Saturday, May 30, 2009

Super Hero Pens, Gigantic Moths, and Oneiric Exhibitionism

Here's an interview between Michael Leong and Chilean poet Estela Lamat.

Leong's translation of Lamat's book "The Worst of All" (Blazevox) should be read.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Arielle Greenberg's comment on the Gurlesque

[Since it came in rather late in the "gurlesque" thread, I thought I would repost Arielle's comment:]

I mostly want to stay out of this conversation, but one point needs clarifying: I came up with the term and notion of the Gurlesque; I do NOT consider myself a Gurlesque poet, mostly. Some of my work veers that way; much of it definitely does not. The Gurlesque is (some of) the critical work I do, not the creative (by and large). So you might be understandably confused about the term indeed if you were to look to my own work to define it (as it seems some are).

But also, just as I have some pretty Gurlesque poems and other not Gurlesque poems, some of the folks Lara and I talk about in our antho are Gurlesque in one project and not in another. I don't exclusively write one kind of poetry--in fact, the pregnancy stuff Seth heard in Iowa is creative non-fiction, not even poetry, and is a political project. It's unlike any other creative work I (or Rachel) has done. Just a note to say it seems a little silly to completely define any one artist by any one work--and this was never my intention by coining the Gurlesque term, nor was it my intention to limit the term to one gender or one nationality or anything like that. I was/am just mapping a constellation I see happening, and trying to figure out where it's coming from as far as I can tell (hence the focus on the USA; I claim no in-depth cultural literacy about most other countries) and am interested in the expansions and exceptions everyone is suggesting.

But also, finally, there's nothing inherently "normative" about pregnancy any more than there is about sequins, drag, abortions or what have you, in terms of poetics, as far as I'm concerned. It's what you *do* with the content, not the content, that counts. And, too, believe me: pregnancy, a state in which you grow a live being inside of your body, and a time which is full of blood, excretion, discomfort, etc., can be pretty darn grotesque, not to mention burlesque!

Kenneth Anger

I was just watching some movies on the refinished Kenneth Anger collection - Puce Moment and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome - and I just can't believe how awesome these movies are. Absolutely beautiful.

Poets seem always to be talking about Stan Brakhage, but I'll take Anger over Brakhage any day (not that you have to choose).

Also, the new collection has hilarious and wonderful commentary from Anger to go along with the films. For example in Puce Moment he talks about where he got the dresses and dogs etc.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Jeff Sirkin on Sandy Florian

Here's Jeff Sirkin's very thoughtful review of Sandy Florian's first book, Telescope in Latino Poetry Review: "A playful, fascinating and revealing machine, Sandy Florian's Telescope is a magic glass, and its refracted product is poetry."

This book and this review might make an interesting complication of Steve Burt's article "The Next Thing," an article I think was actually quite good at identifying a certain tendency in American poetry, though as John Latta points out, "The upshot, the payoff pitch, unarticulated by Burt, is: the New Thing is that old thing—sincerity and authenticity, “craft” and honor and seriousness."

Without going too deep into that article for now, I would add to this that it's perhaps the new version of the old thing, what Mark W so well defined on his blog recently (see my post below). The real boy, the real thing. I'll take Poe and Lovecraft please.

Something that is so amazing about Sandy's books (and this is also why Threadwell gives Burt some troubles in his article) is the way the things become extravagant and performative.

(PS there are several very good reviews in this Latino Poetry Review. Check for example out Notre Dame PhD candidate Todd Thorpe review of Robert Tejada.)

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Experience

Mark has written a couple of insightful replies to Stephen Burt's insistence on "experience" on this blog.

I particularly like the anecdote about "the real boy" because that seems to capture so much of the control aspect that is behind most of the Hoagland style of enforced normalcy criticism.

I've been gone for a couple of weeks visiting the East Coast for various reasons. I'll try to write some more entries in the near future and respond to various comments and e-mails I've received recently.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

In Praise of Virgins

Go here for my chapbook "In Praise of Virgins" by ML Press.

It's a travesty of paper, hand-written note and images from the Russian front.

And there are a very limited number available. So buy quickly.

