L'Immortelle

My immortal
will you go

to hell with me
finally not be

substitutable
for anything

"you make me
weep, you made

me weak" my
heart is old and

not old the way
we stay so still

and seem to turn
away from this

world of light
the way that mo

tion makes us
a dwelling.

Peace On A presents: readings by PhillySound (Ad)*

Peace On A

presents

readings by PhillySound

featuring:
CAConrad
Mytili Jagannathan
Dorothea Lasky
Chris McCreary
Frank Sherlock
and Kevin Varrone

Saturday, March 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & $5 donation

curated by CAConrad and hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2 (btwn 10th and 11th)
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Son of white trash asphyxiation, CAConrad is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull, 2006), The Book of Frank (Chax, 2008), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX, 2008), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School, 2008). He can be found at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com


10 minutes into worry

needing us
a total attempt in vain some days

igniting a fashion for this blasted placement

my old thought of where we are going to bleed on the sofa
all around me this watered motion claps winter on the neck

we are not between trees between hairs
split mine in two so you can get it going
keep it soaring
~ CAConrad, from "going to 108"


Mytili Jagannathan lives in Philadelphia and currently works at the Asian Arts Initiative. She is the author of Acts, a chapbook from Habenicht Press, and her poems have appeared in EOAGH, Rattapallax, Combo, Interlope, Mirage#4/Period[ical], and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics. She’s given many readings across Philadelphia, as well as in New York, D.C, and San Francisco. She is the recipient of an Emerging Artist grant from the Leeway Foundation and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.


Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis, MO in 1978. Her first book, AWE, came out in the fall of 2007 from Wave Books. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-edits the Katalanche Press chapbook series along with the poet Michael Carr and is pursuing a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania. Videos of her reading poems with other poets can be found on www.birdinsnow.com.


The Process of Explication

I.
Students, look at this table
And now when you see a man six feet tall
You can call him a fathom.

Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff
Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun
And the alphabet is full of blood
And when you knock upon a sentence in the
Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags

Likewise, hello and goodbye.

II.
Nick Algiers is my student
And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide
And so, I am the one in front of him
And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire
And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.

Likewise the distance between us then
Is the knife that is not marriage.

III.
Students, I can't lie, I'd rather be doing something else, I guess
Like making love or writing a poem
Or drinking wine on a tropical island
With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.

I can't lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.

And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
That I will never win.
~Dorothea Lasky


Chris McCreary is the author of two books of poems, Dismembers and The Effacements. Current work can be found online at e.ratio and Tool. He co-edits ixnay press with Jenn McCreary.


Ultraviolence

Tiny Vikings break Jane Austen.

They play grab-
ass in class, crash their dad's Stratus

on the weekends. They
come together

in clusters to imagine our overthrow,
gossip about our bad

breath. They creep into our beds
as we sleep, gut us

w/ hunting knives, curl up to nap
wrapped in bloodied sheets.
~Chris McCreary, from "Fiend Folio"


Kevin Varrone is the author of g-point Almanac: id est (Instance Press, 2007) and g-point Almanac: Passyunk Lost (forthcoming, Ugling Duckling Presse, 2008). g-point Almanac (6.21-9.21) was published as a chapbook by ixnay press and Stenos for Indian Summer, a e-chapbook can be viewed at http://durationpress.com/bookstore/index.htm. Individual poems have recently appeared in Big Bridge #12(http://www.bigbridge.org/bigkvarrone.htm) and cross connect(http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/i24/g/contents.html). He currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches writing at Temple University and The University of the Arts.

dear russell I woke this morning three am
ish my family all sleeping and I couldn’t
stop thinking of pollination and shrapnel
what a word o the transfer of energy
therein seems obvious enough. it’s too cold
still and walking through this sunken square
to where I sometimes wonder
if I might not break into blossom,
what would students think if I came to class
in blossom? I thought of swallows and providence
and bees how it’s all congealed in a drop of sunlight
and capistrano ain’t where it used to be even
continents drift when bart died I was moved
by all the people moved by him and not by blood
and the two black women who in a room full of
hospital administrators sang a gospel song
their acapella voices ached and near asphyxiated me
I had forbidden the use of soul in workshop
yet when they sang it is well it is well it is well
I knew it wasn’t, not with mine own,
which was bones in my pocket,
a spherical case, fragments
of a word that had metathesized
from coal.
~Kevin Varrone, from sortameditation


Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and
scholars. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements,
introductions and reading selections.


