Poetic Space

I've been reading Gaston Bachelard's the Poetics of Space. It's interesting; I find I'll totally blank out while reading huge chunks and then suddenly something will come into focus. Does everyone read like this sometimes, I wonder?

Here's some bits I jotted down:

"To read poetry is essentially to daydream."

"Space is everything."

"Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence?"

"When two strange images meet, two images that are the work of two poets pursuing separate dreams, they apparently strengthen each other."

"slow sonorities"

"dream upon their name"

And some things that came up around the text: a remedy of words, value of intimacy/ scattered/ where they feel along the wall/ in darkness/ remains

I guess, too, a product of its time (?) as "they" say, there is a huge chunk of text that romanticizes the woman's place in the house, pointing out that her attention to dusting and waxing the furniture is akin to communing with angels. I often feel this way myself when doing housework; I really look forward to my angelic face poised over a sink full of dirty dishes and some time for me to compose a beatific picture of domestic happiness over the frothiness of caked on grime while visions of sugar plums dance through my mostly empty head. *Sigh*


For further reading: Frances Yates, The Art of Memory



I'm  a huge Wilkie Collins fan and intrigued by this book.

Elizabeth Robinson's Three Novels

Check out the review over at Jacket:

http://jacket2.org/reviews/point-contact-they-create

Black Widow Salon at Crescent City Books

This Monday marks the return of Crescent City Books' Black Widow Salon hosted by Michael Zell. At 7:00 PM, join poet, publisher and author of the newly released Memory Wing, Bill Lavender

as he reads from and discusses this work. 

The Black Widow Salon, sponsored by Joe Phillips and Susan Wood of Black Widow Press and hosted by Michael Allen Zell, is a monthly Monday event, existing to dig deeper into the literary arts.  November 14^th: Bill Lavender.  December 5^th: Josephine Sacabo.  Crescent City Books at 230 Chartres St. from 7-9 p.m.  Seating is limited.  RSVP’s preferred.  More information at crescentcitybooks.com

Memory Wing by Bill Lavender

A memoir in verse that explores the outer reaches of truth: of memory, language and art. Loosely based on the tripartite structure of The Divine Comedy, this poem appears as a simple memoir in lyrical and immediately accessible language, yet it works by accumulation to question the very fact of memory and the foundations of truth and identity. This is a poem that reads as easily as a memoir but which is as dense with allusion as one of The Cantos. As Andrei Codrescu has said of it: "This is a grand American long poem Doc Williams would be proud of."

Advance comments on Memory Wing:
Delving with brilliant image precision into the power of the past, and chanting in plain lyric to the ghosts of his mother and father & the futurity of his sons, Bill Lavender takes us back, down, deep into a psychological Arkansas and New Orleans that resonate with Dante's three part journey. In the vast field of felt memory, he guides us into subtle territories of torment, recognition and reconciliation that are Lavender's contemporary equivalents of Dante's inferno, purgatory and paradise. Bill Lavender's Memory Wing is a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece.
-Rodger Kamenetz

The poet's mother lives, dies in an Alzheimer's wing. The poet takes wing, remembering more because his mother remembers so little. He takes his past-and some of hers-under his wing. There is no waiting in the wings here; everything's laid out on memory's stage, surreal as the Roman memory exercises ordained. The poet may be left wing, but he steps out from under the wing of Arkansas, Blake-like tragedy, and Dante, into the elegiac present, where parents cede to children and in all their dreams come responsibilities and their evasions. The OED's 12th definition best defines wing as "part of a spectral line where the intensity tails off to nothing at either side of it," but that fails to describe the utter intensity of the flight between points in Lavender's book. This non-fiction epic poem flies through past, present, and hallucinated futures at the speed of unpunctuated sound.
-Susan M. Schultz

What a grand concerto! Read this epic eulogy and weep! Lavender is a resplendent Virgil traversing the woods of his memory, which coincides at unexpected places with our own. I'm happy to see the terse minimal suitcase of his lyrical self unpacked and overflowing. This is a grand American long poem Doc Williams would be proud of.
-Andrei Codrescu

Bill Lavender shifts language in rare combinations that unsettle the reader. Memory Wing is no different except that it takes a lifetime to inhabit, but lets us dip into that proper distance between knowing and learning where we hold down our own memories for comparison and where we sit in the same tragedy and splendor….
-Megan Burns

Bill Lavender is a poet, editor, and teacher living in New Orleans. He is the publisher of Lavender Ink, a small press devoted to contemporary poetry, and he is Managing Editor of UNO Press at the University of New Orleans. Besides his dozen books published to date his poems have appeared in numerous print and web journals and anthologies, and his essays and theoretical writings have been published in Contemporary Literature andPoetics Today, among many others.


