2.15.2007
2.12.2007
2.09.2007
Daniel Bouchard
The Filaments, Zasterle, 2006
settings, subjects and objects -- Bouchard creates a movement of thought using these -- "wrappers that clung once to things" -- he is of a long tradition of poets who use a poem as occasion to scan the horizon for clues -- to note his perceptions as though they were simply in among the elements in a landscape exuding information.
somber -- restrained -- meditative -- if you think these poems are "boring" you're missing it. gradual extrapolation from the poem's details -- subdued, subtle…
environment and memory -- birds, garbage, buildings, so much of the content pivoting around ordinary (read -- real) detail of what you see walking down the street (people are objects too- in the Olson sense) or what you see out the window -- and these come into regular collision with the news -- that other window.
"now the colored cross-hatching in a comic strip / deepens the blunt amazement / at the resistance and revenge / of the nation's most nefarious / and villainous administration. / bad guys engaged in monologue heave / a garbage truck into the crowd"
the poetry of evacuated public squares (Lowell? ) "tow trucks drag their victims" sometimes deadpan humor -- static energy ala static electricity -- "let nature be your creative writing instructor"
an account of a rainstorm is also a poetics
A distancing effect throughout.
Public policy colliding with the kitchen table. a chronicler of civic surfaces and statues, traffic, advertisement, ballpark lights, forsythia…
The fiercely mundane details that are not focus-group tested -- "I am he who ate Easter dinner / with family at his sister's house / waking up on the fold-out couch / with his wife, playing with our nephews"
The energy occasionally too comfortable, occasionally too cautious? Needs more dynamic variation?
The trustworthiness ratio of the observation and detailing is very high throughout the book- the consistent, carefully balanced proportions of the lines -- stalwart New Englander!
"The beginning whisper of crickets / could be rain hitting the street / softly, so soft, the slightest change / will give it away, and it's only / my mind making meaning from sound / not the rain I want to come. "
The Filaments, Zasterle, 2006
settings, subjects and objects -- Bouchard creates a movement of thought using these -- "wrappers that clung once to things" -- he is of a long tradition of poets who use a poem as occasion to scan the horizon for clues -- to note his perceptions as though they were simply in among the elements in a landscape exuding information.
somber -- restrained -- meditative -- if you think these poems are "boring" you're missing it. gradual extrapolation from the poem's details -- subdued, subtle…
environment and memory -- birds, garbage, buildings, so much of the content pivoting around ordinary (read -- real) detail of what you see walking down the street (people are objects too- in the Olson sense) or what you see out the window -- and these come into regular collision with the news -- that other window.
"now the colored cross-hatching in a comic strip / deepens the blunt amazement / at the resistance and revenge / of the nation's most nefarious / and villainous administration. / bad guys engaged in monologue heave / a garbage truck into the crowd"
the poetry of evacuated public squares (Lowell? ) "tow trucks drag their victims" sometimes deadpan humor -- static energy ala static electricity -- "let nature be your creative writing instructor"
an account of a rainstorm is also a poetics
A distancing effect throughout.
Public policy colliding with the kitchen table. a chronicler of civic surfaces and statues, traffic, advertisement, ballpark lights, forsythia…
The fiercely mundane details that are not focus-group tested -- "I am he who ate Easter dinner / with family at his sister's house / waking up on the fold-out couch / with his wife, playing with our nephews"
The energy occasionally too comfortable, occasionally too cautious? Needs more dynamic variation?
The trustworthiness ratio of the observation and detailing is very high throughout the book- the consistent, carefully balanced proportions of the lines -- stalwart New Englander!
"The beginning whisper of crickets / could be rain hitting the street / softly, so soft, the slightest change / will give it away, and it's only / my mind making meaning from sound / not the rain I want to come. "
2.06.2007
1.30.2007
William Logan on Hart Crane. At least Logan's given up the pretense of literary criticism for the most part, and is openly focused on trying to police poetry that shows signs of not being lifeless. He also mixes that move with judgmental bitching about Crane's behavior. How is it that the Book Review can allow such poor journalism with poetry?
