Dave Brinks' The Secret Brain (Black Widow Press)

This Thursday at the Gold Mine Saloon

(701 Dauphine St., New Orleans, LA)

celebrate the release of poet Dave Brinks' 

new Selected Poems: The Secret Brain 

(Black Widow Press) 

Introduction by Andrei Codrescu

320 pages

Show begins 8:30 PM

Part of 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series

www.17poets.com

Fall Readings in New Orleans (Oct 25-Nov 9)

Oct 25th

17 Poets (Gold Mine Saloon, 701 Dauphine, 8PM) www.17poets.com

Lavender Ink Poets Thaddeus Conti and Chris Sullivan along with San Francisco Poet Micah Ballard.

Chris Sullivan will be Reading and Signing his book: Mere, NOLA,:
"Mere NOLA is Mother New Orleans, and these poems take us back to the cradle of language. Here is language that is absolutely without guile, truth without effort."

Thaddeus Conti reads from b-side that: About his new collection b-side that
"In this sequel to his ground-breaking and outrageous aepoetics, Thaddeus Conti continues his explorations of the dark side in poetry and drawings that both complement and compete with each other in this beautifully produced volume." 

Poet Micah Ballard was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and earned an MA and MFA from the New College of California. He studied with poet Joanne Kyger and has written about John Wieners; the influence of the San Francisco Renaissance poets can be seen in his work. He has published a number of chapbooks, including Absinthian Journal (2002), Bettina Coffin (2003), In the Kindness of Night (2003), Evangeline Downs (2006), and Poems from the New Winter Palace (2010). He is the author of the full-length collections Parish Krewes (2009) and Waifs and Strays (2011). Ballard is the administrative director of the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. He edits Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editions with his wife, poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux.

Oct. 26th:

Maple Street Book Store Mid-City Location

Diane Tapes Reading Series, 6PM

Featuring Carolyn Hembree, Brad Richard and Adam Atkinson

Also: 

Memory Wing Discussion Group meets to discuss the book by Bill Lavender from Black Widow Press, 7-till, PRAVDA, 113 Decatur, back courtyard

Oct 30:

City Park Big Lake Open Theater Reading, 6PM

Join us at the open theater near Big Lake (far right side if you are facing the New Orleans Museum of Art)

Featured Readers: Nik De Dominic, Tracey McTague, and Ben Kopel 

NOV. 1:

UNO Sand Bar Series, 12:30

Katherine Soniat will read from and sign her sixth collection of poetry, A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge, on Thursday, November 1, at 12:30 at the UNO Sandbar. This event is free and open to the public. A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge is recently out from Dream Horse Press. The Swing Girl, published by Louisiana State University Press, was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared recently in Women’s Review of Books,Hotel Amerika, and Crazyhorse. She teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville.

Nov. 1

17 Poets, (Gold Mine Saloon, 701 Dauphine St) 8PM (www.17poets.com) 

Poet Tracey McTague

Tracey McTague has officially gone AWOL, & may never be heard from again.  In her  former life, she organized the Battle Hill Poetry Marathon, the New Zinc Bar Reading Series, and served as both editor & consigliore for Lungfull! Magazine from 2001 to the present. Her forthcoming book,  Super Natural, from Trembling Pillow Press, is due out this winter. 


Poet Brendan Lorber
Brendan Lorber is a poet and the editor/publisher of LUNGFULL!Magazine, a magazine that prints the rough draft of people's work along with the final version so you can see the process from start to finish . . . if you subscribe. His poems have appeared in such publications as Explosive, Valentine, and The Chicago Tribune. Boog Literature will print a chapbook of his work this fall. He's performed his poetry on radio and before live audiences on both coasts, in between and in Australia. He has been a poetry editor of The Brooklyn Review and the guest editor of BoogLit's tribute to Allen Ginsberg. He was a panel member at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Symposium on the Politics of Race in Poetry and at the Poetry Project's Thirtieth Anniversary Symposium. To pay for rent, food, swashbuckling lifestyle & lavish gifts for his friends, he's a creative writing teacher at Village Community School and has taught English at Brooklyn College where he just completed his MFA in poetry. Lorber lives perched in the window of his lower east side apartment.

