Two New Anthologies of Innovative Writing & Language Art

As chance would have it, I received yesterday in the mail contributor copies of two note-worthy anthologies: THE &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing, ed. Davis Schneiderman (&NOW Books, 2013) and THE DARK WOULD: Anthology of Language Art, ed. Philip Davenport (Apple Pie Editions [UK], 2013). Both were cramped, incredibly, like two contortionists, into my tiny New York apartment mailbox. Luckily the covers weren’t terribly bent.

THE DARK WOULD, the white book on the left, is a gorgeously printed and designed art book. The cover is graced by Márton Koppány’s “The Secret,” an elegantly minimalist concrete poem. This is a description of the anthology from the Apple Pie Editions website:

World-leading text artists and poets are brought together for the first time in this groundbreaking international anthology. Over 100 contributors include Richard Long, Tacita Dean, Shirin Neshat, Tony Lopez, Fiona Banner, Ron Silliman, Erica Baum, Nja Mahdaoui, Simon Patterson, Richard Wentworth, Jenny Holzer, Sarah Sanders, Holly Pester, Nick Blinko, Caroline Bergvall, Tsang Kin Wah, Lawrence Weiner, Rosmarie Waldrop and many more. The book is a gathering of people who use language as their primary material of making, be they artist or poet. It is in two volumes, one paper (300 pages) and the other virtual (1000 plus pages) - contributors have submitted work that meditates on dis/embodiment and the human trace. The anthology is edited by visual poet Philip Davenport, who curated the first posthumous gallery exhibitions of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Bob Cobbing and has helped to curate the UK Text Festival.

The anthology contains a doublespread of pages that come from my most recent book, Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012).
I like how the big letters above can be read across the gutter as the word “NO.”  (In Cutting Time with a Knife, “Carbon” faces “Nitrogen” and “Oxygen” faces “Flourine.”)

THE &NOW AWARDS 2 is a double-sided book with two halves that, as Davis Schneiderman says in his introduction, “mirror each other, except when they do not.” Contributors include David Shields, Craig Dworkin, Joe Atkins, Alexandra Chasin, Jack Collom, Katie Degentesh, Roxane Gay, Jennifer Karmin, Amira Hanafi, Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert, Amelia Gray, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Marcella Durand, Arno Bertina, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Laird Hunt, Evelyn Reilly, Michael Leong, .UNFO, Matt Bell, Bhanu Kapil, Julie Carr, Shome Dasgupta, Jennifer Martenson, Nick Montfort, Don Mee Choi, Sam Cha, Ken Taylor, K. Silem Mohammad, Ben Doller, LaTasha Nevada Diggs, Janice Lee, A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, Jose Perez Beduya, Dimitri Anastasopoulos & Christina Milletti, Gretchen Henderson, Alissa Nutting, Kate Durbin, Raúl Zurita, Urayoán Noel, Sandra Doller, Brian Evenson, Andrew Bergstrom, Parneshia Jones, Andy Devine, Kim Hyesoon, Eleni Sikelianos, Antoine Volodine, Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, Monica Mody, Garrett Ashley, Johannes Göransson, Daniel Levin Becker, Black Took Collective, Kate Bernheimer, Rachel Gontijo Araujo, Lance Phillips, Jesse Ball, Sarah Tourjee, Marc Saaporta, Annam Manthiram, Sawako Nakaysu, J.A. Tyler, J.R. Carpenter, Shane Allison, Amber Sparks, Joyelle McSweeney, John Madera, Nico Vassilakis, Elizabeth Gentry, and Amina Memory Cain & Anna Joy Springer.

This is an image of the front cover, which features an unruly morass of asemic writing:

The book has the first few pages of THE PHILOSOPHY OF DECOMPOSITION / RE-COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION:A POE AND STEIN MASH-UP (Delete Press, 2011), a long poem that was published as a (now out of print) limited edition chapbook; the long poem will form the basis of my next full-length collection.

THE DARK WOULD is currently available from The Knives Forks and Spoons Press.
THE &NOW AWARDS 2: The Best Innovative Writing will be released on May 25.

Thanks to Davis and Philip for the tremendous editorial work.

Perloff, Pound, and Canon Making

I’ve been mulling over Marjorie Perloff’s “Take Five,” a Pound inspired list of “don’ts” that appeared in last month’s issue of Poetry. Overall, I agreed with the spirit of Perloff’s piece and especially liked her second point:

Don’t take yourself so seriously. In the age of  social networks, of endless information and misinformation, “sensitivity” and the “true voice of feeling” have become the most available of commodities. Remember that, as Wallace Stevens put it, “Life is a bitter aspic. We are not / at the centre of a diamond.”

