Posts Tagged ‘Ugly Duckling Presse’

Slot

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

by Jill Magi
Ugly Duckling Presse 2011
Reviewed by Gina Myers

8

“…if I flee consolation…”

In Jill Magi’s new collection of poetry, to slot means to curate, to categorize, to place away. Dedicated to New York and written in the wake of September 11, 2001, Slot shows Magi, a New York City resident, on a quest to understand memorializing and acts of public and private grief.  Published in Ugly Duckling Presse’s Dossier Series, which features works of an investigative nature, Slot looks to a variety of sources in an attempt to make sense of this era. However, the more she investigates and learns, the more complicated the issue becomes.

In Slot, the speaker wanders in and out of museums, goes to work in the days following September 11th, attends a candlelight vigil with her neighbors, and consults a variety of sources, from a mentor to guide books, scholarly works, poetry, and art. Presented as a hybrid, the book combines prose poetry and short lyric poems with photographs, quotes, and bibliography. The bibliography does not occupy its usual spot at the end of the collection; instead, it is woven throughout. Without numbered end notes or citations following the quoted material, it is not exactly clear what comes from where, but that hardly seems to be the point here. Instead, Magi is bringing together a variety of sources and placing them collage-like in conversation with one another as well as with herself:

In November, a place loosened in my throat, I got rid of it, and thought I was sick like the others.

“Perhaps the voids now define a design line that cannot be crossed.”

Thinking that dispatches such as the above were taking a toll on my body, I sought the following:

“Violent city: resembling an ink spot splashed onto the sky—

we saw, together, the glass towers slip and the light quiver shut.

Violent forest: stitched together in wet tunnels.”

Early in the collection, Magi asks, “Am I turning to poetry? As an escape or to make sense?” And it’s possible that she’s doing both—separating herself from the events by attempting to intellectualize them.

In her quest, Magi doesn’t just look to materials about September 11th for answers. She turns to other museums and memorials, from Holocaust Memorials to Hiroshima, the Devil’s Rope Museum in Texas, and the Colonial Williamsburg Escaped Slave Program where “guests are approached by a runaway slave. Visitors know that they are surrounded by slave catchers and so the park’s guests must react instinctively to the situation.” Magi is struggling to understand the memorial in general—how an event can be reduced to a monument and cheapened by a gift shop. She writes:

At the Office, I unroll one of the blueprints:

In the first place, the changing gallery.
In the second, the Café, the Gift Shoppe, 10:46 am. Dusk.
Lively hub of orientation and ticketing. Resource Center. Midnight.

Her mentor comments, “We’ll call them Experience Stages. Documentary Zones. Semi-enclosed spaces. Parental guidance areas so that families, according to their children, may edit.” Through memorialization, history and suffering become sanitized and consumable—something one can edit for his or her children. “Modesty screens” can be used to “prevent small children from watching the graphic and murderous scenes.” At another site, Magi notices “the work to erase the slave quarters, oil refineries up the river, chemical plants barely visible through the trees,” and elsewhere she notes the irony of twenty-nine lynching photos framed in light Georgia oak.

The purpose of memorial is called into question any time beauty or free-spiritedness/childish behavior is juxtaposed with the seriousness or solemnity the memorial should project, and Magi masterfully points a number of these moments out, such as when the Berlin Holocaust Museum opens and “an ‘unidentified youth’ is photographed jumping from pillar to pillar.” She also includes entries from a guestbook and survey questions like “Is there anything that makes an historical site particularly enjoyable for you?”

Even while searching for understanding and attempting to make sense of these contradictions, Magi resists—even rejects—slotting:

Because if I flee consolation

if I midnight. If I contest claims to store, stock, arcade,
exhibit, slot—

If a frame
made from the body
is broken and vulnerable to vines,

There’s a sense that slotting something is to strip it down, to simplify and sterilize, to enforce a single and digestible narrative. While finding a slot for her experiences and feelings surrounding September 11th may make things easier and bring her consolation, Magi knows it wouldn’t be a true representation of things.

Despite the wide-ranging thoughtful investigation of this collection, it is hard to ignore the bit of irony that exists in the fact that Magi’s desire to refuse “slotting” events and grief results in a perfect-bound book, a container of these thoughts and questions that can easily be closed and put away in an open slot on a bookcase. Nonetheless, this is an important collection that is wise in its inquiry and wise in its refusal to reach resolution. In her acknowledgments, Magi writes of her sources, “This ‘incorporation’ is a result of reading and research, writing and rewriting. It is my hope Slot may be a conduit back to these texts, an invitation to study and make brand new incorporations.” And in this way, the book and investigation remain open, waiting for the reader to join the conversation.

*

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Argos Books and The ‘Matter’ of Poetry

Monday, February 13th, 2012

Matter CoverThis month, independent Brooklyn press Argos Books is set to release Matter: A Picture Book. It’s the second installment of  the collaborative series Side by Side and features poems from Dorothea Lasky and “gestural abstract paintings” by Matthew Fischer in response to each of Lasky’s pieces. The resulting folio is a guidebook of “territories to wander into” with “intersections of light and sound” and pathways “to picturing the ‘matter’ of poetry.” Physically, Matter will be hand-sewn with a silkscreened cover. Visit Argos’ website to pre-order a unique copy.