Then again, some poets who aren't inherently invested in inertia can also be a little too comfortable with the policing-type roles of criticism a little closer to home, so I guess I shouldn't single out the Times.
Then again, some poets who aren't inherently invested in inertia can also be a little too comfortable with the policing-type roles of criticism a little closer to home, so I guess I shouldn't single out the Times.
1.28.2007
It's always impressive to see a reader who has the power to reconsider something.
Williamson on Boyer.
Williamson on Boyer.
1.26.2007
next up was Saturday's Roberto Harrison and Tina Darragh reading, Segue series at BPC
Roberto Harrison
private world colliding with poetic connotation-- ambient, undeniable and highly present. ancient voicings / time travel / evenly distributed vocabulary valences and nuanced control of craft -- pleasure in the recombinations of vocabulary /
immediate attention and speculative imagination intertwine, fuse and come into conflict.
"to heal a body's cage"
intense, private, insular, richly elemental
"the radio has its home in the ice"
mandan
Counter Daemons
Tina Darragh
questions of hybrid authorship and of our relation to animals and rights
partial authors
No Rights Reserved -- Darragh encouraged everyone to steal the poetry she read.
Opposable Dumbs
"Field animals have no language, only evolution."
"We were thinking of building where animals were butchered."
"Animals as trademarks are outside of history."
Roberto Harrison
private world colliding with poetic connotation-- ambient, undeniable and highly present. ancient voicings / time travel / evenly distributed vocabulary valences and nuanced control of craft -- pleasure in the recombinations of vocabulary /
immediate attention and speculative imagination intertwine, fuse and come into conflict.
"to heal a body's cage"
intense, private, insular, richly elemental
"the radio has its home in the ice"
mandan
Counter Daemons
Tina Darragh
questions of hybrid authorship and of our relation to animals and rights
partial authors
No Rights Reserved -- Darragh encouraged everyone to steal the poetry she read.
Opposable Dumbs
"Field animals have no language, only evolution."
"We were thinking of building where animals were butchered."
"Animals as trademarks are outside of history."
1.24.2007
An action-packed weekend started Friday at The Vision Dance Music Series to check out Yessified: Sally Silvers (dance), Bruce Andrews (words) Julie Patton (words) and Henry Grimes (violin and bass). Vision Festival events tend to be vigorous re-creations of free jazz in the late 60s style, while occasionally throwing in dance or poetry. This Dance Series variation mixes dance with free jazz players as the theme of the series. The line-up in Yessified worked well. The arrangement basically had all four participants performing in the equivalent of four separate tracks, doing what they wanted to do, interacting when they wanted to interact and leaving room for others as they saw fit.
I tend to find Bruce Andrews' performances in ensembles to be the most interesting of what he does. Andrews was seated at a desk on the left side of the stage like a news caster. He read short word sequences and statements from index cards (which he is know for writing on during readings), flipping through with some degree of improvisation, and leaving spaces in between which opened up the cognitive space in the overall sound field, and made room for the rest of the ensemble. Subtraction is something I'm always looking for in collective performance, and one of my favorite moments with Andrews was during a brief duo interlude with Grimes on bass. As with almost everything during this half-hour performance, the feeling of balance, forward momentum, and transitioning just completely worked, with the power-sharing between tension and relaxation kept constantly in flux. The vocabulary Andrews was using leaned toward racial themes, for instance, "Do white racists call other white people racist?" The complete sentences tend to stand out more in memory, extending as they do from the more textural aggregation of short word combos and noun phrases: "You don't trust people and so you try to control them and push them away."
Julie Patton, with sparkly upturned hair that looking like a sentient underwater plant, moved around on stage and interacted directly and with a certain amount of playfulness with Silvers' dancing. She was in top form here, shifting seamlessly between set poetic materials and on-the-spot invention and response. Much of her singing was locked into what Grimes was doing on bass.
