Drunken Boat Issue 15 book reviews by Jennifer K Dick, including one on Against Expression by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith

Last fall with an overcharged semester I completed a series of reviews for Drunken Boat magazine. These have been programmed to appear since January 2012. So it is with great great joy I see the lovely new issue 15 is up online with 3 book reviews by me and A 4th which is a co-review-dialogue on a poet's work. I admire the web formatting and colors of the new Drunken Boat edition and the attention that went into getting this issue out, including that attention to detail by Shira Dentz the reviews editor (click to read her reviews intro).

I hope that you enjoy what I have to say on Drunken Boat's site, and will support again the presses keeping exciting experimental poetry alive by publishing it.  

Buy books, read books, review books!

keep poetry publishers out of the red!

The 4 reviews:

Review 1: Against Expression by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith

A LONG pro and con reading of the anthology of conceptual writing AGAINST EXPRESSION. (Northwestern University Press). http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/against-expression I try very hard to go through the real strengths and values of this anthology for poets, teachers, general readers and then to cover some of the problems I see with this first collection of work in English trying to address what Conceptual Poetry is.  

          I also recognize that the anthology has had a lot of publicity and cybertraffic around it--my favorite being the image posted on Lemon Hound (April 2012) stating "Conceptual Poetry Carries the Weight of Contemporary Poetry" on sites such as Ron Silliman's Blog, the Poetry Foundation, conference sites on Conceptual Literature, UBU, etc. There is much one can say about conceptual literature, much that is being said. To enter into that dialogue, perhaps pick up a copy of another fine book, Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman's theory collection "Notes on Conceptualisms" and read Ron Silliman's review of it HERE (CLICK) In which he places it on par with Spring and All and Call Me Ishmael! Or check out Marjorie Perloff's article "Conceptualisms Old and New"(2007) (available online directly as a pdf) To see what the editors of this anthology have to say about it themselves, go to Kenneth Goldsmith's interview on the BOMB magazine site which also appears on the Academy of American Poets Poet.org website at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22407 or see the Academy's "brief guide to conceptual poetry" 

I find interesting and amusing Ron Silliman's blog post about Conceptual Poetry vs Flarf. Very recent debates posted this April 2012 on the questions about and reactions to statements that Conceptual Literature is dead. Is it dead? (Gosh, if so, I am getting into the conversation a bit late--but no surprise there, I live far away from where this debate has been happening!) But to read a comment/reaction on that, see "The Jubilee of Poetic Crises" By Canadian poet Christian Bök (often one of the first names to come up when talking of Conceptual authors) on the Harriet site.

 

Among my criticisms in the review I wrote is a tiny remark at the end about the gender issue in this book. It is a small comment, but I admire other's addresses of it--for I know that my list of names of women that I felt should be included (which is near the end of the review) is insignificant and also would make some people furious (yes, Susan Howe is NOT a conceptual poet, certainly not in her own terms--but by the standards defined here in this anthology she would be).  To this end, Ron Silliman asks the question of whether Cole Swensen should be seen as a conceptual poet on his blog. And I enjoy the short commentary regarding Spahr and Young's writing to the authors of the anthology about "what's it about all these men" that appears at the end of Laynie Browne's questionnaire on Conceptual Poetry which was published on one of my favorite blogs, Lemon Hound.

          

Review 2 

Laura Mullen's DARK ARCHIVE.

http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/dark-archive (University of CA Press) It is always interesting to review books by an author you really like and who has been an important teacher and mentor for you. In my case, that would include many writers--evidently including Laura Mullen. This review therefore has a different feel (I hope) than the others as I did. It is a very personal review, where I am not looking at the entire book, but really focusing most of my attention on reading a single poem a bit more closely as it pertains or resonates for me across the book. I admire this book. It hurts. It aches. It excites. It rips me open on personal, narrative, lyric, formal levels. I imagine it will do the same for you!

Review 3

A Lily Lilies by Josie Foo and Leah Stein.

This dance-poetry collaboration review can be found at the direct link: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/a-lily-lilies

I had had the great joy of discovering Josie Foo's writing years ago when a friend of mine--Julie Brown (who now runs WindHorse Intuitive: http://windhorseintuitive.com/) showed me her copy of Josie Foo's Tomie's Chair (Kaya Press). It was therefore a pleasure to see what Foo has been doing since and to read through the collaborative spaces of this book. Hope you enjoy my thoughts on it!

