Posts Tagged ‘Mathias Svalina’

Snapshot: Amy Lawless

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013

I first met  Amy Lawless in 2005. She had recently moved to New York City from Boston and I from Portland. We were both entering the MFA program at The New School. It was exciting and terrifying in all the best ways. Post-graduation we eventually found ourselves living in the same Brooklyn neighborhood. There were brunches, late nights, and a seemingly endless amount of readings all over the city. Amy now lives in the East Village and I in Miami. Time passes; things change. Earlier this year, Amy’s second collection of poetry, My Dead was published by Octopus Books. I decided it was time to catch-up with Amy via email to chat with her about the transition between first and second books, working with Paul Violi, where her poems originate, and a host of other things. Enjoy.

“See The World For What It Is”*

 SK: Hi Amy, sometimes it seems like it was only yesterday that we were sitting in Paul Violi’s workshop. Other times, it feels like that was a lifetime ago, you know what I mean? So much has happened since then, like the unfortunate passing away of Paul, as well as the publication of not one, but two poetry collections by you. Thanks for agreeing to take the time out to answer some of my questions.

AL:  Thanks Steven!  I am delighted that you asked me. Yes, I think you were one of the first people I met in NYC.  You may not know this, but Paul’s wonderful workshop was the first poetry class I’d ever taken in my entire life.  I had moved to New York one week beforehand from Boston. I was very scared.  I didn’t know how to act in a workshop.  You, however, didn’t seem scared.**  You seemed chill.  Yes, so much has happened since then….

SK: You recently had your second book, My Dead published by Octopus Books. What was the biggest difference between writing and publishing Noctis Licentia and My Dead?

AL: They were two somewhat different experiences.  I wrote about half of the poems in Noctis Licentia while in graduate school. The poems took shape during those two years and the year that followed.  I had that built-in community of readers (like you!) in classes and informal friendships.  I cared A LOT about what people would think.  I thought I was a funny poet. That I had to write funny poems. But life was funnier then.

Writing My Dead occurred from 2009/2010 – 2012.  I certainly showed my poems to a lot of friends, curious what they would think and say and react, really curious, but this time the fire came from within and not without, that is without a formal structure of being in a school setting.  I had to write these poems, this was not school, this was survival.

SK: Since your book is titled, My Dead let’s talk about death for a bit. The first section of your book “Elephants in Mourning” was written after the passing of some of your relatives. Can you talk a little bit about the creative process of dealing with the grief and sadness that comes with losing family, that is an extension of your blood?

AL: Sure. Between 2007 and 2009, my uncle Ed died of emphysema at an age too young, my grandmother Evelyn (my mother’s mother) passed away, and my step-grandfather Marty died (Evelyn’s husband).

I eulogized each of three family members in the churches attended by family members. I was the “writer” in the family.  I felt I did a good job, I wanted my family members to be honored with my words. I worked really hard on these eulogies despite the short period of time one has to do these things (like 48 hours).

Of those three family members, only my grandmother Evelyn was related to me by “blood.”  However, Marty was my grandfather – he married my grandmother, my Nana, before I was born.  I always thought he was so damned cool for insisting we (my sisters and cousins and I) call him Marty. Felt adult. He was really smart, kind, and had great stories about World War II, monkeys, the radio, Mohammed Ali, the U.S. Government, where he worked for a long time.  I respected him, and loved visiting him and my grandmother in both their house in Jamaica Plain (Boston), and their house in Cape Cod.  My very image of the beach has been formed and informed by these summer trips.

After Marty died, after the third of these three deaths, the third of these three eulogies, I cried a lot. I couldn’t sleep. I went to my doctor and said I wasn’t sleeping.  She asked what was going on. I told her the third of three deaths.  She put me on a low dose anti-depressant.

I didn’t write a poem for a whole year. Or more specifically, I wrote two poems.  I was totally blissed out, checked out.  I read, attended poetry readings, I covered my sorrow with a pill every day.