Though it's always best to see free jazz players live, it still isn't much to look at. That's where Silvers comes in, really seeming like a band leader as dancer. She kept away from anything show-offy, and, like Andrews, left spaces in where she would stop and just sit in a chair, letting the other members of the group have it for a moment. Silvers is a dancer that you can really see making decisions on stage, and there's a certain feeling of freedom that this creates.
Henry Grimes is an incredible bass player who can play the entire history of the jazz bass in a single performance. His recording career goes back to the late 50s, and he's played with Sonny Rollins, Lennie Tristano, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk, etc. etc. Sporting a bright red Olivia Newton John style terrycloth headband, he began the set doubling on violin. His bass playing was the glue that held the group together: supportive, energizing and flexible. Those are, after all the traditional values of the jazz bass and they're values he totally epitomized with this performance.
I tend to find Bruce Andrews' performances in ensembles to be the most interesting of what he does. Andrews was seated at a desk on the left side of the stage like a news caster. He read short word sequences and statements from index cards (which he is know for writing on during readings), flipping through with some degree of improvisation, and leaving spaces in between which opened up the cognitive space in the overall sound field, and made room for the rest of the ensemble. Subtraction is something I'm always looking for in collective performance, and one of my favorite moments with Andrews was during a brief duo interlude with Grimes on bass. As with almost everything during this half-hour performance, the feeling of balance, forward momentum, and transitioning just completely worked, with the power-sharing between tension and relaxation kept constantly in flux. The vocabulary Andrews was using leaned toward racial themes, for instance, "Do white racists call other white people racist?" The complete sentences tend to stand out more in memory, extending as they do from the more textural aggregation of short word combos and noun phrases: "You don't trust people and so you try to control them and push them away."
Julie Patton, with sparkly upturned hair that looking like a sentient underwater plant, moved around on stage and interacted directly and with a certain amount of playfulness with Silvers' dancing. She was in top form here, shifting seamlessly between set poetic materials and on-the-spot invention and response. Much of her singing was locked into what Grimes was doing on bass.
Though it's always best to see free jazz players live, it still isn't much to look at. That's where Silvers comes in, really seeming like a band leader as dancer. She kept away from anything show-offy, and, like Andrews, left spaces in where she would stop and just sit in a chair, letting the other members of the group have it for a moment. Silvers is a dancer that you can really see making decisions on stage, and there's a certain feeling of freedom that this creates.
Henry Grimes is an incredible bass player who can play the entire history of the jazz bass in a single performance. His recording career goes back to the late 50s, and he's played with Sonny Rollins, Lennie Tristano, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk, etc. etc. Sporting a bright red Olivia Newton John style terrycloth headband, he began the set doubling on violin. His bass playing was the glue that held the group together: supportive, energizing and flexible. Those are, after all the traditional values of the jazz bass and they're values he totally epitomized with this performance.
1.23.2007
1.15.2007
On MLK day, I always put on the first track of Max Roach's Chattahoochee Red LP, The Dream / It's Time with Roach soloing with the Martin Luther King speech. What I love about this piece is that the soloing doesn't sound like a jazz musician riffing off the speech rhythms -- it sounds like Roach is manifesting the energy of listening to King.
1.14.2007
Frank Sherlock and Mark Lamoureux, Segue series at BPC, 1.13.07
Mark Lamoureux
Sifting baroquely through memory details and displaced descriptive riffs.
Lamoureux had an uncomfortable David Byrne-like stage presence, and a discomfort in the poetry too, so we get the alternate universe of response that springs from it. God knows there's plenty to be uncomfortable about, and though I haven't seen this work on the page, I get the sense that the war in Iraq and the nature of the present administration is never too far from it's concerns - and this set of discomforts mixes in interesting ways with other kinds of discomforts.
