Thu 15 Oct 2009
Poetry
Archived Posts from this Category
Mon 10 Aug 2009
There’s a new number of Big Bridge online featuring A Garland for George Oppen, edited by Eric Hoffman. Included is work by Joseph Bradshaw, Stephen Cope, John Cunningham, Thom Donovan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Heller, Eric Hoffman, Grant Matthew Jenkins, Burt Kimmelman, Michael Kindellan, Jack Marshall, Peter Nicholls, Marjorie Perloff, Patrick Pritchett, Martin Jack Rosenblum, Bruce Ross-Smith, Anthony Rudolf, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, Mark Scroggins, John Taggart, Henry Weinfield, Karl Young, and me. It’s a broad and inspiring survey of one of my favorite poets. Click here to go there. Thanks to Eric, not only for sustaining his Oppen-efforts but for asking me to contribute as well.
Sat 30 May 2009
In light, I presume, of both my own delays & the online appearance of Stephen Burt’s article, I’ve been receiving queries as to the state of affairs at The Cultural Society. The most recent projected update was to have been posted about a month ago but other forces have intervened, not least among them is my new job which has taken more time & energy than I’d anticipated.
Nevertheless, the CultSoc is more or less in full swing: in addition to the usual preparations for the next update (likely to appear in July & including 3 PDF chapbooks — one by James Robinson, a collaboration by Erika Howsare & Kate Schapira, & Joseph Massey’s Eureka Slough), I’ve sought outside assistance to create a friendlier, more effective database for the website. Basically, it will be archived by contributor as well as chronologically. So if you want to read all of Peter O’Leary’s contributions, they’ll be at your fingertip(s). Likewise, if you want to see what was happening in CultSoc land back in 2002, it will be more accesible than the current endless-scrolldown of my News page.
So everything’s cool. It’s just going to take a little while.
Mon 25 May 2009
Devin Johnston’s Sources has been reviewed at Boston Review. It’s a wonderful book from one of my favorite poets. If you’re not familiar with his work, you should be & this book is a fine place to start. If you are familiar with his work, then you already know you should have this.
Mon 18 May 2009
The Cultural Society & I received notice from Stephen Burt in the new number of Boston Review. In the article, Burt outlines a contemporary school of poetry dubbed The New Thing, some of whose whose members will be familiar to readers of my website.
Here’s Burt on the CultSoc:
If the most important independent press for the New Thing is Flood, the most important magazine is Zach Barocas’ Web-based Cultural Society. Barocas entitled his own first book (itself surely a part of the New Thing) Among Other Things. Barocas’ poem “Things to Do Today” makes a list of “things I’ve counted on,” among them “cigarettes, history, trucks, & trash,” “lapses / flares & lusty resolve”; disarmingly stark lines elsewhere in that same book promise to “abandon / elliptical things.” Among the first poets Barocas’ journal published, in 2001-02, were Peter O’Leary, Norman Finkelstein, and Michael Heller, prominent scholars of Objectivist writing, and Mark Scroggins, then at work on Zukofsky’s biography. Barocas has also published [Devin] Johnston, [Joseph] Massey, [Justin] Marks, and [Graham] Foust; the Flood writers Philip Jenks, John Tipton, and Pam Rehm (who dedicated “A Sequence” to Massey)…
Poet/critic/CultSoc contributor & booster Robert Archambeau describes The New Thing piece is a sort of follow-up to Burt’s 1998 article in which he identifies Elliptical Poetry. It’s interesting to see how Burt establishes these schools as a means of approaching poetry whose mode(s) might otherwise seem opaque, if not unrelated.
Thanks, in any case, to both Burt & the relevant poets & publishers: the former for giving us his time & attention; & the latter for the poetry.
Mon 12 Jan 2009
As with Sandra Simonds, I came to know of Jen Tynes by publishing her work at The Cultural Society website. Following her through her myriad publications, collaborations, & work with her own imprint, horse less press, has shed a good deal of light on what makes her poems unique.
In the course of the last several years I’ve wearied of a trend in poetry that presupposes not only familiarity with Surrealism but also affinity & advocacy, positions I’m fairly certain the authors of these works do not maintain, in spite of sophisticated senses of finish & craft. What they do possess, however, is a seemingly ahistorical preference for disparate images, anticipating that the oddness of associating one image with its counterpart will generate new meaning. In my experience, this mode usually fails, precisely for its lack of connection to anything outside itself & the scenes that revolve around it. It is essentially a hip mode: those in the know can’t explain how it works; those not in the know are left out. Hipness is, of course, relative & if the preceding remarks appear senseless, I make them nevertheless because it is characteristic of Tynes’ poetry in Heron/Girlfriend to rise above such hip vagueness by relying less on images, I think, than impressions.
