Literal Blood in Colorado Review

The latest Colorado Review contains some poems I wrote after Paul Thek. Thanks to my friend Sasha Steensen and the other editors at CR for inviting me to contribute.

Poetry During OWS

The following feature contains original writing by 19 participants: Anne Boyer, Dana Ward, Anelise Chen, Brian Ang, Marie Buck, Stephanie Young, Lauren Levin, Brandon Brown, Kristin Prevallet, Josef Kaplan, Brian Whitener, Rob Halpern, Alli Warren, Jackqueline Frost, Michael Cross, Frank Sherlock, Thom Donovan, Susan Bernofsky, and David Brazil. The feature was edited and composed between September 2011 and April 2012, dates which correspond roughly to the first seven months of the Occupy movement. It was originally published in the Summer 2012 issue of the journal Rethinking Marxism.

Dog Day Poetry Marathon Schedule

See you all there!

August 17th - 19th at Outpost 186.
186 ½ Hampshire St.
Inman Sq., Cambridge

Friday: 7:00 - 10:00pm
Saturday: 1:00 - 5:00pm & 7:00 - 10:00pm
Sunday: 1:00 - 4:00pm

FRIDAY    
7:00    John Mulrooney
7:08    Emily Spiegelman
7:16    Kythe Heller
7:24    Chuck Stebelton
7:32    Brenda Iijima
7:40    January O'Neil
7:48    Jordan Davis
break    
8:06    Maria Damon
8:14    Anna Deeny
8:22    Ruth Lepson: Talk on Alberto de Lacerda
8:37    Guillermo Parra: Talk on Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre
break    
9:02    Lori Lubeski
9:10    Dayana Fraile
9:18    Michael Carr
9:26    Rachel Sachs Steele
9:34    Janaka Stucky
9:42    Bridget Madden
9:50    Gilmore Tamny

SATURDAY    
1:00    Jim Behrle
1:08    Ben McFall
1:16    Susanna Gardner
1:24    Jenny Zhang
1:32    Cheryl Clark Vermeulen
1:40    Ish Klein
1:48    Hassen Saker
break    
2:06    Aaron Tieger
2:14    Jess Mynes
2:22    Marcella Durand: Talk on translating Baudelaire & Proust poems
2:37    Zachary Bos: Talk on L.E. Sissman
break    
3:02    Tracey McTague
3:10    G.L. Ford
3:18    Allen Bramhall
3:26    Patrick Doud
3:34    Mairead Byrne
3:42    Mark Lamoureux
3:50    Erica Kaufman
break    
4:16    Brendan Lorber: Talk on Ruin & Desire
4:31    Nathaniel Otting: Talk on editing minutes BOOKS
4:46    Filip Marinovich: Talk on the Poetics of Initiation At Brooks School in North Andover
break 
7:00    Susan Landers
7:08    Jen Benka
7:16    Carol Mirakove
7:24    Leopoldine Core
7:32    John Coletti
7:40    Dorothea Lasky
7:48    Eileen Myles
break    
8:06    Jack Kimball: Talk on Don Quatrale, Rene Ricard & Billy Barnum
8:21    Ethan Fugate: Talk on Bike-Commute Photography Poetics 
8:36    Douglas Rothschild: Talk on how great he is
break    
9:02    Karen Weiser
9:10    Simone White
9:18    Jessica Fiorini
9:26    Jacqueline Waters
9:34    Edmund Berrigan
9:42    Betsy Wheeler
9:50    Thom Donovan

SUNDAY    
1:00    Anthony Cuellar
1:08    Suzanne Mercury
1:16    Joel Sloman
1:24    James Cook
1:32    Farrah Field
1:40    Kimberly Lyons
1:48    Anna Moschovakis
break    
2:06    Rachel Levitsky: Talk on the Office of Recuperative Strategies 
2:21    Jim Dunn: Talk on Harry Crosby
2:36    Carol Weston: Talk on Stephen Jonas
break    
3:01    Aaron Kiely
3:09    Ryan Gallagher
3:17    David Rich
3:25    Amanda Cook
3:33    Sean Cole
3:41    Michael Franco
3:49    Gerrit Lansing

The 90s

I awake to this apocalypse too
And Black Earth like the earth
Was dying into the 90s
Where I was born

So the dead awaken
I am this grave of empathy
Left over from wanting to live
So dying becomes a property of life again

*

Put the munis back in community
Wanting it is a sign of our alienation
Hurt today that I appeared (hurt)

These personal apocalypses and these collective apocalypses
Render an affect of high school
This inner light and that outer light
Of the 90s in high school

The sky went dark
The world went dark
And only then was there hope

In my 90s where cafe culture reached its peak
The 90s begins and ends inside the mouth
Indie rock begins in your mouth

*

It is a poem of friendship
I am dreaming the 90s before
I could remember anything
There were spaces we shared
The bodies we were eventually
To share not invented yet
There were certain reminders
We were still human forms
That we were not undead
Which sex do you identify with
When you see a vampire?

