Archive for Reading and Writing

I will palm your polemicsz

November 17, 2009 · Filed under Literature, Reading and Writing · Tagged , , , ,

From Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern by Janet Lyon.

. . . the manifesto form has much to teach us about the problems of modernity: while it may be best known as the no-nonsense genre of plain speech, the genre that shoots from the hip, it is in fact a complex, ideologically inflected genre that has helped to create modern public spheres. Its influence on the history of the modern West, though decisive, has been largely overlooked, perhaps precisely because its apparent rhetorical straightforwardness obscures the degree to which the form is embedded in the contradictions of political representation. On the one hand, the manifesto as we know it from the French Revolution forward is the liberatory genre the narrates in no uncertain terms the incongruous experiences of modernity of those whose needs have been ignored or excluded in a putatively democratic political culture. On the other hand, the manifesto is the genre not of universal liberation but of rigid hierarchical binaries . . . the manifesto participates ina reduced understanding of heterogenous social fields, creating audiences through a rhetoric of exclusivity, parceling out political identities across a polarized discursive field, claiming for “us” the moral high ground of revolutionary idealism, and constructing “them” as ideological tyrants, bankrupt usurpers, or corrupt fools. (3)

. . . the manifesto as a genre is constitutive of the public sphere to the degree that it persistently registers the contradictions within modern political life. For while modernity offers ideological assurances of autonomy and individualism within collectivity, it also and at the same time draws on the degferral of those promises. The manifesto records just this breach between modernity’s promissory notes and their payment. In order to understand how the manifesto has kept the records of modernity for the past three centuries, therefore, we must first reopen the historical record of democratic universalism in the west. (8)

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My May Poem

May 18, 2009 · Filed under Biography, Personal, Poetry, Reading and Writing · Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

It is 2009 and you and I struggle with the same things

we struggled with last year and the year before and

for example I read Simic’s translation of Janevski, Slavko

called the Bandit Wind and remember nothing about it

and yet I also read Iain Banks’s the Wasp Factory

and there’s something about that which I do remember.

Perhaps it’s because I read the former several months ago,

or perhaps it’s because there is rarely envigoration,

or perhaps it’s because Wasp takes place in Scotland

instead of the cruel cold cut region of Macedonia, where

love surely cannot exist and neither can humans, really.

But I thank Andrew for the exotic verse tome since surely

it has affected my life in some way beyond my memory.

I sit here getting ready to watch the Wire while beyond

the fence behind my house (which I never bothered

checking out since I’ve been here, since October) children

play on a court behind their school with the sun bright.

It’s 5:16pm but feels like noon and I’m afraid of dusk

and I am afraid that my inspiration will heave away

like a sigh around the block, air slowly releasing, children

going to their own homes, to be with their families, friends,

while I watch about Baltimore, read manuscripts, and

get ready to go get coffee with a communist downtown.

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Two Poems for Two Birthdays

May 6, 2009 · Filed under Biography, Personal, Reading and Writing · Tagged ,

Hopefully the recipients, those honored in the poems, won’t read these before the birthdays occur.

“How We Hold”
for Katie on her 19th birthday

Inside, the trees drip their last rain,
the branches dried quickly in neon.
The things we do are blankets wrapped
around the things we choose to hide.
What is the intersection like before
we don our fabrics and warmths?
There was once the picture of cars
stopped at their respective sides, lights
yellowing to red before pause and halt.
Now there is the picture of the blue
walls in this house blue and nude.
No one has put up art in this castle,
but there is a five-blade white fan
hanging on the ceiling with its lights.
The fan slides air gently down to skin,
leaving a chill as residual as its hum.
Perhaps inside the house the trees
are dreaming in large ocean waves,
or clipping their branches like a doo.
Each moment we become crafters
shaping the ether into fresh models.
Life becomes more about clay than
about life, though everything is deniable.
When walking along the street, does
each dime turn its face up to face you?
In the rain the sun pressurizes after
the panic of isolation leaving us waiting.
On a school’s whiteboard a markered
sol wore a pair of shades and smiled.
Across the room on another board
a small cross was drawn beneath a tree.
The trees are not yet shedding their skins,
turning brown and baring secrets out,
but as ents their imagery is still based on
subtraction, white space between limbs,
even if white is the green of jungles.
The house was built around the trees
for all to notice that the house was built.
Open the door or the window, or break
the wall down to watch the trees live.