Nov 3

Latter Library Poetry Buffet Reading Series
hosted by Gina Ferrara, 2 PM

Featured poets: Danny Kerwick, Melanie Leavett and Jimmy Ross 

Nov. 7 

LadyFest Poetry Reading, 1505 St. Roch, Reception, 6-7, Reading, 7-10PM (food & bar by donation)

Readers: Heather Tammany, R.K. Powers, Lee Meitzen-Grue, Alexandra Reisner, Emily Ewings-Tramble, Megan Burns, Samantha MacFitte, Laura McKnight, Sandra Grace Johnson, Roselyn Leonard

Music by Stella Lithe

Hosted by Jenna Mae, MC: Megan Harris

Nov 9

Ladyfest Poetry Reading, Buffa's Lounge Back Room, 1001 Esplanade Ave. 8PM- Mindnight

Poets: Jessica Ruby Radcliffe, Chyana Bwyse Bradley, Gerryl Robinson, Cate Root, Kim Vodicka, Gina Ferrara, Lauren Marie, Melanie Levitt, Ayanna Molina-Mills, Kate Smash, Beverly Rainbolt, Kelly Jones, Sunday Shae Parker, Trisha Rezende, Elizabeth Garcia   

Music by Lady Baby Miss 

MC Anna Purdy 

Lucas De Lima's GHOSTLINES

                                          Photo: Radioativemoat Tumblr Page


I read Lucas De Lima's GHOSTLINES again evacuated from New Orleans while Hurricane Isaac made landfall and while the anniversary of Katrina on August 29th made specters of us all.

I watched people in Plaquemines Parish being cut from their roofs as the water rose and trapped them. All time folds again and again. Water wants what it wants, and like any thing other than us: we can only imagine. The photo below was sent to me; this is someone's backyard made wild again. We live edged in and believe in borders that keep known from unknown, safe from danger. De Lima tells us that the poems in GHOSTLINES "mythify the alligator attack that killed my dearest friend in 2006."
What is a myth? What does it mean to make myths in this present splendor of reason and science? Isn't nature always making myths of us all?

Aug. 29, 2012

De Lima states in the opening page that in order to create this myth, metamorphosis must occur. Change that we usually see meted out in myths as punishment is here taken on like a mantle that will protect our narrator as these poems attempt to wander in treacherous lands. Or in another reading, the transformation makes possible the ability to descend from the cerebral consciousness of being human in order to embody the animal, the place we imagine that operates as primal, beyond law and reason. When someone dies suddenly or tragically, we always attempt to make sense where none can be found.  De Lima sheds that illusion and seeks a physical re-embodiment in order to be in a space that seeks not understanding as much as a place to enact grief. 

The "Ghosted Lines" of this chapbook begin immediately as we become voyeurs peeking into the correspondence and exchange between our narrator-turned-bird and the deceased friend. Coming on the heels of De Lima's artist's statement about what this book will attempt, we are given a note that begins: 

"Lucas, Is there any way you could give me a few pearls of advice on my artist statement? I just wrote it now and I'm going to bed without feeling very good about it. I know it's not done, but please, if you have a minute, make comments." 

This is how we enter the poem: in communion, in failure, in potential, in knowing it's not done, in need for an "other" to comment. 

In "Mutation [2]" after describing a movie where a man mutates into an alligator, De Lima quickly conflates the fantastic with the real: "The director has to kill off his ugly protagonist & the trapper has to exterminate the gator that got Ana Maria because every story has to end with a period." 

De Lima then transforms before us exploding out of the narrative and away from the control of telling a story and into the vortex of:

UNLIKE A POEM

UNLIKE A POEM I WRITE WITH ANA MARIA

UNLIKE A POEM I WRITE WITH ANA MARIA'S ALLIGATOR

UNLIKE A POEM I WRITE WITH HER BLOOD & THE ALLIGATOR'S

UNLIKE A POEM WE WRITE LIKE A WET LAND

And then we are birded. Ready to land in dangerous waters, to confront and get close to the beast. We are ready to be ghosted by emails and heartbreaking confessions that were never meant for us, like :

"OH BOY, I LOVE YOU. WILL YOU SEND ME A POEM?"

