A Crash Course in Counter-Intelligence

slowly returning to life . . .

after a whirlwind tour of Cincinnati in search of a house to rent.  It was an overwhelmingly dense trip, during which we saw at least a dozen places (most of which were ridiculously wrong for us) over the course of two days, along with a number of wonderful social outings which helped us feel very welcome in these new environs — a dinner party with a few of our future colleagues at UC, breakfast with the English chair and his wife, and a poetry reading hosted by Dana Ward (of Cy Press and Publico fame), which allowed us to meet a great many local poets, including Norman Finkelstein, Tyrone Williams (both of whom we’ve recently posted on PennSound), Pat Clifford (one of the evening’s readers) and Michael Henson (another Jesuit refugee, who was kind enough to guide us home at the end of the night).

All of this breathless momentum and adrenaline — I should also mention that I must’ve driven at least 200 miles (probably more), going from showing to showing — came to a crashing halt when we had to wait about six hours at the airport before our flight home took off, making me feel as if I were writing my own version of Charles’ fantastic poem “Self Help”: “Endless wait in a dead-end airport terminal — why not finish that Ron Padgett book you just bought? // Cramped legs ache at 30,000 feet — how wonderful it is to feel!”

This wonderful evening ended when a gypsy cab picked us up in the middle of an airport service road, then zipped us home at approximately 85 m.p.h. through late traffic on the Schuylkill (he didn’t have a working speedometer)  almost getting into several accidents, all before trying to scam both us and the hapless Drexel undergrad (who was already in the cab when we got in) into paying twice the airport rate (which doesn’t even apply in our neighborhood).  So, I guess I should say, the evening didn’t really end until  I almost got into a fistfight with the cabbie at the corner of 47th and Spruce at 1:00 in the morning — thankfully, the ubiquitous (and useless) University City yellowshirt who was on the corner took off as soon as we pulled up.

So, all of this is to say that I’ve spent most of the day in a daze, and, as the title above says, slowly returning to life.  I figure I should have the cobwebs cleared out by tomorrow, so if you’re waiting on an e-mail from me, you should be getting it soon (I hope).

CFP: Towards a True Avant-Garde Poetics

I’ll be chairing this panel at the 2009 Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Boston next February 26th - March 1st.  My contact info and submission deadline are listed below.  Thanks!

Towards a True Avant-Garde Poetics

While conventional notions of the avant-garde suggest work which is groundbreaking, confrontational and even impenetrable, this panel seeks to investigate poetry and poetics which adhere to a narrower sense of the term—namely, Peter Bürger’s conception of the avant-garde as work which “demand[s] that art becomes practical once again,” or returns art to the praxis of everyday life. Understood this way, Bürger’s avant-garde aesthetic changes the ways in which an audience interacts with art, calling for personal action, and provides new, democratized inroads to the creative process.

Work conceived under this model might be thought of as “anti-Romantic,” as it resists traditional stereotypes of the poet-figure as both exceptional and solitary—a rare individual graced by the muses—and rather, sees poetry as a common language available to all. The reader/poet is drawn into a larger poetic community, linked by processes of influence and action.

There’s a broad history of 20^th Century poetry which follows this avant-garde ideology, from the stark simplicity of William Carlos Williams’ diction to the high-minded concepts guiding Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist cut-ups, and in particular, work influenced by Donald Allen’s epochal 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, seems to take this ethos as a guiding principle. The Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church in the Bowery, the mimeograph revolution of the 1960s and 70s, and the Language poets’ lists of experiments are all clear manifestations of Bürger’s avant-garde at work, as are contemporary grassroots poetry workshops, listservs and blog-based journals.

Proposals exploring the work of specific poets, forms (the haiku or sestina, for example), venues and pedagogies are all welcome, as are papers which argue for authors or works not conventionally thought of as avant-garde who fit Bürger’s ideology. Please send abstracts of 250-500 words with contact information to the e-mail address above by September 15, 2008.

Last Days in the Bomb Shelter (17 Narrower Poems)

limited edition of 64

Satellite 7 Press, 2008

$5 post-paid

e-mail for ordering information

read CAConrad’s review on Goodreads

Last Days in the Bomb Shelter (17 Narrower Poems), my debut chapbook, is now available from Satellite 7 Press.

