Omnidawn Blog

The Omnidawn Blog Has Moved!

2009-09-22T19:03:00.001-07:00

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Please update your feeds & readers: the Omnidawn Blog has moved to our newly renovated home here. See you there!

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BAY AREA LIT SCENE FEATURE 4: ALBANY LIBRARY

2009-09-12T23:50:00.000-07:00

The Scoop
edited by Meg Hurtado

Where? Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave, Albany, CA.
Curator/s: Catherine Taylor and Richard Russo
When? Now taking place the second Tuesday of each month.
Parking? Yes, and it’s free! The library has a lovely little parking lot.
Donation: Not required, although a donation to the library probably isn’t a bad idea.
Is There a Blog? Yes, the Albany Library Website.

The Run of Things: The reading begins at roughly 7 pm and ends around 8 pm, at which time there is a break for chatting and refreshments. After the break there is an open mic session for audience members which lasts until 9 pm or so.

Quotes from the Readers: “Each poem is different, wild . . . . Maybe not so lucid as I like to think they are!” --Alena Hairston

“Everything and everyone that lives on is trapped in love.” --Indigo Moor

Poems from each of the readers are featured below the review.

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Albany Library Reading Series
by Meg Hurtado

The Albany Library reading series recently hosted poets Indigo Moor and Alena Hairston, each of whom, when asked to pick a podium-partner, selected the other. This sort of happy synergy is exactly what has kept the series going for nearly four years. Of the series in general, which is sponsored by the Friends of the Albany Library, curator Catherine Taylor says, “Every reading is so different,” and that the series, which runs for ten months of every year, makes a concentrated effort to attract a diverse range of readers every season. Past readers include Camille Dungy, Al Young, Brenda Hillman, Robert Hass, Jack Marshall, Adam David Miller, Joshua Clover, Anne Barrows, Jane Hirshfield, and a great many more of all walks and schools, etc.

However, the pleasant and convenient space also cultivates a comfortable sense of community, and Catherine adds that, “There is a core following. Poets here have been very generous . . . . the open mic allows people to read in front of poets they really respect, and they do get feedback.” However, in spite of the nurturing atmosphere and loyal local audience, this series faces the recession-inspired obstacles facing many other libraries and arts programs – series co-curator and Albany Library research librarian Richard Russo retired this month and, due to budge cuts, will not be replaced. The series will go on but will most likely move to another time slot. The next reading, in September, will be the last to take place on a “First Thursday”.

Alena Hairston read from her new book The Logan Topographies, a “hybrid collection” of “postcard poems” reflecting the West Virginia coal-mining countryside. Hairston spoke briefly about the heinous environmental threat posed by new coal-mining methods, in which the top of the mountain is actually shaved off (!!) in order to harvest coal at greater convenience to whatever corporation is responsible for such things. In addition to the environmental undertones of her work, Ms. Hairston also addresses the dynamics between black and white coal workers, and between men and women. The poem which I found most haunting, the one whose shape and spirit I remember (I was too caught up in listening to write down any of the lines) channels the voice of two young black sisters born into a community that values the physical labor/monetary value of their brothers over anything they have to offer.

What Hairston’s poems put forth in substance and social awareness they match with lyricism and love – not an easy thing. Hairston herself is a stunning blend of energy, wit, and physical grace, and in this way her poems are a genuine reflection of their author. They address an almost early-Romantic refusal to isolate Desire and History, to show us the equation in its most tender, terrible, redolent entirety. For instance, she says in her poem “How to Belong” that, “when a somebody is witness to a gleaming shadow, there is desire to share it with another.” Not only does this line tackle the notion of need head-on, it’s a vibrantly-apt description of poetry’s purpose and of Hairston’s style in particular.

Indigo Moor (clad in an appropriately purple shirt) followed Hairston and read primarily from Tap Root, his critically-acclaimed first book. (His second, Through the Stone-cutter’s Window, is on the way.) He began with “Through the Storm Door”, the first poem in Tap Root. In the poem, the speaker hears of his brother’s imminent death and reflects on his childhood/past in the South. Indigo mentioned that when he wrote the poem he’d been estranged from the South for twelve years and from his brother for twenty. The paralysis that floods the poem as the speaker debates returning to see his brother resonates with anyone who’s lost “home”, one way or another – but it also upholds the classical anxiety on which post-Civil War Southern literature is founded.

Moor’s poems often run to music – “the pond is a knot”, “as evening bakes in, thick and slow”, etc – so it’s not surprising that he paid homage in his reading to two great musicians, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. The latter was especially memorable and addressed Johnson’s habit of foregoing hotels while on tour. Most music-lovers already know the story: Johnson was cheap and preferred to seduce a townswoman for his room and board. He made it a rule to select plain women – the one exception to this rule led to his early death by poison. Indigo’s poem “Another Man’s Bed” hi-lights the humor and intimacy inherent in the tale: “Is this how Death catch me, one hand lost in the dust? Where are my shoes?”

Moor read a few more bits of new work, including a poem called “Messages from the Ether” about a series of text messages he received from a wrong number. A brief Q&A followed, and then the open mic commenced.

The open mic at Albany Library is, as I found out later, something of an institution. What I noticed immediately, however, was the enthusiasm with which each reader shared his or her work, and the support with which each reader was received. Some shared love poems, some shared poems of disillusionment. One man requested a minute of silence for Hiroshima (it was August 6th), and one woman sang. Christina Hutchins, Poet Laureate of Albany, read work she had composed for a local tree-planting ceremony. Julia Vinograd , one of the few active poets who has been part of the Bay Area poetry scene since it first blossomed in Berkeley in the 60s or so, read a poem she’d written earlier in the day.

What did all of these poets have in common? In style, in cadence, in substance, not very much. But the true art of community building is more than a collection of individuals who happen to make a uniform crowd. Each and every person, no matter what they’d been doing that morning or what they’d be doing tomorrow, was a poet. Really, what more can Poetry ask but that every once in a while, for a few hours, its body of believers wakes, swells, grows stronger?

The next reading at the Albany Library will take place on Tuesday, October 13 at 7 pm. Giovaani Singleton and Douglas Scott Miller will read.

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Two poems by Alena Hairston:

Route 44 to Route 52

for Doug (1974-2005)

The mountains begin
over and over
in the eyes spelling
out each unincorporated town
bound by the cartels of history,
clasts of deciduous time.

Today we drive
behind the forgetting trucks
heavy with the gravity of tomorrow,
a pulling work between the edge
of tipple and leftover mountain.

Rock shadows and silt seams
landlocked, this tectonics fleeting
in the now of absence.

There is rip and sash in your voice
as you mouth homecoming
in the various bitumen
of passing caves
which appear on no map.

We ride
past the coal camps and company
houses stoked in careless sun;
past adult children who know
more than we should,
standing firm and removed
like the cracked, handwritten signs
for peat and gravel roads too far
away to be called highways.

These are the fields of tar
that smoked our eyes,
took away the open welcome of quiet,
did not love us back.

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22 Mountain

pregnant belly of coneflower and larkspur. coalcaves of lupine and barberry.
where shale grows up and bumps into sun. breathes across the moon.
lunar party. dream of history striated.

people find here. people found here. people lose here. people lost here.
people hunt here. people hunted here. people trap here. people trapped here.
people live here. people lived here. people sing here. people sang here.
people take here. people taken here. people come here. people left here.
people return here. people stay here. people gone?

at its base a labyrinth of rivers spilling sedge and cattail into an island creek,
beholden and cut for use.

sentry and citadel, flying.

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Alena Hairston'sThe Logan Topographies, a collection arranged as a post-card book and inspired by the histories of the Mingo Indians, Italian and Anglo immigrants, and African Americans associated with West Virginia's coal-mining region, won the 2006 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Award from Persea Books. Hairston will read from this work, and also share her current project, which combines poetry, prose, and image.

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Two poems by Indigo Moor:

Robert Johnson, seeking out older, often less attractive women, or a homely young girl, for whom there would likely be no competition, would exchange his attentions for their kindness and a place to stay. Johnson was a reputed ladies' man to whom women "were like motel or hotel rooms."
-Alan White Robert Johnson’s Life

Another Man’s Bed

My dream is always:
I wake to a ruptured silence,
an icepick cracking my dream slumber.

Impulse says
Get your shoes.

Keyhole has sucked daylight
from the room.

Get your shoes.

Left hand sweeps the floor
beside the bed.

Is this how death catches me?
One hand lost in dust?
Where are my shoes?

Dim streetlight glow pushes
through the window,
graying the room.

My eyes become focused rods
divining shape from shadow:

Someone has polished my wingtip
shoes, granted them flight, nested

them on the dresser. The chair
in the corner now wears a hat,

grinds on a cigar. Its single,
smoldering eye finds mine.

Smoke climbs the air
like ivy on an invisible trellis.

A gentle click and a tiny hole
floats above the chair's arm:

deep, hungry, trying to drag
the room into its mouth.

Six chambered screams curled
like fetuses in lead wombs.

A silk-sigh, rustling of sheets
as she shifts beside me.

I lie unbreathing, an eternity
away from motion, wondering
which way rolls me into the grave.

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Pull

I am told it was moonlight that ripened
your failing heart until it finally
cracked, sent the clockhands spinning

off your flesh. I was a coward, still 3,000
miles away, convincing myself that if I
came at all, I could never catch the dying hour:

arrive too late and reconciliation falls
on upturned soil; arrive too soon and
stuttered gushings peak, then sour in the air.

Forgive me, brother. For decades, your
name has stretched my tongue to breaking.
But love and pain often anguish logic

Long ago, on a night like this,
I watched uncle rocket a coyote
skyward with a fistful of buckshot.

It slammed to the ground twisted,
skidding across the grass. Somehow,
it didn’t know it was dead.

Front legs pawed the air as if leveled
by nothing more than errant moonlight.
Chicken feathers lined its muzzle.

It mewled, eyes tunneling through me
to the underbrush where its mate stood,
crosshaired down uncles’ barrel

and already dead by every book and clock.
It stood, mesmerized no knowing, in this
world, every fool carries a twin heart.

Bang! I shouted and the underbrush
went wild with the mate’s running. Still,
if animals have souls, two died that night.

Uncle cursed me under a killing sky.
Why, Boy? You know she’ll hit
the coop later .Dont’cha know that?

This is my understanding
of the fear and silence
of these wounded nights:

the moon snares in the sweet
spot of the throat. Everything
that lives on is trapped in love.

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Through the Stonecutter’s Window has been selected to receive the inaugural Cave
Canem University Press Poetry Prize.

John Keene wrote, “Indigo Moor writes poems that crackle with ‘cryptic lightning.’ These poems open a sustained and impressive dialogue with the visual arts, history, the natural world, and the poet's dreams and nightmares, while dancing polyrhythmically across and down each page. An assured and engaged aesthetic vision takes shape and sharpens here before our eyes.”

Reginald Gibbons said, “Indigo Moor's second book of poems concentrates ‘on every letter and symbol before winging them across ether.’ Always in motion, his lines are choreographed to make sense of all that is most elusive in meaning: music, violence, art, love, history, anger, race, belief, desire. By turns irreverent, passionate, and startling, these poems are vigorous, sensuous, and vivid.”

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POETRY FEATURE 22: George Kalamaras

2009-09-05T21:29:00.000-07:00

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Unanswered Left Shoe


It could be as simple as rabbit scratch in an ancient hut.
Simple, say, as a focus that has much verdigris that the troglodytes flock hard.

He is picketed to a nickering drink from the mud-glove.
She questions her tether beneath quite marvelous brown.

Somewhere, donkeys ask one ear at a time.
We are aware of such dimpled questions.

Obviously, I am still sleeping, examining photographs of unanswered left shoes.
It is more glorious to button the top knot than to tie off the hole.

A knife maker makes notches to signify how long he has been shaving knives.
It takes at least a year to clarify onions from the spleen.

Pure white rectangles inculcate a strenuous blade of grass.
There is much singing, even in times of joy.

When the yogi balanced the dead mouse on his left knee, he no longer needed
   the harmonium for chanting.
The same sense of loss that the mother felt, the father found in the empty
   canister of tobacco.

We forgot the divorce. We lived at least one life as Kuma in Kyoto.
We spent it mostly lamenting the loss of the wrong song.

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George Kalamaras has published ten books of poetry (including five chapbooks). Recent titles are The Scathering Sound (Anchorite Press, 2009) and Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008). Two books will appear in the fall of 2009: Something Beautiful Is Always Wearing the Trees (Stockport Flats), with paintings by Alvaro Cardona-Hine, and The Recumbent Galaxy, co-authored with Cardona-Hine and winner of the C&R Press Open Competition. George is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne where he has taught since 1990.

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POETRY FEATURE 21: Nurduran Duman

2009-08-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

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Picture
translated by Ru en Ergün

the empty frame in me
is a fracture water
the lake of past time

Colorless end.

the tulle of swan
is smoke on my face
its photograph is black

No white in the love word...

this sadness this expression from ash
flame has scattered from its brush
I didn't burn

but died.

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Nurduran Duman (Çan-Çanakkale, 23.10.1974) is a poet, writer, essayist, translator who lives in Istanbul. She wrote her first poem when she was 8 years old. When she was 9, she promised herself to be a writer in the future. She liked poetry, became a poet. Because of her passion about "sea" she attended Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering and graduated as an "Ocean Engineer" and a "Naval Architect". Her poem collection "Yenilgi Oyunu (The Defeat Game)" has been awarded with 2005 Cemal Süreya Poetry Awards. These awards are conferred to in memory of Cemal Süreya (1931 - 1990), one of the most important poets in Turkish Literature. Her book Yenilgi Oyunu was published in 2006. She translated Alma Alexander’s book “The Secret of Jin-shei” from English to Turkish. The book was published in Turkish in 2007. Her poems, translations (poems and stories), poetic articles, book reviews and interviews with foreign writers (e.g. Eileen Gunn, Karen Joy Fowler, Yiyun Li, Anna Tambour, Monica Arac de Nyeko etc.) have been published in various magazines and newspapers. She worked on the poetry of Anne Sexton, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Slyvia Plath, and translated their poems. She was elected two times as a board member of Writers Syndicate of Turkiye. She is a member of Turkish PEN.She was the producer and presenter of the culture and literature broadcast (radio) "Yazın Küresi". She has been conducting many theatre activities in various positions (actress, director, theater electrician, etc.) for years.

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BAY AREA LIT SCENE FEATURE 3: Pegasus Books

2009-08-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

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Reviews Editor: Meg Hurtado

THE SCOOP

Location: Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA

Curator: Maile Arvin & Rachel Marcus
Pegasus Contact Person: Rachel Marcus

Parking/Transportation: Metered parking along Shattuck until 6 pm – after 6, parking is free wherever you can find it.

The Run of Things: Most of the audience arrived right at the stated time. There’s a good selection of books to rummage through and refreshments to keep you mingling and mulling about until the reading starts.

Is There a Blog? All their information is on the Pegasus Books website:

Poems from each of the readers are featured below the review.

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Our Sea of Words
By Jason Bayani

If there’s one thing for which to appreciate Pegasus Books, it’s endurance in the face of one of those huge, corporate bookstores flexing its spanking-new stainless-steel-and-creamy-stucco edifice directly across the street. After this game of flinch, only the modest Pegasus bookstore remained standing. Along this well-trafficked section of downtown Berkeley, it’s easy to see why. Browsing the shelves of Pegasus, it’s obvious that the store pays attention to what’s really happening in today’s literature – a lesson in what’s truly relevant and not just Oprah-relevant.

My buddy and I showed up a few minutes before the reading. While we sat awkwardly in the back cracking jokes, one of the readers, Loa Niumeitolu, introduced herself and hung out briefly to chop it up with us. It was this kind of openness that would shine through her work. For me, it set the tone for the reading as a whole.

The first reader was Maile Arvin, a native Hawaiian from Kentucky. She is a doctoral candidate in ethnic studies at UC San Diego and has been published by Kearny St. Workshop, one of our proudest Asian-American literary institutions in San Francisco. Her first poem was about her return at age eleven to visit her family in Waimanalo— a mostly locals town on Oahu with some of the nicest beaches on the island. The poem addresses the loss of language, the Americanization— or more specifically the effect Kentucky has on her speech, and how this affects her connection with her homeland as even the sound of her own name has changed on her tongue.

The second reader was Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, a Tongan-American scholar, poet and community activist who is currently a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley. At the beginning of her reading she acknowledged her friends and family in the audience and talked about how this reading represented for her a return to writing. The work she shared was intensely personal. Her first piece was a haunting poem about abuse, and the next piece she read, called “L.A. Story”, talked about a young woman who flees to L.A. to escape her home in Utah and her Mormon family - which brings to light the little known fact that Utah is home to a sizeable Tongan community of Mormon-converts. The poem, however, focuses on the young woman’s marginalization within a family for whom, “there are only sons.”

Next was Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru poet from Guam. He has been published by Tinfish Press, is a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies, runs Achiote Press, and serves as the Omnidawn Blog Editor. He started off his set by engaging the audience in some pretty funny banter and made us all cover our ears and yell out “Make the poetry stop!” while recording us for his blog. His work was definitely more aggressive than that of the other readers, with rhythmic lines that seemed to barrel right into the next. His poems were filled with rich imagery and made some good use of wordplay. His style drew heavily from the ocean and uses water in its many forms as a model for some clever lines.

The fourth reader was Loa Niumeitolu, a Tongan-American poet and community organizer whose work revolves around issues within the prison system and within the women’s queer community. Her work draws heavily on the mythology of her homeland. In her list poem, “To a Young Tongan Poet”, she uses both mythology and American pop-culture to provide a good look at the Tongan-American experience. She also claims that “every poem is a love poem”.

The final reader was Caroline Sinavaiana, a Samoan poet and Associate Professor of English at UH Manoa. Her reading represented for her a return to Berkeley, as she’d studied there in the seventies. Her poem “Low Tide” takes a meditative look at a coral reef and the shoreline, studying all of its parts and exposing the beauty of the ocean; she then drives the poem to a point where it waits “for high tide to lift us again to the safety of deep water.”

It came as no surprise to me that the ocean had a prominent presence in the work I heard: through the images, the metaphors, but also through the rhythms of the poetry which often felt like the crashing and retreating of the tides. There was a sense that even when the ocean wasn’t being mentioned in the poem, it was an ongoing force. And that to me hearkened to something that Loa mentioned during her reading, that the importance of this event lay in bringing these Pacific Islander artists together to “help forge a language about being Pacific Islander, away from the homeland.” The community of art is an island of its own.

(Bay Area poet Jason Bayani is currently a second year MFA candidate at St. Mary's College. A mainstay in the Bay Area spoken word community, he has earned a place on several National poetry slam teams. His publishing credits include Rattapallax Magazine, Maganda Magazine, and the 2004 National Poetry Slam anthology. As a guest performer and lecturer Jason has worked in high schools and Universities across the country. He has spent the last few years as a youth worker in San Francisco and continues to write and perform as a member of the Filipino-American spoken word troupe Proletariat Bronze.)

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Poems from the readers:

Low tide
by Caroline Sinavaiana

of our oceans
the watery skin
of earth

pulled back to expose
a webbing of coral
rough & prickly

to hide treasures
of octopus &
spiny sea urchin

her long black spikes
of danger & allure
guarding that golden

softness of sweet
flesh at the center
of ourselves & each

other & other & other
millions of tiny spines
fused into this great

wall of lacy color & refuge
towering from the reef bed
laid for us on the ocean floor

layered over eons
of lifetimes imprinted
on this architecture of mind

streaming across time
that finds us again
consorting on this

ocean path
now run aground
on the fecund reef

waiting for high tide
to lift us again to the safety
of deep water.

for Skye

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Three Points on This Map
After Darwish’s Four Personal Addresses

by Maile Arvin

1. Under this dusty ceiling fan, next to the louvered windows.

It’s the door and beyond the door is anything anywhere not here. I loved elsewhere from the beginning. I saw it hurt you in my rush to get there. I went anyway—still it tasted sweet. It was a gift I had been promised (wasn’t it by you?), and I had stared at the wrapping so long I memorized the patterns and dreamt of walking those weaves. Leaving is a privilege stolen from those who stay. You told me as much, and I could not see how I would ever come back to this young heart, this wet grass and stone. I held your chest close to me at night like a toy I would have to give back.

2. The light in this, my bedroom.

We travel in search of nothing, but we are asked to tell a different story. I believed in the fountains of opportunity, but that was not the reason. I came because I could not imagine not. I did not have the strength to build this bridge at home. I thought I should have something of my own. What I could afford is this IKEA lamp, and a view of concrete, sun reflecting off car windshields. Did I come here looking for a different you or a different me? Don’t you desire elsewhere too? Didn’t you get my postcards? I am making a here for you so that you might rejoice when you arrive.

3. At the top of the escalator, rising out of the station.

I cannot say how I got there. How do you hold on to a moving banister? Still- I remember how to hold on to you. But the shoji screen walls are too thin. With respect to the roommate, or with respect to me. So do we forget those who loved us in other hotels? I have only been to a hotel with you. Do we need a drink to remember who we are to each other? How do we tell which train goes home? Come, make this promise. We'll find a nook, and only sit in the places where it doesn't sound like goodbye.

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LA STORY
originally published in Amerasia Journal 35:1 (2009)

by Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu

the bright lights of the city
surround her like flies

she mumbles a prayer learned in Sunday school
and holds on tightly to the cold air
hope
funnels through her fingers
like the daughter her parents couldn't keep

two weeks ago she fled her home in Utah
fleeing the grasp of the Mormon Church
and her parents' shame,
freshly pickled
like the apricots church leaders taught her
to preserve every Autumn
a skill that promised
to make her into a good wife

tonight, on the corner of Sepulveda Boulevard,
brights lights expose the blue bruises on her body
disguising her as an older woman
she is her mother, her grandmother
lingering in dark corners
abandoning guests and
the tedium of polite conversations

3:00am
she telephones her mother
pleading for her life
for a cusp of warmth to quell the cold

she images that their shared silences
histories of bruised abdomen and
crushed collarbones
at the hands of men
were reasons enough
to reconnect them
bury the aching distance and
reunite them

but the silence on the other end
hangs and festers like a wound
she is reminded
that in her family,
there are
only
sons

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Awaking
by Loa Niumeitolu

that morning on the day you married my grandfather
nane tafu ‘ae afi ke tu’u ‘ae vai melie keke kaukau ‘aki

she piled dry branches, ignited the last match, to heat the rainwater for your bath
the girl from Kanokupolu
‘ae ta’ahine mei Kanokupolu.

Siliva, manatu’i hono hingoa?
her name, Siliva, Silver, do your remember her grandma?

You met at Mele, your mother’s koka’anga,
On foot, she came with the women from Kanokupolu to the capitol city,
lue lalo,
To beat the mulberry bark smooth, paint the kupesi, and set hundred yards of ngatu to dry in the sun.
Your dowery.

folding the last corner of tapa to be stored, the women returned to their families at the westside of the island

Siliva stayed to fish at Faua and returned to your home in late afternoon with tukumisi and koloa’a, ke kiki ‘aki ‘ae haka mei nake tu’u.
She brought your favorite foods, sea urchins and clams, to eat with the breadfruit you had boiled in coconut cream.

Those were her ways, Siliva.
patched the a puaka, the fence to keep the pigs in, then disappeared,
showing up at dark with tokonaki of cassava, taro and whole tusks of bananas.
Fixed the wheels of those wagons used to haul coconuts with to the Copra Board, then disappeared, returning after sunset with a bucket of salted beef.
Mended your dresses and embroidered your handkerchiefs, then slipped away, reappearing with a bottle of cognac and a golden paper box of Benson and Hedges.

You never talked to her, did you grandma?
although you were the same age, almost 19.
Each morning you went to peito, where meals were prepared separately from the main house,
the kettle already hot, filled with lemon grass,
and Siniva, squatting, turning her back towards you,
roasting hopa and ifi for your breakfast.

