Buggeryville

I mean, I can't imagine anyone still checks this thing, but just in case:

I'm going to be in Portland in a few days! And I will be giving a reading with Spare Room.

Sunday, 19 June, 7:30pm
Chris Piuma & Jennifer Bartlett
Open Space Cafe, 2815 Southeast Holgate Boulevard, Portland.

It will be a release party for my new chapbook, Bell-lloc, which is being put out by airfoil. The cover is still being designed, but I should have a picture of it for you soonish.

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I'll also be participating in this madness:

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(Also I will be playing a few songs at a house party; email me if you want details.)

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There might be more to report soon. If you're putting on a thing in Portland in June and would like me to participate in it, get in touch with me and we'll see if we can make it happen.

See you there!

So, first: Tomorrow, Sunday, is the 8th annual Richard Foreman Fest, in which artists of various genres are given a text and a set of rules from Richard Foreman's copious notebooks in order to create a short piece. They have ten days to do this. The result is a benefit for Performance Works NW, a terrific rehearsal/performance space in Portland. It's one of my favorite events in Portland, and this year I was asked to set the rules. They are a bit different than the previous seven sets of rules, so I'm curious how it will turn out. Sunday, 5 and 7pm (different line ups!), Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th.

Second: I forgot to mention this! Spare Room hosted a Portland Polyvocal Poetry event a few weeks ago, and I contributed a piece. You can see videos of the event on YouTube. My piece was fairly different from the rest of the poems; instead of the vocal acrobatics typical of polyvocal poetry, I took a social angle. My piece, "Everyone Gets a Poem", consisted of everyone getting a piece of paper with a poem on it. They were to read the poem, and then either keep it (if they were satisfied with it) or give it to someone they thought might be more satisfied with it, perhaps editing it along the way. The audio isn't, perhaps, much to listen to (although the directions to the poem are read aloud, in case you want to try this at home), but it does capture the "sound" I was hoping for: That of the mix of creativity, conviviality, negotiation, and inquiry that I think of when I think of Portland's poetry scene. (And I'm pretty pleased that the poem seems to have resolved/finished by an edit of the instructions themselves.)

It's a scene that, even though I've been gone for two years, still seems to be the site where my creativity functions. I probably won't be there, physically, in 2010, but almost all of my creative output has occurred there. Hm, hm.

This is the introduction I wrote for mARK oWEns's reading on 21 May 2006 as part of the Spare Room reading series. mARK really doesn't have a web presence per se, alas. He is not even on the Facebook. I do not get to interact with him nearly enough these days.

1.

We ask that you turn on your cell phones
We ask that you place your cell phones in your mouths and swallow them
We ask that when loved ones call you,
you raise your heads and you open your mouths
like hungry baby birds waiting to be fed

2.

I watched the sun rise this morning
until it was a glowing letter O on the horizon.
Bravo, mARK.

3.

[asemic mouth gesticulations]

4.

It only took us four years to get him to read.

5.

The intriguing graffito between our homes
that resembles schematics with letters: a poem

I meant to mention it for many months
until we walked by and you told me you wrote it.

6.

Ab-cd-ef-ghi-jk-l-mn-op-qr-stu-vwx-yz
It’s the most remarkable word I’ve ever seen

7.

What is that smell? Has mARK been writing again?

8.

In mARK’s neighborhood,
the chance of precipitation
is directly connected
to the chance of poetics.

9.

A poem that you can feed to your family.
A poem that will keep you warm in the winter.
A poem that you can bounce off your friends’ heads.

10.

Why are we all in the same room right now?
Why are we all walking down the same street this weekend?
Why are we all riding the same bus?
Why are we all able to perform these simple actions?
Why are we both on opposite sides of the window?
Why are we both in fact facing a window?

11.

Love is the force that unites.

12.

mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns
mARK oWEns

13.

Nothing I have said and nothing I could say
could clarify or obscure or change this poetry.

Over here (especially in the comments) I'm talking about greatness and disposability with Mark Truscott, and over here Rodney Koeneke said some stuff about the Spare Room Centenary and wrote a cento from it (and I'm a fan of his recent use of color-coding), and here Johannes Göransson quotes a nice bit from Lyn Hejinian in an ongoing conversation he's having about translation which I find problematic but provocative, and here Sina Queyras talks about all sorts of interesting things which have led to a commentsplosion that I have not yet put my unequal e-quill onto.

So that's a lot of nice talking.

Unrelatedly:

When I was in Portland people kept asking me if I'd been asked to read in Toronto yet. And I had to explain that, in Canada, I seem to be known more for writing criticism than for writing poetry. Which, all agreed, is insane, but then I think it's insane that I might be known at all. Anyway, outside of the little twitterms on the side of this blog, I haven't written any poetry in Canada yet, which is fine, since they have enough poetry here. You'd think they'd have enough criticism here, too, but perhaps not. Well, on we go, trying to perceive the bigger potholes in the road and to fill them in as best we can.

The ten poems I selected for the Spare Room Centennial, five of which I read:

1. Jackson Mac Low, "3RD DANCE -- MAKING A STRUCTURE WITH A ROOF OR UNDER A ROOF -- 6-7 February 1964", from The Pronouns.

