Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Rae Armantrout on PBS

 

"My poetry just does not seperate things..."

PennSound Radio Launched!

Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of PennSound Radio, a 24- hour stream of readings and conversations from the PennSound poetry archive. Our daily schedule includes rebroadcasts of such series as Live at the Writers House, Charles Bernstein's Close Listening, and Leonard Schwartz's Cross-Cultural Poetics, as well as a curated selection of our favorite performances. You can play PennSound Radio through iTunes on your computer, or by installing the free TuneIn app on your iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android device. Listen at work! At home! At the gym! While rebuilding a transmission! And while you're at it, follow us on Twitter (@PennSoundRadio) to keep up with all of our new programs and special features. https://jacket2.org/commentary/now-pennsound-radio - Al Filreis Al Filreis http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis

 

Now out from Otoliths: *Densities, Apparitions* by William Allegrezza

80 pages Cover image by Deborah Meadows ISBN: 978-0-9808785-8-5 $13.45 + p&h URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/densities-apparitions/17278481 This book explores influence by crossing out or responding to poets who have influenced me. The Whitman and Andrade pieces are cross-outs, and anyone familiar with the first version of C*alamus* will notice that I did not respond to the entire collection. I left out pieces that I did not think would cut well for my project or pieces that have too much personal meaning for me. The response pieces to Leopardi and Neruda are probably even more telling, for in these pieces, it is sometimes difficult to see how the pieces directly relate to the original. Still, the influence is there reworked through my experience. —*William Allegrezza* *William Allegrezza* edits the e-zine *Moria* and teaches at Indiana University Northwest. He has previously published five books, *In the Weaver's Valley*, *Ladders in July*, *Fragile Replacements*, *Collective Instant, *and *Covering Over*; two anthologies, *The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century **and **La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente*; seven chapbooks, including *Sonoluminescence*(co-written with Simone Muench) and *Filament Sense* (Ypolita Press); and many poetry reviews, articles, and poems. He founded and curated *series* *A*, a reading series in Chicago, from 2006-2010. In addition, he occasionally posts his thoughts at http://allegrezza.blogspot.com.

 

CFP: Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing May 4-5, 2012

Hosted by the Poetry and Politics Research Cluster, University of California, Santa Cruz This conference is organized around experimental writing and its many, varying communities including performance art collaborations, small press publishing and editorial projects, virtual and digital work, academic affiliations, and intersecting aesthetic, social and political identities and representations. The goal of this conference is to embrace the productive and generative connotations of community and experiment as innovative acts and encounters that are always in the process of both venturing to do something previously untried, and questioning and testing the very boundaries and mores, however contingent, established by those attempts. Of particular interest is how writing communities might be changing historically in the early twenty-first century, and how writers theorize and make use (or not) of various conceptualizations and practices of community. What do such formations include and leave out? What are the conditions of possibility for a community to emerge? From where does one emerge? And into what? How are writing communities that share an often contested collective vision themselves experimental formations for attempting new modes of relation, affiliation and creation? Confirmed respondents include: Tisa Bryant, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Anna Moschovakis, Vanessa Place, Juliana Spahr, and Ronaldo Wilson. The call for papers is open to all writers and academics, and we encourage proposals that continue to push the critical/creative divide. We welcome interdisciplinary papers that engage philosophy, history, publishing, pedagogy, art and digital media. Conference activities will include panels, round-table discussions and a small press book fair. Each day will culminate with evening readings of the guest writers’ creative work. Please submit an abstract of 350 words to ucsc.poetrypolitics@gmail.com by December 1, 2011. Individual speakers will be placed on panels and allotted 15-20 minutes to present their work. Panel proposals are also welcome. Selected papers will have the opportunity to be published on a post-conference website and in an edited volume of essays inspired by the conference. Please email Andrea Quaid, aquaid@ucsc.edu or Juliana Leslie, julianaleslie@gmail.com if you have any questions.

 

Nico Vassilakis' Vowelist

I've inhaled, drunk, performed, breathed, yelped...this piece many times. But this version takes Nico's score back to the paleolithic past and forward into the post-lithic future (I hear the monoliths in Kubrick's 2001...):

a mp3 version of VOWELIST by (Nico Vassilakis) with Martin Bland, Mark Arm, Steve Dukich, Dean Wynveen, Nico Vassilakis

http://www.cousincreep.com/mrbiand/great%20temptation%20of%20beyond.mp3

Now out from Cannot Exist (but it very much does): Bridge of the World by Roberto Harrison

The title poem dips and soars and ruminates and confronts and...