The morning on the day you married my grandfather,
she gathered vai malie, rain water, from the cisterns that flowed by fragrant blossoms, kakala,
to wash your hair.

She wrapped your hair around her left hand,
chewed the tuitui moe sinamoni in her mouth to a rich paste
and with her right hand, rubbed the paste gently into your scalp
rinsed your hair
molu hono nima, softly wiped water from your eyelids
when you opened your eyes, she already stepped out to leave you to bathe.

they still talk about the royal guests and the gifts of cow, pig, kie, the young doctor- your bridegroom.

Grandma, please tell me how she got that name, Siliva, the one that is not gold.

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from preterrain
by craig santos perez

[we] reach the unwritten

point of arrival [we] learn ‘body language’ is more than ‘a litany
of signs’ each sound turns to us turns to ‘salt
water’ [we] tear at these veils
for the details [we] long for ‘from other instruments of production’ because names are preparatory
[we] name everything [we]’ve never seen and touch
the root

as if it used to lead somewhere as if chance and requital have become the same attachment
you say belief is almost flesh because so much flesh betrays each song [we] translate
vital signs when something else is in control [we] rely on the memory of what our house was like before and after [we] stand in what [we] know
is lost

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New Starred Review of Bin Ramke's Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems in Publisher's Weekly

2009-08-19T23:59:00.001-07:00

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Starred Review in Publisher's Weekly:

Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems Bin Ramke. Omnidawn (IPG, dist.), $16.95 (200p) ISBN 978-1-890650-41-4

Since winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1978, Ramke has steadily released strong and strange books of poetry. He is the rare poet who seems to become more himself with each new book, rather than more like an imitation of himself. Nonetheless, perhaps due to the difficulty of much of his work, Ramke has remained a poet's poet. This much-needed and compact selection from his nine previous books serves as a helpful introduction to this poet, whose work straddles aesthetic camps one never knew shared borders-this is language poetry with a Southern twang, or experimental writing with clear, dire subject matter. From the stark clarity of his first poems ("the only horse/ we owned died on Christmas Eve"), Ramke has journeyed toward wholly original aesthetic ground on which his own often fragmentary words share the page, even the line, with passages from obscure texts, definitions, even mathematics. Yet even Ramke's oddest poems always keep a few subjects-fatherhood, knowledge of the self and the other, love, desire-at the forefront, wishing, at times, "To kiss. To move/ mouth against mouth." And the new poems here are among Ramke's best.

--Publishers Weekly, July 20, 2009

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New Review of Myung Mi Kim's Penury

2009-08-17T19:32:00.001-07:00

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One of Omnidawn's newest publications, Myung Mi Kim's Penury, was reviewed at Publisher's Weekly:

Avant gardist Kim's fifth book is a diligent inquiry into the relationship between language and power. The poems take place in a wasteland where war and, as the title would suggest, poverty are the norm; immigrants are treated with harsh suspicion and interrogated repeatedly, and Kim's rage at injustice and suffering rings loudly: "[lookout post] / Are these your names/ From we are from where are you from/ Say this may speaking// To burn or expose to the threat of the sun a person with a pigeon chest and protruding stomach." The most fragmentary of these poems, which sprawl inventively across the whole page, can be quite difficult to parse, at times overwhelmingly so; still, a sense of urgent confusion comes to the fore, enriching the book's overall texture. Finally, this is an unsettling, collection that staunchly confronts a point in history "when the fish die all at once and appear on/ the banks all at once."

-Publishers Weekly, June 15, 2009

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Purchase PENURY here!

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New Review of Lyn Hejinian's Saga/Circus

2009-08-13T23:22:00.000-07:00

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read a new review of Lyn Hejinian's Saga/Circus (Omnidawn Publishing) at Open Letters Monthly here.

order Saga/Circus here.

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New Review of the Selected Poems of Friedrich Holderlin

2009-08-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

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check out a new review of the Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (translated by Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff) in Words Without Border here.

order the book at the Omnidawn website here.

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New Review of Tyrone Williams' On Spec

2009-08-09T11:46:00.001-07:00

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check out this new review of Tyrone Williams' ON SPEC at ARCH JOURNAL read it here.

excerpt:

In the introduction to Blues People, Amiri Baraka identifies the acquisition of English as "one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene" (xii). Linguistic based formations of identity, such as Baraka's, provide one linage for the excess of speculation Tyrone Williams embodies in his most recent book, On Spec. It is no surprise that Williams' latest effort - a recovery of historical African American outsiders like Thomas Green Bethune, Thomas Fuller and Sam "Boonie" Walton - occasions Baraka's mapping of blues ontology. However, if a serviceable comparison is to made it lies less in the racially relevant findings that both men bring to the table and more in the pressurized negotiation they stamp upon their respective expressions. Baraka - caught between two conflicting histories: white intellectualism and the origins of American Black culture - envisions the moment when the slave decided America was "important enough" to be passed on in some kind of hyphenated language. In so doing, he becomes the dialogic "man [from his own introduction] who looked up in some anonymous field and shouted, 'Oh, Ahm tired a dis mess, / Oh, yes, Ahm so tired a dis mess'" (xii). Likewise, Williams enacts - by way of indefinite embeddings, non-recoverable deletions and ellipses - the incongruity of post-structural literary theory and the vernacular history of black speaking subjects.

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visit the OMNIDAWN webpage for more info on the book.

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New Link: Eleven Eleven Journal

2009-08-09T11:42:00.000-07:00

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check out the new issue of ELEVEN ELEVEN!

Eleven Eleven is a biannual journal of literature and art based at California College of the Arts. The aim of the publication is to provide a forum for risk and experimentation and to serve as an exchange between writers and artists.

To view past editions of Eleven Eleven, click here.

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POETRY FEATURE 20: Sarah Mangold

2009-08-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

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Bright Fruit

My inflection but it’s her sewing machine

the original address contained

walk from it

a trick is the book

the essence of the trip

impersonating Arkansas

They could summon only you

moving furniture against the walls

he refrained from assigning previous sentences

around small books

smaller dogs

the difficulties lie

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Sarah Mangold is the author of Household Mechanics (New Issues), Parlor (Dusie kollectiv), Picture of the Basket (Dusie kollectiv), Boxer Rebellion (g o n g), Blood Substitutes (Potes & Poets), and the forthcoming Cupcake Royale. She lives and works in Seattle where she edits Bird Dog, a journal of innovative writing and art. With Maryrose Larkin, she co-edits Flash + Card, a chapbook and ephemera press.

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POETRY FEATURE 19: Stephen Vincent

2009-07-12T11:07:00.000-07:00



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from Sleeping With Sappho
by Stephen Vincent
  



4.
               
               ]heartless
               ]tentative
               ]I will not
               ]not for you
               ]darkness
                ]
                ]the footfall
                ]
                ]pure crimson
                ]
           



9.

    ]
    ]
    ]
    ]thoughtless
]her sandals
]
]double-knotted
]













17.
            ]sleep
            ]without a face
            ]
            ]
            if yes, spring
            ]birth
            ]

        ]She refuses song
        no x or y, they throw down
        their strings (not once)
            rejection haunts her tongue

        her absence. No ripple in her dress
        nor chatter from her silver anklets.
        She suffers
        because he insists:
        his body a stiff column of marble.
        Without a word
        she refuses.

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Walking Theory (Junction Press: 2007) is Stephen Vincent’s most recent book. Previous titles include Walking (Junction Press), A Walk Toward Spicer (Cherry On the Top Press), Sleeping With Sappho (faux ebooks), and Triggers (Shearsman ebooks). Recent poems have appeared in New American Writing, Volt, Crayon, 26, Masthead, Onedit, and the Hamilton Stone Review. “Haptics” was the name of a recent show of his drawings at San Francisco’s Braunstein-Quay Gallery. The First 100 Days of President Obama (haptics & facing journal entries) was an exhibit, performance piece and new book produced at Steven Wolf Fine Arts Gallery on April 29, 2009 (the 100th Day), Vincent's blog featuring critical commentary, new writing, photography and art projects.

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BAY AREA LIT SCENE FEATURE 2: Moe's Books

2009-07-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

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Reviews Editor: Meg Hurtado

The Scoop:

Location: Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley CA 94704
Main Store: (510) 849-2087
Open 10am - 10pm every day
Curator: Owen Hill

Parking/Transportation: Wherever you can get it. There’s a garage at roughly Telegraph and Channing – $1 per hour with validation. Probably best to drive, but not a terribly long walk from BART.

The Run of Things: Audience usually arrives a little early to browse the store and grab a good seat – it’s a well-established series in the Bay Area and it can get crowded.
Donation Encouraged? Not overtly, but it’s a bookstore – copies of the readers’ work is always for sale.

Is There a Blog? Yes, through the Moe’s Bookstore website.

All upcoming events and past audio and video files from previous events can be found there too.

Quote From a Reader: “Schools are made to be broken.” - Charles Bernstein.

Upcoming Events? Moe’s will host an in-store celebration of its 50th birthday on July 11th. This is not to be missed.

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Some Legends Don’t Need to Slow Down
By Meg Hurtado

Moe’s Bookstore in downtown Berkeley is the stuff of living legend. Snuggled amid the pubs, florists, junk-shops, head-shops, doughnut-shops, used music and vintage clothing stores of Telegraph Avenue, the store has been enthralling independent, left-minded readers for half a century. Owen Hill, author (his latest novel, The Incredible Double, is brand-new from PM Press), curator of the Moe’s Reading Series, and Moe’s employee of twenty-three years, says that the store “performs the same function for the East Bay that City Lights does for San Francisco,” as not only a purveyor of magnificent, inexpensive literature but also as an intellectual gathering place.

The Moe’s reading series has been “an ongoing, regular thing” for six years now, and on June 22, Moe’s hosted a collaborative reading to commemorate the fourth volume of War and Peace: Vision and Text, edited by Leslie Scalapino and Judith Goldman. A thrilling lineup of nine featured authors read their work: Judith Goldman, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Leslie Scalapino, Michael McClure, Denise Newman, Etel Adnan, John Beer, Michael Cross, and Charles Bernstein.

Leslie Scalapino spoke briefly about the importance of interlocking visual art with poetry. Her reading, an excerpt from her poem “The Animal Is In the World Like Water in Water” (inspired by a quote by George Bataille) accompanied by drawings by Kiki Smith. The drawings portray various women being eaten by animals, though Scalapino’s poems are working against the traditional notion of hierarchy and “ascendancy”: “the animal makes / holes in / the girl – the night [not there yet] / is / [night] in the same place then / as both – and holes in night where’re / stars seen [by them there inside it]?” At several points it arises that instead of the animal inflicting bloody death upon the girl, the girl is surrounded by “the rosy night”. Scalapino said that her purpose in the poems was to “reverse” the horror of the drawings, to “make it something sensual and wonderful . . . . and it really is!”

Judith Goldman’s poem “But to me [redo] Ad terminum” dealt with vision on a more internal level. Certain terms and concepts familiar to the amateur art theorist or historian kept popping up: “the bone dropped me / from its mouth / Into the river / to Catch my image”, “conceived as an illustration for a text”, “suggests . . . disappearance”, “The frame is an equal partner in the work”, “figure cropped by left border”, “My mind is encaustic”, “You’ll see on the facing page / this is a work of glazed ceramic”, and my personal Renaissance-Art favorite: “Stop painting the Virgin!” In addition to Goldman’s skillful construction of our visual skyline through words, she moves into moments of tender, defensive, quotidian dialogue: “Sign for the parcel”, “We didn’t know you didn’t know”, “You don’t know your own strength”. Particularly clever was the found-language-esque “You’re paying for the extra day because you exceeded the discharge time” followed by one punny word, “Fine”.

I had never heard Mei-mei Berssenbrugge before, but it was immediately clear that her reputation for elegant and evocative reading is wholly deserved. Throughout her time at the mic she sustained a lilt and pulse that was musical, stylish, and original. She read from a new poem called “The New Boys”, which she described as being inspired by the “slender and willowy and very carefully-dressed” young men of New York. This particular poem blended humor (“he can overplay the artist thing”, “the problems in Israel will be solved by extra-terrestrials”) and post-postmodern innocence and doom (“there’s sex, creativity with the surrealist instincts of a young faun”, “an appearance of renunciation”). Berssenbrugge also read from two of her poems in War and Peace, “Slow Down Now” and “Hello, the Roses”, which were centered around the idea of speaking to plants.

Michael McClure’s untitled poem developed alongside twenty-fives sculptures of horses by Amy Evans McClure, who also provided several drawings which appeared beside Michael’s poem in War and Peace. In section 2 of the poem, McClure made some claims on a grand poetic scale: “BEING BORN IS NOTHINGNESS / DYING IS NOTHINGNESS / Grandpa and Mama are nothingness / and I am here with / ALL LIVES / I / N / venting / a love / - half free”.

Denise Newman’s poem “Future People” was written beside the work of Gigi Janchang, a visual artist who assembles “portraits” with facial features taken from several different photographs. Newman’s work flows in the vein of the gentle poetry-of-the-everyday-eavesdropped-world, and the end of each stanza is punctuated by a shifting refrain built on the phrase “in reality”: “’in reality’, what gets made is winter”, “’in reality’, not in control”, “’in reality’ this is not a mystery. What’s missing is a mystery”, “’in reality’ wanted to be a saint”, etc. It would seem that Newman was affected by the unsettling effect of Janchang’s portraits – and by the question of whether images compiled of disparate parts can in fact be called a “portrait”. It’s a loaded, laudable question, since “naturalism” in art is really a very young phenomenon, and centuries of artists have viewed the ‘compilation’ as the best way of getting at ‘inner’ beauty – Elizabethan artists in particular were fond of sewing together “ideal” features in aristorcratic portraits, most of which bore little physical resemblance to the sitter, and calling it a ‘true’ likeness. But when the features come from multiple imperfect individuals and not a socially-contracted “ideal”, the final product must inevitably make us uneasy. This tension, which Newman referred to as “what was missing, that invisible glue that integrates the parts”, fuels our necessarily-piecemeal perception of “reality”, and creates our anxiety about whatever larger force (Newman describes this force as “God” or perhaps “accident”) will orchestrate our “accident” (“death”, which we can only conceive as an “exception” or “accident”) and the end of our perception.

Etel Adnan advanced to the microphone and ever-so-charmingly announced (or admitted?) that she’d taken the publication’s title literally, and so she’d written an essay about war. On behalf of a generation valiantly shielded by the Patriot Act (happy Fourth of July, everyone… freedom isn’t free and these colors don’t run - they crawl), I was fascinated even though her whole point was that she “had not ‘seen’ war”. While her involvement was certainly greater than that of the average upper-middle class American kid today, the moral of her story is reassuringly familiar, in an unnerving way: nobody sees war. “Even the young men who fought the war, who had weapons, or killed with their own hands, have little say about the war,” she writes. “They have seen nothing, that’s what they say. That it was exciting, or scary, yes, they will admit. But what was it? Events, they will say, little events.” Adnan narrates the way in which war brought her parents together, her teenage and college years surrounded by newscasts, and the pervasive, “perennial” war in the Middle East which has shaped her adulthood and her identity as an Arab. The essay itself is well worth reading, but Adnan’s delivery - both dry and sweet – made her reading perhaps the most memorable of the evening, not least because in spite of her literal interpretation of “War and Peace”, she achieved a very pure, very natural questioning of the intersection of vision and text. Do they always intersect? Do they intersect about the important things, or just about the day-to-day? Are there certain things we can’t ever see, even if we see pieces of them constantly? Can we really talk about what we see? Probably not. In the end, Etel Adnan arrived as a teenager at the only solid conclusion to which a poet can hold: “we were born to read poetry . . . . everything else was evanescence.”

Next came John Beer, who delivered with deadpan humor his brilliant and brief “Descriptive Poem”. The poem centers around the speaker’s view – a physical, visual view – of three lamps in a mirror, nicknamed “Scotty”, “Lola”, and “Lumpy”. In a sense, it’s a poem exploring still-life (for which the original French term is nature mort (“dead nature”) as an art form and as a vivid, constantly-changing life-form in itself. One striking feature of the poem was the way in which Beer rubs contradictory statements against each other and turns them into progressive, dove-tailed revelations, particularly in the following line (which feels reminiscent of both Williams and Yeats): “The view from my / mirror has not changed. / It has changed / entirely.”

Michael Cross read his poem “Pax”, whose title bears a certain brutal-and-brilliant irony, as “pax” can mean military armistice (Pax Romana, obviously, and etc), or outright friendship, and in Catholic culture refers to the “kiss of peace” component of Mass. The lexicon of Cross’s poem, however, was anatomical and sometimes brutal, with decidedly visceral overtones. Phrases like “pigs fixed”, “cleave as stone drawn straw”, “ham of hand, fingers of foot” caught the ear. But the line which most arrested my attention - “dreamt of his blood in the mouth of his brother”.- was simple, archetypal, and extremely reliant on the symmetry of sound.

The final reader was Charles Bernstein, who was perhaps the ideal finish for a long literary evening. Listening to Bernstein’s long conversational lyric was thrilling, but the poem also presented compelling reasons for why we were listening at all. Poetry that tackles the Significance of Poetry is often risky, preachy, or pointless, but Bernstein sailed through all risks with levity and warmth. He dared to channel mighty canonical poets while making charming adjustments of his own. For Coleridge: “Facts, facts, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” For Yeats: “the rag and bone shop of the quotidian”. For Frost: “Something there is that doesn’t love a frame, that wants to lay bare.” For Williams: “So much depends upon what you mean by failure”. My very, very favorite example, which will never get old and which will decorate my psyche for years to come, springs from Keats: “A thing of beauty is annoyed forever.” And there were simpler, even more hilarious moments: “Computers will never replace poets because computers won’t take that much abuse.”

The heart of the heart of the message, however, is quite serious. The tension between facts and truth is perpetual, is even normal, but great danger lies in the way we perceive said tension. Bernstein’s poem began and ended with a refrain which I’ll attempt to reproduce in full, and if bits are paraphrased I deeply apologize: “Think of poetry as a series of terraces overlooking the city of language . . . . Language is an event of the world just as for language users the world is an event of language. Even the ‘world’ is a word.”

Bernstein ended with a brief remark about the importance of independent readings in general and the Moe’s reading series in particular. Most living legends contain, by their very nature, a certain element of “last stand”, but Moe’s seems to be an exception. Of the dizzying economic downturn and general commercialization of art and intellect which have crippled so many small bookstores, Hill says that it hasn’t been that bad so far, that “we’ve had to do more ads, to work a little harder” but that business is “surprisingly solid”. But what looks like solidity is solidarity, really. When asked the best part of working at Moe’s and curating the reading series, Hill replied, “the audience. It’s a very intelligent audience . . . . it’s a little community of the slightly-crazy.” But we’re loyal.

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BAY AREA LIT SCENE FEATURE 1: STUDIO ONE

2009-06-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

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Welcome to the Omnidawn Blog's first Bay Area Lit Scene Feature, which will provide our readers with a report of exciting poetry readings in the Bay Area. These features are edited by Omnidawn intern, Meg Hurtado.

Editor Bio:

Meg Hurtado is a second-year student in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California and attended undergrad at the University of Richmond in Virginia. She’s studied with Brian Henry, Piotr Sommer, Brenda Hillman, Graham Foust, and Tomaz Salamun. She’s originally from Scottsdale, AZ, which taught her about the beauty of the blank slate. She loves the classics (Plutarch, Yves St. Laurent, Technicolor, sailboats, Giotto, Victoria Station), but also the dark-and-weird (Batman comics, Chekhov, the Bog People). She regrets every second she doesn’t spend dancing, but almost never dances. Her favorite poets are Sexton, Berryman, Stevens, Keats. She’s extra-susceptible to Sir Philip Sidney. She’s relatively new to the published world, but this year was published in Cannibal and the West Wind Review.

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The Scoop

Studio One Reading Series

Address/Neighborhood: 365 45th St. in Temescal, Oakland
What Kind of Space Is It Anyway: specifically used as a Art Center
Curator: Sara Mumolo
Parking: Neighborhood parking available, and a lot in the back if you’d prefer.
Transportation: Easiest to drive, but the appropriate BART station is MacArthur
Donation: encouraged, in any amount
The Run of Things: Doors open at 7:00 for wine and refreshments, small-talk, anticipation, etc. Reading begins at 7:30.
Upcoming events: July 10th with V. E. Grenier and Jane Miller and August 1st Aaron Kunin and Kevin Killian. Music by Tommy Busch and Heads Across the Sky.

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My First Studio One
by Lara Durback

From the moment you begin to walk toward Studio One, the space welcomes you. After parking somewhere amid the colorful crowded Temescal houses one approaches waving lawns in the shapes of sine-curves – the temptation to roll on them was intense. I had been meaning to go for awhile, knowing the community building vibe that follows the Studio One series curator Sara Mumolo, who says that “Studio One is a nice place to hang out because of the kind and talented people that participate each month by volunteering, interning, being in the audience, or sharing their works with the community.” In addition to the series, Studio One Art Center is a hub for art, drama, and poetry classes in the Oakland community. In tandem with her duties as curator, Mumolo teaches writing workshops at the Center, and adds “the readings take place on the first Friday of each month as part of the Oakland Art Murmur.” The series has that poetry-plus-art angle that always results in something illuminating and unexpected, and it reminds me of the New Yipes series that went on for years at 21 Grand.

I wasn’t initially familiar with the readers or the attendant crowd, but I’d been able to visit the Studio One blog and read interviews with the readers earlier in the week. The welcome, laid-back feeling I’d had when I approached the place continued through the evening. No one blew me off when I talked to them. There’s nothing clique-ish about this reading series or its patrons; people I didn’t know poured glasses of wine for me without it being their duty or role.

I discovered via post-reading conversation that Mike Young is a former student of K. Silem Mohammed, and I could definitely hear some ghosts of that experience in the mildly flarf-like delivery. Between the punchy line breaks and facial expressions and the crowd’s giggles, there was a thoughtful representation of the intimacy of examining, a feeling of being close to one’s own face, or a loved one’s face. But there are other materials involved too: for instance, there is a “secret mouthwash.” I also heard: “Here, let me spill this dust all over your hair.”

Mr. Young also mentioned that he was paid! commissioned! to write a poem for a baby soon to be born. He chose to tell the baby things he might encounter, like all the people on a bus laughing together at the same time, or being excited about being naked with a man or with a woman. As Mike read, he frequently employed a kind of tender direct address, which was welcomed by the audience. I look forward to reading his journal NOO more closely (which features, in addition to prose and poetry, a section for presenting independent literature: magazines, chapbooks, etc.)

Next, artist Jake Gillespie was introduced via the disclaimer that his films were not meant to be funny. These videos showed pencil-drawings of faces with double-paired eyes. It’s some sort of brain trick, putting the viewer in a slightly altered state. The easiest drawing to describe is a man slowly accumulating strokes of beard hair, so that he has a haggard 5 o’clock shadow and until eventually his entire face is engulfed in black marks. The accompanying music lent a haunting and sobering tone. (Mr. Gillespie told me after the reading that it was the local artist Clovishead.)

[Jake Gillespie, June 2009. image c/o Devin Anderson]

I watched Jake watch his own films with reverence. The subjects drawn had varied expressions, ages, races, genders. I got a sense of overwhelming unity. One image shows a woman’s tears accumulating as these little tick marks, the dotted line of tears, but then the tears begin reversing and mirror upwards. Is it a different sadness? Or have the eyes gained some sort of power, some understanding of the radiance of sorrow itself? I’ve noticed a trend in much recent art in galleries lately—meticulous pencil and pen work, being shown in a large scale. This return to the hand in such a large size (alongside the decline of the pen to paper in everyday “writing”) seems to be a yearning for the physical aspect of communication that we don’t always realize we’re missing. Hand to pen to person. How the written line connects us to people. With the lines in Gillespie’s video, the tears go out extremely far in directions we don’t expect, like airplane vectors. Out. The beard goes outside of the head, affecting others.