After a year, I went off of the drug.  I was happy to do so.  I wanted to know what feelings felt like again.

A few weeks after I went off the drug in the summer of 2010, I was just sitting home watching nature documentaries and Youtube videos. I watched elephants mourning other elephants and I came to feel an overwhelming feeling of empathy and sorrow.  I wrote the whole poem in that one day.  (However, I edited it for a full year.)

I’m glad to have my feelings back.

SK: Paul Violi was a special poet who cared about his students and the poems they wrote. What was it like having Violi as a mentor and what has he meant for you as a poet?

AL: Paul was the most generous of mentors.  He was kind, wry, hilarious, and we got along famously.  A kindred spirit. We would meet every other week at the New School in the courtyard where people would smoke cigarettes.  I don’t smoke cigarettes, but we’d usually just shoot the shit and catch up for a while.  He would tell the most amazing stories.  I’ve written on Paul and his impact on me before. Then we’d wander over to Murray’s Bagels on 6th Avenue.  Drink espresso, talk about poems, laugh our asses off.  Well that’s how I remember it.  After Paul died I went through some old emails.  You know, almost afraid to let the tips of my fingers find them.  And guess what? He was far more critical than I remembered. He wanted me to be reading more poetry, and he was totally right! He didn’t think I should use any pop culture references in my poems, and wasn’t afraid to raise his eyebrows at a poem that had no business existing.  He was able to say so much without saying anything.

So basically, it was the best mentor experience possible: inspiring and generous.  I still sometimes have conversations with him about poems in my head.

SK: Those of who have been lucky enough to know you are quick to realize that your poems really do feel like Lawless children ushered into the world: they are witty, quirky, funny, smart as hell, mischievous, do not shy away from uncomfortable “truths”, and are aware the world is a messy and often awful place, yet remain cautiously optimistic. So tell us, where does a poem begin for you?  Do you set out to write “funny poems”, or do the poems take on a life of their own?

AL: This is a really wonderful question, Steven, and I’m humbled to be characterized as in any kind of close proximity to my poems. I never set out to do anything.  My chest opens up and the alien babies come forth. I am only a shell for some monsters.

I have a little nephew named Freddie.  He’s 17 months old and he does this amazing thing where he points to things that are out of place: a flower without half its petals, an owl picture absent of its head, a lamp not in use, a book not being read, a star not in the sky.  I sometimes do that too, but my pointing might be sitting down and writing a poem.

SK: Since the release of your book you’ve managed to hit the road and do some readings. Where did you go? Do you have any upcoming readings?

AL: Oh holy shit I did.  I had two readings at AWP Boston.  Then I went to Portland, Maine with James Gendron, whose amazing and hilarious book Sexual Boat (Sex Boats) came out from Octopus Books the same day as My Dead, and Zachary Schomburg. Mathias Svalina also came with but he didn’t read poems.  Mathias and Zach made me laugh so hard I almost wet my pants in Maine.  They’re a real comedy duo.  Then all four of us read for the Triptych Reading Series with Brandon Shimoda and Dot Devota. Dot read the most amazing poem I think about rather often. Then James Gendron and I drove to a bunch of places in a rental car. We read at Librarie Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal, Flying Object, in Hadley, Massachusetts with Ish Klein.  Then we came back to Brooklyn and read at the Stain of Poetry Series hosted by the lovely Jenny Zhang with Nadxi Nieto and Leopoldine Core.  Then we drove to Providence and read for the Kate Shiapara’s Publicly Complex series. Then we read in Philadelphia, hosted by Daron Mueller at Molly’s Books.  Finally, we read with Matthew Zapruder and Sarah Rose Etter at Three Tents in Washington, DC. It was really fun going on tour with James. I feel like he’s the brother I never had, and he’s a damn amazing poet.  Since then I’ve had some readings in NYC that were really great.  All told, I sold some books and met some really interesting characters and I slept on some couches.

