, an award-winning author and critic. “I take the long view and say, `It was ever thus.’ When the Greek tragedies were first written down, the lines were written straight across the page, with no distinction of different speakers and no stage directions. Now, you obviously want to identify the speakers. The original way is not necessarily the ideal.”

Smaller presses have cited limited budgets as a deterrent to digitizing. But a top poetry publisher, Copper Canyon Press, last year began an e-book program funded by a grant from the Paul G. Allen Foundation. Copper Canyon has issued electronic versions of collections by former U.S. poet laureates Charles Simic and Ted Kooser, along with dozens of other works.

“One of the things we’ve done is put a note at the beginning of the book to show which is the longest line of the poem,” said Copper Canyon’s e-book coordinator, Amelia Robertson. “The note demonstrates what will happen if that line is broken up and suggests the best setting on the device for keeping the line intact.”

Not a minute too soon as Jacket Copy recently reported that E-book sales almost doubled in 2012, rising to $3.04 billion.” Read about the revolution at Seattle Times and Jacket Copy, respectively.

We have our friends at the Paris Review blog to thank for pointing us to Open Culture where they’ve posted the celestial syllabus to Allen Ginsberg’s 1977 course at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. A bit about the class:

“Argh, you’re all amateurs in a professional universe!” roared Allen Ginsberg to a young class of aspiring poets in 1977 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Their offense? Most of the students had failed to register for meditation instruction. The story comes to us from Steve Silberman, who was then a 19-year-old student in that classroom and a recipient of Ginsberg’s genius that summer.

[...]

[The syllabus is] a particularly Ginsberg-ian list, with a healthy mix of genres and periods, most of it poetry—by Ginsberg’s fellow beats, to be sure, but also by Melville, Dickinson, Yeats, Milton, Shelley, and several more. Sadly, it’s too late to sit at Ginsberg’s feet, but one can still find guidance from his “Celestial Homework,” and you can even listen to audio recordings from the class online too.

There’s mucho more Ginsberg over at Open Culture, so head over and check it out. We decided it might be fun to see how much our archive matches up to Ginsy’s essentials. Click through below. And please, DO register for meditation instruction!

#56 Shakespeare: sonnets… many here

#57 Gingsberg: Kaddish

#50 Poe: To — – –. Ulalume: A Ballad, Annabel Lee, The Raven.

#45 Whitman: Song of Myself: 35, Song of Myself: 36

#44 Blake: poems from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, here.

#43 Snyder: The Bath

#36 Melville: The House-top, The Maldive Shark, The Portent, The Berg (A Dream), The Martyr, Monody

#36 T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

#36 Wm. C. Williams: To Elsie, Smell!, Danse Russe, Thursday

#35 Emily Dickinson: I heard a Fly buzz, Because I could not stop for Death, Success is counted sweetest

#32 W.B. Yeats: The Second Coming

#31 Rimbaud: The Drunken Boat, Illuminations

#30 Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale

#28 R. Creeley: For Love

That’s a good start, and only one celestial page of the whole document!

Poets! What’s going on here?!?! We’ve caught wind of yet ANOTHER plagiarism scandal, reported by the Guardian. Last month Paisley Rekdal shared her thoughts on being plagiarized by Christian Ward here. This time, it looks like another British poet has been lifting lines (nay, entire poems!) from numerous poets in the U.S. The deets:

The poetry community is searching its soul after another case of multiple plagiarism emerged over the weekend.

Publishers and magazines have been working to take down poems and suspend sales of collections by David R Morgan after the American poet Charles O Hartman realised Morgan’s poem “Dead Wife Singing” was almost identical to his own, three-decades-old “A Little Song”.

Assiduous digging by the online poetry community, led by the poet and academic Ira Lightman, then discovered that Morgan, a British poet and teacher, had lifted lines and phrases from a host of different writers. One of Morgan’s poems, “Monkey Stops Whistling”, won him an award. [...]

“When an American poet spotted his own poem under David R Morgan’s name on a website that blogs new work, he contacted its editor, and its editor contacted me. Within around one hour, I’d found a dozen more. Everything online by David R Morgan that I could find since Jan 2011 I could trace 90% of to another person’s poem,” said Lightman, who also discovered an alleged plagiarism of Roger McGough by Morgan dating back to 1982.

Head over to read more on the latest scandal. Sheesh.

Installation by Alicia Martin

After a brief hiatus for National Poetry Month, our monthly Reading List returns. In this installment, contributors to Poetry’s May issue share what they have been thumbing through:

Michelle Boisseau
The UC London biochemist and writer Nick Lane’s book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution has been fascinating me. My heart is liable to be won by a scientist like Lane who quotes Tennyson’s “Tithonus” in a chapter that explores how and why death was invented. The ingeniousness with which life created itself out of the harsh conditions on early earth–a reddish smoggy place where we would have suffocated instantly, a planet where the oceans boiled–gives me a kind of perverse solace considering the maddening, myopic shrugs of the powerful when they’re confronted with how threatened our planet’s biology is.

Geoffrey Brock
The books that, over the course of a busy spring semester, I’ve been dipping into and trying to make time to immerse myself in are now gathered in a stack at the starting line of summer. Among them:

Sidney Wade’s sixth book, Straights & Narrows, in which her inquiring mind tumbles ludically and lucidly through short-lined, punctuation-free couplets. Opening bit: “Where is God / we ask in haste // and answer slow / in winter-paced // adagio.” Random other favorite bit: “so here’s the plan / I’ll serve as // the bravura conduit / to intuitionland // and you provide / the filthy lucre.”

Tracy K. Smith’s third book, Life on Mars, in which science fiction and contemporary personal and political realities illuminate each other. Opening bit: “Is God being or pure force? The wind / Or what commands it?” Random other favorite bit: “I dream a little plot of land and six / Kid goats. Every night it rains. / Every morning sun breaks through / And the earth is firm again under our feet. // I am writing this so it will stay true.”

Camille Dungy’s third book, Smith Blue, whose title refers to an endangered species of California butterfly and whose poems lead us on a splendid tour of various other precarious states. Opening bit: “To love like God can love, sometimes. / Before the kettle boils to a whistle, quiet.” Random other favorite bit: “Come here. Come over here / and see what the bird’s nest is doing. / There are these small eggs, all of these / small eggs, none of them cracked yet, / but the big bird’s away.”

(This God-in-the-first-line thing is, I swear, a coincidence, discovered while writing this post…)

And finally, Rodney Jones’s career-spanning selected, Salvation Blues, chock full of his colorful (and often off-color) narratives with their coloratura digressions that swoop between the soil and sky of speech and thought. Opening bit: “Almost as though the eggs run and leap back into their shells / And the shells seal behind them…” Random other favorite bit: “And here on my front porch, midnight, in Jefferson’s paved Virginia, / all the good students are smoking dope and talking about God.”

David Caplan
I am midway through two books, both of which I am enjoying, but for different reasons. James Longenbach’s The Virtues of Poetry offers a model of critical elegance, economy, and insight. The graceful book says a great deal about poetry with understated sophistication. Yael Unterman’s biography, Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and Bible Scholar resembles its subject: learned, provocative, and immensely entertaining. One anecdote among many: discussing Pharaoh’s dream of seven cows, Leibowitz cited the eminent commentator Rashi, who analyzed the dream symbolically. Leibowitz retorted, “And who asked Rashi to interpret Pharaoh’s dream?”

