CALENDAR OF CATABOLIC GUILT

CENTO OR MY DAY BARBARA GUEST

2012-02-12T14:17:00.001-08:00

what appears to be cobbles to the center where the rock is uncut desolate as the name we must never pronounce light less curious now we will watch the shadowless birdwing refusing wings blossoms falling repeatedly tree to wounded tree stanza to mute stanza houses, the ones we pass by twenty volumes of farmland thick daffodils clicking twenty times because they like to repeat themselves there are many types of waves they all fall differently will they survive the dolphins flight the sun color as its leaving repeats its birdsong on the cusp and knowing it the burning trees will reassemble themselves peak to golden peak

he wished those books were thornier adios to the surgeons to those men of culture who would have you choose between good and evil altar-wise in their coats of paint mountains with their dark and quiet warm as death or in memory of it drawing a blank permits one to sleep for a minute or so when nothing is apparent in your mind I wouldn't mind I wouldn't object to with this black nervous people who cannot manufacture enough air dense as telephone voice humming down the line what glee what ghoulish joyousness the rituals have been observed pottery rattling like candlesticks stronger than rain's grey egoism shifting the iris collapsing not hive but swarm aphid sonnets feeding on my toe Tibet with Monaco thrown in for measure the voices go away for lunch a desk mocks and beckons to effect a change where the ripe dawn hurries let me plead for your brownness to remain are not buildings completed before works of art break off we have a right to autumn steam never lessens its latitude in the sky we find bicycles natural pure, yet feeble this river behaves perfectly reasonably within the city's limits the unreasonable river that both gladdens and disturbs her heart the limits of its angst the unappetizing swell of the muddy river could appeal only to the truly desperate the heavens strike hard on prairies the sickening passages from Longfellow stinking up the night the erotics of root cellars musing the margins drawers of the dream look at that gutter, so muddy

we advance beyond
an expectation of number
in bodies that swim at the last moment

CENTO BARBARA GUEST

2012-02-11T23:20:00.000-08:00

I read the late Empress' letters & thought they were yours allforgetting Rex I am about to use my voice one sky over I ask if that house is real head and body and tail joined no nearer air than water alas the great daze of desire has passed and mirrors reflect the thick mud where armies have passed the hand that holds is webbed his whole insides protests water on stone hurting the ear to no longer repeat "the mirror is water" the poor dead hands are clean a ring of moon for tomorrow into the mirror sighed "such was I" a minor character was he history or was he not

In the time of great kings I hid this knife with a friend I'll play you it's record the next time we go for a walk seeing the funeral of grass a small tune can be heard when several of the branches creak there when benches are placed side by side as one might plan an audience the air is freed of our crimes come close to it now and listen you there at the entrance take from the dripping roof a cupful to drink while lightning pitches straw and trees glitter strangely crack the wide underground angels are in peril there on the rooftops tomorrow in the outraged sky where no one speaks English what clamors o'er the twain do you know what silence means? her face leaned backwards into the past those forms we see in gauze as arches without moonbeams without shoes the music was distinctly shady inky as were the drawings the fall of my voice would be dying brown the sky was white over Paris until it fell in the streets walk only in the white spaces in the steps where leaves lie and names erase them the treachery is cast by mirrors again, the ride that drift shrieks at low tide sweet voice of brine the magnificent sun waves a flag above it Republic of Space waving the gnats and the small giants no one complained

EVERYTHING MUST GO Feb. 3, 2012

2012-02-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

GO TO THESE THINGS

2012-01-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

THURSDAY February 2nd:

OBJECTS from TENDER BUTTONS
the original illustrations by Sandra Gibbons
of selections from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons

@ The Independent Publishing Resource Center's
Jason Breedlove Room
917 SW Oak Street #203
7pm-ish

FRIDAY February 3rd:

EVERYTHING MUST GO/THE FABBRI SERIES
paintings by Jeff Diteman

performances by
John Berendzen
Leo Daedalus
Mack McFarland
Mark Owens
David Weinberg
James Yeary

and scores of others...

@ galleryHOMELAND 2505 SE 11th Ave. 7pm

THE GIBBONS IS SPREADING

2011-12-19T22:51:00.000-08:00

tenderbuttonscomics.tumblr.com

New release from c_L and FLASH+CARD !!! TENDER BUTTONS COMICS !!!

2011-11-20T20:15:00.001-08:00

SANDRA GIBBONS'
TENDER BUTTONS COMICS

c_L has teamed up with FLASH+CARD to release OBJECTS from TENDER BUTTONS, by Gertrude Stein, and illustrated by Sandra Gibbons.

Sandra Gibbons' OBJECTS from TENDER BUTTONS takes a cornerstone of experimental writing and reimagines it in full color, as a serial comic.

OBJECTS from TENDER BUTTONS is a limited-edition full-color comic in the form of 12 cards and envelopes. All 12 cards (and envelopes) come in a box hand-stamped "OBJECTS." It is available for $18 US here.

GO SEE THE SHOW

2011-11-08T14:17:00.000-08:00

Object Poems
Curated by David Abel

November 4 – 26, 2011

Object Poems brings together striking and varied works by contemporary artist-poets and poet-artists: poems in three dimensions; interactive poems; found poems; sculptural and utilitarian poems; conceptual poems; poems that depart in myriad ways from the familiar form of the printed page. The exhibition features more than thirty artists from across the United States, as well as Canada, England, Scotland, and Uruguay, including seven artists from Oregon.

David Abel, the curator, says that “there have been a number of exhibitions and publications devoted to the work of authors as artists: paintings, drawings, sculptures, created independently of the writings for which they are primarily known. To assemble this exhibition, in contrast, I searched for three-dimensional works that had been created as poems, by means of a compositional and poetic practice that was not separate from the artist’s written work. The range of genres, media, and styles is remarkable and demonstrates again the interdependence of advances in all the arts.”

Spare Room: Ashby/Cunningham

2011-10-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 16
7:30 pm

The Waypost
3120 N. Williams Ave.
503-367-3182

$5.00 suggested donation

Chris Ashby is a writer, musician, and poet. His work has appeared in James Yeary's newsletter, Creep of Light, and is forthcoming in Sam Lohmann's Peaches and Bats and visual artist Nate Orton's My Day series. He splits his time as a graduate student at Portland State University and a forestry technician with the Mt. Hood National Forest.

Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher and visual artist currently living in Oakland with his wife and daughter. His first book of poetry, Bird & Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005; his second book, Journey to the Sun, will be published next month by Atelos Press. In 2005 he and Neil Alger founded Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. Since 1999 he has worked at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.

*

from After Language

Blowing through the trumpet, he resembled a weasel in sight and sound. Would you please take out the trash and wash the dishes? If we crawled in, we would be children in the monster's mouth. She was having a permanent out of body experience. We rolled off the boat holding our noses, anticipating the splash. His background in Guatemala City had been the impetus for becoming a traveling clown, and he wouldn't have met her if anything had been different. It's good to know that sometimes we don't have to do anything but look at one another. I sang to her, not to hear myself or as an attempt to impress her, but to hear her sing for she was apprehensive to do it if one asked her without a concrete reason. To take the newspaper and treat it is as artifact in order to expand the boundaries of performance. What is the original doom track? It is the ocean both crashing on the rocks one moment and gently rolling away the next.

