Unrelatedly, I launch my Bywords chapbook, Miss Canada (International) (the result of a. rawlings picking a poem of mine as the winner of last year’s John Newlove Poetry Award) at the Ottawa international writers festival on October 26 as part of the John Newlove Awards reading.
Another selection from the same manuscript appeared earlier this year with
Corrupt Press as Miss Canada. Now, I just need to find a trade publisher
to take the entire thing. I also launch a new trade poetry collection, Songs
for little sleep, with Obvious Epiphanies Press in January, as part of Max
Middle’s AB Series (venue and other reader(s) tba). In two days, we even get to see who might be part of the CBC Poetry Prize shortlist.
San Francisco CA: From Providence,
Rhode Island publisher Horse Less Press comes San Francisco poet Norma Cole’s
latest chapbook, Coleman Hawkins Ornette Coleman (2012). The press
self-designates as “Imagined in Galesburg, Il in 2002 and established in 2004
in Providence Rhode Island, Horse Less Press is a bare bones, thin-skinned
literary press. We publish an online journal, handmade chapbooks and pamphlets,
and full-length perfect-bound books. We believe in the necessary absence of
every articulated thing.” For Toronto-born American poet Norma Cole [see my review of her selected poems here], this is a chapbook of jazz movement and
collision that overtly declares her interest in the musical form and the point
at where opposing motions meet. Is her jazz about movement or collision or both?
The poems seem to suggest a kind of disruption, citing disjunctive phrases.
“Your somatics are your own.”
Like a Fish in a Dumpster
Any further controversy would figure, figure
hummingbirds in
Manhattan then Charlie Parker
synapsoids
beyond function when eyeless eyes are smiling watching you in my
sleep Should we show the exchange of papers? Was it
successful?
Too soon to see the facets, their moving images surprise the other two
upon which were beings, projected time
included – walked over
clap if you want my the new moon which causes things to grow long
and thin, while the full moon causes growth that is short and
wide
Mercy does not come from the sky
Philadelphia PA: I’ve long been
envious of Brian Teare’s Albion Books, and the most recent one to pass this way
is the hand-sewn chapbook, EXCLOSURES ] 1-8 [ (2012) by Emily Abendroth.
The multiple voices, threads and complexities here are fascinating to read
through, and make me interested on where else such a project might be heading.
Is this part of something larger? The expansiveness of the project really feels
as though this is simply the opening to a large, and intriguing canvas, writing
essay-as-poem through multiple voices, quotes, point-form and multiple
perspectives. What else has Abendroth written and/or published? This is an
excerpt from the opening of “EXCLOSURE I,” that reads:
The people were sometimes given a legal option of deciding their own
[sex] [race] [gender] [class] [political affiliation] [hour of maximum ovulation]
although a subsequent [medical] [behavioral] [credit] [asset management]
[genealogical] or [book shelf & file] examination was invariably required
in order to confirm the legitimacy of this selection.
Furthermore, it was insisted – despite “choice” – that each [person]
[object] [country] [talisman] [currency] [border collie] had one “true” [value]
[diet] [pronoun] [language] [symbolic valence] [uncle] that could only be
reliably affirmed by the appropriately accredited [physicians] [internet-based poll]
[DNA experts] [psychoanalysis] [handwriting tests] [neo-natal massage].
The “best” “truest” and “most legitimate” [ fill in here ] as determined
by morphology, financial solvency, first glance, sociology, or experience.
La Jolla CA: Another in the seemingly-unending fifth dusie
kollektiv comes Large Waves To Large Obstacles (2012) by K. Lorraine Graham, produced as a prose-poem response to Chinese characters, phrases and
sentences found in “The Song of a Guitar,” originally composed by Bai Juyi, “On
the Festival of the Moon to Sub Official Zhang” by Han Yu, and (the italicized
lines in each poem) Witter Bynner’s The Jade Mountain. As she writes in
her “Note on Procedure” at the end of the collection: “These poems are all
loose procedural responses. To make these, I translated the characters more or
less literally, but then I also translated the meanings of their roots, and the
roots of their roots, and so on. Sometimes I also included translations of
characters related to the characters in the poem through meaning or sound.
Then, I made all these words into sentences. The vocabulary comes mostly from
process. […] These poems are among the first I wrote at the end of college
after being introduced to innovative poetry and poetics, especially Language Poetry
and the work of John Cage and Jackson MacLow as well as Yunte Huang’s critical
work.” I’m a big fan of what can come out of projects such as these, even if
for no other reason than pushing a writer out of the language of their own
comfort zone, forcing an altered vocabulary; such a project can have a ripple
effect throughout much of what comes after, and, through some forty pages of
text, Graham produces some intriguing short passages. Unfortunately, I’m not
able to replicate any of the Chinese characters.
In the summer of the next year I was seeing a friend leave Penpu and
heard in the midnight from a neighboring boat a guitar played in the manner of
the capital.
Sun and moon, the window and moon, the thousands of grains know in this
bright clear is an autumn year on fire. In dowry slave like movement, I
escorted my guest out more water than mouthful of sand. From ear and door at
night on the side not asleep on her side we heard from a boat a bow shooting a
single arrow. This bullet could play, rebound plucking jade and jade pieces. My
ear learning virtue. This winnowing basket, this girl speaking sound, meat
roasting on flames as a right hand in the capital folds the moon abundantly
vertical.
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