Coming in November 2011
ISBN13: 978-0-9837079-0-5
219 pages $19.95

NOLA SATURDAY: Poetry Reading Throwdown

Jarret Lofstead of NOLAFugees Press and the People Say Project and Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press and 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series are issuing a poetry reading challenge to celebrate the three all-day poetry readings happening this Saturday, Nov. 5th.

How often, New Orleans, do you get the chance to attend three readings in one day where each reading features a host of local poets as well as visiting poets for two amazing literary events: Ladyfest New Orleans and the NOLA Bookfair


Answer the call to attend all three and you can win the POETRY AWESOMENESS PACKAGE:

CHALLENGE:

Attend all three readings (listed below) and document your attendance, so we know you were there. Don't just jump in and out, but listen and let us hear what you liked, what inspired you, what made you jump up and down. We want active listeners and participants to share with us their experiences at these events.



Once you complete your challenge, make your way over to the Maison at 6:00PM for the Printer's Ball, the date on the image below should read Nov. 5th,  and find Megan Burns. The first 5 to complete this challenge will be awarded their certificate of Poetic Awesomeness as well as the prize package:



1 Book from NOLAFugees

This is Megan Burns. 

1 Book from Trembling Pillow Press
1 20.00 Bar tab at Handsome Willy's
1 personally dedicated poem written to you by Megan Burns

Come on,  New Orleans, we know you love a challenge. Show some love for your poets this Saturday and score a little lagniappe for yourself.


Readings:

Ladyfest New Orleans:

Poetry Book Signing
Maple Street Bookstore, Healing Center (2372 St. Claude Ave), 11am-2 pmFeaturing: Valentine Pierce, Lee Grue, Omaira Falcon, and Gina Ferrara

Poetry Corner
Café Istanbul, Healing Center, 1:45 pm-6pm
Hosted by: Megan Harris
Ikon, 1:45
Sam Jasper, 2pm
Laura Mattingly, 2:15 pm
Sandra Johnson, 2:30 pm
Roselyn Leonard, 3pm
Leeandra Nolting, 3:30 pm
Biljana Obradovic, 3:45pm
Laurie Williams, 4pm
Kelly Harris, 4:15 pm
Gina Ferrara, 4:30 pm
Allison Pelegrin, 4:45 pm
MonaLisa Saloy, 5:00pm
Beverly Rainbolt, 5:15 pm
Sunday Parker, 5:30 pm
Valentine Pierce, 5:45pm
Lee Grue, 6pm

Apple Barrel (NOLA Bookfair)

Hosted by:
J.S. Makkos
Apple Barrel: All Day Readings @ the 2011NOLA Book Fair 

Noon-1: Dead Poets Evocation

1:00 Laura Mattingly
1:10 Marlo Barrera
1:20 Megan Harris
1:30 Jamie Bernstein
1:40 Gina Ferrara
1:50 Sandra Grace Johnson
2:00 Jonathan Kline
2:10 Jenna Mae
2:20 Benjamin S. Lowenkron
2:30 Tara Jill Ciccarone
2:40 Angus Woodward (of Baton Rouge)
2:50 Mary Griggs
3:00 Wendy Taylor Carlisle (of Texarkana)
3:10 Michael Harold (of Shreveport)
3:20 Kristina Marshall (of Lafayette)
3:30 Jonathan Penton (of Acadiana, formerly of El Paso, Texas)
3:40 Clare L. Martin (of Acadiana)
3:50 Frankie Metro (of Albuquerque, formerly of Tampa, Florida)
4:00 Jenn Marie Nunes
4:10 Mel Coyle
4:20 Mac Taylor
4:30 J.S. Makkos
4:40 Sean Munro
4:50 Thaddeus Conti
5:00 Jonathan Walters
5:10 Ben Kopel
5:20 Jim Tascio
5:30 Danny Kerwick
5:40 Adam O'Conner
5:50 Joseph Bienvenu

