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NaPoMo16: Brenda Hillman on Jameel Din’s “The Life Is Preserved”

by tsjohnson • April 19, 2016

When asked about her favorite poems, Brenda Hillman replied with “The Life is Preserved,” by Jameel Din, from the 1987 California Poets in the Schools statewide anthology, Thread Winding in the Loom.

I let the request slide for a while through neurotic indecision, then thought about poems I’ve enjoyed for a long time. One of the poems I’ve had on my wall for several decades was written by a child, Jameel Din, who was a student at Lakeshore School in San Francisco in the 1980s. I came across the poem in a Poets-in-the-Schools publication; Jameel’s teacher at the time was Grace Grafton. I wrote asking Grace for more information about the poem and she responded in an email: “Jameel’s poem was published in the 1987 California Poets in the Schools statewide anthology, Thread Winding in the Loom… each year CPITS publishes [the] anthology which features the best student poems, some poet-teacher poems and essays on teaching poetry by a few poet-teachers…” She noted that for almost 30 years she was active as a California Poets in the Schools poet-teacher, adding that she taught 5–15 poetry sessions in all grades 1–5. Because of the anthology, Grace wrote, “every kid I worked with had a poem ‘published’…Jameel was in fifth grade when ‘The Life is Preserved’ was published, about 10 years old, so he must be about 40 now…I probably taught him when he was in 4th grade also.” Many thanks to Grace for all her work as a teacher and poet, thanks to CPITS and to all those poet-teachers out there.

Jameel’s featured poem goes like this:

THE LIFE IS PRESERVED

The life is preserved
in itself, that is how
we are in existence. The
characters in nature exist
in a pattern. That is the
way it is meant to be.
Of the window we see
through, many portions are
left to fill in. Many seasons
will pass. Life will preserve
itself any way it can.
That is self-being. Time
is also preserved in itself.
Ancestors will be in their
time as will others. Many
squirrels will walk in the
distance. They are brown as
the trunks of tress in daylight.
The rabbits of the night
are near to the meadow.
They are near to all life.
The calls of the great ones
are of much power. The life
is preserved in itself, that
is how we are in existence.

There are many things I love about this poem: its philosophical efficiency; the plain diction (reminiscent of W.C. Williams); its combination of intimacy and detachment; the short, linked sentences placed in lines with wandering caesuras; and most significantly, its tone and range. This poem is not “spiritually bossy” the way some contemporary poems are, but instead demonstrates both assertiveness and openness. Its many ragged enjambments create a vibrant receptive music; the lines that end in “the” remind me of Oppen or Creeley, though Jameel’s declarative statements are not “oblique” in the way their sentences can be, enacting a kind of solitary existential angst and dilemmas of relationship. Instead, Jameel’s writing is that of a child stating the principles by which he lives and perceives the world, including the presence of ancestors with power, and brown squirrels the same color as the trees, the rabbits in the night, and so on. Had Jameel been an older writer, and had he not had a such a good poetry teacher, he would have been told to narrow his subject; writing about “life” is after all a rather large topic.

Jameel’s poem is a bit of an odd choice to put forth here. But for me it embodies many values of poetry I love over time, whether it the work of Dickinson or Hopkins or Lorine Niedecker or Forrest Gander or giovanni singleton; it is risky and free, and it is general and local. As a child, I read single short poems aloud to myself, poems I grew to love, that can convey the vastness of mental moments in compressed forms. It doesn’t mean I don’t often love experimental postmodern projects or expansively social poetry or public installations or collaged mixed media writing. But at the core of my love for poetry is always the experience of a verbal event that can deliver quantum packets of strange energy. What we aspire to as poets is to deliver the news of imaginative language openly or secretly. Sometimes we have readers we will never know about. Sometimes we work in obscurity, but we can imagine we have a few readers out there and can try to write poems for them that will last through multiple readings the way Jameel’s poem has for me.

–Brenda Hillman

Brenda Hillman is the author of nine full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize for 2014. With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003), and has co-translated Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi and Instances by Jeongrye Choi. Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice. Click here for author’s website.

