My family moved to Los Angeles when I was five and I left when I was a teenager. 1980’s Los Angeles and I were never a good fit, and I generally dislike songs about L.A. They too often romanticize a glossiness I can’t stand, even when they are trying to get to the grit of things. I rarely miss Los Angeles (although there are people there I miss quite a lot) but “Come a Long Way” by Michelle Shocked fills me with a kind of longing I can wallow in for 4:43 minutes (LP version). Released in 1992, the year I finally left, it’s got everything I remember: the big hair on the Boulevard, earthquakes, the pachyderm, the dying dark. The music is celebratory, the lyrics are wild, clever, even funny, and in Shocked’s lovely, no-frills voice there is a familiar ambivalence about the city I will never get over.
-Lynn Melnick
Lynn Melnick’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including The Awl, A Public Space, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, LIT, and The Paris Review.
Sampson Starkweather, co-founder of the press Birds, LLC, began his reading from his chapbook The Heart Is Green from So Much Waiting (Immaculate Disciples Press, 2010) and finished with new poems. Here’s Starkweather’s set list:
CK: High school: listened to “Carolyn’s Fingers” 152 times at least senior year. No one knows. No iPod to count the number of listens. In the car. On the way to school. On the city bus. Walking through leaves. Had stumbled on it, hunched over the VCR late one night and played that part of 120 Minutes over and over until a little line of static sizzled across the screen. College: I went to London my freshman year. Listened to the song in the dorm bunk-bed. At William Blake’s tomb. On the Tube. In St. Paul’s. Bright, frothy, sublime, ultimate, heady, careening: all the things you want in a song, all the time, as if there were no other song. A free, legal high. Und so weiter, forever.
I even had a bumper sticker for the Cocteau Twins. My only bumper sticker. Ever. How could I not love their tracks, fizzing and lilting and sounding like something utterly familiar but in tune with an eternal thing?
Then one day when I was in graduate school (second time), I posted a blog entry of several favorite items. Maybe an ad for a sandwich. Other stuff. Something about the dusk being really weird that day. And that my favorite song in the whole world was “Carolyn’s Fingers” by the Cocteau Twins. And then Ana Bozicevic commented, “Mine too.”
!
And then, a few years later, in conversation, I found out that it was also the favorite song of Sommer Browning. So here we all are.
*******
SB: I write this dreaming of Cindy, Ana & me perched on pillows on someone’s floor listening to “Carolyn’s Fingers” or “Heaven or Las Vegas.” Since this is a dream, the albums are on vinyl and we’re drinking Mackeson, an English milk stout you can’t get in America anymore (Yes! There’re things you can’t get in America!). Each of us, grown up so differently in very different soil, thousands of miles apart, yet now entwined and familiar. It’s the normal, bewildering mystery of friendship. We all begin as babies, translating our lives in parallel, and what (time? god?) angles us toward each other. Us three, in love with many of the same things, one of them the band Cocteau Twins, and I’d wager to say, we love this band similarly. The unique and personal details of our lives brought us to the music, yet we seem to translate it in the same ways. It’s a funny word to use, translate, considering they lyrics of Cocteau Twins are notoriously indecipherable. The band’s singer, Elizabeth Fraser, says “I make up my own words and steal things from languages I don’t understand.” I like this. I like to think about translating made up words. We do it all the time, whether brillig or slithy. Translation awakens affinity.
Translation is the third stage of protein biosynthesis. There are four phases of translation: activation, initiation, elongation and termination. These stages mimic life, they mimic youth, they mimic narrative, any of life’s microcosms really. Because protein biosynthesis produces genes, and because these stages produce protein strands which produce genes that determined my eye color, govern my metabolic rate, shaped my eardrums, so we too grow in this way, physically and psychically. It makes sense. It hurts my heart a bit to be so robotic about things, but it’s grounding, too. I’m going to use the four stages that grow protein strands to talk about what this music means to me.