Some quick responses

* There's been some talk about men writing "gurlesque" poetry. The way I interpret "gurlesque" is as a sensibility, not a group. So of course there can be men writing with a gurlesque sensibility. Arielle didn't set out to define "gurlesque" poets; she showed the prevalence of a sensibility.

* About race: As I noted earlier when talking about Aase Berg and Kim Hyesoon, it's important to take note of cultural differences. Clearly Lara was very aware of the racial angle since the anthology includes a number of non-white folks (Kara Walker for example). The grotesque has an interesting and troubling past when it comes to relating to differences - long-nosed, mean-looking Jewish cartoon in Germany or caricatures of African-Americans, not to mention lynchings and Abu Ghraib.

* On her blog I noticed that Lorraine objected to Lara not mentioning Mina Loy and The Baroness. I haven't read the intro but I think Lara does write extensively about them. One of the most important jobs a term like "gurlesque" can do is in fact to engage is in reconsidering literary history. For example, the language poets rewrote Modernism to make Stein - rather than Pound/Eliot, or perhaps in addition to Pound/Eliot - the central Modernist, and radicalizing the reading of Williams. In the same way I think "gurlesque" rewrites Modernism, calling more attention to Mina Loy and the Baroness and radicalizing the reading of Plath.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Readings this week in NYC

I'm reading on Thursday at the Bowery Poetry Club from 6-8 with a bunch of the Starcherone authors. I will be reading from Dear Ra and some new stuff at this reading.

And I'm reading with Joyelle, Cathy Park Hong and Ken Chen at the Stain Bar in Brooklyn on Friday, 7-9 pm. I will be reading from Aase Berg's With Deer and some other published/unpublished translations from young Swedish poets at this reading.

New Von Trier

Monday, May 18, 2009

Ron K. inerviews Lara Glenum

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Dirty Dancing by David Lynch



This is really funny.

Gurlesque

Just a brief note: I don't think of "gurlesque" as a group or a movement or anything like that, but as a certain campy/gothic/grotesque sensibility. That's why ultimately you can find it in all kinds of places.

I know Arielle's original essay included a lot of poets who are very different from say Lara and Ariana. And to be honest I don't particularly like (or dislike) a lot of them. Some of them just seem too tasteful, middle-of-the-road.

It makes no sense to me to make lists of definite qualities or lists of who is in and who is out. Besides, those kinds of discussions don't really interest me.

However, I do think it's important to recognize differences in various figures. For example, if one wants to include Kim Hyesoon or Hannah Höch or Aase Berg, I think it's important to pay attention to the very different circumstances, cultures etc so that we don't make the same mistake many scholars are doing right now when defining a "global poetics." I'm for making the kinds of connection Lara is making but I'm also for noting crucial differences.

Also, my interpretation of this sensibility is not all about gender, as it seems to be in some of the discussion below; and especially not about creating new and improved gender roles. To me it has more to do with refusal and abjection. It is part of wider grotesque/gothic strategies/tactics/tantrums. I don't want to make a space for Antigone in the city. Lets drag our blood-splattered dolls around campus. I don't want to feel good about poetry.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Absinthe #11

Absinthe #11

Absinthe #11 is in the mail to subscribers and contributors!

The new issue includes poetry, essays, and fiction by Liliana Ursu, Roland Jaccard, Peters Bruveris, Aldona Gustas, Susanne Jorn, Ulf Peter Hallberg, Mariana Dan, Dimitris Leontzakos, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Serge Pey, Hella S. Haasse, Leo Pleysier, Boris Pintar, Jürgen Becker, and Dy Plambeck, with a portfolio by artists Roger Herman and Hubert Schmalix, communiqués from Copenhagen and Rome by Thomas E. Kennedy and Stefania Rega, and book reviews by John Taylor.

Not a subscriber yet? It's easy to become one at our web site: http://www.facebook.com/l/;www.absinthenew.com.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Gurlesque (Lara Glenum guest post)

Since there has been so much confusion about the concept of the Gurlesque (for example over at the Lemonhound blog site and over at Seth's Suburban Ecstacies), and so many people have asked me about it, Lara Glenum wrote me the following little bit to explain it a bit:

To start off, I should say that the Gurlesque is an entirely descriptive project, not prescriptive. In other words, Arielle and I are describing a set of aesthetic strategies/tendencies being engaged by a fairly disparate set of poets. We are not spearheading a movement or branding a product.