Lately I also have been reading a lot of Albert Goldbarth’s work, well, because I like it. I will soon turn to Alan Moore’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta (a gift from a student) and Jennifer Barber’s Given Away. Tom Chivers’s anthology, Adventures in Form, lead me to Tamar Yoseloff’s fascinating chapbook, Formerly, a cycle of fourteen sonnets about disappearing London, inspired and accompanied by Vici MacDonald’s bleakly evocative photographs. And each weekday morning I take part in a class which is slowly working through the Talmudic tractate Bava Kamma, a text which challenges me in nearly every possible way.

Jessica Greenbaum
Because I am partial to being served good writing on a platter, I tend toward many “Best of” collections, and the new Best American Essays 2012, handpicks a stellar selection. Sandra Tsing Loh’s informative consideration of menopause in the twenty-first century, “The Bitch is Back,” broke the record for funny per square sentence; Wesley Yang’s “Paper Tigers,” about the stereotypes and realities of Asian Americans, riveted me; “Vanishing Act,” by Paul Collins, combed history for those child prodigies whose lives were shortened by the massive concentration on their early accomplishments. In “A Good Short Life,” by the late Dudley Clendinen, we are privileged to hear the thoughts of a writer dying of ALS, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Also nothing less than sacred would be David J. Lawless’ “My Father / My Husband,” which telescopes the felt experience of the long-married husband, often mistaken for the father, of a wife with dementia. It will make you cry, it will make you laugh, it will make you want to read it aloud and then write to David J. Lawless.

But perhaps more surprising, it will make you recommend a book edited by right wing-ist David Brooks, who recently wrote in the New York Times that petitioning the Supreme Court for gay marriage would restrict the freedoms of gay people who got married. That essay just ain’t gonna work, and conveys nothing of what the pieces in Best American Essays 2012 bring to light through lovingly critical eyes on the human condition and a close inspection of why love matters.

Linda Gregerson
I’ve been rereading Ford Maddox Ford’s wickedly funny and heartbreaking tetralogy, Parade’s End, and I’m convinced it’s the greatest novel ever written. Well, barring War and Peace and Ulysses. But exhibiting astonishing commonalities with both. The war in this instance is World War I, the method some near cousin of stream of consciousness. That is to say, Ford captures the leaps and lapses and parallel-tracking that characterizes consciousness in the midst of social and material tasking. I’m finding the sheer, shining structural brilliance of the novel (call it that, though it’s four-in-one) a source of real exhilaration. It was fiction-writer friends who first steered me in the direction of Ford many years ago. The Good Soldier was a revelation to me at the time, but the longer novel was somehow lost on me. No more.

V. Penelope Pelizzon
When Averill Curdy (whose brilliant Song & Error tops my list) was packing to travel by train across Zambia & Tanzania with me recently, the one book I burdened her with was Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun. Based on Kapuscinski’s forty years of reportage in Africa, these are wry observations on the art of nation-building by a sympathetic outsider. (Kapuscinski also has a jaw-dropping bio: “He witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times.”) Just the book to have when your train is twelve hours late in New Kapiri Mposhi.

Every trip is consecrated to a book that’s always near my desk: Susan Brind Morrow’s The Names of Things. It’s an etymologist’s pillow book as much as a writer’s coming-of-age in Egypt. Joining it in the last two months is Elias Canetti’s Voices of Marrakech, one of the best evocations of the pleasures and panics evoked by camels, souks, labyrinths.

Poetry I’ve enjoyed lately includes Durs Grünbein’s Ashes for Breakfast, Alice Oswald’s Dart, Don Paterson’s The White Lie, Roy Fisher’s Selected Poems, and Marianne Moore’s Complete Poems.

Generally I’d rather poke hot pins in my eyes than read online, but there are exceptions. International Crisis Group does some of the smartest reporting on global conflict. After that, I cheer up by reading Another Africa’s coverage of arts & culture.

Derek Sheffield
I read “Inspiration” by Hailey Leithauser recently on Poetry Daily. Another sonic rollick from one of my new favorite poets. Her first book, Swoop, is forthcoming this October from Graywolf.

The Height in Between by Timothy Houghton. Subtle music and a mastery of the couplet form. Poems that add a base note to my day every time I come back to them.

Notes from Disappearing Lake: The River Journals of Robert Sund, edited by Glenn Hughes and Tim McNulty. Sund is one of Roethke’s lesser-known students. Haiku-like poems full of the muck and grace of the Puget Sound.

A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood by Allen Braden. A James Wright, Richard Hugo, Andrew Wyeth smoothie. These lyric poems of rural life, especially farm work, find beauty in surprising places.

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram. Just re-read this. The writing bogs here and there, but the ideas are “lovely, dark and deep.”

Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape by Marjorie Manwaring. “Rejection Letter from Gertrude Stein,” one of the poems in this book, typifies the wit and surprise of this poet.

In the Kingdom of the Ditch by Todd Davis. Thanks to Chris Dombroski and Orion, I got to read this one before its release. Striking meditative poems evoking our relationships with each other and the other creatures of this planet.

Sympathetic Magic by Amy Fleury. A tough and beautiful poet. Here’s a taste: “Like a dowsing rod, you lean toward / whatever is coming to you, the waters / of loving, the sump of loss. Lean in.”

A.E. Stallings
Most poets could do with a greater allowance of prose in our diets, to paraphrase Jane Austen. Here are three novels I enjoyed this year:

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter. I bought this in an airport bookstore based on the title and retro cover. A novel of verse (one chapter is a haiku) and reversals, a satire on the financial madness of our times, this book is wonderful all round, by turns laugh-out-loud funny, sharp-witted, and moving.

Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser. Shockingly topical in our time of Robber Barons. The rise of a financially independent woman (an artist at that) charted against her lover’s decline has a modern edginess, coming as it does without judgment or comeuppance. And is this the first depiction of a mid-life crisis in literature? (Has someone made it into an opera? It would make a great opera.)

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. A 95-year old friend gave me this novel, one of her favorites. I was worried I would find it depressing—but it is rather a hymn to how art can be a stay against despair. Much of it involves the recent tragic history of Greece—Occupation, famine, Civil War, dictatorship.

Omnidawn announced the winner of the 2012 Open Poetry Book Prize this week: Endi Bogue Hartigan, for her manuscript pool [5 choruses].

Hartigan hails from Portland, Oregon where she works for the state university system. Her writing has been published in Chicago Review, Pleiades, VOLT, Free Verse, Peep/Show, Yew, Jack London is Dead, The Oregonian, and other publications. Her first book One Sun Storm (Center for Literary Publishing, 2008) was selected for the Colorado Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She published the chapbook out of the flowering ribs in 2012 in collaboration with artist Linda Hutchins, and has recently created work as part of an artist-writer collective, as well as helping curate the Spare Room poetry series. Cole Swenson selected Endie Bogue Hartigan as the winner of this year’s Open Poetry Book Prize.

Omnidawn announced five finalists for the prize, also selected by Swenson: Emily Abendroth (Philadelphia, PA) for Exclosures, Jenny Drai (Oxnard, CA) for Visitors, Cavaliers, Craig Dworkin (Salt Lake City, UT) for Alkali, Brandon Lussier (Hartford, CT) for Mary Doll Strings, Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer (Saint Louis, MO) for Clarkson St. Polaroids.

