Books™ - Boog City
Transcription
Books™ - Boog City
BOOG CITY A COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER FROM A GROUP OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS BASED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY’S EAST VILLAGE ISSUE 66 FREE ARGOS BOOKS AUTONOMEDIA FRACTIOUS PRESS KAYA PRESS LOUDMOUTH PRESS NEW YORK QUARTERLY 2 3 4 5 6 7 Celebrate Six of the City’s Best Small Presses Inside in Their Own Words and Live Books ™ d.a. levy lives each month celebrating a renegade press T ues. Dec. 14 , 6 : 0 0 p . m . , f r e e N ew Yo r k C i t y Sm a l l P r e s s e s Night Argos Books Marina Blitshteyn Hildred Crill Bianca Stone Autonomedia Jordan Zinovich Fractious Press Steven J. Hann Nikkiesha N. McLeod Buzz Poole K. Abigail Walthausen Thera Webb Readings from Argos Books, Autonomedia, Fractious Press, Kaya Press, LoudMouth Press, and New York Quarterly authors (see below), and music from Matteah Baim with Golden Slumbers. Plus cheese and crackers, and wine and other beverages. Curated by Cristiana Baik and Svetlana Kitto ACA Galleries 529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr. (10th/11th aves) For information call 212-842-BOOG (2664) • editor@boogcity.com www.welcometoboogcity.com Kaya Press Samantha Chanse Lisa Chen Ed Lin Thaddeus Rutkowski LoudMouth Press Geoff Cunningham Carla Repice New York Quarterly Tony Gloeggler Douglas Treem It’s Like I cannot love like a ninepin. Not like the lane. Not like the blue shoe. I can love like a farmhouse, or a griefchimney that funnels from the ovens of my earlier unpopular period. This is a small pond where thousands of black tadpoles loiter at the rocks. This is a wooden raft being tipped by an assembly of teenagers. And there are no clouds in the sky. No airplanes. There isn’t even a sky. There isn’t even a sky. – Bianca Stone From the chapbook Someone Else’s Wedding Vows. Available at the Argos Books website. This Landscape of Girlish Iniquity (forest) Where I lived for many years. Boardinghouse of flocked nightgowns, sunless girls wrapping locks of hair around rags. Took my first tipple there, a ritual that came to replace vesperal ablutions, replace the bedside lowering, soften the mind to near love. Learned the difference between clown and mime was not silence, but skill. Ran my hands along a wall of my invention, was often climbing imagined stairs, spent hours picking invisible orchids. Sometimes I was a man coming on to me. Shy in repose, I rebuffed the evening shadow as a boreal conifer feathering out, cast my fingers across the door draft to pluck a most dolorous credo. No one listened, even those who looked. Once, in recalcitrant vignette, I posed for years as a girl who didn’t know a goddamn thing, my homeland was a single shaft of light across floorboards, the dust shone as snow in a Pasternak diorama. This is what I remember every night as I emigrate to your border. You are sitting at the computer, maybe paying bills. Your dark limbs laden with my favorite birds. Their happy song I am always making my way toward. – Paige Ackerson-Kiely Й elision/possession Renovation Somewhere in the Building I wear the flexible fingers of a hardware guardian alert to repercussions of the upstairs hammer, the intransigent anvil, the interior drill. Where I am is part of where you are wherever that is. There’s no ridding myself of the feel of screws, bolts, electric switches. I lick the sparks on my palm and the entire world is spoken. say a sound is diminished maybe a beat quickens towards the rest an elision slips easily at the end wearing a sleeveless mini as the heart – Hildred Crill From the chapbook The Upstairs Hammer. Available at the Argos Books website. From the first installment in the Side By Side Series: collaborations between poets and artists, This Landscape is a collaboration between poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely and artist Adie Russell. Available at the Argos Books web site. Unexpected Sometimes it is wonderful when a friend shows up unexpectedly at daybreak. I drank a first coffee and opened the kitchen window, and the cold air breezed in and held its soft hat and scarf out to me. Out in the world, across the street, the black dog of sadness sniffs along the red garden wall and snuffles up the snowy hillside, seeking its master. – S.C. Hahn From the collection of prose poems A Sky That Is Never the Same. Available at the Argos Books website. maybe he’s equally as eclipsed by distance as I’m even eagerly possessed is already undressed. maybe we seem too pleasing or too blessed to pass anymore tests so we freely marry our ribs in our chests & we’re really too ready but possession comes last in Russian, a vowel stays longer in the west – Marina Blitshteyn From the chapbook Russian For Lovers. Available February 2011. Mermaid Caribbean thyme is ten times stronger than the English variety — just ask Miss Queenie and her royal navy, who couldn’t yank a Jamaican weed from her rose-garden that didn’t grow back thick, tenfold, and blackened with the furor of a violated man. The tepid American I sank with my old shoes over the jaws of the Atlantic could never understand the hard clamor of my laugh, why I furrowed rough at the brow, why I knew the hollow points of every bone. But dig where the soil is wet and plant the proud seed of your shame-tree; don’t let them say it never grew. Roll the saltfish barrel down the hill, sending that battered thunder clanging at the seaside moon, jangled by her long earrings at our sea, ten times bluer than the bluest eye. That mint tea whistling in the Dutch pot is stronger than liquor, and takes six spoons of sugar, please—what can I say, my great-grandfather’s blood was clotted thick with sugar cane and