Barbara Henning

December 13th Bella Belladonna Event

2011-11-29T17:46:00.000-08:00

Harris Schiff's One More Beat (Accent Editions)

2011-11-13T18:04:00.000-08:00

What I noticed when I left New York City was that when I wasn't here, I wasn't here, even though I had been here for a very long time. We New Yorkers are always moving so fast and the clock on Union Square keeps flashing new numbers and new poets arrive all the time from here and there and old ones stay or migrate elsewhere. I arrived in New York in 1983, a few months before Ted Berrigan died, and it was like the end of an era that I had missed. But Harris Schiff was there and in his new book, One More Beat (Accent Editions), he writes a phenomenal introduction, talking about how he became a poet and who was there and where and how the East Village poetry scene fit into the greater political world of the USA back then and today.

Following Harris's introduction is an introduction Ted Berrigan gave when Harris read at the Poetry Project on May 18, 1977. And then interspersed between Harris's poems is a set of photos by Monica Claire Antonie of Harris, Ted, Susan Cataldo, Lewis Warsh, Burroughs, Bernadette Mayer, Rudy Burckhardt, John Godfrey and many others. Reading the introduction, Ted's introduction, the photographs, and then the poems is like quickly living through those years with Harris. There is a wonderful collaboration between Harris and Ted, "Love Song." This book is a must read for anyone who wants to know what was going on in the 70's and early 80's with poetry in the East Village. I was sitting in Quantum Leap reading the poems, and when I finished, I felt like weeping. Sometimes when life is good, you suffer a lot afterwards.

Go to this website for more information: http://www.accenteditions.com/

Here are a couple of Harris's poems:

Under Halley's Sky

The world's a dangerous place
you take your chances every time you do anything
& even when you don't

you are fragile
as your life

driving is scary
& taking the train

& living next to a nuclear power plant
& having gasoline trucks go through your neighborhood
& working in districts subject to terrorism
or sabotage (depending how you look at it)

walking downstairs
stepping off a curb

strange sex

ordinary sex

eating in a restaurant

eating out of cans

jogging

being a zen buddhist

sleeping in earthquake zone

living under nuclear umbrella

being on planet which may be hit by asteroid

being in suspicious universe which
may collapse at any time or burst

these activities could all be hazardous to your
health & the surgeon general has recommended against
engaging in any of them

unless you smoke substantial numbers of cigarettes
barf regularly
clean up your act
straighten up
run it up the flag pole
& see how it blows

the wind cries any number of names
on a mild
autumn night

trees
riffled
by breeze

leaves
gilded
with light

[below this poem, the sweetest photo of Susan Cataldo.]

Abstract Depressionism

among aristocrats
the large banking houses
perfected the concept
of the oblique hit-man

they called it
noblesse disoblige

it's one of the few lessons
we can learn today from
the spurious collection of data
we call so blithely
History

History also teaches us that
language changes constantly
women remain gracefully
beautiful
men
continue to be
brutal
it does not explain when that started
or why

[Beside this is a beautiful photograph of young Anne Waldman]

Bill Kushner's Walking After Midnight. (Spuyten Duyvil 2011)

2011-11-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

I have a stack of books to read by my bedside and a journal. When I finally crawl into bed, usually just after midnight, I pick up the journal and I write one page. Then I start reading the book on the top. Last week I read from Bill Kushner's new book Walking After Midnight. I loved reading these story poems. Some of them are childhood memories, others veer off into an imaginary life, sometimes like a fairy tale. I found myself more than once lying in bed laughing. I'm putting three that I really liked here.

HUMMER

"I'll tell you nothing," he said, as we drove along.
I could almost count the poles as we sped along.
And my father hummed. He was a hummer. I
looked up and saw the clouds holding up the sky.
"You're not gonna see me," my father said, "once
we get there." And then he sort of chuckled, a
funny sound. "I mean," he went on, "that I am
just gonna disappear." Ahead, I saw a kid on the
side of the highway, holding out his thumb. The
kid looked hot. The sun was out and it was hot.
I could see he was almost soaking wet in sweat.
My father just drove by. "You could've stopped
for him, Dad," I said. "It would've been like a nice
thing to do." Immediately, my Dad stopped the
car, and we both lurched forward, then back. "You
wanna get out and walk it? he queried. I thought
about it and swallowed. "No, sir, I don't" "Don't
what?" "Don't wanna walk it, sir." He stared hard
at me for one long minute. I could see the cactus,
sky and the mountains in the far far distance, as he
kept on staring. i could see the kid sort of running
in a funny hop towards us, my father's car. "So
do we understand each other from now on?" my
father asked me. "Do we understand each other at
last?" Thick silence, and I had to answer. "Yes, sir,
Dad." "Yes, sir, what, boy? I said yes, sir, what?"
"Sir, we understand each other at last." My father's
arms shot up as if in a weird kind of victory. "At
last!" he said, almost breathless. "At last!" By now
the kid had almost reached the car, and he had one
arm out as if to quick grab at the handle of it, my
father's sky blue car. And I could see the kid's eyes
kind of crazy scared eyes. "Good," my father said,
as he gunned the motor, and away we drove real fast.

THE LITTLE DEER

The witch said, "The deer! The little deer! Run
after the deer and capture him, my little darling,
and you shall be king! So I did what the witch
told me. I ran and I ran, but that little deer was a
fast one, and always leaped ahead, just out of reach.
Suddenly, there I was, in the heart of the forbidden
forest, and I was alone, for the little deer was gone.
"Who is that under me?" asked the talking tree.
"It's me," I answered, "your little king." "You're not
my little king!" replied the tree. "you're just a lost
and frightened little boy, aren't you? Afraid that
someone will eat you? Afraid you'll never find your
way back home?" "Yes, tree," I said, for it was true.
"Climb a bit up me, little boy, and I'll try to protect
you. I'll try to find someone to guide you out of this
forest you are lost within." Just then, a riderless
white horse came along. "Oh dear me, oh dear me,"
said the sad horse. "For the Prince of this strange
kingdom and I went out riding, but the Prince he
strangely fell off me, he fell to the ground where he
is now unconscious, and I can't wake him for the
life of me, oh dear!" "Then let this little boy ride on
you, and take him where the strange Prince lies. I do
believe the boy has the magic to wake the Prince up!"
So there I was, riding on the white horse. "Hold me
tight, boy!" the horse commanded, and soon there we
were before the sleeping Prince. "Do your magic,
boy!" the horse whispered. So I bent over the Prince
who was so handsome why I kissed him on his lips, and
that kiss seemed to do it. The Prince awoke and lifted
his head toward me. "Is it you, boy?" he asked. "Yes,"
I said, "oh yes!" "You've saved me, boy! Why I was
lost in a dream of wolves and dragons!" "It was my duty
and my honor, sir!" "Then come and we shall ride back
to my kingdom, boy, and you shall stay at my side forever,
for who knows when I shall need that magic kiss again!"
And so it came true, for I find there is no denying the
command of a handsome Prince. Could I? Could you?

CHIWAWAS

Did you know chiwawas are descended
from wolves? Do not get a chiwawa mad at
you or he'll bite your head off and eat it for
lunch. I saw a chiwawa eat a sheep once,
and then knit himself a sweater with the
leftover wool. He says you got a secret.
A chiwawa can tell if you got a secret. A
chiwawa can smell your secret in you, and
spell it out. "I'm gonna tell on you, sucka,"
my chiwawa whispers when we go for a walk.
Sometimes I just wanna kill my naughty chiwawa,
but I love my little Chi Chi too much. At night, as
we sleep together, and he howls at the moon in
my ear, I just wanna kiss him all over, my sweet
little sweetheart Chi Chi, my very darling dear.