Omnidawn Publishing was founded by wife and husband team Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan to create books that are most closely aligned with each author’s vision, and to provide an interactive and rewarding publishing experience for poets and writers. We encourage authors to participate at every point in the decision making process of book design and book production, and thus far all have taken an active part, deciding on or providing cover art and assisting in the design of the interior of the books. Omnidawn has been publishing poetry since 2001, with Fabulist and New Fabulist Fiction added in 2006.

Congratulations Endi! For more information about Omnidawn, visit Omnidawn.com

We’d be remiss to leave off without giving birthday wishes to Robert Creeley, who would have been 87 today. We have poems galore here to celebrate, and other accoutrement. Thanks also to Chris Stevens for pointing us to this lecture by Creeley on Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. Enjoy!

The East Bay Poetry Summit is almost here!

The East Bay Poetry Summit begins this weekend in Berkeley! (Thanks, in part, to generous donations to its successful Indiegogo campaign.) The summit will draw poets from across the U.S. to Oakland and Berkeley, to give poetry readings at several of the East Bay’s thriving house reading serieses.

The first reading of the East Bay Poetry Summit will take place on Friday, May 24th at 7 p.m. at 2127 Blake Street, with readings by Uyen Hua, Douglas Rothschild, Melissa Buzzeo, Jen Hofer, and David Wolach. Like the most patriotic of Memorial Day events, the summit will include readings, karaoke, and a good ol’ fashioned bbq.

As usual, Dodie Bellamy says it best!

With the plummeting of arts funding and the general disappearance of public space, salon-style events (“house readings”) are taken very seriously in the Bay Area; performing at one can garner more kudos than at a public venue. House readings frequently take place on the weekend and are just as devoted to partying as to poetizing. When the reading begins the party slams to a halt and attention is rapt.

The atmosphere may be casual—those not lucky enough to snag a seat on a couch are crammed together on the floor, some are sprawled across a mattress that somebody—who knows who—actually sleeps on, but this audience knows poetry, and they listen with razorlike precision. At such readings, whether I’m performer or audience, I feel like a beat in a larger matrix of communal creativity.

For more information about the summit, visit its Facebook page.

Sure can!

That may not come as a surprise to many poets out there who haven’t yet transitioned from Ticonderoga pencils to MacBook Pro, however, who better to hear about paper’s advantages than from Arrigo Berni: the CEO of Moleskine. Berni appeared on this week’s edition of the American Public Media program, Marketplace, to speak about the Italian-based (who knew?) company’s history and how it fits into an increasingly digital world.

“The product and the Moleskine story really go way back, toward the end of the 1800s to the beginning of the 1900s. A group of artists and literati, mostly based in Paris, started using this notebooks,” Berni explained. “But the product then disappeared toward the second half of the 1900s, around 1980.”

Berni also taught listeners how to pronounce the word “Moleskine:”

We want people to feel free to say the name the way they want. Having said that, “moleskin” as a word is originally an English word. So the English pronunciation is ‘Mole-skin.’ But then you know, it was moved to France and over there, an ‘e’ was added and the French pronunciation is ‘mol-ey-skine.’

Listen to the host of Marketplace, Kai Ryssdal, in conversation with Moleskine CEO Arrigo Berni, on this week’s episode of Marketplace, here.

At his Samizdat blog, Robert Archambeau reflects on Marjorie Perloff’s recent talk on Paul Celan at the University of Chicago’s new Logan Center (and he quite admired it):

We tend to see Celan almost exclusively in the context of Holocaust writing, with John Felstiner’s Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew as the great explanatory text. Celan certainly is a Holocaust poet—plausibly the greatest of Holocaust poets—but we are wrong to think that this exhausts his meaning and the range of his achievement. In focusing on Celan’s early life and his love poetry (which he continued to write after the war) Perloff showed us a fuller, less iconic, more humanized figure, a Celan who wasn’t just a Survivor, but a man, with all the foibles and idiosyncrasies one might expect in a somewhat coddled aesthete raised by adoring and indulgent parents (Jean Daive has been working on something along these humanizing lines as well).

Not only did Perloff reveal this Celan to us: in stressing the differences between his German and the German spoken in Frankfurt or Berlin (and, indeed, in stressing the vast geographic removal of Czernowitz from Germany proper) she showed us Celan as a representative of a culture quite distinct from that of Germany: the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the traditionally Habsburg (alternately Hapsburg) lands. The Empire’s German was distinct, and Marjorie was quite convincing in demonstrating that many of the legendary ‘difficulties’ of Celan’s poems are actually quite clear, at least to one hearing “with an Austrian ear.” And the Empire was by no means an Empire of German: it was a polyglot culture of many languages, and no one spoke just one. Indeed, the multicultural Imperial identity, in which many peoples felt equally enfranchised, was utterly different from German identity, and it showed in the culture: “There is no way Wittgenstein could have been a German writer,” Marjorie said, “and no way Heidegger could have been an Austro-Hungarian one.”

Celan the product of this multicultural and polyglot sphere, to which belong the works of Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, and Franz Kafka—but he was the product of this world in a special way, because he was the product of that world’s dissolution. Born just two years after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he came of age in the penumbra of loss, with a sense of the ghostliness of his own multicultural and polyglot identity.

In the end, Marjorie wasn’t just telling us that we would do well to think of Celan in the broad context of the dying Habsburg culture: she was telling us that we have a great deal of work ahead of us in reconstructing the lost Empire as a cultural field, and in finding the meaning of its writers not in some generalized Germanic tradition, but in the shadows and fragments of a dying polyglot state. We would be as wrong to discuss Musil or Kafka or Celan outside this context as we would to discuss William Carlos Williams without reference to his Americanness. This, I thought, is a big idea—it proposes not just a new understanding of Celan, but a new field of literary study.

Read the full piece here.

Looking for a new art project to fund, one that might provide some spiritual redemption? We have an idear, having just noticed that Kevin Killian and Felix Bernstein, among others, are collaborating on a new film called BOYLAND. “The pomp and bathos of Death in Venice meets the twisted humor of Lolita in BOYLAND.” According to composer Kirk Nurock, “Felix is a Youtube generation’s clown/genius/dragqueen and conscience. Comedically, intellectually and visually, all of his pieces are masterful.” You can help all the talent raise chickens at their Indiegogo page. More:

ABOUT THE FILM

BOYLAND is a dark comedy about an impossible relationship not unlike that of Humbert and Lolita or Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell.

Meyer (bay area poet Kevin Killian), a middle-aged pedophile and neglected artist, living in a secluded home in the woods (Point Reyes National Seashore) meets James (James Coarse), a neglected 15-year-old skater who moves in with Meyer for attention and freedom.

An extravagant party scene followed by a hallucinogenic pagan romp in the woods turns their relationship into a Satanic theatrical ritual: full of Lewis Carroll, Henry Darger, Aleister Crowley, Pink Narcissus visions, and ending in spiritual redemption.

The film is being shot this July in a lovely cabin in the beautiful woods of Inverness, California.

WHERE YOUR MONEY IS GOING

-Costumes (we are getting and making a bunch of pagan renaissance inspired costumes for the forest romp: see Lindsay Kemp’s version of Salome for an idea)

-Props (Meyer is a photographer and a collector of antique boybilia)

-Set (including Meyer’s house that will be filmed in a cabin that we are renting, hand decorating and living out of)

-Lighting and camera equipment

-Gas (we are driving across country to get to SF)

Whether or not you can give money, please pass the page around if you’re into our stuff!