—–

“How We Had: A Memory of Gorham, Maine”
for Robert Frazier on his 63rd birthday

In the hollow of the trees
where does the strength come from?

How we had those jingles of glass
during the epigraphic earthquakes.

Is the strength noticed through ruby rays
that perusing our porch before dusk?

Is it in the paws of the wild family dog
trekking across the open lawns?

Beneath the bending branches
many names have been made new,

and many have been forgotten or dried-out,
but we still live to see the order of terms.

An undisclosed corner has different sides
to which may be appropriately pierced.

Do you sit with eyes pacific and shut
or do are they always wrenched open?

Those colors of the evening walls
are like gold feet intruding property.

The rush of the blood to the head is too quick,
too quick to be judged before dawn.

The evening’s reds move along transposing
like the reeds and the bramble in summer.

Then with sunset gone we notice the buglers,
birds who have started their evening tunes.

Among the dark figures of all the boundaries,
we discover to have a full throttle of sound.

It may be night but it is not symbolic night.
It is the time of cheerful parties and swaggers.

Outside remains but we wait to think of it,
reflecting on the gold dust replacing red.

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The Diaphanous Quarter

April 6, 2009 · Filed under Reading and Writing · Tagged , ,

a poetry sequence revisited

view the original sequence here.

To Kevin:

You or somebody else in our family once found a quarter that was thinner than usual, but it was taken and thrown into your “school savings” jar anyway. Then when I was thirteen years old I stole it and many other thicker quarters from that jar so I could better afford daily candy bars and bottles of soda. Now the jar is cursed and empty, and reeks of shame, dreams of emulation.

The new yellowed housing development:

motions toward rotting plywood.

***

Solids burned in the basement laboratory

sets to dance, liquid tapping against the pans.

***

Without gas masks we can smell this kitchen;

decaying tangerines, mouse shit up on the counter.

***

Though you mocked every one of my goals,

you were forever coated in their firework singe.

***

We were hesitant to live among the midstate modicums,

the melted signs of our interstate exist rusting, swaying.

***

In the attic certain siblings are still busy kniving away,

but they never edit out toward any erasure.

***

Mother runs down the lane sometimes with bottle foaming,

her plush slippers slowed, converting to asphalt and gravel.

***

When I grow up, you better do everything I do,

says the daughter to her latest, wiry creation.

***

Earlier another beautiful back-slap of freedom reprimanded

before we got the chance to join hands and play in the fields.

***

A sequence of dead lilacs littered in the gulleys, piled high,

eyes set ablaze, calloused hands reaching for the old mowers.

***

Grandfather could make anyone cry talking about dreams, desires,

and how his glasses fell off by the river during a recent storm.

***

A green canoe would coast through each of the ripples,

the forest gasping long before the flamethrowers came.

***

Hookah coals were dropped, burning unhindered like magnesium,

grey disks to black gouges layered atop the thin, red, cheap carpet.

***

Upstate where the elk herds hibernate and then migrate away

will always be our downstate, where we linger like exterminators.

***

After the windows click shut, clamped down, and we nauseous,

we take off the homemade lizard masks and dance like naked warlords.

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An Exchange with Charlie Yergatian

April 5, 2009 · Filed under Reading and Writing · Tagged , ,

From today between twelve and one p.m. via cell phones.

I: Charles

Gathering driftwood,
reflected in calm water,
breathing azure skies.

II: Greg

It was best to sing while
on the pot. Now voices
drowned by dozer cranks
and viper poisons. The
bird remembers being
fed hummus and seeing
pterodactyl gods.

III: Charles

Skeletal leaves crinkle on
hard asphalt. A trash can
filled with bird shit. The
sun comes out and a lone
bird sings.

