Wednesday, January 7, 2015 at 8:00pm
Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church
Questions have arisen about the nature and intention of what we at The Poetry Project have circled around and made a place for nearly fifty years. There should always be questions. Answering a call for poetry, prose, performances or other unnameable forms of meditation, poets give and take on the questions WHAT IS A READING? What should it be? What is read there? And to whom? These are questions about space, place, text and community. Starting fresh for 2015.
with Anselm Berrigan, Eric Conroe, Ariel Goldberg, Krystal Languell, Eileen Myles, Natalie Peart, Jennifer Tamayo, and others.
Simone White:
Charles and the relationship of sound to readings.
What the valences of the word do: reading
We read and we perform
Reading space. What sit about who comes why who is standing in front of you.
What the outstanding questions are
What is a reading what should it become are there too many readings
What do we think about racial sexual division
Public time
Poetics of the reading space
How do we foreground questions of writing
Amiri Baraka Ginsberg intro Naropa 1978
The loss of baraka to that community
Marxist Leninist maotstung thought
This is a communist poem an Afro ???? Lyric
Be about what needs to be only revolution will set us free
Ariel Goldberg
Oakland 25 first reading. Converted store front. Work in progress. Also a party.
Learn about someone's work. Deceptive intimacy.
The loneliness of being in the audience.
Then girlfriends who help gain access
Wrote a book about community and enstragement
Gender categories are the bane of my existence
The feeling of who is not here/there as a problem
White privilege as
Boyer spoke about how white poets aren't talking about race
Even though 2012 everyone was all over occupy
Trace Peterson
Clamour gladman's zine found in the library
Eric Conroe
Corinne--dance. Real time and real things performance in a commodity based economy
About other people and in rooms with other people
I could do with more political enemies in my circle of friends
Listening
What it means by failure of the family
Gleefully
We have made a kind of house here whether you like it or not
Krystal Languell
Similar questions after awp. Response to mysoginost reading and then response to backlash.
Audience member. Poet performer. Curator.
Excess length and sexist double sin
If something goes wrong important gestures to be made
Do I have a torch can i torch things
Free flowing revolving door safe space
Not invited. To a wedding. Much more like a funeral.
Leslie Scalipino memorial
Akilah Oliver
Due diligence of as anti-racist ally. Was replaced
When i die want a memorial
JT
When I read I am trying to overthrow your governments
The protest is probably the best reading
Let there be fire on earth
Can readings be a controversy
Disagreement
A zone of safe unsafety
Terrify and surprise myself. Politicize myself
Moved to what beyond the reading
Counting as torture
I want attention
Stop clowning around let the poem speak for itself
I don't want to be an unnatural event antimatter crater
Natalie Peart
Salon space cocreated with a friend. Brooklyn ladies text based salon
Can be hostile. People in the room or not in the room.
Montana Ray cocreator. Push back about misogyny. Women and queer. 8 artists in any medium. Each gets 8 minutes. Large diversity. Egos checked at the door. Wanted great people to meet other great people. Warm but can be long. Invite guest curators. In attempting to be inclusive how do we still exclude.
Drawing up a text about what doing. Still in process.
Not having hierarchy in readers or audience. Everyone squeezed.
Eileen Myles
"Reading"
Grade school class called reading. A lot about voice and gender sounding. Desire for acknowledgement and long stretches of reading aloud.
Cult of awe around the spoken word.
The thing itself and what we do afterward.
Read the thing for the first time that you never read out loud. Then they begin to have volume self worth.
Standup. Addiction to response pot.
The child wanted to be the teacher.
The problems of time and power.
The boundaries are kept.
Except when they are not. About gender. Who can speak from the audience.
You may or may not be part of a family.
Who is that old white man talking. Wanted to make him a thing. An object.
Naming names. Rob halpern. Gail Scott. Ron silliman. Larry fagen
Maureen Owen made her write a letter to the board. Larry Fagen not the poetry project. We can't make sick fucks go away but we can make institutions porous.