Watch Bernstein’s Boy Crazy (2012) here–it’s his Gay Cabaret Memoirs! Or check out the full index of past film work from the collective behind Boyland–director Gabe Rubin has even made a short inspired by Cindy Sherman’s Doll Clothes (1975). And below is Kevin’s lovely appeal for the movie:

Granary Books announces an important new title–Archive from “A Secret Location”–and oddly enough, we were just talking about its precursor the other day, recalling it as a necessary read for those interested in the history of the small-press movement, mimeograph revolution, and poetry in the mid-twentieth cent. That one would be A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, “the acclaimed New York Public Library exhibition and catalog from 1998, curated by Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips, which documented a period of intense innovation and experimentation in American writing and literary publishing.” As for the present collection:

[It] came into being after the owner “became obsessed with the secretive nature of the works contained in the exhibition’s catalog.” Using the book as a guide, he assembled a singular library that contains many of the rare and fragile little magazines featured in the NYPL exhibition while adding important ancillary material, much of it from a West Coast perspective.

[...]

The Archive from “A Secret Location” was collected by a reclusive New Jersey inventor and offers a rare glimpse into the diversity of poetic doings and material production that is the Small Press Revolution. It provides a rich gathering for framing an understanding of the various drifts, swirls, and eruptions in the poetry and art firmament of the era, including: Beat Generation, Counterculture, New York School, Venice West, San Francisco Renaissance, Wichita Vortex, Black Mountain, Mavericks, Hippies, Diggers, and related iterations that inform, incite, and inspire one another and the culture at large in ways we are only now beginning to fully grasp. The collection includes excellent runs and significant examples of important little mags including:

Angel Hair, Beatitude, Big Table, Black Mountain Review, C, Caterpillar, Fuck You, Gnaoua, Grist, The Hasty Papers, Insect Trust Gazette, J, Kulchur, Locus Solus, Matter, Measure, Miscellaneous Man, Merlin, Mother, Now, Open Space, The Outsider, Pacific Nation, Poems from the Floating World, Renaissance, San Francisco Earthquake, Set, Some/thing, Tree, Trobar, Whe’re/, and Yugen.

Additionally, the collection includes a representative sampling of sixties West Coast counterculture publications, including: The San Francisco Oracle, The Southern California Oracle, Communications Company (the publishing arm of the Diggers); items relating to the explosive San Francisco music scene including a collection of handbills and postcards from Family Dog and others; newspapers and magazines of radical politics such as The Berkeley Barb, Ramparts, The Realist; uncommon pre-zine self-published journals of offbeat commentary such as Horseshit and Jack Green’s Newspaper; and a wide assortment of pamphlets, magazines and diverse additional obscure and rarely seen publications from the period.

Selected highlights from the collection can be found here. There are some incredible images. Above, randomly, is The Outsider:

The Outsider, no. 1. 1961.
Jon Edgar Webb, ed.
[Collection includes complete run, nos. 1–4/5]
[Ref SL pp. 90, 250]

Loujon Press began in 1961 with The Outsider, no. 1, printed and published in the French Quarter of New Orleans. From the beginning, the magazine was as notable for its wide-ranging editorial sweep of new prose and poetry as for the amazing production values brought to bear, which included various paper stocks, multiple colors, hand-printing and hand-binding. The first issue has more than 50 contributors; Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb was associate editor, and advisory editors included: Marvin Bell, Margaret Randall, Jory Sherman, Edwin Morgan, Melville Hardiment, Sinclair Beiles, with Walter Lowenfels as consultant.

No. 2 introduced a Jazz Documentary feature honoring the last of the old-time musicians playing traditional New Orleans live jazz. In no. 3, Charles Bukowski is named “Outsider of the Year.” No. 4/5, the final issue, pays homage to Kenneth Patchen. In addition to the magazine, Loujon published limited-edition books by Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski.

The collection description and more information on Archive from “A Secret Location”: Small Press / Mimeograph Revolution, 1940s–1970s is at Granary Books.

The Believer Logger posted this great conversation between Nicolle Elizabeth, one of its staffers, and Lisa Pearson, the founder and publisher of Siglio Press. (Perhaps you recognize the name “Siglio” from “In Gray There is Multiplicity: Snapshots from It Is Almost That / A Collection of Image+Text work by Women Artists & Writers,” Eileen Myles’s fantastic review.) For all you emerging small press publishers out there: we recommend both Eileen’s review and Nicolle Elizabeth’s recent and wonderfully informative interview with Siglio Press’s director, Lisa Pearson.

NICOLLE ELIZABETH: Hi, Lisa. We’re interviewing publishers, authors, and editors in an effort to share information with readers on what it is like to work in the many facets of publishing. Siglio is a publishing house that has brought many things, such as the works of Spero and Brainard and Calle, to better light. Can you walk us through the differences between publishing novels and publishing art books, with regard to the specifics of the process?

LISA PEARSON: Collaboration and conversation. The novelist generally writes in isolation and most often thinks of “the book” as a kind of delivery system for the language she has so carefully composed and honed into a work of literary art. If she works with an editor, it is on the writing itself; the physical qualities of “the book” are out of her hands and may be of little interest other than wanting a really great cover and decent paper stock. For an artist, and particularly for the kinds of books Siglio publishes—which are more like artists’ books than monographs or catalogues—the physical manifestation of the work as a book is not only critical but intrinsic to the work: it mediates the reader’s relationship with that work in a way that is much less transparent than with a novel, a nonfiction book, or a collection of stories. There are a thousand decisions, large and small, to get the work to really live on the page and as as an object the reader holds in her hands. That’s a dynamic process in which publisher and author/artist engage together: it’s creative and conceptual, but also practical and logistical. And I bring that same kind of attention to the fiction and prose I publish. For instance, in the novel SPRAWL by Danielle Dutton, there are no actual images, but the shape of the book itself, the wide margins, and the space between lines of text, make an essential contribution to nature of the reader’s experience with the book. It’s subtle, but it makes a difference.

Read about Lisa Pearson, Siglio, and how to run a really cool small press at The Believer Logger.

On August 5th, the University of Arizona Poetry Center will have a new Executive Director: Tyler Meier. Meier joins the Poetry Center after working for many years as a poet, administrator, and educator. The announcement, posted on the UA Poetry Center’s website, is a fantastic introduction to Meier and his work:

Meier comes to the Poetry Center from The Kenyon Review in Ohio where he was the managing editor as well as the co-director of the Young Writers Summer Program. He received an MFA from the University of Washington, and his poetry and nonfiction have appeared in At Length, AGNI (online), Laurel Review, Bat City Review, jubilat, Washington Square, Thermos, Forklift, Ohio, and elsewhere.

“Now that the Poetry Center has settled into its landmark building, we are ready to embark on the next era of the Center, to expand our vibrant programs and build new audiences for poetry here and across the country. I know Tyler will bring energy and enthusiasm to the position,” said College of Humanities Dean Mary Wildner-Bassett.

“I’m thrilled to join the Poetry Center staff as Executive Director,” said Meier. “From the volunteers and donors and docents to the writers who visit in the Reading Series, from the incredibly dedicated staff to the larger community served by the collections and programs and events, I’ve been truly astounded by all of the people who participate in the daily life of the Center. The place positively hums. This must be what Ruth Stephan had in mind over fifty years ago when she had the original, beautiful idea for a Poetry Center. It is an aspirational space that recognizes and celebrates a central role for poetry in our contemporary culture, and it amplifies our hopes for what the art form might do in the years to come.”

Meier will replace Gail Browne who has served as the Executive Director of the Poetry Center since 2002. Browne is pursuing other arts administration opportunities in the greater Phoenix area.