The final reader of the evening, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, teaches at Berkeley and at San Quentin State Prison. I’d read Gillian Hamel’s interview with O’Brien on the Studio One blog, in which O’Brien makes observations about his reservations about “speaking” on the web about poetry, mostly because he takes poetry seriously and doesn’t want to be misunderstood by a space that moves faster than he prefers to move. During the reading, he broke out a section of a 40-page prose poem that he describes as having a “relentless iambic rhythm.” This rhythm is disrupted by words acting as “hinges” in certain lines, words that take on a “double syntactic duty.” This is interesting because it makes it a little difficult to read aloud. As he read along, stepping slowly through the cadences, all of a sudden an entire page of the poem went missing, and he pressed on gracefully, though he had to get up out of his seat and dig for the page. It was fitting, it suited the disruption in the lines, and it made for a memorable moment. As a listener, it was a feat to try to track the hinges as they pass without seeing them on a paper in front of me. One that I caught was “…the necessary changes /made/ me feel at home. (In between the slashes is my emphasis on the hinge-word. It’s not a line break.)

So what does double syntactic duty do? Is it referencing an agent or an author acting in the same way as the hinge-word acts, teaching in two different environments, to two different populations? It struggles with finding a balance between any number of dualities, while directly referencing the balance between looking at a page and hearing aloud.

I’ll end with the second poem Geoffrey G. O’Brien read that night:

VAGUE CADENCE

An away of practice the other is
Like a river out of acts the other is
Hapless, unheard, with marks upon him
Having dallied in tarrying unwisely
Backlit at an undecidable remove
In a house of marks the other is
Useless deciding whether to go
Or wait in best practices like a child
A hapless river filled with sand
For years it flows like wet clock-rope
Years of saying as it moves away
Are the undecided water others bring
Like the child of acts the other is
Saying to himself the other is
A hapless river practicing its flow
A house that moves to where one was
With all years off the water goes
The lights are on so the dark is out
Like the useless children others are
A certain building dream within
A part of speech without a name

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POETRY FEATURE 18: Shira Dentz

2009-06-22T08:01:00.000-07:00

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to the equinox

trees outside veins.
spindles lacing
soon enough there’ll be leaves.
start with phrases,
a spray of branches
as the wind blows
is a bit cold
antlers splay white sky.
skin the riddle of trees,
raised question marks.
two bluishred chairs on a lawn facing front of the greentan house
next door.
a male with short brown hair, navy sweatshirt and jeans looks up
at the house.
dry sticks, garbage, could be anything.
light combs lakewater, deer-brown.
my father: a black slip, squirrel
of fabric curled
a noose beside his head.
the raze of nothing
but colors squirt
and a soprano far off:
plane engines, jazzy light, neighbors knocking walls,
vents exhaling heat, saints.
in the background orange looms
large, its pocked skin dicey.
sun flowers on my desk:
scatter
yellow green
consonants,
winter grass.
white lily petal
losing supple,
sister me.

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Shira Dentz is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets' Prize, The Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review's Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly's Poetry Prize. Her poetry has aired on NPR, featured on the Poetry Daily website, and has appeared in The American Poetry Review, FIELD, Western Humanities Review, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Seneca Review, jubilat, Lungfull!, and many other journals. She worked as an Art Director in a New York City advertising agency for many years designing ads for rock concerts and taught in a Brooklyn public high school as a New York City Teaching Fellow before leaving for the Iowa Writers' Workshop a few years ago. Currently, she lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she is finishing a doctoral program. "To the equinox" was partly inspired by Nature in Iowa City, a memorable and, at times, dominant presence.

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OMNIDAWN POETRY CONTEST: LAST CALL!

2009-06-14T13:58:00.001-07:00

Last Call!
2009 Omnidawn Poetry Contest Judged by Ann Lauterbach

Postmark Deadline: June 30

The 2009 Omnidawn Poetry Contest, judged by Ann Lauterbach, is Omnidawn Publishing's second annual contest for a first or second full-length collection of poems by a poet writing in English. (If you have two or more books published or accepted for publication, you are not eligible, although chapbooks do not count for this purpose.)

The recommended length of manuscript entries is 40 to 70 pages. Simultaneous submissions and multiple submissions are acceptable. The prize includes $2,000, Fall 2010 Publication by Omnidawn, and 100 complimentary copies of the book. The entry fee of $25 entitles you to one free Omnidawn title of your choice, if you send $2.92 in postage and your return-mailing-address typed on a piece of paper. See full explanation at

www.omnidawn.com/contest/contest_guidelines.htm

The prize-winning book will be produced, distributed, and advertised to full Omnidawn standards. As with other Omnidawn books, we will encourage the winning poet to participate in the design of the book, including choice of typefaces, cover artwork and design, with all stages subject to the approval of the winning poet. All costs, including production, distribution and advertising, will be fully paid for by Omnidawn. Omnidawn abides by the CLMP Code of Ethics.

The winner of last year's contest, judged by Marjorie Welish, is Michelle Taransky for her manuscript, Barn Burned, Then, to be published this September.

For the complete guidelines to this year's contest, visit

www.omnidawn.com/contest/contest_guidelines.htm

For information on last year's contest and winner visit
www.omnidawn.com/contest/contest_2008.htm

For other information about Omnidawn, including a list of Omnidawn titles, subscription to our mailing list, and more, visit www.omnidawn.com

POETRY FEATURE 17: NATHAN PARKER

2009-06-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

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The Journey Back

after Tolkien, Shelley, Nelson, Eastwood, Housman, Justice, Bishop


Cradling my drunken brother
In my broken arms I tracked

The last cloud on earth after
Deciding the last movie lacked

Cowboys. True, the river clips
Were something to behold.
(write it!)
Michael I love you and wine
Lied. We are just as cold.

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Nathan Parker lives in Northport, Alabama, with his wife, Christie, and his two toddlers, Noah and Clara.

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Interview Feature 2: Brenda Iijima Interviews Tyrone Williams

2009-06-01T12:14:00.000-07:00

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check out Brenda Iijima's wonderful interview with Tyrone William. the interview, titled "An African-American Poetry/Poetics," appears in Kaurab Online.

Tyrone Williams, teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. An experimental poet of a rare breed, Tyrone has authored two books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002) and On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008)and a number of chapbooks including AAB (Slack Buddha Press, 2004), Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press, 2004)and Musique Noir (Overhere Press, 2006).

Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus, 2007) and Around Sea (O Books, 2004). Her book, If Not Metamorphic was runner up for the Sawtooth Prize and will be published by Ahsahta Press. revv.you’ll—ution, is forthcoming from Displaced Press sometime this year. She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs: http://yoyolabs.com/. She is editing a collection of essays by poets concerning poetry and ecological ethics titled )((eco (lang)(uage(reader). She is the art editor at Boog City as well as a visual artist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at Cooper Union.

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Some Announcements from Onmidawn Friends

2009-05-31T19:59:00.000-07:00

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DIGITAL ARTIFACT MAGAZINE
Call for submissions**
Deadline: June 15, 2009

Watch their video call for submissions!

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New Publication: In Your Fish Helmet by Sarah Menefee recently out from Transmission Press.

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Check out Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal.

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POETRY FEATURE 16: ROB SCHLEGEL

2009-05-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

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from ICEBLINK

She neither arrives nor departs
but modifies constant

Cove's pliable shore

Never tethered is it
so permanent to regard itself
immortal

Bury she may his bones
within the ossuary

Crab-apple

or buried sun

She questions the one part of every sound
pining for a different pitch

~

Pockets of water cupped
in clefts of calcified bone

Scattered vertebrae

Rock-moss
phosphorescent and
the pond becoming a meadow

Switch of lightning

Switch of song

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Rob Schlegel's The Lesser Fields was selected for the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry from the Center for Literary Publishing and will be released in November, 2009. His poems and reviews have appeared in Boston Review, VOLT, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Octopus and elsewhere. With Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel he edits The Catenary Press, publisher of limited-edition chapbooks dedicated to serial poems. He occasionally posts here.

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Interview Feature 1: Joshua Marie Wilkinson interviews Tyrone Williams

2009-04-11T22:01:00.000-07:00

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Welcome to Omnidawn Blog's first Interview Feature. We are re-publishing this interview with the permission of the interviewer: Joshua Marie Wilkinson, the interviewee: Tyrone Wiliams, and the editor of Denver Quarterly (in which this interview first appeared): Bin Ramke.

For information about Tryone's On Spec, published by Omnidawn, click HERE.

ADDENDUM: AS A CONTEST, Omnidawn will send a free copy of Tyrone's book to three lucky winners. Here's what you have to do:

1) read the interview below
2) think of a thoughtful / intriguing question that you'd like to ask Tyrone in response to the interview
3) post your question in the comments field of this blog post.

at the end of the week, i will choose the three questions i like best. Good Luck!

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An Interview with Tyrone Williams

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON: I'm curious about the gap between your first book, c.c., and On Spec, just out this Spring. How did the poems/sections for On Spec come together? Were you working towards a new book the whole time, or did you later go back and gather up the most vital pieces of the last six years since c.c. and arrange them?

TYRONE WILLIAMS: I wasn't thinking about a new book but I'd been writing a little since completing the manuscript of c.c. in 2000. I continued to write poems while c.c. was in production--in particular, "Apocryph," Mortal Facts," "Character" and "Little x Little." I quickly began to see these pieces as part of a book I was going to call p.s.: vocals by, an obvious follow-up to c.c. ( I may still write that book), but then went on to another project that I was calling AAB. When Bill and Lisa Howe called and asked for new stuff for a chapbook for the Slack Buddha series I threw together some newer pieces and "gave" them that title, AAB. By then (2004) I was calling the manuscript pseudoeshuneutics--which wound up as the title of the second half of On Spec.

JMW: I'm struck by a number of things in On Spec, but firstly your insistence on a variety of forms--using the page in myriad ways (from vast open spaces to huge
paragraphs, long lines and caesuras to terse couplets and tercets) –what determines the forms you take up? And secondly, the way you draw from influences: ranging from Kathy Acker and Cecil Taylor to Sly Stone and Jacques Derrida—How do these figures and their works play into the poems of On Spec?

TW: I think c.c. is, on a smaller scale, just as varied in its formal procedures. With the first book. however, the procedures were insistently purposeful, a lesson (or burden) I got from Eddie Hirsch when he was at Wayne State University. With On Spec I decided I didn't want all the forms as obviously teleological, but the fact is, I'm constitutionally adverse to free verse forms in my own writing (however much I may admire them in other writers)--most of the forms in On Spec are dictated by the subject matter. As for the various artists and thinkers that wind up in the poems, it's very much a situational matter, banal even—whatever I happen to be reading/listening to/viewing winds up finding its way into a piece. More important, the artist in question offers me new ways to imagine form and procedure in my work (e/g/, the formal 19th c. greeting card format of four of the poems in c.c.). Of course, it goes without saying that I'm huge fans of the people you mention.

JMW: Word play and punning are bound up with political and racial aspects of our subjectivity in your work. I'm thinking of (from c.c.) "White sale. Will not last." and "I'm a black...I mean, African, American..." Even the punctuation here is integral to how the language is split, doubled, and re-cast. In On Spec, this seems true also: "black tape masking yellow // White sacrifice" and there are dozens of other examples that are layered in the cultural meanings they dredge up but also
play with. Could you talk about how this approach to a poetics works in your writing process?

TW: I've always been fascinated—since the age of 13—with the Black Arts Movement and some of its practitioners who insist/remind us that we always speak the language of those who kidnapped and enslaved us. At the same time, this "we" is crucial to my sense of our historicity, the obvious fact that "I" and everyone I know have only known "this" language. But the gap between what happened to our predecessors/ancestors and the experience of those born in the Western hemisphere is the space of play, of irreverence--I don't "revere" the English language but I use it and, on occasion, abuse it. Having written that, I am a grammarian--I was taught by pre-integration "Negro" teachers who taught what we today call "linguistics" in ordinary English classes in elementary and junior high school. And what I learned from the Mrs. Ewings--for example--of the world is that every grammatical marker is purposeful, that every torque of the language renders "meaning" problematic--which seems to me the precise "condition" of African-American existence in particular and "American" life in general...

JMW: I'm curious, also, to know how you read this aloud. You seem very much to be a "page" poet—only insofar as there is a lot of extra-textual architecture in your books that would be difficult if not impossible to convey in a reading. What's your relationship to the live reading? Is some of what's on the page necessarily lost? Are there certain pieces you avoid or like to do especially for readings?

TW: The readings offer me choices--and sometimes I read a poem one way, sometimes another. For example, the poem dedicated to the dancer Katherine Durham, a kwansaba entitled "Limb(o)er," ends with the line "Under, away from, which b(l)acks arched toward..." Both the title and last line force a speaker to make a choice--I've said "limboer," "limber" and "limbo" in different settings. For example, recently, for an audience with a somewhat "older" African-American population, I said "limbo" because I knew they'd understand the reference to the dance...There aren't any pieces I avoid because of the difficulty of reading them, though sometimes, for students or those relatively inexperienced with poetry, to say nothing of my kind of poetry, I will try to choose pieces that are relatively listener-friendly...

JMW: I wonder if you could discuss how you came to poetry. What were the first poems you wrote and read? How long did it take you to put c.c. together and how long until you found a publisher? Who do you cite as your primary influences?

TW: Miss Horn—Durfee Junior High School, 1969-72 in Detroit. She had us doing "creative writing" and I wrote a few short stories that she liked, and since she was a young cute teacher, I'm sure I responded to her encouragement with hormones raging...But I guess it was my high school friend and neighbor, Anthony Luffboro, who really got me going. We wrote poems as a kind of friendly competition--we were our only audience. When we got to college--we both entered Wayne State University--we dropped the back-and-forth writing but we both continued writing on our own. From my sophomore year on I entered the WSU English Department's annual contest--the Tompkins Award--and lost every year--until my senior year. That year I won first prize and a French poem I'd written won 2nd prize in the French Department. Thrilled by my coup, I organized a reading in the student center building, putting up flyers announcing "my" debut reading. I'd secured a large room in the building for my fans. In attendance--my mother, one of my sisters and my girlfriend. That was 1977....

I began writing the poems that comprised c.c. around 1999—the same year I completed my first residency at Djerassi (though nothing I wrote there made it in the book) and met my wife on my way back to Cincinnati. I wrote the bulk of c.c. in 2000 and the beginning of 2001. I sent it to Wesleyan and Chax early that year and got warm responses from Suzanne Tallman (Wesleyan) and Charles Alexander--both said it deserved publication but they couldn't do anything with it. In June 2001 I was thumbing through the latest issue of Poets & Writers and came across an interview with the editors of two small presses in San Francisco, Mary Burger and Jocelyn Saidenberg. I'd never heard of them or the presses but, on a lark, sent it to both. Jocelyn called me in December 2001 with the good news, the same week the wife of a close friend called to tell me he'd attempted suicide; they too, as it turns out, lived in San Francisco...

Influences: my first influences were not necessarily poets, at least not consciously. When I was in junior and high school and college I loved French literature in translation--Rabelais, Racine, Baudelaire--probably because like most teens I was enamored of Poe (I read of his influence on the Symbolists). But there's no question that the Black Arts Movement had a tremendous impact on me--though the figure I was told to emulate was fellow Michigander Robert Hayden (Phil Levine came later). I sent my first poems and manuscripts to Dudley Randall and Broadside Press, then Haki Mahabuhti and Third World Press--in fact, every black press that I knew of (Lotus Press--Naomi Long Madgett) got my work--all to no avail...But to return to influences...I was a Creem Magazine fanatic and loved Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs--given all the music criticism I wrote for the college paper (pop, disco, r& b, punk, rock, primarily) that has to be cited as a major influence. And since I was initially a Chemistry major, the sciences in general--especially subatomic physics--were and are important influences. Poets? Too many to name, but in college I started reading on my own Susan Howe (thanks to Charles Baxter who thought I would like her work), Alice Fulton, Chris Tysh, Barett Watten, Frank O'Hara, etc.. Of course, I had all the Hoyt Fuller, Amiri Baraka, Stephen Henderson, etc. anthologies, magazines and chapbooks--most of which I lost along the way. Today I read everyone from Carl Phillips, Donald Revell, Kevin Young, and Elizabeth Alexander to Claudia Rankine, Erica Hunt, Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern religiously. And I'm a huge Celan, Trakl, and Radnoti fan too...

JMW: What sorts of classes do you teach at Xavier? What's your relationship to teaching? Does your life in the classroom stay separated from your work as a
poet or do they overlap much?

TW: My areas are American literature, literary theory and African-American literature but what I teach is far more diverse, due in large part to the small size of the English Department here (14 full-time tenure-track and tenured faculty). We have to be versatile and we often get to teach whatever we want in some of our general literature courses. So I've taught everything from the metaphysical poets to Central and South American novelists.

Like most literature graduate students from my generation, I was taught to focus on my own work first. Teaching was, for many years, just a backdrop to my literary ambitions. Over time I have come to see teaching as much more integral to who I am and I now take it with all the seriousness it deserves. I rarely teach poetry courses or creative writing--Xavier doesn't attract students with those kinds of interests. But I'm just as happy teaching fiction and theory. So there isn't much overlap between my own writing and my courses, although this semester is the exception that proves the rule: I taught the Nielsen/Ramey anthology of innovative black poetry, Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, in a graduate course on the Black Arts Movement and I also taught "War Poetry" in a senior seminar--Mandelshtam, Duncan, Ginsberg, Darwish, H.D., Prevallet, Elrick.

JMW: What's your relationship to the midwest? For folks unfamiliar with the midwest, Detroit and Cincinnati might seem vaguely the same—can you talk about your experience with this region, and how, if at all, it's affected your life as a poet?

TW: If I hadn't already criticized the use of the term in c.c. I might have said I'm "proud" to be a Midwesterner (as if I had a choice), and believe you me, Detroit is as far from Cincinnati--politically, culturally, socially--as one can imagine. I grew up in a working-class family--my dad worked in all three of the plants (Chrysler, Ford, GM) before driving a truck for a distilled water company; my mother was, for a while, a housecleaner in a home for retired women (all white) before she began working in the public schools--and I had a number of service jobs (shoe salesman, grocery store clerk, etc.). My Detroit is labor intensive in every sense of the phrase. So it's safe to say that my poetry, though it has changed over the years, has perhaps become more complex (though I was writing "experimental" poems under the influence of the Cass Corridor radical/post-hippie scene around Wayne State long before I'd heard of avant-garde movements like the Language Poets), is informed by a working-class/labor ethos. This is why I'm also interested in poets like Bob Hicok, Phil Levine, Jim Daniels, etc., who all came out of the Michigan auto shop/tool and die industries even if my own experiences--I managed to avoid the auto industry entirely as a laborer--and poetics are quite different from theirs. I still wonder about my decision to take the job at Xavier and move to Cincinnati, the antithesis of Detroit in ways both positive--not nearly as dangerous in terms of personal safety (I and every member of my immediate family has been victimized by robbery in Detroit)--and negative--supra-conservative, German-Irish Catholic, etc. It has definitely forced me to push back, to not only articulate my own politics (when I got here my first foray into local politics was an editorial I wrote for the local Gannett newspaper, responding to the anticommunist/ anti-Russian spleen of a local university professor by offering several interpretations of what happened to the Korean airplane that was mistakenly shot down by the Russian military--my department chair received several calls for my immediate dismissal and I received a number of thinly veiled threats...) but to also get involved in the Over-the-Rhine community, an impoverished area of downtown under assault by the forces of gentrification and "population [read: homeless and poor] relocation."

JMW: What's your response to folks who say that experimental poetry, to quote of my student's recent emails, doesn't relate to "the average reader," that it's too caught up in self-referentiality to be meaningful to the uninitiated? What sorts of ways do you invite your students into various forms of poetry, from those you mention up through the Every Goodbye Ain't Gone anthology?

TW: First, there is no "average reader"; even less probable is the "average reader" of poetry. Since I just finished teaching some experimental poets the subject/issue is very much on my mind. The truth is that most (American) people cannot, actually, read (I include most academics in this indictment). This broad generality includes students, of course, but they are by no means the exception that the town criers make them out to be. Of course, when I say "read" I mean reading "serious," difficult, challenging books, magazines, etc. The advantage many younger people have over their elders is their visual literacy vis-a-vis computer games. None of this is a criticism, of course, but the canard that the "average reader" is going into bookstores and walking out with stacks of Mary Oliver, Albert Goldbarth or Thom Gunn--for example--is just that. What's really behind those kinds of statements is not anti-experimental poetry or even anti-poetry per se but a residual anti-intellectualism in general which, contrary to popular opinion, is not an after-effect of the rise of television, cinema, popular music, etc.

As for my students, the process of acculturation--and it is that--depends on their suspension of disbelief. I tell them the bad news first: learning to read poetry--any kind of poetry--is like learning to spell: there are no shortcuts. It is very much akin to learning to swim; you have to learn to trust your body in the water, so to speak. The first thing most people want to do--given the way we are trained in pour educational system--is to figure out a poem's "meaning." I tell them to look for patterns, for forms, for the internal logic of the poem. Those old standbys--alliteration, assonance, rhythm, etc.--come in handy. Pedagogically, I'm trying to do a kind of regression, to get them to shed years of reading habits, to return to a kind of play and wonder, not in order to romanticize poetry but in order to re-open those alternative ways of engaging language closed off by public and/or private education.

JMW: Your relationship with Cincinnati is a curious one—how has it effected your writing? What are you working on now?

TW: Not sure what you mean by "curious"--lots of people work at jobs they dislike and live in places they'd just as soon leave. I happen to be lucky that only one of those applies to me. I have a few kindred spirits in the Tri-State area--Dana Ward, Keith Tuma (Miami, Oxford OH), Alan Golding (U. of Louisville), Norman Finkelstein--but I'm not part of any artistic "community." I don't want to give in to the exaggerations of memory but in Detroit I felt part of a community--literary, political, artistic, cultural, etc.---even if I know that one of the reasons I left Detroit (the second time, in 1987) is because I didn't think there was anything there for me any longer.

As for current projects, I've been commissioned to write a piece for the Kootenay School of Writing conference in late August and I'm trying to finish up the last section of a project for Atelos. I've had another manuscript of poems on "hold" now for two years--it was supposed to come out last year. I could not let it come out this year since I knew On Spec was coming out. So I'm hoping that manuscript (comprised of poems older than those in c.c.) will see the light in 2009...

JMW: Can you give us a preview of the other (post- c.c.?) book on the way? It often happens that a poet's books don't appear in the order they were written (my fourth book will have appeared a full 2 years before my third)--what can we expect from this one?

TW: "the Hero Project of the Century" is its title, taken directly from a NY Times headline some fifteen years--maybe longer--ago. It is much more a "traditional" book, a collection of poems that traverse the landscape of black social life, its internalization of the predominant culture's mores and ethos, and the problem of generations which, for those of African descent in this country, is almost inextricable from the names we give ourselves--colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, African American, etc.

JMW: And will you mind it being read as your "third" book--even if it's not?

TW: I actually consider it my second book--I have an even older manuscript that Mr. Bergwal might find all too much "in your face," the opposite situation of On Spec. Since I reject out of hand any kind of "developmental" ideology with respect to writing--it's a matter of framing, not "maturing"--I don't have a problem with the order of the books' appearances.

JMW: What do you hope poetry can do with respect to the political? Can it be an effective political agent or do you find poetry at a remove from this realm?