The Gurlesque describes an emerging field of female artists who, taking a page form the historical burlesque, perform their femininity in a campy or overtly mocking way. Their work assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends. The theoretical tangents germane to the Gurlesque that I’m exploring in my critical writing include burlesque and camp, girly kitsch, and performance of the female grotesque.

Many people associate burlesque with its 1930s incarnation, the strip-tease, which was a far cry from the early years of the burlesque theater—the 1840s to the 1860s—which were pioneered almost exclusively by troops of female actresses under the direction of other women in Victorian London. Their dance hall repertoire was an antecedent of vaudeville, only much more socially explosive. Robert C. Allen, in his seminal work on burlesque, Horrible Prettiness, surmises that burlesque “presented a world without limits, a world turned upside down and inside out in which nothing was above being brought down to earth. In that world, things that should be kept separate were united in grotesque hybrids. Meanings refused to stay put. Anything might happen.” Emily Lane Fargo writes:

"Burlesque performers also literally usurped male power by taking on male roles onstage.... However, female burlesque performers were never trying to present a convincing, realistic portrayal of a man onstage. Instead, they were utilizing their masculine attire as a sort of fetish object, in fact emphasizing their feminine sexuality by contrasting it with markers of masculinity… These practices, of course, ultimately emphasized the constructed nature of both genders, calling into question accepted gender roles themselves."

The effect of such “unladylike” conduct led at least one critic to deem burlesque performers neither men nor women but “creatures of an alien sex, parodying both.” And parody, as Baudrillard tells us, is the most serious of crimes because it makes acts of obedience to the law and acts of transgression the same, canceling out the difference on which the law is based. The work of early burlesque performers embody Judith Butler’s insistence that we “consider gender as a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.”

If the burlesque is always about the body on display (i.e. the gendered surface of the body), the grotesque engages the body as a biological organism. To Bakhtin, women represent the quintessential grotesque: they are “penetrable, suffer the addition of alien body parts, and become alternately huge and tiny.” Grotesque bodies, male or female, are no longer “clearly differentiated from the word but transferred, merged, fused with it.” Mary Russo writes,

"The images of the grotesque body are precisely those which are abjected from bodily canons of classical aesthetics. The classical body is transcendental and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical and sleek; it is identified with “high” or official culture… with rationalism, individualism, and the normalizing aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The grotesque body is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple and changing; it is identified with non-official “low” culture, and with social transformation."

In Gurlesque poetry, human bodies and human language (and thus identity) are not closed, discrete systems. They are grotesque bodies/systems—never finished, ever-morphing, unstable, and porous. The body, as the nexus of language and identity, is a strange borderland, the site of erratic and highly specific (and language-mediated) desires.

There is no experience of “pure” culture or language available to us, no “pure” identity, no unmediated desire. The concept of the pure lies at the heart of Western aesthetics—the word “catharsis” comes from the Greek verb “to purify”—and women, non-whites, queers, impoverished, or disabled persons have historically been labeled as social contaminants. Gurlesque poets deny catharsis because they deny the aesthetics of the pure.

For ruminations on the Gurlesque and kitsch, you can go here: http://www.actionyes.org/issue9/glenum/glenum1.html

Monday, May 11, 2009

Review of The Tree of No by Sandy Florian

Here's a fine analysis of Sandy Florian's The Tree of No (Action Book, 2009) by Robert Savino Oventile published in Jacket:

"As a reader of the King James Bible and of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, I never anticipated a contemporary author would, by reverse-engineering those works, simultaneously delineate anew their imaginal worlds and break into a realm of imaginative thought so singularly her own. But I had yet to read Sandy Florian’s The Tree of No." (That's the intro paragraph)

Few books have struck me like Sandy's second book. She totally spellbound me when I first heard her read it. And this is a good review.

Review of Dear Ra

There's a short review of Dear Ra up on the Black Ocean site:

"The flinches of Dear Ra consist of confessions, cautions, and insincere apologies. "If the ship is sinking don't make love to the rats." Like Burroughs without the slamming boys, it's a constantly-changing party line. It's "a Haiku about Bang-Bang-Ugh." Too many poems these days are really surrealist novels in hiding; it's nice to see one that comes into the clear." (John Cotter)

A bit down from there you can also get a special deal: Buy my translation of With Deer by Aase Berg and get for free Upon Arrival by Paula Cisewski.