Rebecca Brown's The Terrible Girls

2011-10-30T20:38:00.000-07:00

Last month I read Rebecca Brown's The Terrible Girls. It is a curious, combination of dream-story and science fiction, a bit like The Twilight Zone with a touch of sado-masochisism, the characters allowing themselves to be wo-manhandled or doing the handling themselves. The "The Dark House" is one of my favorite.

In "The Dark House" a woman pursues the one she desires, by doing anything and everything for her. She grovels, becomes the coffee-cart girl, the hidden one, serving the conference star, her would-be lover, who blabs on and on at the podium with out-dated information. We have no idea what the conference is about. It's just in that middle realm of conference twilight zone. Someday, someway the girl will have the one she desires. Just "do things right" and "We are going to be part of a fine and lovely and long and true tradition." A kiss in the elevator and then out the door they go, running away from the conference. The coffee-cart girl carts the conference star on her back with her twisted ankle across a river and through the woods. Ah, here they are. Now you go away, the dominatrix demands, her ankle apparently recovered. A figure is in the house waiting for the desired-one. Brown carefully avoids telling us whether this figure upstairs is a man or a woman. And then she kicks the coffee-cart girl out and makes love to this other one, leaving the curtain open just a bit, with a promise, perhaps, for the coffee cart girl, too. The coffee-cart girl is a curious character, desiring someone who is so vacant and so demanding, and still wanting her, with a terrible driving desire.

"The Ruined City" reminds me a little of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Everything is ruined and beware of the gangs of roaming girls. No men here except Lord Bountiful. The narrator and her girlfriend hide from the terrible girls who fight over what they steal. The city they left behind before the disaster—they are here now searching for something the narrator left behind, "what was left of me," something hidden under the mat. "I tried to pick up what they'd hacked from me but I was weak and it was very heavy." Parts of her body? Too heavy she had to leave "it" behind. Her lover has super psychic powers. Kinesiology? She can hold her hands over the earth. Here it is here, she says. The bag is there and it's rotted away, "the resurrected heart." She gets her heart back like the tin man.

When I read these stories, I sometimes have the sense that the fictional writer is writing out of revenge, to get back at some lover, striving for fantastic fictional revenge. And there are these odd objects in each story that are pursued and hunted, usually without resolution, an "it", a bag, a box, a body part. And the language of the stories moves from straight action and description into poetic prose. It's very hip writing, laying out with a kind of glee the damage love can do.

NEW YORK POETS: PUT THIS ON YOUR CALENDAR

2011-09-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

Poets for Renewable Energy and Peace:
This October 23rd afternoon program (1-4pm) will feature poets from the war
region, including emerging Afghan-American writers Cihan Kaan, Sahar
Muradi, Zohra Saed, and Yusuf Misdaq. It will also include additional poets,
musicians, and speakers to be announced, and a special group performance of Allen
Ginsberg’s famous anti-nuclear power poem, “Plutonian Ode.” This event is
being produced by a recently created NYC-based group, Poets for Renewable
Energy and Peace (PREP), which hopes to inspire new and growing activism
against war and nuclear energy.

@Theater 80 St. Marks Place & First Avenue in the East Village/Lower East
Side. The admission is $10 that goes to HOWL's medical fund for artists and
writers. PREP will be selling advance tickets for amounts above the $10, the
difference going to support the group in its beginning stages, All of these
monies are tax deductible. For PREP checks should be made out to the
Committee on Poetry and note PREP: Poets for Renewable Energy.

Reading this Sunday

2011-08-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

See the flyer below for a reading this Sunday, August 7th at 3:00 at the Bowery Poetry Club. I am reading with David Henderson and there is a screening of a new film about Diane di Prima.

Photos up on New Flickr Site

2011-05-22T16:49:00.001-07:00

I've set up a flickr site with photos from my pamphlets and also other photos.

My Flickr Page

Interview of B Henning & Book Party for LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN

2011-04-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

An interview of me by Rafael Otto about my poetics is now on online at NOT ENOUGH NIGHT. http://www.naropa.edu/notenoughnight/spring11/index_toc.htm

Also for those of you in New York next week, the schedule of events for Harryette Mullen's readings and our conversation (Book Party for LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN) is as follows:

On Friday April 29th, at noon, Harryette will be reading her poetry at Long Island University in the Humanities Building 206 (as part of the rainbow series). Take the Q or R Train to Dekalb Avenue and the entrance near the Humanities Building is at the gate on Flatbush Avenue.

Later that same day at 7 pm at the Poet's House (10 River Terrace, dowtown), there is a book party for the book, as well a conversation between Harryette and me. We will be reading from the new book of interviews as well as looking at slides from her new Geneology project and talking about new work.

On Saturday, Harryette will be reading with two other readers for Cave Canem at 3:00, at 20 Jay Street, Brooklyn, Suite 310A.

Harryette doesn't come to New York very often so I hope to see you.

Thanks & Namaste,

Barb

LOOKING FOR HARRYETTE MULLEN: NOW AVAILABLE

2011-03-16T21:56:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I called my friend, Harryette Mullen, and asked her if she would talk to me about the way she wrote the poems for Sleeping in the Dictionary. I was teaching her book for an MFA course at Long Island University in Brooklyn. It was summer and I had subletted an apartment on Third Street (I was living in Tucson then). I remember sitting on the floor with my computer talking into skype for the interview, for hours at a time and over several weeks. Anyhow, that was the beginning of a very long exciting conversation/interview about Harryette's book. Neither of us expected this conversation to end up becoming a book. At the time, it was just for my class. Then after I started transcribing, I thought, wow, this should be published. And so we edited and rewrote and re-thought the conversation.

Then I broke it apart and sent it to various magazines and webzines for publication. Then it became clear that this was in fact a book length interview. So I thought -- send it to Rachel Levitsky for Belladonna and see if she is interested. It is definitely political, poetic and feminist. Rachel was excited about the interview and the next thing I knew, I was invited to be part of the collaborative board of Belladonna and working with Martine Bellen to publish the book. Then it occurred to us that an earlier interview I had with Harryette in the 90's about her earlier books could also work well with this. So the book grew. Rachel's idea was to include some images to supplement the discussions. I went to LA and photographed Harryette and other places, artwork and related objects. Harryette and I rewrote the interviews again and expanded them. And the book grew some more. Juliana Spahr wrote a very thoughtful introduction. Martine worked diligently and creatively with me to develop, layout, proofread, get permissions, etc (everything). HR Hegnauer did the final layout and a beautiful cover. And now other women on the board and interns are working to get the book in the world.

I'm a fan of Harryette's writing (obviously) and I have taught her books for many years. I like the way politics, the ordinary everyday and far-out playfulness intermingle. The book of interviews will be of use to teachers, scholars and poets. And the good news is that you can now order this book by going to the Belladonna Series website. The books will be delivered to the Belladonna office in Brooklyn within a few days. On the website, you can also read more about the book. As you all may know, Belladonna is a non-profit collaborative feminist project, so it's a great press and reading series to support. The collaborative board is an exciting energetic group of women. Look through the website at the other publishing projects (The Wide Road by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian and many others).

Here's the website --

http://www.belladonnaseries.org/

Also, there will be a book party at the Poet's House on Friday, April 29th at 7 pm, with a conversation between Harryette and me about the book and about her other projects in the works. Also Harryette will be reading on April 29th at noon at Long Island University, Humanities Building Room 206, at Dekalb and Flatbush (Brooklyn). And on Saturday, April 30th she will read (with Christian Campbell and Niki Herd) for Cave Canum at 20 Jay Street, Suite 310A (Brooklyn). I'll be at all three of these events. If you are in town, I hope to see you, especially at the party at the Poet's House (10 River Terrace, downtown, nyc).