Although Argos represents writers internationally, the press is largely run from editor Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s “big kitchen table” in Brooklyn. Covers are letter-pressed in Brooklyn as well, with “the kind and patient help” of Ugly Ducking Presse.

For more on Argos, see Ken L. Walker’s interview with the editors.

–Stephanie Ann Whited

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The Return of the Native

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

by Kate Colby
Ugly Duckling Presse 2011
Reviewed by Wendy S. Walters

6_5stars_6

“…and shrink with me”

Kate Colby’s The Return of the Native draws several of its poem titles from Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel of same name, which explored gender politics and foiled ambitions at the beginning of the modern era.  The novel’s frank portrayal of a shifting mindset about religion and new ways of thinking about the role of women in English society was ahead of its time.  Hardy’s detailed realism inspired empathy for his female characters especially, without the veil of romance to distract attention from their choices and faults.  Colby, in her work, seems less interested in generating strong feelings for a character than she does in evoking the world that makes a character’s invention possible. Because of this, the relationship between the two texts appears to be more atmospheric than literal.

The two works do intersect in Colby’s intent to represent “a synopsis and historical context” that illuminates the threshold of a changing social landscape. Colby’s aesthetic is wrought from scraps of icons, clichés, advertising slogans, and folklore, which resist the comfort that narrative provides in moments of discord.  These fragments manifest as multiple instances of disconnection that form a “crafty sampler of secretly/discontinuous, tied-off threads.” Many of the poems showcase extended metaphors that, in juxtaposition with other brief allegories, mimic the postmodern experience of constant interruption. Throughout the work, the divergent narrative threads do seem to lean towards each other, if never succumbing to unity.  These intentional disconnections both satisfy and annoy at unexpected moments.

“A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion,” one of the more direct pieces in the book, draws on lines we know. Each one aims to confirm some underlying disappointment: “Home is where/ the head is/ taken”; “now back to the technocolonial/ color of my youth” and “Over title I’d take the chain on my stopper,/ my own corroding string of beads and couplings/ and what goes out with the bathwater.”  Colby’s innovations on clichés provoke good feelings, despite the seriousness expressed by them. Some of the most resonant moments in the work as a whole are meditations on growing smaller. The poem “Through the Moonlight” points to the origins of introversion in the “architecture of the body:

Living in cities,
when you become the space
that the body contains
—feel the physics—
and shrink with me
under my para-
pluie of bent tines.

The speaker’s consciousness is informed by the space under the umbrella, but the desire for smallness also has implications for the intimate relationship. When she invites the reader to “shrink with me,” it is implied that presence is also the manifestation of ego.  The speaker’s desire for smallness is also a desire for greater connection through the compression of the self.

Consider a few lines from the poem “An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated” as another laud of the virtues of being contained, this time in the form of an object or artifact:

To climb inside the vitrine
gather together the glass
flowers I want to break
between my teeth, hear
shatter in my head—

How will it end?
With neither a bang nor a whimper
but a weary,
insistent
banging.

Inside the vitrine, the speaker becomes capable of irrevocable change.  Her expression of desire introduces the question of how one lasts when one is considered precious.  In the end, the weary banging manifests only in the speaker’s mind, but still does not cease.  Every “end” serves as a beginning, an endless set of starting points.  This idea is emphasized in the final image of the poem:

My tiny plot
I hoe and harrow
again and again
to see each time
what I might grow there.

The emotional core of the book is comprised of competing desires: to acknowledge there is no ending to any story and to manufacture a resolution when it is not possible to have one.

An intellectual intensity drives most of the poems in the collection, though the few overtly lyrical moments in the work are striking.  In the poem “Through the Moonlight,” an unexpected turn towards overtly romantic language and a direct plea for longing stun with their sweetness:  “Let us always be about/ to be leaving/ one another for the evening.” Later in the poem, we witness the sticky weight of intoxication in this lovely image: “Sluggish bees in late season/ suckle empty soda cans,” which suggests that when we become like the bee and seek fulfillment from beyond the context of predictable associations, desire appears to be unending.

As the book attempts to map the collision of personal, political and literary accounts that define an individual, we are reminded that whatever we observe is likely to be affected by our own meddling in the “drama”:

a long walk
on a short
fourth wall

Colby offers a smart and provocative counterpoint to “the romance of recorded history” through her confident embrace of the narrative fragment. The Return of the Native orchestrates a dynamic between broad cultural influences and sentiment but with little transparency about who is at the center of these perceptions.  Perhaps Colby does not want us to know.  Or maybe she is making the case that character was never that discrete, singular, or of certifiable provenance.  In either instance, it is not entirely clear how she interprets the relationship between conceptual argument and aesthetic experiment.  Maybe this kind confusion is the inevitable outcome of attempting to blend histories that otherwise would not intersect.

*

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chap nook 5: Lerner, Copeland, Goetz

Monday, September 19th, 2011

Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner (The Physiocrats 2011)

In Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner ponders whether any emotional response to art or religion is purely an affectation or desperate insistence on more than the “actual.” This chapbook is an excerpt from the poet’s novel of same name, published this year by Coffee House Press. Any overlap between real and fictive is beside the point, but it is worth noting that both Lerner and his narrator Adam received Fulbrights to work and study in Spain, and both grew up in Kansas. In Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam does what we might imagine a real Fulbright poet does: gives readings, has conversations, smokes spliffs, visits museums. He lets us observe one particular morning ritual:

I was usually standing before [Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross] within forty-five minutes of waking and so the hash and caffeine and sleep were still competing in my system as I faced the nearly life-sized figures and awaited equilibrium.

