spring crackers

Much ado about much at Rembrandt's yesterday. Hello to all who showed, told and processed poetry-related news, books, ephemera. Lia: wonderful suggestions all:
Steve Tomasula, "The Sensualist", "Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves". And thanks for suggesting Twyla Tharp's "The creative Habit"

Check out Ugly Duckling Press. Great writing and design with the word in mind.

Lia, It would be great to hear more about the Banff conference here...
Remember post your work! or that you worked.. here by midnight Sunday!

Get crunching.

really strange writing exercises

http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/


The exercise descriptions are almost poems themselves.

Gerry Gilbert 1936-2009

http://www.theeastvillage.com/tc/gilbert/a.htm

He was a sweet guy. He'd be at every poetry reading at the Kootenay School and elsewhere, taping for his poetry show on Vancouver Co-op Radio. Always absolutely present.

"We'll always be here."

David Bromige

David Bromige died yesterday June 3. He was at the 1995 conference in Vancouver in honour of Robin Blaser, who also died recently. Bromige's paper can be found in the book The Recovery of the Public World: it's entitled "The Poetics of the Vulnerable." A few sentences:

"Vulnerability is a desired quality in poetry as in life more generally. . . . That which is vulnerable has room for us in it, as it has room for the new. We well may disagree with it . . . but we will be able to do so from within the work. It will be not-teflon."

A number of poems by Bromige, selected by Meredith Quartermain, can be found in Golden Handcuffs Review 10:
http://www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com/gh10content/8.html

On the East Village Poetry Web, there's a link to Bromige's poem "Fall," which is his translation of Rilke's "Autumn" into "Californian" English. First Rilke's poem (English trans. Stephen Mitchell):

Autumn

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.


Now Bromige:

Fall

(Rilke into Californian)

      Man, where'd the time go? Detroit?.
      But summer was really, really great.

      Stand that side of the sundial, will ya?
      I want to dig the shadows.

      Robert Duncan's freaking in the meadow.

      Those apples can't get a whole lot riper.
      Give em a couple more hot days.
      My friends who have the winery are already making the wine.

      It's getting chilly, nights. If you don't have a pad by now,
      Too bad. If you're not seeing someone
      You're likely stuck that way, they went back to school.

      Crack a book yourself. Write in Starbucks.
      Go walkabout downtown. [Time passes]. Hey, lookit
      the leaves, wind, etc. doing their thing. Rustle rustle.
      Contrast and compare yourself. Cool!

---

Next The East Village Poetry

publication by Sylvia Legris

Here's Sylvia in good company; she's in issue #26 as well. Laynie Brown is one of my favorites.

NEW AMERICAN WRITING #27 with work from Mahmoud Darwish on Edward Said, Ben Lerner on Barbara Guest, Etel Adnan, SYLVIA LEGRIS, Phillip Foss, Clayton Eshleman, Ray Ragosta, Caroline Knox, Laynie Brown, Jennifer Pilch, Ales Steger, Brian Henry GC Waldrep, Brandon Shimoda, John Olson, Leonard Schwartz, Gassan Zaqtan, Fady Joudah, Rachel Loden, Sharon Dolin, Edward Smallfield, Joshua Kryah, Amy Pence, Linh Dinh, and many others.

experiments

Charles Bernstein's list of generative experiments is at

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/experiments.html

Two new titles of interest

From Book Thug's monthly e-list:

Emerson, Lori [ed]. OPEN LETTER 13:8 (2009): bpNichol + 21. 2009. Contributions include: a seeing of your writing: An Introduction. LORI EMERSON; Openings: bpNichol's Ephemera by KIT DOBSON; Anxieties, Orthodoxies, and Histories in (the 1990's Critical Reception of) bpNichol's The Martyrology by CLINT BURNHAM; Hopelessly Devoted: The Sacred and the Sloppy in bpNichol Criticism by STEPHEN CAIN; The Unquiet Poem: bpNichol's Re-Sounding Cultural Geographies by LEIF EINARSON; Generations Generated by STEPHEN SCOBIE; Apocalypse Now: The Four Horsemen Burn Through Atlanta by JAMES SANDERS and MARK PREJSNAR; The Practice of Community: bpNichol and Steve McCaffery in Collaboration by STEPHEN VOYCE; bp Anecdotingly by PAUL DUTTON; Blurring the Borders/Bordering the Blurs: bpNichol and derek beaulieu by JONATHAN BALL; Conceptual Writing and bpNichol by DEREK BEAULIEU; Men Write What Men Mean: The "Pataphysics of bpNichol's Zygal by STEVEN ZULTANSKI; vol a vent by NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS; b & P in bpNichol Lane: A Look by MARIE BUCK; city bp, everywhere by BRAD FLIS; Modern Fiction and The Decay of History: bpNichol's The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid by CARL PETERS.


FITZPATRICK-O'DINN, Dominique. Table of Forms. Urbana: Spineless Books, 2006. Bridging the sonnet and palindrome through a rich taxonomy of new literary forms, Table of Forms is a collection of experimental, ludic, constraint-driven poetry; a puzzle book; and a writing manual. Dominique Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn and her skilled team of collaborators have created the most comprehensive survey of noncanonical poetic techniques since the Oulipo Compendium. Offering myriad reading paths, this multisequential anthology includes a Table of Contents, Table of Forms, Glossary of Forms, and a matrix on the back cover.