ECOPOETICS 6/7 Launch at Artbook/X Initiative

ECOPOETICS 06/07 at Artbook/X Initiative

A nomadic, “pop-up” launch and open house Oct. 14th, 4-6pm. Readings from 5-6pm inside Fritz Haeg’s Dome Colony space at Artbook/X Initiative 548 W 22nd St., NYC.

Readings and performances with Rodrigo Toscano, Lee Ann Brown, Thom Donovan, Julie Patton, Emily Abendroth, Jonathan Skinner and others to celebrate the release of the latest issue of ecopoetics (06/07).

The editor of the magazine will be present from 4-5pm to discuss the project. / Ecopoetics 06/07 (covering 2006-2009), packed with poetry, prose, criticism, translation, interviews and artwork from nearly eighty contributors. An Australian Eco-Poetics section, guest-edited by Michael Farrell. A Theodore Enslin feature. Interviews with Gary Snyder and mIEKAL aND. New work from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Benjamin Friedlander, Forrest Gander, Joan Retallack, Andrew Schelling, Gary Snyder, and others. Bilingual pages from Antonio Ochoa and Angélica Tornero. Collapsible poetics by Rodrigo Toscano. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Nanifesto.” Artwork by Christine Boileau, Justin Clemens, Ray Meeks, Isabelle Pelissier and Stephen Vincent. Ten color plates. Bark beetle translations, sound walks, field pages, slow texts, dictionaries of imagined flora, and more . . . Copies of the magazine will be available for purchase, also available through SPD.

Notes On Conceptualisms Review at BOMB

Check out my review of Rob Fitterman's and Vanessa Place's Notes on Conceptualisms currently up at BOMB's blog. Thanks to BOMB editor Mónica de la Torre for her feedback and encouragement.

"Whereas conceptual art prioritized the dematerialization of the art object as a means of overcoming art-as-commodity, conceptualist practices in recent poetry deconstruct the authority of author and text by prioritizing ideas as the principle source of a work’s authority. Doing so, conceptualist writers invite their erstwhile readership into a discourse about poetry’s function as a site of institutional, epistemic, pedagogical, and social authority (rather than into debates about how “good” or “bad” a poem may be). Economics is still a big target for poetic conceptualism, but not so much the status of the poem as commodity since poetry tends to operate in a much smaller economy than that of visual arts (the poets whom I know best, for instance, tend to subsist through a gift economy by which the poet is communally vetted, whereas visual artists tend to operate in an economy of commodity exchange even when their works are contesting the very economic system through which their works find subsistence.)"

For Eleni and David

Armies swerve in your breath
Become porous to perfect rest
Insist their guts give out

That the plague is everywhere
We will have been without
Organs or an agreement

To no longer do violence
Committing shit in the other's
Mouth loving the face for when

It isn't eyes all full of ink
I would spill a million tons
If it would bring the dead back

And end these wars become
What we would have become
Were the world so cited.

Abigail Child is blogging

from Rome: http://abigailchildroma.blogspot.com/