Long before I listened to music, I lived in the world of hearing. I heard The Eagles, the Grease soundtrack, and Rick James like I heard the school bell. The strand was in discrete bits. I had the depth I would need for listening, certainly. I used this depth when I felt love, anger, shame, fear—is it biology that prevented me from feeling this in music? Does it take a certain physical evolution to derive emotion from outside of oneself? Mature means ripe, it’s a word from biology co-opted by Saved By the Bell, Aaron Spelling, Gidget. Now it means responsibility more often than it means the ability to reproduce. Years of Wednesday chapel, the ocean, the only time I ran away, the solace of computers, the Cold War, some formula of these things activated my listening.
Along with NIN and This Mortal Coil, my first boyfriend, Clarke, played me Cocteau Twins. Young, nail-biting love initiated me into their space, a kind of church, the thick adulterated tracks piled upon thick tracks building fibers of melody in an abyss of pedals—imagine jumping in and activating each you touched: distortion, overdrive, delay, all the reverb in the world. A hive echoing in space. Prosperity defines the wasteland because what is desolation but abject excess? Elizabeth Fraser’s voice electronically weaved to become a choir, and I’m the only one not singing. I listen better when silent, simultaneously enveloped and shunned.
The strand grows, elongates, album by album these strangers grow, develop, produce videos, appear on 120 Minutes, come through DC and I miss them, come through DC on the Four-Calendar Café tour and I go. I stand with other fans in love with Fender Jaguars and inverted chords and I’m there part poseur because I just love her dress, the fog, her spinning.
Ted, a friend, tells me when he first heard Cocteau Twins he thought Fraser was singing in angel language. Consciousness has this amazing quality to be infinite until it ends. In language, that reads as a paradox, but in practice it’s natural. Termination. This stage is the most important because endings never happen. The strand is finally built. Angel language would have to be indecipherable to mortals, eternally evolving as the angels experience new emotions, new parts of the universe, as they define divine neologisms to describe a new peculiarity in the ennui of immortality. Change is sacred and so inaccuracy is sacred. Translation, the phase, is complete. What I’m left with is how I translate the untranslatable. When I sing along to “Carolyn’s Fingers,” this is what I sing:
Lisa you said Laura chis and dance with menahas
Someday you seed him terror house
E-he frau how teak how you need me
Again gen gen gen now go
Cheek fed terror house who sew sew solid now
Leave leave leave me married now go
This part Lamar suffers baseball’s whining let me out out out
Be still listen to me be bald
E-he he he be softer to me now
Sublime Yassis atop top top free le chat chapeau
Again gen gen gen go chalk Choctaw
It splays it to me how how
Lessons to me chokehold (x 2)
*******
AB: I’m thirteen. And so happy. I’m imagining my own funeral. The casket slides toward the incinerator (because, who wants to be buried? Gross.) – & then they play this song! This ultimate song that is fingertips tweaking the wavelengths of sunbeams. The casket burns & c(r)ackles with joy. Next minute, I picture my wedding – petals, doves and whatnot – and as I glide toward the altar, the same song plays. The same joy follows the casket & bride. A train of joy.
It’s been twenty years, and this is still the song. What is its power? There are words, but not – more like suggestions, to be interpreted like musical hieroglyphics across the languages. At first, back in Croatia, the first two lines go: “Nisam blabla; Esterhazy sam ja.” (“I am not blah blah; Esterhazy am I.”) Now my Anglified imagination-organ hears something different. French platitudes plait themselves in somehow; and, of course, the longing – adolescent or midlife, all part and parcel – and the heavenly aspect. At the bottom of tongues, you are loved, but damned if you understand why, or how.
I read the YouTube testimonies to “Carolyn’s Fingers” by Cocteau Twins, as sung by Elizabeth Fraser, and the heaven-struck supplicants are in unison:
“Heaven linger tout simplement sublime et intemporel ethereal extraordinary from another planet Music of the gods and the voice of an archangel touching deep, deep in the heart and soul If this song doesn’t make your soul sing, then nothing will Obscenely Beautiful & Utterly Brilliant Angel. I used to imagine this album was a recital of forest nymphs—”
Alongside the heavenly aspect, something else keeps popping up in their testimonials: let’s call it first consciousness, of meaning- and self-formation. Sez Kartoffelbrain:
“its funny, this is one of the earliest songs i can remember hearing, and seeing…i can remember the colour of the carpet in the room, a deep grey, and even what the old television looked like in my ma and das.”
