trenchart monographs hurry up please its time, eds. Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place

We started Les Figues Press in 2005 to publish the TrenchArt series. In other words, the idea of the Press was the idea of the series. Or, simply put: we wanted to publish books as a conversation or group curation. As writers, we frequently discussed our work in terms of other people’s writing, even as our individual efforts were writing into, or against, a larger social inscription or text. This larger text could be what Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginary,” defined as “the ways people imagine their social existence,” including their expectations, relationships, and the “deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (23). To Taylor, the social imaginary is held together by the stuff of the imagination—images, stories, legends. If, as writers, we are making texts (poems, prose bits, novellas) in an increasingly networked world, what might our individual works, placed side-by-side, reveal about a social imaginary, which is also in/forming these individual texts? Fred Moten, in a talk at the University of Denver, refused to talk about writing “beginning,” because writing, he said (and I’m paraphrasing) is simply a way our ongoing sociality sometimes emerges. Writing, in other words, is a form of sociality. Writing never comes from one alone.

When we founded Les Figues, we (or to be exact, I) did not have this language for writing. Yet demonstrating this intuitively-held relationship between individual texts—and the larger social text—felt worthy of publishing. Vanessa Place, Pam Ore, and I had been talking about this “something” we wanted to make for a few years, and one afternoon we imagined a publication structure: TrenchArt. (Teresa Carmody, “For What Reason Is This Writing: Publisher’s Preface”)

I’m amazed by the remarkable anthology trenchart monographs hurry up please its time (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2015), edited by Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, an anthology collecting nearly a decade’s worth of publications created as part of the TrenchArt series produced by Les Figues Press. As Carmody’s introduction explains, the original TrenchArt essays, grouped together to be published as short monographs, were the origins of the press itself: to present work as a conversation, and works that would have no home anywhere else. Moving beyond those first, small publications, Les Figues is a press that has evolved over the past decade-plus to be one of the leading publishers of innovative, experimental and conceptual writing in North America, producing book-length works by Jennifer Calkins, Vanessa Place, Redell Olsen, derek beaulieu, Sophie Robinson, Timothy Yu, Claire Huot and Robert Majzels, Colin Winnette, Sawako Nakayasu, Doug Nufer, Urs Allemann, Dodie Bellamy, Sandra Doller and multiple others, as well as producing another important anthology: I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012) [see my review of such here].

Depictions of the present are complacent; depictions of the future are implausible. For this reason, depictions are generally unimportant, unless they are made by important people like economists or real estate agents. These important people describe only the future, which they make sure is boring and plausible. A plausible future is just more of the present. The Empire never ends because the people in it are more important than the world that they deserve. Better to have a world that exists than a world that is better but might rock the boat: this is a good general view. Because if you rock the boat, the boat will take on water, and it might well sink. There are already people drowning in the bottom of the boat. Poetry succeeds as if the boat can lift off from the water and become an airy structure, with a few words surrounded by wide open space where the sun gleams off-white. This is not an important thing for the world to be able to do; it is not an important thing to be able to do with the world. Turn it into an essay where the dead things of the present are nailed to a bulletin board: that is at least a little bit useful. I’ve nailed every dead bit of my ego to this bulletin board that you have just read, and illustrated each one with a corny metaphor. Enjoy. I’ll see you in the future, or else in an extrapolative satire, or else I won’t see you. You are too important to be able to get out of this present world that wants to be with you till death. (Stan Apps, “On Unimportant Art”)

Originally solicited for publication in annual limited editions sets of four or five authors submitting an essay each, the anthology collects the entirety of the series in a single volume, with essays on writing, art and thinking by Harold Abramowitz, Danielle Adair, Stan Apps, Nuala Archer, Dodie Bellamy, Sissy Boyd, Melissa Buzzeo, Amina Cain, Jennifer Calkins, Teresa Carmody, Allison Carter, Molly Corey, Vincent Dachy, Lisa Darms, Ken Ehrlich, Alex Forman, Lily Hoang, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Alta Ifland, Klaus Killisch, Alice Könitz, Myriam Moscona, Doug Nufer, Redell Olsen, Pam Ore, Renée Petropoulos, Vanessa Place, Michael du Plessis, Frances Richard, Sophie Robinson, Kim Rosenfield, Mark Rutkoski, Susan Simpson, Stephanie Taylor, Axel Thormählen, Mathew Timmons, Chris Tysh, Julie Thi Underhill, Divya Victor, Matias Vieneger and Christine Wertheim. As editor Place writes to end her introduction: “And so, the TrenchArt series followed the sound-sensical manner of Alice’s Queen of Hearts—sentence first, verdict afterwards. Which is an admirable way to run anything, especially sentences.” The pieces gathered in this anthology breathe a collective sigh in a multitude of directions, ways and purposes, each asking, why are we continuing to create in the same ways we have already done?