IV: Me

Lazered concrete as
cough suppressant.
Streets like veins around
and through the steel
tumors.

V: Charles

Prosaic lasers shift
through outer space,
taking no prisoners. A
face sees a face. Halfway
across no man’s land.

VI: Me

What land belongs to no
man? The ghost bound to
chains moves ethereally
without any need to
produce. The links are
knowledge. We who are
before watch the
driftwood collect in
bundles and think only of
space.

VII: Charles

A restless dog paces back
and forth, sits, paces. Her
name is Maya. Her ghost
sees only a shadow,
chasing its own tail.

VIII: Me

Deep within canine bowels
hundreds of worms trade
glances intensified by
heat and acidic process.
Self regulation is the
language of these
parasites. The dog eyes
its next meal with caution.

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More Poetry with Straight Lines

February 19, 2009 · Filed under Book Reviews, Literature, Reading and Writing, Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

Book of My Nights

In Book of My Nights (Boa Editions, 2001), Chinese-American poet Li-Young Lee manages to reference “honey” at least three times. Other quirky references include: “fruit,” “birds,” “fabric,” “night,” and an almost symphonic release to various members of the immediate and extended family.

Family, love, marriage, brotherhood, and children are among the more emotionally potent figures that dominate the shards of inference throughout the book.

The bio note in the back of the book says that Li-Young works at a factory in Chicago. This was in 2001 when the book was released, and after minor research I have found not a single update on his life, so who knows if Li-Young still works there; however, the aside about the factory is actually helpful in understanding his poetry as a form of meditation and even a gentle but necessary escape from some vague, terrible monotony.

You don’t get much urban or machinery in any of these poems, which shows great discipline, and obvious influence from traditional Chinese/Japanese poets. Instead, you get a zeroing in on a form of salvation, important ties to some greater purpose, whether through “God,” or the ultimate aesthetic balance of nature:

The birds don’t alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. It is our own
astonishment collects
in chill air. Be glad.

Each stammer is pleasantly collaborated on through visions of philosophic mystery . . .

How is he going to explain
the moon taken hostage, the sea
risen to fill up all the mirrors?

How is he going to explain the branches
beginning to grow from his ribs and throat,
the cries and trills starting in his own mouth?

. . . and ultimately surrealism that has operatic value in its potenty irrational complexity:

Someone’s separating
the white grains of his insomnia
from the black seeds
of his sleep.

Ultimately Li-Young’s book is a quick read but it gets the job done well. It’s a delightful romp through a “day-book,” or more appropriately, “night-book,” that is also subtly unpredictable in its dynamic range of styles. At times the work seems too simplistic, too quiet, but every approach in this book is not without purpose, and it’s purpose is not, surprisingly, simply to vent the insomnia or depression through verse. There is a higher element of peace overarching the pages that sets them in a gentle, smokey fire.

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What are you reading these days?

February 18, 2009 · Filed under Literature, Reading and Writing · Tagged , , ,

Averno by Louise Gluck

Yesterday I read Louise Glück’s Averno, a pretty good sized book about Persephone. Try it out. There’d be a review if there was time.

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On Reviews

February 9, 2009 · Filed under Book Reviews, Literature, News, Personal, Reading and Writing, Uncategorized

I have found it excruciatingly difficult to review any of the fiction I have been reading since taking a more active conversation role with the communists. Quite unfortunate, but I have been reading nonetheless.

Lolita was great. A worthy follow-up to my Nabokovian introduction via the Defense. A compiled accordion of quotes I pulled from my dusty, old and tattered copy (analogous in many ways to Humbert Humbert, our dirty, old, and quite perverted protagonist narrator) can be found here.

I also read through, with agony and pleasure, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, a sprawling work based in Chicago, New York, and even Philadelphia. Who knows when and how that behemoth of mental treachery can be approached–with every day I think, I’m losing more and more of this. It’s a labyrinth I don’t know I should venture back into. But the summation is this: written in the late 50s, it’s a modern American writer’s response to the problem novels of Thomas Mann and the 19th C. Russians. Go humanism, go Romanticism and Enlightenment.