Sonnet 64

When I have seen the upper

Echelons of America

The rich proud cost unlikely to respond 

When sometime lofty towers

The recent war with

And brass of what Benjamin when

I have seen the reflection

Is an undertaking and the firm 

Soil almost heroically cleaved

And the Internet of debris

Ruin hath taught me so interestingly 

Circulating with telling intensity to win

The major companies

Their deeper allegorical significance.

American Books' Solicitations Launch

• • Thursday, August 9, 2012
  • 8:00pm
• 
  
  
  

  SOLICITATIONS: Limited Edition Release + Reading Come celebrate the release of Solicitations, the first project from American Books. Featuring both visual and textual work by a wide array of writers and artists, Solicitations was conceived of as a means to gather community around this new press and the kind of work it will make visible in the future. An evening with readings by: CORRINE FITZPATRICK DOUGLAS PICCINNINI JARED WHITE JOHN COLETTI KAREN WEISER NICOLE WALLACE THOM DONOVAN WILL EDMISTON And a screening of "17 NEW DAM ROAD", new video by: DANI LEVENTHAL

Boog City 6th Annual Poetry and Music Festival

Among the many events at Boog City's 6th annual poetry and music festival, I will be reading and presenting on a panel about OWS and poetry Sunday, August 5th at Unnameable Books in Bklyn.

Here is a link to a PDF of the complete calendar:
http://www.boogcity.com/boogpdfs/bc72.pdf

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Zoe Beloff

"How was I to put on this play with a cast of fifty speaking parts? I didn’t have access to a theater. The answer was obvious–perform at Zuccotti Park and other public spaces around the city. I decided to bring together a band of performers, not only professional actors but everyone who had a desire to participate. We all have day jobs so we would work on weekends. The project was not simply about creating a spectacle, but would take the form of work over time. Like building any kind of movement it would incorporate the process of learning. I would make all the props and scenery out of corrugated cardboard because cardboard is the medium of protest. We would not get permits. We would just do it. And we did. Our performances lasted from March through May. In this way we layered our contemporary project over the three months that the Paris Commune existed before it was destroyed by the French army. We handed out broadsheets to spectators. We documented the performances and posted them online."
--Zoe Beloff

That Sinking Sense of Wonder (reading)

I will be reading "The Thunder :: Perfect Mind" and other poems of a gnostical import here on July 22nd, 4:30 PM

SOUTHFIRST: PRESENTS

THAT SINKING SENSE OF WONDER

JUNE 15 – JULY 22, 2012

Opening Friday, June 15, 6-8 PM

SOUTHFIRST is proud to present "That Sinking Sense of Wonder," a group exhibition curated by Jesse Bransford. Participating artists are Afruz Amighi, Carl Baratta, Jennifer Cohen, Juliet Jacobson, Corinne Jones, Paul Laffoley, Gean Moreno, Adam Putnam, Max Razdow, Dan Torop; the exhibition also includes anonymous tantra drawings. The show will be on view from June 15 – July 22. There will be an opening reception for the artists from 6-8 pm on Friday, June 15, 2012.

Bruised Music (II)

Music has the unique

Value to be objectless

And sparkling as bling

Splay it that this is
The sound of value
Talking who hears it

Like music in an age
Of control who controls it
Like sampling was not a map

Divested of some soundless
Territory I am playing it
Or rather how it plays me

Until I am an ether called
Control to the sampling

Rate of Reagan I wrote this

Anthem now it is codified so
Even country looks liberal 

All fucked-up and deriving sense

From this no other set of sounds
Modeling no one’s death

Least of all some Caesar

Testifying to this seizure
Called control deprived of every-
thing except wild consent

I realized this voice was wrong
What the music did

Intuitive like all sovereigns

All the wrong notes turn right

The police they make music too

Inside sampled ears.