Chris Ashby

*

from Journey to the Sun

it's true you must study

it's true you must reason

coming ever nearer to THINGS

& who gets to have them

moving & burning & crying

boring & overbearing

it will never be easy

but what else were you doing

8 hours a night

dividing & symbolizing

conjugating & declining

stars & animals & literatures

famine & practice cities

& cave-men literally DEMENTED

& now look at them

out in the malls

waving their hats

Brent Cunningham

Caffeinated Art: Abel,Yeary, Larkin at 3 Friends, October 17th, 7 pm

2011-10-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

7 P.M., THREE FRIENDS COFFEE HOUSE, CAFFEINATED ART #133, ABEL, YEARY, LARKIN

SE 12TH AND ASH, PORTLAND, OREGON

David Abel is the author of the chapbooks Commonly (Airfoil),While You Were In and Let Us Repair (disposable books, with Leo & Anna Daedalus), and Black Valentine (Chax); a full-length collection is forthcoming in 2012 from Chax Press in Tucson. With Sam Lohmann, he publishes the Airfoil chapbook series. He has devised numerous solo and collaborative performance, film, and intermedia projects; a member of the Spare Room reading series (now in its tenth year), he teaches classes in reading and writing poetry at the Multnomah Arts Center, where he is also the coordinator of the Literary Arts program.
James Yeary is publisher of the little press c_L, and is a frequent correspondent of Nate Orton’s My Day zine series. For reading series Spare Room he has organized an afternoon of poetry for multiple voices and a marathon reading of The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. He was born in the early afternoon, the point of the day he prefers to be done writing.
Maryrose Larkin is author of Book of Ocean, The Name of this Intersection is Frost, Darc, Inverse and Marrowing. Her next book,The Identification of Ghosts, is forthcoming from Chax Press. She is a member of the Spare Room Collective, as well as a co-editor of Flash+Card Press. Maryrose is interested in using new and old technology to move through the procedural into the unknowable.

MERZ

2011-09-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

I didn't think I would make it, but I pulled things together and found myself at my number one ticket for the fall - Kurt Schwitters' Color and Collage, at the Berkeley Art Museum. It's an incredible show, with two sides, or perhaps it's one show of incredible collage with a very cool supplement. In the end, not exactly what I expected, but I'll quit foreshadowing and try to explain.
Color and Collage is Schwitters' first single-artist retrospective held in the United States in 25 years. It features primarily collages (which he would refer to as drawings, paintings, or Merz) from the Berlin period, where he spent most of his career, moving to Norway in 1937 (read: fleeing the Nazis), and there are just a couple pieces from this period, and then leaving Norway for London, where he spent the rest of his life, dying in 1948. There are a number of London pieces, and, like Norway there are surprising differences between each period, Norway I would call the stark difference, save for that it is so underrepresented (so few works survive), it is probably a stretch to make any generalizing claims about the Norway work.
As you should now, in each locale- Berlin, Norway (Oslo? - I'll check later), London- Schwitters built into each of his living spaces an incredible architectural collage, which he called Merzbau. The first two were destroyed, the London Merzbau I believe still exists. I had thought that this exhibition was an actual reconstruction of the London Merzbau, but it in fact only includes a replica of the Norway Merzbau based on photographs. This replica of Merzbau doesn't end up being as impressive as my dreams- it's more informative than aesthetic, with scraps from the photographs that the Merzbau replica was based on included architecturally. These documentary insertions give some idea, I guess as how to compare the replica to the original (the replica is clearly more spare), and in some ways it comes off as quaint. It is, however, um, very cool. We are given a into into the end-point of Cubism.
Schwitters, just for the record, does seem to have Merzbau as integrally related to Cubism, btw.
And the dialogue between the two (thinking of the early Picasso and Braque with the single train ticket or newspaper fragment pasted into an oil painting, ending in the Merzbau's haunting subconsious of white paint, angles, and fragments- detritus from art and life) is incredible. The suggestions of the realtionship between Schwitters, or Merz (as he referred to his one-man movement) and other art movements is also telling.
In the mid-twenties, Schwitters became close, at least briefly to El Lissitzky and Theo Van Doesburg (Constructivism and DeStijl represented in these figures). There is a three-dimensional (I should say more three-dimensional, as most of the Merz pieces are more or less three-dimensional) piece called "Merz 1924,1. Relief mit Kreuz und Kugel" (Relief with Cross and Ball), where you have the cross, really a fragment of a grid coming from the wall, almost a half foot deep, in grays and black, hugging a red ball. Above all of these is pasted a fragment of an imagined surface, what appears to be an architectural sketch of solid and broken intersecting diagonal lines on a beige paper, which appears like a fragment of an imagined surface, suggestive of skin, or a surface unrefined. This is the more typical Merz in this fragment, placed above the "perfect" academic skeleton of deStijl.
Schwitters' collages of detritus refuse the vainglory or artists of excision (Pound, Broodthaers, myself) off their subjects. Was this, were these collages a long mediation on, or following, Picasso's sticking of a train ticket onto wet paint? Did Picasso grow weary of glorious art, knowing that he could "lower" his art with this gesture and still be praised for it? There may have been a formalism or structure in those first Cubist collages of Picasso and Braque, but it also may have been born there.
Schwitters' pitting of "sense against nonsense" is an analysis, or a celebration of art and its edge, the ledge where art is overlapping with happenstance. The interest seems to be something beyond chance, or beneath it. Merz is perfectly impure. It may contain some formalistic superstructure, some "design sense" but the details of the piece will resist it. One possible reading of the Merz collages are as examinations of the design principle, abstract formalism, undermined by the elements of the units of collage.
In "Iockere Vierecke" (loose rectangles) there is a horizontal crease, a the trace of a fold not quite halfway down the collage, which reminds me of Courbet's "Burial at Ornans," which I saw at the Musee d'Orsay in 2006. The Burial at Ornans was also apparently folded twice, causing the museum lighting to create a glare on the upper portion of the painting (which is one of the largest paintings I have ever seen), making it very difficult to see. This crease, in Schwitters' collage, does not so much contrast with as appear to be a nuanced evolution from the nail he would drive into a collage, in his words: "so as to produce a plastic relief apart from the pictorial quality of the paintings. I did this so as to efface the boundaries between the arts." With the crease here a step further is taken. A quality, as a nail or frame is a quality, showing itself thru light, apart from the ages, a-temporal, reflecting the clumsiness of the hand without the necessity of intentions, though also without the necessity of that intention's lacking. It runs thru the various papers, scraps, that compose Iockere Vierecke, and is reminiscent of others, of wrinkles in the individual scraps, which suddenly appear to be deltas or the confluence of rivers, running alongside the mountain range the crease appears to be in this light, before it all turns back to garbage.

remove the appearance
of human intention
and then remove the
apparition of natural
formation
the result is not of
the world but is one,

all, a new but not
recent, built neither
on the back of man or
nature, which break
with the idiom

create connection
if possible between
everything and
the world

play off sense
against nonsense
(producing a third)

no pictures allowed in here

*

2011-09-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw Sarah Dougher's musical rendition of Leslie Scalapino's Fin de Siècle, presented as a part of PICA's TBA festival. The composition was arranged for five voices, piano, and a small ensemble (I can't find a list of what composed that small ensemble, though I recall percussion, cello, trombone, possibly violin and trumpet). I saw an early iteration of this at the memorial for Leslie Scalapino last February, which consisted of a fragment, one or two movements, of the first of the three plays that make up Fin de Siècle, for voices and piano.
I am not very familiar with Dougher's work, that is to say I am not outside of these two performances I have seen over the last nine months. I have some knowledge that she has a background as a singer-songwriter, but she also has done arrangements of poetry by Robert Duncan and William Stafford. That information, which is to me a particularly interesting collage of a creative background, informs the different aspects that mark this production of Fin de Siècle. I was often reminded of early choral music, Arte Nova, and certainly more contemporary musics in the dissonances, but most of the dissonances in the piece were not tonal. Rather, there are flatnesses, but I'm not sure they didn't mirror Scalapino's language, which, in Fin de Siècle, truly reflected her horror at the contemporary world, in all her (Scalapino's) inability to communicate it. Lines like

the construction worker says
the person being murdered
being in that section is understandable

communicates, absolutely, a weariness on the part of both herself and the rest of us at the end of history, that flatness communicated in

we haven't changed any
from the time of Genghis Khan
we have a fin de siècle
weariness

The flatness to her observational language needs a dissonance to mirror it, and it is surprising that Dougher seemed to look before and after modern music to illustrate it, in early choral music, and to some degree in indie rock, as often passages would be puncttuated by little flourishes on the xylophone. I'm sure it was more effective than I'm making it sound, in fact what Dougher and her ensemble brought in the marriage of "high and low" musics, what came out in the Third Way of it, was one of the most interesting aspects of the performance. I was particularly taken in by long expressive asides from the trombone.
One last element that I think is crucial: how do you carry, or choose not to carry, Scalapino's voice as it exists beneath her work. I understand to get to the meat of Scalapino's difficult syntax Dougher wrote out, re-wrote, Fin de Siècle, to get a sense of it, which I'm sure was absolutely necessary. I myself wasn't able to penetrate her written work until hearing a recording of her reading, which left me mesmerized, and also understanding something different about the work. Scalapino uses a caesura in her line that is very particular, and not easy to get the meaning or music of. It is not completely unlike Creeley, slicing open clauses, because one can and generally does not, which opens up a statement, in the way the poets called Language would open one up, to the reading of statement itself, its meaning and its musics.
Though rough around the edges, I enjoyed Dougher's Fin de Siècle. It is rare that a great, and especially as experimental a poem or poet gets treated, in a traditional but not derivative manner, and I look forward to the next.