Reading in Seattle, Eugene Or, Portland Or, and Austin Tx

2011-03-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

Next week and the week after I'm reading at the following locations. Fliers are below.

THURSDAY MARCH 24TH
Seattle Reading
with Paige Clifton-Steele and Maged Zaher
Thursday March 24th at 7 pm at the Living Room
1355 East Olive Way, Seattle, Washington 98122 206-708-6021

SATURDAY, MARCH 26TH
Eugene, Oregan
Reading with Endi Hartigan
DIVA Gallery, Saturday March 26 at 7:00
280 W. Broadway, Eugene Oregon

SUNDAY, MARCH 27TH
Portland Oregan
Reading with Will Owens
Spare Room Series
The Way Post @ 7:30 on March 27
3120 N. Williams Ave.
503-367-3182

SATURDAY, APRIL 2, AUSTIN, TX
Reading with Kimberly Alidio
for Skanky Possum / Hoa Nyugen/Dale Smith
2208 Trailside Drive #A
Austin, Tx 78704

James Brown Stop Action by Michah Saperstein

2011-02-20T21:37:00.001-08:00

Here's a stop action my son, Michah, made of my grandson Logan, jumping to James Brown. It's funny and beautiful. Check out other photos by Michah at his flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michahnyc/

February Readings in San Francisco, Berkeley and Tucson

2011-02-10T15:03:00.001-08:00

I'm arriving in San Francisco on Monday the 21st of February and reading at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State on Thursday the 24th at 3:30 (Humanities Building H512) and then later that same day traveling with Steve Katz to Moe's in Berkeley for a reading there at 7:30 pm (with Steve and Andrew Joron). See the fliers for more information. Then on Saturday the 26th, I'm reading in Tucson at the Drawing Studio with Tenney Nathanson and Charles Alexander.

Twelve Green Rooms in Press 1

2011-01-14T07:51:00.001-08:00

Press 1 has just released their new issue and my sequence--Twelve Green Rooms-- is included. See http://www.leafscape.org/press1/v4n3/henning.html

"The Dinner" in Talisman's final issue

2010-11-20T16:12:00.001-08:00

The new issue of Talisman is available, #38/39/40 all together as the final print issue. Sometimes folks talk about how difficult it is to find Talisman but when it's found (at SPD), it's a beauty. I have been happy that that over the years Ed Foster has published my work in many of the issues. And I lament the end of the printed version. I'm a bit of a biblio lover, but I think the trees may be happier when the pages of Talisman are flickering over a screen.

My most recent novella (28 pages and 18 chapters) is printed complete in the middle of this issue: "The Dinner". You can order issues from Small Press Distribution for $20.00 http://www.spdbooks.org and read work by John High, Ed Roberson, Laynie Browne, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tony Iantosca, Joel Lewis, Kimberly Lyons, Vyt Bakaitis, Basil King, and many others.

Because I loved the project of writing "The Dinner" (and at the end there is a description of the process), I want everyone to read it so I am posting a link to my website where there is a pdf.

http://myweb.brooklyn.liu.edu/bhenning/PDFDocs/The%20Dinner.pdf

My teaching and reading schedule

2010-11-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

November 1-January 9, 2011. Teaching Poetic Prose workshop for Writers.com.

November 17, 2010. 7 pm. Reading at Xavier University. Cincinnati (with
Don Bogen)

December 12, 2010. 3 pm. Reading at DC Arts Center. Washington D.C. (reading with
Rachel Levitsky)

January 22-March 5. Teaching Flash Fiction/Poetry Workshop. The Poetry Center at University of Arizona. Tucson.

February 24, 2011. 3:30 pm. Reading at San Francisco State University Poetry Center.

February 24, 2011. 7:30 pm. Reading for Poetry Flash at Moe's in Berkeley, Ca.

February 28-May 8. Teaching Flash Fiction/Poetry workshop for Writers.com.

March 12-13. Teaching Poetry Workshop at the Book Festival, Poetry Center in Tucson.

March 24, 2011. Reading at Pilot Books. Seattle, Washington.

March 26, 2011. 7:30 pm. Reading at Diva Center. Eugene, Oregon.

March 27, 2011. Reading at Spare Room Series. Portland, Oregan.

May 16-June 22, 2011. Teaching Flash Fiction/Poetry workshop for Long Island University's MFA.

June 27=July 1, 2011. Teaching a Workshop at Naropa's Summer Writing Program.

Poets for Living Waters

2010-08-21T19:37:00.000-07:00

Three poems from a new series, Twelve Green Rooms, have just been posted at Poetsforlivingwaters.com

Poets for Living Waters

Fanny Howe. Leslie Scalapino. Martine Bellen. Anne Waldman.

2010-07-05T08:57:00.000-07:00

The following was written for Laura Hinton's Blog Memorial for Leslie Scalapino on 6/22/10

http://www.chantdelasirene.com/2010/06/streaming-reading-memorial-to-leslie_23.html

"I Feel a Chill"—and a Desert Memory

In the early 90's, I paired Leslie Scalapino's book Crowd and Not Evening or Light with Emily Dickinson's poems for a graduate/under-grad course entitled Melancholia and American Literature, as examples of two experimental poets from the 19th and 20th centuries. We also read several novels and theoretical work by Kristeva, Freud and Klein. At the time I was also reading Lacan. When I open up Leslie's book now, those swings and the waves—I feel a chill—and a paper falls out with some questions I was asking my class back then. Is she breaking the law, the customary laws of linearity in poetry? Is an opening being created here? A possibility? To "see" something, to defamiliarize it, the boundaries that depict it must change, loosen up, then when we see it, do we lose it again in its movement toward familiarity? Is she creating an opening out of the container of melancholia? How does she escape the violence of definition? I still love this book, the handwriting, photos, dashes, words.

I was lucky to be living in Tucson in May of 2008 when Leslie read for POG, a poetry collective. I finally had the opportunity to spend time with her. You can link to the reading and see photos of her at http://www.gopog.org/ During that same visit, Laynie Browne, Tenney Nathanson, Charles Alexander and I performed with Leslie in her play: "As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen." I remember we were supposed to all wear similar colors but for some reason we were diverse. It was a serious-nonsense upside-down love and death and humor and confusion, a law-breaker, redefining the familiar, and opening up the space between words. It was a lot of fun and a shame that the recording equipment broke down. I also spent an afternoon with Leslie at the Desert Museum. Lots of space between our sentences. Lots of quiet walking. I remember she was suffering from serious back pain, but that didn't stop her from taking the entire walk around the grounds. Down below is a photo of Leslie wearing one of my hats. Even though she was in pain, she cracks a little smile because there is a lizard above her and she wanted to be in the photo with the lizard.

When I heard that Leslie was ill, I thought she'd be with us for a while, but then voom she was gone so quickly. As it is –

Barbara Henning

***

Fanny Howe's Saving History (Sun and Moon Press, 1993).

Recently, I picked Fanny Howe's novel, Saving History, off my shelf. I'd been meaning to read this book for years. Once I started it, I couldn't put it down. It is wonderful, the narrative, the meandering poetic prose that fluidly moves from interior to exterior, from one point of view to another, dialogue erupting out of action that twisting and turning and always progressing. A mystical wandering woman, Felicity, with two children, one deathly ill—she wanders in and out of other people's lives, often abused or sheltered by men who are confused or seeking their own salvation or destruction. The novel takes them across the country from Maine to San Diego and into Mexico where she is tempted to transport body parts in order to save her younger daughter's life. The story is political and mystical. Characters are involved with communism, politics and criminal plots. There is a nightmarish tone. But then Felicity draws her little girls closer to her as she wonders about the meaning of life. Often she seems to make the wrong choices in terms of creating a stable home for herself and her children. Here there is no way out of suffering, except for the moments of love, the love between mother and child, brother and brother, sometimes man and woman, and, of course, the love for the poetic phrase and Howe's vision of the amazing ever changing ever screwed up ever beautiful world. At night after reading Howe, I dreamed about thin ice, dark coats, ice skating, and the final reunion between the main character and her family.