“till other voices wake
us or we drown”
~ George Oppen

*






















*thanks to Nathaniel Siegel & Dottie Lasky for pics!

Happening Now (Ad)

NEW YORK CITY
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23, DOORS 7PM, PROGRAM 8PM

HAPPENING NOW AT THE FILM-MAKERS¹ COOP
BENEFIT SCREENING AT MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP
66 East 4th Street (btw. 2nd Ave and the Bowery)
Subway: 6 to Astor Place; N, R, W to 8 St.; F, V to Lower East Side-2nd Ave; Tickets: $10-$25 sliding scale

Rally on behalf of the Film-Makers' Cooperative at a Benefit Screening and Silent Auction. The evening will feature a program curated by Caroline Koebel of historic and contemporary works recently inducted into the world-famous FMC collection with many of the artists in person. Partake in Two Boots Pizza, refreshments, and hand-screened FMC t-shirts. Auction items include books, i.e., Stan Brakhage's Film Biographies, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Carolee Schneemann's Split Decision, and the dazzling Flaming Creature - Jack Smith and his Amazing Work and Times, - also: signed paintings and other unique pieces of art and expression like Ken Jacobs'first-of-it's-kind "Life Enhancer"!

PEGGY AHWESH
BEIRUT OUTTAKES (2007, DVD, sound, 7:00)
A startling digital resurrection of deteriorating 35mm trailers from the 1960s found in a ruined Lebanese movie theater. Outtakes appears to be a ready-made, albeit one tailor-made for Ahwesh's career obsessions, pre-filled with her signature elements: gleeful disruptions of high and low, affection for decayed textures, a peeping eye for lurid sexuality, and a fascination with unlikely images of the Middle East. Just one sequence of a go-go-booted belly dancer wriggling in an Arabic-language cinema advertisement for home air conditioners alone has the power to shatter more stereotypes than 500 pages of Edward Said. ­Ed Halter

PIP CHODOROV
FAUX MOUVEMENTS (WRONG MOVES) (2007, 16mm, sound, 12:00)
Having studied cognitive science and film semiotics, Pip Chodorov (b. 1965)recent films and drawings explore the terrain between the two fields. While aiming to confuse the parts of the brain responsible for the perception of motion (areas VI7 and VI8 of the optical cortex), Chodorov maximizes the potential hypnotic power of repetition and irregularity.

KEN JACOBS
CAPITALISM: SLAVERY (2006, DVD, silent, 3:00)
An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief.

BOSKO BLAGOJEVIC
DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE (2007, DVD, sound, 2:55)
Remembering the 90s, distracted; a single articulation, a way in.

LYNNE SACHS
THE SMALL ONES (2007, shot on16mm, DVD, sound, 3:00)
During WWII, the US Army hired Sachs¹ cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones‹small and large‹of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of highly abstracted war imagery and home movies of children at a birthday party.

CHIAKI WATANABE
1/3 (ONE OVER THREE) (2006, DVD, sound, 7:00)
1/3 is an audiovisual ensemble with lo-fi and minimalist aesthetics. The ensemble experiments with "one-bit" as an art expression. The emphasis is on using a single bit of information such as one-bit color, one-bit code and a one-bit note. In the title, "1" stands for one bit, "3" stands for the number of audio and visual inputs (one video from a laptop and two sound sources from custom-made electronics and electronic violin effects). 1/3 explores the essence of simplicity within the complexity with electro-psycho-physical perspectives. Sound by Tristan Perich(electronics), Sylvia Mincewicz (electronic violin)info: www.vusik.net

MIKE KUCHAR
TONE POEM (1982, 16mm, sound, 6:00)
The comfort of solitude leads to dreams.