What of the making of things together? Collaboration. We get together to make a thing, a thing that will trigger an uncanny shift of perception in those who see it. This shift will expose a particular societal delusion so ubiquitous as to have been previously invisible. This object we imagine will perpetuate an act of radical haunting, that awakens the viewer to the world around it, but its success depends wholly on our collaborative BOO. I show up as Boris Karloff but my collaborator was hoping for a more Henry James-like spooking. Her laugh is not fiendish enough. He thinks my cape ridiculous. There is always a gap. We mind the gap fastidiously, obsessively. It is not what I had envisioned. My collaborators have deprived me of the sight I’ve grown used to. They have haunted my haunting … generously. “Have you ever really looked carefully at the thing we are making?” they ask. (Susan Simpson, “Untitled Aesthetic”)

As Place points out in her introduction, “[…] Les Figues Press was also born from a women’s art salon, Mrs. Porter’s, held most regularly from 2004 until 2013 or thereabouts. Everyone who attended presented some item for aesthetic contemplation (one’s own or another’s) during the first half of the evening; the second half was devoted to teasing out connections and distinctions between the works. To a consideration of how these scraps of writing or bits of art might tat together, not a telos, but an essay. As in essaie, as in try. Try as in trial. The trail, of course, in the TrenchArt series, was the work itself.” An anthology of this sort functions as a curated montage of divergent ideas on approaches to writing, attempting to prompt new ways of thinking about how writing is created, presented and absorbed, and there is a great deal within that can’t help but to startle the attentive reader into seeing writing in a potentially new way, whether their own, or simply writing in general. A book such as this wants to shake the complacency out of so much of what is currently being produced, disseminated and absorbed and somehow called “writing.” The possibilities are far larger than what most writing might suggest, and perhaps more (including myself) should be better at paying attention to the writers who are working to continuously push at the boundaries.

My art is guided by history: art history, social history, political history, and personal history. The historical and the personal are inextricably linked, like two sides of the same sheet of paper. My work is about how memory itself is political, and the process by which the political is transformed into memory.

I am driven by an urge to retrieve something lost or something that will soon be lost. Walter Benjamin has written about this impulse to return to the past in order to rescue it from disappearance. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History he says, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” In uncovering the historic in my work, I don’t mean to tell the story, but rather I am interested in telling a story—something highly constructed and subjective. In rescuing and remembering the past, the work allegorically reinvents meaning—a new story is told. (Molly Corey, “Aesthetic/Politic”)

One of the more intriguing of an already-impressive gathering of exploratory pieces is Lisa Darms’ erasure essay, “½ EARTH ½ ETHER,” a piece she attempts to salvage through the process of erasure. As she writes in her “Postscript: Under Erasure” (dated 2014):

When I was asked to republish this essay, I thought of it in terms of my job as an archivist. I knew I’d probably be embarrassed by my writing, but that it would be a way to enact my belief that the highest function of the textual archive is to preserve mistakes, imperfections and failures.

And then, I re-read it.

The archive documents failure, yes. But it doesn’t have to perpetuate it. This is the voice of someone who, after three vaguely demoralizing years in a studio art graduate program, has spent a year unable to find work, reading only holocaust memoirs and back issues of Artforum. The original essay’s stylistic pomposity and its humorlessness are qualities I’ve spent the last eight years trying to purge from my writing (and life). My first inclination, when I saw this essay in proofs, was to kill it.

But instead, I decided to retun it with extensive redactions—a sort of faux-bureaucratic disavowal of the more facile ideas, and an homage to the sharpie marker sous rapture of riot grrrl zines. I’ve found that the essay now expresses its stuttering logic more accurately. Because we don’t want to stop time; we want to reanimate it.