One morning, his routine is interrupted because another man is standing at the painting. The man weeps, and proceeds from painting to painting, sobbing at each and garnering the attention of museum guards. What is a museum guard to do, our narrator wonders, when “on the one hand you are a member of a security force charged with protecting valuable materials from the crazed or kids or the slow erosive force of camera flashes” and “on the other hand you are a dweller among supposed triumphs of the spirit and if your position has any prestige it derives precisely from the belief that such triumphs could legitimately move a man to tears.”

Lerner’s narrator is skeptical of “profound experience[s] of art.” He also wants to avoid the pitfalls of pure pragmatism—after all, he is in Spain because he “claim[s] to be a poet.” But he questions his own actions in every circumstance, revealing a vulnerability when encountering Maria Jose from the foundation (“I had been convinced…that my fraudulence was completely apparent to her”) and when kissing people hello, as per the local customs (“when you were drunk or high and foreign, you could easily slip up and the catch the corner of the mouth”). But the machinations of the mind and the things of the world are too mysterious to allow for final interpretation, and to doubt the value of heightened spiritual awareness even hints that such awareness has value. Lerner reminds us that total understanding is always a myth. His spirituality, if you can call it that, is based on curiosity pursued, never on the presumption that humans have the capacity to find a coherent answer. The novel is excellent, but this chapbook excerpt features a wonderful excerpt and is ideal for anyone who doesn’t have the time or attention span for the full novel.

–John Deming

*

Laked, Fielded, Blanked, Brooklyn Copeland (alice blue books, 2010)

 

This lovely, wee book from alice blue books is a miniature museum draped in Thai handmade paper. If you go inside, tune in. Sound counts most in Copeland’s “Laked, Fielded, Blanked.” The poet also relies on observation to get from spot to spot. Her poems explore the geography and geology of Morse Lake Marina, where “The Big/ creek meets/ the Little creek” and “Hammers break open geodes: scalene/ jig-jags.”

Copeland mixes natural observation with (perhaps) confessional verse about a relationship between the speaker and the “you” that suddenly appears—and then dominates—the experience. This relationship, though suggestive through layers of metaphor, is less compelling than the precise, intricate beauty of her descriptions. In that sense, Copeland recalls the influence of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and their progeny:

Someone’s anemone
Unelaborate runtbud
Muscling through
Woodwork

The wordplay, even letterplay, of “someone’s anemone” is part of a complex score that spans the entire chapbook. The poet also reveals a gift for negotiating tight spaces with apokoinu and other enjambment techniques (“from the word/ go we’ve/ done as one, laid/low”).

I close with one of my favorite stanzas, as it shows the work at its best—lyrical and clever:

Rotted out boat
Bottom—
the boat
will stay afloat

as long as you pretend to
row

–Gregory Murray

**

Dendrochronology, Greta Goetz (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

The cover of Greta Goetz’s Dendrochronology reveals both the immediate and cumulative effects of the collection: cluttered, impossibly large for its square-shaped cover to hold.  Similarly, Goetz’s twenty-eight poems (the first twenty-six of which are not titled but numbered), with their exceptionally long sentences jammed into square forms, turn quickly and forcefully, from recollection to reflection, down the page.  These techniques coupled with the omission of punctuation at the end of many poems create an urgent voice from a speaker whose thought or search has not finished despite the fact that the poem has.

Dendrochronology is the study of a tree’s rings to understand both its age and its history of environmental conditions.  Thus, Dendrochronology is a study of a self—its history and growth as well as the changing tenors of its experience.  Goetz’s poetic forms, particularly at the sentence level, mimic the growth rings–their overall shape, the tree’s trunk.  In this, they effectively contain their subject, especially in the poems where a contrast of concrete image and abstraction creates brilliant tension propelled by her driving syntax:

…me, the stranger or accent ague,
a sign more than a well-peopled phrase, the accent not concrete
enough to be riveting, just there at the edge of everyone
else’s interests, homeless, alone, a mark, a reminder
of the primordial need to speak yet unable to promise
in the recognized code, there where the horses gallop
from cave walls into eternity…

There are few grammatical signposts or pauses for readers. This is only a problem in Dendrochronology when the poet lays in too many cumbersome conceptualizing (“it is easy to react in the face of carelessness belonging to/ adolescence, viewed through hindsight or clarified by regret”; “the privilege that is history and upbringing, which despite compassion creates a blindness that cannot be broken without humility”) and clumsy or obvious language (“this is how/ I spell discouragement; a feeling of being unanswered”; “I am a traveler in all of/ the senses of the word that I know”).  But perhaps this is Goetz’s point, as stated in the first poem: “Talking mouths block the exit/ entrapped in frustrated good will/ like a dense city,” for its effect is certainly similar.

At their finest, Goetz’s poems refrain from confession and indulge instead in what emotions—particularly questions and doubts—arise amid particular human experience. Too often, however, Goetz creates an exhausting read; amid the dead wood, there is little space for a reader to breathe. Or bother.