Maison readings (NOLA Bookfair)

NOLA and Brooklyn Poets Collabs and Readings

Happy to have with us all week the amazing poet Tracey McTague, poet-mama, curator of all growing things at the Mother Ship, editor at Lungfull Magazine and one of the curators of the Zinc reading series. She joined us Thursday night at 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series to read from a collaboration done with NOLA poet (Bucktown representin') Brett Evans. The collaboration began as a  project for the Boston Poetry Festival but it continues to flourish under the right circumstances, and we were happy to hear the two performing it live for our enjoyment. One of the constraints (joys?) of long distance collaborations other than the time delay in mailing (emailing) words across space is the lack of opportunity to hear the voice of the person you are working with: does the fictional voice you respond to parallel the flesh voice of the poem, and how does the work change when that intimate space of sharing and creating is breached and brought out into the public sphere?

The dynamic duo of Brett Evans and Tracey McTague were reunited again in under 24 hours to participate in the new series Left of the Dial hosted by poet Ben Kopel and housed at Euclid Records in the Bywater. Standing room only among LPs and waves of nostalgia, Brett Evans delivered his usual punch of wit, cynicism, and lyrical delight scraping the detritus of verbal spoofs, twists, and tongue twisters with comedic timing and surprising juxtapositions. Take for instance a series of poems titled "Versus Verses" which is both exactly what it implies with technicolor Evans panache:

"drunk tank vs. Panzer/ weeping willow vs Sword of Damocles/ emergency milk vs. needed ade/ Imaginary Friend vs. Bride of Mother-in-Law handshake/ Cross the Rubicon vs. Jump the Shark..."

From that surrealist game play, Evans turns towards a complicated invented form that involves a sonnet crossed with a cinquain crossed with Evans particular mode of transmitting the image along a play of word exchanges. "XIII" ends (in the sonnet form): "like I told you once in Oahu/ Suzanne Vega turned 50 today carbon dating/ reveals how long I've loved you"

Poet Tracey McTague celebrated her birthday in style by stepping up to the mic to share her blend of words and syllabic gymnastics to her soon-to-become new fans as well as the old. McTague's poems are like waterfalls, you have to just sit back and let them fall over you and just as your poetry eyes are lured into a slightly relaxed squint, the rainbows appear. McTague eschews narrative for the lightning connections made on the cerebral & subconscious levels allowing syllables and synapses to guide the jumps and ducks around the swirl of her language. Poems are filled with concrete nouns stacked up to create tumbling blocks of images as she sweeps around the puns and delicately trips among the catches and consonants that sing us our familiar sounds like a nursery rhyme. Suddenly, Shelley is standing mid-watered in his sea changed grave, a levee is made for breaching, a cup is turned over and your future falls out: That is the poetry of Tracey McTague.

 If these rock stars should grace a poetry venue in a town near you or perhaps you should wake up in the  middle of the night with the sweet sound of WHAM wafting through your walls: know you're in good hands. This review might be slightly biased as I adore WHAM, but who doesn't?

(photo by Michael Dominici)

Also, it's Ezra Pound's B-day. 

From Canto LXXXI






But to have done instead of not doing This is not vanity To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame this is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

Dylan Symposium at UPenn

In celebration of Dylan's 70th birthday, PennSound presents a Dylan symposium by some self-proclaimed Dylanologists. I was a bit surprised Jonathan Cott wasn't included, as I would name him one of the top Dylanologists of our day. If you're a huge fan, this is probably both fascinating and horrifying. And the video is both, as poets and fans try to pin down the elusive aesthetic of a legend as well as present some examinations of an occasionally off-Dylan in the 80s. It concludes with a sing-along of "I Will be Released," which is both endearing and a bit hard to watch. What the participants don't lack is enthusiasm and, in some cases, bold insights into the language of Dylan. The irony, of course, is trying to package, in the university, talks on such a character. These discussions and talks, as well as these sing-a- longs in all their vulnerable glory, should happen in smoky bars and at late night parties when everyone is feeling quite mellow. So, the medium is a bit forced and a bit awkward, but the intention is true. And for any Dylan fan, the enjoyment is real. At about 90 minutes, this video is certainly worth a watch if Dylan lyrics have been spinning through your head most of your life.
Dave and I saw Dylan here in New Orleans right after he turned 70, and the concert he gave was the liveliest I've ever seen him. So, enjoy PennSound's Dylan Symposium:


http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/multimedia/tv/reruns/watch/119028

Live Painting and Poetry at the Healing Center: Saturday, Oct. 22

Fatoush Restaurant, Coffee Shop, and Juice Bar in the Healing Center, (at St. Claude and St. Roch) hosts a live painting and poetry reading this Saturday, October 22 at 6PM.

Painter and Poet Herbert Kearney will be putting the finishing touches on the wall mural: "All Mothers are Boats" which is the image on the cover of Dr. Jerry Ward's The Katrina Papers (UNO Press). Dr. Ward will read from his book as Kearney paints. Kearney and Poet Megan Burns (yep, that's me) will read from their water healing collaboration poem written and first performed at 17 Poets! in March 2011. Dave Brinks will also read and there will be music from John Spuzzillo.

Please join us for a tribute to water and healing in the aptly named Healing Center.

                                                              Artist Herbert Kearney

The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery by Dr. Jerry Ward, Jr. 

Dr. Jerry Ward

Thursday, Oct. 20: 17 Poets! Dara Wier, Jen Tynes and Jen Denrow

This Thursday, 17 Poets! welcomes back fantastic poet Dara Wier. There is a beautiful interview with Dara by Cynthia Arrieu-King in the (old layout) Jacket Magazine (2010). Dara says: "Imagination is something that you’re supposedly able to own yourself. It’s your imagination. If anybody starts telling you what you should be imagining or what would be appropriate or good or just to imagine, or necessary or required to imagine, you better be suspicious of that."

Excellent advice. And she will probably be laying so more wisdom pearls out among her wonderful verse, so don't miss her.

Also, super excited to have first-time-with-us readers Jen Tynes and Jen Denrow both of Horse Less Press. Here's a great interview with Jen Tynes from over at the infamous rob mclennan blog. Horse Less press not only puts out a wonderful review in .pdf format for your viewing pleasure stocked full of amazing poets but they just recently started publishing full length books including Richard Froude's Fabric, which I reviewed over at Tarpaulin Sky. 2012 books include: Daniela Olszewska’s cloudfang : : cake dirt  and Kate Schapira’s The Soft Place.

Jen Denrow has a great interview here with Thermos about the publication of her first book, California (Four Way Books). 

I'm super excited about this line up this Thursday at 8:00 (www.17poets.com). 

These poets are gonna rock your world. 

Free Speech Orchestra at 17 Poets!, Oct. 13th

This coming Thursday, October 13, 7:30pm will be a very special evening indeed for 17 Poets! Literary & Performance Series at the Gold Mine Saloon, 701 Dauphine.

It's been a long time coming.

After several years of hiatus, THE FREE SPEECH ORCHESTRA is returning.

Join us for this inaugural event.

This edition of The Free Speech Orchestra will feature a Jazz Poetry Session celebrating the Living Memory of our co-founder and spiritual mentor, New Orleans flute player ELUARD A. BURT II (Feb. 15, 1937 - Aug. 5, 2007).

This performance will feature musicians and poets:

Mike Mito-reeds

John Spuzillo-percussion

Marcus Bronson-bass

Jonathan Warren-flute

Felice Guimont-poet

Lee Meitzen Grue-poet

Moose Jackson-poet

Dave Brinks-poet

As always, our feature will be followed by OPEN MIC hosted by Jimmy Ross (Sign-Up for Open Mic begins at 7:30pm).

