Posts Tagged ‘Brett Price’

Browning & Svalina at The Poetry Project

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Brett Price curated what many referred to as a homecoming for Sommer Browning and Mathias Svalina on Friday, March 11 at The Poetry Project.

While living in Brooklyn, Browning was an integral part of the poetry world by curating and hosting Pete’s Candy Store, serving as one of the poetry editors for The Portable Boog City Reader and an editor (along with Tony Mancus) of Flying Guillotine Press, which she still edits.

During Svalina’s tenure in Brooklyn, he co-curated Yardmeter Editions Reading Series, served as poetry editor for Boog City and co-edited (with Zach Schomburg) Octopus Books and magazine. He still edits both. Since Svalina’s departure, this was his first return to New York, and Browning’s second. Attendees brought wine and beer, and even a bottle of absinthe made an appearance, with Brandon Downing working the sugar spoon to perfection.

A little after 10:30, the lights dimmed and the readings began.  Below are the set-lists for Browning and then Svalina.

Sommer Browning took the stage and distributed postcards which contain a cartoon drawing of a person playing  guitar. She said the card was her first poem, titled, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here’s what followed:

1. Sideshow
2. Death Defying
3. When Christopher Died
4. Either Way I’m Celebrating
5. It Isn’t Dead Just Different
6. the comic on page 88 of her book, Either Way I’m Celebrating
7. I’m Sorry I Ate That (title of another comic from the book)
8. Acts of Misinterpreted Surrender
9. A Kind of Chosen Birthday with No Known Pianist
10. The Movies
11. Alive with a finger (comic)
12. Still life
13. The Opposite of Love
14.The Meat from the Dream the Heart Knows
15. Feel Better

At this point Browning attempted to leave the stage, but the audience wasn’t having it and begged for an encore. She read two more poems.

1. “Notes About Art Pepper”
2. “Officer and Gentleman”

After a brief intermission, Svalina took the stage and read poems from his book, destruction myth, as well as a series of new poems about spells. He opened his reading by reading a poem for and by Bill Cassidy who passed away earlier in the year.  More on Cassidy here and here. Here’s the rest of Svalina’s set-list:

1. “Creation Myth”
2. -first line, “In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird”
3. ” ” -first line, “In the beginning there was a book”
4. ” ” -first line, ” He set the first fire as a joke”
5. ” ” -first line, ” In the beginning there was a pen that drew itself into existence & then drew all the”
6. A Spell Against a Dropping of Things
7. A Spell Against Distances
8. A Spell Against Sickness

from “Creation Myth”

1. first line, ” In the beginning there was a big puddle of honey”
2. Sickness is my Meat
3. first line, “In the beginning I was a little thing in the center of a star.”
4. A Spell Against Unlocked Door
5. A Spell Against Human Fraility
6. The Hypothesis of Death
7. first line, “In the beginning the registar”
8. first line, ” In the beginning everything I said exploded.”
9. first line, “My mother & father are both chemists.”
10. A Spell Against Ownership
11. Destruction Myth

*

-steven karl

photos & video Hitomi Yoshio

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Odd Swallows

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

by Robyn Ewing
Slope Editions 2006
Reviewed by Brett Price

6_5stars_6

A ____ of ____

ewing coverFrom the get-go Ewing warns:

I do nothing
    straight-
ly.      

And in the context of Odd Swallows, Robin Ewing’s second collection of poems, nothing could be more precisely put, and at the same time, so completely understated.  Its thirteen sections (fourteen, if you include the final “Special Advertising Section”) employ charts, graphs, comic strips, Mad Libs and more to explore a range of subjects from the particularly personal to larger social concerns such as poverty and war.  One interesting effect of such formal zaniness is that the poems always seem to ride a line between a number of tonal and conceptual binaries: hope and despair; humor and severity; invention and gimmick, etc.   

In the book’s second section, “Art Love War,” many of the poems take on the serious baggage inherent in those massive subjects, but often the manner in which they’re addressed undercuts that seriousness with playfulness.  This is not to say either extreme outweighs the other.  They’re both present simultaneously and the poems serve as grounds for contrast.  The poem “Love, Sincerely” is a good example of this:

Dear                Guy in charge                        ,

      If:
        Lack of           curiosity          .               

      Then:

        Man’s art is          war           .

Love,
Sincerely

Here, Ewing uses the light-hearted form of a Mad Lib to make a statement that seems to oppose that light-heartedness.  It could be read both as a plea and also as a distilled kind of prayer, one that operates simultaneously as hypothesis for and explanation of war.  However, the blanks suggest that any number of other possibilities could replace these particular choices at any given time, which is where the poem really gets its mileage from the form.  In this way, the instance of this poem points well beyond itself and makes a statement about the larger world of which it is a part.  Furthermore, it ends not with a signature, but with what could be read as an imperative command, implying that the speaker doesn’t write in search of an answer, but instead to offer one.

The book greatly challenges a reader’s sense-making methods too, but rarely do the poems give off the feeling that they’re undermining one’s ability to make any sense of them at all.  When the forms aren’t recognizable, often there are keys to accessibility provided.  This isn’t to say that the poems are riddles and Ewing gives the necessary tools to solve them, just that they often leak bits of information that can illuminate approaches to the poems that surround them. 

For example, two of the book’s most interesting sections, “V. Ordinary Swallows” and “VI. Odd Swallows,” work in a kind of counterpoint.  The two poems in “Ordinary Swallows” are pretty straightforward and scientifically toned.  The first, “An Ordinary Swallow Lecture With Weak Feet,” is a paragraph of information about swallows taken directly from a pocket guide to birds (who knows if it’s a real pocket guide or not?): “Their airy flight is characterized by brief periods of floating, frequent shifts in direction and abrupt changes in speed…”  The information sets up a metaphorical framework from which the poems in the following section, “Odd Swallows,” can deviate.  And they do. 

However, there are some poems that don’t quite get off the ground as well.  “40 Something Places In 20 Something Years Is It Something? (Condensed)” is a sprawling hybrid map-chart.  While it really is gorgeous to look at and breaks the distinction spatially between itself and the poem on the following page, it’s hard to see how it amounts to much more than a fragmented list of bits and pieces of the speaker’s history.  “Upon The (Extended) Mass Mourning of John F. Kennedy Jr. and His Wife” is a quirky one-liner: “Ugly people die too,” which seems to come out of the blue and fade back in just as quickly. 

These moments are rare though. “Porto Poemplay Series #YY R24: Smilin’ Jack Smacked By Paradise” is an “involuntary collaboration” between John Milton and comic strip artist Zach Mosely.  Each illustration is paired with selected lines from Paradise Lost.  There are 18 total sections and the resulting narrative is dark and surreal.  It’s a fine example of how the past can be re-contextualized to say much about the present. 

On the whole, Odd Swallows is fun, challenging, and humane.  The poems disrupt the chronological order of the book with hyperlink-like footnotes and other strategies of redirection, and yet it maintains a surprising coherence.  It’s worth swallowing and re-swallowing and when you think you’re done, Ewing reminds:

Unfortunately
    my mind
    is
indestructible.

*

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