(to-forge-the-eye-is-a-mountain-in-the-empyrean)

New Poems

2012-02-08T01:03:00.000-08:00

I have a few new poems up in TYPO 16 and The Cultural Society and a few forthcoming in the April issue of Shearsman. Really pleased to be in the company of so many poets I admire and at the chance to encounter new work!

Above: see a poesis

Hank Lazer and Zach Barocas: Two Essays on Poetry and Spirit

2012-01-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

Here are the links to two essays that have preoccupied my thought recently, specifically regarding the relationship between poetry and spirituality.

The first is Hank Lazer's "Returns: Innovative Poetry and Questions of 'Spirit,'" published in Facture 2 (2001), which attempts to salvage the connection between spirituality and poetic practice from the "squeamishness" the idea of spirituality often produces in the contemporary reader. Lazer also provides a veritable goldmine reading list of poets and books that demonstrate a commitment to both spiritual investigation and poetic innovation.

The second is Zach Barocas's "on poetry & spirit," published in GutCult 8 (2007). In the short essay, Barocas deftly describes the development of his own poetics of spirit and how specifically he has tried to apply it to his own poetic practice.

Though neither of these essays were published recently, they only came to my attention in the last few months during hours of aimless link-hopping online. Both have given me a good deal to think about as my current research and creative interests fall along the same lines.

I am eager to use this blog as a signpost toward other essays, websites, poems that deal with matters of spirit and poetry. I encourage any readers that might be out there to send anything like this my way.

"Dialogue, Doubt, and Presence"

2012-01-04T23:45:00.000-08:00

The inimitable Elizabeth Robinson "chatting up the uncanny" at Evening Will Come

Theodore Enslin (1925-2011)

2011-11-24T19:03:00.000-08:00

We lost a great poet a few days ago. I strongly recommend this interview as an inroad into Enslin's brilliant vision for marrying musical and poetic form.

Two new books by friends

2011-11-23T11:48:00.000-08:00

from Jane Wong's Dendrochronology:

What is this faint vision? What is this stranger? The hand
in the fire does not burn. He shows the trick again and again
until there is the smell of hair. The smell along the back of
her mouth. Kissing, a moth settles on the mattress and there
is more.

A sack of flour pours over water.

from Joan Fleming's The Same as Yes:

What else can I tell you? Five eighths is the same as ten

sixteenths. Salt water is good for your teeth, and if you're

wholehearted about it, you can ask the sea to be your

dentist. Some people live in buses that never go anywhere,

and that's okay too, as long as something's growing. No,

blue's not my favourite colour, but it might be my favourite

word.

Frank Samperi

2011-11-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, I was introduced to the beautiful, delicate poems of Frank Samperi by Elizabeth Robinson. I have spent the time since acquiring rare, out-of-print editions of his books and learning as much as I can about this poet whose work, though abundant and original, is largely unknown.

This seems to be changing due in large part to the work of his daughter, Claudia, who started a blog devoted to her father's life and work. There are also two wonderful essays on Samperi's work available online by Peter O'Leary and J. Townsend. This past week, PennSound launched Frank Samperi's author page featuring a recording of Samperi reading in 1987 and pdf versions of four of his out-of-print collections.

I find something incredibly beautiful, earnest and sustaining in efforts like these to rescue a singular voice from obscurity. Recoveries, rediscoveries of this kind make contemporary poetry the vibrant and diverse creature that it is, and I applaud and thank all those involved in bringing Frank Samperi back into the world.

"Here's a demand"

2011-10-04T14:59:00.000-07:00

Since I've been in New Zealand, I've tried to follow American news and events as closely as possible without letting myself succumb to nostalgia or forgetting to live and participate here, in NZ, a country whose political and cultural climate is most definitely worth paying attention to.

Still, as I continue to follow the evolving Occupy Wall Street movement and the way it is portrayed by American media sources, my heart and thoughts are with those people, trying to reclaim something, so many things, that were taken from them, from us.

I've heard a lot of criticism of the movement that centers on its alleged "lack of demands." It seems those holding this opinion are confounded, confused by this movement whose problem is not that it lacks demands but has too many. This problem, this overwhelming abundance of demands, needs, pleas, seems natural in a country whose infrastructure is finally revealed as being supported, not by the mortar and stone we were told, but by a cheap, temporary substitute.