Be sure to check out our new poetry!

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

NaPoMo16: Pierre Joris on Paul Celan’s “Line the wordcaves”

by jgagne • April 15, 2016

When asked about his favorite poems, Pierre Joris replied with Paul Celan’s “Line the wordcaves” from Fadensonnen / Threadsuns.

LINE THE WORDCAVES
with panther skins,

widen them, hide-to and hide-fro,
sense-hither and sense-thither,

give them courtyards, chambers, drop doors
and wildnesses, parietal,

and listen for their second
and each time second and second
tone.

KLEIDE DIE WÖRTHOHLEN AUS
mit Pantherhäuten,

erweitere sie, fellhin und fellher,
sinnhin und sinnher,

gib ihnen Vorhöfe, Kammern, Klappen
und Wildnisse, parietal,

und lausch ihrem zweiten
und jeweils zweiten und zweiten
Ton.

I have been reading & translating Paul Celan’s work for many years—close to fifty, in fact. His work is always complex & difficult, and theerfore I often turn to the poem above—“Line the wordcaves” from the volume Fadensonnen / Threadsuns—because, besides being a fascinating & well-made poem, it is also a programmatic meta-poem. It give us a handle on how to approach such poems by foregrounding how the poet envisaged the act of writing, & how he would have liked his work to be read and understood. Thinking/reading through this poem helps me rethink how Celan’s (and, indeed many other) complex poems need to be read.

Celan, especially in his late poetry, insists on the importance of the word. This poem thematically foregrounds this point, yielding insights not only into Celan’s writing process, but also into the reading process. The work of poetry is to be done on the word itself, the word that is presented here as hollow, as a cave — an image that suggests immediately a range of connections with similar topoi throughout the oeuvre, from prehistoric caves to etruscan tombs. The word is nothing solid, diorite or opaque, but a formation with its own internal complexities and crevasses — closer to a geode, to extend the petrological imagery so predominant in Celan. In the context of this first stanza, however, the “panther skins” seem to point more towards the image of a prehistoric cave, at least temporarily, for the later stanzas retroactively change this reading, giving it the multi-perspectivity so pervasive to the late work.

These words need to be worked, transformed, enriched, in order to become meaningful. In this case the poem commands the poet to “line” them with animal skins, suggesting that something usually considered as an external covering is brought inside and turned inside-out. The geometry of this inversion makes for an ambiguous space, like that of a Klein bottle where inside and outside become indeterminable or interchangeable. These skins, pelts or furs also seem to be situated between something, to constitute a border of some sort, for the next stanza asks for the caves to be enlarged in at least two, if not four directions, i.e. “pelt-to and pelt-fro, / sense-hither and sense-thither.” This condition of being between is indeed inscribed in the animal chosen by Celan, via a multilingual pun (though he wrote in German, Celan lived in a French-speaking environment while translating from half a dozen languages he mastered perfectly): “between” is “entre” in French, while the homophonic rhyme-word “antre” refers to a cave; this “antre” or cave is inscribed and can be heard in the animal name “Panther.” (One could of course pursue the panther-image in other directions, for example into Rilke’s poem — and Celan’s close involvement with Rilke’s work is well documented.) Unhappily the English verb “lined” is not able to render the further play on words rooted in the ambiguity of the German “auskleiden,” which means both to line, to drape, to dress with, and to undress.