Congratulations Poetry Center and congratulations Tyler Meier! Read more about the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center and about Tyler Meier, here.

A man dressed in a loose kaftan pedaled vigorously on his bicycle. Suddenly, he flew out of his seat and crashed to the side of the road. I ran out of my car to check on him, and then returned to search for my cell phone, only to find a stranger attempting to open the car’s passenger door to steal my bag. I pleaded with the stranger to hand me my cell phone so we could call for help. I woke up before completing the sentence. I was determined to continue the dream, to see the injured man to the hospital, and to be the hero. Instead, I came to be walking alone on the trails above Namche Bazaar in the Everest region. A band of friendly robbers stopped me and asked for valuables. They took my cell phone. I remembered I had not made a call in the previous dream.

Like dreams, there are poems waiting to be completed. Metaphors and similes cut open, then hastily stitched together, rub uneasily into each other on mostly-empty pages. Time does not transform or ripen the words. Every now and then I return to the abandoned lines with the intention to lead them to some satisfactory end, or with the hope the words will choose their own movement. I tell myself to reciprocate and to answer the many voices on the page. The feeling that anything is possible is punctuated with the reminder that everything has changed.

Surfers stretch their spines like underscores on a flat page.

When I turn to the page a few weeks later, I add:

A highway patrol officer, alone/ at the edge of a quiet street points a radar/ into the morning sky. Clouds do not carry/ their burden very far. A row of bodies/ rise to ride the wave.

I do not know what is being written. The writing is divided: let’s call them Self W and Self Z. Self W is skeptical of beauty. It uses memory for bludgeon, takes commas personal, and avoids the first person narrative. Poem Z prefers quotations to questions. Poem Z has a thing for categories and feels modern as a verb. It thinks surfers are underscores because underscores are a code to form, and to inform. Poem Z likes being pulled in many directions. Poem W learns the names of trees.

The page is a topiary garden without an image of a perfect landscape as its goal. The holly, which is neither a dinosaur nor giraffe, has decided to be an obelisk and towers over the boxwood chimpanzee. The wire cages cannot contain nor shape the holly for long, the original frame is already lost under the weight of new growth. But the holly has the seed in it to grow into the holly it will be.

It is with such hope that some of us turn towards the next sentence.

A truly great feature and the Friday pick at BODY magazine: John Ashbery introduces us to the Turkish writer Erje Ayden, who some of you might know better as the pulp fiction writer behind the New York School. Ayden started out as a spy in Europe in the 1950s and then moved into the downtown New York arts scene, befriending Frank O’Hara and William de Kooning—he has been writing performance and prose pieces for 50 years.

Erje Ayden’s novels provide a little-known but fascinating view of American bohemian and bourgeois society from the point of view of a sympathetically bemused Turkish observer. The wonder is that Ayden’s not more famous, as he can be as addictive as Simenon or Proust.

Elevator Repair Service performer and BODY editor Ben Williams goes on:

Erje (pronounced like the letters R and J) and his wife Lisa make all his books essentially by hand. Perhaps a single step removed from the literally handmade books of B O D Y contributor Edgar Oliver, Erje’s books are small and simple and have the feel of the samizdat. If there’s an image on the cover, it’s there not because a graphic designer cooked up some smart, attractive, wrap-around advertisement. It’s there because it has a very specific, personal connection to Erje. Willem de Kooning’s art is on the cover of The People of Imprisoned City and Summer Frank O’Hara Died (in collaboration with his assistant John McMahon) because “Bill” was Erje’s friend — they built a theater together in the ‘60s out in East Hampton, where, he told me, “we had steaks every night. I remember the steaks.”

Similarly, and in accordance with the proverb, Erje writes about what he knows — although the breadth of experience from which he draws can seem preposterous at times, and not just to someone like me who is of a much younger generation. Sure, New York in the ‘60s and ‘70s was a different world than New York in 2013 — for one, there were still bookstores then. And authors could still take a book directly to a local bookstore, as Erje did at the legendary Eighth Street Bookshop, where The Crazy Green of Second Avenue first took hold as a cult hit. But the exoticism of another time doesn’t account for the varied worlds that Erje travelled. He really worked as a spy in Europe in the ‘50s? Yes. He really wrote in Frank O’Hara’s studio while Frank worked at the MOMA? Yes. He really went to James Cagney’s house… and Cagney danced a jig for him? Yes. O’Hara says in his preface to Sadness at Leaving that Erje’s characters are always “on the go, whether their destination is set or not,” and I think that that kind of knowledge can only come from a writer who has frequented many, many worlds.

There are also reflections on Ayden from Jim Fletcher and Frank O’Hara! The latter’s:

Erje Ayden is the traditional “foreigner,” perhaps no more foreign to our language and ways than was D. H. Lawrence, perhaps as foreign to them as Joseph Conrad was to English at the beginning of his great labors. Like Lawrence he has the advantage of viewing our morés and our verbal locutions from alien and strong tradition; like Conrad he would like to have a rhetorical hero of undeniable strength and certitude appear in his writings, but life cannot reveal one. Like so many who refreshed the languages of the world in the 20th century, he is an alien wherever he is, probing and disfiguring ordinary reality with a sense of popularity, and accepting its most peculiar and neurotic aspects as quite unexceptional. Like most writers of power and vivid interest, Ayden is able to transform his miscalculations and misunderstandings into personal expressive advantages. We must admire this unless we are to give up William Carlos Williams’ dictum that the American language is distinct from the English, and lapse into a long development of Mandarin style which would be indistinguishable from the tiring mistake of the English, of the French, and the German.

Because of the moral ambivalence of another tradition, Ayden is one of the sexiest writers we have; because of his struggles with acquired language he has a vigor uncommon among our novelists; without the mannerist inclinations of Salinger, Pynchon, Barth, or Updike, he is able to convey the real trouble underneath the bizarre and the banal. In adopting Fitzgerald as his model, Ayden links himself with other off-shoots of that germinal stylist’s attitude: Nathanael West, Horace McCoy and even Dashiell Hammett. He has the same brevity, the same swift pace, the same tendency of observation and impatience with analysis. Neither daring nor caring to make a beautiful English sentence, he is able to get some of that marvelous Fitzgerald quickness and pointedness, which in the latter’s case made Hemingway’s most machine-gunned sentences seem rather studied. As with Gatsby and Rosemary, Ayden’s characters are quickly fixed by events in an airy space which belongs to no one, least of all them. Through Ayden’s eyes we see an “Amerika,” as odd as Kafka’s; as funny as absurdly sad. Nobody thinks that things are as they seem, but Ayden makes the gap between seeming and being considerably wider. Operating in this gap his people (Elliott in Crazy Green, “I” in Confessions of a Nowaday Child, the hero of From Hauptbanhoff I Took a Train who keeps changing his name) are always on the go, whether their destination is set or not, in order to keep alive.

– Frank O’Hara

And of course there’s work there from Ayden himself. An excerpt from “James Cagney”:

James Cagney lived very modestly in his farmhouse. Besides his wife Frances, he had a servant. We all sat in the living room which was warm and had tea. Art and Cagney talked about the new Hollywood – something that didn’t impress Cagney. Then Cagney turned to me.

“Is it true,” he asked, “that Matisse studied the motives in old Turkish paintings and tiles?”

“Yes, sir, that’s common knowledge. Funny, two men before you asked me the same question – the painters Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline.”