The communion of beasts is primal, is sexual. De Lima states: 

IF SEX MUST BE LOUD

THEN I'LL OPEN MY MOUTH 

I WILL MAKE AN O THAT SUCKS YOU BACK TO LIFE

The sexual desire to stimulate, to reanimate coupled with the tender intimacy of affection and love for the lost body, the body that in the poem has been transformed into recollected notes and lines. In a way, even though our narrator survives, the transformation into a bird makes a ghost of the speaker as well. It is as if both humans have fled, and deep in the myth, we try to read the ciphers left to us among reptiles and their ancestors: "AS THE BIRD EATS ME/ AS I BIRTH MY WAY OUT"

In the end De Lima's mythos has encapsulated us as readers as well; we are told:

MANY READERS ARE GHOSTS

OBSESSED WITH OUR BODIES

De Lima's lines resonated deeply with me. I felt armed with more questions than ever and maybe a bit consoled by the inevitable. Elegy is a familiar space for the poem, but De Lima manages to make it uncomfortable and to make us question what we want from the poem and what we expect from 

coming face to face with the dark haunts we keep ensconced within. I want to dwell in what I unearthed: How often do we enact a thing before it becomes us? Before we feel it? 

When does grief ever really end once the river breaks free?

You can no more put the flood back then you can fly away. 

New Orleans, 2005

You can purchase a copy of this hand made chapbook with its painted cover here: 

Radioactivemoat 

Narcissism, Madness & Alters: Nicki Minaj and Unica Zürn (Part 1)

Kayne West's Monster video opens with this statement: The following content is in no way to be interpreted as misogynistic or negative towards any groups of people. It is an art piece and shall be taken as such. 

The contradictions in this statement are not our concern. Obviously, art can be taken however the viewer receives it. To be told that something is only art is not a waiver for offense, or is it? And why is a disclaimer needed. At some point, someone must have thought, something here is offensive. Does a disclaimer of art make it less so? 

The video depicts an array of scantily clad dead women strewn about furniture and in bed with rappers. I wonder who the "groups of people" are that would be offended? 

But that is not our concern. Our concern is how the female rapper in this video with three other male rappers, who appear to be enjoying a mansion full of dead or dying female forms, makes art in the video. 

The video in full: (Nicki Minaj begins at 3:42) 

Monster (Kayne West feat. Rick Ross, Jay-Z, and Nicki Minaj)

Nicki Minaj employs two alters in this video, Harajuku Barbie and Roman Zolanski. She doubles her performance removing the outside need for dead female forms and instead concentrates on the mirror play of bouncing between two versions of herself. 

In other words, her art is deadly serious about the function of narcissism and madness. One of her alters, the more submissive Barbie character is bound and initially covered in a black cloth, while the more dominant Roman character struts about brandishing a whip. When the cloth is removed from Barbie's face, she immediately becomes vocal and is physically silenced by the Roman character. Her submissive position contrasts her vocal arguments and apparent lack of fear in the situation. To further mimic the full narcissistic game, there is an erotic tension between the two characters as they struggle for control and Roman grinds against the seated figure. It's sexual, it's provocative and it's much more stimulating as far as art than a bunch of dead women lying in the background while you rap. But Minaj enters a narrative shaped by women who use their madness to make art. In fact, she enters into a realm of obsession about a woman's use of her body and her mental stability when she employs her "performative madness." 

In her groundbreaking work on Unica Zürn, Caroline Rupprecht in her book Subject to Delusions spends a great deal of time examining what narcissism is and how it relates to Modernist art. Narcissism springs from the mythological tale of Narcissus who falls in love with his reflection and perishes subject to his own unfulfillable desire. Freud discusses his take on it in On Narcissim: An Introduction. Lacan then adapts Freud's theory to forward what he terms the "mirror phase." Lacanian psychoanalyst Guy Rosalto takes it up in "The Narcissistic Axis of Depression." The idea of Narcissism in art or artist revolves around the gaze.  Rupprecht tells us in her book that Narcissism provides: "the promise of being able to return to some kind of primal unity, of mending what has been divided (and thereby doubling oneself) [it] involves a peculiar kind of pleasure: the pleasure of fantasy" (5). She says, "To me, narcissim is about the fictions we create about ourselves and others, the uncertainty about what is 'real' and what is imaginary" (7). The image or fantasy plays a primal role in narcissism, as well as the individual's complicit desire to be both aware of the fantasy and to believe in the reality of it. In Lacanian thought, the fantasy fills the void of what is lost, what is vacant or lacking in the self is restored by the self's delusional fantasy. 