overproof rum; when he bled it trickled heavy like molasses, clotted black like phlegm in the throat. Every red ant from Negril to Frenchman’s Cove came to burrow and suckle at his vein, where his leg was honeyed with a diabetic rot, and when he caught my grandmother in his wide fishing net, he served her up cold to his wild-eyed son: “Mermaid on the deck.” Now I too am rooted deep in his mutinous garden, buried in the dirt with the rioting mimosas, which open and close with the blue pulse of my breath, spiring tenfold through this dreaming skeleton. – Safiya Sinclair From the forthcoming collection of poetry and essays Catacombs. Available June 2011. Argos Books is an independent literary press, founded in 2010 by three poet-translators. Our aim is to support poetry, hybrid genres, translation, and collaboration, with a special interest in work that crosses cultural and national borders. We have two curated series intended to engage with diverse work in unexpected ways: the Little Anthology series, small anthologies that capture a community, subject or point of view, and Side by Side, collaborations between artists and writers. While publishing innovative work is our primary focus, we are also invested in facilitating critical dialogues among communities, genders, and languages. For more information and to buy upcoming and available titles please visit our website: www.argosbooks.org 2 BOOG CITY WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM BOOG CITY 3 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 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WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM BOOG CITY 5 MEMO from the Office Of Blame: Often people are skeptical at first. It’s understandable. We aren’t your everyday office, and people carrying blame will always be a little less trusting. So they want to know ‘where do you get your funding? Is this a private organization? Who’s paying you? Are you CIA?’... But we see through all that. This is what we train for. We provide a service. By accounting for blame we are offering people the opportunity to get on with their day... perhaps even their lives. We’re not heroes. We’re just doing our job.” - Blame Accountants www.loudmouthpress.org Homeless people in America face the obstacles of social invisibility – despite the fact that their condition puts them on constant display in our streets. “Why Are You Surprised I’m Still Here?” takes a look at the people who exist on the very fringe of our society, by focusing on the signs that they create. Sometimes the sign is ironic, using humor to make a point; most often the sign is a cry for help and for basic recognition. Gathered over almost a decade from around the country by farmer and artist, Billy Kaufman, then salvaged from a dilapidated barn in rural Tennessee, the collection, seen together illustrates the diversity of America’s homeless and the myriad of hardships they face living on the streets. The sales of this book will benefit The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), an organization combining the skills of advocates, lobbyists and people who were once, themselves homeless. Through public education, outreach and government action, the NCH mission is simple - to end homelessness in our country. 6 BOOG CITY WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM by Amanda J. Bradley 978-1-935520-07-8 Hints and Allegations by Adam Hughes 978-1-935520-35-1 Tourist by Sanford Fraser 978-1-935520-11-5 by Joe Weil 978-1-935520-10-8 Petrichor by Joanna Crispi 978-1-935520--00-9 by Grace Zabriskie 978-1-935520-05-4 The Plumber’s Apprentice by Ira Joe Fisher 978-1-935520-02-3 Songs from an Earlier Century Soldier in the Grass by Kevin Pilkington 978-1-935520-09-2 In the Eyes of a Dog by Jim Reese 978-1-935520-17-7 ghost on 3rd by Jackie Sheeler 978-1-935520-34-4 Earthquake Came to Harlem by F. D. Reeve 978-1-935520-20-7 The Puzzle Master and Other Poems by rd coleman 978-1-935520-27-6 beach tracks by Jayne Lyn Stahl 978-1-935520-26-9 by Richard Kostelanetz 978-1-935520-18-4 poetry at the edge™ www.nyqbooks.org WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM York Quarterly Foundation, Inc. Its mission is to augment the New York Quarterly poetry magazine by providing an additional venue for poets who are already published in the magazine. A lifelong dream of NYQ's founding editor, William Packard, NYQ Books™ has been made possible by both growing foundation support and new technology that was not available during William Packard's lifetime. We are proud to present these books and keep them in print so that all may enjoy. My Sick Teacher POEMS Riding with Destiny Recircuits by Pui Ying Wong 978-1-935520-29-0 by Norman Stock 978-1-935520-30-6 Yellow Plum Season Just Beautiful by Tim Suermondt 978-1-935520-28-3 Bones & Jokes by Ted Jonathan 978-1-935520-01-6 by Fred Yannantuono 978-1-935520-06-1 A Boilermaker for the Lady by Oren Wagner 978-1-935520-19-1 Voluptuous Gloom by Iris Lee 978-1-935520-16-0 Urban Bird Life by Ira Joe Fisher 978-1-935520-03-0 Some Holy Weight in the Village Air by Barbara Blatner 978-1-935520-23-8 The Still Position from Pickled Dreams Naked Books™ NYQ Books™ was established in 2009 as an imprint of The New He stands at dawn burning on the inside, coughing stuff up. He walks from the bed halfway to the bathroom like crossing a river on stones. He must inspect what he has coughed up to check it for its color and consistency. If it’s dark and thick if it’s still dark and thick then he will still be very sick. He can’t seem to find enough stones. Avoid the cliche, he taught me. Everything So Dodge it, duck it, kill it at all costs. Seriously Okay: so he is pale as night. by Douglas Treem Custer, he says. 