GOLD MINE SALOON

701 Dauphine Street

Thursday, October 13, 2011

7:30pm

A Brief History of THE FREE SPEECH ORCHESTRA

The Free Speech Orchestra was co-founded by Eluard Burt and Dave Brinks in 1997. It's primary mission is to provide an improvisatory, synergetic space for musicians and poets to collaborate and explore side-by-side the cultural spirit & essence of the New Orleans' community through Jazz and Poetry.

Every performance by The Free Speech Orchestra is unique since the founding vision is to represent a rotating group of musicians and poets at various venues throughout the city, thus providing an opportunity for all to participate and contribute their dear gifts, talents, and passions in celebration of the New Orleans community.

A brief list of musicians and poets featured over the years includes: co-founder Eluard Burt-flute, Harry Sterling-guitar, Roger Poche-bass, Uganda-pecussion, Richard Theodore-bass clarinet, Hart McNee-bass flute, Earle Brown-tenor sax, Kevin O'Day-percussion, Michael Skinkus-percussion, Kufaro-percussion, John Sinclair-poet,Yolanda Harris-poet, Felice Guimont-poet, Valentine Pierce-poet,

Dennis Formento-poet, Paul Chasse-poet, Tom LeBlanc-poet, and co-founder Dave Brinks-poet.

(from lft to rt) Eluard A. Burt II, Tom LeBlanc, Valentine Pierce

FOR MORE INFO:

www.17poets.com

Chapbooks: Collection Tales

The photo on the left is a small collection of chaps that I've amassed over the last two months. About a dozen of them are DUSIE Kollectiv chaps mailed to me from people all over the country who were generous enough to mail their handmade chaps. There are about a dozen Belldonna series chaps in there as well. The photo below is a chap I received in the mail last week from Deborah Poe. I love how the postcard matches the chap, so they got a shot together. 

I tell you these things because all of those chaps on the left were on my desk and my husband somehow managed to spill an entire cup of coffee on my desk-- an entire freshly poured cup, my friends.

In some kind of chapbook miracle, only one chap actually was dripping. There were a handful of other items covered in coffee, including by some weird karmic fate Dave's forthcoming manuscript from Black Widow Press. 

So, the chap below is the one that got the coffee. It's called Turning 25 by Chantel Langlinais from poet Marthe Reed's small press  Nous-Zot. In an interesting turn of events, it created this abstract fade throughout the book. It almost looks like the rib cage of the book is now peeking through, and in an eerie coincidence the subject of the book is death and loss. Formally, the author pares down and extracts from poems, pulling the bones out as it were and then rearranging them so we get these sifted bits that in turn create new poems, albeit sparser echoes of their originals. From the introduction, the author states: "For each text, I turned the book to page twenty-five. The title of each poem corresponds to the 2nd and 5th word that appears on that page, and the poems are created from the words that fall down the left-hand side." Each poem has its own title and then beneath it says to "the poet" from whom the words are borrowed.

Here's a beautiful example from a Plath poem:

Years Familiar


 to Plath


twenty years bred water
waiting in the authentic
fantastic
we waver from ever

the shape intrudes
is closed
is glittering

yet the fabrication is such
that each day disguises many greens
sprouting

like icebergs
on arms that navigate
breaking us
among sacred shatters




I'm a big fan of borrowing as it were and rearranging. I think what we do as poets is see well and "see well again" how to shape and reshape words. I think words work in one poem in one particular way, but the amazing thing about them is that you can try them on and roll them out like your own little dough and then they fit you too. In this chapbook, Langlinais looks at not just poems, but the poems  that have shaped her writing. She fits them on to her grief, to her loss, to her sense of how forms change as we change in the world. It turns out that what you need you have and yet you have to take it and make it your own. I'm awed that a book about borrowing and taking then took a bit of the liquid magic that fuels my every morning and made it work as well. It made me look between stains at each word more closely; life is strange.

Little Red Leaves: Textile Series, Edited by Dawn Pendergast

Dawn Pendegast sent me these chapbooks a few weeks ago in the mail to review. I am blown away by how lovely they are and just wanted to take a moment to show some images from the books. This first one is A Reduction by Jimmy Lo.



























This is an interior shot of the text of Dawn Pendergast's chap Leavesfallleaves made with the
Dusie Kollectiv chapbook series.