It seems natural to me that the petty complaints and petulance of the super-rich in the face of tax hikes would anger the 99% who paid to "bail-out" these now principled conservatives. That this anger cannot be contained in a single slogan or demand, but rather boils over into a cacophony of different visions, goals and desires also seems natural.

There is one such vision that is close to my heart and the hearts of many friends who, like me, have entered the event horizon of student debt. There is a movement among movements to demand that banks forgive student loan debt, and I find their reasoning compelling. I encourage you to check out their agenda here and also to read this Guardian piece, written by the movement's founder. Those eyes belong to my friend, Elaine.

Peter O'Leary in conversation with Joshua Marie Wilkinson

2011-09-06T21:18:00.001-07:00

Peter O'Leary discusses, among other things, religious poetry in the most recent issue of Evening Will Come.

"If we think of language as a star, religious poetry is the source of the light it emits – the radiant core. But religious poetry is also this energetic periphery to language: it’s in that dynamic intermediate region, between what is spoken and what’s unspoken, the place where liquid and solid meet, or vocalization and thought."

LVNG 12

2011-08-28T16:53:00.000-07:00

This is very exciting.

Chuffed that friends Ossian Foley and James Longley are the new editors of LVNG and can't wait to see the future issues of this truly great magazine.

Five New Poems

2011-07-25T23:22:00.000-07:00

Five of my poems are featured this week at Web Conjunctions.

Occasional Religion

2011-07-25T22:18:00.000-07:00

I was recently invited to become a contributor to Occasional Religion, an interdisciplinary online community whose focus is on contemporary religious discourse, and my first contribution, a poem called, "The Work" was just published last week on the site. I think the goal of this website's creators, to reconsider how matters of the spirit are talked about through intersections of scholarship, political commentary, art and verse, is an ambitious and admirable experiment and I encourage those interested to check the site out and participate in this ongoing conversation.

July 13-July 29

2011-07-12T09:52:00.001-07:00

View Larger Map

Today's shape

2011-05-27T15:42:00.000-07:00

This:

When Ecstasy is Inconvenient

Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows-
flight's end or flight's beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It's the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.

-Lorine Niedecker

and this:

Sounds New

2011-05-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

Really wish I could be here.

New Review in Jacket2

2011-05-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

Jacket2 just published my review of Fanny Howe's Emergence. I would love to hear your thoughts.

What does the Worm work in His cocoon?

2011-05-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

There was such a want in the old ways

when craft came into our elements,

the art shall never be free of that forge,

that loom, that lyre-

the fire, the images, the voice.

-from At the Loom, Passages 2

Last Night

2011-05-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

Eleanor Catton Wins Amazon.ca First Novel Prize!

2011-05-05T14:37:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard!

Tornadoes as/and Sacred Forms

2011-04-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

Conditions are right for long-track tornadoes throughout the midwest. Iowa City is on the list of towns most likely to be nailed by this belt of twisters

and

Jonathan Fedors reviews Norman Finkelstein's On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry for Jacket2

Ode Days Ode by Hannah Sanghee Park

2011-04-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

To scoff,
expected, but the world, it stretches in
a way to make the taste of wine seem off.

This way.

Peter O'Leary, "Apocalypticism: A Way Forward For Poetry"

2011-04-02T13:25:00.000-07:00

Wonderful essay covering Pam Rehm and Joseph Donahue's revelatory poetics.

Aotearoa

2011-02-18T13:33:00.000-08:00

"Coming to New Zealand in our spring (your fall) of 1976 (momently to be my fiftieth year) - I knew, intuitively, a time in myself had come for change. I don't mean simply clothes, or houses, or even cities or countries or habits, I mean, all of it - what it ever is or can be. No doubt one's a poor tourist, so preoccupied - but one needs specific places for specific acts, and if the demand be that one step out into space, that life as we say we presume to live, then best it be a giant step, so far from what's known as one can manage."

-Robert Creeley, note from NZ edition of Hello

Bells

2010-10-26T15:51:00.000-07:00

Adam Roberts introduced me to this remarkable segment from Herzog's documentary, Bells from the Deep.

Adam has been working on a serial installment for The Atlantic entitled "The Righteous Skeptic's Guide to Reading Poetry". The first segment has just been published online and I look forward to reading it in full over the coming months. I think the piece raises important questions in regard to how a poet negotiates their aesthetic and social responsibilities. I think it is potentially the beginning of a really important conversation.

Iowa City is windy, getting cold.

The fundamental measure

of this city

is not that bell tolling,

nor the tiled body that moves

as we move, resting here.