****

Martine Bellen. 2X Squared. BlazeVox 2010.

In poet Martine Bellen's new novel 2X Squared, she segues from poetry to prose in a poetic prose way. This is a surreal upside down journey where a lonely girl-woman, Nora, who is mathematically and linguistically creative, looks for her identity, and her identical twin, Rona, whose name is an anagram for her own. She has always felt as if she were part of someone else. And when she meets Rona, she knows it is her own half self. The book is topsy turvey, full of images, shadows and mirrors, the metaphors and concerns of the narrator continually rotate back to twinning. And there is a linguistic playfulness, serious and not so serious. To give you an idea:

"Since fog is adorned with no solid form, fog is adorned with the fog's no solid form. Fog is the killing of fog adorned with no solid form. Therefore fog is fog as fog and fog is not fog as fog. " (63)

"It's the only story I've been told about my birth,
told to me by my stepmother, who was magnatized by fog, who is fog
not moisture, not cloud
adorned with no solid form
since fog is adorned iwth no solid form; therefore, fog is adorned with the fog's no solid form. Fog is the killing of fog adorned with no solid form. Fog is the form of fog adorned with no solid form. Therefore fog is fog as fog and fog is not fog as fog." (65)

Bellen merges everything she reads and hears into this story, making us remember oh so many other writers and friends. Googling and goggling and myspacing, the first person narrator imagines, theorizes, remembers, and analyzes every myth or story about twins as she tries to find her sister. Her mother was on fertility drugs. The scientific language of doubling. The story of the Acomo twins. She's a dreamy thinking girl-woman on a dreamy journey, telling her story and letting us hear and watch her think. It's a roller coaster read and if you like roller coasters, you'll like this book.

****
The following review was published in the Kore Press Newsletter. May/June 2010.
http://www.korepress.org/documents/May_JuneNews2010.pdf

Anne Waldman Goes to War

In Matriot Acts (Chax Press, letterpress chapbook, 2010), Anne Waldman goes to war with "The Patriot Act". In this performance poetry text, she takes to task "Patriot", and all of its relatives and ancestors, examining and then crossing them off. Cross off Patriarch, Patriachal, Paternalism, Pater Familias. Cross off Wall Street ("the belly of the beast"). Because the destructive "Pater" energy in the universe is out of whack, the opposition must come into play. When the freedom of speech, privacy and movement are chiseled away, and the U.S. citizens sit and watch tv and play with their computers, then the loud-mouth poets need to speak out, chant, call upon the energies of reversal, call for a "Matriot Act". And so this Feminafesto. Anne calls forth the Matriachal, Matrilineal, Matrotism. Yes to restore balance, the opposition is needed, and here it is the female principle, the "woman-mind". The poets must band together like the mothers of the disappeared—wake up the women, change the world—mothers and sorceresses. Waldman chants and screams and begs to "Invoke the sweep of history." Words that start with "pa" are implicated all over these pages. Then she turns to the "ma". "Will I trust my activist eyes" "to dance out of the cage"? In between the acts, two old poet-god/esses that have been in hibernation for a while start to talk, an "Old beard" and an "Old she-bear". Where did we go wrong? Where is the she-bear to go now? "Get arrested and listed as a beard?" And the chorus pushes forward: "Matriot, run riot!" And then the poem-play-words begin to dance, invoking the great protectress Kali ("Kali is also an alphabet . . . mother of language"). To right the universe, Kali begins her shakti dance on the body of Shiva, the great destroyer. "Each letter, a form of energy, a twinge of energy, a torque of energy." To ban drones, predators and handguns and stop the violence, stop the war. The Buddha came when compassion was needed. The great mother Kali comes when she is needed, but first we must call for her. Waldman's play-poem is a grand calling forth of the female poetic principle. To stop the war. Stop it now. Stop.

Tenney Nathanson/ Roberto Bolaño/ George Tysh

2010-05-13T13:10:00.000-07:00

Tenney Nathanson/ Roberto Bolano/ George Tysh

Ghost Snow Falls Through the Void (Globalization) by Tenney Nathanson (Chax Press 2010). Ever since I first arrived in Tucson, I began to love Tenney and his writing. I've heard him read from these poems many times. I wasn't prepared though for the power of it as I sat down and quietly read the entire book. The dailiness of his life, with a clear articulation and poetic isolation of the visible bits and pieces of political justification and hiding, corporate hiding, chocolate child slave labor in Africa, murder and theft. Here Tenney uses poetry to undo, attack and ridicule, with rhythm, with zen precision, intention and clarity. The book unfolds as a kind of 21st Century revision of Whitman. All over the page, lyrical and political and right here it is: the whole story, uncovered, and HA, HA, HA. In between there is shopping and prayers, ghost snow, various poets appearing and disappearing, and the zen bells ringing. Who ever said that a zen poet had to step softly—HA, HA, HA.

Here's an excerpt:

I'm not sure where the dashes go
or the butterflies, or banks of flowers at noon
is that what it means
they have all gone into the what?

where does the evil of the year go O'Hara asked
in beautiful September New York air, October too actually
especially at night bizarre being teary twenty-seven years later
hey Tenney where does the evil of the year go
last year your head hummed into the buzzing light
transcendentalized pumpkin brimming the floaty ether
which now are we in here huh Barack Obama I greet you at the beginning of
a great career
Barack+Walt? quod erat demonstrandum?
I shake my white locks at the runaway sun
the body of Walt is the body politic after all I'm sorry I doubted it run through
the body of the Buddha
all three bodies tomorrow see you probably in Nirmanakayaland bump
bump BLAM (105)

* * *

Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño. (Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New Directions. 2010). I've been reading all of Bolaño's books as they've been translated, and I'm always hoping to have something as exciting as The Savage Detectives or By Night in Chile. 2666 was wonderful, an expose, parts of it exceptional, but it seemed unfinished to me. And the last two that have been translated, The Skating Rink and Monseiur Pain, were not as exciting in terms of form and content. But Antwerp, this new little book (written in 1980 or so), is a collection of linking prose poem chapters, each one only a page long and one paragraph only —here I can feel the author's presence in the book, the author living the story. In Barcelona, lost kids, collaged sentence to sentence, overheard conversations, a poet who writes postcards instead of poems, the body giving out, we think with the man on the train: "We've created a silent space so that he can work somehow. He lights a cigarette. . . ."

He's on a train and it seems as if something awful is going on and at the same time everything is ordinary dark. And each poem carries the narrative forward. There is a problem with a hunchback and the people who are groveling, homeless, searching for food, the lost selling their bodies, another commodity. He switches point of view, even reverting at times to jagged and curved lines rather than text, and at one point he introduces himself. My name is Roberto Bolaño... Life is moving by this narrator like the landscape on a train. The Calabria Commune campground. I think this story or setting was woven into 2666. There's a problem here: six dead children, killed by an Anti Terrorist Brigade. The town folk would like to see the campground eliminated and are not so unhappy about the deaths. And then a collage of voices talking, the reasonable and the unreasonable, evidence of a problem everywhere. The narrator talks to himself. He listens to others. He's a detective, an investigator. The unhappy author who looks through a camera: "Empty images follow one after the other: the reservoir and the woods, the cabin with a fire in the hearth, the lover in a red robe, the girl who turns and smiles at you". (27) Sad, yes, dark and beautiful.

