For Simone and Etel

I.
What if Charles Olson
Had gotten that Fulbright
To travel to Iraq would
We be sitting here right

Now before a revolution
After a war would the sun
Be late in the afternoon
Like some angel of no

One’s culture wishing
Things were different
This world we can see
Everyday with our eyes

Not a subtle one just the
Familiar stench of wealth
In Manhattan's Upper
West Side in contrast

It is so subtle to be
With you in conversation
Admire the bright ivy
Covering the back

Edifice of your apart-
ment building the Persian
Rugs and the books
Missing from your

Bookcases as if you
Were barely moved in
More likely in transit
The simplicity of

Your kitchen the fruit
On your table cherries
And red grapes a warm
Aesthetic of Sufism.

II.
“Such distances are short”
--Etel Adnan

Like the progress one makes
From sign-to-sign site-to-site
Since now we must be earth-bound

We can imagine other ages
Aeons when this isn’t so when
There is here where I is you

And this horizon is continually
Thin always waking smelling sweet
Becoming smells sweeter being

With you there is recourse to
Sensuality a kind of thinking or
Nonsense because the sun says so.

Goo Gone (at CUP)

GOO GONE
Risk, Responsibility, and Toxins in the Landscape
Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 7–9 pm
The Old American Can Factory (In the courtyard, weather permitting)
232 Third St at Third Ave
Gowanus, Brooklyn
Free and open to the public, RSVP to info@anothercupdevelopment.org
Refreshments provided!

CUP's office is now located in a potential SUPERFUND SITE. Superfund is a federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country. There are over 1,331 final and proposed sites on the National Priorities List (NPL), and thousands more wait for approval. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed adding the Gowanus Canal to this list.

Please join the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), and Urban Omnibus for a different kind of Superfund discussion. Artist Brooke Singer, advocate Anne Rabe, and historian Sarah Vogel will discuss the history of the Superfund program, the politics of designation, and the changing legal definitions of toxins, risk, and responsibility. Local experts will also give updates on the status of the Gowanus’ designation.

Anne Rabe is the BE SAFE campaign coordinator for the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice. Anne has 25 years of organizing experience on environmental and social justice issues. From 1990 to 2003, she was director and co-founder of Citizens' Environmental Coalition, a statewide grassroots organization in New York State helping communities harmed by toxic pollution and organizing campaigns on State Superfund, radioactive waste disposal, Kodak's dioxin pollution, and other issues. She has received eight state and national awards for her work.


Brooke Singer is a media artist who lives in New York City. Her work blurs the borders between science, technology, politics, and arts practices. She works across media to provide entry into important social issues that are often characterized as specialized or opaque to the general public. She is currently Assistant Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, and co-founder of the art, technology, and activist group Preemptive Media. She recently created Superfund365, an online data visualization and communication tool that highlights 365 of the worst toxic sites across the U.S.:
http://www.superfund365.org/

Sarah Vogel is currently the Program Officer for the Environmental Health program at the Johnson Family Foundation. She received her PhD from Columbia University’s Department of Sociomedical Sciences. Her dissertation, The Politics of Plastics: The Molecular Biography of Bisphenol A, tells the history of the science and politics of this chemical, used in plastics production since the 1950s, known to have estrogen-like properties, and now found in the vast majority of American bodies. Her research and writing considers the question of how we all became a little plastic and the changing meaning of chemical risks and safety over time.

Perplexed Bear

Dottie's photo from a dinner plate last night is begging for a poem about it.

Pages (Iran)

Surfing to find out information about the current situation in Iran I came across Pages. http://www.pagesmagazine.net/2006/magazines.php

PennSound author page

I now have a PennSound author page. Thank you to Michael Hennessey for his work on the page! More recordings are on the way with any luck...
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Donovan.php

After Temple Grandin

It is not a complex feeling
It is pure empathy in the
Sense that I is not I but

One of them slaughtered
The animal is the most log-
ical creature for the ways

It computes the real smells
Its way back from distances
Memorizes whole geographies

I want to remember you
Like a series of chutes and
Bolts which feel no pain

As they are appearing to
You watched I want to calcu-
late the pain that we are

All worth and does not speak
Except wordlessly like a
Single picture can sometimes

Tell the truth of our
Cruelty or the malice of
These everyday embodiments.