–Roxanne Banks Malia

***

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Summer comes to New York part 2

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

For some of us, summer mostly means one thing: festivals. Fondly we have marked off days on the calendar until our favorite mega-music, or arts and crafts, or science festival rolled into town. This year: poetry. If you find yourself in New York City in July or August you should immediately rearrange your schedule because these are not to be missed.

Popsickle: A Festival of Literary Arts

Popsickle is back for its second year. The festival will happen on July 23rd from 1-8pm with dancing to immediately follow. The event will take place in the Gowanus Ballroom. Some of the readers will be Ariana Reines, Dorthea Lasky, Paul Foster Johnson, Roger Bonair-Agard, Coldfront‘s Features Editor, Ken L. Walker, Carina Finn and a host of other great readers.

Popsickle will also feature vendors from Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, No, Dear, Birds, LLC, Supermachine, Ugly Duckling Presse, and a host of others. For all the update information click here or here.

The First Annual New York Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island

This two day festival happens on July 30 and 31st (12-5PM) in various locations throughout Governor’s Island. Free ferry transportation to and from the island is provided. This festival will have literary vendors such as St. Mark’s Bookshop, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Action Books, Belladonna and a ton of others. Food and beverages can be purchased from ERB foods, City Winery and Six Point Brewery. Some of the reading curators are Coldfront(!!!), louderARTS, Stain of Poetry, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Fireside Follies and others. Some of readers will be Melinda Wilson, Niina Pollari (curator of Popsickle), Dustin Luke Nelson, Wanda Phipps, Tim Peterson, Celina Su, Matthea Harvey, Matthew Rohrer, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jamaal St John, Jive Poetic, Fay Chiang, Edwin Torres, and a host of readings from members of The Poetry Brothel. For more information click here and here.

Welcome to Boog City’s 20th Anniversary!

The most seasoned festival planner goes to Boog City who has been doing these for many years now. The festival will be from Friday, August 5 through Tuesday Aug 9th and will feature 67 poets, 10 musical acts and 8 plays over the five days. More information can be found here and you’ll find a complete schedule below.

FRIDAY AUGUST 5, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café
94 Avenue A, NYC

Free with a two-drink minimum
Readings and musical performances by

7:00 p.m.-Rachel Aydt
7:10 p.m.-Jeffrey Wright
7:20 p.m.-Alex Abelson
7:30 p.m.-Alan Gilbert
7:40 p.m.-Joy Katz
7:55 p.m.-Basil King
8:05 p.m.-Crabs on Banjo (music)
8:55 p.m.-Jill Stengel
9:10 p.m.-Rebecca Wolff, reading and in conversation with Alan Gilbert
10:00 p.m.-Sean Cole
10:10 p.m.-Dan Fishback (music)
10:40 p.m.-Crazy and the Brains (music)
11:30 p.m.-Greg Smith and the Broken English (music)

Directions: F/V to 2nd Ave., L to 1st Ave.

Venue is at East 6th Street

SATURDAY AUGUST 6,

11:30 A.M.-9:00 P.M.

Unnameable Books

600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn
Free
8th Annual Small, Small Press Fair
Beginning with readings from authors of the exhibiting presses

12:00 p.m. Evie Shockley, Belladonna
12:10 p.m. Leigh Stein, Bone Bouquet
12:20 p.m. Cariah Lily Rosberg, Don’s Saddles and East Egg Press
12:30 p.m. Magus Magnus, Furniture Press
12:40 p.m. Helen Vitoria, Gigantic Sequins
12:50 p.m. Brenda Iijima, Least Weasel Chapbooks @ Propolis Press
1:00 p.m. Stephanie Gray, Litmus Press/Aufgabe
1:10 p.m. Joe Elliot, Lunar Chandelier
1:20 p.m. Ronna Lebo, Off the Park Press
1:30 p.m. Damian Weber (music)
1:50 p.m. Break
2:00 p.m. J. Hope Stein, Ping Pong
2:10 p.m. Tantra-zawadi, Poets Wear Prada
2:20 p.m. Lydia Cortes, Straw Gate Books
2:25 p.m. Dorothy Friedman August, White Rabbit zine
2:30 p.m. Emily Skillings, Stonecutter Journal
2:40 p.m. Lawrence Giffin, Tea Party Republicans Press
2:50 p.m. Ron Horning, Vanitas magazine and Libellum Books
3:00 p.m. Break
—————–
3:10 p.m. Rebecca Satellite (music)
3:40 p.m. Paul Foster Johnson
3:50 p.m. Austin LaGrone
4:00 p.m. Toni Simon
4:10 p.m. Will Edmiston
4:20 p.m. Kimberly Lyons
4:30 p.m. Christine Hamm
4:40 p.m. Vyt Bakaitis
4:50 p.m. Martha King
5:00 p.m. Debrah Morkun
5:15 p.m. John Mulrooney
5:30 p.m. Justin Remer (music)
6:00 p.m. Break
6:10 p.m. Joanna Penn Cooper
6:20 p.m. Franklin Bruno
6:30 p.m. Tanya Larkin
6:45 p.m. Emily Einhorn (music)
7:15 p.m. Mary Austin Speaker
7:25 p.m. Jean-Paul Pecqueur
7:35 p.m. Jesse Seldess
7:45 p.m. Douglas Piccininni
Directions: 2, 3 to Grand Army Plaza,
C to Clinton-Washington avenues, Q to 7th Ave.