Again, I like the sense of the author in this work. In the end there is a postscript and Bolaño explains that all he wishes "to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength [as] Odes to the human and the divine." And I was not disappointed like the Amazon reviewer who thinks it doesn't all come together, too experimental. This is poetry-fiction! It isn't supposed to come together. That's the point. Sometimes in novels, there is too much effort at connecting everything.

Here is the opening chapter.

I. Facade

Once photographed, life here is ended. It is almost symbolic of Hollywood. Tara has no rooms inside. It was just a facade. – David O. Selznick

The kid heads toward the house. Alley of larches. The Fronde. Necklace of tears. Love is a mix of sentimentality and sex (Burroughs). The mansion is just a facade—dismantled, to be erected in Atlanta. 1959. Everything looks worn. Not a recent phenomenon. From a long time back, everything wrecked. And the Spaniards imitate the way you talk. The South American lilt. An alley of palms. Everything slow and asthmatic. Bored biologists watch the rain from the windows of their corporations. It's no good singing with feeling. My darling, where ever you are: it's too late, forget the gesture that never came. "It was just a facade." The kid walks toward the house.

***

George Tysh's The Imperfect (United Artists 2010). I am immediately drawn into this book because of the soft white cover, with a light grid and a drawing by Janet Hamrick, the repetition of almost-handwriting shapes, over and over, a practice session. Kind of mesmerizing. When I turn the page the white space isolates the words, like someone whispering in an empty room. The first poem starts with half of a word: "ssance", almost sense, almost seance, science, half of renaissance, or reconissance. And so I'm curious to go on. When I read "Metaphor", I realize that this book of poems will be incredibly personal, moving close to the body, to our desire: is it mustache [or] must ache or mistake. And then these little evolving shapes in our lives:

Heart

the outline of a soap dish
on a shelf in the pink

evaporates this morning
in the bathroom I think

of it
beating

When I read "That Still Clear", for some reason I feel like weeping. Perhaps it is the glimmer of my past life in Detroit, just the edge of a word, or perhaps the sense in this poem of so much in life and so short, all that suffering the Buddha talks about, that loss, and it's there in just one syllable. In this poem there are a series of haiku like stanzas—quiet, violent, peaceful, despairing, beautiful and on we go. "from heaven the peace of money/rains down" (21)

With "Song," a few simple words, lined with space, with no arrow pointing anywhere but the word itself, none of William's plums, just the desire trace—

how sweet
time was

how lovely
we

What's so "Imperfect" about this book by George Tysh?—that which is imperfect, is unfinished, still possible, all those margins, and right there we find beauty and laughter. Simple words slip, we step softly, and then we and the author begin to marvel or laugh.

"Death Magazine"

When I discovered it had no pictures
and no word, I let my subscription expire. (71)

or the ending quote by Bataille—

The night is my nakedness
the stars are my teeth
I crash among the dead
dressed in sunlit white.

******

Conversations with Harryette Mullen Update

2010-04-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

The Interview that I discuss below is now available on line in four different spots:

For the most part, this interview follows Harryette's alphabetical structure for Sleeping with the Dictionary. Sections are available or forthcoming in The Poetry Project Newsletter Feb/Mar 10 #222(E-M), Sonora Review (R-S), and the online journals, Eoagh (B-D), Not Enough Night (A-B) and Jacket Magazine (S-Z).

Links are as follows

Sonora Review Blog until the print version is available

E to M republished on the How2 Blog

A to B in Not Enough Night

S to Z in Jacket Magazine

Cities and Memory (Chax Press 2010)

2010-03-26T08:48:00.000-07:00

My new book of prose poetry is now available from Chax Press. It collects many of the serial poems from the photo-poem pamphlets, along with another photo essay. I'm very happy about the publications of this book. Ten years of writing and performing these poems. Anyone who would like to review, please ask me (facebook message) or Charles Alexander at Chax for a copy-- (chax@theriver.com). For a limited time, there is also a good deal subscription option, buying this book, along with new books by Anne Waldman, Tenney Nathanson, Alice Notley and Charles Bernstein. For the subscription go to http://chax.org/subscribe.htm

Thanks to every one for all their support and the conversations and writing that found its way into this book.
Best,
Barbara

Cities and Memory
ISBN 978 0 925904 87 4

http://www.chax.org/

Here are the blurbs--“You are alive and then you’re not, and that’s it,” writes poet and Zen teacher Norman Fischer in a talk on Chan master Zhaozhou. “It’s so easy to forget that this is the case.” Or a little more stringently: “You and I are already dead. We think we’ll be dead later, but that’s baloney. Actually, right now in each breath we are alive and we are dead. We don’t know that and that’s why we are suffering.” Barbara Henning’s radiant Cities and Memory doesn’t have to insist on this, or get all histrionic about it; such a sense of scale and occasion permeates everything here, the correlative lightly-worn gravitas and grandeur inhabiting even the most inconspicuous occurrence. So Cities and Memory gives us every¬thing back, our lives in their ordinary everyday luminosity, nothing special. “Hey yoga girl!” — Tenney Nathanson
Barbara

Henning is a practitioner of the long view, a life adjacent, introjected, clad in parenthesis. She writes words where they change lanes without signaling. Who she knows, what she knows, her knowing is voracious and nuanced and delicately aware. Barbara is the master of the mixed memoir. She achieves phenomenal nuominal density of specifica¬tion, texture. She writes the weather and the tide and she writes in what some say is an unnatural craft and she makes it seem natural. — Erica Hunt

In Barbara Henning’s Cities and Memory the quotidian choreography of a day is teeming with experiential data meshing the feelings of place, people and time. She strips away static silhouettes shadowing the backdrop of time composure and stillness are shattered as continuous reality is layered in this subtle and sustained work. As if a direct challenge to a possible outcome detailed by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, “Immobile inside the train, seeing immobile things slip by. What is happening? Nothing is moving inside or outside the train.” Cities and Memory risks itself by opening up to the flood of con¬tinuum streams. These registers are edged with compassion. — Brenda Iijima

Barbara Henning’s new book brings together several years of her atonal musings on au¬tobiography, place and longing. Lyrical bursts punctuate the narrator’s otherwise seamless restlessness — Detroit, New York, Tucson, and India. The following Escheresque lines from one of Henning’s narrators could well have been spoken by Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane: “Why am I here, I think, when I could be there? Because if I were there, I’d be thinking why am I here when I could be there.” As lopsided as a grin on the edge of a nervous grimace (“sex is an ever available age old temporary cure for sadness”), Cities and Memory is a disjunctive incarnation of a simple, profound ethos: “Don’t forget me, he said.” And Henning doesn’t. — Tyrone Williams

BETWEEN THE MOUNTAINS: MY POETRY GROUP IN TUCSON (2006-2010) & // AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES ALEXANDER AND TENNEY NATHANSON.

2010-02-22T14:36:00.000-08:00

A month ago I moved from Tucson back to 7th Street and Avenue A in New York City. The financial crash brought the rents down in the East Village and I was able to find an apartment on the same block where I used to live, smaller and a little more expensive, but with a big window looking out on the park. When I walk down the street now I pass some of the same neighbors, now older, walking older dogs, and we nod at each other as if no time has passed. Four years ago, I packed up my old Honda civic and moved to the Southwest, spending most of that time living in Tucson with its wide open blue sky, on a desert plain between four brown mountain ranges, on a stretch of land where much of the violence and passion of the west unfolded and then transformed into a medium size mostly working class Mexican/American desert city with lots of artists, yogis, healers and retirees, among others. I was happy to discover that Tucson was also a poetry town.