2012 Poets House Showcase (Reading)

2012 Poets House Showcase Opening Reading

DATE AND TIME: June 30, 2012 - 1:00PM
EVENT LOCATION: Kray Hall
ADMISSION: Free and open to the public

A score of leading poets, representing the breadth and diversity of contemporary poetry, kick off the 20th Annual Poets House Showcase, which gathers more than 2,000 poetry titles. Readings by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Eduardo C. Corral, Thom Donovan, Aracelis Girmay, Scott Hightower, Cathy Park Hong, Eileen Myles, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Idra Novey, Michael O’Brien, Rowan Ricardo Philips, Martha Rhodes, Frances Richard, Leonard Schwartz, Leigh Stein, Mónica de la Torre, M. A. Vizsolyi and John Yau.

Others Letters: Chris Martin and Jared Stanley

"But now, blowing all that back into the recesses is the picture of Bushwick Bill. Oaughhhw. That picture is just so magnetic. The looks on the faces of Scarface and Willie D. That fucking CELL PHONE. The damaged soldier whose only recourse is publicity. Here's the wikipedia description:

The album cover is a graphic picture of member Bushwick Bill in the hospital. Bill had shot himself in the eye after his girlfriend refused to shoot him during an altercation. [3] The other two Geto Boys members and the group's management team yanked Bill out of the hospital room in order to take the picture, removing Bill's eyepatch and IV in the process. Bill has expressed regret over the album cover, saying "Its still hurts me to look at that cover because that was a personal thing I went through... I still feel the pain from the fact I've got a bullet in my brain... I think it was pretty wrong to do it, even though I went along with the program at first."[1]

I still feel pain from the fact
I've got a bullet in my brain.

And what about Pac, then? He's still got a bullet "I" on hologram? There's this essay Charles Bernstein wrote years ago, relating Creeley's one functional eye to his notion of selfhood, of I-ness. Bushwick shoots his eye out and Pac turns his I into a bullet. Not to mention that the I in THUGLIFE stands for infant. This man whose revolutionary mother decayed into a crack addict while he was a boy. Wounded soldiers with no recourse but publicity."
--Chris Martin and Jared Stanley, from "Soldier's Recourse"

from Bruised Music

A different form of being

We are right now singing

Far off into the flower

Of our being

A bruised music staying

Blue, this Reagan machine

That we were, over-

Identifying with the world

Loving life like this were

Life, that is what is means

To be bruised, so we are

Decadent and blue

Like this earful until

We were an abiding music

That never can be love

Until we were the deep

Experiment of this music

Before technology was born

This weeping until we

Could understand its song

As a form of money

Like rap always was a form

Of money any form

Of music really isn’t.

5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Melanie Gilligan (at Art21 blog)

"When I made Popular Unrest I suppose I opened up a Pandora’s Box by experimenting in creating non-individual subjects – i.e. I developed that film using acting workshops in which I asked the group of actors to work together to make up different aspects of a particular person or of an emotional state. I was trying to push for a breakdown of individual, separate characters and to see if I could depart from making the type of drama that is premised on this separation. I didn’t get all the way there by any means but I think I made some headway. But now with this new film the questions that arise from the premise are potentially more difficult to handle – e.g. what would feeling someone else’s feelings mean, and how do I as a filmmaker represent it? These questions are challenging but fascinating because thinking them through has implications beyond the construction of the film to broader inquiry pertaining to political solidarity and collectivity."
--Melanie Gilligan

David Brazil, Sara Larsen, and Robert Kocik at The Multifarious Array

The final event of the 2011/12 series is upon us...

All I want is to be in a band (at The Brooklyn Rail)

Thanks to Anselm Berrigan for printing (and posting) my long poem, "All I want is to be in a band," at The Brooklyn Rail this past month.