FLAVIA SOUZA
CARNALEVARE (2003, DVD, sound, 5:20)
CARNALEVARE is an experimental film about the ecstasy of growth and decay.It is an attempt to reveal that ³the rawest materials in life are so pregnant with mystery and the capacity for change that disguising them is beside the point.² Carnalevare means ³take away the meat² and is related to the observence of Lent and the festival of Carnival. The parallel between this ritual and the cycle of birth and decay is in its powerful release and potential for material transformation. All the objects used in the set had been thrown away, by manipulating a few discarded materials and juxtaposing them meaningfully they could perhaps be transformed into something new. My inspiration for this small film was to investigate my own materiality,free of false trappings under the sure and unchangeable influences of time and nature.

JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ
THE GLOWING WOMAN (2007, 16mm, sound, 4:00)
Spiraling colors and abstracted rotating text, poem by Wanda Phipps on the soundtrack both layered and singular. The colors created through hand-printing black and white film with a flashlight and colored filters onto unexposed color film in the dark.

MARTHA COLBURN
MEET ME IN WICHITA (2007, DVD, sound, 7:00)
This work throws Osama Bin Laden into the fairytale Land of Oz. A combination of watercolors, collage and paint on glass animation, this film is a play between fact, fiction, politics, fantasy, terror and morality.

SARAH PUCILL
BACKCOMB (1995, 16mm, screened on DVD, sound, 6:00)
The Surrealists were fascinated by the idea that beneath the surface of everyday life there exist disruptive and uncontrollable forces. In Backcomb, Pucill inflects these themes with a feminist sensibility. In her film, the feminine, is neither personified nor idealised but remains symbolic - we never see the face of the woman with the black hair, nor do we hear her speak, but we come to see her as an almost elemental force. She suggests there is no escaping restrictive social definitions without some kind of violence, symbolic or otherwise. -- Chris Darke, London Production Fund

JUD YALKUT
KUSAMA'S SELF-OBLITERATION (1967/2007, 16mm, sound, 24:00)
A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration. The soundtrack is by the C.I.A. (Citizens for Interplanetary Activity). "The obsessive act of covering (destruction of boundaries-identities) gradually equivalent to the ritual of uncovering (Stripping away of ego); individual self, destroyed in mask/parody/clustering, is transcended. Mandalic (magic circle meditational form used to concentrate attention to a spiraling in/to a point through which new, expanded awareness is possible. The techniques of superimposition, a mere gimmick in most films, is an apt formal analogue for the dissolution of discreteness, for the meshing-merging of identities in the last orgiastic section of SELF-OBLITERATION -- we are confronted with an atomistic collection of figures interacting but one emergent, undulating Meat-Cloud-Being." -- Paul Sharits.


SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23
Add to Calendar

Tenth Annual Bouquat (Ad)

The Weaklings launch (ad)

The Weaklings
Dennis Cooper reads from his new book of poetry The Weaklings
an edition of 300 numbered, signed and hard bound
from Fanzine Press
with art by Jarrod Anderson (displayed at the event)
Thursday March 13th.
6-9 pm. Reading at 7 pm.
Also music by Luke Rathborne

Ab(b)aton

Where no one should step
The hell of the "mind's
own place" to ever be-
lieve in a world behind

The eyes while the eyes
Were open in the dark
Blood expanded as sight
Concentric to which

Love is never grasped
That is only an impulse
Of care or intent thought
Only of what I would

Do with you today the
Fact that I wasn't a vision
Of light drawn from its
Object to any particular

Purpose disturbs me I am
Hell nothing else with-
out you to hold your hand
Or see sound this place

Was a wreck with us where
Light must begin night
When black light resolved
My objective withdrawal

Little bells seized his
Ears animals taught him to
Hear the law like prophets
Beginning again to see.

