peripatetic double review

Sunday Feb. 7th. Powell's on Hawthorne, Portland, Ore. Release/reading for REMEMBER TO WAVE, by Kaia Sand, which, as a book more than represents the walk that appears to be the center, which began temporally, ideologically as/in a film then thought thru was walked several times & now contains some impression of that time, before a phoenix at rest(?) in some other idea, here or in someone else.

Sunday Feb. 7th. Alison Cobb reads for the Spare Room. I meant to introduce her, thoughtfully & informally, & even if I failed at that (better than last) I was lucky enough to have her folly that (introduction), & follow wit that poem of hers, GREEN-WOOD. Also peripatetic palimpsest, though in its relation to me (alone?), of a place with a more familiar history & more personal, physical, experiential distance.

KS finds a root in the shopping mall, physically & really, the columns in the Expo Center, where the newspaper THE EVACUAZETTE was writ & printed.

& GREEN-WOOD, a cemetary many bodies have laft to speak of, & contain text at play & interchange with its own context(s). A cemetery of facts whose headstones are (its) etymology. & could also have a HAPPY BIRTHDAY IN HEAVEN balloon, which attempts to leave (whether it is tethered or not) & becomes entangled in the scape. As she points out 'paradise' comes from Iran, where it is "around [...] to make or form (a wall)."

The poetry in WAVE & WOOD both come in bursts. As "postconceptualists" stacking fact on fact, the transcriptions blur over each other, as in Reznikoff, but also, in GREEN-WOOD, one observation will tear thru another, as in

"looking back for anything
not burning

In Feb. 2009 Obama eased the twenty-year ban on images of soldier's bodies returning home from war ( hard light, clear edges ). Now each family gets to decide whether..."

Sand's writing also traces & accompanies historical document. Set in typewriter's Courier interwoven w/ & often overlapping with photographic collage, the text, the "Courier", echoes in transcription, & then fades, as in the type printed over "INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY".

And...

word a lamp awaiting fire