These “Worthöhlen,” in a further echo of inversion, give to hear the expression “hohle Worte”—empty words (The general plural for “Wort” is “Wörter,” but in reference to specific words you use the plural “Worte.”) Words, and language as such, have been debased, emptied of meaning — a topos that can be found throughout Celan’s work — and in order to be made useful again the poet has to transform and rebuild them, creating in the process those multiperspectival layers that constitute the gradual, hesitating yet unrelenting mapping of Celan’s universe. The third stanza thus adds a further strata to the concept of “Worthöhlen” by introducing physiological terminology, linking the word-caves to the hollow organ that is the heart. These physiological topoi appear with great frequency in the late books and have been analyzed in some detail by James Lyon^{^[1]}, who points out the transfer of anatomical concepts and terminology, and, specifically in this poem, how the heart’s atria become the poem’s courtyards, the ventricles, chambers and the valves, drop doors. The poem’s “you,” as behoves a programmatic text, is the poet exhorting himself to widen the possibilities of writing by adding attributes, by enriching the original word-caves. The poem’s command now widens the field by including a further space, namely “wildnesses,” a term that recalls and links back up with the wild animal skins of the first stanza. Celan does not want a linear transformation of the word from one singular meaning to the next, but the constant presence of multiple layers of meaning accreting in the process of the poem’s composition. The appearance in the third stanza of these wildnesses also helps to keep alive the tension between a known, ordered, constructed world and the unknown and unexplored, which is indeed the Celanian “Grenzgelände,” that marginal borderland into which, through which and from which language has to move for the poem to occur.

But it is not just a question of simply adding and enlarging, of a mere constructivist activism: the poet also has to listen. The last stanza gives this command, specifying that it is the second tone that he will hear that is important. The poem itself foregrounds this: “tone” is the last word of the poem, constituting a whole line by itself while simultaneously breaking the formal symmetry of the text which had so far been built up on stanzas of two lines each. Given the earlier heart-imagery, this listening to a double tone immediately evokes the systole/diastole movement. The systole corresponds to the contraction of the heart muscle when the blood is pumped through the heart and into the arteries, while the diastole represents the period between two contractions of the heart when the chambers widen and fill with blood. The triple repetition on the need to listen to the second tone thus insists that the sound produced by the diastole is what is of interest to the poet.

Systole/diastole, a double movement most basic to life, thus important to be aware of, and made visible here as “the heart” of the poem, & giving the reader in the process a how-to-read in a double movement of reading/writing or of writing/reading.

–Pierre Joris

^{^[1]} Lyon, J. K. (1987b). “Die (Patho-)Physiologie des Ichs in der Lyrik Paul Celans.” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie.106(4)

Breathturn to Timestead: The Collected Later Poems of Paul Celan, edited, translated and with commentaries by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2014.

Pierre Joris is the author of more than 40 books of poetry, essays, and translations including Poasis: Selected Poems 1986–1999 (Wesleyan, 2001) and A Nomad Poetics: Essays (Wesleyan, 2003). He was co-editor of Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry and has published English translations of Celan, Tzara, Rilke and Blanchot, among others. You can read his blog here.

Be sure to check out our new poetry!

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

NaPoMo16: Rae Armantrout & Emily Dickinson’s “1259”

by jgagne • April 13, 2016

When asked about her favorite poems, Rae Armantrout replied with “1259” by Emily Dickinson. We’re sharing the poem today, to celebrate National Poetry Month and Rae Armantrout’s birthday!

1259

A Wind that rose
Though not a Leaf
In any Forest stirred
But with itself did cold engage
Beyond the Realm of Bird—
A Wind that woke a lone Delight
Like Separation’s Swell
Restored in Arctic Confidence
To the Invisible—

Though not well known, this is one of my favorite Dickinson poems. It works through a complicated and unstable metaphor. As a literal wind kicks up a wave which travels awhile and then subsides into the sea, Dickinson’s more mysterious wind provokes a private mental event—an idea or feeling, maybe a poem, or even the birth of an individual consciousness itself—which is manifest for awhile before sliding back into invisibility. We might expect there to be a pathos to this process, but, instead, there is a defiant and almost autoerotic “Delight.” This poem seems like a kind of poetics statement.