X|O (For)

~ for Emilie & Michael

The wrecks and the lives
never wrecked if not
for love a body blossoms
into it and is strangest

in this duration which
is it that moves every
one the balloon floating
in the train car today

reflects this flabby ho-
liday distorting and
wrinkled where a pattern
spells "xo" "xo" "xo"

somehow there was still
a locus for loving you
other things ineffable
done if only in time this

breath's shipwreck that
mourning may be our
joy afterall a friend wrote
to me writing *myself*

back into being that
'hollow ego' [Oppen] tears
shatter the numinous
no one has yet to kiss.

Coterminous (Regular Lovers)

If you were with
'No one' among so
many than truly
You were with me

Moi aussi! all I re-
member from the
French are con-
ditions of possibility

A 'language per se'
As pure means
Within eternity since
Caresses keep on

Giving--this is the
Book you would
Write and keep on
Writing where no

End should justify
Which lips hands
Seek our event so 'us'
Was always wasting

No time a 'grey-eyed'
Dawn saw it all be-
tween these lines
Athenas pray return.

Prosodic Body schedule

Daria Fain & Robert Kocik are unveiling the next installment of their Prosodic Body collaboration these next few weeks downtown on Wall Street. Below is the low down...

BUILDING A PERINEUM

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has granted us (Daria Fain and Robert Kocik) a workspace in which to continue our prosodic research.

We will be using the space to design a building based on prosody. Some aspects of this residency will be public. For example, we’ve built a rudimentary anechoic darkroom. From 2/13 to 2/24, anyone can reserve time in this room. Suggested uses include: darkroom retreat, tracing the origins of language, wakeful hibernation, hypometabolic attention, swinging open the door of life and death. I call the
darkroom a 'perineum' not only because it has been built in a basement bank vault—but because the perineum (in the subtle body)is the still point and the point of entry for words, and thus the basis of a building based on prosody.

Tuesday February 12: we are having an opening from 6pm-8pm. We will be on hand to speak about darkroom, perineal practice and prosodic architecture.

Sunday, February 17: I will discuss WHAT IS A WORD--the 4 stages of speech and the cosmogony of phonemic emanation in nondual Kashmiri philosophy (particularly the writings of Abhinavagupta) as example of ‘word’ at its fullest)—in contrast to English, psychoanalysis (especially Lacan’s parole pleine) and the neurocentric problem-of-origins in contemporary linguistics (is language acquired or hardwired?). The talk will start at 3pm. The space will be open as a public reading room, with relevant reading materials provided, from 10am on.

Thursday, February 21: the above event will be repeated. The space will serve as public reading room starting at 10am. The talk will start at 6:30pm.

Sunday February 24: we will orchestrate ALL AT ONCE—a voicing of all the phonemes, using permutations such as exhaustion, resorption, forced, unforced, vocalic, consonantal, unstruck, etc. R. Steiner wrote: “The entire universe is expressed when the alphabet is repeated from beginning to end.” Even better (nonlinearly,
atemporally)—in nondual Kashmiri linguistics the phonemes are energies, awarenesses, atoms, that give rise to the objective world. Sound-sum, buzz-bundle, heard at once to see what it does. (I’m also in need of volunteers for the phoneme choir. English employs 40 phonemes!)

Lastly—I’d very much like to meet with anyone who’d like to talk about designing a building that meets the needs of poets.(To my knowledge, there is not a structure on the planet designed specifically for full realization of poetry.)

The address is 14 Wall Street. LMCC Swing Space, level B. Due to security, all visits require appointment. My cell: 718 503 4246.
Yours, Robert.

For (Three Valentines)

1.
Arrows make up the
rules as we go along

in the same spot ventursome
of what is if what is is not

cause for anthem nor
garrulous for forms

what should *not* be ethical
we had to have situations

night and day we had
to have some of it?

most of it? all quantity
became quality in our eyes

a merely projected sunset
the products would seem

too human more than
we’d like them to be

anyway, surplus value
notwithstanding your hands

dematerializes every-
thing it touches, my love.