-Jay Wright

there is
a dancer
above the city

a dancer
above the city
who comprehends
the city's ways

-Robert Lax

"The opposite of killing"

2010-09-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to performances of the Estonian minimalist composer Arvo Pärt over the last few weeks, primarily his vocal works. His compositional method of "tintinnabuli" has been on my mind as a potential frame or model for poetic composition.

Anyway, this video best expresses how I feel today

The melodic voice is being played on clarinet. I've heard other versions of the piece played on cello or violin. I like this one too. And the rabbit really pulls it together.

Pärt talks about "tintinnabuli" in a way similar to Cage's discussions of "noise" and "silence" and Thomas Merton's understanding of the goals and methods of contemplative prayer. This is what he says:

Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers—in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises—and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me.

I think there might also be relevance here to the way I've been thinking about ikons: word as ikon, sound as ikon, poem as ikon. Pavel Florensky defines and defends ikons negatively, that is to call them a "notness." By addressing a "notness" be it ikon (not God), silence (not sound or music or text) we are reminded of what is absent. That which is not here is most here as our minds' struggle to wrap around the immensity of the vacuum it leaves in our lives. The absence is precisely what initiates the thing (whatever it is) coming-into-being, at least in form if not actuality. As a crudely formed poetics: silence and absence are crucial to the word's alchemizing into both concrete object and portal for the unknown to enter the world. As a profoundly felt lack, the poem is, while a contemplative space, a performance of longing. I've also been reading Fanny Howe's Emergence in preparation for a review for Jacket and John Taggart's new Selected. I think these matters have relevance in both of these poets' work as well.

And here Pärt talks to Björk. She discusses crickets mostly.

The Disco Prairie Social Aid And Pleasure Club

2010-06-07T16:51:00.000-07:00

New anthology out on Factory Hollow Press. So many poets!

Volume and Pitch

2010-03-27T13:31:00.001-07:00

Doesn't this sound like a cool class? Would you take it?

Poetry Seminar: Volume and Pitch

A literary artifact has no literal volume or pitch. But a poem need not be spoken, sung or performed to have a voice: a poem’s sonic properties haunt the page, silently. In workshop discussions, we depend on metaphors of music: a poem’s ending is “quiet” or “loud”; we “hear” strains of Oppen in a specific rhetorical construction or of Dickinson in an uncanny metaphor; we praise the generous “silences” that occur in the suspension of a line break or in the use of white space; we speak of “echoes”; we speak of “voice.”

Much of contemporary poetics discourse is involved in discussing, reimagining, and revising our understandings of “lyric poetry” and “lyricism,” terms we’ve inherited from traditional musical forms. I would like my poetry seminar to enter into this conversation. Focusing our attention on examples of lyric poetry, primarily but not exclusively its modern and contemporary manifestations, I want the class to look at the musical qualities of poetry, however latent or explicit, and question how words on a page can create impressions of “loudness” or “softness”; how we can map poems by their “beats” and “bars”; how a poem can be in harmony with itself or modulate into a different key. Some questions I want to challenge the class with are: Do poems in a series or collection possess tonality? Can we think about poems as chromatic, chordal, dissonant, symphonic, major or minor? How does an understanding of “voice” evolve within the trajectory from Romantic to modern to contemporary lyric poetries? How do we define poetic “virtuosity” and what is its significance to the poem and poesis?

Coupled with reading discussion and writing exercises, much of the class will consist of listening to and discussing music. I am interested in debating with the class how different types of sounds can be rendered in language. I want the class to consider how sound and musicality can be functions of form rather than content. We will discuss vibrations, echoes, refrains, ideas of chorus and verse, poems written for multiple voices, poems written for one. We will examine the role of music and poetry in preliterate cultures as a collective memory aid and a living preservation of stories, myths, and ideas.

The goal is to develop a lexicon of terms with which to discuss these poems as music and from there renegotiate, modify, discard, or amend those terms as we progress and encounter new work. From previous teaching experience, I consider comprehensive and close reading of a wide range of materials more beneficial to burgeoning writers than hours of workshop. I want to develop writing projects around the concepts assigned reading and music selections introduce. While I want to focus course reading primarily on poetry, I think selected essays on poetics, music theory and philosophy would be useful to elucidate concepts and engender conversation around the assigned poems. Several writers whose individual pieces or collections I would like to assign include William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Federico Garcia Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, George Oppen, Italo Calvino, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, Frank Stanford, Keith Waldrop, Alice Notley, John Taggart, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Michael Palmer, Lisa Jarnot, Andrew Joron, and Elizabeth Willis. In addition to these poets and thinkers, I am also considering selections from David Suzuki, Oliver Sachs, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Alex Ross, and Douglas Hofstadter.