Italian Poetry in Chicago

Poesia Ultima / Italian Poetry Now
A festival of contemporary Italian poetry and poetics

Featuring four of Italy’s most prominent experimental and
emergent poets—as well as translators and critics—these events
will bring new voices to US readers and expose points of
confluence and conflict between Italian and global poetries.

Thursday, May 28, 5:30 pm
Bilingual reading: Milli Graffi, Maria Attanasio, Marco
Giovenale, Giovanna Frene
University of Chicago, Rosenwald 405
free

Friday, May 29, 1 pm
Poesia Ultima: A Symposium on
Contemporary Italian Poetry and Translation

Moderators: Jennifer Scappettone and
Raffaello Palumbo

1:15-2:30 Roundtable on translation with Lisa Barca, Jacob
Blakesley, Ryan Gogol, Eirik Steinhoff, and Joshua Adams

2:45-4 Roundtable on contemporary Italian poetry and poetics
with Maria Attanasio, Milli Graffi, Marco Giovenale, and
Giovanna Frene

Reception

University of Chicago, Classics 110
free

7:30 pm
Bilingual reading and discussion/ salon featuring Milli
Graffi, Maria
Attanasio, Marco Giovenale, Giovanna Frene Moderated by
Jennifer Scappettone
(University of Chicago), Francesco Levato (Poetry Center), and
Chris Glomski
(UIC)

Th!nkArt Salon in Wicker Park
1530 N. Paulina, Suite F

Saturday, May 09, 2009

Still Ignorant (2)

I liked Richard Greenfield's comment below, so I'm putting it in its own entry field:

This part of the Wojahn interview was left out:

"For there have developed, in recent years, whole schools of verbalizers, nerveless, slick and often macabre; squeezers of the obvious, vulgar jostlers with words; cerebral gibberers and wild-eyed affirmers; helter-skelter impressionists and frantic improvisers; pip-squeak euphuists..."

"The trouble lies in the age itself...in the [poets'] willingness to seek refuge in words rather than transcending them. The language dictates; they are the used. The cohabitation of their images is, as it were, a mere fornication of residues. One can say that the poetry of the future will not come from such as these."

Or is it? Actually, this is by Theodore Roethke (mentioned by Wojahn as one of those major figures forgotten by young poets), from the January 1946 issue of Poetry, speaking of young poets writing within the lineage(s) of Modernism(s).

Still Ignorant

Just some brief points:

* John Gallaher makes some more in-depth analysis of the Wojahn interview here.

* I would say this about his post: I don't think Action Books is what Hoagland has primarily in mind with his "skittery poets." I think he means something more "elusive" and "oblique," perhaps what Steve Burt called "elliptical." The books we publish/write are often "narrative" (though lets face it, that term has become almost worthless, since so called "narrative poetry" often isn't narrative at all, but a lyrical epiphany) and it's not elusive. In fact, Hoagland criticizes a lot of the same poetry I have criticized on this blog - "high ambiguity" - just from a totally different perspective.

* But these folks are not really criticizing one style or tendency so much as a power dynamic, a shift in which they see themselves struggling to retain power (funny because they obviously have much more institutional power than their skittery students). Part of this is the proliferation of small presses. In that way, yes, sure, we're skittery.

* My comment about "jouissance" was half in jest. I think Jordan's comments does a good job of defining this term and its problems. I would add to this, that I see in it also Lacan's pal Bataille's notion of useless "expenditure." Poetry is not progressive, useful. This makes it paradoxically powerful. This is in part why it needs to be reigned in and be craft-ified.

* It's absolutely important to me that I draw this connection: H/W's criticism of Skitterism as a "fashion," facile and useless (as opposed to "wise"? Hoagland give me a break nobody reads your poetry for wisdom! Don't make me laugh!) is repeated in all kinds of context. Most recently I saw it in Steve Burt's article "The New Thing" in the Boston Review: "... their bad poems were bad surrealism, random-seeming improvisations, or comic turns hoping only to hold an audience, whether or not they had something to say." This great concern with "something to say" - which is strange coming from Burt, since in his essays (as I wrote a few days ago), he focuses almost exclusively on formal elements - is echoes throughout this article.