TW: All poetry has political effects--as does marching in strikes, registering voters, and lying down in front of a tank. And though these effects are distributed unevenly along a spectrum or scale we might tentatively call "history," their relative efficacy, as we know all too well, is never determined in advance. Still, poetry is pretty far up the causal chain--in a general sense--so those mediating links (for example, readers from all walks of life) are crucial to its dissemination. I see my own work as a contribution to the critique of calcification in all its modes--the objective/subjective divide, class/coterie scales, the construction of race and ethnicity according to a biologism dependent on an absolute nature/nurture distinction, and so forth. At the same time I'm interested in the very real paradox that political efficacy depends precisely on blocs, groups, social formations, etc. that, at least strategically, must put up a common front of solidarity...

JMW: Of On Spec, Hansa Bergwall writes, "Be warned though, this book is cryptic and often seems deliberately designed to confuse and obfuscate. If Williams were in the business of making crossword puzzles, I suspect he would incorrectly number the clues out of spite." How do you respond to this as the poet under discussion? Is this just part of putting a new kind of book out into the world?

TW: Well, it is a hard book, no question about that, and I have to apologize because late in the production process I realized I'd forgotten to add all the notes I felt would help contextualize--not determine--the work's public life. Both Rusty and Ken thought it might have been helpful to have notes but they did not feel that the absence of notes was a major obstacle to the work. But it is a book that, like c.c., I wrote with a specific audience--black people in general and innovative artists in general—in mind.

JMW: I'm struck by this quote in a recent interview with Lisa Robertson: "Poetry remains an interesting and pleasurable vehicle because it offers almost infinite formal freedom and flexibility. Poetry's culturally marginal position is perversely advantageous I think. It's a largely invisible agent." In light of Robertson's words, what do you make of the contemporary scene of poetry? Do you also find these "perverse advantages" in its invisibility?

TW: I concur with Lisa completely. Poetry's relative 'invisibility" is often invoked to assign blame, usually on poets indulging in poetry's "almost infinite formal freedom and flexibility." Of course, this isn't true only of poetry. The same could be said of certain forms of experimental music, painting, etc. It can be liberating to live off the grid.

JMW: What advice do you have for a young person appearing in your office hours wishing to become a poet?

TW: As you might imagine, that rarely happens. More often, I get the "how can I get this published" line. Still, I point out all the obstacles awaiting anyone contemplating a literary career. Actually, what I say to prospective writers isn't all that different from what I tell prospective graduate students: don't do it, your chances of getting a job/having a "career" are slim to none, the market is flooded with Ph.D.'s/poets, etc. And then if they decide to go ahead anyway--well,
then, they have the right (or wrong) stuff, which is to say, they're going to do it no matter what I or anyone else says. And they will absolutely need that kind of blind, perverse, persistence...

JMW: For folks unfamiliar with the terrain of African-American poetry, who would you most like them to read and know?

TW: Where do I start and how can I possibly finish? This is off the top of my head, but essential, for me, in the 20th and 21st centuries, have been Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Amiri Baraka, Melvin B. Tolson,, Robert Hayden, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, Lorenzo Thomas, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Haki Madhabuhti, Michael Harper, Carl Phillips, Kevin Young, Ed Roberson, Elizabeth Alexander, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, Erica Hunt. I'm very interested in reading more of Carl Martin, Chris Stackhouse, John Keene, Reginald Shepherd, Duriel Harris, and Mark McMorris.

JMW: How does a poem begin for you? What's your technique for revision? How do you know when a poem's complete?

TW: I'll take the last question first. I have few poems that I think are really "complete," Even when On Spec came out and I had a look at it there were/are so many things--mostly tinkering--I wish I'd changed. That said, there are poems I go back and reread after years and think, yes, that's just it, just how I wanted to write it. Tinkering, of course, is not revision--that's an entirely different process. Like many poets, I imagine, keep a journal of phrases, images, snatches of conversation, etc. that I go to when I'm in the process of writing. I'm not a procedural or conceptual poet in the sense that I don't begin with an interest in a specific set of formal problems to engage, though I admire poets who appear to work this way. However, once I have a specific idea for a poem I do think about the formal matters most appropriate--or most inappropriate--to the subject matter (and by appropriate and inappropriate I mean, of course, sedimented traditions). And I do believe in serendipity as I believe a poet must make his or her luck. My sense is that, for me and many others, the antennae are always up even if we are not aware that they're in reception mode.

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BIOS:

Tyrone Williams is the author of c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002) and On Spec (Omnidawn 2008). Forthcoming books include the Hero Project of the Century and MI Howell.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the author of four books, most recently The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo Press). He lives in Chicago and teaches at Loyola University.

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George Albon's BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES inspires music!

2009-04-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

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have you read George Albon's BRIEF CAPITAL OF DISTURBANCES? you should--it's fantastic!

also, check out the myspace page of Mischa Salkind-Pearl, who wrote a piece of music using BRIEF CAPITAL. The piece is called "American Temple" and is on his myspace playlist tab.

Omnidawn will send a free copy of George's book to the first person who listens to the musical piece, comments on Mischa's Myspace page, and then comments on this blog to alert me that your task is complete ;)

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NEWS from BURNING DECK PRESS

2009-04-03T10:38:00.001-07:00

2 new books of poetry are available from www.spdbooks.org, www.burningdeck.com, and in Europe: www.hpress.no

1. Sawako Nakayasu
HURRY HOME HONEY: LOVE POEMS 1994-2004
Poetry, 80 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN13: 978-1-886224-98-8, original paperback $14

Poems unusual for their sense of moving between cultures. Love here is now game, sport, speed-time, performance, now contract, conflict, failure, but always a shifting structure of relation.

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. She is the author of 2 previous books of poetry and several books of translations, including FOR THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF THE WALNUT by Hiraide which received the “Best Translated Book Award” 2008 from Open Letters. She also edits FACTORIAL magazine.

“An extraordinary voice — an ease that thinly covers a swirling anxiety, a well-honed knowledge of how things turn out; and yet an unending romance with the process of romance, only rarely referential (and never explicit) to the act or state of satisfaction, sexual or otherwise. A sense of youth that is marked by a hope, a sense of possibility.”—Craig Watson

2. Michael Gizzi
NEW DEPTHS OF DEADPAN
Poetry, 72 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN13: 978-1-886224-96-4, original paperback $14

Intersection of Tragedy and Comedy? Or the almost reckless declarativeness of a mind’s weathering both merriment and distress?

Michael Gizzi’s long list of books includes MY TERZA RIMA and NO BOTH from The Figures, as well as CONTINENTAL HARMONY from Roof Books. He has edited LINGO magazine as well as Hard Presss and, with Craig Watson, Qua Books. He is currently teaching at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.

“Razor sharp but also rich and generously compelling, Michael Gizzi's poetry lambastes as it celebrates”—John Ashbery [on NO BOTH]

3. news: YOU ARE THE BUSINESS by Caroline Dubois (trans. Cole Swensen) was a finalist for the “Best Translated Book Award” 2008 from Open Letters.

www.burningdeck.com

Exciting Poetry Events in the Bay Area!

2009-04-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

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1> Artifact reading on Saturday, April 4, 7pm, w/ Kaya
OAKES, Dan FISHER & Amanda DAVIDSON. $3 cover, BYOB, it's at a new space,
the house of one Cassie Smith, at 3263 Kempton Ave in Oakland, CA 94611.

2> SPD OPEN HOUSE on Saturday, April 5th, from noon to
4pm (readings at 2pm). Readers are Clark
Coolidge, Norma Cole, Graham Foust, Tennessee Reed, Erica Lewis, Alex Espinoza
and Andrea Lopez. 1341 Seventh Street,
sale on the books, etc.

3> Canessa Park Reading Series, April 11th, 8pm. $5 at the door. Brent Cunningham,
Stacy Doris
& Jennifer Manzano on "memory," at Canessa Gallery, 708
Montgomery Street, SF.

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Announcement: Keith Waldrop's Several Gravities

2009-04-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

Siglio is pleased to announce the publication of
Several Gravities by Keith Waldrop
edited with an essay by Robert Seydel

SEVERAL GRAVITIES

For nearly four decades, Keith Waldrop has been creating a body of visual art that---while mirroring his extraordinary and internationally acclaimed oeuvre of poetry, fiction and translation---has lived largely outside the public eye. Several Gravities, this first collection of Waldrop's radiant visual collages not only reveals an essential facet of his extraordinary oeuvre, but also summons a mesmerizing world in which the invisible and the absent are roused and rise to the surface. Like his collage poems, the images are enveloped in ghosted impressions, quiet tensions, strands of memory and fragments of dream.

Several Gravities (casebound, 112 pages, color illus. $39.50) features a substantial selection of collages as well as a new unpublished serial poem and an essay by Waldrop that enunciates the relationship between his distinctive visual and poetic practices. Editor Robert Seydel contributes an incisive essay on Waldrop's work---its expression of the poet-artist "tradition," and its expansion of the collage form.

For a slide show of images and more about the book, go to Several Gravities.

Keith Waldrop is the author of over two dozen works of poetry and prose, an eminent translator, and with wife Rosmarie the founding editor of the influential and innovative Burning Deck Press. Publishers Weekly has said: "Waldrop, not as well-known as he should be, is among the most important writers, translators, and publishers of avant-garde literature in our time." See Keith Waldrop's biography.

ORDER NOW: PRE-PUBLICATION DISCOUNT 25% OFF UNTIL APRIL 22

Use code WALDROP when ordering at Siglio.

If you prefer to phone in your order, call 310-857-6935. If your book is shipping overseas, email Siglio first at bookorders@sigliopress.com in order to get the best shipping price.

LIMITED EDITION

A signed and numbered limited edition of 30 includes an original, miniature collage from Keith Waldrop's series "Metro Tickets." $100.

ABOUT SIGLIO

Siglio is a new, independent press in Los Angeles dedicated to publishing uncommon books that live at the intersection of art and literature. We publish books without compromise---each title embodies the inimitable vision of its author---and we cultivate wider audiences for original, provocative work, whether by renowned, forgotten, or unknown artists and writers. We believe that challenging work can be immensely appealing: our books are beautiful, affordable, and as much a pleasure to touch and hold as they are to read.

www.sigliopress.com

Artifact Reading, 4/4 7pm, Oakland, CA

2009-03-31T11:29:00.000-07:00

ARTIFACT is terrifically happy to announce our re-re-invention of itself as a house reading series (again)! We started off that way & we're excited to get back to our roots.

Cassandra Smith & her compatriots of The Dollhouse have invited us int their home and for that we are deeply appreciative (& blushing quite a bit)!

*We are going to kick it off on:*

Saturday, April 4th at 7PM
w/
Kaya OAKES
Dan FISHER
Amanda DAVIDSON

We're going back to our $3 cover-charge (as opposed to $5), as well as our BYOB air!

The address & directions are:
3263 Kempton Ave
Oakland, CA
94611

*BIOs*

*Amanda Davidson *will perform with the assistance of an audio tape, a part of her ongoing homage to lost technologies. With Judith Jordan, she makes a pants-pocket sized zine called *Parted in the Middle*. She hopes that by the time you are reading this bio, her website partedinthemiddle.com will be loaded up with new and breathtaking film clips, but even if it isn't, she hopes that you will visit the site and enjoy the cartoon. Davidson also co-edits *Digital Artifact Magazine*, the Web based, narrative little cousin of the Artifact Reading Series. Look online at digitalartifactmagazine.comfor submission details on* *Issue 3:* We Made This for You Out of Nothing.*

*Dan Fisher* lives on the island. No one seems to know exactly where the island is. You can get to the island via 4 bridges and a tunnel. His poems have appeared in *Bay Poetics, Viz, Lament, Work, Cricket Online Review,*among other places. He also makes collages and drawings under the name Fish Fishtofferson. He's really excited about being back in a house.

*Kaya Oakes* is the author of *Slanted and Enchanted: Indie Culture in America* (Henry Holt, 2009), and *Telegraph *(Pavement Saw Press, 2007). Her poems and essays have previously appeared in *Kitchen Sink Magazine, Parthenon West Review, Coconut, Volt,* and many other publications. She teaches writing at UC Berkeley. Her website is http://www.oakestown.org.
--
Artifact Reading Series
Artifact Press
Digital Artifact

www.artifactsf.org
www.artifactseries.blogspot.com
www.digitalartifactmagazine.com

Artifact is a Member of the Intersection for the Arts Incubator Program

Announcement: Kudos website

2009-03-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

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check out the website KUDOS

Here's a description from their website:

Welcome to Kudos

Everybody always remembers that amazing moment they actually won a prize, but writers cannot lose, because entering competitions encourages inspiration, motivation and organisation.

Bigger and better than ever (increased from 28 to 32 pps).
And at just £3 per issue, the cost is largely offset by savings on postage (around 70p each time) because several entry forms are usually enclosed -
which also saves time and effort.

Formerly Competitions Bulletin, these listings are a convenient, up-to-date and accurate means (every item double checked - where possible) to make use of all the information you need to know, allegedly:
current UK writing competitions plus an increasing number of Overseas contests.

Also includes news items and information about markets, outlets and opportunities for all kinds of writing.

Is it the competition which is putting you off? Sticking to the rules improves the odds no end; most judges will tell you, around 50% of entries get disqualified straight off.

*

Kudos 75

MARCH/APRIL 2009
Runs mainly from the end of the month right up to mid May

RESULTS:

For starters, the funniest you're likely to read are on the Bulwer-Lytton website: read, enjoy and be inspired to enter your own. And there's more, jokes that is, with Wergle Flump, and Archangel Shecky, who is winging his way back.

Short stories galore, from Frome right up to Scotland (HISSAC), via Bournemouth, Bristol and Calderdale; not forgetting Dark Tales, Firstwriter and V.S. Pritchett

Last and by no means least, Orbis is joining forces with Virginia Warbey, for the very best in poetry.

PS, Myths and Legends, in poetry and prose, for Earlyworks Press. And if you want to know more about Grey Hen, Loaves and Fishes, plus of course, Purple Moose, all will be revealed - in this issue of Kudos.

Every issue, around 200 competitions - some with free entry; at least 50 for poetry, around 40 for short stories.

Plus collections, anthologies, playwriting, non fiction, books etc, home and abroad. Details of around £250,000 in prize money.

If you like the sound of Kudos, a free sample back issue can be emailed as a pdf file.

*

Review of Martha Ronk's In a Landscape of Having to Repeat

2009-03-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

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check out this older review of Martha Ronk's In a Landscape of Having to Repeat. the review first appeared in First Intensity and is available at the website of the reviewer, Amy Allara .

read other reviews of Ronk's book here.

*

John Latta on Hejinian's Saga/Circus

2009-03-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

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click here to read John Latta's thoughts on Lyn Hejinian's Saga/Circus.

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Review of Lyn Hejinian's Saga/Circus

2009-03-17T18:20:00.000-07:00

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check out this review of Lyn Hejinian's Saga/Circus written by Andrew Wessels and posted at A Compulsive Reader blog.

learn more about Saga/Circus here.

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Xantippe is now ONLINE!!!

2009-03-14T17:03:00.000-07:00

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Exciting news: Xantippe, edited by Kristen Hanlon, has an online edition! From their website:

XANTIPPE was published as an annual print journal [2003 – 2007] featuring poetry, poetics, reviews of small press/university press poetry, and the occasional interview and book excerpt. In this, XANTIPPE’s electronic outpost, the focus is on reviews of recent books (and chapbooks) of poetry. Please see Guidelines if you would like to contribute.

Check them out here.

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Announcement: Recording of Poetry Reading with Lisa Robertson, Eric Selland, and Carol Snow, intro by Hugh Behm-Steinberg (12/5/08)

2009-03-11T18:57:00.000-07:00

*

check out the audio here.

To celebrate the publication of 1111 Issue #5

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian writer currently living between California, where she is Artist in Residence at CCA, and France. Current projects include a translation of Situationist Michele Bernstein's novel All the King's Horses (published in installments in the London arts journal The Happy Hypocrite), and a recorded sound work in collaboration with Stacy Doris, commissioned by The Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver. A new collection of poems is forthcoming from Coach House Press.

Eric Selland is a poet and translator living on the San Francisco peninsula. His translations of modernist and contemporary Japanese poets have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies. He has also published articles on Japanese modernist poetry and translation theory. He is the author of The Condition of Music (Sink Press, 2000), Inventions (Seeing Eye Books, 2007), and an essay in The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). He is currently editing an anthology of 20th Century Japanese avant-garde poetry.

Carol Snow lives, works, and arranges words, quotes and other small mostly indoor objects in her native San Francisco. She is the author of Artist and Model, For and The Seventy Prepositions. Her new book, Placed: Karesansui Poems, is now out on Counterpath Press.

Eleven Eleven is a bi-annual journal of literature and art based at California College of the Arts. The aim of the publication is to provide a forum for risk and experimentation and to serve as an exchange between writers and artists.

Issue Five features writing by Cecco Angiolieri (translated by Brett Foster), Alfred Arteaga, Abby Baker, Aaron Belz, Terry Bisson, Michael Reid Busk, Blake Butler, Jodie Childers, Hannah Craig, Richard de Nooy, Erik Ehn, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Andy Frazee, Elisa Gabbert, Carrie Hunter, Steven Karl, Katoh Ikuya (translated by Eric Selland), Chris Kerr, Bill Lavender, Juan J. Morales, Simone Muench and Philip Jenks, Sarah O'Brien, Pilar Olabarria, Benjamin Parzybok, Barbara Jane Reyes, Lisa Robertson, Elizabeth Robinson, Sarah Sarai, Jordan Scott, Xu Smith, Carol Snow, Jack Spicer, Nicole Steinberg, Nathaniel Tarn, Rachel Tompa, Rodrigo Toscano, Daniel J. Vaccaro, St. Johnnie Walker, Robert Wexelblatt, Andrew Zawacki, and Jan Zwicky.

Issue Five also features images by Kirsten Stolle and Open End Kiss, a project by the CCA MFA Program in Social Practices.

For more information:
www.elevenelevenjournal.com
http://www.cca.edu/academics/graduate/mfawriting/1111.php

Announcement: Stephen Vincent & Obama

2009-03-10T14:06:00.001-07:00

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check out Stephen Vincent's blog; he is posting a work in progress The First 100 Days of President Obama (haptics & reflective commentary, including poetry & art reviews in context.)

*

Two Announcements: Hooke Press & Wood Coin

2009-03-09T19:44:00.000-07:00

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Announcing another fabulous little chapbook from Hooke Press: 

I AM A FURIOUS LITTLE BEE
by Alda Merini
Translation & introduction by Carla Billitteri 

$10.00 list price


Special Online Price = $8

46pp 

Printed in an edition of 200 in October of 2008


Alda Merini is one of the better known poets in Italy, yet she remains
sorely under-translated into English. Carla Billitteri sets out to
right this situation with this delightful selection of Merini's
aphorisms.  These poems all come from a series of limited edition
chapbooks originally published in Italy between 1992 and 1996.
Charmingly perverse, cynically joyful, lustfully feminist, and bawdily
philosopical, they are an ideal introduction to the fiesty intelligence
of a poet who still remains a well-kept secret in the U.S.  Includes
both Italian and English.  Introduction by Carla Billitteri.

*

More issues are up at the newest magazine of literature & liberal arts, Wood Coin.
Featuring Jerome Rothenberg, Carol Berge, David Plumb, Heller Levinson, Barbara
Rosenthal, Mark Terrill, Clare Carswell, Nico Vassilakis, Karl Young, XeusZenon,
AnnyNymity; and cover art by Kari Dorth.

*

POETRY FEATURE 15: Caroline Crumpacker

2009-02-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

September 26:  90 Degrees and Rising

Sallow afternoon of girls around the perimeter
Remember she preferred the silent playground            incipient identities:
she preferred the lesser intercourses          the classic picnic table framing her
resistance as social critique.

Remember she preferred offering, a body on hers, the middle age of women is
a prolonged disturbance.

A café at the blue hour. Soft inner arm. She preferred the tresses of a long reality.

There on the afternoon as a vista of all time passing. There in the ripening melon
awash in arms and fingers. Touch is fluid under such circumstances. The heat rising
from the open stove, a smell of leaves and tinder.

When a woman says her life is falling apart, and she will say it, listen:     Fall is one
more time around the playground I ask her Are you sure? but why question it.
Disappearance is as natural as sleep taking the day inside out.

The threat of no longer becoming. She will say it’s been too long, yes, since he
desired anything. The aporia is unclear.     What sweetness, really, to stand in the
afternoon heat creating something.

The farms turn out a full late harvest. Corn and squash and beans. The rows and
rows of tomatoes. Their colors their variation their candor. The threat of
unconscious transposition. The threat of diminished centrality even within the
small spectrum of one’s own understanding. Standing in the middle of a room with
windows framing the late September sky open to the self secured in its post.

Young girls break your heart the world scraping itself away.

The threat that the dimensions change by themselves.

Tomato basil soup. The long lavender bath. He jumps up but can not make contact
with the day. Define him by what he consumes.

The parts disassemble. Fear of dispersal is fear of continuity.

Break open the hot day deep in there is resistance. Cool creaks. A bag of plums.
Sweet cold water and birds.

Define the matrix by the parts of oneself being consumed. Walking into the kitchen
slowly, the arc of newly combed identity parting briefly. Her avatar. Her reserves.
Her longing.

Remember that she prefers the incongruity of her loneliness to her raptures. She
relishes her preference  progeny is the nearest love that will never change the
resources we squander are a form of wisdom: remember the clouds in that exact
pattern distributing the late age of the young woman as a totem remember the sky
took you in when you had no idea what you wanted remember your own consumption
riddles.       That red mark on the horizon  calls calls calls you vixen.

Then outside the day goes. Claiming itself a late entry. That which is burning.
That which wakes (you) up in the night.

*

Caroline Crumpacker is a Gemini. She lives in so-called “mid-upstate New York” with her lovely daughter Colette. A bit further upstate, she runs The Millay Colony for the Arts, an artists’ residency program. She is a founding editor of Fence and Double Change as well as a contributing editor for Circumference. She is also the curator of the Bilingual Reading Series/World of Poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club. She is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in various magazines and in The Talisman Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman, 2007); American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2007); Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books, 2007); and Love Poems by Younger American Poets (Verse Press, 2004).

*

Pierre Joris' Best Books of 2008

2009-02-07T12:37:00.000-08:00

check out pierre joris' blog where he selected an Omnidawn book as one of his best reads of 2008:

Friedrich Hölderlin | Selected Poems | translated by Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover| Omnidawn 2008.

My blurb for the book: “More than his famous contemporaries, Goethe and Schiller, it is Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet of incessant change and transformation, who today stands as the major poet of his age — and whose visionary work has remained a plum line that helps us fathom the complexities (the beauty and the terror, the ‘inside real and the outsidereal,’ as the poet Edward Dorn has phrased it) of our own age. In their elegant & fluid translations of this excellent and exhaustive selection of poems, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff capture the work’s extreme contemporaneity, what they themselves have called ‘the drama of Hölderlin’s consciousness, the beauty of his lyrics, and the largeness of his vision.’”

Announcements!

2009-02-01T00:26:00.000-08:00

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check out the Lana Turner Journal!

*

check out POEMS FOR THE FIRST 100 DAYS!

*

check out anne boyer's mention of lyn hejinian's SAGA/CIRCUS!

*

check out Eileen Tabios' new book:

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM AHADADA BOOKS

NOTA BENE EISWEIN
Poetry by Eileen R. Tabios
Release Date: 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9808873-9-6
Price: U.S. $16.00
Distributor (forthcoming): Small Press Distribution (spdbooks.org)
For more info: GalateaTen [at] aol.com

Ahadada Books (Toronto & Tokyo) is pleased to announce the release of Eileen R. Tabios' 16th print poetry collection, NOTA BENE EISWEIN. In this book, Tabios applies the methodology of making "eiswein," a German sweet wine, for extracting poems from her readings of Christian Hawkey's poetry collection The Book of Funnels and Sarah Bird's novel The Flamenco Academy.