Raisin Bran in the Sink

2011-09-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I was talking with J---- about form. He was embittered towards formalist poetics, or perhaps this notion of a poem with a particular shape, toward which the poet would direct his or her language, and the poem was the result of that language taking shape in the repeatable form. Interesting enough the poets invoked in that conversation, when I really was still making my survey of "what was going on right now," that those poets have been those I now return to again and again.
At the same time, a few years ago, browsing the independents, having received the issues of SCORE magazine that introduced me to so much of this strange edge- I came across rOlling COMBers by John M. Bennett (Potes & Poets). If I was at this point looking for language acts and events at their strangest, I was piqued. Bizarre fonts, even more bizarre handwriting ("writhing"), a dramatis personae of combs, foam, and stains, a mise-en-scene too aware of the mess of ink it is the remains of.
There are a few different "forms" at work, vaguely similar shapes or tendencies to the event that groups the language together. Sometimes it's word-parts capitalized to write hidden messages within the poem. Other times it's words vertically entering and subsequently sharing other letters in the paragraph. The vague groupings blur with each other to make new forms, and yet each poem, as well as each form, remains distinct though related. More like categories than series. Similar to each other, but not to any other work by any other poet I have encountered.

It's source is the skull, and the method invokes what I've seen referred to as the "swarm of being." Being being our presence in the repetitious, abject stuff that stuck to the drain? That language amkes ever the more multiple- that is language likened to thought. I've liked him to an e.e. cummings of the back of the head. Another poet who contemporary moderns don't seem to think much of. Is it too ubiquitous? Too familliar, in the end (which is a strange claim to make for e.e.c. or j.m.b.)?

Back again to the question of form- John is, to my knowledge, the most prolific poet working by hand, type, sound & video living. I have gotten three to five new poems from him almost every day for a couple years, and that's, I know, just what he is sharing on this poarticular listserv. Part of his ability to do this must be his interest and intensity at devising forms (poetic in their own right) and exhausting them, or if he's not exhausting them, cracking them open and creating new forms.

When this you see...

2011-09-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

Someone else already has a blog dedicated to this (and it's not Ron), but it seems like a good place to start. I've had two dreams involving Ron Silliman (don't worry, that's as creepy as it gets). The first was in 2009, and he wasn't in it, but the dream was about a form of poetry involving a system of shifting colors throughout a text, a mnemonic device that would control a system of permutations. It was clearly inspired by some things he actually said in The Age of Huts. If you write the same sentence in a different pen, is it a different sentence (forgive me, I'm paraphrasing). I began the poem, actually using the strategy (poorly described here, and for good reason), sometime around last January, and am halfway through it.

The second dream, more recent was about catching him read at an arena (and I want to say in Seattle, but, again, it was in my head). A huge event space, and we got good seats. I was excited. I will be excited to finally see him read the first week of November, in New York.

The Age of Huts may be the first book of contemporary poetry I ever picked up (though there was a stack of others to follow it). I must have discovered the blog around the same time, and shortly thereafter met the poets of Portland, and as the dialogues began, here in place, and the web in space, I found myself in awe of the side of poetry that is theory and opinion. The former I think I was predisposed to, though it was mostly private, and before I realized there was a nebulous community simulteneously here and there, it was much for general, for me, than something concerning poetry. Opinion- how can I claim to be unfailiar to its auspices. And yet it seemed to me like a large bat slowly opening its wings before me, or a sad flag sagging at first, and then beginning to beat fiercely.

One of the first things I noticed in this new world was the disdain of the various for the choices Ron made with his spotlight. The opinion of opinion. He certainly has made interesting choices on the light itself he chooses to cast, especially with his reorganization of the hierarchies of those at work into the School of Quietude and the post-avant, with a certain appreciation for the latter, though the connotation of the name is not necessarily positive from a modernist standpoint, and then the School of Quietude, an aggrandizing name to some degree, for the apparent opposition. From this vantage, I believe him to be more diplomatic than he sometimes gets credit for. I have on at least one occasion noted his appreciation for certain Quietists, so the label (basically undefined, again) does not refer to things like 'good' or 'bad' poetry.

As a poet, and critic, I think he is a practitioner of great subtlety. I see his forebear, or a very significant forebear as a writer to Ron being the composer (and writer) John Cage. He at least within his own work seems to be invested in the indeterminacy of experience, his work a chronicle of his rotating and shifting perceptions. Not non-egoic, to be sure, the tradition appears to be in the independence of each sentence or statement as it follows the last, in his long work, The Age of Huts. He at one point thought he would contain all of his work in a single poem called the Alphabet, but it doesn't seem the alphabet was large enough a signifier, as he now places the Alphabet aside Universe, alongside Tjanting and Age of Huts, as Ketjak.

Another thing I can appreciate is one who changes their mind. Creating an arc, and ark. Look forward to seeing you, and remember.

interrupted by your heart

2011-08-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

I have proved myself a diurnal incapability. It's because there are only so many things I can do each and every day: sleep, breathe, eat, wish, love. These fundamentals of our existence were once the fundamentals of our writing. At one point, or rather, for some time, poems of being in longing or being in love were the measure. I don't regret that language has become self-aware, in fact I think that is part of the goal, of universal self-realization.

At the same time, I am glad there are poets like Paul G. Maziar, who use their heads to address their hearts.

I asked Paul to edit the new issue of the newsletter, ciel de lit. It will go out in the mail today, or maybe tomorrow, which is a little late by my usual standards, but I had some stuff to do.

