My lord, you simply must have a look at—and a listen to—this. Way to go, Tony!

It is of course possible to be both ABD and a broken man. Still in recovery, but stay tuned.

A few changes to the links at right are visible. Adieu, Howard. Hello, John. I will probably never be as excited about you as I was about the Mad Doctor, but you've got to bring the one who knows how to dance.

I'm also extending a warm welcome to Aaron McCullough.

And I will remind you that I'm reading at the Ear Inn this Saturday at 3 PM. Details are available by clicking here.

S + 7

Allegro

But

Dissymmetry

My orals are this afternoon. When next I blog again I'll be ABD or a broken man. See you then!

Okay, you're probably sick of hearing about the damn review by now, but you can finally read it online as a PDF right here or at Barrow Street.

Finally got my hands on an actual live copy of Time Out New York today. The review is blue! Page 74.

I am increasingly impressed by the nuanced and thoughtful writing being done over at Gary Norris' Dagzine. Some of the same issues that have concerned me in recent weeks, especially the role of the market in poetry publishing, the latter being a category he emphatically wants to expand to include blogging and other non-print means of publication. He also dismantles the Jeff Menne review of Richard Greenfield's book that I called your attention to yesterday. Gary's perceptions are razor sharp, though I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions. I think Menne's attempts to "place" Richard are well-intentioned and preferable to the style of reviews (such as those common to Poetry) which simply assume in an un- or underspoken way both the book's place in an (invariably hierarchical) tradition, not to mention the reviewer's authority to define that tradition. Perhaps as usual the solution must be a dialectical one, in which the reviewer practices a kind of "full disclosure" of both the book's and his or her own relation to the larger poetry world as they understand it, without (this is the tricky bit) allowing that triangulation to dominate their reading of the text. This requires, among other faculties, a sense for the ways in which texts (I would almost say this is the baseline requirement for "good" writing) resist being so triangulated.

It's a lot to ask from a reviewer, which is one reason I've resisted taking up that task in a formal way. Which of course shows how I've come to understand the blog, or at any rate this blog, as a constitutionally informal space. Other poetics blogs with a more formal edge (I'm referring of course to Ron) come under attack on a fairly regular basis I think in large part because they offend other bloggers' sense that blogging shouldn't be taken too seriously. That's a mistake. Blogging like any other medium or form carries with it certain guiding connotations, just as the sonnet carries with it connotations of argument and erotic pursuit, whatever its actualy content. There is a dailiness to blogging in its purest form that mitigates against its being an ideal transmitter of "finished" wriiting—but that doesn't keep Ron and now, I think, Gary from using it that way, and using it very effectively. Myself, I think I will stick to what you might call advanced blurbing—little linguistic snapshots which will, I hope, provoke a few of my readers to buy them. I don't plan on blurbing books I don't like—that's why I call it blurbing. Almost a homonym for blogging, blurbing is a much-despised medium (the review of Selah this week begins with a complaint about blurbs). But a really good blurb is ideally situated to do the kind of work I think is demanded of the reviewer: the name of the blurber commences the act of triangulation, while the text provides an (never the) entryway into the book being blurbed. And sheer proximity (by being on the back cover of the book in question) both demystifies the "objectivity" claimed by the Poetry-style reviewer and also prevents the blurbist's take on the book from reifying the book itself—because the book is right there to be opened and read. Of course the blurbs I do here won't enjoy this advantage; the best I can do is link to where you can buy the book in question. Which is what I and all blurbists want: for my readers to support the poetry that I find exciting and necessary.

Please read this insightful review of Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees, brought to my attention by New-Brutalist-in-Chief James Meetze by way of consigliore Catherine Meng. The review implies that I'm a New Brutalist by association, or rather that Richard is by associating with me. A thing that makes you go "Hmmm."

Look for me and Richard along with poetry superstars Nils Michals and Brian Teare in Chicago next month.

In other news, I'm getting ready for my big February reading at the Ear Inn. Verrry exciting.

Waves of goodwill are flowing from Pleasant Street tonight toward wherever Sarah Goodyear lives. (The link takes you to a review of the collaborative effort of Matt Rohrer and Joshua Beckman, Nice Hat. Thanks.)

It perhaps bears saying that I am the sole author and instigator of the free blurbs. I'm thinking of making this a regular Cahiers de Corey feature.

Selah has just received its first review, in no less a publication than Time Out New York—and it's very, very good. I'm ecstatic. The review's not available on the web yet, but I'll post a link when it is.