& “Elizabeth could have been cussing in the song and I wouldn’t care coz the way it’s done is just so beautiful. The best music is beautiful in all languages.”
& “It’s amazing that songs ‘without lyrics’ could be so emotive. The lyrics I read are good but I couldn’t care less about them. It’s like looking at a piece of art that just stuns you You don’t think about the brushstrokes, you think how wow it is. When I was a kid, I thought that the lyrics were Latin or some ‘scholarly’ language—”
Music critics are on the same page. One guy in the UK called her “the voice of God.” The castrati must have been swooned over with this sincerity the unbeliever thinks comical. Others term what Fraser does glossolalia, mouth music. The anthropologist Felicitas Goodman finds that the speech of glossolalists reflects patterns of their native language, while William Samarin argues that this resemblance is only on the surface – glossolalia is only “a façade of language.” A façade on what? Kartoffelbrain and Sommer & Sommer’s friend Ted & Cynthia & my own love- and death-minded beast-bride-brain know implicitly, and can tell you straight up: on the sublime, dummy, on John Dee’s ur-tongue of angels where each word brings a thing into being, the learned langue of the tower of Babel.
Fraser says she “goes with the sound and the joy,” and – “I can’t act. I can’t lie.” I start thinking about this self-abnegating author sticking to “truth,” the spatiality of time, Bergson’s “duration,” heaven & mu/nothingness, but within a few seconds of listening to Fraser, I just don’t give a fuck. I’m crying with joy. It’s beautiful and humbling to witness meaning being born, wed to & dying into non-meaning. Few artists have this access, have it to give. I listen and I’m the newborn seeing the kindly face and hearing the voice above me, indecipherable but immediately understood; I’m a dog being cussed at kindly, Keats listening to a nightingale. What does she say?
“Carolyn’s Fingers”
Niece, son, blah love–
chester hats look nice.
Tell me a synonym for Tejas:
hey high fraud! ye Vendler-handler me.
We intend, and then don’t go, child–
chaperones & chess unite.
Niente, intended; love child shuffle–
chap in time, sussurant.
Purr, i, oh. Yeah, and love.
Niece, cordone moll – c’est fou, que c’est drole –
be spas, while he putter down the hall.
Extend, son, to me, apple bow –
the point is truly lost – be swept in a hole.
Listen to me, child –
be swept within an apple.
Ah, i – baby – yeah, dot my i.
Simplement, Jesus c’est chachacha–
reshuffle my mind. Reshuffle my mind.
We intend and then don’t go, child–
(naughty, bother me!)
Niente, indented – man-child, chum-paw.
(naughty, fly!)
Existence, up to me? A faux pas–wish it could be droll.
(Nocti, blind my i!)
Listen, believe me – chill oak, yo –
dot my i.
*******
CK: I’m trying to follow through on Sommer’s suggestion that we write what we hear as the lyrics of “Carolyn’s Fingers.” It’s a struggle. How can we break this gold into something prosaic? To me, the words are really just as incomprehensible as any of their other lyrics (except maybe the words to “Pitch the Baby” – “I only want to love you.”) I was game. I made transcriptions of the first four lines:
Kneee sehm! Haahbla! Chee ho zed, ehsta hen sue neh.
So ee sehem, tehhes aneigh ho, neehah fran ho esta
Even even though
Nidin’t didn’t dee ho
So basically we don’t hear the same things. It’s like in the first grade where it dawns on you that the red you see isn’t like the red Matt Philpot sees. Some first inkling of philosophy. We live with what we can barely discern, what isn’t even representational and never tire of this song, nevertheless. I personally always sing along to the gibberish I hear and it’s always different or just out of intelligence’s reach.