* In fact it's at the essence it seems of "the new thing"-poetry (thus in many ways echoing the concerns of authenticity-obsessed workshop poetry of the 1970s, striving as it did to rid itself of the excesses of the 1960s and its "Surrealism" (which Hoagland has another essay about). It's in for example Jon Woodward's quote about "soft-surrealist cotton candy" for example [Jon reads this blog, so perhaps he can shed some light on this quote?]. You can see the same sentiments expressed in Hoagland's critique of "aestheticism" in the quote I quoted below. Again, what troubles people most about poetry is its extravagance, its excess, its uselessness - its decadence. The weird part is that this suggests a totally under-theorized notion of excess.

* I am actually pretty interested in the rhetoric of insubstaniality - or "soft" in Silliman's terms, "skittery" in Hoagland's, or the frequent critique of "fashionable" ("poetry of the moment"), or "inauthentic" in quietist lingo ("You haven't *earned* this image, Johannes."). It is an interesting piece of rhetoric that cuts to the core of a lot of poetics: the fear of the uselessness of poetry. And also: it's femininity, softness, queerness, unproductiveness, non-progressiveness, excessiveness. I'm also interested in the way that "surrealism" becomes this huge umbrella term for all things useless and extravagant.

* Finally, there's always somebody repeating the mantra: "These are old guys, their day is over, what are you whining about?" Totally totally false idea of how change is caused in literature. These guys are still incredibly powerful. And they play a huge role in defining who in the next generation will have power (ie folks who go along with their tired old schtick).

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Younger Poets are Still Ignorant

I found this excerpt from a Tony Hoagland interview that I think disproves the notion that he has a neutral relationship to the poetry he thinks is being written right now:

"...It's a very effervescent poetry that's being written right now. But it's also a poetry that doesn't have very much allegiance to experience, and not necessarily a deep vision of how it has consequence to living and to walking around in the twenty-first century. In other words, it seems to be largely a poetry of entertainment. It's a poetry that could be labeled "aestheticism.""

Younger poets are ignorant

Seth Abramson has a post up on Steve Burt's piece in the Mayday Parade. Which led me to think about the general treatment of "the young" in a lot of the writing of older poets. I read a lot of little statements and reviews by these older, established poets who seem driven by some kind of defensiveness to attack younger poets. What is remarkable is that these older, established poets seemed to see themselves as victims of these younger, unestablished poets - they write from the position of heroic resistance.

In the latest Gulf Coast, David Wojahn makes several statements that seem to fit in with the general trends of these defensive older poets:

"We're in a somewhat preposterous situation right now. It's not simply that readers don't know the tradition, they don't even know recent literary history. There are a lot of pretty articulate and well-read people who are clueless about the crucial poets of the middle generation. They draw a blank when you mention Oppen or Rukeyser or Roethke, or even Berryman, Lowell and Bishop. Admittedly, those writers aren't easy models - they're militantly self-confronting, sometimes self-lacerating, sometimes self-humbling..."

"Sadly, I think in our post-modern, theory-inflected climate, the very notion that self-representation can be authentic and sincere - can in fact be an essential goal of poetry - seems to a lot of people a little passé. I find it maddening when students in graduate workshops write obscurely not for any abiding aesthetic reason, but for mere self-protection... And so "confessional" has become an unjustly pejorative word like "liberal" or "community organizer," so vastly out of fashion that it seems like it's never going to rise again.'

"Tony Hoaglund has a withering label for the way we've almost all started to write - he calls it "the skittery poem of our moment." Don't get me wrong: I find some of the Language writers very compelling. Rae Armantrout's new collection is brilliant... Nevertheless I think the current period has replaced self-confrontation with slipperiness, with various strand of irony... I'm tired of irony being our lingua franca. We've become brilliant at cannibalizing the trappings of contemporary culture, but I sometimes worry that it's all a form of solipsism... I know a lot of the Language poets really talk up Marx and in an oblique way they want to emphasize the social responsibilities of the poet, but I've had it with Skitter-ism."