Jack Collom at Naropa
Have to be the fight so that you can feel safe otherwise be angry
Don't destroy the apparatus
Would you agree to be in something that thinks about itself. Couldn't agree if in a relationship.
Saw the church burn
12step before project felt more liberatory
Felt like should say every name if said Michael brown.
Simone. Readers can ask another reader a question. Then audience can get join conversation.
A: Krystal are you coming out from your rock?
K: I am working on it. I am here.
Ei: Nathalie what about lady
N: gal. Lady not used as much. Broadly defined.
Ei: ladies gals broad chicks
S: jawn
Ei: how ladies is prejoeative
Shelagh: try to use ladies as gender neutral term like guys
Aud: class
Tonya: southern
N: Jennifer and Eileen. Contrast. J is throwing be external
J: think about the ways I can be unfixed. Forgetting myself. Not undo myself. I wouldn't categorize your reading as inwardly. Dynamic. Set and then deviation.
Ei: internal writing being a poet gesture of stepping up into the mic. This thing gave us permission. Something very visceral about J's work. Poetry is the inside and outside.
S: audience member but also in charge. James Tate once gave a reading I am not a clown. Pick up your stuff from the floor. With a clown face. How do you come back to yourself.
J: commit myself to its inelgance afterward. Catalogue that intensity of feeling of performer and person who goes out in the world. So when it's inelegant. Like this excess of feminity.
Ei: to go and pick up for you. No poet roadie.
Aud: only excess is excess of going past attention.
Ei: what makes us feels tightened and what makes us feel loosen.
Aud: performer breaks mode
Aud: question. Heckling your own story line is how you exist in a space. You disrupt something.
Aud: talk about feeling anxious and isolated. How did it feel to talk about it.
K: large part the nature of the rock I hid under. I didn't go as an audience. When I didn't have a job to do couldn't go for a while. If I don't have anything to do there what is my business. Is it social. No.
A: everyone in ny is broke in time. Am I going to this. Like analogy of couples counseling. I am happy to be here it is hard to be here.
Er: more the performance. The accidental. Avant garde strives for that. In terms of anxiety, hosting a series i used to host. Relinquished power I didn't know I had. Kicking myself. People didn't know the subtext. All i could do was read from previous work.
Aud: lady was taken out of context because it was incendiary. Now slyly slipped back in circulation.
Aud: ladies against women. In the 1990s.
N: what keeps us from heckling. What do you want. What
S: BLT social. Not about having sex. Because that is what it can be about. 8 minute limit is ingenious. Conversation that happens. The poetry project could ever be in the space.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Monday, January 5, 2015
A Poem Book a Week #2 AREA--marcella durand
Something special about a book when it is given as a gift from a publisher--here this one is a favorite.
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What I have in response are the marks of active reading:
The same story cut up and arranged into a different pattern of shards.
It torches like an idea or a dream.
We may contain plastic, but we are not of it.
Acrylic doesn't breath and can be
transported into space. It holds color
and doesn't let anyone in.
Invisibility forms buoyancy.
While in the rippling seven bands luminous and ephemeral, the landscape features may fracture or appear to fracture in the viewpoint of computer-generated hue.
And you rub your eyes thinking such shades could never be. They could never appear except transfused through wire and socket, cord, outlet, oil, coal, and a little water and wind.
One is overlaid over the other, or one came first, but which is linear and what expands in crumbling starfish shape? Tonight, the light over the chemical plants is exquisite. Long factory shadows spread over the invasive fountain grasses, pale beige heads nodding over the shallow waters.