This sentence represents a whole other article in which I plumb the depths of Ana and Sommer’s poems and even some of my own and note how and why our approach to narrative situation might predispose us to liking the Cocteau Twins and their organic sublime. But that’s not this article.
If you Google the lyrics to “Carolyn’s Fingers,” there are apparently “actual” lyrics. I already knew this decades ago and dumped the information out of my mind. I had always reverted to the default notion the lyrics are in Esperanto, anyway. But the band’s strangeness surprises me further: In this narrative moment, the he and the she are stuck in the mire of a messy love, the titular fingers are an outreached hand… a hand rejected. It’s actually kind of wry and sad, unlike the music itself. And so the “correct lyrics” — I don’t think any of the three of us would ever try to learn them. Maybe that’s just a strand of what we work out in our own poems:
When he said, ‘You are full of love’
She fell down into this dirty mess
Some people see me laugh and tell us,
‘It’s wrong to make fun of me’
(Even they don’t give any more)
(Try, try to fall)
She fell down into this mess
(Even then they don’t give)
(Try, try to fall)
She fell down and he’s so sick of it all
And of me
This part not out of her saw fit to drop
Whispers might prove it all
(You’re just closer to me when you fall, but you broke)
This would prove it all
(You just closer to me, but you broke)
This would prove it all
Sleep now
You susur, try to talk
Reach out for that hand
Reach out for that hand
(And even they don’t give any more)
(Try, try to fall)
Even then they don’t give
(Try, try to fall)
You just closer to me at the fall
But you don’t want, want me hand
You’re just closer to me
But you don’t want, want my hand
~~~
Nova by Ana Božičević, Sommer Browning and Cindy King
All resting on a fabric, planets in plane–
I didn’t know that order could be revolution;
one fights in circles, the beginning of the beginning;
concentric and widening, eggshell anvil, liquid fist, till
what’s born is some kind of earth out of starry sky:
Who can resist, that blue-white weaving
infant auroras beneath me.
This isn’t air
but thoughts, solid and trimmed to universe;
stardust in our bones
in our lungs, but a new kind of
hour, beating against the white towers.
This isn’t rock
but an idea, galaxy far, the sun blazing its eye
down through ours.
London, 1992
Cynthia Arrieu-King is native of Louisville, Kentucky, a former Kundiman fellow and currently serves as an assistant professor of creative writing at Stockton College. Her books include People are Tiny in Paintings of China (Octopus Books, 2010), a collaborative chapbook with Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis–By a Year Lousy with Meteors (Dream Horse Press 2012) and Manifest (Switchback, 2013). She hosts a radio show The Last Word about writers in South Jersey and the Tri-State, their writing and the music they love: You can listen in wlfr.fm at 11AM on Sundays. Recently in a blind iPod experiment of all new music, she favored everything now produced by 4AD.
1987
Sommer Browning is the author of Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC; 2011), a collection of poetry and drawings, and three chapbooks, most recently THE BOWLING (Greying Ghost, 2010) with Brandon Shimoda. Her work will appear in EOAGH, The Denver Quarterly, and EVENT. In 2008, she founded the hand-bound chapbook publisher, Flying Guillotine Press, with Tony Mancus. She lives in Denver where she and Julia Cohen curate The Bad Shadow Affair, a reading series.
1993, Ana on the right
Ana Božičević is the author of Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009) and five chapbooks of poetry, most recently War on a Lunchbreak (Belladonna*, 2011). With Željko Mitić, she is the editor of The Day Lady Gaga Died: an Anthology of NYC Poetry of the 21st Century (in Serbian, Peti talas/The Fifth Wave, 2011). Her translation-in-progress of Zvonko Karanović’s It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire recently received a PEN American Center/NYSCA grant. With Amy King, Ana co-edits esque, and works and studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
DJ Dolack shot this video in and around Zuccotti Park in October, 2011. We published an open call asking poets to meet us down there and be filmed reading a poem that, for them, contextualized the Occupy Wall Street movement. Infinite thanks to the bold and bright poets who participated.