Simon Pettet told me to be sure in Tucson to meet Charles Alexander. So when I arrived, I called Charles and he invited me over to the Chax Press studio [http://www.chax.org/] in the Steinfeld Warehouse, a space he shared with his wife, the artist, Cynthia Miller, a cavernous warehouse space near downtown Tucson that housed a number of working artists and also Dinnerware Gallery where later I attended a number of readings and where I once read with Sheila Murphy. When I first walked into Charles' studio, I felt at home with the smell of the old building. It brought back memories of my life in Detroit in the seventies, when artists and poets banded together, collaborated, partied together and lived in close proximity with each other. Affordable space for artists in towns where rents do not take up 80% of your pay check. Charles and I drank tea together and exchanged books and began our friendship. It was 2006 and he was also running a reading series at the Cushing Street Bar. I remember reading there in June with Paul Naylor.

Charles was also hosting a Charles Olson seminar at his studio and he invited me to attend. I'd always loved Olson's essays and it was great to read Maximus and talk about it with a group of poets and someone as knowledgeable as Charles. That class elvolved into an on-going reading group. We'd meet every month at various houses downtown, in the foothills, at Chax and while I was there we talked about Robert Duncan, James Joyce, John Ashbery, Lorrine Neidicker, H.D., Juliana Spahr, Ted Berrigan, Herman Melville, Laura Riding, Wallace Stevens, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn, and so many others. Some other regulars in this reading group were Dawn Pendergast, Paul Klinger, Tony Luebberman, Frank Parker, Sue Carnahan, Chris Sawyer, Jake Levine, Lisa Cooper, Rodney Phillips. Just as I left town Wendy Burke and Eric Magrane started attending. On and off John Wright from Bisbee would appear.

Then I was invited to join the board of POG. Tenney Nathanson explains that POG is an acronym for poetry organization or poetry group, for a collective of folks interested in attending readings and performances and then talking about them on a listserv. Check out www.gopog.org. The POG board decides who reads in their reading series and they do the work involved in hosting the writer and running the reading. I was surprised to discover how much work was involved—writing grants, pr, corresponding with writers, making fliers, setting up dinners and potlucks and fund raising activities, entertaining the writers, and endless phone calls, meetings and emails. I remember at my first meeting when the first call for volunteers to do something, how I hugged into myself (after years of volunteering at LIU), and whispered loudly, "I'll only write bios." But that only lasted for a short time and then I was doing this and that and that and this. While I was there, on and off some of the board members were Charles, Tenney, Cynthia Miller, Carlos Gallego, Rodney, Tony, Frank, Dawn, Jake, Lisa Cooper, Bonnie Jean Michalski, Anna Fulford, Laynie Brown, and Sue Carnahan. These folks became an important part of my daily life and community, my poetry family.

Today I'm looking out the window at the pale blue, almost gray New York sky and the criss-crossing branches from the trees in Tompkins Square. In Tucson perhaps I'd be biking across Campbell, taking a deep breath as I coasted into U of A, the most unusual looking campus I've ever seen, with expansive space and the mountains in the distance, before, behind and all around. Two rows of palm trees cut the path through the campus, their shadows following the movement of the sun. It always felt like I had entered a grand palace on a universal scale and the palm trees were the soldiers lined up along the side, waiting for the king and queen. And I'd be the stranger passing through from another time zone on her bicycle. Sometimes football crowds would gather on the lawns with their tents or soldiers would be marching and recruiters standing around at tables enticing young people to join the army. (Be a hero, go to college, and we won't tell you all the other bloody details.) At Mountain Avenue I'd turn right and swoop down under Speedway Blvd. and emerge on the other side near Helen Street and The Poetry Center, one of the biggest Poetry Centers, with one of the largest poetry collections in the world. http://poetrycenter.arizona.edu/

I'd lock up my bike and upon entering the library, I'd spy my friend and ex-New Yorker ex-Berg Collection librarian, Rodney Phillips, leaning over his computer. I'd stop and talk and then Wendy or Bonnie or Christine or Cybele would stop by and we'd chat. So many young and not so young poets and lots of poetry books and endless classes and events. I was happy to teach three classes at the Poetry Center while I was in Tucson, one on "Poetic Prose and the Prose Poem," another on "Borderline Genres," and another class I organized and co-taught with Tenney, Charles and Laynie, each of us doing two weeks on our individual take on "Experimental Off-Center Poetry." When I first came to Tucson, a poet-student I had worked with in Writers.com classes, Siri Lisa Phillips, took me to the poetry center the first time and introduced me to everyone there. It was kind of like I was blessed by Siri and Simon with their introductions. Thanks to both of you.

The POG board would plan their reading series a year in advance, six to seven people deciding on the four to five out-of-town poets to invite. Tug and pull, but then relatively easy negotiations. When an out-of-town poet who was not on the schedule would contact one the board members to say he or she was coming through town or was on a book tour, we'd often pull it together to put on a reading. Quite often though Charles would do most of the work. And Frank would show up with his sound equipment. We'd call these unplanned readings, drive-bys. I remember once when I received a phone call that Nanao Sakaki was in town and reading at the Drawing Studio on 4th Avenue. Peter Warshall and Diana Hadley had worked together with Charles through Chax Press to set up the reading. I dashed over and the place was full of an audience I'd never met before. Many poets live in the outskirts and don't come regularly to readings. Drummund Hadley (of Douglas Arizona) was sitting next to me, leaning over to see what I was writing in my notebook. In the middle of Nanao's reading, he stood up and read a poem, a tribute to Nanao. He had known him in the past. That night Harris Schiff sent an email to me asking me to pass his regards to Nanao, they had travelled together years earlier in Europe, but Nanao was already out of town and on his way to another US city. Now he's out of his body all together. But three years ago he was vibrant and alive and I was happy to listen to him. Some other very memorable drive/jet-bys were Eileen Myles and Gloria Frym. I remember walking under the old 4th Avenue bridge at night with Gloria and she was surprised that we felt safe there. Now it's been replaced by a shiny new structure. Gloria was staying at Casa Libre and she loved it there, a hidden compound of apartments for poets and another venue for poetry readings. In 2007 David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg were on a book tour and they gave a vavoom beautiful reading in the garden at Z Mansion. When David was reading and smiling and loving the words, that's when I secretly fell in love with him. Living in Tucson with its laid back cost of living and friendliness gave me the time to meet a lot of poets. I remember sitting at my kitchen table drinking tea and chatting with Norma Cole about how we knew things about each other through a shared friend. In New York there was so much going on that sometimes it was easy for me to just stay inside at night and maybe now and again wander over to the Poetry Project, and then zip back home quickly after the last line. I remember when I was at one of the first readings in Tucson and Siri was encouraging me to go out afterwards. I said, well maybe, and then she followed me in her car and caught me turning off to go home. She pointed in the direction of Kingfisher, and I followed her there. That was the beginning of lots of after poetry parties.

