Love and Criticism (@ Harriet)

here

"In terms of ‘negative criticism’ (so called), I rarely see the use of it. If it is to dismiss a work of literature/art as unvaluable/irrelevant, don’t we already do this by not attending it, or by not investing our desires and passions in it? It is so much work just to understand poetry/art (for works of art and poetry to become legible to one’s self) I have never understood why people would want to waste their energy on what does not interest them (what, that is, they do not love or desire). This problem goes back to Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book where Duncan reiterates that the poet “goes where they are loved.” I think there is a lot of wisdom in this mantra of Duncan’s, and in the ways Duncan practiced criticism and scholarship besides his poetry."

NPP at BPC

come hear the NPP (New Philadelphia Poets) strut their stuff tomorrow following SEGUE series at the Bowery Poetry Club.

New Philadelphia Poets to NYC: A Redemptive Strike: Reckoning The Decade

At the beginning of the century, we found ourselves in a dark wood. The past ten years saw the collapse of the Twin Towers, the marriage of religious fundamentalism and global politics, and the rise of digital communities. With this in mind, The New Philadelphia Poets launch a redemptive strike on the past decade. Join us for a reconsideration of this yet unnamed era.

Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery)
Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010
6:00 pm, $6.00

Featuring: Gregory Bem, Sarah Heady, Debrah Morkun, Patrick Lucy, Angel Hogan, Matthew Landis, Carlos Soto Román, and Jamie Townsend.

Celebrate with Nightboat 4 amazing books!

You're invited to the

Nightboat Books Winter Release Party
on Friday, January 22, 2010, from 6:30-8:30pm
at Metro Pictures Gallery, 519 West 24th Street, New York City

Brief readings by authors, editors, and contributors.

Free and Open to All

Help us celebrate these new titles:

Century of Clouds by Bruce Boone, with a preface by Rob Halpern

In the Function of External Circumstances by Edwin Torres

Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman, edited by Stephen Motika. Preface by Dennis Phillips; Afterword by Bill Mohr. (Published with Otis Books/Seismicity Editions.)

eco language reader, edited by Brenda Iijima, featuring essays by
Karen Leona Anderson, Jack Collom, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Laura Elrick, Peter Larkin, Jill Magi, Tracie Morris, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Julie Patton, Jed Rasula, Evelyn Reilly, Leslie Scalapino, James Sherry, Jonathan Skinner & Tyrone Williams. (Published with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.)

For Haiti

Disaster's the national pastime
Shame's the natural course
Of hegemony sovereignty equals
Its weight in force

Disaster knows no limit
Limited only by the eyes
That see it not the decibels
Charged by their screaming

Rubble sees in retrospect
From the distance of their failed
Infrastructure from the distance
Of dispossession a kind of curse

Of progress what dispenses
With the ego society no force
Of nature accomplished this
Because we've gone global.

SEGUE series presents Mónica de la Torre & Fred Moten

Saturday, January 16, 2010
4:00pm - 6:00pm
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York, NY

Mónica de la Torre is the author of the poetry books Talk Shows, Acúfenos, and Public Do-main. She is co-author of the artist book Appendices, Illustrations & Notes. She is a translator and senior editor at BOMB Magazine and a 2009 NYFA fellow in poetry.

Fred Moten’s most recent books are Hughson’s Tavern and the forthcoming B Jenkins. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

American Longing and James Dean in Last Meadow (@ Harriet)

here

"The word that kept runnning through my head throughout Last Meadow was “cinematicalness.” There is a feeling for the cinema, and almost everything about Last Meadow evokes this feeling. Another extraordinary technique that Gutierrez used was an interlocution between himself and the other two dancers in which he would say their lines with/over them, timing this “voice over” precisely. Reciting a scene from Elia Kazan’s East of Eden in which Dean (as Cal) is about to leave his house and Julie Harris (as Abra) adjusts his tie, the scene is first played between Hallaby (as Harris playing Abra) and Boullé (as Dean playing Cal). It is played again with Gutierrez saying their lines over them in the Fender amp, and for a third time with Boullé absented from the scene, looking at herself in the mirror as Dean playing Cal."

SEGUE intro for Adam Pendleton (@ Harriet)

here

"That Pendleton’s recent solo-exhibition “EL T D K” pays tribute to Amiri Baraka’s 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” seems a perfectly logical step in Pendleton’s practice. Listening to Baraka read his poem tonight repeatedly at PennSound, from a 1964 reading at the Asilomar Negro Writers Conference in Pacific Grove, California, I could hear in Baraka’s reading echoes of the ambivalence that Pendleton himself brings to the performance of his work—an ever-shifting blend of irony and sincerity, affirmation and negation, caveat and invitation. Through his identification with a white, European avant garde movement—Dada—Baraka gives voice to a genealogy of violent struggle against a society of white masters. Given the content of Pendleton’s exhibition—a set of paintings with only phonemes painted on them, a long row of boxy lithographs reproducing widely known photo-documents from canonical 60s and 70s art performances, and a Sol LeWitt-like installation of black cubes entitled “Black Dada”—like Baraka before him Pendleton would seem to recover a white-identified art tradition for Black and Gay liberation struggles while calling into question the perceived reduction such reappropriative gestures can perform."

Withdrawals (II)

It is easy not to sing
The face withdrawn from smoke
Different than a soundtrack
Which never was of us

Expressing this limit that face
Makes signals in the air
Only that face understands
Because it can't stop remembering

The total catastrophe that was the line
Or the face wishing this
Wishes invisibly
In a language of these days

We became crossed-out
You burned your photographs
To remember home
A kind of body torn apart

A kind of body shared

A kind of body no one shares.