surplus
The Story of My Accident is Ours
Just released by Futurepoem, Rachel Levitskys The Story of My Accident Is Ours blends the novel, essay, and serial form into a rich site for assaying the human social condition. Composed in “chapters” and privileging paragraphs as units of thought, Levitsky writes about (read that as “around,” not “on”) a great Accident in order to explore how social being is contrived and inhabited. Her project reads like a philosophical meditation on public spheres and the body as she seeks to trace how intimacy and self-understanding emerge in our late-State-manufactured context. The philosophical sensibility springs from her coolly detached neutrality and distant standpoint, which allow her to detail the broader machinations of the worlds social structures with a calm, orderly precision: “the State made ecstatic way for the industry and its products, lubricating pipes, opening ports, stimulating sales” (52). This… read the full review »
What It Is Like: New and Selected Poems
Impatience can be a virtue. It has a quickening, comic effect in the poems of Charles North:
Your recent letter is so stupid so utterly moronic its thanks for your letter of January 5th
a little difficult to believe it was
written by a human being let alone someone
who made it past second grade you
miserable bastard do you eat
from a plate
I enjoyed getting it
(“The Postcard Element in Winter”)
North, a philosophy-trained clarinetist, suffers from being labeled a New York School poet, third generation. His poems have the consistency of well-steeped tea, Barrys or Lyons; they are as energizing as coffee, but they stimulate rather than suppress appetite. Reading them, you become hyperaware of whats going on around and inside you, the weather, unspoken feelings, difficulty, and sudden ease:
SONNET
Selected Days
One of the most tricky questions surrounding poetry is one of the most common: “what is this poem about?” While the question seems casual, easya way of filling unoccupied airanswering the question requires a fair amount of precision. Unless the answer has a grasp of the “aboutness” relevant to the poem at hand, the response is apt to be empty and misguided at best. Furthermore, the kind of aboutness that a poem has is fundamental to whether or not the poem is significant, by which I mean how much work it can do in the world and to what end.
In a 2010/2011 lecture available from Omnidawn Press in chapbook form titled The Given & the Chosen, Ann Lauterbach provides a rich response to the question of aboutness: “I might say, in answer to the question, what are your… read the full review »
The Epic Post-Easter Basket
The Epic Post-Easter Basket: The title of none of Joey Yearsus-Algozins works under consideration, all of which may be found here: at the Troll Thread Collective.
Recently, which is where I left my glasses, I wrote a small note for Harriet* about what Ive been reading recently, in which the poetry of Joey Yeasous-Algozin was highlighted. This is what is known as critical cross-pollination. That is to say, in my imagination, the world of poetry is an ever-expanding field, populated by many different kinds of poetry and poetry-lovers, some of whom read here, some of whom read there, all flitting gaily about, dropping names, trailing stingers, and leaving the brightly-colored traces of their readings in the sticky hearts and minds of yet other busy readers. I should also add that in my imagination, the women are all… read the full review »
Okay, Okay
Google as a tool for the making of art has had a separate life from Google as a prosthesis for navigating the world and its culture, the way the pencil has had separate lives in the studio and at the office. Taking up the disinterested Kantian aesthetics of the language poets, Flarf and Conceptualists have made a point of providing results for useless searches—unless you have a rabbit with mange, “rogaine bunny” is not something youd look up to plan a course of action. Diana Hamiltons first book, Okay, Okay (available both for purchase in hard-copy and for free as a pdf from Truck Books), however, asks a serious and painful question: “how to stop crying at work.” This search leads often to the kinds of message board and self-help material that Flarf has been criticized (unfairly,… read the full review »