There were also numerous readings at the Poetry Center. One of the highlights was a controversial Conceptual Poetry conference led by Marjorie Perloff . You can scroll down on my blog to see my response [http://barbarahenning.blogspot.com/2008/06/dark-labyrinth-of-conceptual-poetries.html] Also the Poetry Center recently held a month long series of readings and talks about eco-poetics. I was happy to taxi-talk, dinner-talk, and/or poetry-listen from the airport to their rooms or restaurants or readings with Juliana Spahr, Lila Zemborian, Rosa Acala, Elenie Siklianos and Jonathan Skinner. And Chax Press put on a lot of readings, too, some of them were co-sponsored with POG. POG and Chax were so close that sometimes you couldn't tell the difference. The really memorable event with Chax (for me), was when Charles Alexander organized the Charles Olson conference. I wrote an essay-poem on Olson's lecture, "The Special View of History" for the panel. Re-reading Olson, searching for clues about Tucson and writing the essay helped me rethink my own poetics. There were presentations by Anne Waldman, Tenney, Cole Swenson and Steve McCaffery. You can listen to us reading Olson and you can read our essays at http://chax.org/eoagh/issuefive/olson.html

There were also events that (for me) seemed to spin off of Kore Press and Lisa Bowden's action-oriented life in Tucson. http://www.korepress.org/ I'm sure others were involved and maybe even more involved in directing these projects, but Lisa invited me to participate. "The Invisible City Project" was an event where local writers, artists and dancers went to locations in Tucson with spontaneous artistic eruptions. http://invisiblecityproject.wordpress.com/ I'm spontaneous initially but then I like to spontaneously rewrite and rewrite. I wandered around with a pen and pad, wishing I was an official dancer so I could twirl across the bridge. Then at the "Parade of Lights" opening the holiday season in 2007, Lisa and others organized a group of women (I think again mostly artists, dancers and writers) to participate in the parade. They called themselves Dorothy Thomas's [http://www.actiondownthere.blogspot.com/] We dressed in black, carrying white shopping bags with various slogans for peace and a candle inside each bag. We didn't speak, but instead passed out flyers against the war and asked for donations to various groups that promote peace. The Dorothy's won the grand Marshall prize. Walking in that parade reminded me of the "Take Back the Night March" (against rape) in Detroit in the seventies; when we marched quietly down the street in Detroit though, some men threw stones at us. In Tucson, we won the prize.

Frank Parker took me to the Desert Museum the first time, and after that I regularly took many visiting poets there. I remember going with Harryette Mullen, Lewis Warsh, Kit Robinson, Mark Wallace, K. Lorraine Graham, Jonathan Skinner, Lila Zemborian, Maureen Owen, Jeane Hueving, and Leslie Scalapino. Maybe there were more. Some poets like the restaurant best, some like the animals (I like the javalina), or the saguaro cacti, others like to study the language on the signs. If you visit during the week, it can be a meditative walk through a desert terrain, but on the weekend it's sometimes a push and shove with crowds of children and tourists.

I remember when I first arrived and the POG folks on the board asked me to do the talk to ask the audience for donations. After a dramatic lovely reading by Alice Notley in St. Andrews Episcopal Church, everyone was quiet and I went up to the pulpit and started talking about the benefits of an organization that brings off-center experimental poets to Tucson. Apparently the take was bigger than usual, but so was the audience. At a potluck afterwards at Gail Browne and Francis Sjoberg's house, Geoff Young--who was in town staying at Casa Libre--reminded me that Pound first said, "Make it New," not Williams. Did I say Williams? Yes, you did, he argued. Oh, well, early dementia.

I remember sitting in El Minuto with Renee Gladman, Laynie and Frank eating Mexican Food and really liking Renee's easy going thoughtful in the moment presence. I remember sitting on a picnic table in Himmel Park with Frank talking about local POG politics. I remember going into down dog right next to Laynie Browne at a class taught by my good friend, Lisa Schremp. I think Laynie and I were sometimes in Lisa's classes together years earlier in New York City. I remember sitting in the garden at the Poetry Center listening to Norman Fischer talk about zen poetics and then walking over to have tamales at Bentley's Cafe. So many dinners with so many poets--Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Charles Borkhuis, David Gitin ,Tyrone Williams, Michael Kelleher, Anne Waldman, and many more. We ate Mexican. We ate Indian. We ate. We ate. At our potlucks, we ate Tenney's sesame noodles, Cynthia's enchiladas and my salads. I remember Eleni Sikelianos talking about Paris and poetry, and this and that poet, at Charles and Cynthia's dinner table. Driving Beverly Dahlen to the airport. She was alone in the poet's cabin without a cell phone. Meeting Denise Uyehara in a health food store and knowing instantly that I would like her and her artistic performances. I remember getting antsy in my seat while listening to Jefferson Carter's witty poems about women's aging bodies. I remember acting in Leslie Scalapino's play with Laynie, Tenney and Charles. "As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen." It was a serious-nonsense upside-down love and death and humor and confusion. I remember a fund raiser at the Hut on Fourth Avenue, Carlos, Charles, Cynthia and Tenney dancing rock 'n' roll to Mr. Free and the Satelitte Freakout and Robert Palmer's Women.

My POG pals. Just a few months ago after I read with Myung Mi Kim, there was a small gathering at Charles and Cynthia's house, with Roberto Bedoya, Sue Carnahan and Tenney. We sat until relatively late in the evening laughing and telling stories. Friends. We also helped each other through difficult moments in our lives. I remember Cynthia and Charles driving me home from the hospital after a one day procedure and I was groggy. Tenney and his wife Lynda with their line of children from all different countries at a reading at the Poetry Center. Tenney gesticulating and laughing at one of the best readings of the whole three years, reading with dear Maureen Owen and her delicate precise visual poems. Crawling down the Tucson side streets with Sue at the wheel and we're talking. Driving through the mountains near Tubac with Sue and we stop so she can slide a rattler over to the side, but he goes up inside the wheel well. Where is he? We don't know. Maybe in her garage. Sitting in Charles and Cynthia's living room, listening to Frank play his flute and read his poems while his son strums on the guitar. And Laynie's little boys proudly reading their poems at all of the open readings, their poems equal to any of ours. Jake Levine with his Aural Pleasure reading series and his warm appreciation for all the students who engage in word pleasure and after the party pleasure, too. Rodney taking up the camera (after Christine retires) as his weapon-disguise as he floats around the Poetry Center readings, no one even noticing him, but he is always there. Click Click. Click. Bonnie, Dawn and Paul doing just what I said as I stood in front of them as a yoga teacher and had them lift their arms up, their spines up and then down into down dog. You are a haiku! A grimace on Dawn's face later turning into a smile. Yoga teachers can be dominatrices. It's good for you, I said. Tony Luebberman sitting on his veranda reading Juliana Spahr's poem about 911 out loud. Behind him, the mountains, the sun and all of the cacti in his garden.

Another off shoot of POG (for me) was Tenney's Desert Rain Zen group that he started last year. Every Saturday at 4:30 at the little Chapel at U of A, there would be a group of zen-followers sitting and walking silently for an hour and then having tea together. Someone once said, one of the interesting things about this group is that there is such a presence of poets. http://www.desertrainzen.org/

I missed a lot of readings while I was in Tucson because I was traveling. But what a great three and a half years I spent there. Thanks everyone.

You can see some of the photos from my personal erratic photo album. Sometimes I'd take my camera with me and other times, I'd forget.

http://gallery.me.com/barbhenn/

THE INTERVIEW ON POG

***

In July of last year, I started an interview of Tenney Nathanson and Charles Alexander about the history of . We never got to finish that interview but I want to include what we talked about here, as fragmentary as it is. Please add your thoughts, questions, and recollections in the comments.

7/30/09

Barbara: How did POG come into being?

Tenney: I could start with the very first part because that's when you were still in Minnesota, Charles, right?

Charles: Yes, although I might want to trace back to some models.

Tenney: Why don't you do that. So do the Chax stuff before POG.

Charles: Chax press has almost always had some kind of reading series or public events particularly when we got non profit status in 1986 and we had artist residencies, bringing poets and writers here, sometimes two or even four at time. We had a series of talks by writers and artists called The Magritte Sessions at Cafe Magritte and we had for about three years a series called "Hear and Now".