Review 4

RONALDO V WILSON's "Poems of the Black Object" (Futurepoem Books) http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/poems-of-the-black-object

A review-dialogue with my friend and fellow poet, JONATHAN REGIER of a book we both really admire and enjoyed thinking about together. For anyone that is wondering, no, this is not a new book, not hot off the presses. It came out in 2009, and I have been reading and re-reading it since I got a copy at the AWP book fair that year. It bears relooking at critically and reminding anyone who has not read it that they should. Among the 10 best poetry books by American authors in the first decade of our new century, I would have to say this is right up there!  It won the 13th annual Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. An interview with its author by Elizabeth Hildreth appears online at Bookslut at http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_03_015753.php Author  Ronaldo V. Wilson is also the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, from University of Pittsburgh Press

          I advise anyone that has not yet gotten themselves a copy of Poems of the Black Object do so NOW--and thus also support one of the finest presses putting out books in the USA today, FUTUREPOEM BOOKS.  For more on my co-author of this review, read Jonathan Regier's first collection of poetry, Three Years from Upstate published by Six Gallery Press. 

Lastly, for anyone who has been following the Lex-ICON pre-conference blog project (an image a day for 60 days at: http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/) they will notce that the very very exciting section of Drunken Boat 15--HANDMADE/HOMEMADE was curated by Deborah Poe whose image appeared on Lex-ICON last week: IMAGE 45. Congrats on this exciting work on Drunken Boat, Deborah!

French Elections 2012! François Hollande wins...

I imagine the streets of Paris still buzzing and yelling and dancing and horrah-ing while Mulhouse has already gone to bed--but happily. Things are changing. Certainly, after the debate the other day it seemed OBVIOUS who the choice would be here in France, but I think that even a few weeks ago Sarko would never have imagined himself moving out of this job... and onto what? And Hollande? A few weeks ago? I wonder whether he felt he had as strong a chance to make this happen, was merely lost in campaigning in hopes or really felt this was going to take place. My friends were devided--the pessimists who said we were in for another 5 years of havoc and downward spirals, others who--like me--were unsure what direction the wind was about to take us, and the third, happy category of complete optimists, in which sat only ONE actual person that I knew personally. He was entirely convinces that Hollande would win, and he was constantly voicing that sureness and optimism all about him--and it was lovely to hear and tonight I salute his faith in the candidate we all saw get elected.

For me, it marks an unfortunate moment. I should have filed for nationality. After all, at this stage in my life and tenured career here what happens politically can have a clear (and sudden) impact on me. So I was regretting not being able yet to cast a vote for a country that has now been mine for the better part of my adult life. And I thank the French men and women who did go out and vote today and made their opinions count.I raised a few glasses to and with you tonight in the Place de la Concorde in Mulhouse in front of the siège of the PS. 

I was impressed, at the Place de la Concorde here in what is a little, post-industrial city struggling to remake itself on many levels and with a reputation for voting right (and even extreme right) but which voted Hollande as a city (as did Strasbourg--Go Alsace!--) that there were so many young people out--not just kids with their parents, but a large contingent of PS supporters wearing the party t-shirts and who evidently have been working for this election were the age of many of my students. Professors often talk--that old cliché of now versus then, of how things are versus some nostalgia for an earlier, smarter, more engaged moment. So, seeing these young supporters rejuvenated my hope for the future. And the French government site on the elections estimates that 79.9% of those eligible to vote in the election voted. Good for voters! Stay engaged! Keep fighting for what you believe!

And on that excited note, I shall say good night--as, like the rest of Alsace just coming back to work and getting back to school after our spring break, it is time to head to bed and to sleep and to perhaps dream that this election will lead to some better politics in the 5 years to come. Certainly, the pressure is on for Hollande--the first PS president elected since Mitterand. There will be comparisons and hopes, but also the ferocious critics will be waiting to nip and bite at his heels the first chance they get. It will be tough, so let us all have a little dream of seeing this work!  

To close--a little re-cap of ce soir in photos:

Arriving to watch the crowd waiting to hear the election results. 