NOTA BENE EISWEIN extends Tabios' body of work that is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. Just as she is inspired by other art forms for creating poetry, her poems have been translated into other art media -- Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Modern Dance and Sculpture -- in addition to languages such as Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, and Portuguese. Tabios blogs as the "Chatelaine" at http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com and edits GALATEA RESURRECTS, a popular poetry review journal at http://galatearesurrects.blogspot.com

To celebrate the release of NOTA BENE EISWEIN, Ahadada Books is pleased to announce a SPECIAL RELEASE OFFER. For orders received through February 28, 2009, the book will be available at a 25% discount for $12.00. There will be free shipping as well to U.S. residents. Eileen will be processing U.S.-based orders (which means you can get a signed copy!), so please email her for more info:GalateaTen [at] aol.com.

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POETRY FEATURE 14: James Belflower

2009-01-26T01:45:00.000-08:00



from FRIEND OF MIES VAN DER ROHE








In Canaan night, tent lanterns along both clines
women and children on one, the shuddering river between and on an other
my brother’s hand turns our gift
on another side—








           That night Jacob waited alone. “Let me go,
           day is breaking,” he said. “Jacob,” said he.
           “Not anymore, Jacob heel-clutcher, will be
           said in your name; instead, Israel, God-
           clutcher, because you have held on among
           gods unnamed as well as men, and you have
           overcome.” Instead, he blessed him there.
           He rose in the night and led his children to
           the river Jaboc.

           He answered. “Why is it just this, my name
           you must ask?” Now he asked him, “What is
           your name?” Jacob’s thigh was limp as he
           struggled. It was clear he could not
           overcome Jacob so he broke his thigh at his
           hip. Now Jacob looked out afar and there he
           was.

                               and was addressed
                                      by the Other’s
                                                   blood

                                                           as if
                                                           it were she
                                                           (kinah)








                               another side of Jacob’s gift:

CHORUS: “If we were asked to explain the presence of Mahler’s scherzo in
Sinfonia, the image that would naturally spring to mind would be that of
a river running through a constantly-changing landscape, disappearing from
time to time underground, only to emerge later totally transformed…

…thus this fifth part may be considered to be the veritable analysis of
Sinfonia, but carried out through the language and medium of the
composition itself…”

…he himself went on ahead and bowed down to the ground seven times as he
approached his brother…

*

And Also a Fountain, James Belflower's collaborative chapbook with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez, is forthcoming from NeOPepper Press in 2009. He was a finalist for the 2008 Sawtooth Prize, Slope Editions Book Prize and the National Poetry Series, and won the 2007 Juked Magazine poetry prize. His poems, reviews, and essays appear or are forthcoming in: Jacket, EOAGH, Denver Quarterly, Octopus, LIT, First Intensity, 580 Split, Abovo, Konundrum Engine and Cricket Online Review, among others. He runs PotLatchpoetry.org, a website dedicated to the gifting and exchange of poetry resources.

REVIEW PAGE: Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover

2009-01-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

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review by Ron Slate at On The Seawall

review by Francisco Guevara at Words Without Borders

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visit the main page of Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin for more information.

New Review of Paraspheres

2009-01-19T13:28:00.000-08:00

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new review of Paraspheres by Diane Kidman at Carp(e) Libris

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1/24: Thom Donovan & Tyrone Wiliams in Brookyln

2009-01-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

Prepare yourselves for this stellar reading!

Thom Donovan & Tyrone Williams

Saturday, January 24th

7:30 pm

Unnameable Books

www.unnameablebooks.net

456 Bergen St.
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(718) 789-1534

Tyrone Williams is the author of c.c. (Krupskaya) and On Spec (Omnidawn). Hero Project of the Century and MI Howell are coming out this year. He teaches poetry at Xavier College in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Thom Donovan is an ongoing participant in the Nonsite Collective, coedits ON Contemporary Practice, the first issue of which can be purchased now at SPD, edits Wild Horses of Fire weblog, and curates PEACE events series. His poems and critical writings have been published variously.

NWF Fiction Review Feature 1: Trevor Calvert reviews THE GONE AWAY WORLD by Nick Harkaway

2009-01-11T21:35:00.000-08:00

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Welcome to Omnidawn Blog's first NWF Review Feature. In future features you will find reviews of recent books of fiction that reflect "new wave fabulist; fabulist; speculative; nonrealist fiction" tendencies.

*

The Gone Away World
by Nick Harkaway
Review by Trevor Calvert

Reminiscent, at least tonally, of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr.Strangelove, Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World is an intriguing and timely addition to the symphony of contemporary fantastic and fabulist fiction. While most neo-fabulist writing is voiced more with magical-realist and fantastic tones, Harkaway’s first novel plays more with the science fiction genre; yet, labeling Harkaway’s first novel as science fiction is erroneously reductive.

The Gone Away World thrusts the reader into a world where something-bad-has-happened, and as readers we are not quite sure what, or even if this is meant to be our world—all we know is the Jorgamund Pipe, as its namesake implies, now winds its way around the globe, maintaining reality. But before we can figure this out, our nameless narrator skips back in his past to a world we do understand—our own—and begins from there.

The narrative follows the protagonist as he grows up in suburban England, learns Kung Fu, finds love, discovers some facility with politics, and is maneuvered into a job with military intelligence. Far from buying into militarism, the protagonist at best has a bitter and problematic view of his employers. Indeed, introducing a militant element (and the novel hinges on this) allows Harkaway to make insightful criticisms of the military complex and the sort of worldview that maintains it. Really, nothing overtly unreal happens until chapter six—wherein the narrative hits a second stride and wades into the realm of the fantastic.

Science fiction is known for its surprising and insightful story-telling, yet as the genre has aged, some facets have become more commonplace: androids, sentient programs, space-cathedrals, and alien races either bent on destroying us, or more recently, resisting our colonization (apropos topics change with the times). The Gone Away World includes none of the above. In fact, a good portion of the novel reads as "straight" fiction (albeit strange) before the science surprises us by wiping out most of reality. Not the world itself—we already have bombs that do that—but the very informational structure of the world. And there is fall-out.

Nick Harkaway’s novel stems very clearly from the anxious nuclear tension that existed throughout the cold war. Many people can recall the ridiculous idea that huddling beneath a desk would provide protection from nuclear attacks, or the pervasive and creeping dread of fall-out. Harkaway’s book takes that frightening time, and shuffles the most absurd elements into a macabre and dangerous future where the world is very certainly not our own.

Despite a strong narrative voice and engaging storyline, the book does have its flaws. Harkaway can be too wordy, and the writing sometimes feels a bit disjointed. One example: “Leah is staring at me with wide eyes which have more than a little approval in them, and she hastens to reassemble Carsville’s arm in what I suspect may be an unnecessarily painful way, because he passes out and therefore cannot give countervailing orders to his men, who snap into action as Gonzo tells them to move out” (p.181, US edition). At other times, the narrative becomes tangential and must find its way back to the main thread (Harkaway never moves as far away as Pynchon, but neither does he venture out with as much aplomb); nonetheless, riding through these rougher sections is worth the passage because Harkaway scatters throughout the book’s landscape surprising narrative twists and vistas.

Readers of definitively experimental neo-fabulist writing may not like Harkaway’s narrative as it is classically straightforward; however, the content is fresh, and as a whole it slides gracefully around rigid genre identifiers (much like some if its characters’ kung fu).

With this "Gone Away World" as the novel’s backdrop, Harkaway introduces a well-realized cast of characters (military spooks, mimes, a kung fu teacher, ninjas, the French, a few pirates), and despite the calculatedly wacky lineup, resists slipping into the easy tropes of freewheeling, humorous fiction. Instead, he crafts a world that allows his careful and wry commentary on love, politics, fear, and culture to illuminate the world-as-it-is.

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Trevor Calvert is a writer, bookseller, and recent library-school-graduate living in Oakland, California. He has a book of poetry, Rarer and More Wonderful (Scrambler Books, 2008) and has been published in various journals and magazines. Some of his interests include puppets, vocabulary design, and martial arts.

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Hank Lazer Photo & Videocast

2009-01-08T13:03:00.000-08:00

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a photo of Hank Lazer reading (with Christian Bok) in San Miguel de Allende. look closely, he's reading from a copy of Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008 (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008).

also, check out this VIDEOCAST of Hank reading / discussing Lyric & Spirit at the U of Alabama Library Lecture Series. note: after clicking link, scroll down to "Spring 2008" and look for "Reading and Lecture Lyric & Spirit with Hank Lazer".

ENJOY!

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Video Feature 4: Michelle Taransky

2009-01-04T19:31:00.000-08:00

Michelle Taransky, winner of the Omnidawn poetry contest, has a new video of "barn burning, that" featured at THE CONTINENTAL REVIEW. Taransky sends her thanks to Emily Pettit and Ava dellaira for their production help, to Jordan Stempleman and Nicholas Manning at The Continental Review for their interest, and to John L. Roberts for making the film.

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Video Feature 3: Christopher Arigo plus A NEW POEM

2008-12-27T14:22:00.000-08:00

Embedded is a 5-minute video of Christopher Arigo reading from his poetry collection
In the archives. This reading (9/20/07), hosted by Steve Dickison and the San Francisco
State Poetry Center in conjunction with Omnidawn, was held at the Unitarian Church
on Franklin St in San Francisco, CA. Other readers that night were Donald Revell
(link to his video here), Bin Ramke, and Laura Moriarty (link to her video here).
(We plan to have Video Features of Bin Ramke as well as other wonderful writers
in coming weeks.)

For more information about In the archives, published by Omnidawn, click this link.

And here is a new poem from Christopher Arigo:


*

And the explosions forced away the hummingbirds

      0.

     and the air surrounding them screamed
(did they scream or was it you) agitated
     startled by their own flight
by shrapnel by phosphorescent buzz-bombs
     byproducts of terror and potential terror
the potential dormant in mating index finger to trigger
     the finger’s potential when hovering
above buttons red and dead-like—dead-making


        1.

and they wait—

breathing shallow muscles tensed pupils dilated to swallow more light more light
morelight
       some freeze flooded with endorphins some flee flooded with fright some fight
and reasons come in waves of chemicals and flashes and screaming

        2.

     someday the hummingbirds may return
to a hole in the earth to wait for a time more loving
     please don’t leave us—
sadly most won’t miss you until you do

        3.

     and the hummingbirds fly until they lose momentum until they run out of air
and the machines are patient
     and the birds will wait for their malfunction
violence mates with an efficiency some call modern living
     the birds occasionally twitter and vrrrip in response
the timers are set to kill

         4.

     hummingbirds wish the war would end
(or is it you or me)
     it is hard to hum when children die from bombs
this country is killing hummingbirds
      (or did you mean children)

         5.

hummingbirds live in a world where people destroy their homes
      because people want bigger homes
      because children need to write poems
      because I kill forests too

         6.

—pens have potential for dead-making too
—pencils are made of trees and rock
—poems are made of trees and rock
—poets should be soft stones willing to erode

         7.

      the hummingbirds visit the poinciana not you
they do not bloom on their own
      these hummingbirds are of the desert to which I must say goodbye
they cannot be made machines—
       the hummingbirds are not helicopters—
they care nothing for airlifts or fleeing criminals
      their red throats do not imitate gunshot wounds
the whirring of their wings brings air strums to your ears
the chatter of helicopters sweeping with menaced eyes upsets your ears every
night

         8.

listen did you hear what the birds say:
       they say a nest is a refuge is a home
a nest is a place for real children unkilled
       a kinder-refuge untouched by almost-adults

         9.

you hope the hummingbirds are not disturbed in their nests of plant down and
spiders’ webs
       covered so perfectly with lichens as to appear part of a branch

*

Christopher Arigo's first poetry collection Lit interim won the 2001-2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize (selected by David Bromige) and was published by Pavement Saw Press (2003). His second collection In the archives (2007) was published by Omnidawn Publishing. Additionally, he co-edits the literary magazine Interim with poet Claudia Keelan and is currently working on a book-length hybrid scholarly/creative nonfiction project on the intersections of ecopoetics, ethnopoetics, hunter-gatherer culture, language extinction, and anticivilization theory. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University.

*

REVIEW PAGE: Saga/Circus by Lyn Hejinian

2008-12-26T14:03:00.000-08:00

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Saga/Circus (2008)
by Lyn Hejinian

review by John Herbert Cunningham @ The Quarterly Conversation

review by Andrew Wessels @ A Compulsive Reader Blog

review by John Latta @ Isola di Rifiuti blog

review by John Cotter @ Open Letters Monthly

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Visit the main page of Saga/Circus for more information

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Announcements

2008-12-22T13:03:00.001-08:00

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check out this review by Jeffrey C. Robinson of Lyn Hejinian's THE FATALIST at DOUBLE ROOM.

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check out this review by Ron Slate of Paul Hoover's and Maxine Chernoff's translation of the Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.

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check out this feature of RUSTY MORRISON and OMNIDAWN at the EAST BAY EXPRESS.

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Lana Turner, A Journal of Poetry & Opinion, No 1 is now available. Edited by Calvin Bedient and David Lau. Subscriptions, $12.00. Send check to Calvin Bedient, 2309 Pearl St., Santa Monica Ca 90405.

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POETRY FEATURE 13: Christina Mengert

2008-12-14T01:38:00.000-08:00

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Rest

            each time I think of you, you cease to be
                         -Jacques Roubaud

A bird, a stone – the body

is overturned. We lay it down

and call it “bolts of cloth.” Also

“lands of unlikeness.” Like a

phonograph, it is proof

we render the natural to scale,

more than motion, an incantation

brought back to the slick wreath

of human expression. Listen:

the page shudders, yes, like a sea.

Listen: who can hear the rest           (only the rest)

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Christina Mengert is author of As We Are Sung, forthcoming from Burning Deck Press, and co-editor of 12x12: Conversations in Poetry and Poetics, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in 2009. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder and through UCLA's Writers' Extension Program.

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Announcements!

2008-12-08T21:59:00.000-08:00

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More Bay Area readings courtesy of Jordon Zorker

November 16, Canessa gallery - Brian Lucas, Valerie Witte, Brian Strang

November 18, Books & Bookshelves, Colleen Lookingbill & Joseph Noble

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3 new Burning Deck titles are available from: Small Press Distribution, or www.burningdeck.com--H Press: www.hpress.no (after January 1, 2009)

1. DICHTEN =, NO. 10: 16 NEW (TO AMERICAN READERS) POETS
translated from the German by A. Duncan, T. Frazer, N. Grindell, C. Hawkey & R. Waldrop
Poetry, 144 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN 978-1-886224-92-6
original paperback $14
Publication date: December 15, 2008

A magazine issue with poems by Ann Cotton, Franz Josef Czernin, Michael Donhauser, Ute Eisinger, Daniel Falb, Hendrik Jackson, Marget Kreidl, Bert Papenfuss, Steffen Popp, Monika Rinck, Farhad Showghi, Hans Thill, Raphael Urweider, Anja Utler, Ron Winkler, and Uljana Wolf.

The poets in this issue, mostly in their thirties and forties, show great formal diversity. The works range from the sound explorations of Anja Utler to the camp sonnets of Ann Cotten; from Czernin’s puns and permutations to Rinck’s and Falb’s deceptively simple parlando; from Donhauser’s grammatical disruptions to Papenfuss’s baroque lists and “sassy East tone.” But they all share a concern with form and with language as material. The poets have also all received at least one prize.

2. Série d’Ecriture #21:
Isabelle Baladine Howald
SECRET OF BREATH
translated from the French by Eléna Rivera
Poetry, 64 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN 978-1-886224-91-9 original paperback $14
Publication date: December 15, 2008

SECRET OF BREATH is a suite for two voices — a voice from outside and a voice from inside, a voice of the living and a voice of the dying — in a race against death and toward death. Caught in a narrative frame and a landscape marked by war, snow, cold, speed, and separation, these two voices, even while facing death, embody the approach of love. The secret of breath is as much a kiss as a last sigh.

ISABELLE BALADINE HOWALD lives and works in Strasbourg, where she directs the “Philosophical and Literary Encounters” of the Librairie Kléber. Her books of poetry include LES NOMS, TRÈS BAS (A Passage, 1986) and LES ETATS DE LA DÉMOLITION (Editions Jacques Brémond, 2002). Our present volume, SECRET DES SOUFFLES, is her most recent book (éditions Melville, 2004).

ELÉNA RIVERA was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood, to the age of thirteen, in Paris. She is the author of MISTAKES, ACCIDENTS AND A WANT OF LIBERTY (Barque Press, 2006) and SUGGESTIONS AT EVERY TURN (Seeing Eye Books, 2005). Her translations have appeared in the CHICAGO REVIEW and CIRCUMFERENCE: POETRY IN TRANSLATION. She was recently awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Institute for the Arts.

3. Série d’Ecriture Supplement #5
Anne Portugal
QUISITE MOMENT
translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop
Poetry, 24 pages, offset, saddlestitched
ISBN 978-1-886224-95-7 chapbook $8
Publication date: December 15, 2008

As Anne Portugal has said, her poetry breaks with elevated subjects as well as with the beauty of phrases. “Poetry is is a laboratory of languages. It is first and foremost physical.” Here, she truncates words to give rise to new rhythms, puzzlement, and sheer fun.

ANNE PORTUGAL was born in Angers, in 1949. She lives and teaches in Paris. She is also the model of a famous “Poets’ Calendar.” Her most recent books of poetry are DANS LA REPRODUCTION EN DEUX PARTIES ÉGALES DES PLANTES ET DES ANIMAUX (1999) and DÉFINITIF BOB (2002). Norma Cole has translated NUDE (Kelsey St. Press, 2001).

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From 32 poems:

Today, I braved the post office with the broken heat to mail out the most recent issue of 32 Poems.

Will you be getting one?

Our printer, our designer and the cover artist all did a great job to make something beautiful for the fall 2008 issue, and we hope you are planning to subscribe or renew.

By the way, Christmas is coming. Birthdays are coming...

We all know the economy is no good right now, and you may be looking for a good deal when it comes to gifts. I know I am. Well, 32 Poems is inexpensive.

For $14, you get an entire year of the magazine. I don't think there are many other poetry magazines that can claim to publish 64 poems per year with little to no advertising.

32 Poems is good. It's not just us who say so. As you may know, we've had poems in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets and have received some wonderful reviews. Order now.

32 Poems publishes the newest voices who soon become nationally-known, award-winning poets: you guys, Caki Wilkinson, David Roderick, Alison Stine, Paula Bohince, James Hoch, to name a few.

We've made it easy for you to order a gift subscription or two, easily.

Did we mention it's easy? Click on the link below right now, and you can pay with Paypal.

$20 for two years. (Save $8 Plus Get 1 Free Issue!)

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Be patriotic. Be thrifty. By all means, be cool. Order now.

Thanks! We really do need your help, as 32 Poems publishes almost completely through the money we get from subscriptions. We can only continue with your support.

And...most importantly, please pass this email along to at least three other readers whom you think might be interested in subscribing to what many describe as the best poetry magazine in America.

Always readable, always affordable, always already, always yours,

Deborah Ager and John Poch
32 Poems Magazine

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POETRY FEATURE 12: Finalists of Omnidawn's Poetry Contest

2008-11-29T20:13:00.000-08:00

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New poetry from the five finalists of Omnidawn's Poetry Contest: Ethan Saul Bull, Michael Tod Edgerton, Carolyn Hembree, Brandon Shimoda, Jordan Windholz.

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TURTLE POND (ANOTHER YARD)

The turtle pond is floating in the plastic
grass.

Leaves are cutout in the shape of famous
artists and constellations.

I’ve written it down—I am religion and
not religion

in the grass selling shapes.

It all looks like the pad of grass at the top
of a baby’s head.

The size of it intrigues me—you are a
turtle looking at a duck.

I will stay here master of tax deduction
strategies and tabletop figurines.

We’ll end up in the refrigerator arguing.

I’ve gone out to a new artificial yard near
the bank.
The earth is in my eyes.
I’m getting another parking ticket
and the damn tv no longer obeys me!

We’ll have to lie down awhile.

It’ll feel like standing where we are

making piles and tossing matches.

Ethan Saul Bull currently lives and works (a little) in Mexico City. He received his MFA from The University of Arizona in 2008 and then immediately fled the country (again). He loves parentheses. This poem is from his work entitled (INSIDE YOU) WITH NARRATIVES ON. Other poems from this collection have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, The Raleigh Review, Bare Root Review, and Cause and Effect Magazine among others.

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(Curtain. Alter)

(in the spot, fades)

In the fold of curtain the amber. In the fold. Curtain seeks amber. Its darkening. In the dark. The spot. Over the spot across filled. Over the seats slow. Across filled seats. (cross fade to red back) To velvet back. Curtain folds. The light. Over the velvet. The warp. In the velvet. Holds the spot. The shadow frames. (hold) Shallow focus on the curtain’s. Or amber, but velvet or. Dancers. Blue or black. In the dark. In the dark wings. In the dark burgundy bright scarlet. Holds.

(music, cued crane view, roll)

Dancers in the wings the curtains. Down. Doors. Close house. Fades. Over the fold of the amber over the burgundy. The scarlet lit. Velvet. Opens. An opening in the stage. Music cues. (pan across) Filled. Full. Fold the seat down. House. Lights opening. Cues. Or silence. We crane. To see to. Or small noises. Reach. The stage the light the opening. Wings.

(walk walk, slowly, cut, to audience seat backs, cut deep focus, center stage)

Sounds entering the melting under. Warm. Lights cue, the music. Dancers the dance, the audience. Stage all set, set all blue. Expanse. (hold spot) She holds his hand. He stretches. He warms. Wings, noises, with waiting on stage. He holds his hand. Eyes follow. Seated. Wing, the way out to, across, his waiting in the, opposite, by step by. Lips.

(reach, )

Michael Tod Edgerton holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. His poems and reviews have appeared in Boston Review (contest winner), Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Electronic Poetry Review, Five Fingers Review (contest winner), Mantis, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Skanky Possum, Word For/Word, and others.

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Bird Tells How It Went with Skinny's Beloved

Sh, Bird say from his clock tower
thus twitter nor tweet be heard all night
wide, drafty them halls orange feathers swoosh through
Bird: Old Sweetheart talks to hisself nowadays
he thinks nowadays he be judging crime
(seen on court steps, seen midday ranting)
Bird: He lives nowhere now you know!

I know
I picture him: Sweetheart's always to me
an oil paint boy—bluely plush knickers
crop in hand, too young to ride the mead
'hind him a whinny or neigh or brrr
'hind him a horse alights, it has wings
all things live long enough they get wings
alas! I and he be what? fly-by-night
tonight old snow outside courthouse
caught in dogwood branches so

From on high seems they be blossoming
by park's spiky gate latch near froze
a girl jogs the square her dog crimson-
collared be white it be late nearby
bronze horseman his right hand free spots her
Yaah now! she hears she falls she falls
snow drifts and snowy tufts drift up

Who done it? 'twill be in court in short
order: the judge be in the clock tower
Bird: Order —everafter hurray down
down in tunnels with have-nots, has-beens
with them Old Sweetheart live this way
achoo! 'neath the courthouse 'neath pink sheets
Bird say, Boohoo
yank courthouse to close
ne'er be I whispery to him, It
be ok be ok ok? o!

Carolyn Hembree has poems out or forthcoming in the following journals: Antennae, Archipelago, Colorado Review, The Cream City Review, CutBank, Faultline, Forklift, Ohio, Indiana Review, Jubilat, Meena, New Orleans Review, Puerto del Sol, RHINO, and Witness. Her poetry has also been anthologized in Intersection, Lush: A Poetry Anthology & Cocktail Guide, and Poetry Daily. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Carolyn received a 2005 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts. She is Poetry Editor of Bayou, the literary journal of the University of New Orleans. Carolyn was born and raised in Bristol, Tennessee. Before receiving her MFA from the University of Arizona, she found employment as a cashier, housecleaner, cosmetics consultant, telecommunicator, actor, receptionist, paralegal, coder, and freelance writer.