The self-centrism of what Jean Twenge has called “Generation Me” is rampant and surely needs to be addressed. I just submitted my final grades this afternoon and, in reviewing student compositions (in this case, a required review of a poetry reading), I encountered this opening sentence: “I find it very difficult to relate poetry to my everyday life unless I am the author.” Poetry is, of course, an important modality of going beyond the self and a privileged genre for interrogating and exploring the limits of authorship. I hope that these lessons will eventually sink in for this student.

I had considered whether or not to use “Take Five” in a future class or workshop but Perloff’s fifth and final point raised my eyebrow:

Don’t forget that, whether consciously or unconsciously, all poems are written with an eye (and ear) to earlier poetry and that to write poetry at all, one must first read a lot of the stuff. So, at the risk of sounding like a Philistine, I would say put down thy Agamben and pick up thy Auden, thy Ashbery, thy Rae Armantrout. Put down thy Badiou and read Beckett, Bernhard, Bachmann, Bök.

I do appreciate the need and value for a certain kind of prescriptive pendanticism, and I, by and large, find Perloff’s canon to be valuable and exciting; I’ve enthusiastically taught nearly all of the writers that she’s mentioned here. The importance of reading deeply as well as widely, moreover, is a fundamental piece of advice that I constantly bring up in my workshops. But Perloff’s injunction to “put down” certain authors–in this case, continental philosophers–has me wondering about the pedagogical value of such a statement. Why the need to “put down” anything? Perloff’s alliterative quartet of “Beckett, Bernhard, Bachmann, [and] Bök” echoes, whether consciously or unconsciously, Langston Hughes’ famous trio of “Bessie, bop, or Bach.” Why not Badiou, Bök, Bessie, and Bach?

Hughes’ “Theme for English B” offers a great antidote to pedanticism and makes a powerful argument for cultivating a wide range of influences:

I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.

Reading is important here but it is listed among a plethora of activities. And Hughes presents the self in a productive relation to others and envisions authorship as not a smug exercise in myopic individualism but a dialogic intervention within community:

So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.

THE DARK WOULD (Apple Pie Editions, 2013) at the BBC

THE DARK WOULD language art anthology will feature on the BBC literary programme The Verb at 10pm Friday April 19. Listen online to the programme live, or via podcast at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnsf

An excerpt from Cutting Time with a Knife will be in the first volume of the anthology, and some new material that remixes CTwaK into different molecular structures will be in the second volume. I’m happy to be included with many of my favorite writers and artists.

THE DARK WOULD, edited by Philip Davenport, gathers work by over 100 contributors including some of the most noted artists and poets alive today. This is a moment in time when poets and many artists share the same primary material: language. The anthology is split between two volumes – paper and virtual. Many of the works here are in two parts, speaking to one another across the paper/virtual divide, as a metaphor of dis/embodiment, considering time, mortality and human traces in the natural world.

As Editor Philip Davenport writes: “THE DARK WOULD asks what it is to live in a body now, knowing that one day we won’t be here. Perhaps this is best done by people for whom language is itself a state of between-ness. Here is a gathering of artists who use language and poets who are in some wider sense artists.”