Zürn, Untitled, 1961 (Ubu Gallery)

In Zürn's work, her "madness" becomes both the subject and the reason for her work. In Dark Spring, Rupprecht in her introduction states: "It depicts a flight from language into vision...Compared to these fantastic images, reality is 'pathetic'" (DS 4). Zürn's The Man of Jasmine written before Dark Spring is described as: "an imaginary god-like figure, the Man of Jasmine, compels the protagonist to write the story of her illness by sending her poetic hallucinations" (DS 16). Her partner Hans Bellmer has been often quoted as saying that Zürn had "written herself into madness." 

While Minaj's alters may be a form of "performative madness," it remains true that her career and by extension her livelihood depends upon her believing in their autonomy and their ability to express themselves through her. Zürn experiences her images as hallucinations and her "Man of Jasmine" figure is both based on a real figure (Henri Michaux) and yet also a hallucination that she believes in, which is pushing her to write her story. In the same way that Narcissus becomes addicted to his reflection, Zürn becomes addicted to her hallucinations; it's through her interactions with them that she is able to create complex images, anagrams and writings about her experience. Does her writing create her madness or her madness the writing or are they both existing in parallel states within one body? 

Minaj as well is able to express herself and create a brand based on her alters. Some have speculated that a disruptive childhood or personal problems are the source of her alters. But for the most part, these characters seem to be extensions of herself that she is able to employ mimicking madness but also creating a space through other bodies for her own body to perform and say certain things. It is not a coincidence that the alter, Roman Zolanski, is a man who performs the anger and rage that Minaj feels she cannot perform as herself. Similarly, it is the "Man of Jasmine" who demands that Zürn record her illness through her writing as though the authoritative male figure gives one the space to explore these places where female bodies cannot trespass alone. From The Man of Jasmine (trans by Malcolm Green) "Then her vision appears for the first time: The Man of Jasmine! Boundless consolation! Sighing with relief, she sits down opposite him and studies him. He is paralysed!What good fortune. He will never leave his seat in the garden where the jasmine even blooms in winter." The "Man of Jasmine" is the part of Zürn strapped down in the chair, who although physically powerless is not without power and control verbally as "he" begins to issue commands that Zürn feels compelled to meet. 

As an interesting side note, Zürn when she initially met Surrealist Hans Bellmer was often tied up and photographed by him. One could say that in their initial encounters Zürn played the role of Minaj's Harajuku Barbie while Bellmer played the role of Roman. As their relationship went on though, Zürn invested more deeply in the split self, or fantasy of the other, thereby allowing a communion where she could be both the object and the creator. The fantasy removes Bellmer as the other and allows Zürn to play at the unity of her divided self; the fantasy is still enacted by a male figure but it emerges from within Zürn providing for a sense of wholeness. Much like, Minaj's figures who allow her to retain complete autonomy over the divided portions of her art.  

Unica Zürn photographed by Hans Bellmer, 1958

This is a great site for looking at more of Unica Zürn's drawings from books that are now out of print: http://50watts.com/Unica-Zurn-Oracle-and-Spectacle

In another post I will talk more about Surrealism, madness, and more of Zürn's work.

Gemology by Megan Kaminski (Little Red Leaves)

A Review of Gemology by Megan Kaminski

(Little Red Leaves Textile Series, 2012) Editor, Dawn Pendergast

Gemology is a poem in the city, moving in the veins of the streets among buildings, in the backseat of cabs, and along the body, embodied in the bones and skin of the metropolis. The “polis” and the body, both intimate and generic folding up into lines that spool out to such shattering images:

           