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A GIANT ASLEEP IN FORTUNE'S SPINDLE

Refugees … disembark from the ship
that brought them

Preterm flowers
Dark, unbridgeable water

Not the land we envisioned
Nor the attraction
Rainbows stripping in the gutters
Fine hairs of finished color falling to the cock-film
We might relieve ourselves
Within so as not to blister the pattering
Feet or the feet sniping colors

Greeted with silence, scrabbling the sun
Turning bones to insouciant meal

The ocean had the estimable nerve, at least
Humping the waves
Outside of time—to kill without equivocation

This country shakes loose bearings of death
A tart little seed, fruit destining its pistols

Waiting in the wreathes, I bite hard
Into pig quarters. The trees never part
An aggrandizement of flowing roots
To acquit love
Like a champ I eat every last
Bite of the shrub, chase it through straw
In the repellant heart
Dip into my breast I am liquid

Brandon Shimoda is the author of The Alps (Flim Forum Press, 2008), The Inland Sea (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008) and, with Sommer Browning, The Bowling (Greying Ghost Press, forthcoming). Recent work can be found now and soon in A Public Space, Boston Review, Cannibal, Fence, Fou, jubilat and elsewhere. Born in the United States, he currently lives in the United States, where he works for Slope and Wave Books. The poem featured on this blog is from A Giant Asleep in Fortune's Spindle, an assemblage of poems, drawings and collaborative questionnaire-in-progress. This, and others, are dedicated, variously, to the living memory of A, E, G, K, K, L, L, M, M, M, P, P, R, S and Y.

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Ruminant

something like grace cottons the

limbs when the I is lost. lambs

without shepherd huddle

a landscape, eat their names

like tender shoots, like swallows

feast in flight. the air forked

and feathered with warblers,

their song, a broken

adjective, spilling. that whole field,

a cathexis of green

these lambs see, the pasture’s every I

hearing as one herd.

Jordan Windholz lives in the Bronx with Erin, his deepest love. He is currently a PhD candidate in Early Modern Literature at Fordham University, which he mostly enjoys, though he gets strong urges to hole away somewhere with as much O'Hara, Stevens, Melville, Crane, Dickinson, and Hopkins he can get his hands on so he can forget 16th and 17th Century England. He strongly believes mystery is what it is all about.

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New Review of Hank Lazer's Lyric & Spirit

2008-11-25T20:15:00.000-08:00

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Hank Lazer's Lyric & Spirit reviewed by Sue Walker at Jacket 36.

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Announcements about the Omnidawn Team

2008-11-24T15:58:00.000-08:00

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3 poems by Rusty Morrison recently went live at Web Conjunctions!

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a photo of Cherise Bacalski, the newest addition to the Omnidawn team, reading at the Bernal Yoga Literary Series on November 8th:

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finally, my first book of poems, from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) was listed #1 at SPD Poetry Bestsellers for Sept/Oct. get your very own copy here.

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more exciting announcements to come this week, so stay tuned!

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POETRY FEATURE 11: Roger Snell

2008-11-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

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Journal II

After G.A.

Shapes of the unsaid
puncture the ordinary—

“astonished by daylight”

from exile, in
exile

derivations of
inbeing—

would efface this
prelude for the sun

its solidarity—

a green node above
the filament

yellow-starred
anthers

this half-
room in
shadow

the scuttled align-
ment of letters

the many-
lived lives
of words

unknown among
memory gaps—

a stillpoint for
the artifacts
of silence.

The hundredpoems—

forgotten.

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Roger Snell lives in San Francisco with the lovely Ann Marie and their almost five year old son Duncan. They edit & publish Sardines Press. His new book The Morning has just been published by Plein Air Editions & Bootstrap Press. Check out a review of the book at Bookslut.

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Announcements!

2008-11-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

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check out Stephen Vincent's comments on Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin translated by Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover.

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3+3 Poetry hosted its first San Francisco reading on Saturday, Oct. 4th, 2008, at 7pm in the Canessa Gallery. The event featured 3 established Bay Area poets, Gillian Conoley, Standard Schaefer and Norma Cole reading theirwork alongside 3 emerging Los Angeles poets, Polly Geller, Lizzy Epstein and Sarah Suzor. Listen here.

Canessa reading for Oct 18, 2008, featuring David Brazil, Rob Halpern, and Stephen Ratcliffe can be heard here.

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32 Poems is looking for 1-2 extra sets of hands to help us grow.

The 32 Poems intern could help with any of the items below that looks interesting:

planning readings (best if you live in large metro area);
creating concept for new renewal postcards (graphic designer would do the actual
design work);
sending out renewal postcards;
creating concept for new subscription postcards (graphic designer would do the
actual design work);
building or updating website;
contributing to blog with interesting posts;
photographing or taking video of 32 poems events;
reading poems sent in via online system;
manning 32 Poems table at AWP for a few hours each day;
inventing interactive ways to engage with people at AWP conference;
using web 2.0 tools to create community.

If you are already familiar with 32 Poems, you are welcome to suggest an area we
need to work on and to explain how your skills would help with that.

Please send a cover letter explaining your experience in 1-2 of the areas above to
deborah@32poems.com. Please do not send a resume or any attachments at this time. If
you know how to make video, you are welcome to make a video explaining your
experience. In that case, just send me the link.

Please also put "32 Poems intern" in the subject line, so I can filter the emails to
a special folder.

------------------------

We welcome you posting this to your blog, posting to your university's bulletin
board, telling your best students, etc.

Thanks!

Deborah Ager, Publisher

32 Poems Magazine
http://www.32poems.com

BLOG: http://blog.32poems.com

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POETRY FEATURE 10: Eric Baus

2008-11-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

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FERMENTED OPALS

I looked down to sustain the camera’s hide. I have never seen an Ibis mirror. The house rained. The beds echoed. A dead oud’s resin cloned the first sentence. An apple in the closet developed the scene. I felt the sun.

I fell into an opaque bed. The clone smiled. I have never seen a clone smile. His snails grew fur. The closest ant grafted the smoke with sand. This is the first piece of wood. This is the first piece of glass. Clouds arranged them behind dead doves. The membrane’s séance broke. The doves died again. The dead doves reset. I arranged them into flowers. I have never seen a flower. I have never seen a dove.

The sky and its stills mated. I have never played an oud. I have never said Bird. O snail, I heard outside. When the first dove died, the ouds ate apples. I died too. My glass fermented opals. The second séance failed, my fur glued to flowers. I have never seen a cloud. I have never looked down. The organs smoked. The clone strummed. I fled, immersed in planes. The mirror in the closet chimed. Dove. Oud. Bed. The blue membrane’s array split. Inside, the blanks bred herds.

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COMMON CLOUD

I have been a patient tincture. My sister, a watcher of snow. She thought her name would be stunned and it was. It was Iris Versus The Blur. It hurt to see the same snow twice. I was Also or Minus or Gauss. I think we are being minted again. I think we are cotton or bread. There is always a different cost. A different cloth. A second coat. It takes some time in the positive press. We practiced our transfers today. Iris’s insects were bluing the sky. Helio. Helio threads. She likes to call them Dowsing Crowds. I trace. I see parallel rays.

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Eric Baus is the author of The To Sound (Wave Books) and Tuned Droves (Octopus Books). He edits Minus House chapbooks and writes about poetry audio recordings on the site To The Sound. He lives in Denver.

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POETRY FEATURE 9: Karen Garthe

2008-10-26T00:08:00.000-07:00

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Standout
in LA rain

This was To Be’s Fantastic
but packed in the querulous use

Ancestor of Narcissus amassing
mirrors to compass

A self of magic blond and air
nest, spark

Twixt
Narcissus

And the uncorrected proof
of Dreamtime

Yet a mere thong
cod and extra

Plus saboteur
of all profit and sleep

Queering the magic blond
the Dreamtime

To a wailing embankment
of limbless

Fish-form, gills and vent
between the self and the proof

Of sublime orangeries
limelight tucks

To be more
famously at the door

Than a standout extra
in LA rain

Swaddled so
seal-like-Sedna

Wails
Arctic melting

Ice
flowing shards of

Mirrors
and oceans rescinding

The unpack
of the querulous use

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Karen Garthe's poetry has been published in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Court Green, Fence, VOLT, American Letters & Commentary, CHAIN, POOL, Ellipsis, Torque, Cannibal, etc. It's forthcoming in the Best of Fence and in the debut issue of Lana Turner, and her poem "The Porticos of Toulouse," which appeared in New American Writing, will be featured in the 2006-2007 volume of Green Integer's Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative Poetry in English. Her first book "Frayed escort" won the 2005 Colorado prize.

Garthe moved to New York City from Baltimore in 1968 to study at American Ballet Theatre School. In the early '70's, she lived in Charlottesville, VA, where she co-founded the Experimental University and wrote for an alternative newspaper. She also taught at the local dance academy and performed in local ballet and dinner theaters before returning to Manhattan to study with Merce Cunningham. In the late 70's Garthe worked in the music industry for The Wartoke Concern, managing Patti Smith, John Cale and Television. She managed the music room upstairs at Max's Kansas City and the Other End, a cabaret on Bleecker Street in the Village. In the '80s Garthe worked in the Special Projects Division of Doubleday and Co., before joining the Barthold Fles Literary Agency. She founded her own literary agency, Greenwich Mean Time, but then decided to focus on her own writing. In NYC, Garthe has worked in the music industry, publishing, social services, health care, government, heritage preservation, and the visual and performing arts. She currently works in the administration of a private school.

In a Chicago Review essay titled "The Predicament of Modern Poetry (The Lyric at the Pinch-Gate)" Cal Bedient writes: Garthe's lines sound fundamentally strange and foreign, partly for the reason that she, too, slips and leaps about with a William Jamesian certainty that "experience remolds us every moment," that to follow a straight line and not zig zag is to do violence to the continual infiltration of otherness in our experience, violence to the rule of serial nonidentity.

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3 Exciting Announcements & a Correction

2008-10-23T17:57:00.000-07:00

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Bowery Books is pleased to invite you to a book release party for

BODY OF WATER by Janet Hamill.

Janet Hamill will read and perform with Patti Smith at the Bowery Poetry Club, Sunday NOVEMBER 2nd, 6 p.m.

FULL INFO: A book party for Janet Hamill's new poetry collection BODY OF WATER (Bowery Books) will be held on Sunday, November 2 at 6 PM, at the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, (Between Houston and Bleecker), admission free. Patti Smith, who contributed several photographs to the book to illustrate the poems of her life-long friend and mentor, will be on hand to celebrate the release, along with Lenny Kaye from her band.

Advance Praise for Body of Water

"...This book is a romantic, surreal, lyrical Voyage. It twists and turns with the playful tide of poetic vision, enhanced by the delicate measures of Patti Smith's photography. Kudos all around."

-Anne Waldman

"Reading Janet Hamill now, as I have over the last thirty years, I'm amazed again at the particulars of the world her poetry makes – a night world, as I read it, peopled with bright creatures & splashes of color, beautiful & terrifying by turns....With this & much more, she has become indispensable."

-Jerome Rothenberg

With its unbridled surrealistic, hypnotic imagery, Janet Hamill's alchemy of language gives us back communion with our souls. With a magician's grace she reminds us of the enchantment of our being. Hers is a music both modern and magik.

-Maureen Owen

"...Hamill's mastery of form and feeling comes together to create a poem that delicately examines celebrity, gallantry, silence, talent, and beauty. Only a poet could do that. Or maybe only Janet Hamill."

-Patricia Spears Jones

Bowery Books gratefully acknowledges that this publication is made possible with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Bowery Books is a proud member of CLMP.

Hope to see you there!
Bowery Books

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"The Exaggerated Man and Other Stories" by Terry Grimwood is out now and available from www.lulu.com and from the author himself at terrygatesgrimwood [at] msn.com.

Read a review here.

And another review by Greg Hamerton (author of "Riddlers Gift") below:

“Deftly-crafted nightmares of ordinary humans struggling with crisis, making decisions that lead you ever deeper until you're aching for liberation from a gripping and sometimes graphic hell, whereupon you get ... the twist! Great short stories, like a blend of Stephen King and Roald Dahl, from a writer who understands human frailty all too well.

Exaggerated Man opens with one of its strongest pieces, Coffin Dream, in which Grimwood demonstrates his talent for deconstructing reality and whispering in your ear, in the dark, until you really aren't sure that you are going to wake up. The characters in Grimwood's stories all struggle with personal issues - they are mostly complex and troubled, and often unpredictable. In some stories you're expecting a violent reaction from them because of all the tension in their souls, but then they do nothing and you're left with an understanding of how truly human they are. The inability to overcome weakness is what makes characters flawed in the first place. There is a good range of stories in this collection, from demons to ghosts, from science-fiction crisis to fairy-tale-gone-wrong. They may not all be to your taste, but with the great variation in style and theme throughout The Exaggerated Man, there are certainly many gems that I marked to be re-read when I need a spike of supernatural espresso.

Warning: If you are easily disturbed by occasional violence, gore, blasphemy, foul language, and demonic themes then Horror probably isn't your genre, is it, precious?”

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Two internet recordings of readings from Books & Bookshelves:

Oct. 3, Brian Teare & Frances Richard.

July 22, George Albon & Stephen Vincent:

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Correction:

In the acknowledgements for the Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover, we erred in listing the editors of Poems for the Millenium, Vol III: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry.

Here is the corrected acknowledgement:

Poems for the Millennium, Vol. III: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry, Ed. Jeffrey C. Robinson and Jerome Rothenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009): "In the Forest."

We apologize for this error.

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Exciting Discounts from The University of Alabama Press

2008-10-19T21:55:00.000-07:00

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The University of Alabama Press is proud to announce its latest offerings in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series:

Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005 by Jerome Rothenberg

and

The Alphabet by Ron Silliman.

Purchase one or both of these publications at a 30-percent discount and you can receive, as a bonus, two of our bestsellers from the MCP series for $5.00 each: Another South: Experimental Writing in the South edited by Bill Lavender and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy by Marjorie Perloff. (See below for pricing and ISBNs required for ordering.)

To purchase a copy of any of these titles at the discounted offer, good through November 1, 2008, just call our warehouse in Chicago toll-free at (800) 621-2736 or locally at (773) 702-7000 and mention sales code FL-109-08. As always, we invite you to forward this e-mail to any of your colleagues who you think might be interested, or suggest names and addresses to which we should send future mailings. If you have any questions, please contact me directly at rminder@uapress.ua.edu or 205-348-1566.

Poetics & Polemics

“The significance of Jerome Rothenberg’s animating spirit looms larger every year. . . . [He] is the ultimate ‘hyphenated’ poet:
critic-anthropologist-editor-anthologist-performer- teacher-translator, to each of which he brings an unbridled exuberance and an innovator’s insistence on transforming a given state of affairs.” — Charles Bernstein

6 x 9 / 360 pages
(cloth, ISBN 978-0-8173-1627-3): $43.75 USD (30% discount)
(paper, ISBN 978-0-8173-5507-4): $20.97 USD (30% discount)

The Alphabet

“Ron Silliman’s ongoing long poem The Alphabet . . . mingles quotidian observation, linguistic philosophical reflection, and street-level social critique to produce as vivid, systemic, and cumulatively moving an account of contemporary life as any poet now writing.”— Times Literary Supplement

6 x 9 / 952 pages
(cloth, ISBN 978-0-8173-1618-1): $59.50 USD (30% discount)
(paper, ISBN 978-0-8173-5493-0): $27.97 USD (30% discount)

Another South
(paper, ISBN 978-0-8173-1241-1): $5.00 USD

Differentials
(paper, ISBN 978-0-8173-5128-1): $5.00 USD

Domestic shipping: $5.00 for the first book and $1.00 for each additional book
Canada residents add 7% GST
International shipping: $8.50 per book

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POETRY FEATURE 8: Patrick Pritchett

2008-10-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

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The Real Real

       Whoever sees the real charges the eye with a flare. Keeps evening kneeling, a
blue-smoked air stripped of its string of

      lights given as the park to the people and where they move there, from path to
path, each node cinched and fluid, the cold edge of a run over ice to

      where the middle is a bridge and not anything separate. The weather for it
melting, I mean the way it’s built out of the ground and because

      of it a shelf is what it says will last, will hoist the fables of the margin even after
the spire is misrepaired.

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Patrick Pritchett is the author of Burn, Lives of the Poets and Antiphonal. He is a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University.

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New Reviews of Omnidawn Books

2008-09-28T23:42:00.000-07:00

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Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. from the German by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover. Omnidawn (IPG, dist.), $24.95 (496p) ISBN 978-1-890650-35-3

Review From Publisher's Weekly:

Sublime visionary, great religious poet attracted to pagan myth and German poet of world-historical importance, Hölderlin (1770-1843) at the turn of the 19th century made his mark with Greek-inspired odes, intensely heterodox (and often never completed) hymns to imagined gods and real European places, and elegies on love. All these great works came about before 1807, when the tormented writer suffered a mental breakdown. Despite his importance to subsequent German poets (Rilke) and philosophers (Heidegger), and despite careful translations, Hölderlin has never enjoyed the U.S. following attracted by (for example) the author of The Duino Elegies. That may change with this ample yet sensitive facing-page version. Husband and wife team Chernoff and Hoover-both are experimental poets, fiction writers and editors-do best with the strangest (most clearly "modern") stanzas and pieces of unfinished hymns, but also give fine attention to the earlier, more elegant works and to the naïve rhyming poetry of Hölderlin's last years. Here is the Hölderlin who praised "The Poet's Courage," asking, "Isn't everything alive already in your blood?" Here too is the poet for whom modern life is at once opportunity and abyss: "I approached to see the gods," he wrote, "[a]nd they themselves threw me down beneath the living." (Sept.) ---Publishers Weekly, 8/18/08

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Saga/Circus Lyn Hejinian. Omnidawn (IPG, dist), $15.95 (144p) ISBN 978-1-890650-34-6

Review from Publisher's Weekly:

This pair of new long works from the California-based experimental poetry master (The Fatalist) makes a fine introduction to her current powers. Hejinian-admired in avant-garde circles since the 1970s-combines epistemological investigations with deft jokes. "Circus" is both prose poem and experimental, nonlinear fiction: named characters (Sally Dover, Quindlan, the talkative Askari Nate Martin) chase one another through short nonlinear chapters (one sequence includes, in order, "Chapter Two," "Chapter One," "Chapter 3 and Chapter Two," "Chapter Between" and another "Chapter Two"). Sometimes kids, sometimes gossipy wives, sometimes circus performers and sometimes figures in a whodunit; these are characters meant to dismantle expectations, in quotable sentences and baffling passages reminiscent of Gertrude Stein: "Quindlan refuses to recognize anything as a digression, to take a suggestion, to accept a designation." Less whimsical and perhaps more profound, "Saga" comprises 37 numbered free-verse segments: each imagines a long journey on a seagoing vessel as a figure for poetry, history, life. Along with Hejinian's usual canny smarts, this newest long poem includes unexpected Romantic aspirations, with nods to Wordsworth and Coleridge: Hejinian, or her persona, says she "felt uprooted even/ At an early age perhaps from gods, my deities/ Were streaming/ Or grinding like a boat being hauled over stony ground." (Sept.) ---Publishers Weekly, 9/15/08

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check out these 2 reviews of Randall Silvis' IN A TOWN CALLED MUNDOMUERTO:

review at PRICK OF THE SPINDLE by Cynthia Reeser

review at ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION by Paul di Filippo:

"Magical realism is a tough mode to bring off. Books in this vein can often sound twee or fey or forced or artificial. But the best magical realism exhibits a kind of reverence for the mysteries of life, illuminates the strangeness of the human condition, and entertains the reader with a tragicomic perspective. Randall Silvis fulfills this mission in his novel In a Town Called Mundomuerto (Omnidawn Publishing, trade paper, $12.95, 160 pages, ISBN 978-1-890650-19-3). An old man named Alberto feels compelled to tell the same mythic story of his youth over and over each day to a fifteen-year-old boy (“. . . to allow the story its opportunity to speak . . .”), until the boy becomes a half-complicit bard himself. Alberto’s tale concerns Lucia Luna, the village’s most beautiful woman, and how she danced one night with a dolphin god in human form, and became pregnant by the visitor. All communal propriety goes topsy-turvy, and Lucia Luna’s life becomes threatened. Only the young Alberto, in love with the older woman, can save her, by accosting the dolphin-man in his lair. By turns droll, somber, reflective, rueful, and hopeful, this story speaks of eternal verities in very specific mortal masks."

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POETRY FEATURE 7: Julie Doxsee

2008-09-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

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GIANT ATTRACTION WITH CREATURES

Everyone’s tooth
is a little machine

that can’t starfish itself
to the lip it loves.

The way you speak
hits the ceiling & stays there

laryngitic, a blue noise
photoshopped clean I can’t

stand so vertical. What brought
this image to light made a

motorcycle-growl & chicks
exploded from the eggs

you would have cracked into
my mouth. What brought this

image to light wrapped a
perfume ad around your hand

during the immaculate peeping
so you wave goodbye to infinity.

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LEISURE ACTIVITY

I know something we can do
together. We just lean our

heads back like this to the wall
where our voices won’t register

eye to eye. When we vanish
a white field will roll out

where poolwater used to be
& the hem of the grove

will quiver like someone cut it
out of the landscape & threw it

up high to cover the
top of the sun. See how good

that feels on our throats.
Men take pictures of us

glowing & we never know it.

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Julie Doxsee is the author of two books: Undersleep (Octopus 2008) and Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean 2009). She teaches writing and literature in Istanbul, Turkey.

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Announcements

2008-09-18T22:08:00.000-07:00

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REALISMS OF THE EVERYDAY: A CLASS

Poets Laura Moriarty and Brent Cunningham will be teaching a weekly evening class for writers and poetry readers starting October 7th. Together they taught a popular "Martian Poetics" class in the Spring. The new class, "Realisms of the Everyday," will take place Tuesday evenings at Small Press Distribution in northwest Berkeley. New students especially welcome!

For questions, contact brent@spdbooks.org. Information and sign-up for the class can be found here.

CLASS DESCRIPTION: A great deal of poetic invention has found its way forward by revaluing or returning to the “real”: the ordinary, the everyday, the mundane, the colloquial, the immediate, the tangible. In this class we will explore the problems and potentials of the real from the perspective of working writers. We will take a look at actuality and everydayness as aesthetic tactics, aesthetic forms, and aesthetic inspirations. We will notice our existence in what we think of as everyday life and note how others have solved the problem of both occupying and representing this “life.” We will focus especially on the difficult problem of defining the “real”: is it what we continuously think, what we immediately perceive, what we actually do, what lasts, what would exist without us, or something else? Is it all of these things? Is it some specific (secret, discoverable?) combination? And, practically speaking, what does it mean to one’s writing to value certain ideas of reality over others? We will often write during class. We will do exercises that use “what is” as their generative engine. In place of in-class workshopping, each student will receive a 30-minute individual consultation with one of the instructors outside of class hours. For interested students there are additional opportunities for one-on-one meetings outside of class at (cheap) hourly rates. There will be opportunities to browse the thousands of small press titles at SPD. And there will be a 30% discount on all SPD books for all students of this class! Throughout, we will attempt to complicate our presumptions about what really is, while also recognizing the undeniable power and vitality of is-ness.

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Now available from Ahsahta Press!

New & Selected Poems
by Charles Hartman

New poems join a selection from nearly 40 years of Hartman's groundbreaking computer- and jazz-influenced work.