Poets: Kate Angus, Alex Cuff, John Deming, Christine Kanownik, Steven Karl, Paul Legault, Kendra Grant Malone, Filip Marinovich, Mike McDonough, Rebecca Murray, Martin Rock, Matthew Savoca, Justin Taylor, Melinda Wilson, Hitomi Yoshio, Matthew Zapruder. Reading poems by: Mark Bibbins, Edward Dorn, Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, Mina Loy, Campbell McGrath, Kiriu Minashita, Charles Olson, Jacques Prevert, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Delmore Schwartz, William Shakespeare, William Carlos Williams, Matthew Zapruder. Further videos can be found here.
Introduction
by John Deming
We’re like mice trying to get in,
fawning over the icy breadbox.
We do not have to imagine.
We do have some idea.
—Shanna Compton, “We the Blind Need Pushing”
The Occupy movement really is an exciting development. In fact, it’s spectacular. It’s unprecedented; there’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations that are being established at these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead — because victories don’t come quickly– this could turn out to be a very significant moment in American history.
In a 2003 interview, Kurt Vonnegut said that during the Vietnam War, “every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
There is a long-standing debate over art’s ability to actually make social change. But art indisputably provides culture and context for things that happen in the world, and the experience of art–which can convince in ways that logic cannot–is a renewable source of inspiration and conversation for people who are fighting very tough battles. Our goal here was to get as many poets as possible to read on camera just outside Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Poets were asked to read something that, for them, contextualized the proceedings.
The video, shot and edited by DJ Dolack, features these poets, as well as three others who provided us with voiceovers (thanks Paul Legault, Melinda Wilson and Matthew Zapruder), and contains a significant amount of footage from Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park last October. When Mayor Bloomberg ordered the clearing of Zuccotti Park in late November, he also condescended to OWS participants, saying, “now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.” I don’t think I am jumping to conclusions by calling this, and Bloomberg’s response throughout the affair, thinly veiled hostility. At the very least, it is cavalier dismissal.
Bloomberg, in effect, is employing the Rush Limbaugh model—if you make a group and its ideas seem ridiculous by employing general terms (liberal) and a condescending tone (tree-hugger), you can dismiss the group without actually having to face its complaints. With OWS, the fallback perspective was that protesters wanted handouts and didn’t want to work for a living. In fact, a survey performed by the Baruch College School of Public Affairs in October showed that 50% were employed full time and that only 13% were unemployed, only 5.5 points higher than the current rate for the whole country. Also, the notion that all unemployed protesters are unemployed because they are lazy is an obviously pompous generalization.
It is true that the OWS movement is often unspecific and that its protesters often have differing viewpoints (see this on-the-ground dispute). This is in part because there is a lot that is concealed from the general population. For this, I refer you to the quote above from Shanna Compton’s poem “We the Blind Need Pushing.” A large population is capable of sniffing out a problem that perpetuates behind closed doors, even if that population isn’t made privy to the specific schemes underlying the problem. When the details are uncovered, it is usually too late.Bloomberg’s failure to govern is in his dismissal of a movement that reflects widespread cultural intuition, in his condescension towards a group that can’t tell him exactly how many jellybeans are in the jar.
OWS also resists generalizing its focus because the “problem” it addresses is huge, nuanced, and too broad to oversimplify. The OWS mantle of “99%” is telling. The one percent have a simple message: give me my money, give me your money, give me the government’s money; profit-seeking is my right. The simplicity of the message is possible thanks to the narrowness of the minority. Naturally, a group which portends to represent 99% of the public is forced to manage all the inevitable mess inherent in genuinely democratic discourse. It must work against an opaque, entrenched network of petting and massaging between the government and the private sector. Malfeasance is reported all the time, but always too late. This Venn diagram, rampant online, reflects this rather nicely:
Bloomberg’s condescension is understandable, then, as he could be a poster boy for the intersection of business and government. But Bloomberg is really not the problem, as he was not the only political leader, or the first, to crack down on the public occupations. The closer the mice get to opening the breadbox, the more they find how deep certain kinds of corruption go, and just how many are involved—how much of government and big business has colluded in order to increase patently unnecessary wealth. It is true that a respectable democracy will provide for its citizens the freedom to pursue wealth (note: a recent New York Times article shows that upward mobility is something of a myth in the United States). But I am always shocked when people use this “freedom” to pursue wealth as a moral justification–we can, therefore we should, even if it means breaking laws and ruining lives. What can we say about any society that privileges individual wealth and power over all else?