No one combines seemingly dissonant words and concepts more surprisingly and to better effect than Dickinson. That’s what I love most about her – and there are two great examples in this poem. You will almost certainly never find the words “cold” and “engage” sitting side by side anywhere else. “Coldly engage,” which would still be surprising, would be more correct, of course, but nowhere near as good. “Cold” in its noun form prepares us for the later appearance of Arctic. It suggests both cold water and dispassionate intellectual fascination. What’s more, it hints at an attraction to the cold. It’s also worth noting that the long “o” in cold travels like a wave throughout the poem appearing in “rose,” “woke,” and “lone” – all one syllable words. The second really surprising word combo in this poem is “Arctic” and “Confidence.” Surely these words have never been seated together before. They create an interesting ambiguity here. Confidence might mean self-assurance, an independence enjoyed by this wave, but it might just as easily mean something like the opposite – “confidence” as shared secret or confession. Both work! If we lean towards the latter, as I do, then we have to wonder what kind of “confidence” can be described as “arctic.” Perhaps the very poem we are reading is such a confidence, one shared with the theoretical audience who might (or might not) read her long after her death.

This poem isn’t one of Dickinson’s anthology pieces, so I feel a kind of “lone Delight” whenever I read it, but I am glad to share it here.
–Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Just Saying, Money Shot, and Versed, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her twelfth book, Itself, was published by the Wesleyan University Press in 2015. Partly: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in August 2016.

Be sure to check out our new poetry!

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

Announcing 2 books by TED GREENWALD

by jgagne • April 12, 2016

“Is it cynical or is it innocent? He has an almost machinic way. But is it utopian? The most progressive of Ted Greenwald’s poems are just that. No, they all are: forward thinking, Sagittarian, and wildly Americanly kind.” –Eileen Myles

We are pleased to announce the release of two noteworthy books by prolific poet Ted Greenwald! Greenwald’s long career spans six decades and more than 30 books. Based in New York City, he has long been associated with St. Mark’s Poetry Project and founded Poetry Readings at Ear Inn with Charles Bernstein. His work has appeared in Paris Review, Partisan Review, C, Lines, Big Sky, Angel Hair, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Bomb, Adventures in Poetry, The World, Poetry Project Newsletter, nY, and Shiney.

Common Sense

First published in 1978, Common Sense evinces a spare street-wise style rooted in the vernacular of the city. Now something of a cult classic, the book is recognized as an understated masterpiece, pushing at the edges of spoken word. This is the language of everyday, brought onto the page in such a way that we never lose the flow of speech and at the same time we become attuned to its many registers—musical, emotional, ironic. Ted Greenwald’s work has been associated with several major veins of American poetry, including the Language movement and the New York School, but it remains unclassifiable.

The Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems, 1969–1982

A New York-based poet with close ties to the New York School and the Language poets, Ted Greenwald has written daily since the early 1960s. The Age of Reasons includes the best of Greenwald’s uncollected poetry. While some of these poems appeared in literary journals or magazines in the 1970s, none were included in any of his previously published books. These distinct works were written in advance of or alongside the extended explorations of a mutated triolet form that increasingly occupied him from the late 1970s on. Alongside Common Sense (1978), The Age of Reasons evinces Greenwald’s ability to think with his ear, to hear what’s said as it arrives as a fresh sound or shape in his head. This work is singular in its pattern-making, its music-making, and its ability to simultaneously follow multiple paths.

“No poet has taken the idea that poetry should be at least as good as overheard conversation as seriously as Ted Greenwald.” –Publishers Weekly

“Ted Greenwald knows what real American talk sounds like, understands the rhythm and pulse of the language, and knows how to write poems that are built around that knowledge. He is one of America’s most ambitious and provocative poets.” –Terence Winch, Jacket 19

“Ted Greenwald’s poems ‘give voice’ to a variety of New York idioms, and with that, a distinct attitude toward both language and experience. His ultimate strength as a poet is his basic humanity, something that can be claimed for very few.” –Bill Berkson

“I have called Greenwald an ‘urban primitive’ because his work seems to spring from the base materiality of New York streets, the immediacy of enunciation, abrupt demand, tough neighborhoods, shifting milieus, grit and exhaust, flux and flurry. I see him as a genuine original whose method is a unique exploration of common language, utterly without academic pretense.” –Curtis Faville, publisher, L Publications