Here are the last 14 lines (unlike the others in their ecstatic dance of clauses and conjunctions--the others are reflective/reflexive statements enjambed across the pages--the poem moves from the personal to the universal, here to there):

it there to become and to see there as one is there to see

and to allow one to arrive with it there and to see, and to be one with it

 

there as one is there to be with it. And to see there as one is there to believe

as it is one to believe it there

 

and to see it there as one with the soil and the air and the light and rain

and to be there with one to be there one with it there once again, and to see it there

 

and to believe as there is one there to believe it there again and to see. And to see

there as one is there to believe as it is there again

 

and to see there as one is there to arrive and to be with it

there and to see it there once again and to see it there again

 

and to believe as there is one to it again and to see and to hold

and to see it there and to hold

 

being that nothing holds

dissolving

 

Order it here:

http://cannotexist.blogspot.com/2011/03/roberto-harrisons-bridge-of-world.html

Found this essay lurking on my hard-drive, written sometime in the 1990s...

Robert Grenier’s Series As Bridge

            Two years after moving to San Francisco in 1980, my writing models changed from Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and Gary Snyder to Aram Saroyan, Edwin Morgan, Seiichi Niikuni, Claus Bremer, Ian Hamilton Finlay and many of the other concrete poets in Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. My focus shifted from poem as vehicle of self-expression to poem as pivot of language potential. Driven less by personal/political agitations, the need to voice my outrage, I dug into the material of language itself, sought out strategies to liberate the visual representations of language — the alphabet, words, letters, parts of letters, the spaces between them — from their confining semantic contexts. 

            How did I make this jump from Beat to concrete poetry, a poetry I had knocked my head up against for years without an answer? (How in the hell could “lighght” be a poem, Mr. Saroyan?) I didn’t leap blindly: a number of writers served as bridges: Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Larry Eigner, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge, among others. Robert Grenier, in his book Series, particularly in the section titled “FALL WINTER FAMILY HOME,” provided one of the most direct routes into an understanding of concrete poetry.

            Grenier’s work led me to word level, the seemingly inscrutable substances of individual words, a mind-boggling place for a reader and writer oriented toward ”larger” discourses such as poems, stories, novels, and essays. I rarely studied words for their own sakes, interested in them as parts dependent on the whole. Words were right when they enhanced the larger picture. But Grenier showed me what can be done with words themselves by themselves. They were not so minuscule anymore, no longer simple cogs in a complex machine. They had their own formidable powers, their own energies. They could stand out on their own.    

            Words unshackled from oppressive contexts, a poem such as

 

                                    JOY

 

                                    maple

                                    apple

 

frees readers to bring their infinitely varied experiences with “maple” and “apple” into play, or to create new experiences in the reading. If Grenier would have written the poem as ”JOY//red maple//apple blossom,” or something similar in which the meanings of words were more inextricably bound to other words, possible paths of meaning would be truncated. Autumn and spring, two distinct seasons suggested by the adjectives, would have to figure into the equation. Without those constraining modifiers, readers shape their ”maple” and “apple” into the trees, syrups, fruits or whatever else they want to construct and experience. The title, of course, channels meaning by delineating an overarching emotion for the poem — joy — but as a subjective state, tied into “mapleness” or ”appleness,” numerous readings can still be generated.

            Because Grenier chooses to deploy so few words in many of the poems in Series, he’s taking more risks with each word choice. The fewer words, the more significance each choice carries. A poem such as

 

                                    BLINKING LIGHTS

 

                                    wooden spoons

 

opens itself to myriad readings (or mis-readings, for that matter), not something many writers would want to happen to their work. Grenier has the nerve to let words and readers do as much of the work on their own as they can.   

            With fewer verbal constraints, many of the poems bubble with a spontaneity rare in poetry. For example:

 

                                    PAINTINGS

 

                                    lamb stew

 

The combinations of words seem incongruous yet natural, impossible yet unpremeditated. Aware of ”painters” who use non-paint materials on canvas (blood, bodily wastes, nail polish, food) — lamb stew could very easily describe a set of paintings, I can’t help but belly-laugh at the poem. 

            I was initially perplexed by the poems consisting only of titles, words comprised of all capitalized letters: DEVOTION, FINN POWER, SNOW TIRES, LIES, CLAPBOARDS, THROUGH THE SPACE BETWEEN. I couldn’t think of any context in which these words would stand comfortably by themselves (except FINN POWER, they’d all make weird graffiti or bumper stickers), but in the context of a book of poetry, they were especially disconcerting. I decided then that they were poems intended to throw the context of poetry itself into question. How are these poems? How is anything a poem? You can’t take anything for granted.  