“The abstract expressionists… They’re good, but Matisse, Matisse was a Giant. Well, maybe you’ve heard that I paint too once in a while. Kid stuff. It relaxes me… But those Matisse still lifes, God, aren’t they gorgeous?”

“They are, sir.”

James Cagney was old now, and chubby. And his cheeks were puffy. He had difficulty walking. For years now he had been suffering from multiple illnesses, diabetes, heart condition etc.

Art addressed me, “Turk, don’t let Jimmy (his friends called him that) fool you. He still can dance better than anyone else.”

I knew something about James Cagney. He was born in New York City in 1899 to a working class Irish father and a Norwegian mother. They were poor. For a while he went to Columbia University and studied architecture but he quit because he didn’t have the money. After that he joined a vaudeville troupe as a song and dance man. He became famous for his female impersonations.

Wooster Group and other downtown luminaries Kate Valk, Scott Shepherd, Ben Williams, Modesto Jimenez, Jim Fletcher, Ross Fletcher and others will be reading from Ayden’s work at The Performing Garage on May 26 to benefit the writer. If you’re in New York, it’s a don’t-miss. To reserve a seat, email RSVP at The Wooster Group dot org.

Neat-o, huh? According to this recent Inside Higher Ed article by Scott McLemee, in which he reviews Mathew L. Jockers’s new book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (University of Illinois Press), “some critics apply the word ‘poem’ to any literary artifact.”

The article begins:

“A poem,” wrote William Carlos Williams toward the end of World War II, “is a small (or large) machine of words.” I’ve long wondered if the good doctor — Williams was a general practitioner in New Jersey who did much of his writing between appointments – might have come up with this definition out of weariness with the flesh and all its frailties. Traditional metaphors about “organic” literary form usually imply a healthy and developing organism, not one infirm and prone to messes. The poetic mechanism is, in Williams’s vision, “pruned to a perfect economy,” and there is “nothing sentimental about a machine.”

Built for efficiency, built to last. The image this evoked 70 years ago was probably that of an engine, clock, or typewriter. Today it’s more likely to be something with printed circuits. And a lot of poems in literary magazines now seem true to form in that respect: The reader has little idea how they work or what they do, but the circuitry looks intricate, and one assumes it is to some purpose.
I had much the same response to the literary scholarship Matthew L. Jockers describes and practices in Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (University of Illinois Press). Jockers is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The literary material he handles is prose fiction — mostly British, Irish, and American novels of the 18th and 19th centuries — rather than poetry, although some critics apply the word “poem” to any literary artifact. In the approach Jockers calls “macroanalysis,” the anti-sentimental and technophile attitude toward literature defines how scholars understand the literary field, rather than how authors imagine it. The effect, in either case, is both tough-minded and enigmatic.

Following Franco Moretti’s program for extending literary history beyond the terrain defined by the relatively small number of works that remain in print over the decades and centuries, Macroanalysis describes “how a new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.”

All things macro and more at Inside Higher Ed.

We’ll leave off the week with this final item. It is true that poetry is a kind of money. Vanessa Place drilled this lesson into us this week when we found out that the first poetry-product from VanessaPlace Inc., a book of poetry made literally of money, called $20 (selling for $50), sold out at the May 3rd launch. To the poetics of gratuitous expenditure: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Over at Filip Marinovich’s WOLFMAN LIBRARIAN is a PDF of the first of Julien Poirier’s long poem “WAY TOO WEST,” scheduled to appear there weekly in serialized form for thirteen episodes. The post includes a music video! Poirier was a founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he co-edited 6×6 and edited New York Nights newspaper from 2001 to 2006 (you can also read his 2005 UDP chapbook Short Stack here). He now lives in Berkeley; and we’re lucky to get this much work from him at once–good on you, Filip!

-the story of Sadakichi Hartmann, a bohemian artist who befriended both Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound! Who the heck is Sadakichi Hartmann? Well friends, The Believer‘s Michelle Legro has done the legwork here and if you thought you knew all the crazy anecdotes there are to know about the great and powerful poets Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman, boy is this one a doozy!

According to Legro, Hartmann (of German and Japanese ancestry) immigrated to Philadelphia at the age of twelve after being disowned by his German father: his Japanese mother passed away before he turned a year old. As a young boy living with his great-uncle in Philly, Hartmann paid a visit to Walt Whitman, who lived in nearby Camden, New Jersey: “I would like to see Walt Whitman,” he said. Legro writes:

The poet—with his long gray beard and open, flowing shirt, which revealed his naked chest—greeted him by sight. “That’s my name. And you are a Japanese boy, are you not?”

If literature was the passport into this new kind of modern society, Walt Whitman was the common language, and the home of Whitman is where, around the age of sixteen, this lanky, German Japanese boy with a dark suit and a pince-nez began his American pilgrimage into the dark heart of bohemia.

Pound met Hartmann in Greenwich Village and later remarked “If one hadn’t been oneself, it would have been worthwhile to have been Sadakichi.” Read all about Hartmann’s life, art, and connections to modern poetry at The Believer.

Rigoberto González

The Los Angeles Review of Books has Rigoberto González discussing the merits of the poetry contest within the context of a more diverse literary landscape–the winners of three contests in particular serve “as antidotes to the underrepresentation of minority poets.”

The first of these to be featured is the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, steered by Letras Latinas, an initiative of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, which chose Laurie Ann Guerrero for A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying; second, the longstanding Asian-American poetry organization Kundiman, who, along with Alice James Books, picked Matther Olzmann’s Mezzanines; and third, the Carolina Wren Poetry Series, which “demonstrates a clear commitment to this mission, selecting works by poets from diverse communities including women, ethnic minority, and LGBT authors. L. Lamar Wilson’s Sacrilegion is shaped by a black gay identity.”

González reviews in full each of the books. Here’s an excerpt from his thinking on Sacrilegion:

Wilson’s contribution begins with poems that cover a part of the journey when every gay man becomes aware of his difference and its dangers: school bullying because he plays games for girls in “Woe Unto Sons,” the unsettling recognition of the self in the body of another gay relative in “Family Reunion, 1993,” the innocent homoerotic fantasies that become not-so-inconsequential in the era of AIDS in “It Could Happen to Anyone: A Letter to the Boy.” But it’s with the poem “Resurrection Sunday” that Wilson’s voice and skill reaches an extraordinary pitch.

“Resurrection Sunday” weaves two visual encounters that shape the speaker’s understanding of himself as a black gay body: one is a homoerotic film in which a white director is instructing a black male to perform auto-fellatio; the other is a photograph in the book The Anatomy of a Lynching, in which victim Claude Neal (accused of raping and killing a white woman in 1934) is shown hanging from a noose, his murder made more vulgar because first he’s castrated as part of the public spectacle. In both images, “A man holds his penis in his mouth.” The poem navigates between the two obscenities — one a sexual exploitation, the other a desecration, both acts of racism. In that journey back and forth, the speaker must locate himself as an object of desire, informed by his Otherness, and claim the subjectivity of his black male identity, which is eroticized and feared by the white gaze. In other words, he must mature into a sexual being aware of the the temptation and threat of his masculinity

[. . .]