LAST FIVE MINUTES
The long and the short
Of it is
I have to keep pushing
I feel myself
Pushing against the
Lead-in to beauty
And take a hunch through
With me
Into the halls
Where the everyday
Seems like eternity
There’s no fooling around
About something
As serious
As it is beautiful
There’s no match
For the feeling
That gets there
When I get there
And absolutely no sense
Of duration
And no telling
How everything turns out

April

202 pp., 6 x 9 1/4”

Paper, $17.95 x

978-0-8195-7642-2

eBook, $14.99 Y

978-0-8195-7643-9

NaPoMo16: Evie Shockley & June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights”

by tsjohnson • April 6, 2016

This April marks the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month, which was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996. Each year, publishers, booksellers, educators and literary organizations use April to support poetry; whether you’re undertaking the National Poetry Writing Month challenge, teaching poetry in your classroom, or making efforts to read more poetry year-round. To commemorate this ever-evolving, vital genre, we asked some of your favorite Wesleyan University Press authors to share their favorite poems.

Evie Shockley, author of the new black, kicks this series off with one of her personal favorites: “Poem about My Rights” by June Jordan.

June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. The June M. Jordan Literary Trust, www.junejordan.com.

Poem About My Rights

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear

my head about this poem about why I can’t

go out without changing my clothes my shoes

my body posture my gender identity my age

my status as a woman alone in the evening/

alone on the streets/alone not being the point/

the point being that I can’t do what I want

to do with my own body because I am the wrong

sex the wrong age the wrong skin and

suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/

or far into the woods and I wanted to go

there by myself thinking about God/or thinking

about children or thinking about the world/all of it

disclosed by the stars and the silence:

I could not go and I could not think and I could not

stay there

alone

as I need to be

alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own

body and

who in the hell set things up

like this

and in France they say if the guy penetrates

but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me

and if after stabbing him if after screams if

after begging the bastard and if even after smashing

a hammer to his head if even after that if he

and his buddies fuck me after that

then I consented and there was

no rape because finally you understand finally

they fucked me over because I was wrong I was

wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong

to be who I am

which is exactly like South Africa

penetrating into Namibia penetrating into

Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if

Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the

proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland

and if

after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe

and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to

self-immolation of the villages and if after that

we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they

claim my consent:

Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of

the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what

in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

and according to the Times this week

back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem

and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they

killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba

and before that it was my father on the campus

of my Ivy League school and my father afraid

to walk into the cafeteria because he said he

was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong

gender identity and he was paying my tuition and

before that

it was my father saying I was wrong saying that

I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a

boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and

that I should have had straighter hair and that

I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should

just be one/a boy and before that

it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for

my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me

to let the books loose to let them loose in other

words

I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.

and the problems of South Africa and the problems

of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white

America in general and the problems of the teachers

and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social

workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very

familiar with the problems because the problems

turn out to be

I am the history of rape

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of

myself

I am the history of battery assault and limitless

armies against whatever I want to do with my mind

and my body and my soul and

whether it’s about walking out at night

or whether it’s about the love that I feel or

whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or

the sanctity of my national boundaries

or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity

of each and every desire

that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic

and indisputably single and singular heart

I have been raped

be-

cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age

the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the

wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic

the wrong sartorial I

I have been the meaning of rape

I have been the problem everyone seeks to

eliminate by forced

penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/

but let this be unmistakable this poem

is not consent I do not consent

to my mother to my father to the teachers to

the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy

to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon

idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in

cars

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

My name is my own my own my own

and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this

but I can tell you that from now on my resistance

my simple and daily and nightly self-determination

may very well cost you your life

Upon being invited to share a favorite poem this month, of my many, many favorites, I chose June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights.” Jordan is on my mind right now, because I will be participating soon in a symposium celebrating her legacies (which will already have occurred—at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—by time you are reading this). Her capacity for clear analysis, truth-telling, and unforgettable phrasing (“Wrong is not my name“) is one legacy of Jordan’s that I admire immensely and that is on display in this poem. Also on my mind right now, because of important conversations happening in the poetry community these past few weeks, is the difficulty of navigating this world as a woman—particularly as a woman of color—when Business-As-Usual is structured without our needs, aspirations, or desires (in other words, our humanity) in mind. We humans are long overdue for a new normal around issues of gender and sexuality, and Jordan’s poem—with its urgency, its incantatory repetition, its rule-breaking language, its potent analogies, its traces of the nature poem it might have been, and its insistence on being the poem it of necessity must be—makes the case for change impassionately.
–Evie Shockley

Evie Shockley is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of the new black, a half-red sea, the chapbook The Gorgon Goddess, and Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry.