             The more I thought, the more I was intrigued by this section of Series. These poems were stripped down; words stood exposed; the poet’s voice muted, the strategy shifted weight from authorial personality to the character of words themselves. Grenier accomplished a lot of different things in Series, but one that influenced my writing was his ability to let individual words stick up for themselves.

            Once I grew accustomed to looking at language microscopically, I only had to take a short step to understand concrete poetry. When I again leafed through the Williams’ anthology, the poems were not so esoteric. I sought out books by those poets and found Aram Saroyan’s delightful Pages. I was struck by similarities between Grenier and Saroyan. (I wondered if Grenier knew Saroyan’s work, or if Saroyan knew Grenier’s work.) Grenier could have written any one of the following poems:

 

                                    Not a

                                    cricket

 

                                    ticks a

                                    clock

 

                                    *

 

                                    something moving in the garden a cat

 

                                    *

 

                                    incomprehensible birds

 

                                    *

 

                                    night

                                    so daylight

 

                                    *

 

             However Saroyan came to make decisions similar to Grenier’s, or at least arrive at similar results, he clearly was also a master of poems with few words, as were many other concrete poets. Concrete poetry, or visual poetry as it is known by its contemporary practitioners, is particularly trenchant in its investigations into the bodies of words, continuing to manifest what the words have always known.

            Grenier bridged my writing and reading from Beat poetry to visual poetry. I wonder now where his scrawl writings, perhaps the most intriguing visual poetry now being produced, will take writers and readers in the future. I’ll be learning from them, wherever they go.

 

 

 

The following titles from Xerox Sutra Editions can be downloaded as pdfs:

http://www.scribd.com/xeroxsutraeditions/documents

O'er by mIEKAL aND
A book of vispoems created on December 25th, 2010 in an ion of 53 copies.
Public Category: Art & Design
Reads: 80
Published: 12 / 26 / 2010
20 p.


1st Birthday DRAWINGS FOR ZON from his MA
Elizabeth Was draws and makes a small coloring book for Zon Wakest on
his first birthday, December 1, 1988.
Public Category: Art & Design
Reads: 149
Published: 12 / 25 / 2010
14 p.

Sixixix by Crag Hill
SIXIXSIX was originally published in 1983 by Xerox Sutra ions. A new
ions with drawings by Jake Berry was published in 1987 by Xexoxial
ions. This digital facsimile was created in 2007. A transformative
language cut-up long poem which reckons with the unspoken fears of
nigredo. the dark night of the soul. 100 drawings by Jake Berry invite
countless associations with the writing to form a work which growls &
whispers. Book can be purchased at:
http://xexoxial.org/is/sixixsix/by/crag_hill
Public Category: Creative Writing
Reads: 137
Published: 12 / 19 / 2010
100 p.

The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You by Bern Porter
Thee manifesto of the post-Hiroshima generation. An alphabet book
which in 40-some pages sums up the world vision of the disinherited.
Bern was the Director of the Institute for Advanced Thinking in
Belfast, Maine. Book can be purchased at:
http://xexoxial.org/is/the_last_acts_of_saint_fuck_you/by/bern_porter
Public Category: Speeches
Reads: 127
Published: 12 / 13 / 2010
60 p.

WEEKS by Hannah Weiner
First ion published by Xexoxial ions in 1990. Photos by Barbara
Rosenthal, introduction by Charles Bernstein. At one point in her
life, this clairvoyant author saw her books on her forehead. This
book, however, is a hearing of the world as it happens, one writing
per week. One quickly learns by reading that there is no logic to
disaster or everyday life. Of special interest to mediaglots. Book can
be purchased at: http://xexoxial.org/is/weeks/by/hannah_weiner
Public Category: Creative Writing
Reads: 135
Published: 12 / 08 / 2010
88 p.

Xerolage 1 • Bill DiMichele • (Above) At the Meeting of White Witches
A study of the four-dimensional face of Humanity, a conjuring of
higher functions, a practical mono-myth, Gurdjieff-Ouspensky
influenced, told in Xerolage style. Xerolage 1 can be purchased at:
http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage1/by/bill_dimichele
Public Category: Art & Design
Reads: 155
Published: 11 / 21 / 2010
28 p.