Serenity

2011-08-26T13:45:00.001-07:00

See more incredible visual poetry by Kaalam at The Renegade

ra

2011-08-25T10:03:00.000-07:00

In 2002 I was living on Jefferson Street in Moscow, Idaho. I was playing a major role in the local radio station, I was helping operate KUOI FM 89.3, I was watching bands like Animal Collective and Old Time Relijun play to crowds of 30 in my basement, I was making junk sculptures, I was reading Kerouac and Ginsberg. Every once in a while Brad Watkins would come home with something else to read, Charles Olson or Crag Hill, I would watch him read from a distance, and when he went off to wherever he went off to, I would steal what he was reading and read it to.
Brad's taste in "experimental literature" (is that what he called it?) resonated with me. He had this "procedural" book of writings (did we even call it poetry?) by Jeff Noon called Cobralingus. In addition to being vaguely Oulipean (not that I knew that then) it was riddled with references to European electronic music. The Thermals slept on our couches and passed typewriters around with us. Then I met the folks on the Hobo-a-go-go to tour Patrick, Elkins, Jason Voss and Justin Shay who had a lot of "poetry" and music in them, and a whole lot more that seemed positioned in between.
A year or so later I dropped out of college for a minute, and made a trip across the country to see my family, stopping in Ann Arbor, Michigan to play music with Patrick Elkins and Dustin Krcatovich (Actual Birds). Dustin and I recorded an EP of poetry and noise called "Small Creatures of the Wood Play Well Together." I went back to Idaho. I, at least sort-of, graduated from college. I started doing the odd reading. One was at the 1912 building and Crag Hill read, with one of his kids, I guess it must have been Noemi, one his knee, reading stories they wrote together. The reading was apparently secretly intended to be a pulpit for some evngelical folks, but we did a decent job of underminding that.
I moved from Idaho to Arizona to live with Brad. It was hot and boring but occasionally I went to open mics and read poetry. The poetry "scene" was boring, too but it gave me something to do. Brad and I moved to Portland, Oregon a few months later. I started going to readings at Tony's Talkin' To, and hanging with a guy who called himself Frank Sauce. Frank told me about "Language Poetry" and also that Crag Hill was the torchbearer for concrete and visual poetry in the United States.
I started reading language poetry and the scene in Portland got to seem more and more boring. I started writing letters to Crag, and told him this. He pointed me in the direction of Spare Room. He specifically said "meet David Abel, Mark Owens, Maryrose Larkin and Joseph Bradshaw." I went to one reading, and I don't remember it, but I did chat with Mark and Joseph. Then I moved to Alaska. Or tried to. I sat in a cabin in Fairbanks for a couple weeks and made "poems" with black pens and red markers. I came back to Portland.
The second or maybe third Spare Room reading I went to was their hundredth - a marathon! One hundred poems by one hundred poets from the last hundred years. I even got to participate in it, and as such was introduced to the work of Andrew Joron, Kevin Noonan, and John Taggart.
When Joseph invited me to open for Jim McCrary at a Spare Room reading, Crag came to town. Around this time he introduced me to the work of Nico Vassilakis, and I travelled to Seattle for a Subtext reading with the intent purpose of meeting him. In August 2010 Crag, Nico and I went on a short tour of the midwest, doing readings in Chicago and Madison, and attending the Avant Writing Symposium in Columbus, Ohio, where I met, read, and performed with mIEKAL aND, Camille Bacos, John M. Bennett, MusicMaster, Maria Damon, Matthew Stolte...
I had a birthday last week and Crag was in town. I'm still wearing his performance. Happy birthday to you, Crag.

Reading.Writing.

2011-08-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

There is a show up at galleryHOMELAND right now. I am often caught describing it as being visual art that displays "paratactical strategies foe reading and writing." The show of visual art, which must feaqture 25 or so artists, had an incredible response at the opening, and a few good write-ups, b ut in the end, I think that the show is incredible, and the appreciation, in print, has been meek.
I am biased. I have a piece in the show. Which may or may not have been a trigger to Lisa Radon's decision to put the showsw together. I have dabbled in sculpture very little since I focused on it in college, though I feel that so much of my work has nonetheless (since and including then) remained on the same track.
The piece, wnefe by Jackson Mac Low a Concrete Poem set to Doom music is a recereation of Jackson Mac Low's algorithmic reading of Ezra Pound's Cantos, or an 800-page book I layered on line after line of white-out, long after I broke the spine. I do think it was an interesting gesture but it wasn't far from the flashlit gallery reading I gave of Finnegan's Wake in 2006.
There is so much interesting work in this show at galleryHOMELAND and I cannot do it justice. Being interested in visual poetry I am, of course, drawn lake a goth to a flame at Derek Beaulieu's contribution(s), which are his readings of a Calgary newspaper, allowing the suggestions of color in each block of prose to take over any other content. Then there is the case I share with Numita Gupta Wiggers, with her textile homage to John Baldessari's "I will not make any more boring art," and one of R.W's seminal inspiration's Patrick Collier, whose visual poems are conceptual excisions from newspapers and the like.
Lisa Radon's own work, who I am also proud to share space with. Is work to be reckoned with, existing at the border of print the blur. Her Paragraphs on Paragraphs on Sentences on Sentences pitch one conceptual text against the other, for a moment, in the end revealing themselves to be the hand, The Hand, perhaps something neith Gertrude Stein nor Sol Le Witt, her sources, would ever admit.
On September 1st, as a part of the exhibit, David Abel, Rodney Koeneke, Lisa Radon, and I will perform at evening o'clock. And it will be terrific.

galleryHOMELAND
SE 11th & SE Division
Sept. 1

Forth then, little blog

2011-08-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

So, it's been 5 months since I posted anything. And a lot longer since I posted anything other than events I was to participate in, I have even failed to mention the last half-dozen readings and other events.

What is my excuse? A lot of writing on paper has been done, and a fair amount of publishing. I just got back from the IPRC where I printed most of the covers of the next c_L chapbook "Rotations" by Jesse Morse (don't tell him, please!). I've got to travel a bit, with a recent performance in Seattle alongside Garek Druss, John Teske, whilst tabling for c_L, Peaches & Bats, and Abandoned Bike. Also there have been the Spare Room and the Poetry on the Piazza series, the latter series meta-curated by David Abel, and last night's particular Piazza reading directly curated by him, which was a reading by Seattle's Robert Mittenthal, Vancouver's Donato Mancini, and Windsor, Ontario's Louis Cabri.

Robert is a friend, an influence even. Donato's work I either first encountered through Crag Hill or blown up on the wall of galleryHOMELAND for the Spare Room 100th reading (which was also the first Spare Room event I participated in by reading). I met Donato for the first time last night. Also, a poet I was unfamiliar with prior to the reading Louis Cabri, who Michael Weaver described to me as "the greatest hope for American poetry" (he's Canadian, but we Canadians are Americans to, right Vespucci?). Louis was an incredible performer of a brilliant and inventive poetry that reminded me of Jackson Mac Low but with a simple, bouncing, musical quality. I agree with Michael.

So I'm going to try and come back and write again, there is ernough going on that I should have something to say, but I would appreciate the odd comment, even if it's "stop." I'm obstinate enough to handle that. Even when it seems that comment boxes are where the mind goes to die.

And if you shoot me a line, and let me know what's going on, maybe I'll repost, process, or recant, and you'll get to give me or save me a little work.

Also, if you made it this far: thanks. I'll see you tomorrow.

c_L chapbooks available in 2011

2011-05-23T19:52:00.000-07:00

c_L has released it's second chapbook!

Lines on Canvas or What I Know or Have Seen of His Life
by Sam Lohmann

Lohmann's Lines on Canvas are a collection of lines drawn to the end of breath. From the referential object found by Sam in his exploration of the landscape, this time from the vantage of the idea of the painter. Each line is drawn from a singularity in text to its possible extent in the world, as Sam has culled it from one biographer looking at an other. That other being the painter Cézanne, from the eye and mouth of his friend Joachim Gasquet.

From the overbearing sky
He produced atrocious studies
In the attic a canvas of holes

This chapbook is an excerpt from a full-length work that should appear later in the year. Lines on Canvas is available from the publisher for $8 domestic mail.
Send a check or well-concealed cash to

James Yeary
2947 E. Burnside
Portland, OR 97214

also:
Phoebe Wayne's Lovejoy is still available.
c_L's first publication, Lovejoy's several narrative threads each take a different perspective on the construction, presence and decay of Portland's Lovvejoy columns, a series of "outsider" architecture that have been disappeared from the Portland cityscape since the WPA projects of the 1950s that helped bring them into the world.

Both chapbooks feature letterpress printed covers and hand-sewn binding.
Lovejoy is available for $6 domestic mail.

CREEP OF LIGHT

2011-04-25T18:25:00.001-07:00

So there's a new letter

a newsletter

a new newsletter in the world

issue 0 featuring Cecil Touchon, Nico Vassilakis, Joe Bradshaw, Sarah Kelly & Dan Thomas-Glass

issue 1 featuring Derek Beaulieu, Norma Cole, David Abel, Maryrose Larkin, Chris Ashby, Lisa Radon, & David Drake

monthly is the plan, mail is the reason

3 issue subscription for $6
I hope to get this paypal button thing figgered, in the meantime, "well-concealed cash" is how the post-punks do their business

Reading in the Palouse!