978-1-935520-14-6 Custer, he did not crack. He holds a finger straight up. He jerks once and half of each cell in his body flinches. But Keats, he says. Keats, he says again. The finger draws an arc in the air, points straight down a moment, then loses its strength and curls. He says Keats cracked. Standing there pale as the night, trembling like anything other than a leaf can tremble, he composes: Keats cracked, but Custer laughed. For posterity, he looks at me. He speaks with finality. Keats cracked. Custer laughed. I note the revision with one nod of my head. Suddenly he finds the stones to the bathroom where he holds his hand to his face to see what he coughed up. by Douglas Treem Forthcoming NYQ Books include books by: Anna Adams, Yu Yan Chen, Franz Douskey, Steven Henn, Luke Johnson, Gordon Massman, Michael Montlack, Mather Schneider, Shelley Stenhouse, Barry Wallenstein, and many more. ONE YEAR LATER My brother was on his way to a dental appointment when the second plane hit four stories below the office where he worked. He’s never said anything about the guy who took football bets, how he liked to watch his secretary walk, the friends he ate lunch with, all the funerals. Maybe, shamed by his luck, he keeps quiet, afraid someone might guess how good he feels, breathing. The Last Lie by Tony Gloeggler 978-1-935520-15-3 by Tony Gloeggler BOOG CITY 7 URBAN FOLK A Magna Opera Laughter & Lust Meets Frampton Comes Alive! Meets Ride This (or Trio) Meets Taking Liberties BY JONATHAN BERGER Fustercluck!!! Elastic No-No Band ustin Remer does not hide his influences well, or, really, even try to. He seems proud to give credit where it’s due. The title of his 2008 EP, Every Elvis Has His Impersonators, makes an indirect reference to Elvis Costello’s 2002 track “Episode of Blonde.” That’s a J which were thematically consistent works. While sometimes the themes are pretty vague (Costello’s Punch the Clock can be identified as “the pop album”), each of the albums these English New Wave singersongwriters released during their most prolific periods has a distinct identity all its own. Like his revered predecessors, Remer likes to make thematic albums. His last full-length as Elastic No-No Band was My 3 Addictions, which described, in studio, like Remer and Nan Turner’s take on Joe Jackson’s “Different for Girls,” which successfully captures all the chaotic energy of a drunken night out for karaoke. Much better is the reinterpretation of the Everly Brothers’ “Poor Jenny,” wonderfully assisted by Toby Goodshank (who also collaborated on the cover with Elastic No-No Band-member Preston Spurlock). There are live tracks throughout the album—including the hilarious story- logical choice, since the EP is a minialbum of Costello covers. Even the name of Remer’s group, Elastic NoNo Band, alludes to John Lennon’s first post-Beatles undertaking. Remer is certainly a big fan of the singer-songwriters, clearly bowing before masters like Costello and Joe Jackson, who, in fact, is covered on Remer’s latest. From 1980 through 1987, Jackson made albums that use lyrical themes and musical styles as the cartilage linking disparate songs. Elvis Costello, meanwhile, produced a 10-year run of high-concept albums, from This Year’s Model through Blood and Chocolate, separate sections, his vices of girls, movies, and food. Now, with Elastic No-No Band’s dual-disc, 45-track magna opera, Fustercluck!!!, Remer has upped the ante. He has made not just one concept album but a series of them, joined in one appropriately named whole. Included in the 140-minute extravaganza are a live album, a collaborations album, a covers album, and a B-sides album. Sometimes these albums overlap. Early on disc one is a triptych of cover songs, all featuring duets with prominent AntiFolk artists. Some of them were recorded live in the about-songs “The Worst Thing on My Resume,” which details Remer’s repeated attempt to get included in the soundtrack of a Troma film. That, and with the band tracks “Imaginary Girlfriend,” “Red” (one of the versions included on the album), and “Turn Out Right Rock,” which has made an appearance on the last two Elastic No-No Band full-lengths, compose part of the live album. Numerous tracks give the impression of loose, ramshackle, live recordings, and the comprehensive notes at the interactive website support this assessment. In fact, Remer’s own commentary on his humongous album helps put much of Boog City’s Classic Albums Live presents a performers’ choice album the work in perspective. have extra-band collaborators, the Often there are associations traditional numbers usually include between tracks, certain suites of songs AntiFolk expatriate Debe Dalton. The that link together quite well, that With Elastic No-No Band’s are followed by dual-disc, 45-track magna opera, the innards of another, entirely Fustercluck!!!, Remer has upped different concept the ante. He has made not just one album. “Color Machine” and concept album but a series of them. “Mouth” are experimental tracks (so part of the B-sides album), most Dalton-related track is the duet the first with Brook Pridemore and of “There’s A Hole in The Bucket,” the second with the sampled help of which includes her in the role of Dear the artist formerly known as Declan Liza. She sings her lines with perfect, MacManus. Then the album left- thinly veiled contempt for her partner, fields into “Hangover Dial,” a slightly Dear Henry, who acts innocent while sweet song about postponing the leading her irrevocably into the call to the night after the bender. intellectual impasse that closes the Sometimes the links between song. It’s truly a thing of beauty. songs are clear but still Other incredible voices can be cacophonous. Right after a solo heard