War and Peace 4: Vision and Text

WAR AND PEACE 4: VISION AND TEXT is devoted to collaborations between visual works and poetry, includes collaborative works of Charles Bernstein with Susan Bee, Amy Evans McClure with Michael McClure, Kiki Smith with Leslie Scalapino, Denise Newman with Gigi Janchang, a film on paper by Lyn Hejinian, Alan Halsey's visual texts, Simone Fattal, and Petah Coyne. Judith Goldman interviews Marjorie Welish, Lauren Shufran interviews Jean Boully, Leslie Scalapino interviews Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Also included are E. Tracy Grinnell's homophonic translations of Claude Cahun's "Helene la rebelle" and poems by Fanny Howe, Thom Donovan, and others.

Yes Men Strike Again

I received another "hopeful news pandemic" form the Yes Men's mailing list this morning, this time strategizing for the Copenhagen climate conference coming up December 7-18 later this year. Read all about it...

June 18, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TOP HEADLINE: WORLD LEADERS SIGN PACT TO AVERT CLIMATE DISASTER
Newspaper Ignites Hope, Announces "Civil Disobedience Database"

* Civil-disobedience database: http://BeyondTalk.net
* PDF of printed newspaper: http://iht.greenpeace.org/todays-paper/
- Online version: http://www.iht-se.com/ * Video: http://iht.greenpeace.org/video/ (coming soon)
* CONTACT:
- The Yes Men, mailto:press [at]theyesmen [dot]org
- Mark Breddy (Greenpeace), mailto:mark.breddy [at]greenpeace [dot] org,
(+32) (0)2 2741 903, (+32) (0)496 15 62 29 (mob.)
- Lawrence Bogad, mailto:l.m.bogad@gmail.com,
+1-212 300 7943

In a front-page ad in today's International Herald Tribune, the leaders of the European Union thank the European public for having engaged in months of civil disobedience leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference that will be held this December. "It was only thanks to your massive pressure over the past six months that we could so dramatically shift our climate-change policies.... To those who were arrested, we thank you."

There was only one catch: the paper was fake.

Looking exactly like the real thing, but dated December 19th, 2009, a million copies of the fake paper were distributed worldwide by thousands of volunteers in order to show what could be achieved at the Copenhagen climate conference that is scheduled for Dec. 7-18, 2009. (At the moment, the conference is aiming for much more modest cuts, dismissed by leading climate scientists as too little, too late to stave off runaway processes that will lead to millions or even billions of casualties.)

The paper describes in detail a powerful (and entirely possible) new treaty to bring carbon levels down below 350 parts per million - the level climate scientists say we need to achieve to avoid climate catastrophe. One article describes how a website, http://BeyondTalk.net, mobilized thousands of people to put their bodies on the line to confront climate change policies - ever since way back in June, 2009.

Although the newspaper is a fake (its production and launch were coordinated by Greenpeace), the website is real. Beyondtalk.net is part of a growing network of websites calling for direct action on climate change, building on statements made in recent months by noted political figures. (For example, in September Nobel laureate Al Gore asserted that "we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants.")

Leading American environmentalist Bill McKibben was enthusiastic about the newspaper's message and the methods BeyondTalk.net calls for. "We need a political solution grounded in reality - grounded in physics and chemistry. That will only come if we can muster a wide variety of political tactics, including civil disobedience."

"Non-violent civil disobedience has been at the forefront of almost every successful campaign for change," said Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men, who helped write and edit the newspaper and are furnishing the technology for BeyondTalk.net. "Especially in America, and especially today, we need to push our leaders hard to stand up to industry lobbyists and make the sorts of changes we need."

"Roosevelt would never have been able to push through the New Deal if people hadn't taken to the streets, occupied factories, and demanded it," noted newspaper writer/editor and University of California professor Lawrence Bogad. Segregation, British rule in India, and apartheid wouldn't have ended without a lot of people being creatively uncooperative - even if that meant getting arrested. Nonviolent civil disobedience is the bread and butter of progress."

The fake newspaper also has an ad for "Action Offsets," whereby those who aren't willing to risk arrest can help those who are.

A HOPEFUL NEWS PANDEMIC?

Today's fake International Herald Tribune is part of a rash of recent publications which mimic prominent newspapers. Last November, a fake edition of the New York Times announced that the Iraq War was over. A few days earlier, a hoax USA Today featured the US presidential election result: "Capitalism Wins at the Polls: Anarchy Brewing in the Streets." And this April 1st, a spoof edition of Germany's Zeit newspaper triumphantly announced the end of "casino capitalism" and the abolition of poor-country debt.

The rash of fakes is likely to continue. "People are going to keep finding ways to get the word out about common-sense solutions those in power say are impossible," said Kelli Anderson, one of the designers of the fake International Herald Tribune and co-designer (with Daniel Dunnam) of BeyondTalk.net.

"We already know what we need to do about climate change," said Agnes de Rooij of Greenpeace International. "It's a no-brainer. Reduce carbon emissions, or put the survival of billions of people at risk. If the political will isn't there now, it's our duty to inspire it."