New American Writing 32 (final issue)

Sleeping Beauty

to all the waters we went it cannot be expressed and the vows so sorry we were /all the waters to no purpose the pilgrimages to no end and the days so sorry were /and tired in our seeking when she came from the ether it was no simple however /it was gold-back and bellsound rung toward future all the waters it wept/ til spindle-cursed the lure of cloth drew her up the tower / unknowing at the wheel a good woman and alone handed the needle kindly and oh quiet blood it cannot be expressed our waiting became her waiting / redsky redbird forgive us a life we grow tired in our sleep (Jennifer K. Sweeney)

While the nature of literary publishing has always appeared tenuous, there is still something disappointing and altogether sad about the demise of any literary journal, whether the recent announcement of the final issue of Toronto’s Descant (after some four decades), or that Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover’s New American Writing will cease publication (one can at least feel some twinge of optimism through the fact that Vancouver’s The Capilano Review, in the midst of a transition out of the institution that had long supported them, managed a highly successful Indiegogo Campaign to midwife their new independence). Any project that has continued this long should certainly be admired and celebrated, especially one that has managed so long with the original editors. I can easily imagine that the work they’ve done with the journal over the years has influenced an entire generation or two of American poet-publishers who have, themselves, gone on to produce their own publications, even as New American Writing continued to evolve, develop and annually publish. Having only discovered them a few years back, I’ve admired the work I’ve seen in each issue, and am sad to see them go. As Hoover wrote on the journal’s Facebook page in December:

Friends of New American Writing: Maxine Chernoff and I have decided to cease publication of the magazine due to overwhelming problems with the funding. We are grateful to have published some of the best poetry of the last four decades, including OINK, which ran 19 issues beginning in 1971. We are proud of our ability to help young poets become established and to have contributed to the larger discussion of poetics and the literary history of the period. Thanks to our many contributors, subscribers, and readers.

The final issue of New American Writing is therefore the current, NAW 32 (2014). That issue and all back issues except 4 (Australian poetry) and 5 (Censorship and the Arts) are available through www.ccnow.com.

Part of the enjoyment of going through issues of New American Writing has always been in the strength of writing from familiar and unfamiliar names both new and well established, some of whom run through multiple issues of the annual journal, and this, the 2014 volume, features new writing by numerous poets, including Endi Bogue Hartigan, Fanny Howe, Aaron Shurin, Geoffre O’Brien, Clayton Eshleman, Karla Kelsey, Laynie Browne, Lisa Samuels, Noelle Kocot, Lucy Ives, John Tranter, Matthew Cooperman, Edward Smallfield, Anselm Berrigan, Philip Hoover, Travis Cebula, Amish Trivedi and Sara Marinelli, as well as a series of translations by Gillian Conoley, Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, Stephen Kessler, and Odile Cisneros. I’m fascinated by the density of the three poems included here by Noelle Kocot, a poet I’ve long heard of but haven’t yet explored the work of, as well as the incredibly sharp lines of the extended sequence “The Hermit,” only some of which is included here, by the brilliantly talented Lucy Ives. Impossible to replicate here, the three poems included here in Anselm Berrigan’s “Rectangle” series are visually interesting, and suggest a far larger project down the line (that I am very interested in seeing). Attentive readers will not only see work by the late Chicago poet and publisher Dean Faulwell (1939-2013), prefaced by a short introduction by Paul Hoover, but some of the last work, the poem “Gogol’s Luck,” of the late San Francisco poet Colleen Lookingbill (1950-2014) who passed away in March, 2014, a couple of months before this issue was released. Her poem includes:

Meanwhile hints and questions are forgotten

overcome, we spend a long time

scrutinizing smart and beautifully shaped references

back to the wasteland, return is seeing

that’s how we do things

New American Writing: Canadian section

Ten Canadian Poets

►◄

edited by rob mclennan

: Rob Budde
: Stephen Cain
: Margaret Christakos
: Trisia Eddy
: Jon Paul Fiorentino
: Phil Hall
: Marilyn Irwin
: Meredith Quartermain
: Nicole Markotić
: Andy Weaver


The thirty-first volume of the poetry annual New American Writing is now available, with a section of “Ten Canadian Poets” edited by yours truly, following on the heels of other selections of Canadian poetry I’ve attempted to showcase outside our borders, including the Canadian issue of Swiss online pdf journal dusie, or the three sections I edited for Jacket magazine (on Douglas Barbour, on George Bowering and on new Canadian poetries), as well as a thread that exists in the midst of the new “Tuesday poem” feature I’ve been curating, over at the dusie blog. I’ve actually been wanting to edit an anthology of twenty-four Canadian poets for a non-Canadian publisher for years, but haven’t yet managed to convince a publisher.