throughout the album. Sure, duets incarnation of Elastic No-No Band make up the collaboration album, but rips through an excellent version of there are also a number of outstanding “Goodbye Southern Death Swing,” call-and-response sequences featuring originally by Major Matt Mason anonymous voices. “Hot As I Are” USA (with Remer, co-producer of includes excellent uncredited shouting. the album), there is a strange epic. While bassist Spurlock and drummer “The End of Disc 1 As We Know It” Doug Johnson are credited as backing prominently features a Major Matt vocalists, there seems to be a fair voiceover and an infectious Muzak amount of Remer helping himself out with track that seems eerily familiar. Also backup vocals. Many of the tracks are part of the B-Sides Album are five demonstrably improved by executing remakes on the album(s)—seven if the magic of multitracked Remer. you count “Red,” which exists as Probably the best thing about a live track on disc two and a Fustercluck!!! is the sheer chutzpah of its collaboration with Chris Andersen magnificent sprawl. It’s a massive thing (of The Christian Pirate Puppets) on to consume all at once, but there are disc one. so many ways to take it in. Certainly, it’s The cover album hidden more than worth the attempt. in Fustercluck!!! can be further Jonathan Berger is Boog City’s subdivided. While most of the covers Urban Folk editor. performed live by Sidewalk Café Aaron Araki featuring Two Kazoos Todd Carlstrom Bob Kerr Ben Krieger Chris Maher So L’il Brian Speaker The Trouble Dolls Yoko Kikuchi & Kate Wheeler Genan Zilkha and Ray Ferrer NYC Directions: F/V to 2nd Ave., L to 1st Ave. Venue is at E. 6th St. The Beatles The White Album LIVE Fri., Dec. 17, 8:00 p.m. $5 suggested with a two-drink minimum 94 Ave. A For further information: 212-842-BOOG (2664) • editor@boogcity.com 8 BOOG BOOGCITY CITY OCTOBER 2003 WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM PRINTED MATTER Ives Crosses This Out Seeing Stanley’s Forest for the Trees BY C HRIS MARTIN Anamnesis Lucy Ives Slope Editions rite, “at first glance Anamnesis might seem like a failed paean to the Platonic Ideal.” Cross that out. Write, “Anamnesis has been used by W Lucy Ives audiographers to describe ‘The Madeleine Effect’ of certain timbres to trigger memory.” Cross that out. Write, “that Anamnesis is about memory makes it inextricable from the dangers of nostalgia.” Strike through “nostalgia,” write “prose.” Cross all that out. Write, “the triumph of Anamnesis is not found in the process of erasure, but in the perseverance of starting over.” Now add “the first book by Lucy Ives and winner of the 2008 Slope Editions Book Prize” before “is.” This is the experience of reading Anamnesis, which is exasperating and exhilarating in turns. As the OED gloss found on the book’s last page notes, anamnesis is “the recalling of things past; recollection, reminiscence.” There seems to be a connection to Plato as well, whose doctrine of anamnesis involved the imperfect mortal remembering of those ideas once known by the soul in its ideal constitution. It is, indeed, a book about memory, but only insofar as memory is an active recreation of the remembered. And it is about the ideal, but only insofar as it wages a refutation against it. What is important here is how the moment makes its unpredictable swerve, clamoring just ahead of time, which is busy sweeping up what just happened, even if it happened a long time ago. This constant scurry destabilizes Anamnesis, but Ives dutifully clothes the moment’s vulnerability with lines that bring out whatever “sure” she can find in the close of “measure.” In this way, she mirrors the inexorable choosing we all do as the de facto authorities of our lives: Write, “It became bright morning in the middle of the night” Write, “On television I saw a beach” Write, “I stepped outdoors” Write, “Someone was smoking” Cross all this out Write, “I needed a lot of things” Cross this out Write, “When one has come to have only a memory of feeling” WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM Cross this out Write, “But I stay like this, I change and I don’t, embarrassed of my own presence” “Only a memory of feeling” seems like an operative line in this book. Recent neurological studies have revealed just how much memory is invented and perpetually distorted through its reinvention. As Ives’ lines reinvent themselves, they posit these feelings anew, retaining only the flashbulb’s overlap as it drains from image to image. But since this is a book and not a brain, the lines themselves must remain as they are, even in the midst of being crossed out or amended. So, “I change and I don’t,” and this “I” finds itself locked into the perseveration at the core of presence that makes it feel so “embarrassed.” What recuperates this perseverating self of Anamnesis is the aforementioned perseverance Ives demonstrates, her perpetual redo that moves from erasure to compulsion to witness. It is, finally, the witnessing that seems most important here. Once one falls into the rhythmic emendations of the text, the gentle thrill of lived life emerges in all its fractured glory. Though anamnesis is a term forever tied to Plato, the force of Ives’ writing appears directed against the ideal. It’s not that she’s searching for the perfect line or some egress to the transcendent or access to the soul’s own memory; she is bearing witness to the present moment, whether lived or remembered, and how its disappearing act keeps purity at bay. Anamnesis succeeds most when it feels least ideal, shoring its succession of now against our desire to memorialize it: Anamnesis is, indeed, a book about memory, but only insofar as memory is an active recreation of the remembered. And it