2.
You were the thought-
balloon directing me

my words your faith
in materialism makes

what’s between
our ears like a wall

creates space stars
time as what is on

them crumbles like a
stencil to this sense

see me please oh as what
isn’t is a horizon or rim

not a mission here’s a book
eat it don't read it don’t

judge us for what we are
precariously put the

whole world would dis
appear if not for these

hands touching you once
the world felt heavier for

which color must discover
please tell me you felt

something too because
there was thinking a set

of terms that our love
was somehow necessary.

3.
"number there in love was slain"

No sunset of information or fa
shion or who-you-know or talk

to these glass buildings ugly as
you observe thank goodness for

love or love’s presentiment at
least this time of year even if

we should never be I wanted
to speak of it also its flickering

locatedness its discretion and
difference if we should not

finally say “desire” there are
children we must imagine never

having there are places and there
are place-names divisions like

time is a series of cells beneath
the shipwreck of our breath

could you for instance “kill time”
with me forever or "go to hell"

for love is it your lips the antici-
pation of them which made

the movie start and stop premo
tions of whatever one begins to

recognize as feelings obscurer
places in our screen-life how I

can’t stop thinking about them
once the movie’s started how

ever we decide there must be
blood--*number there in love*.

BIG DIG

for Kyle Schlesinger
after Lawrence Weiner

If quotation were subtle

and/or then →

a project arrows would point

to this and be arrows

diagrams

and/or this unsubtlety

material changing its mind

the more one looks at it

it looks at you

incanting there is

a logic to

whatever we dig

and/or that, in an effort

← to text you forget me

taking up all this space

holey moley! (not)

market forces what is

recognition to our cause

Every Name in History is I

While the precipitating event for *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* was the 2002 Chechen hostage crisis in Moscow, the piece is in no way concerned with its representation or with the fast kill—notions of the spectacle as they relate to terrorism as a mediated form of political address. Also not on the agenda is a neo-Brechtian foregrounding of theater itself as a metaphor for the presentational excesses terrorism generates. Destruction aimed at the surplus of the antagonists’ “way of life” and the symbolic regimes they hold valuable, are always the target of mutual agitation. Particular to this event is the vast spectrum of trauma existent even prior to the hostage crisis; my interest is more in forms of erasure and arbitrariness—some of the extenuating circumstances of an assimilating regime.
~ Catherine Sullivan, from "According to the Good Wishes of the Tlaxcalan People, Cortez Set Out on an Exhibition"

That all of Sullivan’s work is "political art”—a nomination Sullivan would herself resist—I have no doubt. But it is political mainly in the way that all aesthetic mediations of cultural content produce indeterminate political consequences and meanings. In *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* (2003 and 2004), Sullivan would seem to bring the problem of political consequences qua aesthetic determination to the foreground of her work. “The project itself is hopelessly immersed in an confounded by the painful trajectories suggested by the event, what is elusive about them as opposed to what is directly consequential.” *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* is partly based on the submerged massacre of Chechen terrorists and theater-goers in a Moscow theater in October, 2002. If terrorism, more often than not, enacts forms of hysteria through its immediacy, *Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land* would seem to embody this hystericism through its use of pantomime to reenact the event at the Moscow theater via the Russian Broadway-style musical, *Nord-Ost*—the musical that was playing in the Moscow theater at the time of the hostage crisis.