Potential music selections include J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Scriabin, Erik Satie, Leadbelly, Blind Willie Johnson, Mahalia Jackson, John Cage, music of the Cante Jondo, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, John Cale, Sonic Youth, Radiohead, and the Wu-Tang Clan.

IDENTITY

2010-03-21T15:44:00.000-07:00

Just received Kevin Holden's new chapbook, Identity, from Cannibal Books.

Moments like this...

a white pane

an art space

made of cement

a whole heap of immanence
shock white carrot flowers
hydroxy all blue broke Hegel
a bit of bioluminescent fish

the math or the grid

flowers, baby, it is the math or the grid

...should make you need to hear more of this mathy music

Eleanor Catton on Orange Prize longlist

2010-03-19T14:03:00.001-07:00

Ellie's novel, The Rehearsal, has been longlisted for the Orange Prize!

Million Dollar Quartet

2010-03-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

Ellie and I saw a terrific musical at the Apollo Theater in Chicago this past week which documents the events of December 4, 1956 at Sun Studios that brought together Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis for an impromptu and unprecedented recording session.

The performances were fantastic; actors, David Lago (Elvis), Lance Lipinsky (JLL), Gabe Bowling (Perkins), and Sean Sullivan (Cash) performed both individual and ensemble performances of early Sun and other rock songs that not only accurately rendered the original recordings but added something new and vital. This wasn't some shabby tribute act, but a reimagining.

I've also been into Tony Tost's off-radio radio show which presents key tracks from members of the Quartet as well as a variety of roots and Americana recordings. Tost's commentary is really smart and evocative; listening, you can tell he's been breathing deep this stuff.

I've been thinking a lot lately about our generational interest in roots, Americana, folk music. Look around and you see band after band (Fleet Foxes, Iron and Wine, Will Oldham, Bon Iver, Califone...to name a few) giving new life to the "old and weird."

I may be mistaken that this interest is recent (the Greenwich scene in the sixties was doing the same thing with the Harry Smith anthology) but I wonder what's at its base. Is it the age old, "What does America mean?" dilemma?

I worry about nostalgia; that is, as someone who loves this music, I worry about its fetishization. It may be easy to make a fetish of an "old, weird America" when our current situation is less desirable, saturated with spectacle. It seems natural to mythologize earlier times when music was "simpler" or more "authentic."

But do we commit violence upon these musicians? By idealizing them, do we colonize their work?

Is there a responsibility on our part to this music?

Cannibal 2010 Subscription

2010-03-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

You get all this for $75

* Allyssa Wolf's second full-length collection, Sister.
* Chapbooks by Kevin Holden, Ben Mazer, Tim Van Dyke, Dot Devota, Adam Roberts, and Tom Andes.
* Mini-chapbooks from our Boundless Books Series.
* Cannibal: Issue Five, featuring poems by
* Carrie Olivia Adams, Samuel Amadon, Susan Briante, Lily Brown, Adam Clay, CA Conrad, Kate Dougherty, Farrah Field, Laura Goode, Kate Greenstreet, Jane Gregory, Whit Griffin, Melanie Hubbard, Andrew Hughes, M.C. Hyland, Grant Jenkins, Jeff T. Johnson, Jon Leon, Sam Lohmann, Sara Mumulo, Hoa Nguyen, Danielle Pafunda, Alison Palmer, Kyle Schlesinger, Cedar Sigo, Sandra Simonds, Nate Slawson, Tony Tost, Steven Toussaint, Amish Trivedi, G.C. Waldrep, & Joseph Wood.
* Anything other books and broadsides we make before the New Year.
* The unparalleled sense of supporting one of the most aggressively productive and self-sufficient book arts poetry presses around.

Do it!!!

2009-12-02T14:45:00.000-08:00

Saule Sidrys (1986-2009)

If memory by definition positions itself across a ravine from that which is no longer present, its cry constitutes not a hollow sound, not a lament, but an echo, a trace of you, eternally recurring. If lacunae form as I invoke your image, this suggests not a sink but a porousness. What remains is a conduit you fill completely, Saule. Your elegance and grace remain. All our words and gestures populate the absence. Love bridges the distance.