is about the ideal, but only insofar as it wages a refutation against it. What is important here is how the moment makes its unpredictable swerve, clamoring just ahead of time, who is busy sweeping up what just happened, even if it happened a long time ago. Write, “Girls react to others on the street” Cross out “Girls” Write, “I” And draw the pigeon with one leg white as milk and the orange basketball Sliding across the rim Write, “A man shows me one of his thumbs” Write, “I am passing him” Cross this out Write, “All this is only writing” Cross this out Chris Martin is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon). The web journal he edited, puppyflowers (www.puppyflowers. com), just finished its 11-issue run. BY KARL SAFFRAN Book Made of Forest Jared Stanley Salt Publishing ared Stanley’s reading here in Milwaukee in the fall of last year was, in the most pleasant way possible, something like a sucker-poetry-punch to the gut. It was one of the rare cases of seeing a reading by someone whose work you’re not familiar with and being sincerely wowed—by the poems and the performance. I’d hesitate to call Stanley’s delivery a style, as his writhing movement appears to be the poems escaping from his body in a purely natural way. His physical reading, at the time, seemed entirely of the poetry—only later was I aware of it in a larger sense. His book, published last year by Salt, gives a similar effect, starting, even, with the title. Book Made of Forest, for me at least, almost wants to be read as Book Made of Trees when in fact it’s much less ordinary, much bigger. The forest, of course, is vastly more complex than a group of trees. Stanley takes aim at this complexity in his first poem, “What is Outside.” After utilizing lines from Robinson Jeffers’ poem “The Birds,” Stanley finds that J Daws, hungrier than I am screech for interiority. Anechoic choice to die of exposure or expostulation. The first section of the book is filled with moments like these: man is brought to nature and likewise, nature to man. A mockingbird perched on a plastic owl’s head over the top of the screen through the window and “A rake is imitating a typewriter/ scratching the word yes/ in the dirt between the trees.” The poems have a relationship with nature that is refreshingly human. Instead of living with nature in the stereotypical sense of peace and harmony, Stanley here treats nature like an affable but messy roommate, leading to an affectionate yet strained domesticity. There are moments such as “An eye is a whisper of a shadow; I think of trees;/ embarrassing trees that care.” and Moon, you can’t win. You’re wallpaper, a head on the ramparts, or a compass of hinges in a city’s sky. The effect is strange, wonderful, and somehow more real then the awed deference often contained in poetry concerned with nature. These moments of human interaction (as opposed to human interactions) once again recall Robinson Jeffers and, here, his notion of Inhumanism—to which the strongest call is found in his poem “Carmel Point”: “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;/ We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident/ As the rock and ocean that we were made from.” In many ways, and certainly on the surface, my reading of Stanley’s writing as a humanizing of nature runs in direct opposition to Jeffers’ efforts to “unhumanize” ourselves. If there’s an intersection, however, it’s in Book Made of Forest’s “State Park.” Twice referencing “public private disappearance,” Stanley mocks the act of visiting protected land reserved for the masses. Oh my people you fennel, rocks and vandalism, you fees, you gates, you group of kids, you candles in the Sibley maze. Instead of living with nature in the stereotypical sense of peace and harmony, Stanley here treats nature like an affable but messy roommate, leading to an affectionate yet strained domesticity. Far removed from Jeffers’ hope for “uncenter[ed]” appreciators of nature, Stanley’s parkgoers are preoccupied with “[t]he money situation/ no children to love/ all the people who could know.” The poem closes with some of my favorite lines from the book: You stack of wood, soon to be pencils you pencils at the end of nature you number of unsolved indentations you. on the ground. Book Made of Forest closes with “Admirations: Covers, Portraits, and Articulations,” a section composed mostly of prose poems dedicated to various poets, musicians, artists, and others. The sentiment here, for the most part, remains the same. From “For Michael O’Brien”: “the mulberry … it would be a city mulberry, a beautiful shape made more beautiful by carrying its requisite number of flying plastic bags. English needs fewer words.” The standout poem from this section, though, is “For Brenda Coultas,” which just might have the greatest Civil War battlefield/celebrated actor metaphor ever written. Chantilly’s a beautiful name for a nonexistent place under an innocent parking lot that never killed nobody. I go there inhabited by you, and though you may or may not exist, this mark is there for all to see for now, the colonial style colonizing the fairly national site of bloody death and bullet-pocked trees. What kind of land deserves a death-mask as much as John C. Reilly, in life a friendly ghost but with pangs of history written in a dark script around the eyes, jowls, brows? It is moments like these that demonstrate Jared Stanley’s descriptive powers and his ability to tease out elaborate beauty from even the bleakest of landscapes and, likewise, undeniably human complexity from otherwise standard scenery. Karl Saffran lives in Milwaukee, where he co-curates the Salacious Banter reading series. For more information visit www.salaciousbanter. blogspot.com. BOOG