Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Help Save Room 302 Books

john curry, certainly a world class poet living in our community, is
presently facing almost certain eviction.

Stephen Brockwell alerted me of this precarious situation, by phone, and
asked if I would get the word out, most recently at the TREE Reading
Series on September 22, where we were able to scare up enough to cover one
of his 5 months owed rent & save his telephone service.

curry's been in constant production of his own and hundreds of others work
since 1979. hes mainly ineligible for grants. His bookstore is mainly an
unused resource. His archive documenting the growth of avant-garde writing
in Canada is one of the key collections in the country. Nicky Drumbolis
has said: curry and his work are the best-kept secret in Canada.

Since time is of the essence, if curry's to avoid eviction, there are a few
ways you can help:

Start to use his goddamn store!

Room 302 Books is the only bookstore in Canada ever to focus
specifically on the avant-garde and overlooked outsiders, specializing in
concrete/visual/sound poetries (mainly Canadian) with a stock of over
20,000 mainly rare titles, including elusive ephemera, and probably the
only source of most of jwcurry's various imprints and titles (which number
in the thousands). curry's current lists finally focus on his own work as
artist & publisher, virtually the first time everything thats (still)
available has been made commonly available. You can purchase bookstore
IOUs (or set up an account) today in any amount for those who'd like to do
that.

Subscribe to Curvd H&z, curry's serial imprint. donor subscriptions
(please indicate) of $100 or more get « the stash in a sampling of available
titles from various of his imprints immediately, the remaining « put on
account for forthcoming titles.

Donate outright.

I would like to encourage you to donate something so as to keep this
excellent bookstore, publisher, archive and artist alive, and at the same
time help prevent curry's eviction from his apartment. For those who'd like
to purchase bookstore IOUs, Id ask you to write (#302-880 Somerset Street
West, Ottawa Canada K1R 6R7) or call him at (613) 233 0417. Please
contribute as you can.

Roland Prevost (with collusions with curry)

Find her connected with an orientation tactfully. When I enter a dark room, she might never speak concretely, vulnerable edge in her voice. Wake up the person sleeping in that honesty.

            Filled his throat with hail, the handkerchief loose. He was unable to strike a pose. His muscles, his members, punctual, he had fallen tight against coffin. His stomach hard, beyond were his legs, with no discomfort.

New from Otoliths: The Meditations by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

80 pages

Cover painting by Julia Wolfson

Otoliths 2009

ISBN: 978-0-9806025-5-5

$12.50 + p&h

URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-meditations/7491123

 

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Meditations beautifully combine the inward focus of reflection with the leaps and breakages of contemporary urban life — a life in which meditative stillness is elusive, if not impossible.  At the meeting-point of real-world politics and poetic internality, The Meditations jump-cut between the rhetorics of capitalism and constant war (“as if the weapons were moving // entirely in the wrong direction”) and hard-won lyric flight (“horses laugh // and clouds put on their aprons”).  Throughout, Joritz-Nakagawa plays with line-breaks and white space, with orthography and diacritical marks — all of which syncopate syntax and hint at the manifold meanings hidden in phonemes.  Like tesserae, her words and lines create — through fragments — exquisite patterns.  These are poems that “enter the language partial / and come out / whole.”

                                                                —Elisabeth A. Frost

 

---

You’re crazy. That is language by definition. Now, you know that, don’t you? Would you like some imaginary opponent for good reasoning? I am not sure of strangers in the house. Corpse in family quarters, don’t know if it is physical. Soon her optimism had the feeling the scapegoat was no longer growing. Interested in your view-point, she had fallen into a crisis of other.

As I Work on an Essay on Xerolage, an in-Progress Interview with mIEKAL aND

CHill: When Xerolage first appeared in the 1980s, there were many small press magazines publishing visual poetry and xerox art--Kaldron, Photostatic, Lost & Found Times, Score, Generator, among them. Whatwould Xerolage add to that body of work?

MAnd: That's a long time back to remember but I should point out that the phrase visual poetry was not in such wide circulation in the early 80s & there were many, many ideas circulating about what follows concrete poetry.  My own approach included prose, poetry, typography & visuals so I favored calling work my work & the work of others visual/verbal literature, a term that I liked because it seemed more inclusive than visual poetry.  Xerolage comes out of wanting to make the space to focus on single author works that were created for a specific magazine format.  One that was particularly easy to reproduce on a copier. So many things have been fit into that frame: copy art, mail art, collage, visual & concrete poetry, scores, found, graphism, conceptual.

 

CHill: Though the term visual poetry indeed was not in wide circulation (not even in a wet dream at Poetry Magazine), the above mags would have been using it. SCORE used the term in its first issue, 1983. I agree that the term visual/verbal literature works is inclusive of visual poetry, and thus also including prose with visuals as well, e.g. your "Erotic Logic" and much of Michael Helsem's work.

Some Qs bouncing off your answer above: Mail art may have been at its peak in the 1980s, projects including all that you mentioned above for Xerolage--copy art, collage, visual/concrete poetry, scores, found art, and conceptual art--How did you see Xerolage speaking to, interacting with, mail art? What was Xerolage attempting to do that mail art was not doing? Or, what do you want to do more of that mail art was doing?

mIEKAL: In the 80s one didn't have to seek mail art out, it just appeared at the door, solicited, unsolicited, surprising & not.  Even back then there were 2 streams as far as I was concerned.  One stream was the garbage in garbage out school, mostly recycling images of popular media such as Reagan, Nixon etc & I have always found that work wearisome. The other stream was a fascinating network of artist / poets mostly working in isolation, many of them from eastern bloc countries, who had to devise ways to even get their mail out of the country.  While a lot of this work was piggybacked on the Fluxus movement, it was remarkably fresh & alive (I'll avoid the use of the word original), constantly changing & growing, & in my mind consciously created for the network of viewers who were receiving these packages.  In that sense, the work was offered, not to a random audience, but to an energetic collective of like-minds, many whom are still in contact with each other 30 years later.  So while the content was / is always important to me, the mode of transmission lent an air of person-to-person value.  When the  internet came along, a lot of mail art stopped being interesting in the same way, because suddenly there was a whole new way to get one's work around.  It has always been a little mysterious to me that it took so many folks 10-15 years to make that switch.