Venue is bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave.

SUNDAY AUGUST 7,
12:00 P.M.-4:00 P.M.

Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn

Free

12:00 p.m. Mark Lamoureux
12:10 p.m. Nicole Wallace
12:20 p.m. Ian Wilder
12:30 p.m. Douglas Rothschild
12:45 p.m. Charles Mansfield (music)
1:15 p.m. Brett Price
1:25 p.m. Meredith Walters
1:35 p.m. Kimberly Ann Southwick
1:50 p.m. Andrea Ascah-Robinson
2:05 p.m. Greg Fuchs

2:15 p.m.-break

2:25 p.m. The Death of Irony; The Triviality of Poetry
in the Face of Such Tragedy; and Other
Myths of 9/11; a Retrospective

The Death of Irony; The Triviality of Poetry in the Face of Such Tragedy; and Other Myths of 9/11; a Retrospective Immediately after 9/11, media pundits and assorted politicos unilaterally declared “Irony is Dead.” But the spray-painted sign at the first responder’s entrance to Ground Zero, which very cryptically read “Payback is a bitch,” belied this assertion. A number of poets who felt that irony was perhaps still alive will look back and consider the value and purposes of poetry.
Curated and hosted by Douglas Rothschild, with panelists Jim Behrle, Joe Elliot, and more.
Directions: 2, 3 to Grand Army Plaza,
C to Clinton-Washington avenues, Q to 7th Ave.

Venue is bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave.

SUNDAY AUGUST 7,
5:45 P.M.

Zinc Bar
82 W. 3rd St.
NYC
Boog Poets’ Theater, featuring:
Austin Alexis’ A Favor
Charles Borkhuis’ Flipper
Maria Brandt’s The Root People
Joel Chace’s The Cell
Jennifer Hill’s Three Turns
Vincent Katz’s Veranda of the Grand Gables (excerpt)
Eugenia Macer-Story’s, Captain Midnight’s Spyglass Heart
Matt Reeck’s Panoptical Illusion:
Directions: A/B/C/D/E/F/V to W. 4th St.

Venue is bet. Sullivan and Thompson sts.

MON. AUG. 8,
6:00 P.M.

Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn
free
6:00 p.m. Sheila Maldonado
6:10 p.m. Mark Statman
6:20 p.m. Cara Benson
6:30 p.m. Ekoko Omadeke
6:40 p.m. Kathrin Schaeppi
6:55 p.m. Michael Leong
7:05 p.m. Joe Crow Ryan (music)
7:25 p.m. break
7:35 p.m. Monica Hand
7:45 p.m. Greg Purcell
8:00 p.m. Claire Donato
8:10 p.m. Jibade-Khalil Huffman-Bday is next day
8:20 p.m. Ish Klein
8:35 p.m. Joe Crow Ryan (music)
Directions: 2, 3 to Grand Army Plaza,
C to Clinton-Washington avenues, Q to 7th Ave.

Venue is bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave.
TUES. AUG. 9,
6:00 P.M.

ACA Galleries
529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr.
NYC
d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press, season 9 kick-off
Black Radish Books
featuring readings from:
Bruce Covey
Carrie Hunter
Mark Lamoureux
Marci Nelligan
Marthe Reed
Kathrin Schaeppi
Jill Stengel
David Wolach
and music from
Cat Rockefeller

Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.

Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues

-steven karl

ALL NEWS

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Edwards, Fletcher, May, Schoonebeek, Hubbard @ Stain

Friday, July 1st, 2011

On Friday, June 9th, 2011, the Stain of Poetry monthly reading series by kicking off the summer with B.C. Edwards, Sasha Fletcher, Ryan Doyle May, Daniel Schoonebeek and Will Hubbard.

Although both B.C. Edwards and Ryan Doyle May have published poetry here and here, and both were reluctant to solely wear the “poet-hat.”  Edwards and Doyle May also write “fiction.”  Edwards read only poems, while May read a poem then read an excerpt from a fiction piece.

Will Hubbard read from his newly released book, Cursivism. Schoonebeek read poems and then part-way through his reading was joined by another poet and they concluded the reading by taking turns.

Sasha Fletcher is perhaps best known as the author of the novella WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS AND WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS. On this evening, Fletcher delighted the audience with a reading of  primarily new poems.  Here’s his set-list:

1. a vast and shining piece of beauty

2. date night

3. it is going to be a good year

4. driftwood

5. in what is commonly called a dry spell

6. letter to the editor

7. ask me no questions i’ll tell you no lies

8. we, the people

 

ALL NEWS

 

-steven karl

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The Ducklings are at it again

Saturday, June 11th, 2011

Ugly Duckling Presse is throwing a book release party at the Pierogi Gallery, 177 N. 9th St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn tonight at 7:00 for three of their new Spring 2011 titles: Cursivism by Will Hubbard, The Hermit by Laura Solomon, and Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson.

UDP events are always a good time so if you find yourself in the area be sure to check it out.  Below are blurbs and links for each of the books.

WILL HUBBARD grew up in North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn, New
York. His first book is Cursivisms (UDP 2011).