Jerry Rothenberg, Rosemarie Waldrop, Tom Phillips, Nja Mahdaoui, Tom Raworth, Paula Claire, Susan Hiller, Robert Grenier, Ed Baker, Lawrence Weiner, John M Bennett, Kay Rosen, Allen Fisher, Richard Long, Ron Silliman, Richard Wentworth, Kevin Austin, Maria Chevska, Alan Halsey, Ken Edwards, Mike Basinski, Charles Bernstein, Jenny Holzer, Hainer Wörmann, Tony Lopez, Fiona Templeton, Maggie O’Sullivan, Geraldine Monk, Márton Koppány, David Annwn, John Plowman, Jesse Glass, Jurgen Olbrich, Liz Collini, Robert Sheppard, Patricia Farrell, Fernando Aguiar, Shirin Neshat, Penelope Umbrico, Gregory Vincent St Thomasino, Anne Charnock, Steve Waling, Robert Fitterman, Michalis Pichler, David Austen, Keiichi Nakamura, Shaun Pickard, Geof Huth, Tony Trehy, Wayne Clements, Peter Jaeger, Eléna Rivera, Kenny Goldsmith, Harald Stoffers, Erica Baum, Nick Blinko, Philip Terry, Caroline Bergvall, Carol Watts, George Widener, Philip Davenport, Nico Vassilakis, Monica Biagioli, Tacita Dean, Jeff Hilson, Alec Finlay, Christian Bök, Fiona Banner , Nigel Wood, Satu Kaikkonen, Simon Patterson, Dave Griffiths, Nayda Collazo Llorens, Vanessa Place, Peter Manson, Andrew Nightingale, Matt Dalby, Steve Miller, Christoph Illing, Sean Burn, Doug Fishbone, arthur+martha, Hung Keung, the gingerbread tree, Brian Reed, Laurence Lane, Tomomo Adachi , Tom Jenks, David Oprava, Scott Thurston, Julian Montague, derek beaulieu, Wang Jun , Mike Chavez-Dawson, Alec Newman, Rick Myers, Andrea Brady, Eric Zboya, Linus Slug, Jeff Grant, Richard Barrett, Christopher Fox, Linus Raudsepp, Carolyn Thompson, Tsang Kin-Wah, Stephen Emmerson, andrew topel, Anatol Knotek, Ola Stahl, Roman Pyrih, Christine Wong Yap, Sarah Sanders, Ying Kwok, Catherine Street, Michael Leong, Sam Winston, angela rawlings, James Davies, Rachel Lois Clapham,  Steve Giasson, Amelia Crouch, Aysegul Torzeren, Jeremy Balius, Emily Crichley, Amaranth Borsuk, Ben Gwilliam , Imri Sandstrom, Sam le Witt, Michael Nardone, Tamarin Norwood, Lucy Harvest Clarke,Jessica Pujol Duran, Holly Pester, Rebecca Cremin, Ryan Ormonde,  Nick Thurston, j/j hastain, Bruno Neiva, SJ Fowler, Alex Davies, Helen Hajnoczky, Samantha Y Huang, Anna Frew, Nat Raha, Jo Langton, Ekaterina Samigulina, Emma King, Leanne Bridgewater and more.

Celebration of Recently Published Faculty Authors

Cutting Time with a Knife will be on display, until the end of the month, in the front lobby of RU’s Alexander Library as part of the tenth annual Recently Published Faculty Authors Exhibition.  Diminutive in size, it’s a bit tucked away behind Anthropology & Political Science and NFL Head Coaches:  A Biographical Dictionary, but Nicholas Krushenick’s yellow, orange, and white on the front cover packs a nice flashy punch.

The Alice Adams Remix Continues…

Week 1 is done…three more to go!

Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams

My appropriation of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams continues.  Here’s an excerpt:

You were hopeful a week ago
that you could make even asperity listen
but realized that,
philosophically, the hothouse of words
is neither a fluffy idealization
nor a dreamed and unfounded drama.
It is a ransacked background
drenched in camellias,
but, as in a great bouquet with no
flowers, the unknown magnifico
may be there.
Sometimes, you said,
you returned to an opened meadow
in which the surcharged moments
were forever a omen of what your rare
and protracted attention would become,
a not wholly recognizable expanse
dreamily groomed in dismaying detail.
It always stems from a transitory meeting
in the way that jazz can produce
intensely sympathetic difficulties
with the introduction of a hearer.

In the white archway of prophecies,
besooted questions dropped
before a tiny shot of blue.

Read the rest here.

Reading Tomorrow

 

Title:Reading by and Discussion with Poet Michael Leong

When: Wednesday, April 3, 2013 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Where: Literary Arts Building, Chelovich Family Lounge
68.5 Brown Street

Description: Michael Leong is the author of two books of poetry: e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions, 2012), which won a “Face Out” grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. He has also published a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX [books], 2009). He is the recipient of a 2012 &NOW Award for his chapbook The Philosophy of Decomposition/Re-Composition as Explanation (Delete Press, 2011), and his newest chapbook, Words on Edge, was chosen by Rob Fitterman as the winner of Plan B Press’ 2012 Poetry Contest. He is a lecturer at Rutgers University where he completed a dissertation on the contemporary long poem and the archive.

http://michaelleong.wordpress.com/

Complimentary sweets, coffee, and tea will be served.

Cost: Free

Contact: Literary Arts Program
401-863-3260

[PERMALINK]