Be sure to check out our new poetry!

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

Wesleyan University Press @ AWP2016 – Los Angeles

by jgagne • March 25, 2016

Join Us @ AWP 2016, in Los Angeles!

Booth #1213

Don’t miss these events:

A Lunch Time Reading at Ace Hotel

Thursday, 3/31: Noon–2PM
Ace Hotel, 929 South Broadway, Los Angeles
1913 Press, Sidebrow & Wesleyan University Press present:

Rae Armantrout
Fred Moten
Ben Doller
Sandra Doller
Amaranth Borsuk
Kate Durbin
Lily Hoang
Mathias Svalina

Just Saying: A Tribute to Rae Armantrout

Thursday, 3/31: 3-4:15pm
Room 502 A, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level R255

Stephen Burt
Amy Catanzano
Catherine Wagner
Monica Youn
Rae Armantrout

Four author-critics approach Armantrout’s work from a variety of angles, including her association with Language poetry, her exploration of science through verse, her treatment of pop culture and current events, and her merging of everyday experience with epistemological questions about perceptions. Read more here.

Friday Afternoon Cocktail Celebration for BAX 2015

Friday, 4/1: 4-5pm, AWP Booth #1213
Purchase a copy of Best American Experimental Writing, 2015 for $10 (50% off cover price) & enjoy a free Moscow Mule!

Book Signings @ Booth #1213

Rae Armantrout (Itself)–Thursday, 3/31, 4:30PM

Robert Fernandez (Scarecrow)–Friday, 4/1: 10AM

Ben Doller (Fauxhawk) –Friday, 4/1, 12PM

Stop by check out our new books!

Treaty Shirts: October 2034—A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation (Gerald Vizenor)

Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow (James Morrow)

Common Sense (Ted Greenwald)

Age of Reasons: Uncollected Poems 1969–1982 (Ted Greenwald)

Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

Fauxhawk (Ben Doller)

Scarecrow (Robert Fernandez)

The Book of Landings (Mark McMorris)

A Sulfur Anthology (edited by Clayton Eshleman)

A Lunch Time Reading @ ACE HOTEL #AWP2016

by tsjohnson • March 15, 2016

1913 Press, Sidebrow & Wesleyan University Press present:

A Lunch Time Reading at Ace Hotel

Rae Armantrout ♠ Fred Moten ♠ Ben Doller ♠ Sandra Doller ♠ Amaranth Borsuk
Kate Durbin ♠ Lily Hoang ♠ Mathias Svalina

Join us on March 31st at the historic Ace Hotel in Los Angeles for a readings and performances by poets Rae Armantrout, Ben Doller, Fred Moten & more!
Noon–2PM in lovely Segovia Hall.

Readers/performers include:Mathias Svalina (Sidebrow), Ben & Sandra Doller (Sidebrow), Amaranth Borsuk & Kate Durbin (1913), Lily Hoang (1913), Ben Doller (Wesleyan), Fred Moten (Wesleyan), and Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan).

About Ace Hotel

“The hotel is housed in the historic United Artists building in Downtown LA. Built in 1927 for the maverick film studio, this ornate, storied and vibrant Los Angeles gem stands as a monument to a group of seminal American artists.”

A 15 minute walk from JW Marriott, the site of this year’s AWP Conference and Bookfair, the Ace Hotel is located at 929 south Broadway. Directions here.

Grab lunch on your way!

-Fernando’s Taco Inn. Across the street (W Olympic Blvd) from the JW Marriott.
-The Ace Hotel’s coffee bar offers both sweet and savory items to go.
-Have a sit-down lunch at LA Chapter after the reading.