“Cursivism contains some of the best blasts of short prose I’ve read
in quite some time.” —GRAHAM FOUST

http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=173

•••••••••••••••••

LAURA SOLOMON’s books include Bivouac (Slope Editions, 2002), Blue and
Red Things (UDP, 2007), and The Hermit (UDP, 2011).

“Laura Solomon’s poetry rescues love and language from the tendency to
reduce either to single, knowable facts by finding missing dimensions
of our awareness.” —Paul Killebrew

http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=170

•••••••••••••••••

MAUREEN THORSON is a poet, publisher, and book designer living in
Washington, D.C. She is the author of a number of chapbooks, including
Novelty Act (UDP 2004). Applies to Oranges is her first full-length
book.

“Maureen Thorson’s first full-length book is a necessary satellite
signal made of a uniquely singular ache and echo. She deftly performs
a precise dissection of heartbreak’s timeless ability to blow open the
universe of our lives and allow our fascinating agonies to burst into
being.” —ADA LIMON

http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=168

•••••••••••••••••

Facebook RSVP below:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=186312991421579

 

-steven karl

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Crossing the Line: Poetry’s E-Book Horizons

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011



As e-readers proliferate, poetry publishers try to keep poems looking like poems

by Rachel Mennies

Since the widespread releases of the Kindle (2007) and iPad (2010), the discussion about e-books has largely focused on prose, if on genre at all.  E-prose is certainly more popular, more widely read and sold, than e-poetry—a reading practice that mirrors our larger reading interests and purchases here in the United States.  When we debate or embrace or disavow the e-book, according to those who make the devices, we’re typically picturing a novel, or a collection of essays, and we can find evidence of this claim by glancing at the text displayed on screen in TV ads for the products (Sedaris for iPad, for example) and the books most prominently advertised on the devices’ homepage stores.  This not only reflects what Americans are reading, but the works that most presses are producing for e-bookstores.

While part of this production decision reflects demand, certainly, it also highlights a second truth about e-books: it’s harder to produce an e-book of poetry than it is for prose.  Prose, after all, can tumble from page to page without concern.  Changing font typeface or size affects prose text aesthetically, but leaves its content and meaning intact.  A chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, for example, can take up five pages or seven, and its sentences can spread over the page in any number, without wrecking the integrity of the writing itself.  As small presses innovate in the e-book realm, contemporary poetry begins to make its e-book debut.  This debut raises new and genre-specific concerns, the greatest of them deriving from one of poetry’s smallest units: the line.

Long-line poets have the most to fear from the e-book, as the line is the most easily distorted prosodic element on an e-reader.  Poets like Kay Ryan, known for her short-line prosodic focus, might find their work nearly impossible to mangle on a Kindle (unless the poems are inexplicably double-spaced, like Ashbery’s work in the iBooks version of Notes From the Air). In contrast, long-line poets face breakage and splintering in their work depending on the reader’s use of the font-alteration and font-size-change options that come standard on both Kindle and iPad.  One vetted long-line example is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” whose anaphoric line-starting “who” became lost and muddied when translated into e-book format.  Craig Morgan Teicher of Publishers Weekly wrote of this problem last October, noting “Even from a distance you can see the difference”:

Ginsberg broke his poem into what he called “strophes,” those long lines that hark back to Whitman.  The indentations you see above are meant to indicate that the line keeps going beyond the end of the page, until the next left-justified line.  Ginsberg was careful in his liniation [sic], and part of the poem’s impact is in seeing that “who” sticking out again and again on the left side of the page. The digital version pays no mind to this whatsoever.  What we get is not the poem itself, but a kind of poor transcription of it.

Here, the e-book turns poem to prose—badly blocked and confused prose, at that.  We lose Ginsberg’s sprawling yet meticulously organized thoughts, his carefully nested musings on the “best minds of [his] generation.”  If this is the future of the e-poetry book, as Teicher wonders in his article, perhaps this approach has already failed us.  Perhaps another methodology will serve the medium well, find the right sort of justice for its art.

In the wake of these early malfunctions, finding the “correct” or faithful path for e-poetry might seem like a daunting process to undertake.  Several small presses, thankfully, have emerged as willing pioneers. Ugly Duckling Presse garnered national attention in the poetry community last year when it announced a shift to e-publishing its back stock and chapbook titles.  Another independent press, Milkweed Editions, has just released in both Kindle and paperback formats Seedlip and Sweet Apple, the first full-length collection by poet Arra Lynn Ross.

Seedlip and Sweet Apple examines the life of Shaker founder Ann Lee; it’s a stunning, quietly wrenching collection, one which follows the narrative arc of Lee’s story from birth to death.  Ross most often uses persona to eke out Lee, to show her in a complicated and intimate manner to the reader—though many other voices, including Lee’s brother William, mother, and members of the converted, speak in the book as well.  “I could fold the world over,” declared the child Lee in “Mother’s Touch,” “and make it rise up right.”  This collection crafts each moment in this “rising right:” as Lee inspires the Shakers, endures torture and prosecution for her beliefs, and moves to America to formally instate her sect.  Throughout Lee’s life, Ross gives voice to her doubts—her darknesses as well as her triumphs—in a manner as poignant as it is haunting. “I am Ann the Word / but who here will have heard?” asks Lee once arrived on New York soil.  In Lee, we can hear the insecurities of any founding voice, any new spirit on the cusp of invention.