Snow Sensitive Skin review at Jacket 37

Here is a review I wrote of Taylor Brady's and Rob Halpern's collaboration Snow Sensitive Skin, published in a small edition chapbook by Michael Cross' Atticus/Finch press back in 2007.

I hope this book will come back into print, as it has so much to say about the state of lyric today in relation to the disasters which have come to define daily social existence and geopolitics. Few books I have read feel closer to the "real" of our super mediated present. Few books are also as intensely musical, during an age in which most of the poetry that counts is resolutely against lyricism except to sample, parody, or simply destroy it from the inside-out.

Snow Sensitive Skin proves that prosody can be an effective counter-hegemonic strategy in any age, but especially this one.

Red Lines at Queens Museum of Art

Damon Rich [director of Center for Urban Pedagogy] opens his latest exhibition Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center at the Queens Museum of Art on Saturday, June 20. Red Lines is a large-scale installation that explores how we finance our living environments, and will remain on view through September 27, 2009. Opening day events include: a 3–5 pm screening and discussion of Primetime: Fighting Back Against Foreclosure, a documentary by Jennifer Fasulo and Manauvaskar Kublall looking at predatory loan practices and their aftermath, and a blow-out 5–7 pm reception. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Queens Museum Panorama of New York City has been used to map the pattern of 2008 foreclosures across the city. Red Lines is curated by Larissa Harris, and is a project of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). More information at
http://www.queensmuseum.org/exhibitions/redlines.htm

June 20, 2009
Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens, NY
7 to Shea Stadium

Oakenwolf

I feel very honored to have the following (Soma)tic Exercise dedicated to myself and Dorothea Lasky by our colleague and friend CAConrad. I am looking forward to trying out the writing exercise as soon as my leaf is ready...

(HH) Hamlet House review at FANZINE

Here's a review of Lilac Co and St Johns Theater's work-in-progress (HH) Hamlet House up at FANZINE now. Check it out!

from the review:
"In (HH) hamlet house we are neither what we do or what we say, but the desynching of saying and doing, speech and gesture. Even though (HH) hamlet house is live, it presents the now obvious fact that what is said and what is done are virtual to each other. I am reminded of this desynching, too, when Ophelia announces that she will turn green, takes her hands from a bucket of water, and starts painting herself green with a dab of paint. The effect of this action is affecting not just because it is weird (it would be too easy to call this gesture “weird”), but because of its play between what can be imagined at the level of speech (“I will paint myself green”) and what the theater can make real (the act of painting one’s self green). When the possible becomes instantiated (where it once existed only virtually at the level of statement) we wonder and are moved."

New links on disability and somatics at Nonsite Collective

There have been quite a few new contributions to the "Somatics as Aesthetic Practice" curriculum (formerly "Poetics of Disablement") at the Nonsite Collective's website recently. Here are some links:

Two Essays by Sue Schweik

"Aesthetics as Somatic Practice" workbook pages

Patrick Durgin on disability and poetics

Raúl Zurita at the School of Nursing: The Poetics of Healing

About "That Same Nowhere"

Two essential links on Torture

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090601/chomsky?rel=emailNation

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/20/torture

Bhanu Kapil interviewed by Lisa Birman

Check out this interview of Bhanu Kapil at Trickhouse.

Lisa Birman: ...In Ars Poetica in 2007, you said, “… if poetry is written in a third space, some place less obvious than the colours blue or red, then where is that space?” You do posit that space, in Ars Poetics, but now is a different time and space. So, where is that space?

Bhanu Kapil: It’s the darkest space possible. I wait until the garden has gone dark, for example, before throwing a book into it, and sometimes, the whole day passes without writing or thinking but with the intense longing to do those things. When I was a child, for example, I forced my parents, and the Manders, the elderly couple whose car it was – we were all squashed in on a drive around Lake Coniston – to pull over next to a cobblestone bridge. Mrs. Manders had already pointed it out as the bridge Wordsworth sat beneath to write poems. I was thirteen or fourteen, and clearly, already, unmarriageable, as I demanded that they stop the car and let me out. As I recall, they waited in the car as darkness and a light rain fell, while I sat, knees up, hunched, under that bridge, writing a poem. But it wasn’t a poem. I was writing nonsense. I was making what I would now call notes. Curved space, rural space, British space. But what triples a space? What makes a space trans-generational, so that it triplicates the problem, just as sexual and relational dysfunction are the particulate trace of a disjunctive event far preceding them? A cube of dark space, bounded by Plexiglas…ideally, I’d write my first sentence in that room. The darkness, as I think of it now, is Pakistan. Because the third space, like Heidegger’s borderline, can’t be brought into language unless it’s after the fact. And so, I want that to open up when someone opens the book I haven’t written yet…the immensity and ephemerality of border space. I want to trans-sect it, enter it, lie down in it, at the same instant that language does. Building that vibration has meant preventing language from coming. It’s meant that 80 per cent of my time, at least for this current project, has been spent on site-specific concerns, you could say. I go to India, for example, to scrape the darkness into a jar. Darkness, and a kind of blazing white fog.