Xerolage has never been identified with movements or genres as such.  It has always been about creating a frame to see the work of single artists alongside of some sense of who they are as a person, because I have always believed the person & the work go hand-in-hand.  I also have been committed to questioning what visual poetry can be by selecting work & artists that would never think of themselves as visual poets yet their work navigates the same proximity.  

Chill: I’m intrigued by your statement that you believe the person and the work go hand-in-hand. Tell me more? How does the person and the work go hand-in-hand in a Xerolage issue such as Vittore Baroni’s “Sangue Misto” (Xerolage 7) or Greg Evason in his issue (Xerolage 12).

Awaiting an answer from mIEKAL.

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Xerolage 3 (1985), Scott Helmes

"visual poetry is going the way the rest of our society is going--towards the visual mechanization of information. After being dormant the past eight to ten years in the U.S. it will break out into new realms of poetry. this marriage of tech w/visualization will lead to a completely new definition of text and reading."

Call for creative proposals papers / performances / presentations (deadline November 20th).

post _ moot: a 2nd convocation of unorthodox cultural and poetic practices

April 22-25, 2010, Miami University of Ohio

The second Post-Moot Convocation, an international conference to be held at
Miami in spring of 2010 to foster creative exchange among poets in the early
21st Century, will present papers / performances / presentations on a range
of contemporary issues in poetics.

Topics will likely include but will not be restricted to (we welcome other
formulations):

- ecopoetics
- issues of writing and power
- postconceptualist poetics
- performance and performance writing
- spatiality
- the book as object
- poetic economies
- sound / noise
- versions
- state of lyric
- signifying on older poetic traditions
- translation
- electronic archives

Proposals should take account of the fact that upwards of 50 people are
likely to be included in the program. In other words we can consider
presentations that have extended duration, but we hope not to get into
exhaustive parallel paneling and hope for proposals of between 15-25 mins on
average. We have a variety of presentation / performance venues available,
dependent upon proposals. We can host work by participants unable to attend
in person.

We look forwards to hearing from you: the post _ moot collective (Maria
Auxiliadora Alvarez, Tammy Brown, cris cheek, WIlliam R. Howe, Cathy Wagner)

please respond to: postmoot@gmail.com

I look forward to seeing how this concept develops (Wild Orchids):

WILD ORCHIDS will be an annual edition in which poets, theorists, and
visual artists are invited to respond to the work of another in
affective and other formally unexpected ways.

Announcing WILD ORCHIDS vol. 1. 
New and affectionate writing on HERMAN MELVILLE by:

KIM EVANS
BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER
ALAN HALSEY
DONALD PEASE
COURTNEY PFAHL
JOYELLE MCSWEENEY
JENNIFER SCAPPETTONE
GERALDINE MONK
CHRIS SYLVESTER
STACY SZYMASZEK
MARK VON SCHLEGELL

 All details at:

http://wildorchids.endingthealphabet.org

Robert Dewhurst & Sean Reynolds, eds.

SHAMPOO Issue 36

Some may say Shampoo is eclectic to a fault. I'd argue rather it's been generous, broad rather than narrow, and actually quite consistent in its poetic pitch over the last ten years. Read the issue linked below, but also, if you're new to Shampoo, read previous issues. There's a spunk--a shine, a bubble, a bubbling--to Shampoo's aesthetic. It's well worth a scrubbing in both cold and hot water.

& a note I'll forward from Del Ray hisself:

Dear Salon Selecteds,

 I'm elated to present you with  SHAMPOO  issue  36 !    

 Check it all out here:   www.ShampooPoetry.com   . . .

 where you'll soak & steam in relevant poetries by Zhuang Yisa, Arisa White, Dana Ward, Gautam Verma, TC Tolbert, Steve Tills, Eileen Tabios, Suejin Suh, Paul Siegell, Ryan B. Richey, Daniel C. Remein, Matt Reeck, Stephen Ratcliffe, Caitlyn Paley, Anjali Khosla Mullany, Michael Montlack, rob mclennan, Ian M. McCarty, Esa Mäkijärvi, Anthony Madrid, Alana Madison, erica lewis, Caroline Klocksiem, Raud Kennedy, Alexander Jorgensen, Russell Jaffe, Luke Humphries, Alisa Heinzman, Eli Halpern, Christoph Girard, Angela Genusa, Amy Garrett-Brown, Ricky Garni, Mark Stephen Finein, Laurie Duggan, Denise Dooley, Susan Denning, Peter Davis, Aaron Crippen, Marisa Crawford, Christopher Cheney, Will Burke, Megan Breiseth, Lucas Bernhardt, Robert J. Baumann, Louis Armand, Stan Apps & Sherman Alexie, along with radiantly alive SHAMPOOArt by Angela Genusa!

  SHAMPOO thanks you !

 Herbal essence,

 Del Ray Cross, Editor
  SHAMPOO
 clean hair / good poetry
  www.ShampooPoetry.com