Seedlip and Sweet Apple’s print version—the version I read first—makes innovative use of experimental lines, using right and center justification, varied spacing, and wide ranges of length to explore the collection’s myriad chorus of speakers.  Here, we find prose poems alongside lineation and innovative nonce forms like the newspaper-announcement heading-and-date style of “The World’s Course.”  Ross employs dialogue, placing her two speakers on the right and left margins; she often takes up the entire page with her verse, choosing to leave swathes of white space in the middle of lines and stanzas.  In “Manchester Constables’ Log,” Ross uses three columns of text to convey Lee’s punishments for her developing faith in England, mimicking, as in “The World’s Course,” the format and structure of an actual logbook:

July 13, 1772                                                    John Lees and Ann Lees,
                                    daughter                       appear before Justice
                                    of the Peace                  Peter Mainwaring…

In the print version of Seedlip and Sweet Apple, this formal play heightens the poems, granting them a contemporary open-form context in the midst of a historical biography’s telling. Seedlip and Sweet Apple’s Kindle version, however, presents some of the problems Teicher described with “Howl.” In its untouched form, the e-poems look faithful to print—and, on the Kindle for iPad app that I used in my reading, they glowed from the iPad with a beautifully contrastive intensity. Milkweed preserved Trajanus, the font from print, making the reading experience nearly one-to-one with the physical book.

It wasn’t until I purposefully started altering the font size that the poetry eroded; the poems only “failed,” or lost their original identity, at the widest extremes of large and small.  Ross’s lines and stanzas blurred in big fonts, and floated away on a screen of white in small ones.  While I’d wager that most readers would find these extreme sizes off-putting or unhelpful to the reading process, the mere fact of their enabled existence presents problems for Ross’s experimental, innovative prosody.  Her shifting, multifaceted line looks either correct or corrupted on the iPad, depending entirely on how far up or down the font bar a reader swipes her finger.  This flexibility might be a liability of the reader, the press or the device, but it certainly should not concern the writer as she develops her art.  I imagine a poet like Ross adapting her unusual line to the constraints of the iPad, and can only see the collection suffering for this awareness of e-form.

Ross, Milkweed, and Seedlip and Sweet Apple certainly aren’t alone in this struggle to maintain the integrity of poetry as it moves to e-book format.  The e-poetry book, while different from its print parent in medium and use, certainly shouldn’t become alien to print in content: a shell of its former glory, a mere vehicle for transliterated prose versions of poems.  Losing control of lineation is ruinous to contemporary poetry, and could very well limit its progress in the e-book realm.  And yet, this same system of delivery could invigorate the genre, as readers and writers of poetry are turning increasingly to online venues to expound literary magazines, scour for poetry news, and submit writing to journals and presses. E-book readers don’t just read poetry books—they also use RSS readers or e-magazine subscriptions to receive blogs and journals.

As we come more frequently to the Web for writing about poetry, poetry reviews, and individual poems published in web-only journals, we’ll start looking for e-poetry books from all of our favorite presses as well. Dedication to the development of these e-books coupled with consumer interest might well change the face of literary publishing. And Seedlip and Sweet Apple—though I’m certain it was never intended as an allegory for e-poetry—serves well as a lens through which to view the current state of these changes. Ann Lee, founder of a new religious sect—and role model to a group of hardworking craftsmen—looks out upon her strange new world often throughout the collection, marveling at the power of combining faith with innovation. “And what of you, my child?” asks the speaker of “Say to This Mountain, Move:” “Surely, / you have more faith than a chicken.” Far from Luddites, the Shakers embraced change; how fitting for the fierce and gorgeous Seedlip and Sweet Apple to show us another sort of strange new world, and well.

*

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chap nook 1: Graeper, Dolack, Lyalin

Saturday, December 4th, 2010

Into the Forest Engine, Garth Graeper (Projective Industries, 2009)
7.5
One of Into the Forest Engine’s most appealing qualities is its physicality. The artifact itself has a metallic quality and looks like the inside of a dark factory, perhaps one that produces mannequins or can openers. It’s pocket-sized, and the more worn my copy becomes, the more delightful I find the little book.

The chapbook is divided into four sections, and feels like navigating a series of underground tunnels. The poems are mysterious and dark, sometimes cold. The first section is titled “The Remains.” The title implies an earlier destruction, and prepares the reader to traverse a terrain akin to a graveyard. And there is a lot of decay and decomposition of various bodies throughout the book; there is mention of “temporary / bodies,” and the opening pages are rather ghostly:

the traces,
voices of the invisible
serenading

the foxes
haunting for their
unlikeness, urging us to turn

Graeper impressively weaves the artificial and natural worlds throughout this collection, and in the first section, he draws a beautiful comparison between the bodies of trees and human bodies: “root systems / a hole where they’re married / in the water.” I’m picturing the dark and dank of swamplands and the underwater webs of baldcypress tree roots. In a more deeply abstract way, all humans are connected in the dark somewhere before birth, or more physically, by the umbilical cord.

In the second section of the book—“During the Glitch,”—the speaker’s tone grows more personal and pensive: “walking so we don’t feel / cased in a thin, flexible death.” These lines, though less forcefully, echo the sentiment of Robert Creeley’s, “I Know a Man” : “the darkness sur- / rounds us”…

Two small qualms: the four section titles feel too profound. For example, “Desire Enters the Engine.” There are too many explicit “hearts” throughout the poems. Sometimes they wander too far into the cosmos. But they are also Whitmanesque, cosmic, organic, metallic, distinctive.