This is an interior shot of the images and text in Lucky by Mairead Byrne with illustrations by Abigail Lingford. 

This is an exterior shot of all three showing their textile sewn exteriors. 

For the full review please visit Galatea Resurrects here.


You can get your own Textile Series chaps here.

Break

Thinking about the eye tooth
the first break
the song before
emerging

Poetry Buffet Reading: Joel Dailey, Brett Evans, and Murray Shugars

Here's a poem from Joel Dailey who read yesterday at the Poetry Buffet held every first Saturday of the month at the Latter Library. Joel Dailey publishes the infamous Fell Swoop Journal in old school pseudo-mimeograph style. He has a new chapbook Surprised by French Fries, (Ugly Duckling Presse) that gets a review in the October issue of Entrepot. When Joel is not trying to spread internet viruses in order to shut down social networks, he can be found  giving a poetry reading every five years before bursting into flames. As I can't even find a picture of Joel Dailey on the internetz, I'm not really sure he exists. His daughter has been babysitting our 3 kids for about 8 years now, so I forgive him all proclivities.








Joining Mr. Dailey was poet Brett Evans who let me run off with a copy of his Pisa Can 74 (Fell Swoop, #109). Basically, as Evans describes, it's a shucking away of the interior guts of the Pisan Cantos (by Pound, do I need to say that?) as one would a mirliton in order to stuff it with delicious seafoody centers. In this case, the seafood stuffing is a mix of New Orleans history, tragedy, obscure references a la Poundian influence and a bit of raunchy flair as in the opening line:
"symbols and tits/ enormous tragedy of the wild country dream/ punc'd by Milano heels/ heels to the ceiling/ where in history's hide and seek/ will you find it?"

I love the dovetailing of the New Orleans imagery:

"lunch of: po-boy paper spread
 on flipped lid  
 
                                   Of the pick-up truck
                     tailgating with platonic oysters
                       soldiers taking their clothes off
                            Quick n Dirty boat building content"

Covers done by the amazing collagist, Tracey McTague. Let's hope this series continues, and I'd like to see the various New Orleans dialects and spoken languages creep in about the edges as well. Evans is also hard at work on a never ending project about how much he loves this American Life.

You can catch both Brett Evans and Tracey McTague reading a new collaboration they wrote this summer at 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series, October 27th along with features Lewis Warsh and Marilyn Kallet.



(Brett reading at 17 Poets, 2004)


Rounding out the Poetry Buffet offering yesterday, Vicksburg poet Murray Shugars reading from his book, Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (Dos Madres Press). He will be reading at the Maple Leaf today. Host of the Poetry Buffet,  Gina Ferrara is a big fan of Shugars' collection and brought him to New Orleans to share his work with us. Be sure to check out November's Poetry Buffet on the first Saturday, Nov. 5th with special guest host Jonathan Kline.

Gina Ferrara will be over at the Healing Center signing books as part of the annual Ladyfest New Orleans along with poets Lee Meitzen Grue and Valentine Pierce at the new Maple Street Bookstore Branch in the Healing Center 11-2pm.

Reviews, Chapbooks, Readings, and Book Prizes

My review of Kate Eichhorn's Fieldnotes, a forensic is in the new issue of Rain Taxi (Fall 2011).

I've been ecstatic about receiving in packages of two or three a day a collection of Dusie Kollective Chaps. The author's have been so generous, and I love their notes as much as I do their willingness to share their chapbooks with me. I'm having to collect all the notes, chaps and envelopes together, so I can keep them as I discovered them from the mailbox.

Black Widow press has just released Niyi Osundare's City Without People, and I have been reading and rereading it for an upcoming review in October's issue of Entrepôt.

We also had a wonderful reading by Louisiana Poet Laureate Julie Kane last night at 17 Poets! She read a beautiful crown of sonnets (sonnet corona) for artist and coffee shop owner Bob Borsodi. He was quite a remarkable person, and Nathaniel Turner has a wonderful collection of tributes to him here.  

Trembling Pillow Press has just opened its first Bob Kaufman Book Prize in poetry. Submissions are open now through Nov. 15th with judge poet Bernadette Mayer. You can find out more and enter here.