Poet, editor and teacher Michael Gizzi passed away Monday, according to reports. You can hear Gizzi read from his work here. Rodney Koeneke has compiled some language by and about Gizzi at his blog. Craig Santos Perez reviewed his latest book for Coldfront in March. Gizzi was the author of more than ten books of poetry; he also was a Brown University MFA graduate, and highly notable Burning Deck fellow.
Archive for September, 2010
Michael Gizzi, 1949-2010
Thursday, September 30th, 2010
The International Train from Ridgewood to St. Mark’s
Thursday, September 30th, 2010
The end of September will follow the thunderstorms of today, or at least Friday will, which can only mean that the autumn armada of readings will push on. Of incredible note, Michael Gizzi—author of over ten books of poetry, Brown University MFA graduate, and highly notable Burning Deck fellow—passed away on September 28. And, as Rimbaud so hates, the world marches on. For the past ten days, per usual, readings series have been actively off and running. Of record, there were two great ones—Poetry Time at SpaceSpace (on Saturday) and the Monday Night series at the Poetry Project, which oversaw the release of the new international magazine VLAK.
Saturday night ushered plenty of poetry-seekers to Ridgewood, Queens (or, what the curators call the “Bushwick/Ridgewood borderlands”) where the Poetry Time at SpaceSpace reading series kicked off its third season of literary performances. SpaceSpace hosts many other neighborhood activities for Bushwick and Ridgewood residents like music, yoga and crafts.
The Poetry Time crowd was pleasant and in ample number, topping out somewhere around fifty—all in one large apartment living room and kitchen!. In usual fashion, there was a garbage can filled to the top with cheap beer, a big ticket raffle for many arbitrary and deliberate (as well as unmentionable) items. Ben Gocker plays host to the series, offering up introductions that act as conceptual alternatives to the rather bland bios-read-straight-through tradition, one in which he cited a review that Gilbert Sorrentino wrote regarding the work of Curtis Jensen, one of the night’s performers. Sorrentino died in 2006 and probably never read Jensen’s work, but hey, he did attend Brooklyn College (as Jensen currently does).
Poetry Time is held at the residence of a handful of folks and all the readings are preceded by video presentations, a few of which have been compiled, produced, and edited by Fence poet Brandon Downing. This time was no different. The selected poets read to the audience while sitting at a desk, their sheets of paper under a green table lamp. Listeners sat on sleeping bags laid out on the large living room floor. Others stood in the kitchen around an island counter top. Each performer read for an average of twenty minutes (listed below, in order of appearance):
Brandon Downing (video presentation)
Curtis Jensen
Judith Goldman
September 27 kicked off the Poetry Project’s Monday night reading series, hosted and curated by Macgregor Card. Not quite a normal Poetry Project one-off, it was the initial release event for the bi-annually released VLAK magazine, an international journal of poetics and art holding up forts in New York, Prague, and London. The list of the inaugural issue’s contributors is pretty astounding, an intercontinentally-inclined consortium of highly accomplished poets and critics and artists.
As each night’s reader took the stage to deliver a few poems, he or she thanked VLAK’s two attending editors (Louis Armand and Stephan Delbos) for putting together such a lovely artifact, each commenting on how great the issue looked. Pierre Joris publicly told Armand that the magazine looked better than anything he had been responsible for in his forty years of editing, writing, reading, etc. Eileen Myles took home the unofficial award for getting the audience to laugh loudest, reading from a piece that didn’t completely slam Ron Padgett (who was not in the audience to defend his self) but did highlight the rotisserie of people that St. Mark’s tends to simmer.
Of note, the Poetry Project Newsletter for October and November (#224) has also gone to the printers and become available to the reading public. Pick up a copy.
Listed below are the readers for the first Fall 2010 Monday night series at St. Mark’s, all contributors to VLAK as well:
Louis Armand
Vincent Katz
Abigail Child
Jess Fiorini
Elizabeth Gross
Arlo Quint
Stacy Szymaszek
John Wilkinson
Joshua Cohen
Stephanie Strickland
Stephanie Barber
Bruce Andrews
Christine Wertheim
Pierre Joris
Marjorie Welish
– Ken L. Walker
Billy Collins in Nebraska
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, whose forthcoming collection, Horoscopes for the Dead, will be released this spring, read 30 poems at the Reynolds Series on September 27, at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Here are the poems Collins read:
1. You, Reader
2. Grave
3. Palermo
4. The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska
5. Feedback
6. What She Said
7. Oh My God
8. Horoscopes for the Dead
9. Unborn Children
10. Hangover
11. Monday
12. Tension
13. The Golden Years
14. The Country
15. The Nigh House
16. Splitting Wood
17. Lines Lost Among Trees
18. Morning
19. Bonsai
20. The Trouble with Poetry
21. Litany
22. Divorce
23. Refrigerator Light
24. Motel Parking Lot
25. Lanyard
26. Forgetfulness
27. Japan
28. A Dog on his Master
29. On Turning Ten
30. Nightclub
–Rick Marlatt
Smith/Wilkinson tour dates
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Abraham Smith and Joshua Marie Wilkinson are hitting the road in support of their new books, Hank and Selenography. Abraham Smith’s reading in a hotel stairwell last year at AWP blew me away, so go see them if you’re in one of these locations.
October 8th: Tuscaloosa, AL
October 9th: Oxford, MS
October 10th: New Orleans, LA
October 12th: Lafayette, LA
October 13th: Baton Rouge, LA
October 14th: Dallas, TX
October 15th: Houston, TX
* exact locations and times can be found here.
