Speaking of, two packages arrived recently. One from myself and one from my hero, Dr.C.,MD, you may know her as Cookiesforbreakfast. Totally unexpected (the one from me was ordered from UDP so many eons ago, I'd just assumed it lost), and both totally extravagant and rad! So, as I've no news to report beyond the weather and my continuing indecision, I'll just adopt the brilliant MTBE-style book review format to convey the packages' contents' bounteous awesomeness (and - ahem! - get Navel Gazing off the top of the page). OK, here we go:
1) F.R.David - The "Stuff and Nonsense" Issue (Winter 2008), de Appel, Amsterdam. [This one was from C., how did she know that it was totally what I needed right now?]
first line: "Words, Don't come easy."2) Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (UDP, 2009)
last line: "Is GOLDEN!"
first line: "In the winter of 2008, at a launch for The noulipian Analects (C. Wertheim and M. Viegener, eds., Les Figues Press, 2007), Vanessa Place, Anna Moschovakis, and I were engaged in a conversation about the poetics of erasure techniques."3) Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems (UDP, 2007)
last line: "Use them all." [Actually, the last "line" is a page with a dot or period in the center, but that kind of felt like cheating.]
first line: "a man stands"4) Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer, eds., 0 to 9, The Complete Magazine: 1967-1969 (UDP, 2006)
last line: "Gailyn is doing the dishes."
first line: "Not '0 Through 9,' we said to each other, that would subsume us into Jasper Johns; let's call it '0 To 9' instead."5) Aleksandr Skidan, Red Shifting, Genya Turovskaya [et al], trans. (UDP, 2008)
last line: "The tape is still available from The Malabe Co., Inc. but the price has gone up to 14¢ a yard."
first line: "In speaking about 'red shifting' I would not start with the Doppler effect, because it has no room for the word 'red,' just as in subsequent definitions of this physical process, be it cosmological, mathematical, or poetic."*Those should be triangley brackets, but those doesn't show up in web browsers...
last line: "knives {and}"*
Bonus #1: I uploaded the editorial intro from F.R.David, cause it was just so gosh-darned right about everything. (It's about how art is not about communicating things. To which I say, YES!)
Bonus #2: Here are some of the Saroyan poems:
COUPON--
Coupons are the brightest yellowest
Reddest headiest delights on the face of the earth!
PLACID TEAS--
The creammade an "e"in the tea.
SONG--
My father's my father's,
My mother's my mother's,
My sister's my sister's,
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm.
It may--
be the
coffee-
maker
Or it
may be
the ra-
diator.
I see--
this
little
and
even
less.
JULY
It'll hit you you in July.
5 comments:
these poems are SO up my alley. I love the coffeemaker/radiator one. Awesome. I'm getting me some Saroyan.
I KNOW! Here's another good one:
Poem Recognizing Someone In The Street
e y ? h
e ? h e
h e y !
ps - and yes, no matter what you do, things will be fine and your adventures will continue.
i miss you bunches, though! and sometimes change is good; it makes you face the crazy (and makes you go a little crazy) and thus forces you to figure stuff out.
Funny, the radiator one was my fave too, though I also really like the meeting someone in the street one.
How are you feeling about the Skidan poems? He was recently saying reasonable things on Grundrisse (a rare occurrence there :)), but I've never read his poetry.
Thanks, CB! I miss you too, but never fear, I'm hatching plans and will try to come up your way in August.
KG - I am, I admit, a total neophyte to poetry. The Skidan is difficult, but there are things I like about him. Mostly, right now, the images. (There are, no doubt, a million references that sail by without my noticing at all!) I'm going to email you some, so you can see for yourself.
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