Upcoming: I am going to North Carolina to read for the So & So Reading Series hosted by Chris Tonelli on Saturday June 15 with Lauren Hunter, Christine Kanownik, and Alina Gregorian.  I’m also reading for something Book Camp somewhere in either Oregon or Washington from August 16-18, also with James Gendron.  After that? I’ll be reading a collaborative poem with Angela Veronica Wong at the Best American Poetry gala launch on September 19.

SK: What’s next or what are you currently working on?

AL: I have been writing prose poems with the same title, “The Secret Lives of Deer.”  I also have a manuscript called “EMPIRE” that’s not so much about Roman Emperors as it is about me. I should probably send it to some friends to have them read it.  I am writing some book reviews and essays.  Oh, I am also collaborating with the amazing Angela Veronica Wong.  I recently reviewed Ben Fama’s Mall Witch for BOMBLOG, which was an interesting intellectual exercise. It’s fun and sweat-inducing to write essays and reviews, so I’m doing more of that.  I want to sweat more.

I decided it would be fun to do a second Snapshot with Amy, asking her primarily silly questions, because why not?

Snapshot with Amy Lawless pt. 2

“I Refuse To Be The Joey Tribbiani Of Anything”

SK: Would you rather be in the cast of Friends, Gossip Girl, or Cheers?

AL: That’s a trick question.  You know I’m from Boston so I’d say Cheers.  However, the idea of living or constantly inhabiting a BAR is icky.  Having everyone know your name is lovely but too intimate. Therefore, I’d like to say Friends because everyone falls in love in the water fountain during the opening credits, and I want to fall in love.  Oh wait. Joey Tribbiani, voiced by Matt LeBlanc, doesn’t find love.  I refuse to be the Joey Tribbiani of anything.

SK: Amy, you caught me! It was totally a trick question. I thought for sure, you’d say Cheers- haha!

SK: Who or what were you in your past life?

AL:  I have no idea.

SK: What is your spirit animal?

AL:  Crow.  Read about it and find your spirit animal here.

SK: Would you rather be a puma or snow leopard?

AL: Snow leopards are prettier.

SK: If you were in a band would you be the lead singer/rhythm guitarist, lead guitarist, bass player, or the drummer?

AL: All the instruments.

SK: Ideal vacation? Cabin in the mountains or luxury hotel with beach-front access?

AL: Can it be a cabin on the beach instead?  I’m always at a luxury resort in my own thoughts.

SK: Would you rather be Wonder Women, Supergirl, or She-ra?

AL: She-ra?

SK: Would you rather be a famous unicorn or salty old dragon?

AL: Dragons know a lot.

SK: Romantic lead in a comedy, crazy killer in a Tarantino-type flick, or that “one” in a sci-fi feature who inspires hope by swearing earth is out there and you’re going to lead them to it?

AL: You must come with me.  The meteor is going to hit. This is your last chance. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? ….[heaving heaving breaths] Tell me. Tell me when was the last time you saw the sun with your own eyes?  [Slaps giant steel goggles off of the head of Krinld] THE EYES IN YOUR HEAD!  You’ve all been under the thought-blasts of Gzianz for too long.  We have to get out of here. USE YOUR EYES.  We have two hours to get to the ship. After that it’s over.  You can kiss your sweet leach stars good bye! 

SK: Astrological sign?

AL: Pisces, the astrological sign closely associated with death. It is the last sign.

SK: Final question, if you were a tree would you be a deciduous or a coniferous?

AL:  I don’t believe in coniferous trees.  I would have to be a deciduous tree because I believe very much in the changing of the seasons, in leaves falling.  These leaves turn red and yellow and orange and brown and express their death in ways I can’t deal with—it’s too beautiful and poignant. When leaves fall we can look at them on ground and know that the passage of time exists and is real, and oh look you have a grey hair.  Oh look your time is limited. Oh look, the water in the glass I’ve left on the counter is lighter because the water has evaporated.  Oh look.  Coniferous trees don’t provide ME this kind of opportunity for self-reflection.  After all, it’s all about me.