Sorry about the long quotes but believe me there's more. The thing I think is important is that he is very good about bringing up names of people he admire (Lowell etc), he's even good at naming Language poets (or at least Rae A.). But he doesn't want to name the Skittery Poets. They are the ones who upset him the most. Why? Who are they? They're not the Quietist establishment and they're not the Language Poets (he apparently respects them, they are officially poets).

Answer: They seem to be his students (or are they "The American Hybrid"?). And part of the reason he doesn't name them, I suspect, is that they are not well-known, not holding down nice teaching jobs, not winning big awards.

So how can they be the Poem of the Moment?

I suppose they can be the poets of the moment in that he sees a lot of students who are interested in other things than he's interested in, who resist his attempts to change their interests. So on one hand I think this is a problem of pedagogy. Perhaps Wojahn's pedagogy should not be so resistant to the students' ideas? They may not simply be deficient (cowardly, ignorant); they may just have different perspectives. You don't have to agree with your students, but you should make some effort to understand where they're coming from.

Actually, I think the key about Wojahn and his crew is: They hate jouissance...

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Cocteau

"This same American critic once congratulated me on inventing the "tragic gag." I did not invent the tragic gag, but I used it as much as possible. The gag is a great find. Here is an example: Charlie Chaplin swallows the whistle and all the dogs follow him. The audience bursts into laughter. With the tragic gag, I don't expect the audience to laugh (if they do, I have failed), but I expect a black silence from them that is almost as violent as laughter."

Jack Smith

“Corniness is the other side of marvelousness,” argues Jack Smith in his breakthrough essay “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez."

Apparently the collected writings of one of my favorite artists has been reprinted. So if someone wants to give me a birthday present, that would be a good choice. (My birthday is July 4th). Thanks.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Feminist Poetics

Hello, dear friends,

Apologies for the mass posting, but I wanted to let you know about an exciting new poetry project...Please check out the first of the new poetics forums at the literary blog-journal Delirious Hem! If you're taken with it, please consider posting a link to your own blog, through your Facebook status, to listservs you're on, or the like! with affection and thanks, Danielle

Delirious Hem Poetics Forum #1: This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like
http://www.delirioushem.blogspot.com

Delirious Hem's monthly poetics forums are designed to give women poets a platform from which to address topics we all grapple with, obsess over, cram down the craws of our cohabitant lovelies. DH's poetics forums invite creato-critico-bio-cultural-multi-dimensional responses. Political personal public private. Theory-rich, yammer-strung, high-octane, molecular-fringe. DH's poetics forums invite contributors to drop in briefly or never shut up. We hope you'll do the same (see fig. 1, the comments box).

Featuring:
Monday May 4: Mary Biddinger, Anne Boyer, & Brandi Homan
Tuesday May 5: Megan Kaminski, Becca Klaver, & Majena Mafe
Wednesday May 6: Gina Myers, Martha Silano, & Leah Souffrant
Thursday May 7: K. Lorraine Graham, Mytili Jagannathan, Elizabeth Treadwell, & Sarah Vap
Friday May 8: Teresa Carmody & co.


There are likely as many strains and modes of feminist poetics as there are of feminism, but in reviews, discussions, and even our own manifestos, we often fall into shorthand that fails to explore this valuable friction, our own variations. I've lately longed for unpacking, and so issued this open-ended call:

This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like: what branch of feminism, model of feminist poetics, feminist icon, or etc. informs your poetry? Or, from which of these does your poetry diverge? Are there particular feminist tactics you employ? Do you consider yourself a feminist in many ways, but don't particularly involve it in the poetry? Feel free to take liberties with the questions! Short, long, essay, manifesto, whatever appeals to you!

Curated by Danielle Pafunda

Monday, May 04, 2009

Negative reviews

Poetry Magazine

I have to give credit when credit is due: The new Poetry Magazine features a bunch of (largely earlier)poems by one of my favorite poets, Inger Christensen. They don't necessarily make for the best introduction. I would say read The Alphabet or Det first. BUt for those who already are into her work, you should definitely pick up the new issue.

Sunday, May 03, 2009

I will read in NYC

Event: The Brooklyn Rail Presents: Starcherone Books
""hybrid innovative crazyass whachamacallit writing""
What: Performance
Host: Ted Pelton
Start Time: Thursday, May 21 at 6:00pm
End Time: Thursday, May 21 at 8:00pm
Where: Bowery Poetry Club