Mathias Svalina was born in Chicago. He is the author of Wastoid, The Explosions, I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur, and Destruction Myths. With Zachary Schomburg, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and is an editor at Octopus Books. He currently teaches writing and literature in Denver, Colorado.

Sandra Doller’s books include Leave Your Body Behind, Oriflamme, Chora, and Man Years, and two chapbooks: Mystérieuse by Éric Suchère and Memory of the Prose Machine. The founder and editrice of 1913 Press & 1913 a journal of forms, Doller has taught at Hollins University and Boise State University, and she currently teaches film, literature, and writing at Cal State-San Marcos. She lives in California.

Ben Doller is the author of Dead Ahead, FAQ, and Radio, Radio, winner of the Walt Whitman Award, as well as his latest collection Fauxhawk. Along with the poet Sandra Doller, he has published two collaborative books. He is an associate professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Amaranth Borsuk is a poet working across media platforms. Her books include Handiwork, selected by Paul Hoover for the Slope Poetry Prize; Tonal Saw, a chapbook-length erasure; and Between Page and Screen, a book of augmented-reality poems created with Brad Bouse.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. She is the author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), E! Entertainment (Wonder Press), and five chapbooks. She is founding editor of the online journal, Gaga Stigmata, and her tumblr project, Women as Objects, archives the teen girl tumblr aesthetic.

Lily Hoang is the author of five books: Parabola, Changing, The Evolutionary Revolution, Unfinished, and Old Cat Lady (forthcoming 2014-15). With Blake Butler, she edited 30 Under 30, and with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she is editing the anthology The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on the Avant-Garde and Accessibility. She is Associate Department Head at New Mexico State University, where she teaches in the MFA program and serves as Prose Editor for Puerto del Sol.

Fred Moten is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Arkansas, Poems (with Jim Behrle), I ran from it but was still in it, Hughson’s Tavern, B Jenkins, The Feel Trio, and the critical works In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition andThe Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney).

Rae Armantrout is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Itself, Just Saying, Money Shot, and Versed, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Katja Kolcio, Wendy Perron, Eiko—Conversations w/o Walls & Solo #10

by selliott • March 11, 2016

Today! Friday March 11th, beginning at 8PM

Dancespace Project at St. Mark’s Church Presents

4-8pm: Conversation Without Walls: Bearing Witness

Scholars and artists gather to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. How are we challenged by mounting human failures? How does being a mover affect our thoughts and sensitivity? And how do our memories affect our movement? How do choreographers concern themselves with changing environments, artistically, politically and socially?

$10 suggested donation. RSVP for the conversation here

4pm: Presenters: Marilyn Ivy & William Johnston
Respondents: Gabriel Florenz , Harry Philbrick , Julie Malnig

5pm: Presenters: Karen Shimakawa & Ana Janevski
Respondents: Debra Levine, luciana achugar

6pm: Presenters: Yoshiko Chuma & Katja Kolcio
Respondents: Koosil-ja, Wendy Perron

9pm: Eiko Solo #10

Eiko will perform solo inside the St. Mark’s sanctuary. Introduction by Yukie Kamiya, Gallery Director, Japan Society.

Tickets: $20 / $15 Danspace members

(*This performance is currently sold out, but a wait list will be taken at the door starting at 8:15pm.)

St. Mark’s Church 131 East 10th St. New York, NY 212-674-8112

Celebrating International Women’s Day

by tsjohnson • March 8, 2016

Today, March 8th, is International Women’s Day! A great way to commemorate a day—and womens’ history month—is to read a book written by or about a woman. Here are just a few of our favorite books by or about our favorite females.

