Self Portrait With Robert CreeleyS

Click Self Portrait with 2 Creeleys to hear my SoundPoem. Another version HERE.

I wrote it in French after listening to the YouTube video of Creeley linked off Nicholas Manning's blog, recording my own voice in layers over it in a lowtech home version of things. But the sound of my accent in French felt wrong, so I translated & adapted it back into English for the above mp3 files.

Any preference? Leave me a comment!

ENCLOSURES at BlazeVox Books

I have admired BlazeVOX for awhile, their site is fun, http://www.blazevox.org/ you can download FREE eBooks by fab authors & purchase lovely printed books by even MORE fabulous authors--William Allegrezza, Noah Eli Gordon, Kazin Ali, Ray Bianchi, Peter Jay Shippy, Amy King, Michael Gessner, & many more! But what's not to like about a book editor who pre-announces that they are "publishers of weird little books" & "a place of refuge", or of which Ron Silliman says on his blog "...approach with caution"? 'Weird', but lovely: humourous, serious, violent, ephemeral, moving (physically), penetrating, these books are so varied that what seems most to link them together is the sense that each one is a project on its own, seeking to make its space and way, & which BlazeVOX gives voice & page & webspace to. Dedicated to works in an experimental vein, BlazeVOX books often move around the page, opening multiple sites for voices, eye. Or, they are sieved down to only their most essential lines, sometimes giggly, sometimes grabbing you by the throat. OFTEN these books put to question the delineation between genres (ie poetry/theater in Benjamin Buchholz's "playlet poems" entitled Windshields). Some of the books are minimal, others come at the reader with a lined denseness encroaching on the eye, the mind, the self.

So, I am really excited to have a work among their new set of eBooks this fall! Please read ENCLOSURES, a collection from a longer work still in progress. These are my Lili poems, a character who moves through these very visual pages in her own darkness. Poem from Enclosures previously appeared in Cutbank 67. The electronic chapbook at BlazeVOX is available in free pdf download: http://www.blazevox.org/ebk-jd.pdf

& Thanks to BlazeVOX editor Geoffey Gatza for his AMAZING cover layout and photo! You can read some of his own works on the BV site or order copies, too, of his collections!!!

Cutbank 67 + New Book by Claude Royet-Journoud

It never stops, the flow of words seeping under the cracks of the door, books, chapbooks, periodicals of friends, acquaintances, authors I admire or just had the luck of meeting! But here is a journal I am just thrilled to be in myself. I admire the feel of it, the lovely artwork by Louisa Conrad, and the afternoons it has provided me with excellent reading: Cutbank 67 (order a copy online, submit for their next issue and do subscribe via http://www.cutbankonline.org/)

Besides a few poems of my own from the forthcoming eBook chapbook at BlazeVox, Enclosures, you can find: Fiction by Danielle Dutton, Charles McLeod, Edan Lepucki, Leslie Jamison, Matthew Ira Swaye, and Daniel Mueller, Poetry by Patricia Goedicke, Sarah Gridley, Erin M. Bertram, Seth Abramson, Robb St. Lawrence, Sandra Miller, Jennifer Pilch, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Nathan Hoks, Brent Armendinger, Kismet Al-Hussaini, Carey McHugh, Hanna Andrews, William S. Barnes, Karyna McGlynn, Matt Shears--a poet I was thrilled to be introduced to the work of in this issue!!!-- and Julie Doxsee. There's also an Interview by Jane St John with fiction author Aimee Bender.


SECONDLY: CLAUDE ROYET-JOURNOUD
I was delighted to find, on this grey Wednesday in Paris, a bright yellow-covered book which had arrived from sunny Marseille: Go and pick up a copy NOW! It is Claude ROYET-JOURNOUD's newest collection entitled La Poésie Entière est Préposition, Eric Pesty Editeur, Marseille, 12euros. I'm certain you can get copies from Michele Ignazi bookstore, rue de Jouy in the 4e Paris, or order directly from the publisher via http://www.ericpestyediteur.com/ Please note, this is a PARTNER PIECE to the book by Claude Royet-Journoud coming out with P.O.L. in early November, entitled: Théorie des Prépositions.

AFTER-WORDS

Please note--this has now become part of a collective blog site called ReWords, and so do go and check out this project en cours: http://rewords.blogspot.com !

I have always been a fan of the response poem, the putting of voices into dialogue. So, as I sit in my little cell-like room in Paris pounding away at the PhD which feels like my personal Sisyphisian boulder, I have this week taken up the habit of riffing off of the poems and prose paragraphs that fellow writers have shared with me such as Cole Swensen and, today, Sandy Florian. And so, in the spirit of the web being a web, intricate invisible lines spidering between our solitudes, here is my response to Sandy Florian's text which she wrote and put up today on her blog: http://thetreeofno.blogspot.com/2006/06/tree-of-no-other-to-speak.html. My response is here, a poem ping pong, as it were! from Oct 5, 2007:

Like a Wakening Form of Being

so that the flame preserved might still be kept
.....................so that I may be so unduly, so undulatingly
wired in the incandescence of this
…………………….whirling after the six-shooter in the near day
asking for intervention, waves
…………………….askance in the alcove of all this
so that I may be sleeping may be preserving
…………………….so that the horn-hymn-whipporwhorl birdcall
in the ignition of the bic of the zippo
…………………….interminable stance sentence of the sun’s scope
or captain’s wake devoid king
…………………….or son’s of kings on the angled threshold
thrush of neck exposed to the dark of this
…………………….threat of a legend of a whispering wind
under marked doors dimples dire demands
…………………….ululating dime stores and piled pick-ups dusted
perchance pleased or pleading
…………………….prayer-bound-up in mesh, rugged roped, cuffed
or simmering in the knelt-by furnace
…………………….or encroaching desert, mounds, and burials
should impel, me to compel, me to
…………………….sons and then the staunch vermillion, the burgundian
sky of this or broached topical units labelled lineage
…………………….scraped shoulder putting the back up to beam to
veer past the mythology and behold
…………………….eye in the, still central nervous brachial retchings
flame fortuitous as language, Babel or Babylon,
………………flagging in the lugged-along limping of what could only be
tide-netted
…………………….a state