CITY OCTOBER 2003 BOOG CITY 9 PRINTED MATTER There Is a Message on the Monument Selected Edward Sanders Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985. New and Revised Edition. Let’s Not Keep Fighting The Trojan War: New and Selected Poems 1986-2009 Edward Sanders Coffee House Press dward Sanders is famous. The poems in this book thirst, pacify, rage, and historicize. There is a hieroglyphic emblem on the very first page that should be well attended to. Is it a magical talisman to ward off evil spirits? Is it the name of the book reproduced in ancient Egyptian? Careful study of this text may allow its decipherment. American poets should read this book. Americans who can’t stand even the smell of a poem should read this book. Rock ’n’ rollers, if any still exist, should read this book. It is a book for careful study, yes, but also a book for joyously singing aloud. Edward Sanders is a crowd, a multitude harnessing a weirdly wavering articulate revelation that echoes through the stone canyons of the city and frightens woodland creatures into reluctant evolutionary dances. Everything is permissible, personified, and perforated; that is, until it is realized that there are only two constants in Sandersian n-space: time and the voice. Thirsting for Peace achieves the wonderful incompletion that is thirst: the desire to be quenched and that dull ebullition cooking the taters behind all static forms. “Form” here means poetics, artifice, and prosody. Sanders has done and written a million things. Almost by making it look like an accident—that special achievement of American art—he has created his own brand of historiography, poetry, and the public persona. His lines are like little word globules, little molecules, little hallucinatory street machines. Yet they are often so prosaically conversational that it is easy to forget they are poetry. The beauty of Sanders’ poetry is also its greatest liability: all Americans born in the raging 20th century may recognize the topics discussed in these poems but will not all feel the same about them in the end. There is the dimension of the universe you live and have lived in, and there is the dimension of the universe in which these poems are the most accurate description of what exists, what has happened. With Sanders, new information comes to light. This book enters into the charged and necessary negotiations that warring parties must conduct in order to establish peace accords. Sanders includes more and more, can accommodate more and more, heroizes and vilifies the irreconcilable until the poem is so tactically impactful it’s ready to blow up E BOOG CITY Marilyn’s tiki-wiki skirt. He makes up words and spins asymmetrical webs. He can even abbreviate atrocity until you feel your briefs creep up your crack into a squishy bunch. Sometimes the poem feels like the hairball in your hotdog, and sometimes the poem cools its heels in the nymph-pools of En Gedi. In Sanders’ verse, all metaphors are welcomed. These poems enact a gentle rage. The bare-handed rock-climber of time’s crumbling pile of fragments climbs onto the stage and sings boogie woogie. These poems say: Have courage! See for yourself! “This is the age of investigation”! Is poetry like this readily available to us anymore? Are there poets like this here or anywhere? For now he is here. Anymore is now. But Sanders is not a self-important man; he has Miriam Sanders photo BY DOUGL AS MANSON indeed taken the humble oath of the truth-teller for the benefit of his people. These poems exist as historical proof. There is a witness who will take the stand. Nobody else is telling this story in this way, so at least listen, even if you can’t imitate. The poems in this book embody the desire to investigate and research. They should inspire readers to seek out more information about the people and events described. Learn your history, teach your children well, and serve your fellow creatures with good deeds. There is a message on the memorial. • A companion volume to Thirsting for Peace, a new book of selected poems, Let’s Not Keep Fighting The Trojan War, bears witness to the Peace Eye bard’s continuing investment in the writing of history. He stretches a shining cord of memory across time—a cord embodied in the driving, incessant beats of pop songs; the density of his famous “data clusters”; and in matter-of-fact, plain-spoken meters. Opening with a “new” poem by the greatest lyric poet of Greek antiquity, Sappho, Sanders proves how ancient and far-reaching his poetics is. While his mammoth, multi-volume America: A History in Verse divulges oceanic tides of information, the pieces here are much more discrete, fleeting, personal, and anecdotal. They include memories of Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg; 9/11, poets’ Issue 66 free poetry editor Joanna Fuhrman poetry@welcometoboogcity.com editor/publisher David A. Kirschenbaum editor@boogcity.com printed matter editor Arlo Quint p-m@welcometoboogcity.com copy chief Lauren Russell copychief@welcometoboogcity.com small press editor Douglas Manson smallpress@welcometoboogcity.com art editor Cora Lambert art@welcometoboogcity.com urban folk editor Jonathan Berger uf@welcometoboogcity.com 10 BOOG BOOGCITY CITY OCTOBER 2003 wages and fame, travel to tombstones, and collecting verses from famous poets for a new “Amazing Grace.” Of course, there is always discussion of the prominent causes about which consciousness needs to be raised—the peace movement, campaigns for social justice—and of simple human kindness to those in need. Reading the book from cover to cover takes the breath away in its range of distinct topics and personages. As a whole Let’s Not Keep Fighting The Trojan War resembles the “lists” Sanders praises and