In a time when few public intellectuals or artists would seem to know how to adequately address the terrorist as a viable political subjectivity, Sullivan has done so by articulating both the actions of the Chechen terrorists and the brutal reaction of the Putin regime as the irresolvable effects of cultural struggle, and struggles specifically for political autonomy and agency. Whereas one might typically ask why the Chechen terrorist or the Putin government acted in the ways they did, Sullivan does not interpret through her art, and instead chooses to dramatize a struggle of forces as they present political antinomies after the fall of the Soviet Union. From Sullivan’s theater of effective antinomy result aesthetic works and events radically opposed to any foreclosure of meaning, a typology of individual and collective desires as they negotiate both wills to power and to ressentiment.
~ from "Every Name in History is I: Catherine Sullivan's *Triangle of Need* and works to date"

Interrupted Form

The sentence is always interrupted. Mind 1 that speaks out loud, or writes, is interrupted by mind 2 that is simultaneously preparing the next sentence or answering a question. Therefore the correct form to represent both minds or the complete mind, is an interrupted form. It takes two or three seconds for the thought to form into a sentence, meanwhile another is being spoken-written. On acid some hippies could hold conversations with two people at once....

The interruptions may be hereditary. My mother could go on with an interrupted story after several minutes without going back and repeating a word. The structure of the mind we each have determines somewhat our style of writing and some style therefore as well as some formation of brain cells may be an inherited quality....
~ Hannah Weiner, from "Mostly About the Sentence," in *Open House*

Screen Life

~ after Thomas Hirschhorn and Rob Halpern

Not in those videos or anywhere will their
flesh be anything other than flesh a nation's

generalized porno of tanks and skulls &
bones rock you scrape the eye where it wasn't

saved by screen savers other fantasies what
would a decal say if it could speak what

promises would it make abjection creeps
like shadows close around the "developed"

world whose gun-bursts tell disastrous schlock
shuck gassy brains shell-shocked marines

rip video contain what glimpse of the ter
minal multiple windows open-up while a billion

others close "kind of like" people monads
corpses global effects despair of subjects

"the multitude" how militarized a world became
our sex the way one skull-fucks with pics

4-EVA magic markers occult whatever sense
brought back collapsed skulls nipples defaced.

Some Sort of Grace (quote)

So I asked her to leave and after closing the door again I tried to say something to him staring into that enormous eye. If in death the body's energy disperses and merges with everything around us, can it immediatley know my thoughts? But I try and speak anyway and try and say something in case he's afraid or confused by his own death and maybe needs some reassurance or tool to pick up, but nothing comes from my mouth. This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can't form words and maybe I'm the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, "All I want is some sort of grace." And then water comes from my eyes.
~ David Wojnarowicz, from *Close to the Knives*

Last Year

I go thru hell
Everytime I see you
And you don't disappear
With me

The meaning of this
Film a ghoulish Europe seeks
Its exhausted dead when
We were little

Universes her gasp
Escaped from anywhere
A portal in the air
Where those who can't

Escape from thread
Reproduce despair
Multiply the survival
Of every possible name.

In Memory, Peter Hare (1935-2008)

Teacher, scholar of Pragmaticism, philosopher, gentleman...

Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is 'of' the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past's continuation; it is 'of' the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it.
~ William James

Kocik / Levy*

If young men are killing not only themselves but also other innocent civilians with the backing of their people, you should be able to figure that out. It’s too much; you’re not listening. Keep reading. Nothing is in here. Poems, as Spicer reminds us, are written for ghosts—there is no point in *my* living life elsewhere, so this is the place to be.

Infinitely more

Are an infinite miracle

The beauty of something you can do when the attempt toward that thing, thoroughly promised, is penned to dissolve or resolve our hopelessly dated history in a way that feels like something true. Everything settles down from someone telling the stories in which everyone appears, i.e. the writer’s thought in the space of committing to thought. There’s a loosening and gathering into sense, an erasure and inscription of sapient terms that melt in the leavening of one state to another. The poetry of one’s self in relation to one’s self and all that self may be embodied by to others. There’s a gentle curvature in its reflection—it moves toward the readers who come.
~ from Andrew Levy's *Nothing is in Here*

*drawing titled "Amygdala Alembic Talisman," by Robert Kocik

Peace On A presents: Dan Featherston & Catherine Taylor (Ad)

Peace On A

presents

Dan Featherston & Catherine Taylor

reading for the launch of Featherston’s *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* (more info below!)