Typography by Jakub Konvica

     city built on line body on body

     alphabet buried beneath street

     concrete-riverbed-city

     cross-sectioned-fluid-fattened

Kaminksi celebrates the movement and the chaos of the city as it replicates and mirrors the precise chaos of the line of the poem. Likewise, the lines of the poem inhabit the metaphor of the body’s desire to mimic the city or is it the city’s desire to mimic the body? Each anatomy detailed, each subject to disaster and all lettered somewhere between manufactured and magical: “Vowels roll drip down thighs/ conjunctions across backs.” What is more erotic than the city? What is more desirable than the words sung hovering breath by breath above the line of the body? The poet enters us; we hope to be suspended and we want to be carried away:

            promise to bring back remnants

            rosaries of fingers and toes

            button eye button nose

            bring me back to light

            carry me in soft palms

Photo credit

This little book is a soft missive, slipped between recycled cloth and intricately stitched together; it’s a vessel for us to handle. It feels soft to the touch, the fabric gives a bit along the page, and the words within are hard to hold. A stitching attempts to piece together a whole; a stitch is a line like the line of a poem that binds. These lines pull together the intimate recesses of the body and merges them with the political census of the larger body: the bodies that govern us: “Dear neighbor, dear Liberty/ you are probably not a terrorist.” Bodies are vulnerable, gloved in a casing easy to breach, but how does that translate to the imaginary body? The body of the whole, the bodies we create by imagining they exist: city, village, Senate, House, community, family. Kaminski wants to cuddle, she wants to astound; we are drawn in by the lyrical smoothness and seduced by “kisses linger ruby-lined-wrist.” This book wants to bed you, it wants to take you on a tour of the sites, and then it wants to split you open: “melon ripe and red/ let them all out.” What do you want from the book? What do you unbury inside as these words coalesce? A gem is nothing more than a rock subject to time and pressure that we suddenly decide to call a jewel. 

Photo credit

Links and Contacts regarding UNO's firing of Bill Lavender

Dave Brinks about UNO's decision to fire Bill Lavender and put UNO press on hiatus: 

Dear Friends,

Today the news from the New Orleans poetry community is very, very bad.

Poet BILL LAVENDER, director of University of New Orleans Press has been SACKED by the administrators at University of New Orleans.

Bill Lavender not only resurrected UNO Press, but under Bill's stewardship these past four years, UNO press has published an astounding 80+ excellent books nationally and internationally; and the press is by no means strapped for funding. UNO Press is currently regarded as one of the most prestigious and  financially self-sustainable university presses in all of the United States.

Be assured, this so-called "elimination" is purely POLITICALLY motivated, not otherwise.

Dean Susan Krantz of the University of New Orleans informed Bill Lavender of his "elimination" recently via email while Bill was still in Scotland fulfilling his duties as Director of UNO's Abroad Program.

IN THE NAME OF POETRY, please...

Stand with US!

SPEAK out!

Let them hear your VOICE loud and clear!

Pressure is mounting from all sectors near and far to EXPOSE the corruption and unethical conduct at the University of New Orleans at the very highest levels!

Bill Lavender's so-called "ELIMINATION"  is a devastating blow which will be felt deeply by poetry communities everywhere-- from New Orleans to New York to California to Brazil to Zimbabwe--and everywhere in between!

Let higher ed charlatans know you DETEST of their actions!

INFORM fatcat administrators that their professed soulessness toward POETRY is indeed a high act of treason to the art we LOVE!

They must answer for this singular INJUSTICE to POETRY and to poet Bill Lavender!

We need every nano of LOVE and SUPPORT you can give!

YOUR voice will be LEGION!

TURNABOUT!

Love, Strength & Peace Through Poetry Always!

Sincerest Regards,

Dave Brinks

* * * * * * * *

Please send a personal letter of objection to ALL email addresses listed:

University of New Orleans Provost Louis Paradise: lparadis@uno.edu

University of New Orleans President Peter Fos: pfos@uno.edu

University of New Orleans, College of Liberal Arts, Dean Susan Krantz: skrantz@uno.edu

University of New Orleans, Director of Creative fbarton@uno.edu* * * * * * * *

Sign Petition site:https://www.change.org/petitions/uno-president-peter-fos-provost-louis-paradise-and-dean-susan-krantz-keep-bill-lavender-as-the-director-of-uno-press-4


* * * * * * * *

Links to media reports covering this outrageous act (please post your personal comments to articles):

Inside Higher Education story: http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/08/07/u-new-orleans-says-press-hiatus-will-be-brief

NOLA.com story: http://www.nola.com/books/index.ssf/2012/08/visionary_director_of_uno_pres.html