This takes me back to art. Art has the power to provide transformative experience. In a political context, artists are frequently preaching to the choir, which makes Vonnegut’s statement apt. If you think showing Richard Siken’s Crush to Rick Santorum would change his views on homosexuality, you’d have as much luck speaking to him in Japanese—his mind is made up. But insisting on art as a means of contextualizing social phenomena can certainly help to galvanize those who are sympathetic but silent; art performs what religion strives to perform–it refreshes life, reconstitutes it, reminds us how amazing it is, lest we sink into a demoralizing status quo. Generally, this is the modus operandi of OWS–to make a public scene, to insist that these issues stay in the public eye, not in the boardrooms of the greedy.
Art provides another essential function. Only humans make art. We can pretend that only humans reason, but it is pretty clear at this point that plenty of animals, plants, and viruses are problem-solvers. We can also pretend that public policy and law are based in reason. This is how we have arrived at the conclusion that corporations are people (wholly rational according to the paper trail of federal law stretching back over the last fifty years). “Reason” has gone mad and turned on its owners. Art can be used mediate one’s own dehumanization; in times when everyone is insignificant until bundled into predetermined packaging, the singularity of one human’s expression, required for the mere production of art, is defiant and worthwhile.
If people aren’t privy to what happens behind closed doors, and know this, it is easy to hang back and do nothing. This is why public demonstrations like OWS are so crucial—they become an only recourse. The incorporation of art—music, drumming (yes, it was loud), poetry, painting, chanting—serves to keep a group interested and inspired when performing an ostensibly unwinnable fight—not forgetting Noam Chomsky’s statement that “unless [the Occupy movement] continues to grow and kind of becomes a major social force in the world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.” If art can’t convince hardline ideologists to change their minds, it certainly can improve the experience for the protest-minded, keep them inspired, keep the conversations going and possibly connect with people young enough to form new opinions. It seems pretty important.
Nestled within the back room of Pete’s Candy Store, the first Multifarious Array of 2012 launched on January 6th. Instead of being hosted by Dorothea Lasky, the series welcomed back its founder, Sommer Browning, who returned to host and read. The other readers included Steven Zultanski, Noah Eli Gordon, and Harmony Holiday.
Browning read entirely new work including a poem “Drinks with Sam.” You can watch the video of here.
Steven Zultanski read two longer poems titled, “Mouth” and “Self-portrait for Abortion.”
Noah Eli Gordon also read from a longer work titled “The Famous Poet is Despondent.”
Harmony Holiday, the author of Negro League Baseball (Fence Books, 2011), read new poems riffing off the film Ganja & Hess.
Here’s Holiday’s set-list:
“Church and State”
“Appear Surreal”
“A Dictionary of Imaginary Places”
“B-sides for my Idol (idle?) Try-outs”
“A Guide To Our Discipline”
Holiday’s reading also included a listening to re-edited sound-bites from the film.
I knew what a weasel was, and I knew what a woman was, but what was a weasel woman? Billy Joel knew, I thought, and it seemed taboo, maybe even weirdly sexual. Of course I was mishearing “She’s Always a Woman.” The song played often on the soft rock radio station my mother liked, its piano opening quieting me, getting me to focus my attention for clues that might give this weasel woman away. “She can kill with her smile.” This woman ostensibly had the Garden of Eden to do what she wished with. “She can” phrases repeat—she can do so many things. The song’s words are so tenderly sung. A weasel’s long slender body. I grew to like my weasel woman, wishing to be mildly weaselish when I got a little older. To make someone “oh” and hum like that. To never give up, to never give in.