Friday, February 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & $5 donation

hosted by Thom Donovan with Cuneiform Press at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2 (btwn 10th and 11th)
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Dan Featherston is the author of several books of poetry, including *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* (Cuneiform Press, 2007), *United States* (Factory School , 2005), and *Into the Earth* (QuarryPress, 2005). His critical writings on American poetry and poetics have appeared in a number of publications, most recently Charles Olson: A Poet's Prose. While living in Tucson , he helped found POG, a poetry group that has hosted dozens of performances by poets and artists, and edited A.BACUS, a journal of experimental poetry and translation. Featherston is currently a visiting professor at Kutztown University. He lives in Philadelphia with Rachel McCrystal and their dog Fredo.


Carceral Time

Forced to sleep with their hands exposed
how will a tool take shape?

Dreams take the shapes of tools
through which the body escapes itself.
A wake. A spoon baked into a cake.

In the fist of memory
time was folding inward.

(from *The Clock Maker’s Memoir*)


Catherine Taylor teaches at Ohio University. Her essays, poetry, and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Xantippe, The Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Jacket, and ActionNow. Taylor is a Founding Editor of Essay Press (www.essaypress.org), a small press dedicated to publishing book-length innovative essays. She is at work on a hybrid genre book about South Africa and a scholarly book about 20th-century documentary representations of political violence entitled */Documents of Despair/*.


nobody, who are you? A fucking nation? Walcott I’m not. A roseate universe, subcutaneous nipple, prismatic cd playing cum and dust and Oum Kalsoum. National identity’s inevitable as sand, blood, a dark juggernaut MLK refused to accept despair as the only response to the ambiguities of history, but I can’t, today, so far from you, O Canada, who is asked to represent it. Which I’s slip the noose? Salim Halali’s heart may have been a foreign country, mine’s a minefield for you, h’bibi, skip the stones, centrifugal archipelago, ruin

(from an untitled work)

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and
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THE CLOCK MAKER'S MEMOIR by Dan Featherston
Advanced praise for *The Clock Maker’s Memoir*:

Through a series of poised, meditative stanzas, *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* takes on the formidable topics of time and memory. What’s evident throughout this book is a careful craftsmanship leading to novel perspectives all around the clock.
~ Lisa Jarnot

*The Clock Maker’s Memoir* registers the world’s variety in small catalogs of storms, shadows, dreams, memories, and rituals of childhood. In such forms, time returns each time with a difference. Likewise, the supple measure of these poems returns us to a rhythm or tone each time with a difference, sounding a subtle echo of slipped in sleep. As William Blake declares, “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it.” Yet Dan Featherston finds it — through alert and resourceful art.
~ Devin Johnston

With its precise music, *The Clock Maker’s Memoir* navigates the immeasurable distance between the clock’s face and the face worn by lived experiences. In these poems, memoir is not some static repository: it is a poesis of the present tense. Featherston’s craft and his unblinking commitment to particulars fashion a lyric search that one can trust to ask the questions, the necessary questions of time, space, and how we find one another amidst all this memory.
~ Richard Deming

This book will soon be available from Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org). Order direct from Cuneiform (www.cuneiformpress.com) and you'll receive FREE SHIPPING. Send a $12 check to: Cuneiform | 214 North Henry Street | Brooklyn, NY 11222

“Effort lay in us
before religions”
~ Lorine Niedecker










photos courtesy Dan Featherston & Geoffrey Gatza

My Chance (II)

Sings amber rose hues blue
Splits the morning air sun

Rendered a perpetual window
Everywhere you should really

Read the paper dummy pay
Attention follow hand to its living

Conclusion caresses can do no
Harm in fact they wander without

End distractedly like the body
Can't know anything when we

Do what we do I think of talking
Like this also a "happy" poem

A "sad" one undergoes skin
Stalks eyes pressure intends

Sings the bright blue white
What happens happens since

You are a song or pressed to
Me what is news anyway when

No one was a product no one
Was alienated brifely we could

See things finally as just things
Things just in their thing-ness.