2011-03-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

with David Abel!

Thursday April 7th

5:30 pm

Washington State University

Kimbrough 101

Pullman, Washington

Sat., March 5th: Poets James Yeary & Lindsay Hill. Music by Justin Smith

2011-02-14T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Switch

An Event of Poetry, Art, & Music at Switchyard Studios: 109 SE Salmon St, PDX 97214. email us! theswitchpdx[at]gmail[dot]com

James Yeary is a [me, a] poet and visual/performance artist living in Portland, Oregon. He is a member of the Spare Room collective for whom he recently organized The Maximus Poems Marathon, plus a festival of poetry for multiple voices. He is publisher of the chapbook series c_L books and is co-author (with Nate Orton) of the zine series my day. His work has appeared in ditch, Peaches & Bats, and SHIFTER.
+

Lindsay Hill was born in San Francisco and is a graduate of Bard College. His most recently published books are: The Empty Quarter and Contango (both from Singing Horse Press, San Diego). Recent work has appeared in Peaches & Bats, New American Writing, and Peep/Show poetry online: peepshowpoetry.blogspot.com/. Lindsay lives in Portland with his wife, the painter Nita Hill.

+

Justin Smith is an experimental composer, based in Portland OR

Jennifer's question (from the collected texts)

2011-02-04T09:46:00.000-08:00

When working in form, does that form take precedence over language?

Language itself is a form, as is poetry. The idea is that spectralism would enhance language, by flattening things like narrative.

The form of the word flattens the visual qualities of the letter. The form of the sentence gives to the word a particular quality -a context.

But like calligraphy returns independence to the visual qualities of the letter- the poem returns the word its objective magic

What was language again?

The Maximus Poems: a marathon reading presented by Spare Room

2011-01-31T13:08:00.000-08:00

These pictures are out of order.
The first one is of the last day of The Maximus marathon, at YU, and was taken by Chris Ashby. As you can see, we ran out of wine.

The next two, of Alicia Cohen and Sam Lohmann, followed by Jennifer Bartlett and Jaye Harris, both taken by Paul Maziar at Gallery HOMELAND, day two.

This next-to-last one is me looking smug, day one. What can I say, it was the beginning of the great event, and somehow someone also managed to bring my favorite beer, HUB 7-Grain Stout, in a keg. The last two also taken by Paul Maziar at Switchyard Studios, he also being the host of that day's reading.

I cannot express enough what a great pleasure it was for me and I think the many poets, projectivists and olsonians involved. Thanks to eveeryone who came and to all who participated.

Performance: Seattle

2010-12-08T13:53:00.001-08:00

An Opening Is Nothing

spatial poetry.

ver(a)rt gallery [Vera Project]

3rd and Warren. N of Key Arena [Seattle]

Tuesday, December 14th from 6 to 8 PM. Performance at 7.

performances by James Yeary, Nico Vassilakis, and a Gaburo Ensemble from Olympia (performing Lingua II: Maledetto; performers include David Wolach, Arun Chandra, and Elizabeth Williamson)

The show features works by

Bethany Ides (NY)

Urban Subjects: Jeff Derksen, Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber (Vancouver)

Donato Mancini (Vancouver)

Nico Vassilakis (Seattle)

A marathon reading of Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems

2010-12-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

On January 14th, 15th and 16th of 2011, in commemoration of his 100th birthday, Spare Room in Portland, Oregon, will host a three-day marathon reading of Charles Olson's book-length epic, The Maximus Poems. We will read Volume 1 on the 14th, the second volume (IV, V, VI) on the 15th, and Volume 3 on the 16th.

Olson centennial events and conferences have also been held this year in Vancouver, British Columbia; Gloucester, Massachusetts; and Buffalo, New York. Olson was a teacher at Black Mountain College, the experimental arts school which also counted John Cage, Robert Creeley, and Robert Rauschenberg among its teachers and students.

The readings will take place at the following times and locations:

Readers include:

Jesse Morse, Jennifer Bartlett, Zachary Schomburg, Dan Raphael, Laura Feldman, Michael Weaver, James Yeary, David Abel,

Alicia Cohen, Sam Lohmann, Jaye Harris, Donald Dunbar, John Hall, Susan Rankin, Rodney Koeneke, Endi Bogue Hartigan,

Lisa Radon, Linda Austin, Tim DuRoche, Pat Hartigan, Mere Blankenship, Joseph Mains, Jamalieh Haley, Drew Swenhaugen, David Weinberg, Christopher Luna, Paul Maziar, Jacqueline Motzer, David Weinberg

January 14th: 4-9pm
Switchyard Studios
109 SE Salmon St

January 15th: 2-7pm
galleryHOMELAND
2505 Southeast 11th Avenue

January 16th: 2-7pm
YU
800 SE 10th Avenue, Portland, OR 97214
(entrance on SE 10th Avenue at SE Morrison Street)

James Yeary,

for Spare Room

flim.com/spareroom

d u r a t i o n

2010-11-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

w n e f e

2010-10-13T15:25:00.000-07:00

PO PO PO/ /NO NO DELUXE (Lisa Radon)

2010-09-24T03:59:00.000-07:00

TUPER FORMAN SAYS

2010-09-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

PNCA
1241 NW Johnson St.
Portland
October 13th
7:00 PM

I believe this will take place in PNCA's Red Room & will be connected to Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books exhibit.

-and-

Pilot Books
Upstairs in the Alley Building
219 Broadway E
Seattle
October 19th
7:00 PM

Nightshades of the Wordsalad

2010-08-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

Here are links to Paul Baker's recording of my Madison reading:

James 1 of 2
James 2 of 2

with Crag Hill
part 2

& mIEKAL aND
part 2

These readings are equally comfortable at Paul Baker's
wordsalad.wordpress.com!

TWO READINGS

2010-08-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

ANYTHING BUT MORE- OR LESS-SHAPED READING, this Monday, August 16^th, 7 p.m., at Avol’s Books, 315 W. Gorham.

Myopic Books (Chicago), Tuesday August 17, 7 p.m.

PO PO PO

2010-07-16T08:54:00.001-07:00

Portland Polyvocal Poetry July 18th!

2010-07-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

Portland Polyvocal Poetry

Sunday, July 18th
2:00-4:00 pm

Ladd Circle
(SE 16th & Harrison, between Hawthorne & Division)

FREE

Performers, poets, and friends will gather to test the capability of the poem as conversation.

Many of the poems performed on Sunday will be from years past, and by poets no longer with us; others contemporary and presented by their authors. All will be performed by multiple voices, some by speaking or singing chorus, and several will include the opportunity for audience creativity and participation.

Please bring your own refreshments and accommodations for seating (towels or folding chairs).

Compositions by

David Abel
Kathy Acker
Endi Bogue Hartigan
Crg Hill
Bethany Ides
Jackson Mac Low
Jesse Morse
Jacqueline Motzer
Charles Olson
mARK oWEns
Chris Piuma
Leslie Scalapino
Nico Vassilakis
Karl Young

arranged and performed by

David Abel
Alicia Cohen
Tina Frost
Endi Bogue Hartigan
Crg Hill
Lindsay Hill
Bethany Ides
Maryrose Larkin
Devin Lucid
Jesse Morse
Jacqueline Motzer
Morgan A. Ritter
Standard Schaefer
Michael Weaver
David Weinberg
James Yeary
You

(eye in the sky courtesy of Maryrose Larkin, though she says she didn't take the picture)

road hogs

2010-06-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

I am part of a party moving by truck from one end of Farmer Rd. to the other. Farmer Rd. is actually Simplot Boulevard, Simplot being the industrial-agriculture giant my hometown existed around, Simplot Boulevard was also the road I took to school my last two years of high school. We pause and I see men holding down hogs, by hand, in an almost sexual embrace, and slitting their throats, holding them from behind until they're done. They make a few more slashes in them, connect a bit of machine to their rear. I see this happen repeatedly, with no variation to the gesture. On the way back I see it again, and am stunned by the similarity of one death after the other.