–Steven Karl
A New Quarantine Will Take My Place
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010
by Johannes Göransson
Apostrophe Books 2007
Reviewed by Matt Soucy
“If you want to get rid of me / you’re out of luck”
There is a strong cycling of images in Johannes Göransson’s A New Quarantine Will Take My Place. Sustained images set up a dense and tightly-wound set of poems, or, as it intended, a single poem broken up by titled sections. Nearly every poem ends in an incomplete phrase that is completed in the next poem and then turned in a new direction. The convention is not just clever exhibition; piling his poems on top of one another, Göransson provides a sense of anxiety and quarantine.
The voice in “The Seminal Union of Carvers” is striking and strong but also hints that its air of strength and control is at least partially ironic. True to the book’s title, Göransson opens with images of Vietnam, of Peace vs. War, of guards vs. inmates. The book continues in a balance between big picture commentary and personal feeling and experience.
“Shotgun Wedding in the Ribcage of the Bourgeoisie” has a gaudy moment of referring to how poetry teachers would critique the speaker’s work. He seems to be saying, “What are you going to do about it?” This second poem smacks of hubris, if not monomania, and even though the images are culturally broad, they are all blatantly reflected through Göransson. In the end, the provocative and brutal images are taken as personal affronts to be dealt with through violence, humor or poetry.
In “Obscenity Can Be a Form of Asceticism,” he writes, “I’m the son of a liar,” and the poem does actually feel like a lie, pushing the reader away. But there are welcome images which provide solidarity – for example, referring to the glitterati as animals. (The narrator abuses a captive Shirley Temple intermittently throughout the book.) Göransson’s use of animals is one of most interesting parts of the book. He does not stretch very far and pulls generic images (pig = excess, lamb = sacrifice, horse = fear and fragility, bird = beauty and metaphorical flight) but combines and recombines them throughout the book so they actually become more interesting – not an easy feat.
Throughout, humans are animals. That is one reason that genocide/quarantine has happened and will happen again. The poet seems to feel as if he’s living in a genocide. Instead of emulating the epic pieces of traditional literature that pull the greatness of humanity from those experiences, Göransson accepts a nihilism that surges not from humanity but from his own abused perspective. So, though the set-up for the book seems large-scale, the most compelling work comes from the poet’s experience, particularly with abortion.
The narrator in A New Quarantine refers to personal experience which has made him pro-life and seemingly misogynistic. In the aptly titled “We Will Use Clothes Hangers Next Time” and “This Silence Would Be More Pedagogical In A Meatpacking Plant,” Göransson fills the page with images of pigs (fetal and non-), sharks and lambs. “I’m talking you, about filthy girls have no right to call / yourself strippers”…“If you’re a cheerleader don’t / forget the vermin in your outfits…” In “Two Poems,” Goransson writes:
I only learned three things from those years:
If you want to get rid of a baby throw out the bath
water.
If you want to get rid of a shivering lamb toss it into a
room full
Of starving dogs. If you want to get rid of me, you’re
out of luck
I’ve tried my whole life. We must be twins
Two criticisms are that the use and reuse of images can lead to sometimes tiresome redundancies and repetitions, and that the whole book as a continuous poem can lead to a page-turner effect a la The DaVinci Code where the reader is coerced, rather than compelled, to keep reading. Importantly, Johannes Göransson keeps you reading.
*
Tourist Trap 1: Julie Doxsee
Sunday, September 26th, 2010
Tourist Trap, NYC is a web video series that follows touring poets to some of New York’s top tourist destinations, as well as lesser known bars, reading venues and unheralded back streets. Each episode will feature one or two poets as they explore the city, discuss their work, how urban landscapes influence their writing, the history or importance of landmark they’ve chosen to visit, as well as any art/literature related conversations they might deem relevant along the way. Each episode will culminate with a short, 1-2 poem reading at their destination of choice.
Julie Doxsee holds a PhD from the University of Denver and is the author of Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean 2010) and Undersleep (Octopus Books 2008). She teaches creative writing, literature, and academic writing at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, where she lives on the European side of the Bosphorus.
Email ttrapnyc@gmail.com for more information.
Tourist Trap, NYC is produced by Eye For An Iris Press and Coldfront.
*
Book your seats: “Time Travel” tour
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
If you ever were (or are) a music fan like me then you know that giddy feeling you get when you check the dates to see if a band on tour is coming to your city. Well, Coldfront is here to give you reason to get giddy. Take a look at the tour dates for two Ugly Duckling poets!
TIME TRAVEL THROUGH THE COSMOS TOUR: in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Philly, Amherst, D.C. and beyond! Natalie Lyalin is reading in support of her book Try a Little Time Travel, and I’m reading in support of Aquarius Rising. For more information visit www.uglyducklingpresse.org.
—————
Sept. 24, 8pm
Metrorhythm Reading Series
Blue Angel Wines
638 Grand St.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Oct. 3, 5pm
Polestar Reading Series
Cakeshop
152 Ludlow St.
New York, NY
BOOK RELEASE PARTY!
Oct 9, 8pm
Flying Object
42 West St.
Hadley, MA
Oct. 25, 8pm
Poetry Project Reading Series
St. Marks Church
131 E 10th St.
New York, NY
Nov. 13, 8pm
Yardmeter Reading Series
267 Douglass St.
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Nov. 20, 8pm
Chapter & Verse Reading Series
Chapterhouse Cafe
620 S. 9th St.
Philadelphia, PA
Dec. 4, 8pm
Poetry Time at Space Space
390 Seneca Ave.
Ridgewood, NY
Dec. 11, 8pm
Barrelhouse Readings
Wonderland Ballroom
1101 Kenyon St. NW
Washington, DC
--Steven Karl
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