 

* The title comes from a line in Amy’s second book, My Dead (formatting mine).

** I had taken some poetry workshops at Portland State University, thanks to the kindness of Michele Glazer, but was also very scared, just better at faking it (ego and all that stupidity!).

 

Amy Lawless is the author of the poetry collections Noctis Licentia and My Dead. She has been named a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She teaches writing in New York City and blogs at amylawless.blogspot.com.

Steven Karl is an editor for Coldfront Magazine. His first book, Dork Swagger, is forthcoming from Coconut Books in the fall of 2013. He lives in Miami, FL.

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Posted in features


chap nook 7: Turovskaya, Cohen & Svalina, Zapruder

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

New Year’s Day, Genya Turovskaya (Octopus Books, 2011)

Genya Turovskaya’s New Year’s Day weds the lyrical, the philosophical, and the absurd using unadorned language in lines that, through repetitious morphing, are as elegant as they are alchemical. “I wanted very badly to feel very badly to feel,” Turovskaya writes in the title poem, and it is this kind of redundantly precise and amorphous semantic gesturing, threaded to the self and a search for emotional certainty, that makes the five poems in this chapbook unique. Though the title New Year’s Day suggests an emphasis on beginnings, the poems within are concerned with disrupting the illusion of linearity. “I imagine a black hole at the far end of the airport corridor,” she writes, raising questions about linear and spatial distortion and the interaction between the infinite and the finite. Though the sphere fits inside the cube, Turovskaya seems to say, nothing has been contained, as with emotional experience, as with language. Put two seemingly simple things together; what remains is no longer simple. In “White Letters,” words and phrases are continually repositioned and juxtaposed, so that lines such as “your eyes are like a thousand square miles” and “I carried the weather” rematerialize as “your eyes carried the weather for a thousand square miles,” replacing logic with celebration of surprise, exuberance, and energy. “[I]n plain English / a baby is born,” Turovskaya writes in “The Present World,” and, as in all the poems in New Year’s Day, language becomes the literal act of creation, a site of miraculous, if not mysterious, reinvention.

– Nick Sturm

*

Route, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina (Immaculate Disciples Press, 2012)

Like a millionaire lights his cigars with burning $100s, a widening post-Ashbery vein of poetry treats the Known-New Contract like an afterthought, if a thought at all. Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina’s prose poems in Route operate under this principle, where the sentences are a series of blind left turns that generate insane juxtapositions: “Between two fires the metal broods in the false state of departure. Of the forty-two thousand corpses, each turns in a hand before the right place is found.”

Each of Route’s series—“Black Metal & Ice” & “Two Sisters”—offers a meta-commentary on this “composition by gap.” The first is a polar landscape where caches scattered in voids threaten to absorb the untrue traveler. The costs of movement into the unknown and tenuously known are high and saturated with the consciousness of previous loss: “The sun devises a plan: history combines with a man-hauling sledge….Two things, food and children, have been left behind.” Here, the sentences’ zigs and zags are invested with a mortal stake, a quiet wonder at where one has arrived and a sense, also, of enervation, the piling weight of a travel in which the traveler is forced to abandon her accoutrements. This is a poetics not of a resistance to meaning, the Known, but a bifurcation of meaning into its component parts.

The leaps in “Two Sisters” are less perilous and invested with more possibility: “If she can jump from one floating umbrella to the next, the larger sister can find a new face to kiss in the ocean’s chop.” The sisters are contrasted with scientists who, in trying to find universal organizing principles, bind and are bound: “She sees the scientist holding the chains above their heads. The manacles. The beakers.” Ultimately, the sisters’ engagement with the “dirt & stethoscopes” of land is a dalliance where they are never truly at risk. Arriving from and returning to the ageless, unfixed sea, and outside of time and the concerns of larger society, they are a less dire version of Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus.