TUESDAY NIGHT WITH THE TREEFROGS

2010-06-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

I can designate a space
& whatever happens within it
is art

but this isn't
this waiting for something to happen

for a music
so thin
you can't believe in it

looking down as if it were just my feet

2010-05-07T07:04:00.000-07:00

dreamt I was -had been visiting Seneca & Megan, friends from Idaho (&this perhaps where I was visiting), but had by chance met & was conversing with the household of young people that lived "around the corner". They showed me their actualized recipe for marijuana pancakes, something I had in fact dreamed up in Idaho (well, sinsemilia abbelskivers), & when one of those women inquired of a place to practice & record music, I told her of the modish, which is a place here actual transplant friends of mine do same. I literally spelled it out for her, & upon waking realized I was trading the secrets of the waking world for that of my subconscious.

JANDEK & THURSTON MOORE

2010-04-29T23:12:00.000-07:00

Live at the Hollywood Theater. Tonight. Four hours ago.

two guitars, three long sets. While this was billed as Jandek featuring Thurston Moore, perhaps due to dint of their playing styles & personalities (& is the blur), TM came out as much more the show stealer. But it was nonetheless an incredible incredible evening. & Jandek's Branca-ish walking blues was a perfect center for TM's surface, which was, of course, all over the place. I squirmed with joy. & I hardly watched, as is my tendency when I'm really enjoying a musical performance.
Jandek spent most of the evening facing the theatre screen, away from the audience, while TM spent most of it facing us, but behind his bangs, & both of them paced from time to time. While TM never really riffed, but moved from high end noise to occassionally percussive sludge into controlled feedback - this may sound typical, I think it was on the contary just difficult for me to put in words. He was much louder, & used distortion & (I think) occasional, if for more than a few moments during the first "jam", effects, whereas, Jandek's tone was thin & clean. It sounded as if he was perhaps in a Lou Reed "ostrich tuning" (all strings tuned to the same note". He played very repetitively, in the afforementioned "walking blues," which is my poor job of describing his circular sounding movement of dissonant chords, & then into a dissonant strumming, & then back. Occasionally Jandek played what seemed to me to be very reminiscent of Sonic Youth, but the show never seemed derivative to me, & it was only after the second long & loud set that I gave in & put in the earplugs. The third set Thurston possibly played near the entirety of with a drum stick, tho this was not the first alternative, extracurricular element he brought in. I was actually surprised to hear them begin a third set, albeit delighted, when the mood changed, & they both sat for the first time. It may have been because I put in the plugs (I think this is likely), but for the third set the sound seemed more balanced.
After the show Chris & I went to Proper Eats for a vegan nacho. On the way out the door I noticed a book by Robert Duncan, & opened it to this poem:

KEEPING THE RHYME

By stress and syllable

by change-rhyme and contour

we let the long line pace even awkward to its period.

The short line

we refine

and keep for candor.

This we remember:

ember of the fire

catches the word if we but hear

("We must understand what is happening")

and springs to desire,

a bird-right light

sound.

This is the Yule-log that warms December.

This is new grass that springs from the ground.

MAGAZINE RELEASE

2010-04-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

SHIFTER 16
PLURIPOTENTIAL

Book Launch at Printed Matter, 195 10th Avenue, New York, NY
Saturday, April 24th, 5 - 7 pm

Editors:

Sreshta Rit Premnath
Warren Neidich

Contributors:

Éric Alliez
Bernard Andrieu
Eric Anglès
Kader Attia
Elena Bajo
Lindsay Benedict
Nicholas Chase
Seth Cluett
Zoe Crosher
Krysten Cunningham
Yevgeniy Fiks
Dan Levenson
Antje Majewski
T. Kelly Mason
Michele Masucci
Daniel Miller
Seth Nehil
Warren Neidich
Susanne Neubauer
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Chloe Piene
Sreshta Rit Premnath
Linda Quinlan
Patricia Reed
Silva Reichwein
Barry Schwabsky
Gemma Sharpe
Amy Sillman
Francesco Spampinato
Tyler Stallings
Laura Stein
Clarissa Tossin
Brindalyn Webster
Lee Welch
Olav Westphalen
James Yeary

We present scores, scripts, instructions, critical essays and more for Shifter’s 16th issue entitled “Pluripotential”.

Here we invoke a term, which describes the innate ability of stem-cells to differentiate into almost any cell in the body, to think through the possibility of criticality and cultural change through aesthetic strategies.

The skin that we are born with is transformed as a result of its life of touches, caresses and trauma and becomes flesh*. While on the one hand each of us experiences a unique set of circumstances, our common knowledge also shapes this flesh. Analogously, the brain becomes the mind through its history of experiences: A British child growing up in Tokyo speaks fluent Japanese, something her parents having arrived later in life to Japan may never be able to do. The brain is prepared for a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic conditions, within certain biological limits of malleability. Furthermore, as Agamben has noted, "the child [...], is potential in the sense that [s]he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning."**

These limits of malleability may fall within the paradigm of what Ranciere calls the distribution of the sensible: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception, that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common, and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”*** Does art have the pluripotential ability to produce events in the cultural landscape, which in turn produce a redistribution of the sensible: a shift in public consciousness concerning how and what we see and feel, and furthermore a reconsideration of who constitutes the public “we.” Here the contradicting ideas of a homogeneous people, versus the singularities that produce differences within the multitude become relevant.

This play between structural constraints and a potential for continuous change is seen in forms such as scores, scripts and instructions; and strategies including "detournement" and remix, which hold within them the potential to be performed and reconstituted in multiple ways. It is therefore through these forms that we set out to explore "Pluripotential".

Footnotes:

*"The Merleau-Ponty Reader", Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ted Toadvine, Leonard Lawlor, Northwestern University Press, 2007; Pg. 405
**"Potentialities", Giorgio Agameben, Standford University Press, 1999; Pg. 179
***"The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible", Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2006; Pg. 12

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shifter (www.shifter-magazine.com) is a topical magazine that was founded in 2004 by Sreshta Premnath. Premnath continues to edit the magazine in collaboration with guest editors. Copies of the magazine are held in the MoMA artist book collection as well as Printed Matter.

Finding the internet to be the only inter-continental “commons” not policed by immigration policy, Shifter began as an online magazine. It was conceived as a topical magazine in which ideas could be approached from different directions and disciplines. It attempts to create a platform where individuals engaged in various fields including visual art, experimental writing, cultural theory, philosophy and the sciences can view their work in relation to each other without hierarchy. The online magazine has always been free, once again to circumvent the inequities of the global capitalist marketplace.

For Roman Jakobson, a “shifter” is a term whose meaning cannot be determined without referring to the message that is being communicated between a sender and a receiver. For example the pronouns “I” and “you”, as well as words like “here” and “now”, and the tenses, can only be understood by reference to the context in which they are uttered.

As this suggests, Shifter’s topics have often focussed on issues of subjectivity and rupture in language, and contributions reveal an equal emphasis on visual and textual strategies. This is a project open to change and failure and does not depend on revenue. Each issue creates a community of artists and writers who may not have seen their work contextualized together, and in this way hopes to open a dialogue amongst them.

SPARE ROOM READING APRIL 21

2010-04-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

Three poets and one visual artist read and perform from their books that document their walks thru the cities they live in.

Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch will read from their book Ten Walks/Two Talks (with a special guest)

James Yeary & Nate Orton will read and perform from their books My Day Walking Across Portland and it’s Hinterlands, vol. 1-3

Concordia Coffee House
Wed. April 21st 7:30 pm
$5 suggested donation
2909 NE Alberta
For more info:

Spare Room Readings
flim.com/spareroom

ALEMBIC ORGANIZAM

2010-03-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

Performance Works NorthWest presents...