–Melinda Wilson

*

12 Poems, DJ Dolack (Eye for an Iris Press, 2010)
7.5DJ Dolack’s 12 Poems opens with a piece that warns: “It’s going to get better / before it gets worse.” Uninhibited experimentation with spacing lends certain pieces an airier, drawn-out, contemplative feel, while others retain a wry, economical tightness. Dolack also displays a particular skill for the aural — “Rot and Poplar” is especially sonically appealing. Its subtle off-rhyme creates a lilting, sing-song effect: “we may have stood / for some dream retention / a scent of fresh catkin.” Though not quite shocking, Dolack’s imagery and juxtaposition of language are certainly memorable. He writes of “a low / yellow moon outside / sipping back the sky.” This is but one instance of Dolack finding fresh language to explore one of poetry’s more recurrent images.

A strong speaker is noticeably absent from most of Dolack’s poems, many of which display a mastery over depicting emptiness. Not rooted in the overtly personal, the collection’s dialogue manages an effective directness as it explores themes of communication and loss. Dolack’s final lines are especially successful in their often bizarre, seemingly off-the-cuff delivery. Just when you may be inclined to think that 12 Poems risks being a collection full of pretty language lacking much punch, you are met with “In Wind & City,” a piece which spans four pages, ending on a surprisingly eerie note. Then, toward the collection’s end, you are left with a resounding taste of the poet’s wit, the surprise innuendoed command of, in a seemingly anachronistic context, “So google me.”

–Alissa Fleck

**

Try a Little Time Travel, Natalie Lyalin (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010)

There are numerous innovative phrases and shocking moments in Natalie Lyalin’s chapbook, Try a Little Time Travel, that emphasize the tension between past and future. These poems, anxious in content yet controlled in voice, call to mind the works of Rimbaud and unapologetically announce their frustration with the current state of things, struggling to strike a balance between past mistakes (“In the beginning we missed things”) and the yearning for future restoration (“One thousand years from now our brains will connect”). Though the collection’s focus is scattered and simplistic at times, the speaker’s faith pulsates through each poem with rejuvenating power, convincing the reader that something important awaits. The wait, however, is painful and met with impatience, and the elusive answer may exist anywhere in the future or past, which inspires the speaker to fantasize about time travel. Time travel, however, comes at a price. Even imagining it requires a modicum of self-sabotage: “. . . tear out a hair strand, / This is your tether for returning.”

–Kimberly Steele

***

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Posted in reviews


Neighbor

Monday, November 8th, 2010

by Rachel Levitsky
Ugly Duckling Presse 2009
Reviewed by Marjorie Tesser

“completely in my head / all in my head ”

The relationship between neighbors includes both proximity and separation, in and out of balance.   More prism than lens, Rachel Levitsky’s gem of a book, Neighbor, explores the subject from several perspectives.  Situated in a neighborhood that alternates between benign and sinister, Levitsky’s many-layered work contains varied takes on the self in relation to the other, building on ideas introduced in her prior full-length book of poetry, Under the Sun. 

The book is styled as a log, with entries composed over two years.  Levitsky sets up an architecture — a neighborhood — with headings for each entry, consisting of a place, or series of places, public, semi-public, or private, (“bed/room/square sky”) and a date (the entries are not in chronological order, but are related by subject matter or tone).   Thus the poems are located in time, place and perspective. 

At first, the poems appear focused on the author’s apartment building and her urban, diverse, pre-gentrified neighborhood.  There are allusions to race, class, gender, and religion, and to public perceptions, suspicion and attempts at conciliation.  The neighbor (or neighbors, as both male and female neighbors are referred to as “neighbor”), always unnamed, appears a sinister or unfriendly figure.  Levitsky then ups the ante (anti?) by referring to herself as a “United Statesian,” thus locating her “neighborhood” on a grander scale. 

An early poem, “Neighbor,” shows the multiplicity of examinations the book assays:

Neighbor is a long page
about the neighbor

why it is called “Confession”
or if it’s called “My Neighbor”

or what, if anything, I am.
I have ideas.

At the time I type this
I’ve been at it for one year

the last six months
completely in my head all in my head

where there are many levels.
The problem is whether they

are connected or if
they are levels

at all. “A level” may connote
a piece in a unified structure,

or unity of disconnected parts
firmly housed. By what?

The State or me
or if I am the State.

I am a collection
of desire

precariously
housed.

While the author condemns the ‘confessional’ as uninteresting, she has no reservations about revealing private mental processes; as she modestly states, “I have ideas.”   Her explorations of alienation, detachment, sexuality, philosophy and cognitive theory are profound, fascinating, contradictory and sometimes funny.  It becomes clear that the self/other dichotomy is not solely external, as Levitsky ponders the self as both subject and object.

One of the joys of this book is the spirit of inquiry it displays, the shifting perspectives and positing.  So many sides are presented that the work is never in danger of becoming doctrinaire or didactic. Yet there is an arc and resolution to this extent:  in “Blotter,” a poem near the end of the book, the others are named, are friends.  Perhaps innate unease with multiplicity can transmogrify into acceptance.

*

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