Watch Sally Blow featuring Sally Saxophone
Sally Saxophone coloring book, for kids whose parents are not
unfamiliar with altered perception. Print out copy & color away. You
won't find a coloring book like this in any store! Created by
Elizabeth Was in 1981.
Public Category: Comics
Reads: 430
Published: 11 / 11 / 2010
12 p.

Geraldine Monk / Alan Halsey Broadside for reading in Madison, WI
October 23, 2010
Geraldine Monk & Alan Halsey put on a spirited & wide ranging reading
from new work at the Project Lodge in Madison, WI. 20 broadsides were
signed by the authors.
Public Category: Creative Writing Reads: 564 Published: 11 / 03 / 2010
2 p.

Mesostics for Dick Higgins by mIEKAL aND
mesostics extracted from “foew&ombwhnw” by dick higgins
Public Category: How-To Guides/Manuals
Reads: 280
Published: 10 / 27 / 2010
46 p.


Fluxonyms by Elizabeth Was & mIEKAL aND
Neologisms deconstructed into concrete poems; concrete poems summed
into neologisms. In the tradition of Kamensky, & word-puzzles.
Originally published by Runaway Spoon in 1988.
Public Category: Research
Reads: 302
Published: 10 / 14 / 2010
34 p.


Advancience Snakespeared by mIEKAL aND
COMPUTER GENERATED 3rd Millennium database sonnetry is a howlsmith's
dark karaoke of the soul retreat & moment by moment recovery. A
testament to all that has ever been written by every genius yet to be
born.
Public Category: Creative Writing
Reads: 208
Published: 10 / 02 / 2010
26 p.


Not As It Seems
Poets past & present log their impressions of things that are not as
it seems. Feel free to add to this project by posting to the comments
anything that is not as it seems.
Public Category: Speeches
Reads: 157
Published: 10 / 02 / 2010
8 p.


Plagiarist Codex
Built in 1988 for the first Festival of Plagiarism produced to
illustrate this problem. The document is a fake Mayan Codex as
allegedly the oldest artistic manifesto Plagiatorentums. Already the
photocopied book covers leave no doubt that this is not ambitious
forgeries, but typical, easily identifiable Mail Art is, although
would be even with the limited technical means of xerography, the
impression of a pirated copy of one was lost or under lock held
manuscript easy to produce. The Plagiarist Codex A look at the
supposed Mayan Codex gives doubts about the Fabricated of the
document, for they still gave out for good. (google translation of
Florian Cramer review)
Public Category: Art & Design
Reads: 799
Published: 09 / 18 / 2010
50 p.


Logokons by mIEKAL aND & Liaizon Wakest
Created in 1993 with the hypnotic assistance of my 5 year old son
Liaizon. All glyphs were generated with an archaic bitmap font or.
Text printed in Glitch Millenium designed by mIEKAL
Public Category: Art & Design
Reads: 161
Published: 09 / 17 / 2010
56 p.

Now Available: Scott Helmes' Poems From Then To Now

 


Visaul poetry / Collages and rubberstamping.
A6 format - 48 pages - laser printing.
Thread and quarter cloth binding
December 2010
price: 15 euro / 20 US $ / 13 UK Sterling



 . . . . . . 

Concrete Poems

 . . . 

Haikus


 

Rubberstamp Poems



Since 1976, Scott Helmes has been a leading international 
figure in experimental poetry. Work has been published 
in notable magazines, including Poetry, Paris Review, 
Tam Tam and the Notre Dame Review. Recent poems have 
been published or exhibited in India, Turkey, Cuba, Russia
and England. 

He is also a founding member of the Be Blank Consort.
As a writer, his work has appeared in Print, Minneapolis-
St. Paul, Minnesota Monthly, and Whistling Shade, 
including non-fiction and fiction.

As an artist, mail artist and photographer, he exhibited
throughout the world. His work is included in museum collections world wide 
and his writing archive from 1972 to 1997 is in the Avant 
Writing Collection of The Ohio State Libraries. 
Scott Helmes lives in St. Paul, MN, USA.

-- 

 

Thu Plew Thot Breke thu Ploins

-       Ofter Denald Ruvell

  

Thuse ore thu lest thruads,

Canversations cet in twa by tuth

Ar by thu sward af Aluxander—

 

Cortoons

Crutins

Borrage bolloons

O morriage thot aught nuver te hove unded

Ond ruturns, uach outumn,

Te thu lattle struam eut frent an opple cleuds.

 

Thu seundtrack swulls hure.

Herses dasappear an uvery darection.

 

Mulville’s Paerre as o gruater semething wu knew.