Alembic #9: Organizam: A Mutant Cabaret of Non Acts

April 2-3, 2010 @8 pm

WHAT:

A weekend of humor based, conceptual, non-dramatic events informed from experimental traditions such as Dada, Situationists, and Fluxus. 2 nights blending words, laughs, music, dancing, props, concepts, video, (non-) acting, games, sounds, implosions, with live humans.

(Careful! Both evenings are officially withdrawn by the Ministry in Defense of the Demagnetic Counter-board.)

WHO:

John Berendzen

Tony Christy

Maria Jose Gonzalez

James Yeary

Maryrose Larkin

Eric Matchett & Jake Anderson

Anna Daedalus

Leo Daedalus

David Abel

J.A. Lee

Crag Hill

Linda Austin

Curated by Marko Whens

WHEN: April 2 & 3, Friday & Saturday, at 8pm

WHERE: Performance Works NorthWest

4625 NE 67th Ave, Portland, OR

HOW: Tickets: $10 - $15 sliding scale

Reserve at 503-777-1907 or boxofficetickets.com

ALEMBIC is an ongoing series of performative events at Performance Works North West curated by guest artists from the worlds of dance, theater, visual and media arts. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition/Oregon Cultural Trust.

M ENTAL TEKST by Jim McCrary

2010-03-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

Hmmm. Poetry of Critique. & closes the integral: speech=music. But in a Dee Dee Ramone kind of fashion. Great Surrealist opener:

When the madwomen come dancing out of the tree above

last nights dinner wine jumps back and covers the floor

with unbearable rants of bottom man fish oracles that you

My dinner will die laughing from ingesting these brightest

Which is I think Jim giving the jab. I like the jab. He continues:

statements coming across universal and universes which are

beyond even your wide minded brothers and sisters in our
loving state of compress.

If you think this matters. That matters.

The last line the morphing chorus

Matter matter matter matter. Not

Jim hints at an interest in vispo, as I mentioned in an ancient post, as

the participants and commanders who seem to spend

countless hours scouring all letters in both known and
unknown alphabets just trying to find something to say.

Like any of this matter. Matters.

A question of the music from the back of the head. Jimmy (that's me,) likey.

MY DAY IN THE COUVE

2010-02-23T23:35:00.000-08:00

Nate (lines) & I (types) have finished My Day in Vancouver, which is available from me at $1 a copy, or at Powell's & Reading Frenzy in Porkland. It includes an 'original' rubbing & has been cut to size. Unlike Vancouver, it is the most unique my day yet...

peripatetic double review

2010-02-23T09:35:00.000-08:00

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

The Crystal Text

2009-12-12T19:13:00.000-08:00

Saturday, December 19
Beginning at noon; ending 5:00ish

The Waypost
3120 N. Williams
503-367-3182

Free admission
(Audience welcome to come and go)

The work of heaven or hell: to somehow
become aware of a howling in the motors.
Clark Coolidge, The Crystal Text (54)

As the solstice approaches, come in out of the wind and join us to listen to Clark Coolidge's compelling booklength poem The Crystal Text, read aloud by a dozen local writers.

Readers will include James Yeary, Jesse Morse, Sam Lohmann, Maryrose Larkin, Rodney Koeneke, Patrick Hartigan, Jen Coleman, Allison Cobb, Joseph Bradshaw, Meredith Blankinship, & David Abel.

A colorless quartz crystal sits upon the writer's desk, still and irreducible as a death's head in St. Jerome's study or Cezanne's studio. But what would the crystal reveal, if it could speak? How might the issue of its presence be brought into language? The poet of The Crystal Text, by means of a rare stamina of attention and listening vulnerability, seeks to become the medium of the crystal's transmissions.
(unattributed blurb, 1986 edition, The Figures)

like experience is

2009-10-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

idiom-free, an vocabulary not to use

but to purge, (the large glass?) rubs

"against"
its traces ,dreamcatcher keychain

th bazaar itself, heavy metal lyrics

sunburnt retina or, Mekas' Walden vs.

experience, ("walking acetate")

OuVisPoPo

2009-10-05T23:45:00.001-07:00

Is it gone? It is gone.

FAMILY SHOW AT LAUNCHPAD GALLERY

2009-09-29T12:03:00.000-07:00

Nate Orton has roused my long docile participation in the plastic arts, by convincing me, at an early hour of the day, to sign up for launch pad gallery's upcoming showcase: "Family."

So, I (and you) were "enthusuastically and apprehensively invited to explore what family means" at Launch Pad gallery, as part of their 8th annual open-call non-juried group show. I'm excited to participate in this, to which I am bringing both an installation sculpture & hybrid performance, which will be performed, physically, between 6pm & midnight Friday October 2nd, and displayed from the 2nd until November 1st.

This will be the first gallery show I have participated in since the pair of gallery shows that marked my exit from the University of Idaho in Spring, 2006. Fear not- my low-fidelity, low-resolution aesthetic & crypto-linguistic-projection appears to have held its icy constancy during this dormant period, as the liquid nickel of conception sloshed 'round the objective pit.

Launch Pad Gallery
534 SE Oak St
Portland, OR 97214

2009-09-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

Concrete is only avant garde to the extent it is not subsumed by the hypothetical set we call "poetry." & then or thus or moreso the "hypothetical set" we call visual poetry -even tho its definitions may be broader- is restricted in the sense that it is another pleasure of the idiom. The avant garde (as opposed (literally) to the postavant (which DOES exist), to poets, painters, etc) defines itself (from without) by being an oppositional force. The Situationist anthology wrapped in sandpaper.

And to that extent the avant garde is bad. Mac Low's chance/deterministic pieces are bad to the extent they are poems (ask conventional poets!) but good if not incredible to the extent they are not. -while remaining w/in the definitions of the set-
An avant garde work wld not have borders w/in or around it The avant garde artist wld have to be in loathe of his subject
If the avant garde artist was a lover of poetry
he wld stay away from it

A binary alphabet wld halve to reflect that. Or the diastic selection wld dance to it, as the translation incl. color, it incl. setting, as it incl. character it also incl. movement.

And it isn't that the definitions aren't broad enough for a room-size poetry environment against poetry. Is not the room, or space, the catchall/counterpart to voice?

OuVispoPo

2009-07-25T06:49:00.000-07:00

Reporting from the vispo conference in Finland, Geof Huth has relayed that Finnish vispoet Marko Niemi has started a new blog.

To me this is very exciting. Of course it at the moment just means the unveiling of a blog that hasn't any posts yet. But, from the Phaidos disc to Chinese & Islamic caligraphy, Apollinaire to the concretists, there is something new under the sun.

Or, at least, there is an attempt to recognize and begin real discussion of a new form, in (under the banner OuVispoPo) the tradition the Movement for Potential Literature, a movement for potential visual poetry.

This will be different from much of the visual poetry's history in that this 'wing' of vispo will be a conceptual side (tho I think Nico V's work is a different conceptual side), based on deterministic form & constraint. Those of us who choose to get to work on this will need to get to work on lists of instructions, diagrams & frameworks, & other devices.

The parent movement, oulipo, or OuLiPo, or Ouvrement pour Literature Potentiale, led to such works as Perec's A Void (a novel that lacked the letter "e," and in translation the letter "y," I believe), Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa, and also paralleled Jackson Mac Low's constraints & procedures.

A precurser to visual poetry's "Movement" might be bpNichol's "Translating Translating Apollinaire," which began as an OuLiPoean series of "translations" and developed into a multimedia, and very visual series.

But TTA isn't the vispo of our canon. It's still heavy on the textual side. I've been scratching my head trying to think of constraint-based visual poetry pieces. And I -I'm sure they exist- I don't know if I've seen them. Or enough. Get to work. Give Marko something to blog about.

After June 4th reading, w/ Jim & Crag @ the tugboat

2009-06-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

Jim: "Fucking New York School! Ted Berrigan drank beer and took speed and wrote about it. We all did that. He died. We've got to write about something else."