In other news, there were some cell phone poems recently posted and some work poems, based on a new and simple exercise that is both humbling and enough distraction from the trauma of working retail. See below for an abstract and link to more creative work.

In otherly news:

Free Zinn available for reading.

Speaking of free political texts?

Videos from the Dodge Poetry Festival–it’s like you are really there in one of the chairs dreaming about some pleasing verse, and where did the fashion sense of artists go?! Poets need to start acting like clowns and zigzags once in a while!

and PS: Winnie the who?

Two segments of recent creativity:

“Because it’s just not for”

In response to her mother,
who stood outside the bookstore,
looking at the palisade of red
romance novels and green mysteries,
who asked with a grave monotony
of the store next door to me
that I don’t like to think about,
because it’s just not for me,
“What’s in there?” the girl
all pinks and sweatpants,
wearing her smile like a saber,
lazily responded, destroying
both my moment and my ease:
“Beautiful diamonds and stuff.”

From “After Ringing Up Jena Swan”:

I

Her bright magenta pea coat
wraps tightly around her
frame like skin, skin whipping
around like raw flesh hanging
in flaps but youthful and fresh still
and being the best for everyone’s
eyes as a choice garment or cloth
blossom not matching her any
better than how it’s supposed to.

(read more here at In Memory of My Feelings)

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Green Line Cafe Poetry Series – Meredith Avakian and Debrah Morkun

January 21, 2009 · Filed under Literature, Philadelphia, Reading and Writing · Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I had the pleasure of dropping in on the Green Line poetry series in West Philadelphia last night. The series has been going on for who knows how long. I remember never being able to make it the past few months, sadly, even though I never really had a great idea of the types of readers or audiences that composed the events.

Well, I blindly walked into this one, and it turned out alright. The series is hosted by the modest Leonard Gontarek (a poet I must read more of!), who provided pretty good introductions to both readers. Their names and their background information is listed below, courtesy of the email I got from Nathalie Anderson’s wonderful Philly poetry mailing list:

Meredith “Miz” Z. Avakian is a New Jersey native of Armenian-American descent who has been writing poetry since she was a child. She received a bachelor’s degree in public relations from Temple University and continues to reside in Philadelphia, Pa. Although most of her work is shared through live performances, some of her poetry has been published in various print and online publications including the Armenian Mirror-Spectator, the Armenian Poetry Project, Poetry Ink and The Literary Groong. She has spent most of her life searching for a sense of justice in the world’s inequalities. The message is underlined throughout her poetry and time dedicated to volunteering for community events. Both her personal and professional lives revolve around communications and the role that “having a voice” plays in society. Her book of poems, Propaganda Begins with PR, was published in 2008.

Debrah Morkun received a Master of Fine Arts in Writing & Poetics at Naropa University in 2004.  In 2005, she served as Coordinator of the Internship Program at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.  Her long poem Projection Machine served as the lyrical impetus for a multimedia Fringe Festival performance combining poetry, music, visual art, and dance, that was performed at the Adrienne Theater this past September. She is a founding member of The New Philadelphia Poets, a group committed to expanding the spaces for poetry in Philadelphia.  Her work was recently published in Moria, and forthcoming in Crossing Rivers Into Twilight.

While I was not particularly fond of Meredith’s work, probably because I wrote in a similar style and admired poets of the pseudo-slam performance approach (pseudo because it was no a competition last night, it was strictly two poets reading/reciting their work) back between the end of high school and beginning of college,  she was a crowd pleaser and attracted the attention of a quite a few people who did not seem to be at the cafe for the reading. While I did record (with my mp3 player’s microphone) Meredith’s performance, the speakers were far too low for me to pick up anything, and after spending some time attempting to edit the files, there was no hope after all. But I encourage everyone to check her out on Youtube as that’s probably an even more appropriate mode of seeing her work.