Poetry Foundation story: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/08/university-of-new-orleans-press-on-hiatus/#.UCKiEZ-N5Fk.facebook

Publisher's Weekly story: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/53459-uno-press-is-shut-down-director-bill-lavender-ousted.html

Times-Picayune story: http://www.nola.com/books/index.ssf/2012/08/furor_over_shuttered_uno_press.html

The CHRONICLE of Higher Education story: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/director-of-u-of-new-orleans-press-loses-job-amid-budget-cuts/46549

Another story from Publisher's Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/53474-with-director-s-ouster-uno-press-faces-uncertain-future-.html

Another story from Inside Higher Education: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/08/06/university-new-orleans-plans-put-university-press-hiatus

[NOTE: If you tweet, post and use hashtag #UNOpress to get these articles trending]

[NOTE: if you're on FB, check posts there]

New Poems & Essay on Poetics Online

My new essay on Pierre Joris's poetics and work with Magherbian poets is now live over at Rain Taxi. 

PIERRE JORIS

Cartographies of the In-Between

edited by Peter Cockelbergh

Litteraria Pragensia (€12)

“There is no difference between inside and outside at the poem’s warp speed.”
              —Pierre Joris, Notes Toward a Nomadic Poetics

Also very happy to have some poems over at Yew Journal along with images by Stephenie Foster. Yew Journal is an online journal of innovative poetry, hybrid writing and images by women.Founded in 2011 by poet Carolyn Guinzio and designer Stephenie Foster, Yew is a venue to showcase three poets per month along with visuals provided by the poets, the editors, or other contributors. Text and image will interact in a manner that enhances and maintains the integrity of both.

Video Review: j/j hastain

I did this video review for Horsless Press' OPEN Review section.

If you have never checked out OPEN reviews, it is a wonderful new space for ongoing dialogue between poets. Instead of the traditional review, OPEN encourages the intimacy of the letter format, so that writers can discuss their personal engagement and experiences with the poem. They also encourage NOTES showing how a reader travels in the text. Thanks to Jen Tynes and Michael Sikkema for opening up this new space for interchanges and exchanges.

OPEN REVIEWS at Horseless Press

From the site:

We are interested in reviews that overtly, intimately, intensely, and interestingly engage in conversation with authors and their texts. We are interested in reviews that can stand alone. Reviews submitted for O P E N should be written as open notes (250-500 words) or letters (500+ words) to the author(s) of the reviewed text. Open notes and letters that address the text itself or some animal, vegetable, mineral, character, or characteristic of the text are also interesting to us. We are excited by reviews of events and multimedia reviews. Notes and letters will be published here on an occasional basis.



I decided to experiment with my first video review of a book in tribute to j/j hastain's book,  "new forms and meditations for the pressurized libertine monk" (Scrambler Books, 2012). I filmed this at our Tao Farm, and then tried to do the voiceover in one take to adhere to the idea of having a dialogue as to what arose for me in reading the book. I had a few notes on hand. But in the spirit of meditating on the lyrics, I also wanted to be spontaneous and open the book to any page and let the shape of my review be built upon what came to the surface. Hope you enjoy, and be sure to check out j/j hastain's work. 

Laura Mattingly: The Book of Incorporation (Language Foundry, 2012)

Poet Laura Mattingly's new collection The Book of Incorporation from New Orleans press, Language Foundry, steered by poet and printmaker J.S. Makkos is a beautifully designed letter press and hand bound collection whose construction lends precedence to the form of the poem on the page. Below is an image of a left handed copy of the book, a rare stitched one for lefties. But each book is crafted and bound with precision and eye towards the best format for presenting the moving poems that lie within. Mattingly's poems were created with an eye on the Tibetan book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, both of which she read during the gestation and birth of her daughter. The construction of the book in its oversize format reflects the gravity (and gravitas) of the ritualistic incantation and power of the poem in capturing and containing the spirit of that liminal space between death and life, between coming into this world and leaving it. The circle on the cover reflects that continuity but it also holds within it the sphere of entrance and exit, which is enacted within the woman's body and which in this book expresses itself through the woman's voice and song. 