When Kafka’s Burgomaster, the administrator of a limited temporal order, says, “I’d like to know something coherent about you,” Gracchus replies, “Ah, coherent. That old, old story. All the books are full of it, teachers draw it on the blackboard in every school…merchants tell it to the customers, the customers to the merchants.”

When the Burgomaster says, “I’d like to know something coherent about you,” Cohen and Svalina, rowing away, answer, “Three fish leap into the boat & melt into silver. Relief in the sound of horizon.”

–Joe Hall

**

The Odyssey, Matthew Zapruder (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2011)

Matthew Zapruder’s new chapbook of plainsong-like poems is an odyssey both intimate and universal. “Poem for Engagement,” for instance, is filled with broad, sweeping ideas: “we are people/and we know/how real a dream/when it’s empty/but for the few/great questions is.” Yet, however encompassing the language, the title draws a tidy border around the poem and limits its pertinence to an expression of quiet contentment; clearly, happiness is not always loud.

Many of the poems in The Odyssey are solitary, even still. The “odyssey” in question might be any journey entered into alone. This includes marriage, as we see in “Poem for Happiness”:

and now I am thinking on a hillside
where the wind is blowing very strongly
we will get married

He closes the poem with an image of workers reading next to each other during lunch. They are “together and alone,” and the same is true for any couple, except that those in a relationship know they are “together,” that they chose it–a happy-making thought in the midst of heavy contemplation.

Some of the most resonant moments in the collection allude to loss: “…it was/how sick she was/I should’ve known/her long fingers/shook all summer” (“Poem for Massachusetts”). Others allows us refuge in huge, multifaceted landscapes: “A constant breeze/from the north where shadows live/in ancient government/among the old huge trees/carries a little scent of wood/into the city” (“Poem for Lu Chi”). The title poem does both:

our house seems
like a small
palace we keep
ready for someone
terrifying
I read a few pages
of The Odyssey
trans. Richmond Lattimore
someone dead
touched these pages
I hand you your coffee
your face shines

Zapruder creates a warm world of relationships and household inventory. He tips his cap to Frank O’Hara with the “Lattimore” reference, and like O’Hara, Zapruder seems interested in cataloging the small in the service of the large. He likes to account for at least some of the billion points of context that complicate any room or landscape. But Zapruder appears calmer and more calculated. He makes us feel the tangibility of contentment with life’s banalities and reminds us to keep our eyes open, for any situation can suddenly become miraculous.

–Jessica Kagansky

***

 

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Posted in reviews


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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Posted in news


Poetry in a Painting Studio: Yardmeter Editions

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

An interview with Farrah Field, Jared White and Shelton Walsmith

How long has Yardmeter Editions been going on?

Shelton Walsmith: In April, Yardmeter Editions will be 2 years old.

Farrah Field: We try to have events once a month, but sometimes we just do it when we can. We try to keep it pretty stress free.

Jared White: Yardmeter started up as an event series in Shelton’s beautiful and cozy Gowanus studio. Shelton, poet Mathias Svalina, and a third friend, Jon Pack, started it up. Farrah was actually featured as a reader in the first event, in which Mathias read poems as well and Jon hung his photographs on the large blank dry wall in Shelton’s space.

What is your favorite thing about curating the series?

Farrah Field: Our series is generally designed to be multi-media events and I really like getting to know the artists, musicians, film makers, writers, etc. who attend and who have presented. Although Yardmeter Editions is a series, I really like it that we treat each happening as its own event.

Shelton Walsmith: And it’s an opportunity to shine light on talented artists who may or may not have other venues for their work. Everywhere, but I think especially in New York, the climate of competition is such that artists have to hit the streets and beat the bushes in search for opportunities to showcase their talent and further their careers. Having done this myself for many years, and always wishing for invitations rather than rejections, curating satisfies a larger ambition: to be a part of the New York art world by creating it on a grass roots level.