New Books

2009-11-18T13:46:00.000-08:00

Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (UC Press, 2009) and Haunt (Instance Press, 2000)

Brian Teare, Sight Map (UC Press, 2009)

Rod Smith, Deed (University of Iowa Press, 2007)

Elizabeth Robinson, The Orphan & Its Relations (Fence, 2008)

Geoffrey G. O'Brien, The Guns and Flags Project (UC Press, 2002)

Barbara Guest, The Collected Poems (Wesleyan, 2008)

Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (New Directions, 1960)

René Char, trans. Gustaf Sobin, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland (Counterpath, 2009)

Robin Blaser, The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser (UC Press, 2006)

Dan Beachy-Quick, Apology for the Book of Creatures (Ahsahta, 2008)

John Ashbery, Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007)

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Vintage, 1993)

Frank Stanford, Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away (Lost Roads, 1991)

Graham Foust, A Mouth in California (Flood Editions, 2009)

Brandon Shimoda, The Alps (film forum, 2008)

Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (Semiotext(e), 2009)

The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, ed. William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi (Cracked Slab Books, 2007)

Conductors of the Pit, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman (Soft Skull, 2005)

Robert Fludd, ed. William Huffman (North Atlantic Books, 2001)

Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Mysticism in Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde (Inner Traditions, 1995)

Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon, 2004)

C.D. Wright, Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon, 2009)

Spring 2010 Course Description

2009-10-26T09:28:00.000-07:00

8C:001 Creative Writing Studio Workshop

Steven Toussaint

Sec. 020 M 11:30-1:20 424 NH

“Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.”

-Federico García Lorca, “Play and Theory of the Duende”

The arch is the page; the wind is whatever you generate and choose to write on it. In this course, we will follow Lorca’s cue, approaching language not as something reducible to mere explication, but as something with visceral energy, something to be experienced and embodied. Apart from weekly creative writing exercises and assignments, we will also be engaging with a number of selected texts (poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction) that not only announce the “constant baptism of new things” but also test the limits of expectation and press on the boundaries between genres. Furthermore, we will expand our attention to music and film selections that, like our selected texts, seek to physically inhabit us and be inhabited by us. Boldness and enthusiasm are absolutely necessary for a productive and dynamic class.

Required texts (available at Prairie Lights Books):

In Search of Duende, Federico García Lorca, ISBN: 0811213765

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, ISBN: 0156453800

Additional readings provided by instructor

350 poems

2009-10-21T17:50:00.000-07:00

Two good friends of mine, poets Adam Roberts and Eric Linsker, have organized in conjunction with 350.org a really bold and crucial initiative in response to global climate change. Here is Adam's description and a link to the blog: here here here!

For the project, 350 poets in the United States and abroad are being asked to write a 3.5 line poem--in a language of their choosing-- in response to climate change. Why 350? Because that's the agreed-on safe upper limit for carbon parts-per-million in the atmosphere (we're at 390 & rising, close to the point where irreversible climate shifts will take place.) 350.org is mobilizing climate actions across the country for October 24th -- more than 4,000 events (including this one) in over 160 different countries. The idea is that by participating, and forwarding actions like these to close ones around you, we are embedding the number 350 in the popular consciousness -- so that our governmental leaders will be pressured to shoot for it, specifically, as a meaningful and ambitious target.

Please check it out and show your support.

Studies in Sleep

2009-09-18T10:17:00.000-07:00

by Ellie Catton

Streetwise (1984)

2009-08-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

Fantastic documentary by director Martin Bell following the lives of several homeless children as they navigate the underbelly of Seattle. Stark and at times terrifying, the film's greatest achievement is how honestly it portrays the building of community and of relationships within a truly desolate and perilous landscape. The whole film is available to watch on YouTube. Big thanks to Ally Harris for introducing me to it.

Why is nobody talking about this?

2009-08-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

While folks at Fox and Friends praise the town hall format as a chance for the real, salt-o-the-earth, American people to voice their opposition to the Obama administration's health care reform plans, they forgot to mention this small, apparently negligible nugget: sick

"I guess I am"

2009-08-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

"Residents called to complain there was an old scruffy man acting suspiciously"

Echoes, antlers

2009-08-16T02:26:00.000-07:00

Because it's raining and so should you

The Old, Weird America

2009-06-30T09:06:00.000-07:00

Light a candle and go there: here

The World is Watching

2009-06-19T18:35:00.000-07:00

photos from Christiane Amanpour

Hello

2009-06-03T14:22:00.000-07:00