We are going to stop here on page twenty-seven as memory of an idea hits. What I value most from AREA as an entry point is the poem "Scale Shift" which is about the relationship between time, place, and color. For instance, if you live in the northeast in the first decades of the third millennium, then each season (winter, spring, summer, fall) has its own set of colors. But then there is an argument that the human relationship to earth does damage to the processes of the earth and desire: were humans not industrializing and digitizing. And, so what durand helps us to see (if you can forgive the pun) is that the visual representation of that damage is in the loss of color in our geographies--urban landscapes, but also dystopic desserts. She doesn't leave us with color as only earth, but also color as skin. So my take-away in the middle of reading a challenging text is an argument for the importance of diversity of colors... so it's a useful book if you want to think along lines of racial and ecological justice... circles... areas...
The poem that then opens up some of durand's brilliance as wordsmith for then going back to access perspectives throughout the book (as Donna Masini says, a poet teaches you how to read them) is the first prose poem in "The Verneuil Process." It starts off with sky and clouds, then moves to bay, and then ocean. There is a description of the process of seeing ("It takes opacity to capture light") and then an eye. As a reader the first time, I think it is a human eye. But then we get noise of a "passing giant crushing turbine" and a "flapping" turns to "thrashing" and "light fracturing along tissue," and the eye that seemed disembodied as only eye, becomes eye that is part of a fish suddenly being caught by a giant commercial fishing boat. Because the plot of the poem occurs through descriptions of kinetic and sonic imagery, the reader is absorbed into the story to empathize with fish and what durand imagines it feels like to be the horror for a fish being caught by commercial boat.
So my take-away here is to as I read be more thoughtful about point-of-view and how imagery might be creating narrative.
What I have in response are the marks of active reading:
The same story cut up and arranged into a different pattern of shards.
It torches like an idea or a dream.
We may contain plastic, but we are not of it.
Acrylic doesn't breath and can be
transported into space. It holds color
and doesn't let anyone in.
Invisibility forms buoyancy.
While in the rippling seven bands luminous and ephemeral, the landscape features may fracture or appear to fracture in the viewpoint of computer-generated hue.
And you rub your eyes thinking such shades could never be. They could never appear except transfused through wire and socket, cord, outlet, oil, coal, and a little water and wind.
One is overlaid over the other, or one came first, but which is linear and what expands in crumbling starfish shape? Tonight, the light over the chemical plants is exquisite. Long factory shadows spread over the invasive fountain grasses, pale beige heads nodding over the shallow waters.
We are going to stop here on page twenty-seven as memory of an idea hits. What I value most from AREA as an entry point is the poem "Scale Shift" which is about the relationship between time, place, and color. For instance, if you live in the northeast in the first decades of the third millennium, then each season (winter, spring, summer, fall) has its own set of colors. But then there is an argument that the human relationship to earth does damage to the processes of the earth and desire: were humans not industrializing and digitizing. And, so what durand helps us to see (if you can forgive the pun) is that the visual representation of that damage is in the loss of color in our geographies--urban landscapes, but also dystopic desserts. She doesn't leave us with color as only earth, but also color as skin. So my take-away in the middle of reading a challenging text is an argument for the importance of diversity of colors... so it's a useful book if you want to think along lines of racial and ecological justice... circles... areas...
The poem that then opens up some of durand's brilliance as wordsmith for then going back to access perspectives throughout the book (as Donna Masini says, a poet teaches you how to read them) is the first prose poem in "The Verneuil Process." It starts off with sky and clouds, then moves to bay, and then ocean. There is a description of the process of seeing ("It takes opacity to capture light") and then an eye. As a reader the first time, I think it is a human eye. But then we get noise of a "passing giant crushing turbine" and a "flapping" turns to "thrashing" and "light fracturing along tissue," and the eye that seemed disembodied as only eye, becomes eye that is part of a fish suddenly being caught by a giant commercial fishing boat. Because the plot of the poem occurs through descriptions of kinetic and sonic imagery, the reader is absorbed into the story to empathize with fish and what durand imagines it feels like to be the horror for a fish being caught by commercial boat.
So my take-away here is to as I read be more thoughtful about point-of-view and how imagery might be creating narrative.
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