Woo-hoo!

Free Blurbs

The title poem of Jerry Estrin's Rome, a Mobile Home haunts me with the urgency of what it describes ten years after it was published:

17

Each no is a progress rendered by capital

A history of Kuwait, Bullion City

A history of pleasantness can be arranged

Stacks of stolen loot still steady our metaphysical Mercedes as
we zoom to the border still being carried away

Bullet holes in the glass of Iraq

A politics for the present

With its repertoire

This picture is on strike

Radiance floods from the ample white space of Lisa Fishman's Dear, Read which, as Brenda Hillman notes, "call up the traditions of Dickinson, Niedecker, and Riding." Emotional lineation, short sentences aglow, like a female Creeley stabbed by desire without guilt:

Fires

J. played guitar and sang. J. lay me on the kitchen counter,
made me see myself in shadow.
In the dark, J. sang and sang. In the light, J. sang.
First it was night when J. brought me home.
Then it was day. Translucent, I sang.

Yedda Morrison's Crop is a horrorshow of alienated labor reinventing itself as alien eros, a broadband indictment with "endless anonymous capacity for entrance," engaged, hilarious, an incitement, completely beautiful, and sadly unreproduceable here (by me).

Hung Q. Tu builds Structures of Feeling that plumb irony without smartassness, "Pure as the driven news," like clicking refresh a thousand times on a webcam covering a WTO riot. I'm struck by the sheer usefulness of this book: it's a guidebook for deportees to George W. Bush's America:

fly me to the moon fiscal Disney ride
ball club isn't in reference to stars
crisis centers alter ego put bombs to sleep
Bahrain
this kind of publicity you have to pay for

Or, from "More LBJ":

E-1, E-2, E-3 . . . items or atoms harem scare'em
palm dead ahead



Fonda the clan



showroom den (of iniquity)




everybody splashes their satellites in the Indian ocean



camouflaged spotter
magnified golfers
California wave
after wave



house dressed



"keep that away from me"
temptation



painstaking accidents
low hanging merchandise
cafeteria evolved
zero sum banter

What is Lisa Jarnot up to? Her Black Dog Songs (a gorgeous object before it's anything else, with a blurb from Stan Brakhage somehow confirming the book's status as an image) go car-camping in Gertrude Stein's K.O.A., bearing knapsacks-full of linguistic odds and ends that, she, MacGuyver-like, assembles in an instant into whatever's most needful—weaponized love poems, mass romantic destruction—with just her own bare hands, a mesmerist's broken watch, and the beguiling truth-lariat of syntax:

Indian Hot Wings
for George W. Bush

The chicken wing factory is lit up in flames
and the flames are the wings of the little hot chickens.

The little hot chickens are the lampshades of the night
glowing inside the burning of dawn.

The dawn light is chicken-light for little white chickens,
The chickens are white like the glowing of coal.

The coal light of chickens are the white light of chickens.
The chickens are burning and bright in the sun.

The sunlight and lampshades are brighter than chickens.
The dreams of the chickens are bright as the sun.

The chickens are filled with the hot coals of lampshades.
The chickens are burning, the chickens are done.

Wallace Stevens, thou should be living at this hour! But the creepiness is so often betrayed by tenderness, or perhaps it's the reverse. I'm going home to read this to my dog:

Greyhound Ode

Go to sleep little doggie
while the moon is still foggy
and the wild dogs all bark
by the light of the moon

by the moon little doggie,
under streetlights so foggy
while the wild dogs all bark
by the moon by the moon

at the waters so foggy
little dog little doggie
go to sleep little doggie
by the light of the moon.

Happy birthday, Jim!

It's later than I think.

Great things are happening downtown as I write this—a marvelous convergence of poetic and publishing energies. Two panesl this morning, both of which managed to do an amazing job of providing both macro and micro views of small press publishing, experimental poetics, and community building. They've all been so different. Joel Kuszai read a paper on how individual poetry communities might model themselves upon criminal syndicates, and suggested that the power thus achieved could, for example, be used to drive a corporate textbook publisher out of business. (It's nothing personal, it's just business.) Mark Weiss of Junction Press spoke extemporaneously about the experience of creating and running his one-man press, which has produced a number of remarkable border-crossing projects (quote: "When you turn a junction upside-down it becomes a boundary") representing the work of poets from Baja California (including blogworld's own Heriberto Yepez), Trinidad, Cuba, and elsewhere. Julianna Spahr, who I've long wanted to see in person, turned her experience at Buffalo and with Subpress into a kind of parable. In the first half of her talk she spoke of how the "heroism of a cold place" and a general obsession with male modernist writers was eventually countered by the magazine she and other women started there; in the second half she spoke of the utopian ambitions behind Subpress and its limitations as a model for collective publishing (1% tithe vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy, no one person actually in charge of advertising or distribution, unwillingness of poets to choose cheaper galley publishing format, etc.).