I just want to be in a band, man

And play anything ourselves out of here

Hear these tones like water stutters water

Like sunk ships suture the social or social

History was what we were immersed in

I hear your voice on the other side of disaster

What plays its way out of disaster

Just like it wanted to be, just like it wanted

To be in a band, convince us we are living

In a different future-past because the tones

The political economy of noise with its puncture

Of the present might wake/make a plinth

Through this struggle to be all-too-human

Come back from these feeling tones—

Assemblage, stutter, DJ function

Damn the Caesars: Crisis Inquiry (essay)

CRISIS INQUIRY
ed. Richard Owens

A SPECIAL VOLUME OF DAMN THE CAESARS
WITH ATTENTION TO THE WORK OF
ROB HALPERN & KESTON SUTHERLAND

POETRY & CRITICAL COMMENTS

Michael Cross • Andrew Rippeon • John Wilkinson • Luke Roberts • Laura Kilbride • Brenda Iijima • Marianne Morris • Edgar Garcia • David Rich • Nat Raha • Ryan Dobran • Josh Stanley • Reitha Pattison • Joe Luna • Emily Critchley • Robert Sheppard • Richard Owens

FEATURE: ROB HALPERN

Recent poetry, prose and lecture notes from Halpern | critical comments on Halpern by John Wilkinson, Thom Donovan, Kevin Killian, Brenda Iijima, Tyrone Williams, Samuel Vriezen, Kenneth Jacobs and Lee Spinks | bibliographic checklist of writing from and on Halpern.

FEATURE: KESTON SUTHERLAND

Recent poetry, email and essays from Sutherland | critical comments on Sutherland by Josh Stanley, Neil Pattison, Robin Purves and Laura Kilbride | annotated worksheet on Hot White Andy by Justin Katko | bibliographic checklist of writing from and on Sutherland.

REPRINT: SEAN BONNEY & FRANCES KRUK

The full text of Sean Bonney's Four Letters Four Comments (including responses from Jennifer Cooke, Pocahontis Mildew, Danny Hayward and Lara Buckerton) and Frances Kruk's Down You Go, or, Négation de Bruit are reprinted here as they appeared through Punch Press in 2011.

For Terry

When the sky is falling

And your baby is walking reluctantly

Who won’t stop talking

Until the sky is right again

Tex Mex is on you

Why doesn’t this water look right

Our videos are a commons

Cows bring on a welcome lethargy

When a town becomes you

When you stop wishing

When you step back from the video

What’s the angle

What’s relational

The grass for real and the video of the grass

Do not a public make

Who is a commons at the movies, at the video

Sings a song like it could become common

Waste was only the beginning now where will they put it

Stuff it up their asses

Neither Democrat or Republican

Light beer won’t overtake you

New Wave done as Honky Tonk

Love for the student is a virtue

Let the video lose control again

Stop the waste water Machiavellian

Fuck the filtration of what should be good

Capture the sky, put a little here

Who think about process their life becomes a process 

Against control

Let the video lose control again

Say goodnight like a shout out to the world

Sleep is your megaphone

All that is good little one

This shift from alarm to infancy.

Post-sovereign

Lana Del Rey’s Video Games its post-

Exceptionist decadence like a sublime

Glitch flickering within the silent arrest

Of this system of social wealth tattoos

The hand yellow the soul it looks like a magik

Marker smudge commemorating where

The hand fractured the ethical is aesthetic

Because we are in this bright and fading

Light of spring Arthur who I didn’t know

Before we were introduced this sunlight

Occupies us art becomes a sudden dis-

traction when it is all we can seem to know

*

Can we march there differentiated like

The police outnumber demonstrators what

The fuck’s with that

From sunlight do we come back

From white cuffs and being here

In piss and piss-colored sunlight

Unmediated by

Can we march there differentiated like

This DIY-ness wasn’t necessitated

By the lack of a WPA in 2009

Like we couldn’t make some way better art

Where is the conscience that defies

Social contracts?

*

A group of folks in the future

That is not prophecy but description

The constant monotone buzz that is Empire

To be otherworldly in this world

Bodies in movement producing sound--both lover and loved

The clock of one protocol with another

To allow an inner-freedom in ourselves

And others conditions freedom externally

Freedom that is the result of an in-

exhaustible desire to be capable of response.*

*with some language from Fred Moten

MONDO BUMMER Reading for Boog City

MONDO BUMMER authors Jedidiah Clarke, Thom Donovan, Brenda Iijima, Lauren Ireland, Lily Ladewig, Nate Logan, Kendra Grant Malone, Thurston Moore, Matthew Savoca, Sparrow, Leigh Stein, Adam Tobin, Zack Tuck, and Anna Vitale are reading at ACA Galleries in New York City on Tuesday, May 29. This free event starts at 6 p.m. sharp, and features a performance by Brooklyn's own La Défense. The reading is presented by Boog City, as part of the d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press series. 


ACA Galleries address is: 529 West 20th Street, 5th floor, New York, NY 10011