"Charles is a precisionist of language, an improviser searching familiar scales for a wrong note, a word or phrase, that can take him past regular habits of meaning or melody to some new kind of right place." —David Antin

"Charles Hartman's New & Selected Poems will finally establish his rightful place as at least one of the best poets of his generation. It takes a large collection to reveal the range, depth, intricacy, and inventive playfulness of his very very fine sensibility. Most of all I love his intelligence—his refusal of sentimentality that finds an angle for the release of unexpected yet rich and complex feelings, and his range of attitudes and situations matched by astonishing metrical inventiveness and resonance. ('Songlines/tune/the travels.') This intelligence makes for a range that beggars most poets—from elegant short dimeter poems to several sustained and complex long poems on topics ranging from becoming familiar with exotic places to establishing attitudes toward the ways new technologies affect possibilities for feeling and for thinking, or for continuing to think that feeling matters."—Charles Altieri

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Zone : Zero
by Stephanie Strickland

Spinning language both exhilaratingly liminal and elegantly precise, Strickland's work charts the emotional distance between 0 & 1.

Includes a CD with two sequences from the book as interactive digital poems.

"Stephanie Strickland is one of contemporary poetry's polymaths: her poetry displays an astonishing command of scientific knowledge—for instance Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem—technical know-how, especially in the realm of electronic poetics, and unusual verbal virtuosity. The pièce de résistance in Zone : Zero is the interactive generative Flash poem "slippingglimpse," in which text and video, made by using motion capture coding, combine so as to create a genuinely new and distinctive eco-poetry. Readers/viewers will find themselves totally mesmerized." —Marjorie Perloff

". . . mystic immersion / enabled / smite embedding / enabled," writes Stephanie Strickland as she launches us into the mysteries of her interior castle, her Zone : Zero. With her extraordinary ear, her crackerjack sense of timing, her genius for structure and her exquisitely dry wit (as in the delicious vaudeville routines of her "Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot"), Strickland can lead us down these high stone stairs, through these neurodigital pathways and never lose us, even into her castle keep. And when we find ourselves there, what fierce playfulness awaits us, and what startling pleasures, pleasures indivisible from the victories they embody: "And Colette took up this / bread, which was black, / and spat back at Lord Death / the red / pomegranate drops."—Rachel Loden

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REVIEW PAGE: Tendril by Bin Ramke

2008-09-14T23:06:00.000-07:00

>

Tendril (2007)
by Bin Ramke

Review by Lucas Klein @ Gently Read Literature

Visit Tendril's main page for more information.

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Poetry Feature 6: Reginald Shepherd

2008-09-07T00:30:00.000-07:00

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Somewhere Off the Coast of Cyprus

Gods don’t get what they want, they stumble,
falter and halt at the frontiers of fulfillment, puzzled
that power isn’t always pleasure. They want
to know what know is (I have known, I knew, I know, I will
know, I will have known), instead learn only no. (Conjugate
this, decline every noun.) No happy ending to this sentence
for a god, sentenced to helpless
potency, all will and self-belief but somehow
substanceless, a notion of force that steals a form
and calls it body, steals a body and calls it mine, impervious
to touch. A litter of porous marble’s all that’s left,
paint-stripped but still stained, nothing that anyone
could use. How useless immortality becomes
in time, rubble retrieved from a receding river
in a year of drought. The goddess has no arms,
the god’s hand drawing back the bow
is missing, there’s no protection for them
anymore. Acid rain worms through their statuary
skin. Better to wait for the waters
to return, the mildewed monuments to finish
crumbling. Let the shipwrecked cargoes sleep
where they sank (myths buried in them
like birds that won’t be heard), gold leaf and lapis lazuli
dreaming of love, whatever love means to a god.

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Reginald Shepherd is the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, which he plans to use to pay off the medical bills for a year's worth of nonstop sickness. When not in the hospital in one capacity or another, he's the author most recently of Fata Morgana (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2008), and Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Innovative American Poetries (Counterpath Press, 2008). He lives, and takes long naps, in Pensacola, Florida with his partner Robert Philen, a cultural anthropologist and paragon of love, kindness, and generosity.

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Review Page: Lyric & Spirit by Hank Lazer

2008-09-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

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reviewed at Jacket 36 by Sue Walker

reviewed at The Alabama Writer's Forum by Alan May

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For more on Lyric & Spirit, please visit the book's main page here.

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The Omnidawn Poetry Contest Winner and Finalists Announced!

2008-09-02T23:08:00.000-07:00

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Marjorie Welish has selected a winner and five finalists for the Omnidawn Poetry Contest! We will have the official news posted in full detail on our Omnidawn web page soon. But we are letting our blog readers have the news immediately.

Congrats to the winner:

BARN BURNED, THEN
by Michelle Taransky

And these five finalists:

(INSIDE YOU) WITH NARRATIVES ON
by Ethan Saul Bull

VITREOUS HIDE
by Michael Tod Edgerton

SKINNY
by Carolyn Hembree

O BON
by Brandon Shimoda

RUMINANT [PSALMS]
by Jordan Windholz

We are enormously grateful to everyone who sent us their manuscripts. We will be sending out letters to those who sent us an SASE in the coming weeks. Just to note, everyone who entered the contest and requested a free Omnidawn book should have received it.

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News about the Omnidawn Team

2008-09-01T10:58:00.000-07:00

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from the post below, you can see that Canessa gallery is featuring work by Omnidawn's very own Cassandra (Cassie) Smith! Cassie recently read at Canessa, with Truong Tran and Geof Huth (the pic above is from Huth's blog). Here's what Huth had to say about her reading:

First up was Cassie Smith, who surprised me by actually sitting down at the chair. She then read from “A Myth in Two Parts,” which she said was an older manuscript. She read with what I thought was incredibly beauty, very quietly, with a soft voice (not just a quiet one), and well cadenced. The poem consisted primarily of imagistic fragments of various lengths, all of which together added up to an almost spooky whole. The poem was something like a shards of a shattered narrative, but the details were gentle, and hyper-focused. Words would blink at us and disappear.

“sound as if for falling”

Anaphora was one of her common tropes:

“We were born…”

“Or we or we or we or when or where”

She talked about a terrifying dream she had where a bird flew into a window just next to her and dropped dead, then explaining that within twenty-four hours of that dream that event happened to her in real life. She wondered what her real name, Cassandra, might mean given this story.

“Our birds in flight with these lines”

At a couple of points, she whispers to us that she doesn’t know how to read certain visual parts of her text, so she just describes them to us.

“the tilde our hero”

“or still and if for apples”

“extinction of weathers”

“wished there were heels for this kind of weather”

I’m not at all sure I have transcribed any of her lines correctly, but I know I want to read these words on the page, so I can really understand them, yet there is the understanding from hearing them aloud, through her voice, that I am glad to have experienced.

Cassie is currently Omnidawn's "Data Base Manager."

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the other news is about Omnidawn's "Blog Editor" (me!). my first book of poems has just been published by Tinfish Press. Check it out here.

and check out the blurbs:

The act of remembering is the art of recovery, and the
art of reclaiming a past that has never been hidden
only silenced is an act of responsibility. Craig Santos
Perez has arrived to give voice and meaning to the
unheralded narratives with his fierce debut from
unincorporated territory. At once a palimpsest and an
archive of "retrievable history," this book of poems is
sure to place Guam on both the literary and geographical
maps. This poet of consciousness, of communal memory,
and of political fury, has undone the callous erasure of
imperialism and empowered his people's folklore, stories
and journeys. Craig Santos Perez is a poet with a mission,
and with the skill and battle cry to do it right.

~Rigoberto González~

Perez's deft first book delivers a Guam outside the story
of the 'nation', reminding us who and what is 'from'
his island through the biography of touch, and the
intermingled military and colonialist histories brought to
the Chamorro people from far across the ocean.

~Robert Sullivan~

In Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory
we hear the movement of the Pacific Ocean; turning
each page we hear the oars of the people navigating
this ocean. This is a smart, formalistically rigorous, and
unapologetically political collection of poetry. Personal,
tender, and tough, Perez's poems, collages of text and
images offer a necessary critical, historical perspective on
American ownership, Western tourism, and simultaneous
erasure of the island of Guam. from unincorporated
territory rejects the blank space on American maps and in
American consciousness.

~Barbara Jane Reyes~

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Canessa Gallery: Poets on Paper

2008-08-28T11:23:00.001-07:00

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POETS ON PAPER

Works by 5 Poet-Artists
at the Canessa Gallery
September 1-October 1, 2008

Brent Cunningham
Cassandra Smith
Dan Fisher
Scott Inguito & Jared Stanley

Opening Night: Thursday, September 4
6:30pm-9:00pm
(during the "First Thursdays" SF Art Crawl)

Canessa Gallery
708 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94111
415.392.1768

Works Online:
B. Cunningham: http://brentcunningham.blogspot.com/
D. Fisher: http://fishfishtofferson.blogspot.com/
C. Smith: http://flickr.com/photos/violetedison/sets
J. Stanley: http://www.mrs-maybe.com
S. Inguito: http://www.scottinguito.com/

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The Blink Issue 2 & Ahsahta reminder

2008-08-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

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announcement from Amber di Pietra about THE BLINK, Issue 2:

Excerpt from the Editor's Letter (Alexis Brayton),

I’ve noticed this about photographs: that my own memories get mixed up in that shoebox. I do not know, for example, if I actually remember that sunny morning on the porch of 8 Orchard Avenue-- small and confident and all packed for summer camp-- or if the memory has taken on its own flat life, born of a Polaroid.

I took a picture of my 5 year-old niece not too long ago with my 35mm and she immediately said, “Let me see it!” I had to explain that the image was in the film, and we could not look at it until the picture was developed. She looked at me sideways, like I was messing with her. These days we can take and retake and take and retake a picture until everyone’s hair looks perfect. It is alarmingly easy to amass enormous numbers of digital images. I miss the weight of ‘real’ photos but mostly what I miss is the patience they required and the space that was held for mystery while they were being developed. We had to make choices about which pictures were worthy of albums with a finite number of pages and--for those who move around a lot-- which were worthy of carrying with us.

Read more about this new issue at Dominic Bruno's blog.

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Just a brief reminder that the Ahsahta Press subscription sale lasts only until September 1.

Seven books by exciting poets (Rachel Loden, Ben Doller, Stephanie Strickland, and more) for $75, no shipping! Read more about it at http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu, where you can also subscribe.

Subscription orders do more than bring you this great deal—they support Ahsahta Press and help us continue to publish poets and poetry of all kinds. Treat yourself & support the press too! Thanks so much. We couldn't do it without you.

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Omnidawn Blog is

2008-08-11T23:13:00.000-07:00

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on vacation until August 23. we'll miss you!

hope everyone enjoys the rest of the summer!

sincerely,
craig

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POETRY FEATURE 5: EDWARD SMALLFIELD

2008-08-02T21:58:00.000-07:00

autumn in New York

                              A blur
                           at this tempo
                              a memo
 often mingled                ignores
    with pain                the store-
      fronts     lit with     & rowing
  against the river           the going
    & coming                  a blur:
                               finger-
    prints                   on the keys
                             on the knees
   of the city               a lingering
                            I want to live
    it                         a sieve


after Niedecker 4


                                pillow
    slip                        so white
it hurts             the eyes.
              Nightgown                    blow
thru my bare                       snow
                -blanket                    I
    freight                            the night
                      —the marrow
              of           the hummer
            (hotly)               cared
 for                no objects here
water                           , summer
          (the hot)                 shore
Good-bye       to lilacs        by the door

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Edward Smallfield is the author of The Pleasures of C and the coauthor of One Hundred Famous View of Edo, a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson. His poems have appeared in alice blue, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Parthenon West Review, 26, and a number of other magazines. He lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.

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news from New American Writing and Ahsahta Press

2008-07-30T21:59:00.000-07:00

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speaking of great deals, check out the new New American Writing, edited by Paul Hoover & Maxine Chernoff:

New American Writing 26 (2008) is now available. The issue has an Enrique Chagoya cover, attached, and work by sixty poets: Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Sylvia Legris, Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack, Norma Cole, John Kinsella, Gillian Conoley, Clayton Eshleman, Nathaniel Tarn, Claudia Keelan, Donald Revell, Karen Volkman, John Tranter, Ron Padgett, Bill Berkson, Noah Eli Gordon, Liz Waldner, Martine Bellen, Ed Smallfield, Laura Kasischke, Joseph Lease, John Gallaher, Craig Santos Perez, Noelle Kocot, Donna de la Perriere, Kismet Al-Hussaini, Jordan Davis, Mark DuCharme, Molly Albracht, Stephen Vincent, Sarah Gridley, G.C. Waldrep and many others.

(notice the name i accidentally bolded!)

$15 for one issue or $36 for a 3-year subscription. Available from NAW, 369 Molino Avenue, Mill Valley CA 94941, and at better bookstores. If you wish to order copies or obtain a subscription using your credit card, go to their website.

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Now available from Ahsahta Press!

*Subscriptions to our new season of books!

*A $125 value for only $75—about $10 each.*

Ahsahta Press is publishing an unprecedented seven new books of poetry in our 2008–2009 season. Beginning in September, we'll bring out two collections by poets at the peak of their powers: Stephanie Strickland, whose masterful Zone : Zero is accompanied by an interactive CD, and Charles O. Hartman, whose New & Selected Poems brings together three decades of jazzy innovation. In January, Kathleen Jesme's new book The Plum-Stone Game gives us work by a poet D.A. Powell calls "refreshingly unafraid of the sensual powers of poetry." Also in January, we'll publish our 2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize–winning book, the whole Marie by Barbara Maloutas, whose work was chosen from 740 submissions by C.D. Wright. Subscribers will receive Ben Doller's FAQ: in March—a follow-up to his Walt Whitman Award–winning first book—as well as first-time author Carrie Olivia Adams' filmic Intervening Absence. At season's end in May we publish Rachel Loden's Dick of the
Dead, in which Richard Nixon does his tragicomedic best to bring the world to rights.

If you're a poetry reader, you can ask your bookstore to carry these books as they come out—but why not place a subscription order with us and find them in your mailbox as soon as they're published? We'll give you an amazing discount (40%) *and pick up the shipping*—and you'll get everything we publish in our 2008–2009 season as they appear in September, January, March, and May.

This year's subscription will bring you our entire season's books ($125 if purchased separately) for only $75, including shipping, if you order before September 1, 2008. (Of course, you can order throughout the year, though our subscription price rises to $95 on September 1, 2008—still a great deal at about 25% off. We'll ship already published books as soon as we receive your order.) Subscribing early helps the press function—so thanks!

Ahsahta Press poetry consistently surprises, delights, challenges, and stimulates the reader. Don't miss any of it.

*2009 Subscription Season — $75.00 before September 2008*

Stephanie Strickland, *Zone : Zero* (with CD); Charles O. Hartman, *New & Selected Poems*; Kathleen Jesme, *The Plum-Stone Game*; Barbara Maloutas,* the whole Marie,* winner of the 2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by C.D. Wright; Ben Doller,* FAQ:*; Carrie Olivia Adams, *Intervening Absence*; Rachel Loden, *Dick of the Dead*

*As a bonus for ordering early, select a book from our backlist. We'll send it to you free with your subscription!*

Subscribe today!

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pre-order Omnidawn Fall Books: Special Discount!

2008-07-28T00:38:00.000-07:00

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Our two upcoming fall titles can be pre-ordered for amazing discounts.

But!! there's more news!

If you pre-order both of our new fall titles together, you can have them for the even better discount of 51%. Only $19.95 to have both books!! Free shipping in the USA.

All discounts end on August 1, 2008.

Books will ship mid to late September 2008.

Please visit either book's web page to access these special offers:

www.omnidawn.com/saga-circus

www.omnidawn.com/holderlin

Hejinian, Lyn

Saga/Circus

144 pages (6 x 9 paper)

ISBN: 9781890650346
Normally $15.95

Special intro price, until 8/1/08: $9.95

www.omnidawn.com/saga-circus

Hölderlin, Friedrich
translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover
Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin
496 pages (6 x 9 paper)
ISBN: 9781890650353
Normally $24.95

Special intro price, until 8/1/08: $14.95

www.omnidawn.com/holderlin

POETRY FEATURE 4: LIZ WALDNER

2008-07-20T23:24:00.000-07:00

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Lacustrine and Midrash

This is what kind of sweet life I have had:

Someone wrote to me:

what a shame it is your love of life
should be pulled into its best channels by a lady radio

and I wrote it down
and I found it long enough later
that I have no idea who or when or why.
I did love that lady radio.

Also:

Someone sang to me:

up in an airplane
smoking her sweet cigarette
she went way up in an airplane

Then I read, years later, this very thing
in a Walker Percy novel
knew someone else had heard it sung
knew this was marvelous for I was so lone, so solitary
that whatever I heard was rendered
solitary too. Or so I thought but Oh

like Robinson Crusoe, I was not alone.

Now call upon my soul within the house,
go on, please.

I will answer, I am so happy.
Whereas before I knew this had all been so sweet

I would merely have hoped you would love me.

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The ______ Stripped Bare

1. The company of heaven would be my company were it not for
this set of clothes.
2. The fiddle player looked in my eyes the whole way I walked up
to him.
3. The potter was unconcerned and hastened to show me her new
and unspeakable work.
4. Traded miracles over a fake bird’s eye maple tabletop with a
woman I’d seen before.
5. Outside the low blue light silvered the snowy mountain tops and
the unsettled surface of the sea.
6. Somehow the beach at Fort Worden Park eluded me today.
7. Somehow this feeling that scares me found me.
8. “Elvers” an unlikely name for something I might ever eat.
9. If they went to see the movie they never loved the book.
10. ‘Gilthoniel a Elbereth!’ echoes up loved from memory.
11. Terry Gilchrist sunburnt her nose repeatedly in 1980 Santa Fe.
12. All week New Mexico has reasserted itself, even before the sun
above.
13. It is harder to wear out her clothing than one might wish.

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Liz Waldner's most recent poetry collection is Trust, due out from Cleveland State University Poetry Center in Spring 09. Poems current or forthcoming in New American Writing, Poetry, The Journal, Interim, The New Yorker, and Weber.

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REVIEW PAGE: On Spec by Tyrone Williams

2008-07-14T00:21:00.000-07:00

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Review by Steven Lansky at City Beat (also includes a brief interview).

Review by J. Peter Moore at Arch Journal

For more on On Spec, visit the book's main page at the Omnidawn website.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS!

2008-07-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

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FOR THOSE IN THE DALLAS, TX AREA

Prick of the Spindle, an online journal of the literary arts, hosts its first poetry/short fiction reading in Dallas, TX Saturday, July 12 at 1 p.m. It's not too late to sign up as a guest reader! Contact Cynthia Reeser at pseditor@prickofthespindle.com or at (337)378-9800 to sign up or
for more information.

The event takes place at Barnes and Noble, 616 Preston Royal (in the Preston Royal Shopping Center), Dallas, Texas. Come show your support for literary arts in the south by attending the event, which is free and open to the public. Join Editor-in-Chief Cynthia Reeser and Fiction Editor Erin McKnight as they read selections from their own work.

Visit Prick of the Spindle here. Hope to see you at the open mic!

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Dear Friends and Followers of Kelsey Street Press,

A note to let you know that you can now order your favorite Kelsey Street Press titles on-line at our site. and always with FREE shipping!

--- Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim available for you to purchase on-line!

--- Finally, Under Flag by Myung Mi Kim is now back in print!!!

--- A fabulous recording of Bhanu Kapil reading from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers is now posted on our site here.

--- Kelsey Street Press has a new blog curated by KSP member Amber Di Pietra.

We invite you to participate in our Vertical Interrogation project. Please send us any of your answers to any one of Bhanu Kapil's Vertical queries. Jean Valentine's response is posted here at our blog site here.

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POETRY FEATURE 3: BRENDA IIJIMA

2008-07-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

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SHORN OF ITS HABITAT

as if a final descent                                          HABITUATION RABBIT

the primeval swamp

the common herd

the crowded giant suns                                    HOVERS THE NORM

the many questions posed

the many species written off

the most helpful people

in fact, the several individuals

in fact, their sense of loss                                              ENTREAT TREATY

TREATMENT            SUCKER            QUARREL           THESE CLAWS

in fact, there’s no way to measure

in fact, an international team

in fact, cremation, autopsy reports

in fact, temporalities

in fact, something to do with microeconomics        SUCK UP TO THE FACTS

in fact, the winning lottery ticket

in fact, regurgitation paragons

JUGULAR BONE BREAK                          HETEROTROPIC OSSIFICATION

bipedal apes

with opposable thumbs

without notice

the way tires squeal                         THE ANIMAL SHE FELL OUT OF A TREE

the way the day ends on the trading floor

the way you handle that device

the way advice is given                               WAS MOTHER

because where i live

where they live                          WAS MY MOTHER

where they live—                                SWARM AND FESTER

eternity of continuation

a flea, a parasite, a rat, a worm

a tick, a slug, a mouse                                    FEEDING BY DAY

easter bunny numb

WHITE CHOCOLATE MOCHA ROYALE BITTER SWEET DARK

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Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus, 2007) and Around Sea (O Books, 2004). Her book, If Not Metamorphic was runner up for the Sawtooth Prize and will be published by Ahsahta Press. Chapbooks include Rabbit Lesson (forthcoming from Fewer & Further Press), Color and Its Antecedents (Yen Agat, 2004), Early Linoleum (Furniture Press, 2004), Spacious (Other Publications, 2003), Audible Bio (Longhouse, 2003), In a Glass Box (Pressed Wafer, 2002) and several other artist's books. She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Together with Evelyn Reilly she is editing a collection of essays by poets concerning poetry and ecological ethics titled )((eco(lang)(uage(reader). She is the art editor at Boog City as well as a visual artist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she designs and constructs homeopathic gardens.

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Video Feature 2: Donald Revell plus A NEW CONTEST!

2008-06-29T22:23:00.000-07:00

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Embedded is a 7-minute video of Donald Revell reading from his translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell. This reading (9/20/07), hosted by Steve Dickison and the San Francisco State Poetry Center in conjunction with Omnidawn, was held at the Unitarian Church on Franklin St in San Francisco, CA. Other readers that night were Christopher Arigo, Bin Ramke, and Laura Moriarty (link to her video here). (We plan to have Video Features of Bin Ramke and Christopher Arigo, as well as other wonderful writers in coming weeks.)

For more information about Don's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, published by Omnidawn, click this link.

Just to let you know, Don's new translation of Rimbaud's The Illumninations will be published by Omnidawn in June of 2009.

For more information on Donald Revell's book, Invisible Green: Selected Prose, published by Omnidawn, click this link.

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Congrats to Gabriel Winslow-Yost and Miranda Siemienowicz, winners of the previous Omnidawn Blog contest! Their prize: FREE OMNIDAWN BOOKS OF THEIR CHOICE!!!!

You're probably asking, "when is the next OMNIDAWN BLOG CONTEST?"
The answer: RIGHT NOW!!!!

The first person who tells me what Donald says is "the right thing to say about Republicans" (you have to listen to the reading to find out). After someone leaves a comment with the correct answer, then i will give a prize to the person who comes up with the funniest alternative "bumpersticker."

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POETRY FEATURE 2: NICK MOUDRY

2008-06-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

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Still-life

I think love is not this flower.
You sing at night through our teeth.
Our mouths do not move. If I want
a pumpkin, I will have a pumpkin.

It is raining. You are not wet
because you are inside. Looking up
you notice there is no
ceiling, only poems about ceilings.

If I want a pumpkin, I will
have a mirror to reflect all pumpkins.
It is raining inside the poem.

The poet has no control over this.
The bamboo withers. The poet
has no control over that either.