bemoans near the volume’s end: Not even a billion parallel universes … would be enough to list what needs to be done. Even as much of the work is dedicated to the intertwined strands of history and poetry, with Sanders’ memory and investigations in the foreground—disclosed in clear and strident tones— the book is also a tribute to the great poets and personal friends who meant the most to him. There are odes, nostalgic laments, diary poems, and elegies as well. In their need to rouse, affirm, or repudiate, the poems have no qualms if they are sometimes homiletic. Sanders can be populist in the way that Carl Sandberg was populist and sometimes as Archibald MacLeish was. He writes in homage to his peers as heroes and to his political heroes, the Kennedys, as tragic actors. He writes hymns, fight songs, and cheers. One poetic innovation that Sanders often uses is the compound word—called a kenning in Anglo-Saxon poetry—such as “vom-vom,” “poor-kill,” “fang-packs,” and “time tracks.” While his kennings, use of shorthand, and abbreviations are often funny, they can now and then feel forced. Sanders can so terrify me with his descriptions of horrors that I stop reading. He has seen much, traveled far, and known deep sorrow. He understands the results of his efforts and why he must continue them. He reminds readers why the best journalists and journalist-poets should be revered as heroes. I am cheered by his encouragements and appreciate his advice about poverty. In a poem about Herman Melville’s father, he writes: Advice to the middle aged with penury’s prize … Be prepared to be sneered at like a hungry rat This is so true! I recently accompanied a friend to a local food stamp center, where she was digitally fingerprinted and photographed. Her newly snatched bio-info was then run through the government’s big counsel Ian S. Wilder • First printing, December 2010, 2,250 copies. Send a $3 ppd. check or money order payable to David A. Kirschenbaum to the address below for additional copies. Paper is copyright Boog City. All rights revert to contributors upon publication. “crime-brain scanner,” all in order for her to sit in a waiting room for four hours, where she was finally acknowledged by a tired, overworked employee who yelled at her for not having all the papers she needed. Treated like a suspect just because she wanted to get Sanders stretches a shining cord of memory across time—a cord embodied in the driving, incessant beats of pop songs; the density of his famous “data clusters”; and in matter-of-fact, plain-spoken meters. something to eat, my friend found herself inside “the same cruel system” that Sanders claims trickled out from beneath a glacier 15,000 years ago. Is this also “we the people”? Sanders is adept at revealing such absurdities. I especially enjoyed his capsule biographies, the results of a practice that may have begun with his book The Family, about the Manson murder cult (no relation), continuing through his Hymn to the Rebel Cafe and into his big volumes of 20th century history. I laughed at how Friedrich Hölderlin had to go out “looking for tutoring jobs in poetless towns,” as I was reminded of all the poets I have known who were forced to travel across the continent and beyond, looking for work in the name of poetic art. Sanders’ tone ranges from encouraging and informative to admonishing and disquieting, but overall it is comforting. Sadly, in this second half of a two-volume selection of a 50-year career, we are often given too-quick glimpses into the broad and diverse spectrum of his tens of works and thousands of pages. Luckily, the fuller swathe of these details can be found elsewhere—either in his books, musical recordings with The Fugs and others, or in the various outside accounts of the many events in which he took part. His very varied life in verse traces a very varied course across time and space, so that reading these two books has an epic feel. The best poem for me was his description of a psilocybin trip with Charles Olson, recalled in all its Day-Glo, goofy pomp. While much of this book scatters details about like a runaway nomadic foray into the wilderness, it still enables me to have vivid visions and a feeling of green. It ever points and tacks its craft to a magnificent and unnamable source. Douglas Manson is a poet and educator, publishes little scratch pad editions, Celery Flute: The Kenneth Patchen Newsletter, and maintains a blog currently listed as “Island of the Nondisenchanted.” He writes poems, published Roofing and Siding in 2007, and now lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Boog always reads work for Boog City or other consideration. (Send SASE with up to five poems or pages of any type of art or writing. For email subs, put Boog City sub in subject line and then email to editor@boogcity.com or applicable editor.) BOOG CITY 330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H N.Y., N.Y. 10001-4754 www.welcometoboogcity.com T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664) WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM POETRY Peter Waldor Short Hills, N.J. Notes to a Painter for a Series of Paintings on the Millipede’s Legs 14. Fold the paper into a square and place it in your pocket. Walk and find a solitary flat space and unfold the paper, weight the corners and wait two days, no matter the weather. Then, in ink, the legs as tall grass bent by wind. Let it stay two more days no matter the weather, refold, same pocket. Walk home. Andy Gricevich Madison, Wis. From For the Record Through the Window (tinted winter) The stock of unfortunate size is sinking in the bleat of tax-sensitive born-agains milling and polling to stuff the season with electrostatic perms achieved at last and risk, a