As a stunning turning point, “Resurrection Sunday” sets a tone that endures through the end of the book, even as Wilson shifts directions occasionally into the portraits and praises of the lives of women such as Henrietta Lacks, Lucille Clifton, and the important women in his life: his mother, grandmother MaMary, and MaMary’s sister, Tudda. The mother becomes particularly essential to the speaker’s identity formation. Refreshingly, the story of the relationship highlights acceptance and support, which makes the mother’s cancer all the more tragic: “You didn’t turn me away when I said His name is Johnnie / & I love him, & you never said Brown boys can’t be sissies, baby, / though I wish you had, since now a lump the size of the head / of a tack may take away the only one who hasn’t recoiled / at what comes naturally to me.”

Wilson claims an important political/social responsibility and does it well: to write about the black gay male experience conscious of his time. . . .

González also underscores the significance of his own review when he draws the books together:

Carolina Wren Press’s stress of the word “quality,” Letras Latinas’s affirmation that it will “nurture the various paths” of Latino poetry, and Kundiman’s selection by committee, are efforts to secure the best work from specific communities, that is, to make sure that the smaller competition pool and precisely-defined guidelines attract manuscripts of literary merit. The future success of these processes, however, will become evident in the critical reception of their award-winning books.

The second part of a three-part series on Rhizome explores art with its lineage in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)—but wait, this is about Apollinaire, first! A few of our favorite calligrammes are presented here. And the emotionally complex, code-based emoticon, second! For instance:

Following in the footsteps of Baudelaire—and paving the way for the Surrealists and the French New Wave—early 20th-century artist Guillaume Apollinaire cultivated a cerebral taste for the most sensational elements of modern life. A poet by calling and a publicist by trade, Apollinaire seized on the outrageous whether he found it in the avant-garde (he coined the term “Cubism” in praise of early paintings by Braque and Picasso) or mass culture (he called the serialized tales of fictional super-villain Fantômas “one of the richest works that exist.”) Apollinaire’s poetry fed on the chaos of Paris in the early 1900s. Take this representative passage from 1909’s “Zone”:

You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud:
Here’s this morning’s poetry, and for prose you’ve
got the newspapers,
Sixpenny detective novels full of cop stories,
Biographies of big shots, a thousand different
titles,
Lettering on billboards and walls,
Doorplates and posters squawk like parrots.

Apollinaire’s 1918 book Calligrammes delved further into its source material, imitating its typographic forms to create pictograms in which the text echoes the image. For obvious reasons, the calligrammes are notoriously hard to translate, but to give you some idea: the following picture of a woman wearing a hat is made up of a text about a woman wearing a hat:

Glossing Calligrammes in a letter to a friend, Apollinaire wrote that they were “typographic precision made in a period when typography is winding up its career brilliantly, at the dawn of the new means of representation, cinema and the phonograph.” If Apollinaire was correct that typography was witnessing a brilliant period, he was wrong that it was winding up its career.

An example of ASCII art:

Writer Tom McCormack eventually merges the two:

ASCII art only ever flourished as a truly popular genre in the form of emoticons, which in the 2000s were eclipsed by the Japanese Corporation SoftBank’s supplemental character set of “Emoji.” (Emojis will be the subject of the next and final installment of this series of essays.)

ASCII art persists now mostly as a connoisseur’s medium.

[. . . .]

Personally, my favorite piece of ASCII art, also undated, is a map of Leopold Bloom’s path through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. A painstaking labor of love, and a work that knots together its form and subject to make visible the conditions of its own historical occurrence, the image recalls the dream of a city knit together by people’s stories and desires—a world wide web that never came to fruition.

Jump to the piece to see that marvel.

If you think back to last year’s Olympics in London, you’ll recall the remarkable performance staged by the Chilean arts collective Casagrande. Yes, we’re talking about the bombing of poems over London. Our friend David Shook covered the even for us here. Now, Casagrande is hoping to publish a book containing poems from the bombing, along with images of the event:

Bombing of Poems is a performance, which consists of dropping one hundred thousand poems from a helicopter over cities that in the past have been bombed during military confrontations. At the moment, it has been held in six cities around the world. Each time the cargo of poems has been released, none of the 100,000 poems has been left on the floor: every single poem was collected and treasured by the crowd.

Today we would like to publish a book including the 300 poems and the best pictures of the performance carried out in London, 2012.

The book is a hard cover edition, and will be published in Spanish and English. The poets are from more than 200 different countries and included an introduction of Oscar Hahn and William Rowe.

To accomplish this target we need to fundraise 8,000 US dollars.

www.loscasagrande.org

There’s only a week left to help support the project. Find out more here, and watch the video!

…like those ones that are on books published by New Directions… Oh wait! Here’s one! Our friends over at BOMBLOG, recently posted a fantastic conversation between Michael Barron (Poet and Associate Editor at New Directions ) and Elaine Lustig Cohen (Artist, Designer, and Partner/Collaborator of the late Alvin Lustig: legendary book jacket designer for ND). How’d they even find each other? Barron explains:

I first met the artist and designer Elaine Lustig Cohen through the website dedicated to her former husband, the legendary designer Alvin Lustig. Back in 2006, I had been asked to get in touch with the estate regarding his jacket designs for New Directions: we were hoping to replace intermediate designs on some of our books with the original Lustigs. I was an editorial assistant at the time; New Directions was still going through a generational change. Emails were considered unofficial. One senior editor told me to type a letter, “preferably with a typewriter.” Another told me to call. But I had neither an address nor an number. So I emailed the webmaster of the Alvin Lustig site and hoped for the best. Elaine herself answered my inquiry—it was the first contact she had had with New Directions since its founder James Laughlin passed away in 1997.

That was almost seven years ago. Yet over the years, Elaine and I have teamed together in promoting the legacy of Alvin Lustig. Many of New Directions’ classic titles now proudly wear their original Lustig jackets. This May, New Directions will issue an Alvin Lustig postcard collection: 50 of his best ND designs in a box.

Since our first meeting, I have also come to discover Elaine’s incredible body of work. A couple of years after our initial contact, she invited me to her opening at the Julie Saul Gallery. The exhibit was called, “The Geometry of Seeing” and it displayed the sort of opus only a designer cum artist could develop—a prototype for a sewing kit, a giclée of a geometric Alphabet, a collage made from old train tickets, and a wooden box adorned with colored cubes, among other pieces…

This interview took place at Elaine’s Upper East Side home. The interior of her townhouse is touched with a designer’s sensibility—everything in its right place, from the curation and layout of art to the selection and placement of furniture. Speaking with Elaine is like cracking open a volume of 20th-century American design history. At 85, Elaine’s memory is as sharp as her knowledge is erudite. She speaks with a modest firmness, doubtless in her affirmation of fact, but humble about her accomplishments.

To learn more about Elaine Lustig Cohen visit her profile here. To read more of her conversation with Michael Barron, read-on at BOMB.

We’re always happy to find the occasion to celebrate the poetry of Adrienne Rich. Our excuse today is that it’s her b-day! The good folks over at brain pickings have posted Rich’s 1997 letter declining the National Medal of Arts. They write:

In 1997, to protest the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, she became the first and only person to date to decline the prestigious National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist on behalf of the people of the United States, awarded to such luminaries as Maya Angelou, John Updike, Ray Bradbury, and Bob Dylan.

We’ll give a taste of the letter but then let you make the jump to read the rest (which includes a broadcast from the radio show Democracy Now with Rich reading said letter):

July 3, 1997

Jane Alexander
The National Endowment for the Arts
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20506

Dear Jane Alexander,

I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal.

Head over to read Rich’s clarification. And if that’s not enough, we have a wealth of poems, podcasts, videos, and essays by and about Rich right here!