2. Tina Darragh, the first five sections (A-E) of on the corner to off the corner.

3. Thomas A. Clark, Larch Covert.

4. Hannah Weiner, "Silent History", published in Hannah Weiner's Open House.

5. David Melnick, the first five pages of Men in Aïda.

three of which others read:

6. Ted Berrigan, "Ann Arbor Song", from In The Early Morning Rain.

7. Joan Retallack, four pages from Errata 5uite (but not these four pages).

8. Lyn Hejinian, a section captioned "The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically." from My Life.

and two of which were projected instead of read:

9. Aram Saroyan, "REMIEIMBER", from The Rest.

10. Donato Mancini, "The Sorrows Of Young Werther (Goth Phase)", from Æthel.

(For whatever it's worth, people afterwards were asking me most about the Darragh poem. It is one of my favorite chapbooks, and if you read this blog and haven't yet, follow the link and read it. It is dictionarylicious!)

It was nearly seven hours long! Many highlights (at least half of which involve mARK oWEns or the performers he drafted, though of course the sound poetry is going to be more exciting from a performance stand-point) (but needless to say I hope that the recording of mARK and Leo Daedalus's remix version of the Ursonate came out -- zounds!) but mostly a feeling of fullness, and a sense of happiness that such a thing could even happen, and a delight at the connections and threads that emerged (as of course they would). I'm glad I was able to be part of it. More later, perhaps; I'm in an airport right now, heading back to Toronto.

Rodney Koeneke has posted a very sweet note about Spare Room and its upcoming 100th reading, and I am biased in this but I agree completely with his assessment.

I would also like to think that Sunday's 100th reading -- a marathon of 100 poems by 100 poets selected by 10 people connected intimately to Spare Room, which will last for, oh, five hours or so -- is going to be, shall we say, challenging in its content, but made accessible in its form. The diversity of poets, the diversity of voices reading the poems, the ability to move in and out of the event at will -- this should, I think, provide people who are not diehard poetry-reading-goers some sort of entryway (and some sort of emergency exit!) if they are curious but wary of poetry fatigue, worried of being overly bored by poetry that they are, for whatever reason, just not meshing with. But some of the poems read will be long enough to allow some real luxuriating in the bath of a particular poet's syntax. (I believe Lindsay Hill -- spoiler alert! -- is going to read a longer [ten minute?] section from Gerturde Stein's Tender Buttons, which I am particularly looking forward to; I have a similar longish selection from a challenging, ear-wracking work that I hope I can pull off.)

All of which is to say, oh just come to the reading on Sunday. See you there.

Sunday, January 25
starting at 2:00 pm
ending when we finish (6:00? 7:00?)
Free admission

Gallery Homeland (at the Ford Building)
2505 SE 11th Avenue

I am not posting to this blog so much, lately, and little longer than a quotation, because I am plunged in my academic training, and I suspect it will be that way for at least the next few months.

Nevertheless, a quick note. I am working on my selections for Spare Room's 100th reading, which will be a big hoe-down of an event featuring "One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets from the Past Hundred Years". Ten people who have been involved with organizing Spare Room have been asked to select ten poems from ten poets, which will then be read on Sunday, January 25th, starting at 2pm, and going on for a few hours.

And I am flying back to Portland for the event!

Picking ten poets is not the tricky part. I quickly picked a few that I wanted to ensure were included (Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Wiener, and others) and saved a few spots to choose after I saw what others had chosen, so I could balance out the dance card. Those will be easy to fill.

But I was trying to pick exactly which Jackson Mac Low poem to read last night, and it was overwhelming. Not only because there were so many options, but also because I wanted something that would "work" read aloud, and something that would work without context (in case people didn't know from Jackson -- something that would be "self-evident", or approximately self-evident). But I also wanted something that would justify his inclusion -- a "show-stopper" -- and something that would point to all the reasons why he's such an important poet to me. But I also also wanted to use this as an opportunity to read one of his texts that I've wanted to work with for ages.

This is almost certainly too much to demand of a few minutes of text, however. Plus if everyone chooses all of their poems with this method, the evening will be impossibly ponderous, unrelentingly so, and it will reinforce the Norton Anthology approach to poetry -- that it is monumental, and that poems should feel complete in themselves in some way. And some poems do, and sometimes that is nice, but of course that's not actually what I'm interested about in Jackson's work, or Ted Berrigan's (outside of the Sonnets), or Hannah Weiner's -- all of them were interested in making a quotidian poetry, a poetry that lived with them. Jackson's processes, Ted's postcards, Hannah's journals, all point to this very unmonumental approach.

So I'm trying to recalibrate with that in mind. I will try to push the event away from "100 monuments of awesomeness" and more towards "100 years of people doing stuff" -- though the urge to show that poetry can be monumental and awesome is great, and not to be completely neglected, and I'm sure the event overall will be a mix of the monumental, the everyday, and the in-between -- and maybe the event itself will be some or all of those things.

Lisa Radon read tonight (accompanied on percussion by Tim DuRoche). She's been writing through manifestos, using various art (& dance, &c.) manifestos as source materials to pull pieces from.