Lamoureux deployed sequences of vaguely political, graceful obscuritanistism which would sometimes be punctuated with humor and condense into something more solid: "A kind of gooey equity goes for a motherfucker's eyes."
In general he has a tendency to favor an emergent-type of vocabulary use, where the vocabulary tends to opt for the more obscure terms.
Sometimes pushing a fantasy-like vibe: "The master is a haughty buccaneer among scribes"
Frank Sherlock.
Sherlock read a long, highly engaging collaborative poem written with Brett Evans. About New Orleans/Katrina.
Interesting pairing - where Lamoureux moved in evocative socially retreating complexities, Sherlock investigated layers of social interaction and context that he intentionally complicated.
Once the context is established this way, abstraction is minimized, because anything you hear will be applied to what you know about Katrina.
Strong, niorish George Carlin-like delivery, and a good use of humor.
Too many memorable lines to quote, but here are a few:
"The suicide hotline goes to Bollywood"
"Tonight doesn't make sense, but don't steal my salad then tell be you don't eat vegetables.
"A flaming turkey-toss over a football field."
"Bioremediation is a trombone slide."
"Let the Shiite hit the fan."
"I'm hot for reaper."
"I need to have a conversation with the moon."
Mark Lamoureux
Sifting baroquely through memory details and displaced descriptive riffs.
Lamoureux had an uncomfortable David Byrne-like stage presence, and a discomfort in the poetry too, so we get the alternate universe of response that springs from it. God knows there's plenty to be uncomfortable about, and though I haven't seen this work on the page, I get the sense that the war in Iraq and the nature of the present administration is never too far from it's concerns - and this set of discomforts mixes in interesting ways with other kinds of discomforts.
Lamoureux deployed sequences of vaguely political, graceful obscuritanistism which would sometimes be punctuated with humor and condense into something more solid: "A kind of gooey equity goes for a motherfucker's eyes."
In general he has a tendency to favor an emergent-type of vocabulary use, where the vocabulary tends to opt for the more obscure terms.
Sometimes pushing a fantasy-like vibe: "The master is a haughty buccaneer among scribes"
Frank Sherlock.
Sherlock read a long, highly engaging collaborative poem written with Brett Evans. About New Orleans/Katrina.
Interesting pairing - where Lamoureux moved in evocative socially retreating complexities, Sherlock investigated layers of social interaction and context that he intentionally complicated.
Once the context is established this way, abstraction is minimized, because anything you hear will be applied to what you know about Katrina.
Strong, niorish George Carlin-like delivery, and a good use of humor.
Too many memorable lines to quote, but here are a few:
"The suicide hotline goes to Bollywood"
"Tonight doesn't make sense, but don't steal my salad then tell be you don't eat vegetables.
"A flaming turkey-toss over a football field."
"Bioremediation is a trombone slide."
"Let the Shiite hit the fan."
"I'm hot for reaper."
"I need to have a conversation with the moon."
1.05.2007
12.20.2006
12.17.2006
12.15.2006
12.11.2006
I used to think of sampling as a relatively recent human musical phenomenon.
I've recently learned from The Life of Birds that it is neither recent or exclusively human.
The Lyrebird is the original sampler.
I've recently learned from The Life of Birds that it is neither recent or exclusively human.
The Lyrebird is the original sampler.
12.08.2006
Kristin Prevallet and Taylor Brady
Segue Series @ BPC, 12.2.06, NYC
Taylor Brady
Brady read from Occupational Treatment
Treatment as in film treatment -- the sections he read from were like a multiple camera shoot hovering at the permanent circumference of a string of settings, issues, questions. Some of the freedom of voicing here I might associate with say, Will Alexander, but minus the mystic intonation, and with very different selections of material, repetitions and social contexts invoked. Brady focuses on the details and architecture of an environment and the mental space of a reading practice and a question of memory was continually superimposed on it. He follows unusual logic riffs and more often than not gets them off the ground. The overall fictional/poetic space could vary its comfortably between effects one could liken to Goddard, Leslie Scalapino and Dave Burrell by turns. Thought-provoking smart writing.