"All we can do is have a conversation, to go any higher is impossible."

"What we need to do is, next time we all get together, go out into my yard or your yard or his yard, and get sticks and spend an entire afternoon, four hours at least, and just scratch a single syllable into the dirt."

Note on the end of a notebook

2009-05-26T12:21:00.000-07:00

I thot my poetics were the most open, but I am beginning to suspect that in spite of my perceived openness it is actually quite difficult for me to "make poetic" of the grapheme. And by that, I mean I am finding it difficult to apply the context that is poem to any string of words.

Since "From Cause" + its variants I have written two "my days," a work where the grapheme is charged w/ poetic force via its proximity to Nate's/my sense of place. I have come to enjoy this type of (nonce) writing much, tho I still believe my day at the library to be the masterpiece.

I have also worked (sparingly) as of late on a series I am entitling "Candor Calendars," which are memory-based compositions. I actually produced one of these some time ago (Echo Lodge(d), April 2008, part 1 of "Suspended Ball") before Candor Calendar 1. Both were (are) composed as a collage of fragments of earlier works, the fragments put to the composition as memory's rhythms called them forth. One odd note I take on these pieces is the earlier, Echo Lodge(d) seems the much more "poetic" to me, tho the latter the more phanopoetic.

Other variations on the Candor Calendars include the "Mnemosyne Articles," which are detailed notes on everything I can remember from the course of a day, and their cousin, the dream journal. These works are attempts at compositional fodder as well as tools that might help one understand memory's tools + techniques, but in this regard, I will say the results have been limited; I am left, at present, with the concept of the magnet.

There is, I think, a tripartite relation (genesis?) btwn these works + my interest in the art medium used for a non-artistic purpose, such as Storm Large's "life story" monologue (tho of course she + her enthusiasts wld be very offended by the notion that it isn't art). What are some other examples of this?

Love?

Lascaux?

The theatrical idiom brings to mind the dream journal. In theory, the dream is an account(ing), perhaps in the "number-crunching" sense of the mind's varied occupations, an attempt of the mind to process, to understand its (pre)occupations. And yet we experience the dream as a (somehow distant) observer-participant, the caesura between dreamer-director + the dreamer as (s)he experiences.

Does the hinge/wedge between the "psycho-self-accounting" + the dream's theatrical tendency relate to our understanding of conceptual writing?

For instance, the notion that the dream is a chance-assembled account(ing) that the dreamer as observer-participant applies narrative cohesion to. Conceptual writing's de/recontextuali(reali)zations perhaps "force" narrative out of these juxtapositions in a like manner. Place & Fitterman note in "Notes on Conceptualisms" that "conceptual writing could be determined by the expectations of the readership/thinkership," + "that an 'open' conceptual writing may be somewhat closed." Is my "poetic" charging of the ego-voice-as-distinct-from-the-self + appropriated-texts-as-a-manifestation-of-the-ego closing off the possibility of a (traditional?) poetic?

SPARE ROOM READING

2009-05-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

James Yeary & Jim McCrary
Thursday June 4th
Concordia Coffee House
7:30pm

detritus from MY DAY AT THE LIBRARY

2009-03-02T20:18:00.000-08:00

FICTION

ZINE 565.39

A comic about a trilobite

270 c555

Christianity: the illustrated history

745.593
R573f

Fabric Memory Books

"sshhhiit!"

OED

zigzag

partly phonetically symbolic, the two different
vowels suggesting the two different directions

ziggurat

"did I steal that from you?"

PERIODICALS

Antique Doll Collector

--Discovering a Pit Brow Lass
--Spain's Cloth Doll Boom
--Half Dolls

FICTION

820.9
K36P

"Behind such feelings lies the notion of a stable
shared world in which all men's [sic] senses participate."

LITERATURE + HISTORY
introduction by Jennifer Love Hewitt

R 823.8
D548LE

and a zone for your waist.

Topographical Shakespeare

THE ALPHABET IS NOT ENOUGH

2009-02-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

When searching for my buddy Ashby666 in my cell, I hit 'search,' push 1 (which means 'A' the first time) then 7 (P) AP brings me close enough to see Chris.

Tho as I mentioned before "I only know your phone number"

This

2009-01-24T23:26:00.000-08:00

" I don't trust it in their ears."

8 LIONS

2009-01-24T23:25:00.003-08:00

no fences

ZIG LEFT

2009-01-24T23:25:00.001-08:00

zag right

AGAPE SWEATER

2009-01-24T23:23:00.000-08:00

elk cave

AMBIENT SNARE

2009-01-20T16:05:00.000-08:00

Ubiquitous Herb

ASEMIC CLOCK

2009-01-18T20:48:00.000-08:00

ANGORA GRILL

2009-01-16T22:27:00.000-08:00

fricative jibe

"Just remember that there were three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea."

2009-01-12T15:17:00.000-08:00

Just read "100 Years of Solitude." I know I'm a little late getting into it (it was published 25 years before I was born). But I've talked to a couple people who read it and told me they only liked the beginning, specifically, one said the first chapter, the other the first half. I think that that is because once you penetrate Marquez' vision of Macondo/Aracataca the magic becomes little more than a literary treatment of a Colombian's knowledge of his own people's history.

Specifically: Treating the mis-en-scene of the novel as its world, HYOS begins with a migrating people with no ancestry or origin. They are not 'Colombians' because there is no outside world until a couple generations of Buendia bring in a train and a water port. The outside world, in fact, established by the citizens of Macondo.

The phantasies of those that live in solitude are juxtaposed against the violence, when the same enters the real world, a sentence that condemned Marquez to exile, perhaps. Out of the one character who has really snapped, lost his mind, and not a participant in magic (even while he spends his last decade in Melquiades' room of ancient texts) Jose Arcadio Segundo speaks the one truth, the one history, from the real's inverse in literature, in the center of the magic, the eye of Marquez' intentionally orientalized home, is the thesis:

"Just remember that there were three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea."

Bus

2009-01-09T20:50:00.000-08:00

I am for some reason fascinated with the thought process (mine) as it operates between waking and "the day's first speech." I have no excuses for this but I have made several attempts at scoring down thoughts before I've spoken on a particular morning- and I have been repeatedly unsuccsessful. However, I awoke this morning with my poem-magnet at work, and though I said "Hello" and "thanks" to the bus driver, what I scored afterward is basically what was formulating prior.

So its a lie, but writers are liars. Thus, "Bus."

Felt like I could only quit my job if I left town.

Running across the boardwalk, carrying his cane.

Smells like big tits in Mo Money

and it's
(issa) cold in the word.

Miracle Exposée

2009-01-05T23:33:00.000-08:00

liquor rice

Stevens variation

2009-01-02T11:45:00.001-08:00

All writing is conceptual poetry.

I'm going to SEATLATL 2-day!

2008-12-29T15:39:00.000-08:00

SANTA/RECEIVER

2008-12-25T18:41:00.000-08:00

pot, latched

VERIZONLESS WINDOWS

2008-12-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

cholesterol diamond

SATAN'S COOL

2008-11-23T10:14:00.000-08:00

ur at
lodge eye
dark circuit source
Seward sewers
cower cord cord
lyin' loin salve
if
Rico Chevre

CROSSED OUT TOOTH

black meddle

2008-02-25T15:00:00.000-08:00

Ills the wasted round swollen ground

Geoidal bulge, a broken back

Still says: "god willin'"

(some scar he has borrowed)

hasn't he for a home

A list of all comers comin'

To finally and cast the first one:

Last tune.

Thus, Jesus Christ is the end of all love songs

Fall before the cliff that calls you, lemming

Lies as long as the horizon wide

The Tsar of July shot through the collar

Hung by his heels in the stars

Hell, by and for these people of the book

Stomping to the rhythm of war drums

Threatening to fall out purgatory's bottom

The Church vs. Eros / Cupids deforested

Wings shorn, forced to his knees

His sexualized camps follow

For a savior hung like Christ