2 Photos taken just minutes before 20h00.

Dahia arrives and someone has given her a sign--so we 2 foreigners have a little photo session waiting for the election results...

 The moment as the television announcers seem to be about to say what this audience wants to hear...

Are we hearing correctly? Up in front, one of the young supporters cracks open a bottle of Crémant, showering those that have yet to react to the news that yes NOW IS THE MOMENT:

Quickly, the joy beings to spread throughout the crowd!

The merry dance of HOLLANDE a gagné, 

avec 52% (selon les éstimations) 

 Between Sarkozy's concession speech and Hollande's address of the French, a little music is played in Place de la Concorde, Mulhouse:

The night has come on, blue and calm, and the evening is drawing to a close at Place de la Concorde, Mulhouse, Alsace, France. Isn't this a lovely image of the blueness?

 

The end of the evening, the rain over, the crémant drunk, the dances danced, the flowers fading or tucked into jackets to carry home--and a few signs like this one here that had likely been used as an umbrella during the brief storm that passed over mid-evening disintigrated by the rain. 

 

And to end, Hollande's slogan--

LE CHANGEMENT, C'EST MAINTENANT (Change is now!)

The final issue of ACTION POETIQUE, n° 207-210

Getting the massive 4-numbers in one final number of Action Poétique (1950-2012) is like watching the white whale being sunk, the gigantesque adventure of French criticism and poetry is being dis-activated (de-actioned, like decommissioned). (FYI: this photo is of the avant-dernier number as I have not found one of the new, final issue online yet) 

I only finally subscribed (instead of picking up a copy now and again) this last year and am saddened to see this review go. It brought me so many texts over the years--on Mallarmé, on American poets being read and translated into French, on Anne-Marie Albiach when I was working on my PhD on her work, that fun pink pink issue on Dada a few years back, and so much much much more. It is thanks to Action Poétique that I stumbled across certain French poet-critics for the first time (Pascal Petit, Liliane Giraudon, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Mitsou Ronat, Isabelle Garron, Frédéric Léal, Franck Venaille and others who have works in this final issue) and felt engaged and informed by what such French poet-critics were thinking over the years. This is a sad, sad day. 

As Hervé Martin cited on his blog announcing this issue as the penultimate arrived: "Pascal Boulanger a écrit en 1998  Une Action Poétique de 1950 à aujourd'hui, disponible chez Flammarion." For anyone who wants to hold onto the great legacy of Action Poétique, get a copy of issue 207-210 as it also contains a DvD of all the preceding issues (and their table of contents lists). It is thus an archive gift and a mournful wave farewell.

And also--for anyone in Paris who is wanting to get in a last hurrah with the editors and authors of the review, Michèle Ignazi bookstore is hosting a reading event with Henry Deluy and the editors of Action Poétique the 14th of May: 

 

A l'occasion de la parution de

l'ultime numéro de la revue

Action Poétique

1950-2012

 

rencontre avec

 

Henri Deluy

et l'équipe de la rédaction

 

le lundi 14 mai 2012

à partir de 19 heures

 

Henri Deluy présentera également ses derniers livres

L'heure dite

(Flammarion)

Poètes néerlandais de la modernité

(Le temps des cerises)

Manger la mer

Soupes et bouillabaisses à travers le monde

(Al Dante)

 

AT:  

Librairie Michèle Ignazi

17, rue de Jouy

75004 Paris

01 42 71 17 00

 

40's project mini-review 8: Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene

I have unexpectedly become a fan of Bhanu Kapil's books these last years. One enters each through revisitation. Her texts are like places--you arrive as a foreigner, hesitant, seeing the unusual, the unexpected, but you continue to explore and reread lines and paragraphs and pages until you fall in love and feel at home in the world she has made for you.

Kapil's works have an immediate poetic draw where one encounters dazziling lines like in SCHIZOPHRENE (Nightboat books, 2011) "It's already late. A black world coming down from the heavens. Black with stars."(p9) A few pages get read over and over again, and then you are hooked. There is something hard to explain about how her works connect--they feel at once dense and loose, not unlike how her own personal blog functions--http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.fr/.