Over the past year at PennSound, I’ve had the privilege of being brought into a larger poetic community — both electronically (my day-to-day interaction with our massive library of recordings), and in person, through my work with Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis, the thriving PhillySound scene (particularly CAConrad and Frank Sherlock), and a wide range of visitors and correspondents — which has been tremendously fulfilling, as well as inspiring. Last Days in the Bomb Shelter was originally intended to be a calling card of sorts: a means of responding to the various poetic discourses I was engaged in, and more practically, something to give back to all the folks who were kind enough to slip me a copy of their book or send me their latest work in progress.

Then I started laying out the book and the addictive thrill of publishing took over (there is printing in the blood, after all — my grandfather lost the tip of a finger to a giant Curtis press) and I decided to make a larger edition of 64 available to a wider audience. With the exception of one poem, everything here was written in the past six months, and a few were composed days before printing began. The “narrower” in the subtitle is solely a matter of widths: I had a number of open-field works I’d hoped to include which were too wide for the format.

Here are two poems from the book:

My Last Dime and What It Got Me

often, I have made the wrong decision

no-light burns within me—it warms
the coin clutched in my nervous palm

we exchange electrons (no
natural order to things)

a dampened reaction

in my other hand, a ticket
we soar above endless wastes—
never so dear a price

(“this stop discontinued”)
we make a radiant loop

I will learn to keep my mouth shut

My Own Disaster

a threatened loss

at 3am

is dimmed in its intensity

despite the fact

that I have reversed

childbirth.


please don’t lose

any sleep

over me.

astounding . . .

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo

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James Houston missed the deadline for Radiohead’s “Nude” remix contest, but winds up getting far more attention and accolades than the winner when the band likes his entry enough to post it on their blog. Rather than stick with a standard cut-and-paste remix using the downloadable song “stems” (for guitars, bass, drums, voice and keyboards/effects — a clever marketing plot in which the band who gave their latest album away for free charges folks about half the cost of a cd to buy the constituent parts of just one song), the recent art school grad re-scored the song for four pieces of obsolete technology: a Sinclair computer (complete with cassette memory) for the guitars, a dot-matrix printer for the drums (a nice update of the traditional “typewriter-as-percussion” trope, even if still pleasantly anachronistic), a scanner for the bass (which is low rider-worthy in its deep, dense resonance) and an array of computer hard drive speakers to deliver the vocals.

Unlike most of the 8-bit blip music I’ve heard, this spartan and lilting rendition comes off as surprisingly warm — the Atari-“guitars” have a majestic, searching quality, and there’s something about Thom Yorke’s disembodied voice straining to be heard above the rattle-buzz machinery din which makes an already-lovely song even better. This human/automaton dichotomy is reversed through Houston’s simple cinematography, which effectively anthropomorphizes the outdated devices (especially in the series of “headshots” at the end). While watching the video, Jennifer made the astute observation that, as a society, we used to be nostalgic about people, but now we’re nostalgic about technology instead.

Then, a few hours later the news broke that Tim Russert had died, and we reversed that notion as well — using technology as a means of mourning as we watched the live feed of eulogies over on MSNBC, huddled around Jennifer’s laptop as, no doubt, previous generations huddled around tiny black-and-white tv sets to absorb their own tragedies.

I’m in the midst of finishing the edits on a marvelous Studio 111 Session with Tom Mandel, recorded last week at the sweltering CPCW offices. Keep an eye on PennSound for the finished product in a day or two, but in the meantime, check out some of the other great readings on his PennSound author page.

When I record poets, I keep a tracking sheet which lists all of the titles along with any flubs and restarts I have to edit out. This quote in particular struck me, especially since I was already eyeing the list of tiny text fragments on my page and planning on weaving them into a poem.

winter, where did you go?

Though it’s not super-legible, this is the thermostat in our dining room, topping off at 89° at a little past midnight. This makes me pariticularly grateful that there’s an air-conditioned bedroom waiting for me. I’ve gotten too used to summer in Boston, where there’d typically be one three or four-day stretch of temperatures over 90 for the entire season, and I lived two blocks from the harbor, which kept a cooling breeze circulating through the neighborhood. At this moment, West Philly feels like the 9th Circle.

Nevertheless, I was very glad to brave the heat for a reading at Robin’s tonight by the inimitable (and always entertaining) CAConrad, and immensely enjoyed the incredible cello-work of Monica McIntyre.