The distinction I draw between images and impressions is that the latter, in Tynes’ hands, create their energy by accretion, not simply by stringing together moments of staged intensity. Tynes’ poems pull their images together like Rauschenberg prints: although anything is ultimately available for inclusion, the materials tend to function in sets, similarly arranged, similarly colored, until the next work calls for change. In any case, the poems are best viewed as whole works, not merely as the sum of their parts. Images are discrete; impressions are unified.
A large part of Heron/Girlfriend’s success lies in its structure. The book is divided into three sections, more, I suspect, to regulate its flow than to enforce thematic separations, though the divisions carry some formal variations (for example, there are three “Church of …” poems in the first section, one in the second, & none in the third; the first section sticks closely to contemporary lyrical arrangements, the second & third less so). Rather than isolate one section of poems from another, Tynes maps a form for her book in which the reader is welcome to move freely from poem to poem, gathering energy which flows in all directions to create a dense, powerful, passionate collection of poems from one of our most thoughful poets.
Fri 19 Dec 2008
I’m hoping to have the time & inclination to mention why each of the previously mentioned books strikes me as notable & am starting with Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini.
Although I have supported & published her work at The Cultural Society (including a downloadable PDF mini-chapbook), I came relatively slowly to Simonds’ poems: their energy was difficult to resist, yet I found myself unsurely footed in their structures, which were much broader than I could grasp on a first or second reading. Once I got the hang of it, though, I was compelled by the long lines & quick, deep breaths that generate the poems’ contradictory nervous flow. An analogy might be running a length of chain-links through one’s hands, aware of each bump along the length of a secure whole. This whole extends best from poem to poem; that is, reading one of Simonds’ poems does not offer nearly as much meaning, rhythmic force, or thematic depth as reading several of them does. I am thus most moved by Warsaw Bikini’s extended & successful effort to determine glamour as a state of consciousness or being from which we sadly but consistently measure our shortcomings.
Warsaw Bikini relies on a lexicon that cross-fades between mainstream culture, sometimes-heavy makeup, variations on Freud’s Talking Cure, and a devotion to poetry as a medium of both understanding and inquiry. In its way it is campy, & like all effective camp it winks its way toward tragedy, both personal & political. It is not unusal in this unusal book to be confronted, in rapid succession, with parking lots, emotional trauma, fast food, literature, & class conflict. Most readers will recognize these places (my impulse is to call them ’spots’) and references handily, & frankly, it makes for fun & surprising reading. But Simonds’ skill is such that she employs these markers as the entertainments & distractions from which they’re derived. They become the objects, not the subjects of the poems, & the result is a highly effective & utterly moving poetry that one learns to read by reading further.
Mon 15 Dec 2008
Since I last posted here, K. & I closed Letterbox & returned to Brooklyn. A good deal else has changed, too, but I don’t think it’s worth going into. Suffice it to say that these last months have been ones of recuperation, reinstatement, rethinking, & replacement. So, you know, we’re feeling good, looking forward to getting back to some things here & getting on with others.
A quick recap of some notable poetry I’ve been reading includes but isn’t limited to:
- Night Scenes, Lisa Jarnot
- Sources, Devin Johnston
- The Sound Mirror, Andrew Joron
- Behind the R, Gina Myers
- Warsaw Bikini, Sandra Simonds
- Determined by Aperture, Shannon Tharp
- Heron/Girlfriend, Jen Tynes
Fri 8 Aug 2008
I’ve got two poems in the new number of A Public Space, included implicitly among ‘others.’ Pick up your copy today.
Tue 27 May 2008
The Cultural Society is pleased to announce that we’re now taking pre-orders for a broadside of “At Once,” a poem by Joseph Massey. It measures 4.5 in. x 10 in. & is available for $7.00. The edition, letterpress-printed on Crane Lettra paper, is limited to 100 copies. you can place your order by clicking here. Orders will be filled in the order in which they are received.
Sat 15 Mar 2008
In conjunction with Intermedia Arts‘ terrific 55408 show, The Beat Coffeehouse, The Cultural Society, & Letterbox are putting on a show: Colin Monette will play his music, Bill Mike will play his music, & then Amanda Nadelberg & I will read some of our poems. You can get the full scoop here. I look forward to seeing you.
Fri 12 Oct 2007
Saturday 10/13/07 @ The Beat Coffeehouse | 1414 W 28th St | Mpls
7:00p (free): Poets reading: Graham Foust & Sun Yung Shin
8:00p ($5): Musicians performing: Matthew Foust, Adam Svec, Bryan Knisley
Click here for more & similar info.
Fri 21 Sep 2007
Stephen Burt is guest-blogging at the Poetry Foundation this week & has some nice things to say about the most recent CultSoc update.
Click here to have a look.
Thu 20 Sep 2007
The Cultural Society website has been updated. Celebrate our 6th Anniversary by stopping by.