-Jennifer H. Fortin
Jennifer H. Fortin is the author of the just-published book of poems Mined Muzzle Velocity (Lowbrow Press)and a few chapbooks. She recently moved to Syracuse, NY.For more information, visit www.jenniferhfortin.com.
The American Dialect Society has elected the word “occupy” as 2011′s Word of the Year. It won significantly in a runoff against “99%” and the word “FOMO” (“fear of missing out”), which refers to “anxiety over being inundated by the information on social media,” according to CNN.
This week, you will see Coldfront Magazine’s Occupy Wall Street video, filmed by DJ Dolack at Zuccotti Park in October and featuring numerous contemporary poets reading poems that they feel contextualize the movement. Stay tuned.
The American Dialect Society is a group of “linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, authors, editors, professors, university students, and independent scholars” that is dedicated to “the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it.”
Here is our report on last year’s word of the year, “app.”
Next week, two exciting new reading series that incorporate both live poetry and live music (in alternating sets) will be held in Manhattan — one uptown, one downtown. We suggest you experience both.
The first, “The Local Word,” will be held on Tuesday, January 10 at Le Cheile in Washington Heights. “The Local Word,” founded by Erin Lynn, is one of very few reading series held uptown, and allows Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood residents to see a great reading right down the street. Amy Holman, Lauren Hunter, and Michael T. Young will read, and piano/violin combo Jason Laney and Tami Jaton will provide music. Laney and Jaton also played last month when the series debuted with Stephanie Berger, David Eye and John Deming (author of this news brief), who performed a combination of music and poetry. The intimate and house-packing series is held in a hip, tranquil event room in Le Cheile, which boasts paintings of uptown Manhattan.
The second poetry-music combo, “Couplet,” will be held on Thursday, January 12 and will feature readings by Joanna Fuhrman, Rick Snyder, and Hanna Andrews, followed by a set by DJ Ceremony. “Join us for a poetry reading at 8pm and stay for the after-party. Drink specials,” the Facebook invite page suggests. In an e-mail, series founder Leah Umansky said that Couplet is “a quarterly event combining my two passions in life: poetry & music.” It will be held at The Delancey on the lower east side, one of the best live venues in the city.
Here are details for both events:
The Local Word
Date: Tuesday, January 10 (monthly)
Time for the reading: 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Event Venue: Le Cheile
Venue Address: 839 West 181st Street, New York, NY
Venue Phone: 212-740-3111
Nearest Subways: A to 181st Street — two minute walk
Admission Price: FREE
COUPLET
Date: Thursday, January 12th. (Quarterly)
Time for the reading: 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.
[Time for the after-party: 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.]
Event Name: “Couplet” (A Poetry and Music Series)
Event Venue: The Delancey (Main / Street level)
Venue Address: 168 Delancey Street; NY, NY, 10002. (between Clinton and Attorney.)
Venue Phone: 212-254-9920
Nearest Subways: F: Delancey Street /// J, M, Z: Essex Street /// J: Bowery /// B, D: Grand Street.
Admission Price: FREE
Ages: 21 & up.
More info: www.djceremony.comhttp://iammyownheroine.wordpress.com, ;http://coupletreadingseries.tumblr.com/, http://www.facebook.com/events/282841648423907/
My family moved to Los Angeles when I was five and I left when I was a teenager. 1980’s Los Angeles and I were never a good fit, and I generally dislike songs about L.A. They too often romanticize a glossiness I can’t stand, even when they are trying to get to the grit of things. I rarely miss Los Angeles (although there are people there I miss quite a lot) but “Come a Long Way” by Michelle Shocked fills me with a kind of longing I can wallow in for 4:43 minutes (LP version). Released in 1992, the year I finally left, it’s got everything I remember: the big hair on the Boulevard, earthquakes, the pachyderm, the dying dark. The music is celebratory, the lyrics are wild, clever, even funny, and in Shocked’s lovely, no-frills voice there is a familiar ambivalence about the city I will never get over.
Lynn Melnick’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including The Awl, A Public Space, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, LIT, and The Paris Review.
