All the Whiskey in Heaven official NYC launch!!!

All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems of Charles Bernstein launch

Sunday March 28, 2010, 6:30pm
Zinc Bar
82 W. 3rd St, New York, NY

Poets & friends read from All the Whiskey in Heaven
Thom Donovan
Peter Gizzi
Kenneth Goldsmith
Erica Hunt
Dorothea Lasky
Tan Lin
Elizabeth Willis
& Charles Bernstein
hosted by Dorothea Lasky

more information on the book at
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/books/all-the-whiskey/
read a review of the book in Time Out New York here: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/books/83616/charles-bernstein-all-the-whiskey-in-heaven-book-review

Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=31844#!/event.php?eid=353717594665&ref=mf

New Dusie Chaps

things are boiling over at Dusie Collective....

On Jane Sprague's The Port of Los Angeles (@ Harriet)

here

In the first part of Sprague’s book she tells a story. She sings herself, “Citizen Jane,” in conveyance (her family’s move from Upstate New York to Southern California), and in doing so speaks both of personal loss—a loss of feeling rooted in a place—and about conveyances far exceeding herself—“ourselves perfectly pitched at the edge of globalism.” (23) Global or international economic exchange is represented by the ports of which Sprague also sings (“container / as the staple / vessel of modernity” [28]). The ports encompass a local ecology of dockworkers and natural phenomena, drug and sexual trafficking, goods transported via shipping containers and other modes of transport. They are also the backdrop for the United States’ over-consumption; its consumption of world products and commodities at the expense of others within an international community—their labor power, their health/wealth, the security of their families and communities. “ownership or loss / and ‘no bordered sense of that’ / I do not know how we were to be (we) unbordered.” (32) Irresponsible consumption and waste as a result of exception.

"I am testing..."

I am testing a series of propositions about friendship and
Community which may or may not last in time
Or produce the results I would have wanted or intended

I am testing them against the tried ephemera of political action
And reflection on this action called theory
Even while it may be occurring

No dream encompasses this contradiction
Between what we dream and how we wake up
And an effective mode of action within a particular
Set of forces or relations

Thus the feeling one is doing nothing
While one is in fact doing everything
One must act very specifically
While maintaining the possibility of everything.

For Robert

My friend when you go away
Into a medical emergency
An emergency of how living
Is practiced I miss you

I feel I am missing out
On my own life the consequences
Of which a building never
Materializing would make it true

Because the building is never
Built it remains a proposal
Or plan about how prosody
Lifts the body outside itself

How ekstasis cures
Your books remain to be written
Because the possible
Doesn’t end with words.

The Archivist

Because you wanted the world to hear
What you heard
Ears are all we are sometimes
A moment of music on them
And not all this drudgery
That is work and that is
A politics of work

The details not the mirage
Of seeing that’s what the archivist sees
Like we were sometimes just eyes
No longer I when we see
Stein said that
Because the world is mindful

Of identity you were taping it
All the time even the noise even the blanks
Before they organized our memories
What was even searchable
As memory

How any of it could impress us
This is where music comes in
Structuring the thing otherwise
All that time with the tape on
Just in case there was music.