Jared White: We love being able to gather people who are doing very different kinds of work, especially in different mediums. New York is so balkanized in terms of art scenes that it is fun to bring people together who might not otherwise meet in conversation. Some of our most exciting events (though hard to plan!) have been one-off evenings in which presenters were able to collaborate beforehand – an artist responding to poets and vice versa – and we look forward to doing more of these sort of unique high-concept events in the future. The full name of the series, Yardmeter Editions, suggests our desire to play with the limits of the transitory event versus the artifact, and we’ve talked about various ways to explore this aspect further.

In particular, I think something that Farrah and I particularly enjoy (though I also find it very stressful) is exploring various ways to do introductions. We’ve tried reading whole poems by presenters, doing complicated flowcharts about the presenters’ work, recording our introductions beforehand and playing them as audio files, and performing live interviews.

Tell me about any other people who work on the series.

Shelton Walsmith: In the past Yardmeter consisted of poet Mathias Svalina and photographer Jon Pack. I think back on the people who have performed as being collaborators, for instance, filmmaker Cat Tyc has shown her work but, like Jon, remained as a technical advisor. I also feel the regular members of the audience have collaborated with us somehow, perhaps in their abiding presence but more importantly in their shared memory of events. That said the consistent force behind Yardmeter Editions is the three of us.

Farrah and Jared are writers with an enormous openness and capacity for ideas and experience. As individuals they are assured enough in their own work to concentrate attention on the writers within their immediate sphere but also to reach out and connect with the work of others outside the comfort zone. As a couple they make an irresistible stand-up act. Kind of good cop bad cop without the bad cop…Our partnership began with Farrah’s initial involvement as a performer at Yardmeter. Since then the three of us have evolved into a good shared vision. It’s exciting working with them because while they are very rooted and plugged into poetry culture they also view change/growth/development as essential to a functioning event series.

Jared White: Farrah and I are poets and so our knowledge and social network tends to lead toward other writers, whereas Shelton as a painter knows a lot of artists that he wants to invite to Yardmeter; still, Farrah and I have invited visual artists and Shelton has invited writers so there is definitely no hard and fast rule about this.

After Cat Tyc, a video artist and writer, showed her short film, “Umbrella,” for Yardmeter last spring, we invited her to help out with future events and she’s been a terrific asset in facilitating the use of a projector to show short films. Jon Pack has also been an invaluable part of Yardmeter; beyond being of the hosts, he showed work from his photography project exploring derelict Olympic stadiums in the first Yardmeter and has done amazing work at many of our events taking photographs to document these transitory occasions for posterity (and Facebook).

Farrah Field: I really like it when Shelton, Jared, and I get together to plan events. We have all kinds of ideas—we like generating ways to break away from the typical reading format. (Think about it: a reading in total darkness. It can happen!) So planning events that have artwork that speaks to what poets and musicians are doing, well, it takes quite a bit of planning.

What are the best and worst things about the venue?

Jared White: Shelton’s studio is located right on top of one of the one-hundred-year-old toxic spills that pepper the Gowanus valley. It’s such a terrible situation environmentally and an enormous worry; it seems to me to be a very positive development that these sites have finally been given superfund status so eventually they will be cleaned up. In the meantime, the superfunding of the area may stave off development and allow it to retain its gritty, arty texture amidst the surrounding neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn. It is wonderful to walk up Douglass St and feel like you are coming upon a secret. Shelton’s studio is very friendly and it is always such a wonderful feeling simply to be in his space. (Not to mention the unforgettable Brooklyn skyline visible from the roof.) The only downside we have found so far is that the space gets very hot in the summertime when filled up with people, but we’ve addressed this issue simply by just taking a break. We’ve talked about perhaps taking Yardmeter outdoors to a nearby park or rooftop and hopefully we may get this going next summer.

Farrah Field: I love how homey Shelton’s studio is, a space where people can present and perform without having to worry about background bar noise and that sort of thing.