At work is collage, lines--and spaces between those lines--as she writes: "When it's rotted to the bone, the paper is covered with metallic fur, which is not paper. 'It was a contemporary voice that had the same power as a foundational voice.' No. It's a first line, then a second, the fragments overlapping with a visceral sound, where the pages stick. I unstick them to see. To read." (p58, Schizophrene)

We, too, as readers, unstick these pages, see and read, feel the visceral, the unexpected violence in parts, the beauty in others. We are jerked back and forth between them, and the surprise awakens some process in us--involvement, engagement.

What I found particularly interesting--and I have yet to decide whether I liked or disliked this tranparency--was that with this short work, Schizophrene, there is also a curious transparency of process--beginning with "Passive Notes" which introduces this book, speaking transparently about what the author had wanted (to write an epic) and how what is here came about through failure and rebeginnings (tossing out the notes--which later becomes line one of the text itself, "I threw the book into the dark garden."(p1))--and closing with her "acknowledgements and quick notes" which again reveals process by revealing encounters both artistic and educational (things learned, from whom) which helped this book come to be: "From cross-cultural psychiatry, I learned that light touch, regularly and impersonally repeated, in the exchange of devotional objects, was as healing, for non-white subjects (schizophrenics) as anti-psychotic medication. In making a book that barely said anything, I hoped to offer: this quality of touch." (p71).

For anyone interested in montage, collage, books of place, of journey, of language, books which are looking at the foreigner and a sense of home or estrangement--this is for you. It is delicate and fierce, and though small, is large in its scope and is magnified by its own need to be read and read again. Schizophrene, like Kapil's body of work, is a correspondance with its readers, opening in them to new spaces of langauge.

VERSAL 10 Launch... reserve YOUR place NOW

Fall in love with the lit mag all over again  

Amsterdam's first international literary and arts journal, VERSAL, is turning 10! 

 Yep! So come and celebrate:

WEDNESDAY MAY 23, 2012 · 7PM - 12AM
BO CINQ, AMSTERDAM
FREE ENTRY · RSVP ONLY · GOLD TIE

Join us in toasting to 10 years of our literary community and its flagship Versal at the magnificent Bo Cinq in Amsterdam. Use the Leidsekruisstraat entrance: follow the gold V to join the fun.

*Dress code: Gold tie
*Free glass of Prosecco for the first 100 guests

RSVP IS REQUIRED · Space is limited
RSVP by May 14 to rsvp@versaljournal.org

CIRCUITS proofs and DUSIE Kollectiv 5 on display in Houston...

For anyone who saw me in the halls at UHA today, it is obvious that I am suffering from a sense of April as perhaps justifiably being entitled the cruellest month (though hopefully no wars outside budget ones on the horizon!). It is therefore with great great JOY that I received note that for anyone in HOUSTON, TX there is a book show on containing tons of GORGEOUS chaps from Dusie Kollectiv 5, among which you can find my own little contribution (Tracery). 

This show is happening thanks to John Pluecker who is displaying his collection of Dusies from what he called "this last round of Dusiedom". It is part of an installation at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. The installation is called "Antena Books/Libros Antena" and it is a temporary bookstore, reading room and literary experimentation lab. The Dusie show will be up until the end of June. Read more from John about it at:  http://johnpluecker.blogspot.fr/p/antena-books-libros-antena.html and also check out his very gorgeous image from his own work which is currently on the Lex-ICON 60 posts in 60 days pre-conference blog project at: http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/2012/04/lex-icon-blog-project-post-20-john.html

Of course, it is great to think that people are off in Houston checking out things I have also enjoyed reading and collecting here! 

To go with that joy? The proofs of my manuscript soon to be book Circuits... here above is the not yet official cover, it is a cover en cours de production.  But hey.... too exciting not to post! YEA for CORRUPT PRESS!!!  Now to work on reading through the proofs!!!!!! (that will be some work!!!)

April poems: questioning the genuine act of making poems in the space of performance engendered by blogs and the internet age

I like that Carrie Etter--who invited me to participate in the writing of a poem a day as part of this month's April Poetry Month project--on occasion sends out little emails saying "Hey, want to check in and leave a comment on my blog about how this is going for you?" (click HERE--CARRIE ETTER for her blog) It is not that I feel that excited by what I have to say, but that when I head over to her blog to leave my 2 cents in her comments space I find I enjoy reading about everyone else's successes or failures--that like me a few people have had to double up one day because another was missed, etc. 