After Meredith I got to watch Debrah, organizer of the New Philadelphia Poets (a debatable name, if I must throw in a couple cents right now), read some of her work–mostly segments from long poems. I got the sense that I was watching Anne Waldman all over again, back in Providence and Bristol, a few years ago, with a touch of Allen Ginsberg thrown in for merit. Definitely influenced by the Beats and the more experimental writers of the 50s (Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, et cetera), she was one of the better poets, or rather challenging poets, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing present their work in Philadelphia. Hopefully she’ll read again soon in this town. In any case, the speakers were indeed turned up for her performance, and though the quality of the recordings had a shitty end-result, they are semi-tolerable (another debatable subject). There was a bit of anti-noise/noise reduction processes that had to be taken, which did not resolve all the issues with the tracks, but nevertheless it was/is a good learning experience on my part.

The recordings were via an internal microphone on a touchscreen COWON multimedia player. The tracks were edited via Audacity, the freeware audio editing software for Windows. I host the files via Box.net. You can check out my other poetry files on that site here (it’s currently empty).

See below for the files recorded last night, or check out the online folder of the entire reading if that’s your preference. Each individual track is a different poem. If I had been more responsible I would have taken the time to apply the specific names.

01 – Part the First

02 – Part the Second

03 – Part the Third

04 – Part the Fourth

05 – Part the Fifth

Regarding future recordings–there are several “end of the store” poetry events at Robins Books next week (a store that closes very soon, unfortunately) which I plan on attending, which means more auditory pleasure to follow.

Oh, and there was a response poem written after this event, too. Click here.

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“For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation.”

January 11, 2009 · Filed under Book Reviews, D. H. Lawrence, Literature, Reading and Writing · Tagged , , , , , ,

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The Rainbow is one of those great, startling books that exceeds its setting to provide universal lessons to the reader. These lessons are in the form of questions social, political, and of course philosophical, and while it does help to know some of the background Lawrence was working with to get the most out of the Rainbow, this isn’t necessary, as my own readership can attest to. The Woman’s Rights movement and post-colonial/industrial themes in the Rainbow are not necessarily as heavy when compared with Lady Chatterley’s Lover or even Songs and Lovers, probably on one hand because the Rainbow is his first great experimental, or rather Modern, novel that focuses as much on thematic content as it does on style, which is a reason in itself you should pick up a copy. The Rainbow is like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure on THC. On the other hand, it’s not too wild and zany–it’s more mild and subtle than something like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, which furthers its accessibility.

And on that note, this book reaches out to you–the three generations of family throughout the book means there will definitely be some aspect of psychology/rites of passage/family interaction that you will be able to relate with. For me it was the elder Tom throughout the first part of the book, who couldn’t figure out how to get his grip on life and ended up drinking all the time to deal with the pain, the darkness, before ultimately seeing a goal in romance, and then outwardly reaching and grasping that goal. The misogynistic trends of England during the late 19th century are definitely present in Lawrence’s treatment of women, but as you go forward to the final protagonist, Ursula, and even before that Anna (Ursula’s rebellious, feline-in-character mother), you start to realize both the social movements to liberate women and how exactly that came about in family environments with the downfall of the male presence in the household, the downfall of that archetype that could previously control but now more often than not fails.

So the universal lessons are present indeed, but keep in mind that this was a banned book because of its treatment of sexuality. This book, along with his other great works, ended up inspiring Henry Miller during his escapades throughout New York and France, being a key biographical influence that’s revealed through Miller’s letters to Anais Nin. But this book, which was “burned on the streets,” doesn’t nearly extend its fiery passion the way his later books do–but still, it’s easy to see sections in the book where someone who puts their selves in the shoes of Lawrence can understand what he’s doing, with the scenes of passionate love-making, as well as the mere description of two individuals kissing, which honestly appear more sacrilegious than the sex itself.

All in all, pick it up, stick with it, and you’ll find yourself rewarded in many, poetic ways.

For fans of Thomas Hardy, other Lawrence books, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, James Joyce.

See my review of this book on Goodreads by clicking here.

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