When soliciting for this small section of “New Canadian Writing,” I attempted a cross-section of some of the writers I’ve been keeping my eye on, the ones from various corners of the country that excite me. They range from the well-established to the other end of emerging; they range from the experimental to the more lyric narrative. The differences between our two countries are small, stark, obvious, nebulous and often impossible to articulate. There is no single difference. We look and sound like you, but after a while, subtle difference come up, that you hadn’t quite noticed before.

There have certainly been improvements over the past decade, but on the whole, writing doesn’t cross the Canadian/American border easily, and most international publishers that produce poetry works don’t often publish the works of Canadians, leaving us aware of works by American, British and other international writers, but predominantly as a one-way system. Online journals such as Jacket magazine, Jacket2 and Lemonhound have certainly worked to improve the conversations between countries, as well as the Canadian poets now with author pages on the American Electronic Poetry Center website, but there is always room for improvement. I hope that this small engagement might provide some further interest in what some truly amazing Canadian poets have been up to, lately.

Thanks so much to Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff for allowing me this space in their journal.

New American Writing #30 (2012)

genesis

in the morning i shadow you with envelopes, and falling down stairs our breath; the night as it moves. and the lines recede, a thunder; and they are ecstatic in the aisles; and the boats are righted and culled from the bearing deck

and the rain

and the dark paper map

and the lineage of small white instruments, arrayed by the door

and there were the ones who grew; and there were the ones spacious in trees; and there were those who pressed into surface, who suffered and were not to blame; who recorded the sounds of slippers on floors, a traveling back to weather and rind (Laura Walker)

I don’t often like to talk about journals I’m in, but I just received the new issue of the annual New American Writing, edited by Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff. Their thirtieth annual issue, it features more than two hundred pages of writing by such as Sylvia Legris, JulieCarr, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Kenneth Goldsmith, Elizabeth Robinson, Andrew Zawacki, Clayton Eschleman and tons of others. Wisely, the issue opens with three fantastic short prose works by Lydia Davis, the first of which, “The Old Soldier,” claims to be “from Stories From Flaubert,” which includes:

I thought about how, in this perpetual half-sleep of old age (which precedes the other sleep, and is a sort of transition from life to nothingness), the fellow no doubt was seeing once again the snows of Russia or the sands of Egypt. What visions were floating before those cloudy eyes? And what clothes he wore! What a jacket—patched and clean! The woman who served us (his daughter, I imagine) was a fifty-year-old gossip in a short skirt, with calves like the balusters in the Palace Louis XV and a cotton cap on her head. She came and went in her blue stockings and coarse skirt, and splendid Badinguet was there in the midst of it all, mounted on a yellow horse, three-cornered hat in hand, saluting a cohort of war-wounded, their wooden legs all precisely aligned.

The issue also includes a long, staccato poem by Paul Hoover, four poems from Sylvia Legris’ “Island of Prosections,” three poems by Laura Walker each titled “genesis,” and an extended sequence by Donna Stonecipher, excerpted from a longer work titled “Model City.” The editors of the journal appear to favour the sequence, extended or otherwise, and the fragmented lyric, and lyric prose-sentence. I’m taken by the two poems Camille T. Dungy has in the issue, from a “Frequently Asked Questions” sequence, each riffing off single lines asked to (seemingly) new mothers, including “Is it true that once you’re a parent it’s hard to maintain a social life of your own?” and “Does she have teeth yet? Does she bite you?” What really impresses is the range and the heft of the journal, watching the sheer array of what is happening in writing, predominantly throughout the United States, it might seem. Should more Canadians start sending work in, to make the “American” of New American Writing become larger than just the United States (I’ve noticed Legris, for example, has published more than a couple of times in the journal)? What of Mexico, perhaps? And currently, I’m working on a section of “Canadian poetry” for their next issue, due out in exactly a year from now.

And I know I need to read more of her work, but what little I’ve seen of Rosmarie Waldrop’s writing is quite enviable, and this issue includes some of her stellar, short prose poems.

Plugs and Sockets

No recipe for poetry or sex. Just water. In panic you invent the crawl and hope for nine lives. Wives. What if your rhythm doesn’t match any language? Runs down before reaching the knot in the wave? The hand is quicker than the eye, but the space twists. The sun goes down in the middle of a word. Then we don’t know what’s up. Or down. (Rosmarie Waldrop)