Shelton Walsmith: Because the venue is my painting studio, I could go on at great length about its problems. Before anything it is my work space and a sanctuary to follow my vocation. I work there 5-6 days a week. Having a monthly event series can be very taxing when you proliferate large objects which have to be shuffled safely around on a monthly basis. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to paint. Gone are the days when an artist could find an otherwise unused cold water flat and make art for $100 a month because it’s ugly old Brooklyn. Now Brooklyn is a destination instead of a last resort. My studio is very expensive to maintain and at times, especially when we started Yardmeter I was at risk of losing it for lack of resources. However, this financial focus was one of the reasons I began approaching writers in 2008 to join forces and stage events there. The full weight of the financial meltdown was dawning and every conversation I had with artists was all gloom and doom. It was real but it was tiring and discouraging that people ordinarily obsessed with art and culture were now obsessing on “the end of art as a means to make money.” Since my space is largish (aside from a load bearing column in the center of the room which is another stone in my shoe) it is a fairly open and can handle an audience. I saw an opportunity to punch a small hole in the presiding despair with a bohemian venture that had nothing to do with money.

Despite all that, it’s a room full of possibility. Constant rearrangement (while a pain) is completely doable. There is a place to step outside and still be in touch with what’s going on inside. It’s old and has architectural details that speak to this older New York idea.

What is your favorite Yardmeter memory over the last couple of years?

Shelton Walsmith: Our most recent Yardmeter was number 13. So many magic things have happened I hesitate to isolate individual memories. The musician Snowblink sent chills down the foundation of the building. The antlers attached to her guitar created a daemon which still lives in the room. Recently playwright Kristen Kosmas did something unforgettable with clarinetist Chris Speed. Cellist James David Jacobs conducted a rousing chorus of about 40 of us singing, “You haven’t been eating scalloped potatoes for 3 days, like I have!” in row-row-row your boat-like sections. Mathias Svalina imprinted us with a pulpit style delivery which leaps to mind as the high bar established for future Yardmeters. Oh hell, all of it. I am always so pleased to be there more as an awed witness than a proud host.

Farrah Field: One of my favorite events was when painter Bari DeJaynes collaborated with three poets prior to the event. He mailed small pieces to each of the readers and on the night of the event, they each read something they wrote in response to the work Bari sent. In turn, Bari made new pieces that responded to all of the poets’ work. I loved that!

Jared White: I love how every event always offers some spontaneous energy and excitement – for instance:

– a live lottery to determine which Yardmeter audience member could go home with a piece by the New Zealand-based sculptor Kristin D’Agostino in a globe-circling artistic exchange.

– Paige Ackerson-Kiely sitting down on the steps to the fire escape during a mesmerizing reading of her poems

– Much-missed ex-New Yorkers Mathias Svalina and Julia Cohen offering readings from Denver on an abstract collaborative video piece at the event for Trickhouse

–Leah Souffrant performing a poem for two voices by reading live over a ghostly tape recording of herself

–the audience trying on necklaces designed by the poet Paige Taggart while she did a reading of her work from memory

–impromptu folk dancing to Central European gypsy/klezmer by Jeff Perlman and Patrick Farrell of Romashka

I’m always just so honored and happy to be able to invite some of our favorite writers, artists, musicians and other creative folks to come spend time with us and show us what they are working on – especially those who are coming in from beyond New York City and who we wouldn’t get to see otherwise.

photographs by: Jon Pack

** The next Yardmeter Editions will be held on Friday, December 17 at 7pm. **

— Ken L. Walker

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Posted in features


Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

by Keith Newton
Cannibal Books 2009
Reviewed by Mathias Svalina

6_5stars_6

…The Map Will Never Be Made

newton cover

Fragments, in poetry, collude. A lens flare fractures, sunlight knifes from distant windows: together they conspire toward guidance. Fragments tell us that something is waiting around the corner, when there is nothing waiting, & there is no corner. But when we turn the corner no one can see what happens to us.