The second panel featured Jen Coleman and Allison Cobb (two of the four editors of Pom-Pom, Jonathan Skinner (editor of Ecopoetics, and Brendan Lorber (editor and bandleader of the irrepressible LUNGFULL!). These guys were great. Jen and Allison spoke of their magazine's unique model of poems that only respond to other poems that have been in the magazine (a version of what Charles Bernstein calls "wreading"). Jonathan talked about his fascinating project to produce a magazine of poetry of the Outside, in the widest possible sense—I suspect he and I could have a lot of things to say to each other about pastoral. In fact at one point he made reference to the "complex pastoral" of urban writing, citing Brenda Coultas' marvelous Bowery sequence (first published in Ecopoetics, now available in her book A Handmade Museum) as an example. Brendan Lorber read a terrific essay which will be printed in LUNGFULL! 13 about the number 13 as an abstract symbol of fear, and this symbol's relationship to an older, matriarchal conception of society that existed before a period of environmental scarcity led to the rise of patriarchy and a system in which those at the top have a vested interest in artificially maintaining conditions of scarcity. These ideas aren't new, but he synthesizes them wonderfully into something that I think simply everyone ought to read. Perhaps it will be available at his website soon.

As I was listening to all this I was struck once again by the fact that Brendan, Jonathan, and I form a recognizable "type" of young white male poet, and that I probably have more in common with them than I do with 99.999999% of the human beings on this planet. I am attracted and repelled by them as manifestations of the same genus, led to magnify minor differences in order to preserve a notion of my own specialness. In their presence I get a little nervous, as if afraid that we might touch each other and disappear in a matter/antimatter explosion. Back home, I find that I'm comforted by the similarities while seeing the differences as much more profound than I had. What's similar about us is a manner, a comportment that mixes bemusement with determination. And the desire to make a meaningful life outside the debased corporate values that we're usually too immersed in to notice, as fish don't notice water. Which is of course a point of similarity that binds us to many kinds of people, all over the world—people whose fear, as Brendan suggested at the end of his paper, cannot last forever.

SPD Opens Outler in Ithaca, New York

That's what it feels like tonight—a huge stack of books that I've been ordering in dribs and drabs over the past eight months suddenly descended upon us today. In one stroke we've become the store with the finest selection of innovative poetry within a two-hundred mile radius. So come one, come all, to The Bookery and do a little browsing. Consider it a permanent continuation of the Small Press Culture Workers conference happening tomorrow. Y'all are just lucky that I'm broke, because if I had the money I'd buy all of these (except the ones I already had).

In strictly alphabetical order:

George Albon, Brief Capital of Disturbances (Omnidawn, 2003)
Dawn Michael Baude, egpyt ( Post-Apollo, 2002)
Anselm Berrigan, Integrity & Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999)
Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002)
Ted Berrigan, So Going Around Cities: New and Selected Poems 1958-1979 (Blue Wind Press, 2003)
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Nest (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge w/ art by Kiki Smith - Endocrinology (Kelsey St. Press, 1997)
Adrian Blevins, The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Ausable Press, 2003)
David Bromige, As in T as in Tether (Chax Press, 2002)
Norma Cole, Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn, 2002)
Kevin Davies, Comp. (Edge, 2000)
Jordan Davis, Million Poems Journal (Faux Press, 2003)
Jerry Estrin, Rome, a Mobile Home (Roof, 1993)
Lisa Fishman, Dear, Read (Ahsahta Press, 2003)
Graham Foust, Leave the Room to Itself (Ahsahta Press, 2004)
Nada Gordon, V. Imp. (Faux Press, 2003)
Arielle Greenberg, Given (Verse Press, 2002)
Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003)
Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2004)
Katy Lederer, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002)
Aaron McCullough, Welkin (Ahsahta Press, 2002)
Bernadette Mayer, Jen Hofer, Danika Dinsmore, Lee Anne Brown, The 3:15 Experiment (Owl Press, 2001)
K. Silem Mohammed, Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003)
Laura Moriarty, The Case (O Books, 1998)
Yedda Morrison, Crop (Kelsey St. Press, 2003)
Tosa Motokiyu, et al, eds., Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (Roof Books, 1997)
Jennifer Moxley, The Sense Record and Other Poems (Edge, 2002)
Philip Nikolayev, Monkey Time (Verse Press, 2003)
Bob Perelman, The Future of Memory (Roof Books, 1998)
Deborah Richards, Last One Out (Subpress, 2003)
Elizabeth Robinson, Harrow (Omnidawn, 2001)
Barry Schwabsky, Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press, 2003)
Steve Shavel, How Small Brides Survive in Extreme Cold (Verse Press, 2003)
Ron Silliman, N/O (Roof Books, 1994)
George Stanley, A Tall, Serious Girl (Qua Books, 2003)
Brian Kim Stefans, Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos, 2003)
Chris Stroffolino, Stealer's Wheel (Hard Press, 1999)
Sotere Torregian, "I Must Go" (She Said) "Because My Pizza's Cold" (Skanky Possum, 2002)
Rodrigo Toscano, Platform (Atelos, 2003)
Hung Q. Tu, Structures of Feeling (Krupskaya, 2003)
Rosmarie Waldrop, Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn, 2003)
Hannah Weiner, We Speak Silent ( Roof Books, 1996)
Hannah Weiner, page (Roof Books, 2002)