Vulva Speaking* (Into Bride)

Having Santa Claus in my body
The simultaneity of its contradictions
Where to go between steps (the first declivity)
Bewilderment of weight and displacement

Cezanne’s unhappiness at his roses dying too soon
As part of my being unteachable
Muscle memory--I imagined it effortlessly
The lover animal, the human animal

As if questioning if the act is virtual
Most of the work is lost
To extensivity (movement, projection, mobility)
No constancy to the momentum in space.

*all language taken from Carolee Schneemann's 5/18/2009 talk at St. Mark's Church

Jane Sprague's Apache Roadkill

This little book packs a wallop. So much has been said by our parents/parent generation about Vietnam. Now the child tells the tale through the filter of adulthood. The effect is affecting--evoking the stuttering wail of Susan Howe's poetics or the telepathic syntactical jumble of one of Hannah Weiner's ms pages. Removed generationally from the event, do we as the (American) children of the event have a need to mourn and process? Yes! This book is a pitch perfect negotiation of the right (read "rite") of autobiography to work-through while resisting the deadening symbolization of collective memory (local, national, tribal, or otherwise). Read it and weep (literally).

"In 1969 all the children were killers and we weren't one of them eating paper, Kimmy and where were you I did not then and do not now know how to talk my father BULTACO and I remember the dirty flying that dirt track the way the pebbles felt flying up and hit you the smell slightly metal diesel some strong fuel mix which makes motorcycles go and I know or think we must've crawled skinny wrists and chubby while our fathers watched us I don't know where the women went but we would have been small enough to listen under trees and crawl just shy of the image"
--from Apache Roadkill

I am reading this Sunday...

at HomeBase IV with Dorothea Lasky and Katy Lederer. See the ad below. Thanks to Stuart Krimko and Christopher Stackhouse for inviting me:

Dear friends of Readings at Max Protetch,

Chris and I have put together a reading in conjunction with HomeBase IV for next Sunday, May 24, at 2:00pm. Perfect pre-bbq fare.

HomeBase is a roving public art project currently in its fourth incarnation at 232 East Broadway; the reading will be held there. Directions and further information here.

We're quite happy to have Thom, Dorothea, and Katy reading:

Thom Donovan edits the weblog Wild Horses of Fire (whof.blogspot.com), coedits ON Contemporary Practice, and is an ongoing participant in the Nonsite Collective. Since 2006 he has curated PEACE events series in New York City and he is also a curator for the SEGUE reading series. His recent poetry, essays, and reviews have been published by War and Peace vol. 4 (O Books), The Brooklyn Rail, MUSEO, and Vigilance Society. He currently teaches at Bard College and Baruch College.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), as well as several chapbooks. Currently, she studies creativity and 21st Century Learning at the University of Pennsylvania. Videos of her reading poems with other poets can be found on www.birdinsnow.com.

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008), as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003). She lives in Brooklyn.

Hope to see you!

Reading info:

Thom Donovan, Dorothea Lasky, Katy Lederer
Sunday, May 24, 2:00pm
at HomeBase IV
232 East Broadway

curated by Stuart Krimko and Christopher Stackhouse of Readings at Max Protetch

The 13 People Who Made Torture Possible

here

We Did It

And we are still doing it
We is still doing it

We and our allies
And the friends of we

We is powerful if only
In this that

It can make a policy
Of burying

The evidence of its crimes in
The wide open it has

Excuse upon excuse for this
It (the we) laughs

It off with a shrug
We points the finger at

Everyone else
Except itself

Or the market or
Geopolitical strategies

Or the military industrial
Complex which

Must be assuaged
And so the world

Is threatened
By we's example

And so we
Is threatened

By other we's
Would Kissinger survive

A minute before
An international court

Of justice not swayed
By the sovereignty

Of we would the Bushes?
The answer seems obvious

We is terrified
To account for its

Process of election
What is it about we that

Wants to make a man with brown
Skin detained sit naked

With a Playboy while
We takes pictures of him?

What perversity of we
Permits simulated drowning?

When will we finally feel
Some culpability in its we-ness?