Keith Newton’s chapbook-length poem Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City is a series of fragments broken into four sections. Most of the stanzas consist of a single line & all but one is a single-sentence. The fragments do not accrete. They don’t form into a stable narrative by the end. Our questions are not answered. Instead, the poem functions in blink-length memories. We find ourselves beneath the poem’s tangly sheets, entwined into memories & ideation.

It is one text, so it may be safe to say that all the memories originate from the same blinker. I blink. Do you blink? Perhaps the poem in fragments is the writer blinking the reader’s eyes.

The poem opens in an estate: “Garden, vestibule, corridor, asylum. / A definite capacity in the black pines.” This estate or house is a center point for the poem, but through its fragmented descriptions it does not exert gravity. It has capacity but no actuality. We pass by the house. We enter it & exit it but we are not drawn back. We learn that it is “A house under a spell. // A word to enter, a former name.” Instead of a blueprint, we are left with a series of doorways & details.

When we are in the poem we are in a city. There is an occupying force. Everyone is in trouble, in danger. There are traitors & agents, but they never quite enact themselves, instead their actions are cut off by syntax:

Suspect of a foreign attachment, 
the procedures are autonomous.

…

The questioner and the occupant at the front door.

The poem as an accumulation refuses to remember what befalls the occupant at the hands of the questioner. Corporeal subjects are rarely allowed to complete their actions in this poem. Newton reserves complete sentences for either the hallucinatory, “Against an impasse of the shades, / where the light is blocked, / the fever is the same,” or the simple declarative non sequitur: “The backdrop is missing”; “The focus is adjusted”; “They can pretend if they want.”

I do not know who we are as readers. I know I am not merely an observer. To invest oneself in the fragmented rhetoric of this poem is to blinkingly enter this city. I’m tempted to take the easy way out & say the reader is both the victim & the oppressor combined. No single viewpoint gives us this world. We are, at best, as the poem says, “The surveyor in pursuit of fragments.”

This Happy City has an atmosphere of noir, but lacking the kitsch. No glib speech or cleverness, but retaining the atmosphere of impending, fearful potential – an atmosphere I associate with the threatening fog of Carné’s Port of Shadows. It reads like the scraps of a shredded confession, rich with the imagistic anguish of betrayal. As I read it I keep wondering who has been exiled. Who has been sent forth & by whom?

The controlling agent that keeps the physical subjects from completing actions is, perhaps, the same agent that provides a stable interpretation. So then we’re back to wondering what is intended in the construction of fragments & what can be gained by surveying (ostensibly a controlling map) & what is it to survey in pursuit of fragments. The map will never be made & can only exist in the process of attempting itself. The victim hidden in this shadowy city will always lack motive, means & resolution. 

What keeps this potentially alienating poem from pushing me out is the stately grace of its lines’ progression & the regular interruption of the text by a scrawled line drawing that perhaps shows a skyline or a treeline or a series of codes. Newton’s terse yet deliberate sentences balance against oblique sentence fragments such as “At the hollowing of the patrol.” & “Crouched for the harvesting of objects.” The stateliness moves us smoothly through the language, so that no matter how odd the statement is, it arrives with calm. To spend time inside this poem is to be always looking for the hiding place, the tic of the face that reveals the lie.

So much of our daily experience is a filtration of experience & sense. It is lucky that the horrible bulk of our memory does not press down on us. We are lucky that our minds inure us to the constant sensation of being alive. To remain sane & secluded & safe we have to live inside of constructed worlds within the world we live in.  What makes a home? Is it a certain smell? The sound of the third stair creaking?

This poem a deep & velvety bag full of ominous trinkets & with each line I dip my hand back in & pull something new & disconcerting out. The fragments we seek in the attempt to survey do not complete the experience & likewise this poem does not end. The closing stanzas are “A flowering city from the decks. // A converted city out of reach.” It focuses itself at the end of the poem, but continues to push us past the cohering function of the text on the page. This is a quietly mysterious work that compels me to continue my mapping.

*

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