Hurry in before I win the lottery and buy them all.

Can't seem to stop feeling tired. This is one of those weird limbo periods—between the writing and the oral component of my exam. It's a long intermission and I can't decide if I should go out to the lobby for candy or if I belong behind the curtain with the stagehands frantically arranging the props.

Looking forward to Jane Sprague's conference here in Ithaca on Saturday. And this afternoon Larissa Szporluk is reading in the English Department. But part of me just wants to lie on the couch and watch daytime TV until it's nighttime.

Good news? Bad news? Who knew?

You are 40% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Selah is going to be reviewed next week in Time Out New York. Then on Monday, I'm going to be reviewed by my dissertation committee.

Little nervous.

The Same River?

Finishing the exam has left me in a fragmented sort of mood. Here are some choice selections from a copy of a shiny newish translation by Brooks Haxton of Heraclitus' Fragments—the last seems particularly apposite:

8
Men dig tons of earth
to find an ounce of gold.

10
Things keep their secrets.

14
Now that we can travel anywhere,
we need no longer take the poets
and myth-makers for sure witnesses
about disputed facts.

17
Pythagoras may well have been
the deepest in his learning of all men.
And still he claimed to recollect
details of former lives,
being in one a cucumber
and one time a sardine.

24
Hunger, even
in the elements,
and insolence.

31
Without the sun,
what day? What night?

32
The sun is new
again, all day.

38
Thus in the abysmal dark
the soul is known by scent.

45
The mind, to think of the accord
that strains against itself,
needs strength, as does the arm
to string the bow or lyre.

50
Under the comb
the tangle and the straight path
are the same.

52
The sea is both pure
and tainted, healthy
and good haven to the fish,
to men impotable and deadly.

58
Good and ill to the physician
surely must be one,
since he derives his fee
from torturing the sick.

59
Two made one are never one.
Arguing the same we disagree.
Singing together we compete.
We choose each other
to be one, and from the one
both soon diverge.

64
Though what the waking see is deadly,
what the sleeping see is death.

66

The living when the dead
wood of the bow
springs back to life, must die.

67
Gods live past our meager death.
We die past their ceaseless living.

69
The way up is the way back.

72
Moisture makes the soul
succumb to joy.

74
Dry, the soul
grows wise
and good.

77
A man in the quiet of the night
is kindled like a fire soon quenched.

82
The rule that makes
its subject weary
is a sentence
of hard labor.

84
Goat cheese melted
in warm wine congeals
if not well stirred.

90
Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work, and helps
make something of the world.

92
Although we need the Word [logos]
to keep things known in common,
people still treat specialists
as if their nonsense
were a form of wisdom.

98
To a god the widsom
of the wisest man
sounds apish. Beauty
in a human face
looks apish too.
In everything
we have attained
the excellence of apes.

105
Yearning hurts,
and what release
may come of it
feels much like death.

108
Not to be quite such a fool
sounds good. The trick,
with so much wine
and easy company, is how.

121
One's bearing
shapes one's fate.

128
A sacred ritual
may be performed by one
entirely purified but seldom.
Other rites belong to those
confined in the sodden
lumber of the body.

130
Silence, healing.