But I keep thinking about the nature of writing poems and blogging them or about them.The nature of private and shared space.

I have always felt that the rewords blog I co-founded and love posting on is this kind of a blog-space where the PLAY of poetry is at work, where play is prioritized, where Picasso's adage “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up” is honored and the child is out in the blogosphere messing with language, unconcerned with issues of judgement--Rewords is a space where if what I have put down is completely stupid, flat, lame, in process, drafty, like a room with holes in it, that is ok. Like my poem of the day today, "Eurydice's Vision" which I posted on rewords despite my misgivings about it.

But when I think of putting poems out on blogs elsewhere, even here on my perso blog, I feel like I should manage something better--and then the genuine act of making gets caught up with what feels like to me an ingenuine act of performance. I personally do not want to dance for the crowd. Instead, in the writing, I feel like I want to peel open--myself, my ears, my vision, my body, my soul--if such a thing does exist. 

There are different spaces of making for me, of creating--I believe in being a child and thus getting my hands dirty and tossing stuff round the room and collaging and enjoying the feeling of things emerging, converging. And yet I want also to touch something that is "[...] not a paraphrase or a metaphor for reality but a reality itself." For, in addition to that thought, as I am at the moment in the process also of re-reading Joseph Brodsky's essays on poetry, he reminds me that "The Poem has the quality of an uneasy dream, in which you gain something extremely valuable, only to lose it the very next moment." (On Grief & Reason, essays, Joseph Brodsky, FSG, NY, 1995, p386)

What is interesting is that in this essay, Brodsky argues that that getting at "a reality itself" comes from a poem "being a conscious act". There, at that point, is where our paths diverge. 

For there is something of the conscious, of the lucid dream in really great moments of writing, in moments when you feel the language and you have merged and that what is emerging from you is genuine on every level--formal, narrative, expressive, etc. But it is a lucid dream which at the same time is perhaps changing course because a second driver steps in, takes over, surprises you, leaps out of the closet or rounds the corner--the line swerves, the old-fashioned meters and rhymes of many of the great lyric poets would diverge from their regularity at some crucial moment and that would make ALL of the difference. 

For me, then, the conscious, that lucidity is lost magnificently buried in the subconscious. The dream-state takes over from the lucid me at moments, and the writing self lets it. 

In a space of blogs, the internet, of sending the written writing straight out onto the pavement to get run down or perhaps lauded somehow hollows out that process. I guess what I am saying is that the poem remains for me a private act. The best poems take time--though the draft may be able to flop down onto the page one day, the tinkering that accompanies that first gesture often takes the poem to its reality. The child and the adult, the unconscious and the conscious, the lucid and the uneasy-out-of-control dream are both necessary for the poem to be. 

I guess what I am saying is that though I love knowing we are many of us tossing words onto pages this month, giving parts of every day writing poems, that there will of course be a great difference between these drafts or notes for poems and final "Poems" with a capital P, if such things do exist.

April showers.... poems, and toils

There is something about everyday blogging and everyday poem-writing that is not entirely compatible. One feels turned outward, like a chat to the chair in the corner with its back turned to you so that you cannot tell whether the friend you hope you are talking to is really there or not. The other--the poem--is turned in on itself instead. Even if it is a zany, splay it out all over the page in jibberjabberish going about your pop-culture filled day letting it rip kind of poem, it is still YOUR very own private inner wildchild day, and not one you are there to necessarily communicate to that chair. 

Anyway, so what I am saying is part of this week I have been poeming, not blogging. But I like that some people successfully blog and poem, poem and blog. 

Still happy to think everyday that so many other people are out there telling the universe that making the poem happen is worth it. --Ah, April... and

Right now? It is 6:06 am and there is a nightengale giving the end of the night its all before the chill of dawn breaks into day and he is chased off elsewhere. 

And I am off to sleep, too (like the woman in Leighton's painting, above left), having scribbled whatnots all night and then also finished the programme changes for yet another version of the Lex-ICON programme. It is inching its way towards being, being itself, being finished. Check it out HERE and check out the supercool video by P Castellin (click on his still image on the blog to be sent to the video in motion): http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/2012/04/lex-icon-blog-project-post-19-philippe.html