There's a strong gnomic impulse operating below the surface and it occasionally bubbles over: "he was haptic as money," "misunderstanding is a signal fire," "understanding is stupid, let's bleed"
This writing invites you to root around in it's materials, even as a listener.
Like a sequence of reshuffled visual-sestinas with images stretched out and repeating.
Repeated terms: money, face, eyes, porn, love, hand -- these build into a kind of harmonic / thematic fabric.
"Now the territory is a hole in us"
"water is stupid"
deliberately, patiently crafted environment / fiction / mediation / essay / poem
Looking forward to reading through the whole book now.
Kristin Prevallet
Compelling well-paced opening sequence involving cybernetics and surveillance.
"What can be separated from my immediate fear"
This series voiced almost like the notes of a FBI agent against a poet.
"Something is written by one person that is crossed out by another"
Moving beyond the image to the intensions behind it
dramatic fssssst sound between stanzas
"annoying as anti-everything"
"remember when we hadn't yet been told to return to normal?"
Prevallet closed with a hilarious film/poem of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner which dated from her Buffalo college days and stared Taylor Brady.
Prevallet in introducing the film: "Romanticism was a rhetorical gesture there"
Brady deadpanning: "I fear you, Ancient Mariner!"
Addressing an interpretation of materials, and in a fairly straight-forward way, the question of what the hell does this poem have to do with me living as a student in Buffalo NY right now. More an attenuated poetic gesture than a movie exactly, certainly an interesting engagement with the question of activation of text / history and setting. I always like it when poets change up their presentation and take some risks.
Segue Series @ BPC, 12.2.06, NYC
Taylor Brady
Brady read from Occupational Treatment
Treatment as in film treatment -- the sections he read from were like a multiple camera shoot hovering at the permanent circumference of a string of settings, issues, questions. Some of the freedom of voicing here I might associate with say, Will Alexander, but minus the mystic intonation, and with very different selections of material, repetitions and social contexts invoked. Brady focuses on the details and architecture of an environment and the mental space of a reading practice and a question of memory was continually superimposed on it. He follows unusual logic riffs and more often than not gets them off the ground. The overall fictional/poetic space could vary its comfortably between effects one could liken to Goddard, Leslie Scalapino and Dave Burrell by turns. Thought-provoking smart writing.
There's a strong gnomic impulse operating below the surface and it occasionally bubbles over: "he was haptic as money," "misunderstanding is a signal fire," "understanding is stupid, let's bleed"
This writing invites you to root around in it's materials, even as a listener.
Like a sequence of reshuffled visual-sestinas with images stretched out and repeating.
Repeated terms: money, face, eyes, porn, love, hand -- these build into a kind of harmonic / thematic fabric.
"Now the territory is a hole in us"
"water is stupid"
deliberately, patiently crafted environment / fiction / mediation / essay / poem
Looking forward to reading through the whole book now.
Kristin Prevallet
Compelling well-paced opening sequence involving cybernetics and surveillance.
"What can be separated from my immediate fear"
This series voiced almost like the notes of a FBI agent against a poet.
"Something is written by one person that is crossed out by another"
Moving beyond the image to the intensions behind it
dramatic fssssst sound between stanzas
"annoying as anti-everything"
"remember when we hadn't yet been told to return to normal?"
Prevallet closed with a hilarious film/poem of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner which dated from her Buffalo college days and stared Taylor Brady.
Prevallet in introducing the film: "Romanticism was a rhetorical gesture there"
Brady deadpanning: "I fear you, Ancient Mariner!"
Addressing an interpretation of materials, and in a fairly straight-forward way, the question of what the hell does this poem have to do with me living as a student in Buffalo NY right now. More an attenuated poetic gesture than a movie exactly, certainly an interesting engagement with the question of activation of text / history and setting. I always like it when poets change up their presentation and take some risks.
11.30.2006
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