In Memory, Peter Hare (1935-2008)

Teacher, scholar of Pragmaticism, philosopher, gentleman...

Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is 'of' the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past's continuation; it is 'of' the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it.
~ William James

Kocik / Levy*

If young men are killing not only themselves but also other innocent civilians with the backing of their people, you should be able to figure that out. It’s too much; you’re not listening. Keep reading. Nothing is in here. Poems, as Spicer reminds us, are written for ghosts—there is no point in *my* living life elsewhere, so this is the place to be.

Infinitely more

Are an infinite miracle

The beauty of something you can do when the attempt toward that thing, thoroughly promised, is penned to dissolve or resolve our hopelessly dated history in a way that feels like something true. Everything settles down from someone telling the stories in which everyone appears, i.e. the writer’s thought in the space of committing to thought. There’s a loosening and gathering into sense, an erasure and inscription of sapient terms that melt in the leavening of one state to another. The poetry of one’s self in relation to one’s self and all that self may be embodied by to others. There’s a gentle curvature in its reflection—it moves toward the readers who come.
~ from Andrew Levy's *Nothing is in Here*

*drawing titled "Amygdala Alembic Talisman," by Robert Kocik

Peace On A presents: Dan Featherston & Catherine Taylor (Ad)

Peace On A

presents

Dan Featherston & Catherine Taylor

reading for the launch of Featherston’s *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* (more info below!)

Friday, February 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & $5 donation

hosted by Thom Donovan with Cuneiform Press at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2 (btwn 10th and 11th)
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Dan Featherston is the author of several books of poetry, including *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* (Cuneiform Press, 2007), *United States* (Factory School , 2005), and *Into the Earth* (QuarryPress, 2005). His critical writings on American poetry and poetics have appeared in a number of publications, most recently Charles Olson: A Poet's Prose. While living in Tucson , he helped found POG, a poetry group that has hosted dozens of performances by poets and artists, and edited A.BACUS, a journal of experimental poetry and translation. Featherston is currently a visiting professor at Kutztown University. He lives in Philadelphia with Rachel McCrystal and their dog Fredo.


Carceral Time

Forced to sleep with their hands exposed
how will a tool take shape?

Dreams take the shapes of tools
through which the body escapes itself.
A wake. A spoon baked into a cake.

In the fist of memory
time was folding inward.

(from *The Clock Maker’s Memoir*)


Catherine Taylor teaches at Ohio University. Her essays, poetry, and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Xantippe, The Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Jacket, and ActionNow. Taylor is a Founding Editor of Essay Press (www.essaypress.org), a small press dedicated to publishing book-length innovative essays. She is at work on a hybrid genre book about South Africa and a scholarly book about 20th-century documentary representations of political violence entitled */Documents of Despair/*.


nobody, who are you? A fucking nation? Walcott I’m not. A roseate universe, subcutaneous nipple, prismatic cd playing cum and dust and Oum Kalsoum. National identity’s inevitable as sand, blood, a dark juggernaut MLK refused to accept despair as the only response to the ambiguities of history, but I can’t, today, so far from you, O Canada, who is asked to represent it. Which I’s slip the noose? Salim Halali’s heart may have been a foreign country, mine’s a minefield for you, h’bibi, skip the stones, centrifugal archipelago, ruin

(from an untitled work)

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and
scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements,
introductions, reading selections and pics.


THE CLOCK MAKER'S MEMOIR by Dan Featherston
Advanced praise for *The Clock Maker’s Memoir*:

Through a series of poised, meditative stanzas, *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* takes on the formidable topics of time and memory. What’s evident throughout this book is a careful craftsmanship leading to novel perspectives all around the clock.
~ Lisa Jarnot

*The Clock Maker’s Memoir* registers the world’s variety in small catalogs of storms, shadows, dreams, memories, and rituals of childhood. In such forms, time returns each time with a difference. Likewise, the supple measure of these poems returns us to a rhythm or tone each time with a difference, sounding a subtle echo of slipped in sleep. As William Blake declares, “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it.” Yet Dan Featherston finds it — through alert and resourceful art.
~ Devin Johnston

With its precise music, *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* navigates the immeasurable distance between the clock’s face and the face worn by lived experiences. In these poems, memoir is not some static repository: it is a poesis of the present tense. Featherston’s craft and his unblinking commitment to particulars fashion a lyric search that one can trust to ask the questions, the necessary questions of time, space, and how we find one another amidst all this memory.
~ Richard Deming

This book will soon be available from Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org). Order direct from Cuneiform (www.cuneiformpress.com) and you'll receive FREE SHIPPING. Send a $12 check to: Cuneiform | 214 North Henry Street | Brooklyn, NY 11222

“Effort lay in us
before religions”
~ Lorine Niedecker










photos courtesy Dan Featherston & Geoffrey Gatza

My Chance (II)

Sings amber rose hues blue
Splits the morning air sun

Rendered a perpetual window
Everywhere you should really

Read the paper dummy pay
Attention follow hand to its living

Conclusion caresses can do no
Harm in fact they wander without

End distractedly like the body
Can't know anything when we

Do what we do I think of talking
Like this also a "happy" poem

A "sad" one undergoes skin
Stalks eyes pressure intends

Sings the bright blue white
What happens happens since

You are a song or pressed to
Me what is news anyway when

No one was a product no one
Was alienated brifely we could

See things finally as just things
Things just in their thing-ness.