As she read, I realized that manifestos use the word "no" far more often than most genres of writing do, which Lisa later confirmed. And I began to wonder if you could do some sort of measurement, figuring out the frequency range of the word "no" in manifestos compared with other genres of writing. Then you could see whether this frequency range could diagnose a manifesto. Or, you could just call any piece of writing in which the word "no" appears that frequently a manifesto. (Perhaps a law code would have the word "no" even more often, on the far side of the manifesto range, but maybe not! Someone should crunch those numbers. If I were going into grad school for English, that's the sort of project I would want to work on.)

Joseph Noble also read tonight. He's been writing poems riffing off various aspects of Orson Welles. One thing that interested in him about Welles is that so many of his works were taken away from him and finished by others. The Magnificent Ambersons, for instance, notoriously was reedited, with forty-odd minutes of material cut and an entirely new ending shot. And this calls into question the nature of authorship; film is a medium where many creators are needed to make one piece, but Welles's films end up pushing this idea even further.

After the reading I suggested to him that he have someone else finish up his poems -- without getting any authorship credit, perhaps nothing more than a special thanks. He would give up the final say as to the shape and content of his poems, which would be published under his name. Maybe his publisher could decide who would do the final edit. Poetry perhaps suffers from the opposite problem that film does -- it usually comes off as being entirely the work of one author, as being totally auteurist. I don't know if he will use my idea or not, but if he does, I hope he doesn't credit me (and I hope it takes a good long while before people connect it with this blog post).

No, not a werewolf. I was a person who attended poetry readings.

Maryrose alerted me to a very nice post on Mark Wallace's blog about how nice poetry readings are, how they allow poetry communities and poetry-based relationships to flourish, and how keen this whole world is.

Curtis Faville responded in the comments with some concerns about such "poetry communities" and how the performative nature of a poetry reading says nothing about the quality of poetry on the page, which he seems to equate with the quality of poetry.

Now, resigning myself to the role of poetry blogger, I'm going to use this opportunity to reply to both of them, first to suggest that Faville is a bit off in his sense that the page is the proper home of poetry, and to bear witness to my own experiences with poetry communities.

1. The page is not the ultimate arbiter of poeminess. That is limiting and ahistorical. It denies the poemy effectiveness of language when spoken. It is a giant "fuck you" to sound poetry. It insists that poetry is not for now but for the ages. But, as someone who lives now and not in the ages, I could hardly care what the ages or those who live in the ages think. Their poemic concerns are, by and large, none of my business. They are a wildly unpredictable bunch, who never return my e-mails. I'll let them work out poeminess on their own; they won't decide what I get poemy goodness from.

2. The performative nature of the page is indeed different from the performative nature of the reading, and one doesn't necessarily translate into the other. I think I just mentioned this.

Now, on to my experience as a teenager who, unlike Wallace, had access to poetry readings. Then we'll get back to this. (We will, today, ignore the role of the internet.)

When I was 19ish and growing up in New York City I started going to poetry readings. For a while I went fairly regularly to readings at the Ear Inn. Perhaps some of you reading this also were going to readings there then. Do you remember me? At the time I looked something like the guy on the left, the taller one:



No, you probably don't remember me. I found going to these poetry readings mostly an alienating experience, mostly (with a few exceptions) filled with endless encounters with unwelcoming careerists, whom I had nothing to offer. I was a quiet, awkward teenager. I had little to offer for a careerist poem. Even the poetry zine I was publishing was more interested in what people who didn't consider themselves poets wrote than "real" poets. I was largely superfluous to the scene. No one seemed to be talking about things I was interested in talking about anyways -- no one was talking shop, certainly, and if they had it probably would have been a very different type of shop than what I was interested in.

So I had access to a poetry scene as a teenager, and found it to be fairly disgusting and off-putting. It was nice to see some of the poets whose work I enjoyed read, and it made me feel connected to moderately famous people, but these connections were fairly ephemeral and certainly were nothing like what Mark Wallace is talking about.

And then I moved to Portland, where there wasn't a poetry scene (of the sort of poetry I was interested in, anyways). A handful of (generally non-careerist) poets got together (read: were organized by David Abel) and started up a scene, and it's doing well now, and now I finding myself agreeing with Wallace's assessment, that the interaction of interesting people is one of the main draws of "being a poet". I'd even go further, and suggest that some of the most interesting poetic moments happen in those or out of those interactions -- or, at least, it's been important to me. (See: Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie by Lytle Shaw, and eventually there will be a link to a pdf for The Redundancies here.)

So now I've lived in a place with a dysfunctional (for my needs) poetry scene, and one with a functional poetry scene (for my needs), and I'm about to move to a third city, and I am, frankly, a bit worried that I won't have a functional poetry scene in this new city. Which is to say, that I won't have poetry in this new city. In that sense. And what will I have to do about it, or what will I be able to do about it.

3. Which makes Faville's reaction -- of withdrawal, of burying one's head in the page, and declaring it to be the true place of poetry -- seem all the more tempting; it is safer, more controllable. Hell, we can all agree, is other people. But I'm not ready to give up on the possibilities and the poetics of human interaction yet.