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Nick Moudry wrote this poem in the fall of 2002. He was in graduate school at the time and lived with the poet Eric Baus in an old house in Northampton, MA. Eric went to Whole Foods every day and bought lots of fresh produce, half of which would rot in a bowl on the kitchen table. Nick did much of his writing at the same kitchen table. He wrote several poems about rotting food that year. Now Nick lives in Philadelphia and works at Temple University. He is contractually obligated to state that he received a 2008 literature fellowship fromthe Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

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READING TONIGHT: AARON SHURIN in BERKELEY

2008-06-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

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Come to Moe's Bookstore in Berkeley tonight at 7:30 to celebrate the release of Aaron Shurin's new book KING OF SHADOWS, just out from City Lights.

From the City Lights Book Page:

King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays chronicling the author's gay life and life as a poet in San Francisco since the 1960s. In the title essay, Shurin describes his coming into poetry and gay identity via a high-school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Other essays tell of his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and the influence of the sexual politics of the '70s. In “The Bars of Heaven and Hell,” we are given a personal history of venturing into gay bars in pre-Stonewall San Francisco. Written in a lyrical, literary, yet highly personal style, Shurin’s intelligent and insightful essays circle in and around issues of identity and sensibility, and how our interior and public lives are shaped by them.

From the Moe's Events Page:

Aaron Shurin is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, including the poetry collections Involuntary Lyrics (Omnidawn, 2005), The Paradise of Forms (Talisman House, 1999), a Publishers Weekly Best Book, and the prose collection, Unbound: A Book of AIDS (Sun & Moon, 1997). His work has appeared in over twenty national and international anthologies, most recently Nuova Poesia Americana Contemporana (Italy: Oscar Mondadori, 2006). Shurin's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. He is Associate Professor and Director of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

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READING TONIGHT!

2008-06-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

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The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand
Sunday the 15th of June in the year Two
Thousand Eight
www.newyipes.blogspot.com

Brent Cunningham and Gina Myers

LIVE! // 6:30PM

21 Grand
416 25th
St
Oakland CA 94612

$3--$infinity sliding scale

GINA MYERS
currently lives in Saginaw, Michigan where she makes books for Lame House Press and co-edits the tiny with Gabriella Torres. Her new chapbook Behind the R is forthcoming from ypolita press later this year. Recent poems have appeared in Coconut and Cultural Society.

BRENT CUNNINGHAM is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his fiancée and new daughter. His first book of poetry, Bird & Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. After receiving his MA in English from SUNY Buffalo in 1998, he began working for Small Press Distribution (SPD) in Berkeley, the nation's only not-for-profit distributor of literary books. He currently holds the position of Operations director. A board member of Small Press Traffic since 2001, he was a founding curator of SPT's "Poets Theater Jamboree," an annual ritual of amateur experimental theater. In 2005 he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. In 2008, he became the Assistant Program Coordinator for the Artifact Reading Series (artifactsf.org), which recently relocated from San Francisco to the Oakland Art Gallery in downtown Oakland.

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POETRY FEATURE 1: GILLIAN CONOLEY

2008-06-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

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Welcome to Omnidawn Blog's first Poetry Feature! Rather than be a forum for only Omnidawn authors, we see this as an opportunity to highlight the work of other writers we admire too.

This week you will find work featured by the poet Gillian Conoley.

In coming weeks you will find work by Karen Garthe, Brenda Iijima, Rob Schlegel, Ed Smallfield, Liz Waldner, and that's just the start! We plan to feature new poetry by a different writer every week or two.

Feel free to comment.

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(click images to enlarge)

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Gillian Conoley is the author of five collections of poetry: Profane Halo; Lovers in the Used World; Tall Stranger, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award; Beckon, and Some Gangster Pain, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer Award. Her work has been anthologized widely, most recently in Norton's American Hybrid, Counterpath's Postmodern Lyricisms, Mondadori's Nuova Poesia Americana (Italian), and Best American Poetry. A recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as several Pushcart Prizes, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt. Barbara Guest said of her work, "Out of the old beliefs a new language speaks. We said this yesterday, and today the words are stronger. I am taken by surprise by the wit and jeopardy, by the way an ending is avoided on the surface of the book's meaning. I am excited by the triumph of this writing." Rain Taxi says of her poetry: "All the pleasures and dangers of the work achieve a brilliant suspension, like particles of dust in airŠ a time-stopping grace in quantum improvisations of form." Conoley has taught as a Visiting Poet at the University of Iowa Writers'Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College and Tulane University. She makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Current projects include a new manuscript called The Plot Genie, from which these erasures are taken, and translations of Henri Michaux.

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OMNIDAWN BLOG LIVES!!!!

2008-06-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

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my apologies for the long delay, but the Omnidawn Blog is back and we have some exciting things planned for this summer!!! hope you will visit often :)

first, congrats to the winners of the previous contest: clockworkquill for correct answers and gabe w-y for funny answers! please email me: cperez [at] omnidawn [dot] com to claim your prizes!!!

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NEW LINK: check out POTLATCH POETRY. I'm already addicted.

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NEWS FROM BURNING DECK PRESS:

1. LINGOS I-IX by Ulf Stolterfoht (trans. R. Waldrop) has received
the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

2. Now ready: vol. 52 of  “BURNING DECK POETRY BOOKS”

Heather C. Akerberg
DWELLING
Poetry, 64 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN13: 978-1-886224-89-6, original paperback $14
ISBN13: 978-1-886224-90-2, limited signed edition $20
Publication date: May 15, 2008

The poems of DWELLING investigate, musically and with “bended”
syntax, the issue of form—in body, home, and poem. They ask questions
like: What makes a space a home? Is it shape and architectural
elements, the experiences and interactions that transpire there, the
objects contained in, or the language ascribed to it? Can one
separate recollections from the physical spaces in which they
occurred? Is a “home” just a backdrop for events or is it another
body, inside which is found the tangible and intangible stuff of
self, a body to be read like a text?

Born and raised in the Midwest, Heather C. Akerberg resides in Omaha,
Neb. She has taught English Composition, Creative Writing and
Bookmaking, as well as Cognitive Skills. Heather is a freelance
writer and sustainable agriculture enthusiast. She has an M.F.A. in
Creative Writing from Brown University and a B.A from the Jack
Kerouac School at Naropa University. Her poetry has appeared in
Bombay Gin, Aufgabe, untitled and The Nebraska Review. Dwelling is
her first book.

Copies are available from:
Small Press Distribution, 1-800/869-7553 or www.spdbooks.org
In Europe: www.hpress.no

contest winners & part 2 of the HANK LAZER TOC CONTEST!!!

2008-04-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

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thanks for all those who played our week-long Hank Lazer TOC contest.

first, we are happy to announce that JOSEPH MASSEY guessed all three blanks correctly 1) The Lyric VALUABLES 2) Lyricism of the SWERVE and 3) John Taggart's PASTORELLES, so he gets 3 Omnidawn books of his choice.

for the radical guesses, we are giving MATT a prize for his answer: "Nice work if you can get it: john taggart's HIGH PAID, SECRET GOVERNMENT JOB." Matt wins an Omnidawn book of his choice.

and finally, we chose DEREK's answer: "elephant" for the final winner. He also wins any Omnibook of his choice.

LOTS OF PRIZES. these crazy people at Omnidawn must really love its blog readers!!!

to claim your prize, please email me: cperez [at] omnidawn [dot] com

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YES, i did mention a second contest. rules are the same. correct answers get books, funny answers get books. this will be up till the end of april. SO GOOD LUCK AND HAVE FUN!

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PART TWO of the Table of Contents of Hank Lazer's new Omnidawn book Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008

Spirit

Returns: Innovative Poetry and Questions of “Spirit” 209

Sacred Forgery and the Grounds of Poetic Archaeology:
Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets 265

The Art and Architecture of Holding Open:
The Radical ____1_____ of Architectural Body 281

Meeting in the Book: Reading Edmond Jabes through
Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lavish ____2____ 297

Poetry & Myth: The Scene of Writing, Thinking As Such 307

Force, Vector, Pressure: The Phenomena of that
Relationship (An Interview with Chris Mansel) 321

Reflections on The Wisdom Anthology
of North American Buddhist Poetry 329

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Lyric & Spirit: Hank Lazer & a CONTEST!!!!

2008-04-12T23:58:00.000-07:00

These pics of Hank Lazer are from the Poetry Flash Reading Series, featuring Hank and Mark Salerno, at the new Cody's in Berkeley, which took place on April 5. Mark Salerno:

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Hank has a new book out from Omnidawn titled Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008

BIO:

Hank Lazer is both a critic and a poet. His brand new book from Omnidawn Publishing, Lyric and Spirit: Selected Essays, shows new ways of writing spirituality and the lyric, drawing on Language poetry, Buddhist verse, the jazz of Monk and Coltrane, Heidegger, Derrida, and much more. Lazer is also the author of twelve books of poetry perhaps unique in their developmental track from the tradition of William Carlos Williams on into a Language-based tradition. His two most recent books of poetry are The New Spirit and Elegies & Vacations. With Charles Bernstein, Hank Lazer edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama.

A little about the reading series, hosted by Richard Silberg (who I just met yesterday -a really cool guy):

"From 1982-2006, Poetry Flash curated one of the West Coast's most exciting, inclusive, and longest running reading series at Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, a leading, historically significant, independent bookstore. (The series began in the late sixties/early seventies.) That store closed on July 10, 2006. However, the Poetry Flash reading series continues, alive and well. Over one-hundred writers---primarily poets---continue to be introduced each year by our host, Poetry Flash Associate Editor Richard Silberg in various locations listed below. Now, as in the past, our series is open to diverse poetics, while providing a forum for poetry's best." (quoted from the poetry flash reading series website)

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I was going to post a copy of the Table of Contents of Hank's new book to give you a sense of the essays, but instead i think i'll have a little 2-part contest. first, i will post half of the table of contents and leave a few words omitted. to win the contest, you have to guess one of the missing words. the first to guess correctly wins. NOT ONLY THAT, we will give prizes to the FUNNIEST responses! so have fun! the prize: any OMNIDAWN book of your choosing!!!! the contest will be open for a week.

Contents

Introduction 21

Lyric

The Lyric ___1___: Soundings, Questions, & Examples 29

“Vatic Scat”: Jazz and the Poetry of Robert Creeley
and Nathaniel Mackey 83

Lyricism of the ___2___: The Poetry of Rae Armantrout 95

The Early 1950s and the Laboratory of the Short Line 129

Nice Work If You Can Get It: John Taggart’s ___3___ 159

Q & A Poetics 171

Thinking/Singing and the Metaphysics of Sound 185

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OMNI-NEWS!!!

2008-04-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

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POETRY READING THIS WEEKEND!

Saturday, April 5, 7pm: Poetry Flash presents

Hank Lazer (Lyric & Spirit, Omnidawn 2008)
and Mark Salerno (Odalisique)

at **New Cody's Location**

CODY's BOOKS, 2201 Shattuck Avenue,
corner of Allston Way, downtown Berkeley
Across the street from Berkeley BART,
near parking garages.

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POETRY READING TODAY!!!!

Reading @ Pegasus Books
Friday, April 4
7:30 pm

Poet/filmmaker/destroyer of dictionaries Chris Vitiello, in a rare west coast
appearance, will read from his new book Irresponsibility (just out from Ahsahta
Press) and provoke and alarm in a multitude of ways.

Writer/landscape-architect-in-training Mary Burger will read poems and essays from
the forthcoming book A Partial Handbook for Navigators (from Interbirth Books), and
attempt to figure out where she is.

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NEW PUBLICATION FROM TRANSMISSION PRESS:
from editor, Logan Ryan Smith:

DOROTHEA LASKY'S, TOURMALINE-- a collection of brilliant,
vibrant, honest, imaginative, and send-yr-ass-into-orbit kinda poems.

for more fun stuff, including very candid pictures of TOURMALINE hanging out
with the reclusive Pink Panther.

As always, trades are welcome, and if ye be too broke all you need to do is
tell me you have (or will have) voted for Obama when you had yr chance, and
you'll get yrself a free copy, lickity split. Seriously. Try me.

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EXCITING NEWS FROM BURNING DECK:

Catherine Imbriglio's book,

PARTS OF THE MASS (Burning Deck 2007),

has received the Norma Farber 1st Book Award of the Poetry Society of
America. It was selected by Thylias Moss.

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OMNIDAWN BOOKS RECEIVE PRAISE:

Our book IN A TOWN CALLED MUNDOMUERTO is on the SFSITE as one of
their top 10 Editors Choice List.

&

Tendril, by Bin Ramke (Omnidawn, 2007)
recommended by Reginald Shepherd

Ramke's Tendril is a book of lyric meditations and intellectual musings that mixes personal memory with social and cultural history in a mesh of intertextuality that demonstrates how poems come out of poems and writing comes out of writing, but also out of passion and emotional necessity. This web of literary, scientific, and historical discourses both sustains the voice and is something against which the voice struggles to be heard. Ramke also demonstrates a gift for sustaining his meditations through extended formal, thematic,
intellectual, and musical arcs. - RS

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First Annual Poetry Contest

2008-03-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

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The 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize is Omnidawn Publishing's first annual contest for a first or second full-length collection of poems by a poet writing in English. The contest will be judged by Marjorie Welish, with a cash prize of $2,000 and Fall 2009 publication by Omnidawn Publishing. Manuscripts will remain anonymous until a winner is selected.

Please visit us at: http://www.omnidawn.com/contest.htm

More contest details:

The $25 entry fee entitles entrants to one free Omnidawn title of
their choice, if they enclose SASE with postage. (See our web page
for full list of titles, and see poetry guidelines checklist for SASE
postage).

Book Production, Distribution, Advertising, and Complimentary Copies. The prize winning book will be produced, distributed, and advertised to Omnidawn standards and will also meet the Green Press Initiative standards and have the Green Press Initiative statement on the copyright page. The book will be printed using the same archival quality acid-free paper and full four-color cover used for other Omnidawn books. As with other Omnidawn books, we will encourage the winning poet to participate in the design of the book, including choice of typefaces, cover colors and artwork, with all stages subject to the approval of the winning poet. The book will be distributed worldwide by Omnidawn's distributor, Independent Publishers Group, and will be advertised along with other Omnidawn books in Poets & Writers Magazine, American Poetry Review, American Book Review, Rain Taxi, and other publications. All costs, including production, distribution, and advertising will be fully paid for by Omnidawn. In addition to the $2,000 cash prize, the winning poet will also receive 100 copies of the book free of charge.

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Last AWP photos & A Contest

2008-03-17T21:39:00.001-07:00

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Farewell AWP! See you all at the Omnidawn table next year!

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CONTEST: the first person to name ALL 3 poets in this photo will receive any Omnidawn poetry book of your choice.

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EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENTS

2008-03-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

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1.  From Letterpress to Hypertext--KELSEY ST PRESS
on the Web!

In 2004, Kelsey St. Press celebrated its 30th  anniversary. Now,
just four years later, we are excited to say that we are growing
and changing in many ways. What started in 1974 with an old
letterpress dressed in leopard print in Patricia Dienstfrey's
basement has extended its arc through pixels and html. With much
thanks to Jerrold Shiroma, who redesigned our web site, we
can offer online ordering for our readers for the first time.
Please try out this new feature and if you don't already have
it, add Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim (2007) to your
shopping cart!

The internet has become a vital part of today's small press
world and as a long time member of the publishing community,
KSP is thrilled to begin this blog and have a voice in this
forum. Like any good blog, the goal is to keep you up-to-date
on projects, readings and other news related to our authors,
artists and friends in innovative writing. But we also hope
to bring you special features-not only interviews with our
authors and artists but by newer writers, book artists and
designers. Just as with works like Symbiosis and our most
recent, Concordance, we welcome collaboration and we are eager
to see where that can go in the more impromptu and open space
of the blog.

In the next year or two, I hope to revisit and blog about
the KSP oeuvre from start to finish, to better familiarize
myself, as a new member with our history, but also to
revitalize dialogue around these books. This kind of re-imagining
is happening on many levels at KSP. Other members are exploring
possibilities for e-books, re-issuing out-of-print works, and,
any moment now, you will be able to visit our Listen page and
hear readings and other audio from KSP writers. We have been
able to make these recording thanks to Ross Craig's know-how
and generous donation of studio space. Stay tuned for recordings
from Bhanu Kapil, Kathleen Fraser, Laynie Brown, Susan Gevirtz
and more!

And please email me with your questions, comments, or ideas
about blog features, interviews, guest writers, etc. Also,
don't forget to send me links to your personal blog or press
so I can be sure to add them to the side bar. Finally, be sure
to join our brand new e-mail list. Click on the About page 
to sign up.

[or link to them from our sidebar]

2. Press Release, Newcomer Can't Swim

Newcomer Can't Swim, Renee Gladman. Kelsey St. Press, 2007.

Written as seven loosely connected pieces, Renee Gladman's
Newcomer Can't Swim mixes poetry with prose to recreate life
for the twenty-first century flaneur in urban America, where,
amid a confusion of aims, identities, and miscommunication
devices, being attuned to different frequencies also means
being lost. In this contemporary world of signs that crisscross
a global culture, how can one maintain a firm existence and
make human connections? Gladman posits a fluid self and parallel
existence: "The / body moves away from living, from the flesh
and bone of life, / and becomes regions. I take on / water.
I look outward." In languages of elegy and splintered
consciousness, Newcomer holds all frequencies together,
keeping the contradiction of a life that animates the "I" of
this book at the same time that it goes on without her.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.

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EXCITING EVENT FEATURING 32 POEMS MAGAZINE:

32 Poems is having a reading at The Writer's Center in
Bethesda. We're going to mix poetry with indie rock music
from a band named The Caribbean and see if we can blow
the roof off. (Shhhh, don't tell Sunil, the director,
I said that, okay?)

Want to know the cost?  Zero dollars.

Oh, guess what? You can become a 32 Poems "fan" on Facebook
to follow who we're publishing, where poems from the magazine
are appearing (Best American Poetry 2008!)
and see photos of events we hold. CLICK HERE.

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The Sound of Words: A Scheme to Rock the Writers Center
Featuring: The Caribbean (a rock band) and 32 Poems Magazine
(a poetry magazine)
DATE: Friday, May 9
TIME: 8 PM
LOCATION: The Writer's Center,
4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815

DESCRIPTION

32 Poems Magazine, The Caribbean (an indie rock band), and
the Writer's Center join together to bring you outstanding
poetry from Sandra Beasley and Bernadette Geyer
and songs from The Caribbean.

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EXCITING NEWS FROM BURNING DECK:

2 new Burning Deck titles are available from:
Small Press Distribution, or orders@spdbooks.org
In Europe: H Press

1. vol. 51 of the “BURNING DECK POETRY BOOKS”:

CYRUS CONSOLE
Brief Under Water
Poetry, 64 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN13: 978-1-886224-87-2, original paperback $14
ISBN13: 978-1-886224-88-9, limited signed edition $20
Publication date: March 15, 2008

Brief Under Water is a sequence of 55 short passages that uses prose
narrative as a design element in a larger lyric structure. The title
refers to Kafka’s 1919 Brief an den Vater, reflecting a struggle with
the notion of literary inheritance. So does Console’s sentence,
refined nearly to the point of anachronism, that owes a great deal to
Melville and to Garnett’s translations of  Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and
Turgenev.

The book was written while the author supported himself as a
metalworker, housepainter, and waiter. The clashing of these
professional spheres contributed to the struggle outlined above. The
binary numbering (1, 10, 11, 100, 101…) is meant to express his sense
of movement-in-place.

“[The] manuscript is terrific….The sensory detail of the writing, not
surrealistic, not plot-oriented, is not even with the sense of
'leading anywhere' but accumulating both detail and expansion at
once, opening a floating, fascinating, sometimes apparently violent
yet detached terrain, as if not the author's psyche…but the world
itself… seen from at once extreme and mundane edges.”—Leslie Scalapino


2. volume 20 of SERIE D’ECRITURE:

Caroline Dubois
You Are the Business
translated from the French by Cole Swensen
Poetry, 104 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN 978-1-886224-86-5 original paperback $14
Publication date: March 15, 2008

C’est toi le business uses an eerie cadence to examine the
construction of identity in a media-saturated world. Focusing on
icons of cult film from Simone Simon to Blade Runner, she develops a
haunting collage of overlay and echo, populated by unsettling twins
(a “sister,” a clone, a verbal stutter), that evokes the doubles with
which a society based on representation invests us.
In “talala” for instance, the terms of identity taken from the
film Blade Runner (human being vs. “fake” or “android”) are used to
raise questions of authorship: do phrases come to us or do we make
them, and if they come to us, then from where?
Always conscious of the role that language plays in the
mediation between self and media, the book is poetry in its
linguistic freedom, film criticism in its thematic aspects, prose in
its physical shape. But it always pushes language toward new sensual
territory.

Caroline Dubois lives in Paris and teaches at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in Rueil-Malmaison. She has translated American poets like
Norma Cole and Deborah Richards. C'est toi le business is her most
recent book (2005). Earlier books include Je veux être physique [I
want to be physical; P.O.L., 1999], Arrête maintenant [Stop now;
Editions de l’Attente, 2001] and Malécot [Ed. contrat maint, 2003].
Cole Swensen’s recent books include The Book of a Hundred
Hands (2005), The Glass Age (2007), Noon  Try, Oh, and Such Rich
Hour. She has translated Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Pascalle
Monnier, Jean Frémon and others. Both her poetry and her translations
have won many prizes.

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OMNIDAWN AUTHOR EVENTS

2008-02-26T22:27:00.000-08:00

Please join us for these three author events:

Saturday, March 8, 2008: WRITERS WITH DRINKS

Fan Wu (February Flowers)
Justin Courter (Skunk)
Declan McCullagh (News.com, Politech)

At The Make-Out Room 3225 22nd. St.,
San Francisco CA,
from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 7 PM.
$3-$5 sliding scale, All proceeds benefit
Other Magazine.
Charlie Anders MCs.

see web for announcements about this reading series

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Monday, March 10, 7:30 pm: Omnidawn Press Night
at Moe's

Justin Courter
Mary Mackey
Laura Moriarty

Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley (510) 849-2087
Events begin at 7:30

see web for announcements about this reading series


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Sunday, April 5, 7pm: Poetry Flash presents

Hank Lazer (Lyric & Spirit, Omnidawn 2008)
and Mark Salerno (Odalisique)

at **New Cody's Location**

CODY's BOOKS, 2201 Shattuck Avenue,
corner of Allston Way, downtown Berkeley
Across the street from Berkeley BART,
near parking garages.

See web for announcements about this reading series


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AWP Conspiracy Theory

2008-02-25T15:50:00.000-08:00

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click here to see what all the conspiracy talk is about. feel free to comment as well.

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Ken and Rusty asked me to post their thanks to everyone who visited the Omnidawn table, and to everyone who came and enjoyed hearing the authors at the Omnidawn reception.

Rusty writes: "It's a highlight of the year for us -- to be able to meet some of the people who read our books, and talk to them about what interests them and excites them. We're very grateful to everyone who reads our titles. And this year, we want to also thank the wonderful people who worked with us behind the tables."

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also, CONGRATS to REB LIVINGSTON who won the game in this post. She will receive a free copy of any Omnidawn Book (she recently chose Rosmarie Waldrop's Love, Like Pronouns. An excellent choice).

stay tuned for more giveaways.

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PICS from the Omnidawn Reception at AWP

2008-02-24T11:55:00.000-08:00

AWP PICS: THE TABLE

2008-02-19T22:20:00.000-08:00

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far & away, omnidawn had the best table and the one of the best locations at the book fair. LOOK AT ALL THE PEOPLE:

speaking of people, let's play a little game. if you can guess the identity of the person next to rusty, i will send you a prize:

and, if you can identity the person in the scarf, i will also send you a prize.

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Omnidawn at AWP: Before the Madness

2008-02-18T20:41:00.000-08:00

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Stay tuned, all week I'll be posting pictures from AWP. These first two were taken during construction of the Omnidawn table, before the crazy rush:

ken & rusty deciding where to put the lights.

ken showing off expensive chocolate lures.

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