breast pervades the attention and might as well, since the room is bright and its center colossus-free. Get up to the waft of backup in the basement, repeat melt-freeze as phrase screen made out with it the corner of snow would fall through tilted fields of broken home runoff to walk thought down a crease unplayed leaving its remainder unwritten you think historically of self-neglect in time as unshelter in the vast shortages 15. High up, a rusted ore car, too high for a petite bourgeoisie to strap on his mule and haul down for his lawn, which, therefore, has no ornaments. In the loam a millipede labors, legs arched-a roller coaster. Indwelling jargon parades against clockwork, re news a softer emergence etched vs. mist Music makes the world louder by contrast Cars distinguish one another Unmetaphorical germination takes precedence 23. Bleached ribs of a whale on an uncharted isle. Paint faithfully, though you will never leave the island. About the Poets Andy Gricevich edits Cannot Exist magazine and, with Lewis Freedman, facilitates the ______________-Shaped Reading Series. He spent much of the last decade performing satirical cabaret songs with the Prince Myshkins and strange political theater and chamber music with the Nonsense Company. He fears we may be confusing irony with habitual insincerity and is uncomfortably writing this in the third person. Peter Waldor is the author of Door to a Noisy Room (Alice James Books), which was a finalist for the 2009 National Jewish Book Award. The poems appearing here are part of a manuscript called “Leg Paint,” which is a set of instructions to a painter on how to paint a series of pictures depicting the millipede’s legs. Submission Guidelines Email subs to poetry@welcometoboogcity.com, with no more than five poems, all in one attached file with “My Name Submission” in the subject line and as the name of the file, ie: Walt Whitman Submission. Or mail with an SASE to Poetry editor, Boog City, 330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H, N.Y., N.Y. 10001-4754. WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM BELLADONNA* COLLABORATIVE 2011: A YEAR IN THE COMMONS THE WIDE ROAD Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian Long awaited by many since the early 1990’s, The Wide Road is a master collaboration between two of our most necessary language innovators. Self-described as a “picaresque buddy being,” The Wide Road explores the simultaneity of thinking and communicating in present time. As such it is a mobile text, at once a constant and shifting travelogue, a celebration of the female body, an investigation into the intersections of female friendship, mothering, writing, community-making, activism and thought. ������������� ISBN: 978-0-9823387-4-2 Read more online at www.belladonnaseries.org/thewideroad.html READING & RELEASE PART Y: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 7:30 pm; $6 Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie St; New York Pre-ordering available at www.BelladonnaSeries.org Belladonna* promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. BOOG CITY OCTOBER 2003 BOOG CITY 11 New from L I TM U S PR E S S HOW PHENOMENA APPEAR TO UNFOLD BY LESLIE SCALAPINO New & Expanded Edition In “Eco-logic in Writing” one of many brilliant essaytalks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, “Seeing at the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one’s living make?” What more crucial question for those concerned not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager. For Scalapino the essay is a poetic act; the poetic act, essay. It’s in that combination that her textual eros—the lush beauty of it!—could reject aesthetic purity and risk the rawness of genuinely new thought, touching what she called “the rim of occurring.” “Writing on rim” is a celebration of the wondrous present, but requires agonistic struggle with the ugly—poverty, war, institutional brutality, racism, sexism, homophobia. Scalapino’s Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one’s times, “altering oneself and altering negative social formation,” is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future. With compassion and humor, Scalapino was indeed living on the rim of occurrence. That is the living in the writing that produced this work—its fundamental optimism and ebullient credo: “The future creates the past.” JOAN RETALLACK �� �� ������������������������������������������ ��������� BY ����������� In Beauport, Kate Colby tells the tale of the decorator and designer Henry Davis Sleeper, braiding in proselyric reminisces of her own New England upbringing and ‘anti-ekphrastic’ poems after Currier & Ives lithographs of the Victorian-era leisure class. This is Colby’s ‘sotted nineteenth century,’ peopled with antique glass buoys and ‘animate dioramas,’ where the sound of seagulls dropping quahogs on the roof echoes all day. Not since Charles Olson’s Maximus has Gloucester been so gallantly and aptly sung! � ������������������ ������������������������������������������������ Visit us online at www.litmuspress.org Distributed by Small Press Distribution at www.spdbooks.org ���������������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������� ������������� ��������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������ �������������������������������������������������� ���������������������� ������������ ������������ ������������������������ ���������������� ������������������� ������������������������� ��������� ������������������������ �������������� 12 BOOG CITY OCTOBER 2003 ���������������������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������ ����������������������������� ��������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������