In its new paperback edition, Connecticut state senator Donald E. Williams’s Prudence Crandall: The Fight for Equality in the 1830s, Dred Scott, and Brown v. Board of Education is a necessity to read. Crandall was a Connecticut school teacher dedicated to the education of African-American girls who ignited a firestorm of controversy when she opened Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color, in Canterbury. The town’s residents retaliated—Crandall couldn’t find anyone willing to supply her with goods necessary for running the school, and even the school’s well water was poisoned. Crandall herself faced ridicule all over town, was arrested, and yet did not close the school until her girls’ safety was threatened. Williams tells of Crandall’s push for justice and how her struggles helped to set legal precedent. He explains the relationship between three trials brought against Crandall, for her violation of Connecticut’s “Black Law,” and other notable legal cases: the Amistad case, the Dred Scott decision, and Brown v. Board of Education. Williams also discusses how Crandall v. State impacts our modern interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960, Jeanine Basinger highlights the incredibly contradictory messages sent to female moviegoers—films about women’s lives constantly displayed both conformity and righteous freedom. Where women’s film has often been dismissed as another instrument in female oppression, Basinger brings an understanding of both film and women’s lives to parse out the complexities in films sometimes dismissed as “sheer trash.” Films from across genres, from melodramas to westerns to musicals, are examined under Basinger’s discerning eye for traces of subversive rebellion against the “proper” idealized role of women. As the New York Times Book Review said, “Ms. basinger analyzes Hollywood’s view with affectionate wit and verve…Her book is a timely reminder that female rebellion didn’t start with Thelma and Louise.”

In humorous, ironic prose, acclaimed Science Fiction writer Kit Reed explores women’s lives and feminist issues in the twenty stories inside Weird Women, Wired Women. Spanning across the years of the women’s movement to more contemporary years in American history, Reed’s writing in Weird Women, Wired Women deals in her usual darkly comic speculative fiction at its best. Reed uses her expertise in science fiction to further cast a subversive spell over these depictions of predominantly-believed women’s roles. The collection of short stories with provocative, clever titles such as “The Bride of Bigfoot” and “Mommy Nearest” takes worn-out suburban subjects and gives them a fresh coat of paint—if that paint is moving, eerie, sharp social criticism, that is.

Inside American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, readers can find indispensably valuable poetry and prose from women’s points of view. Each section of the book is devoted to a single poet and contains new poems; a brief “statement of poetics” by the poet herself in which she explores the forces—personal, aesthetic, political—informing her creative work; a critical essay on the poet’s work; a biographical statement; and a bibliography listing works by and about the poet. With highly acclaimed poets selected-among them Rae Armantrout, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, and Harryette Mullen—this collection forces us to redefine lyric poetry. Underscoring the dynamic give and take between poets and the culture at large, this anthology is indispensable for anyone interested in poetry, gender and the creative process.

Women and jazz have been intricately involved with one another since the genre’s conception, but so often the men of jazz stole the spotlight away from the many acclaimed ladies. Some Liked It Hot looks at all-girl bands and jazz women from the 1920s through the 1950s and how they fit into the nascent mass culture, particularly film and television. G.A. Foster from Choice says, “A remarkable book in every respect. Although one can find several other books on this topic, this study stands above the rest for its accuracy, scholarly discipline, thoroughness of research, and detailed analysis… A stunning achievement. Essential.”

March is Maple Month!

by selliott • February 26, 2016

According to the Maple Syrup Producers Association of Connecticut, March is Maple Month—the sweetest time of year. The longer days and melting snow reminds us that Spring is coming, and it is time to harvest maple sap and boil up some maple syrup. You can enjoy the process and product by attending one of the many maple festivals throughout New England. Learn about some of these festivals from Yankee Magazine’s list of “Best Maple Festivals in New England.”

You can learn more about the process of sugarmaking by attending a talk by David Leff, author of Maple Sugaring: Keeping it Real in New England. David has several events scheduled in Connecticut, where he will read from his book and share knowledge from his experience as a sugarmaker.

Photos courtesy of David Leff, Maple Sugaring: Keeping It Real in New England.

A Sampling of Maple Festivals in Connecticut

Stamford Museum & Nature Center’s “Maple Sugar Festival Weekend,” March 5–6
Sweet Wind Farm’s Maple Festival, March 12
Plymouth Maple Festival, March 15
AG Day at the Capitol, March 16
Hebron Maple Festival, March 19–20