Frontispiece drawings by Laura Mattingly:

The epigraph tells us that the books of the dead are instruction manuals for the dying and deceased, and in that vein, the Book of Incorporation is an instruction manual for embodying the space between being mothered and mothering, between one and the doubled self, between holding life within and bringing it into the world. The poems are numbered and each title is often a long explanation of the movement that the poem will respond to: in many cases these movements are domestic and personal, but the titles also reflect the manual-like impression that this book means to forward. Enmeshed in domestic rituals of house cleaning are invocations and deliberate soul journeys that are undertaken in preparation for the birth of the new life. Mattingly unflinchingly embraces the dark shadow of pregnancy, which is the realization that the mother's body becomes a host, an other and in that space of becoming a flood of psychic and psychological events take place. One could argue that the dual nature of birth embraces death and that the two become twinned and twined in the body of the mother. Mattingly honors and reflects this in the book rather than turning away; she sings to those who have passed and gives voice to restless spirits who continue to speak and hold presence. 

from VIII: A Mother's Song: Psychic Housecleaning in Preparation for Transformation (pictured above)

"On this morning I cry with open eyes

because all the things in my life needing to mourned

have been already"

(pictured above) XVII: The Choosing of the Womb Door

"You choose to muscle in blind and limitless terror through the womb-door." 

Mattingly exposes all and somewhere between the fantastic notions of mythology and Mardi Gras-like masquerading is a raw, vulnerable quality to the poem which makes one shiver as they read it. It is the whisper of overhearing deep secrets of the soul and, in this case, they are secrets given in love and in openness in order to create a path of knowledge rather than the too often selfish need to confess to appease the ego. Mattingly never loses touch, even in her most intimate moments, with the ritual and mythology that grounds and informs these poems making them more than a personal odyssey and instead a primer of movements from self outward into the inclusion of hosting and bringing forth a new soul. It is this nod to the magic and the mystery of the event that Mattingly so achingly transcribes in all its messiness and fear and longing that makes these poems hard, even dangerous in their alchemy, but they also carve a precious terrain that gifts back to the reader some of the most stunning aspects of being human.  

In XXII: Osiris and Isis: In the Face of Fragmentation, A Love Song of Incorporation the poem lives in the landscape of a Halloween night in New Orleans, revelers dressed as Egyptian mythological figures, but Mattingly transforms the scene of "wire-clothes-hanger-ram horns" and wine glasses amid the spectacle and breathes into the event all the mystery of the ancient tale as she reveals: 

"I float to his shoulder and plant a riversong in his ear like a seed...

this is how you were conceived, little one

for just one night          this is how I lured your daddy back to me"

It is this ability to weave the personal with the myth, to dance between the mundane and the magical that makes these poems fascinating. Mattingly is able to not just transform the scene making her lover's return worthy of a reunion of Isis and Osiris but she is able to reveal the subtle magic that "looms" in our lives. It is the combing of these two threads, the poet's and the mother's that creates this journey in incorporating the body: the newborn, the newly mothered, and we: the readers, incorporated into the journey and in doing so mirroring our own psychic needs and desires. 

I can't think of a book of poems that does for birth and pregnancy what this book does since the publication of Home/Birth: A Poemic by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker. That particular text, amazing its own way, looked frankly at the medical industry of birth through statistics, facts, and personal experience; it as well transgresses the polished notion of "happy pregnancies" and reveals in stunning honesty the reality that some pregnancies do end in death and not life. The nearly taboo subject of the mother's odyssey in giving birth to a child who does not live and how to exist in that space is captured in that book in a way that I have never seen paralleled. That being said, the Book of Incorporation could be seen as a text that exists in the same sphere as Home/ Birth looking intensely at the psychic journey that the mother and baby enter into when a soul enters this plane. Calling upon ritual and myth, the Book of Incorporation recognizes the fact of the mental strain of pregnancy and the uncharted waters of emotional complexity that are brought to the forefront in the state of hosting another life. It is a book that remembers that rituals contain the wild state of our beings and provide a foothold in dark places where we must travel blindly.


You can order copies of this limited edition hand made book from:

Language Foundry c/o J.S. Makkos 4224 Royal Street, New Orleans, LA
70117

Listen to Laura Mattingly read from The Book of Incorporation at 17 Poets! in New Orleans: