Brian Howe's Lucifer Poets Gallery

...is up at TheFanzine:

http://thefanzine.com/articles/poetry/295/lucifer_poetics-_the_state_of_nc_part_2

After Bhanu Kapil

There is nothing safe
In migrating or maki
ng a hole where you

Should be given birth
To a bardo a monster
Of the bardo Frapuch

ino products combu
stible and red blood
lusting which is us in

A wilderness the wild
Ocean becoming us
As we don't seem co

mpletely to cross its
Thresholds distracted
By the sentences in

Your skin space rese
mbles everything it is
Not so we become sp

ace travel in our name
A kind of occulted
Name we wouldn't wi

sh upon anyone no
Longer any land beyo
nd the sea just these

Points in real space
We dissemble heart
beats spotting sites.

The Extent to Which pics*

*courtesy of Dorothea Lasky. For more pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorothealasky/

Poem for Immediacy

So in its mediated way
Of that windshield
It is the fact that no

Glass obstructs which
Bothers us proves some

thing surprising for
The eye entranced the
Hand reaching through

It to that beer can
History race class an

tagonism inversion of
This obvious trope lost
In the missing glare.

The Extent to Which

here is the official press release and some rehearsal pics for Daria Fain's and Robert Kocik's collaboration The Extent To Which, which opens this Wednesday, December 10th.



"…some of the most innovative movement around."
The New York Press

A Danspace Project Commission

Presented by Danspace Project & the Center for Performance Research--CPR

Tuesday, December 9 at 7 pm (Gala Evening Honoring Pauline Oliveros--please note correct start time)
Wednesday, December 10 - Saturday, December 13 at 7 & 9 pm
Sunday, December 14 at 3 pm

All performances at the
Center for Performance Research--CPR
361 Manhattan Avenue (between Jackson and Withers, L train to Graham Avenue)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Tickets: $20/$15 Danspace Project members

Leslie Scalapino intro for Segue

The next couple months thru January I will host the Segue reading series with Evelyn Reilly. The following is my first introduction for the series, which I read last night to introduce Leslie Scalapino:

In a letter to Charles Bernstein dated May 25th, 1989, Hannah Weiner writes:

"I think there are four ways the poet of the future can work, and you can combine them also. One is to work politically, ecologically, whatever work that needs to be done in the world, one is to raise the level of as I explained consciousness (this I think is done by like us language some other poets of course using disjunctive, non-sequential techniques) one is to work with power, and disguise yourself that quits keep clear about writing new poetry. Meaning grounds you in every day speaking consciousness and cannot alter the mind by technique. Alter the mind and you work politically with greater effect […] The mind obeys unconsciously giving strict orders that are agreed upon by someone who twice dying explains without clear motive like once clairvoyant journal explained." (163)

When I read this letter, excerpted by Patrick Durgin in the collection of Weiner’s writing, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, I cannot help but think of Leslie Scalapino, who for the past thirty-five some odd years has fulfilled all four of Weiner’s "ways," combining them with dedication and passion through writing, teaching and her Bay Area based press, O Books—a press which continues to publish new writing, and organize a discourse about language, politics, and social responsibility. What’s more, Scalapino makes Weiner’s four ways seamless by discovering a writing radically hybrid and anti-categorical that abolishes traditionalist distinctions between poetry and philosophy opting instead to activate thinking through acts of composition. The proof is in the gerund (think-ing) as Scalapino advances many of the problems most famously articulated by Stein, whereby writing must continually enact meaning and not merely describe it. Composition as explanation; but also composition as that which charges experience with meaning.

To immerse one’s self in Scalapino’s work, and track its evolution (and to do so is now made a little bit easier for many of us by the recent publication of Scalapino’s selected poems, It’s go in horizontal) is to also witness one of the most rigorous practitioners of what Weiner calls “twice dying”. As I understand it, to “twice die” is to undergo thinking as that which interrupts a psychological “stream of consciousness,” and thus presents the otherwise within eidetic experience (ideation, perception, memory). This, of course, is not achieved by thinking alone, but by thinking as it is mediated and made possible though writing. Like the yoga master or Sufi, the thing is (lifting a term from Jalal Toufic’s work) to die before dying; that is, to experience living itself as a discontinuous condition. It is an interruptive dialogism (or dialogic interlocution) which perhaps describes Scalapino’s writing most succinctly, as one is not only never in the same syntactical stream twice, but neither before nor after a nexus of subjects and objects determined by event (what occurs, and what happens as what is). To twice die, as Weiner’s statement insists to me, is to give shape to new thought-forms which themselves may raise consciousness, in tandem affecting the political and social as those realms wherein the struggle for a new subject, and therefore new actualities, are born. More than ever we need these emergent thought-forms, and it is with great pleasure and a deep admiration that I often look for them in Leslie Scalapino’s ongoing work.