Salt, a U.K.-based poetry and fiction publisher, announced yesterday that it plans to shift its emphasis in poetry from single-author poetry collections to its popular Best British Poetry anthology series. Salt has been publishing poetry collections from writers across the globe for the past thirteen years: to date, Salt has published over four hundred poetry collections. (Many of them are debut collections by emerging authors.) According to Salt’s website:

The move will mean that the business will no longer be commissioning new single-author collections, though the press is not ruling out a return to publishing some in the future. Salt will continue to support and market its extensive backlist, as well as develop other poetry anthology projects.

Before the changes take effect, Salt will publish a further dozen new poetry collections, including several debuts and this year’s Crashaw Prize winner, Lydia Macpherson.

“There’s never been a better time for poets to write,” says Chris Hamilton-Emery. “There are huge opportunities for poets to publish in new ways — and there are scores of new presses emerging, too. It’s an exciting time. It’s also the right time for Salt to take a break from our work on individual collections — we’ve done a great deal over the past thirteen years — we want to concentrate our efforts on anthology publishing, where we support poets in raising their profile and reaching new readers.”

To date, Salt has published books by poets who are no strangers to our site, including Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, and Tom Raworth. Learn more about Salt and its plans for the future, here.

David Wojnarowicz scholars and fans rejoice: The artist’s journals–archived at NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections–have just been digitized! Check out one of the tweeted photos of the many; and the full list of materials is here available to VIEW. We spied this poem, “Poem to Brian Sleeping”:

GalleristNY writes that “[The journals] follow Wojnarowicz on his travels through Mexico, Europe and elsewhere (as well as include ephemera like a menu for a Chinese restaurant at 207 Second Avenue, which is now the home of Momofuku’s Ssäm Bar restaurant).” Very exciting. . . .

We done told ya and told ya, but will wonders never: Today is the last day to submit to the first-annual Wonder book prize, judged by Macgregor Card:

Please send in your submission tonight by Midnight (EST). We are accepting full-length manuscripts of any genre. The author of the selected manuscript will receive a $300 prize and publication.

Please send a cover letter, your manuscript and a $10 submission fee ($15 if you would like a final copy of the selected book). Please do not include your name in the manuscript. Each submission will be read blindly by the judge.

Do it. And while you’re at it, check out Mathew Timmons’s recent post for Wonder’s Tumblr, “About shit I wonder.”

Ahsahta Press announced the winner of the annual Sawtooth Poetry Prize contest: David Bartone. Bartone, a native of Amherst, Massachusetts, won for his manuscript Practice on Mountains, which will be published next year by Ahsahta. In addition to publication of his manuscript, Bartone wins $1,500.

His manuscript was selected by this year’s judge, Dan Beachy-Quick. This year’s Sawtooth Poetry Prize Competition received 605 entries, out of which 37 were named semifinalists, a number that was then narrowed to 20 finalists, then to this year’s winner.

In awarding the prize, Beachy-Quick wrote, “Self-knowledge requires, strangely enough, a means to quell introspection, that self-thinking of self and all that there occurs which but mimics the understanding to which it cannot arrive. David R. Bartone’s Practice on Mountains offers itself as an astonishingly vivid record of just such a practice, seeking some enlightenment it is also too savvy to trust exists. The poetry finds an oddity of voice absolutely necessary, daily speech that contains within it shards of poetic fragment, a kind of lyric discursiveness that always interrupts its own method when that method threatens to become merely such. It’s wonderfully self-searching without being narcissistic, tied into love’s agonies in ways familiar but strikingly honest, deprecating but audacious, learned but humble. It brings to its readers a primary document of the mind reading through the heart’s various damage.”

Ahsahta Press, named for the Mandan word for “Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep,” was founded in 1974 and publishes seven to ten books of poetry per year, one of which is the winner of its annual contest.

Ahsahta Press is based at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, and is directed by Janet Holmes, a poet and professor in the MFA Program for Creative Writing at Boise State.

Congrats, David! Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge will judge next year’s contest, which will begin accepting submissions January 1 and continue accepting submissions until March 1, 2014.

Hey Bay Area! Today is “Say Hey to Clay Day” at Small Press Distribution.

If you’re local, stop by SPD (1341 Seventh Street in Berkeley) any time from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM to say good-bye to Clay Banes.

If you haven’t met Clay, you probably know him from his weekly “SPD RECOMMENDS” e-newsletters that documented bestselling small press titles as they shipped from SPD’s warehouse. Clay’s e-newsletters also featured up-and-coming small presses in the subject lines and placed featured publisher’s books on sale, with special sale codes within the content of the e-newsletters.

Clay leaves his position as Sales and Marketing Manage at Small Press Distribution after five years of promoting small press poetry (and fiction), publishers, and writers across the country. As they say at SPD…

We will be celebrating the reign of Clay Banes as SPD’s Sales & Marketing Manager from 2008 until 2013. Happily for Clay but sadly for us, Clay is leaving SPD and he is also leaving the Bay Area for his native Massachusetts. Please stop by to say “hey!” next Wednesday on Clay’s actual last day at SPD on 1341 7th Street in Berkeley. Food and drinks will be served all day and if you are in the mood to buy a book you can take 30% off the usual price.

Thank you Clay!

Things were astounding enough/the passenger ferry/the steeple/enough to make you die of astonishment
—Sarah Mangold, from “I meant to be Transparent”

To be transparent, if it is a material, is to let light pass through so objects behind are made visible. To be transparent is also to transmit heat without altering bodies. To be transparent in computing is, (I imagine), a world where computers are so present and so invisible that the individual is not aware how problems have been solved. Transparent is “shining through” from the Latin transparere. It is to “appear.”

The appearance or disappearance is shot through with motion. Invisible or visible is a movement that may alter perception or position. What is a poem whose borders are meticulously redrawn, a poem that is self-consciously a process of processing what it is not seeing? A poem that keeps an eye on the periphery might require a form of astonishment or stillness, or a doubled vision, to catch the fleeing or the fleeting in its particulars.

In her post last month on National Poetry Month (NPM) Daily, Sarah Mangold wrote, “For the last five years, I head in to work an hour early and spend that hour in a nearby coffee shop writing. Everyday. Even if I’m not in the middle of some spectacular idea, I’m writing, moving, practicing.”

These sentences have lingered in me for the last few weeks. They lead me to her work. I read her poems in fragments on a computer screen because that is how I move through poems these days, five minutes here or two minutes there. This form of reading does not follow the kind of intention that Sarah Mangold maintains in “writing, moving, practicing” but it makes me think about the appearance and disappearance of “things” in poems. I’m trying to think about the perceptive eye, the roving body, and the intention that is practiced as I look to versions of the world around. My eyes are crossed in peripheral terms, peripheral times, if that makes sense.

One speaks of transparency and perhaps the images that arise signal, in time, to silhouettes, traces, and refraction. The truth of transparency is also the untruth in what falls to the sidelines, and what remains in the shadows.

magistrate building/sitting neatly as adults/the body as message writes Sarah Mangold in the same poem.

One must, in reading these lines, develop a slow-motion tactic, so that one floats with the edges guiding the eye. The static is an illusion or is it a frame of reference to something else? There is very little distance between body and the bodies. I have already admitted to reading with a fragmented eye. What is revealed is astonishingly moving, and as clear as language permits, as clear as one can be when things appear or are brought out of the shadows of illuminated bodies.

An emphasis falls on silhouettes/trenches lilies/substituting for an original body and voice.
—Sarah Mangold, from “I meant to be transparent”