Those Magritte Sessions also included artists (visual artists, musical composers, and more) as well as poets. That kind of non-separation of various arts has been a basic premise in my work for a long time, and it is also a big part of my life, being married to and sharing a studio with Cynthia Miller, who has from the beginning been a big part of POG, either as one of the directors, or through me, since she has a lot to do with everything I do (and vice-versa). She was a great supporter and planning helper for the Magritte Sessions, too. That was a cafe, by the way, begun by artists in Tucson, and, while it lasted, at the center of the downtown art social life.

In that series, and others, we brought people from all over and had pretty good support from grants and everything. When I left Tucson in 1993 and was in Minneapolis for three years, that is probably the next part of the story when Tenney comes in for the pre-POG plan.

Tenney: Was it really 1993 when you left?

Charles: In 1993 I left . . . it was in July, however I was gone for a while in May to find a place to live up there and then I came back in August of 96.

Tenney: I compressed that in my head into a slightly shorter time. I got here in 85 and met Charles almost right away because he was hosting Eli Goldblatt giving a talk and I knew Eli. I didn't know who you were, Charles. I didn't know the connection to Karl Young or anything but I knew Eli from my year in Philly at Temple. We both knew Toby and Gil and those people so I went to hear Eli give a talk and I met Charles that way. Until Charles left it was just a fantastic poetry community because there was the poetry center stuff, but then there was all this stuff I really cared about, bringing Bernstein out, and it was really done through Chax Press. Chax was mostly a press but it had a very serious somewhat, sporadic isn't the right word, selective, there wasn't like an event every month. But every year there were several things that were really interesting to go to and then when Charles left, it took a while to realize it, but it really changed. There was really nothing there except the Poetry Center which was terrific, but sort of big and institutional and only intermittently of interest to people doing the kind of stuff we were doing.

A few things dovetailed. I had a couple of advanced poetry graduate students, most notably Dan Featherston who was already pretty well known as a poet and was editing ABACUS at that point. And then Jill McCartney who was not a poet but was writing her dissertation with me on Ashbery and other people. And there were one or two others, Jason Lagapa, who was also around. They were done with course work and also when I did the Contemporary Poetry Course, I thought that I always had to start with the same old people so there was no advanced poetry context for them, and no links between the academic stuff, and what Dan was doing as a poet, so I got this idea that we would start this discussion group that would be sort of people at the university and people outside. Another kind of model for that was the first year that I was here in 85. I taught a senior undergraduate seminar and Charles and Cynthia Hogue and Karen Brennan all decided to sit in. So they kind of co-taught. Well I did most of teaching but for certain sessions they were interested in, they taught or co-taught so it functioned half way between a university course and sort of a community poetry seminar. So I thought I would start something like that and then just about that time I got word that Charles was coming back and I remember saying that this was great because I missed all the programming. But Charles said, "I don't think I'm going to do that much programming this year anymore. I want to focus my attention on publishing books." So I thought that in a way this might slightly trick him back into community poetics and stuff.

Charles: Now I learn . . .

Tenney: A commitment to get a lot of people to share the burden with him if he would do some of it. And the rest of us would try to be equal partners in it.

Barbara: What year was that? 96?

Charles: That must have made sense to me because I had been doing it at that point for twelve years or more. Even before I came to Tucson in Madison Wisconsin. Some of that on a very professional level. At the Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis, I was the head and I had a salary and I planned these things and paid people very well who came. Even the kind of grants we were getting in the 80's from the State Arts Commission and we got NEA money. It was a great event, a great series but I did take it pretty much all on me, so the notion of doing it like that again didn't appeal to me but the notion of doing it with a group of people, particularly with Tenney who was both a great friend and I can't imagine anyone in the poetry world who I have more respect for. Fantastic.

Barbara: So before you put POG together, Tenney, Charles had already been running a very elaborate series here—with a three year gap?

Charles: It was a real mix of local writers, regional writers, national writers and once in a while international writers. And some of those years I was also the director of the Tucson Poetry Festival. One year we'd be bringing in Robert Creeley, Nathaniel Tarn, and Daphne Marlatt from Canada, and Sheila Murphy from Phoenix and a few others.

Tenney: One year you brought in bpNichol to the Poetry Festival.

Charles: bpNichol, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nate Mackey, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and then the last one I helped plan but I left the Poetry Festival directorship before it actually happened was Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka and the jazz pianist, Cecil Taylor which was like... I was in heaven doing that.

Barbara: Sounds quite a bit different than now. What year was this?

Charles: That was the festival that took place in 1992. I was still in Tucson but I was no longer directing the festival by the time it occurred. I had done enough of that.

Barbara: So during this gap when Tenney you were here, but Charles wasn't, suddenly there wasn't any off-center poetry.

Tenney: The thing that was slightly variable was that I think the Poetry Center has gotten better and better but when Lois Shelton was director, she actually took more direct input from the board.

Barbara: Who is on the board now?

Tenney: I think it is usually one person from either the English Department faculty or one person from the Lit faculty. So I've been on it two or three times. At any rate when Lois was on it, it turned out to be pretty good, pretty much a pork barrel, four or five of us on the board and each one of us would pretty much name somebody. So the years when I was on the board, I was able to get a few people like Kenneth Koch and so on. But it was maybe one or two things a year at most. Charles was not doing the Poetry Festival then. That generally seemed not to be the off-center stuff we like, so I didn't go to much of that stuff when he wasn't directing.

Charles: There was a little part of that period though in the very early nineties, a group that came out of the program that called themselves "Among Other Things" and they had a fairly regular program of readings in art galleries and things downtown too. So it seemed like there was a lot of activity.

Tenney: Karen Falkenstrom was one of the people doing that for a while, wasn't she?

Charles: Karen, Roger Hecht and Bill Marsh. Also, probably the most visible member of that group was Rebecca Byrkit.

Tenney: And they brought Norma Cole down. I remember that. Did they bring Tom Mandel or was that you?

Charles: I brought Tom.

Barbara: So sporadically the people in the MFA program are interested in doing more radical things with writing . . . If you come into a program and your only goal is to get published and you aren't that interested in all the possibilities with language, you might not be so interested in going off at an angle with your poetics, besides representational or expressionist modes.

Charles: I can put it in other terms which I think were still in effect when I moved here at first in the mid 80's. I don't think I see this model around any more, but that is the graduate model is to keep on ploughing your writing and your work and pretty much alone without a community in mind with the hopes that you'd be discovered or win a contest or an award and all of a sudden the career will take off. Or your work would find a bigger audience. In my mind that's the kind of writer-think that encourages loneliness and depression and alcoholism.

Tenney: What I remember from the program a long time ago and I think is very different now is that the aesthetic was a little more focused, more things were pretty clearly beyond the pale. It was quite competitive and everybody sort of knew who the "best" students were. And I think that is very different now. So one of the things that encouraged was this quick facility so people would kind of figure out a thing that they could do well that somebody was praising and just do that and I think that in the last few years there is more a sense of willingness to try different things and not be so polished and see where it goes. Sometimes in the past, sometimes students were told that they were not ready. They shouldn't be doing that. They are only students now. I think that in that situation, too, POG had a really crucial role to play because we are sort of the place where people can go and begin to build community projects with poetry.

Charles: But I also think that what I have been told by some people in the program is that POG and Chax Press have consistently treated people as colleagues even if they are students, younger colleagues, older colleagues, but never lesser colleagues, whereas people tell me that the MFA program has a more hierarchical attitude about those kind of things, with notable exceptions throughout the years. Early on one of the people I knew and gravitated to her work even before I knew Tenney was Lisa Cooper. She was an MFA student at the time, and Mike Magoolaghan who also was an MFA student. At the time they even edited an issue of Sonora Review that had a sort of alternative writing section that I participated in and through the years there have generally been anywhere from one to as many four or five poetry students who have been really important people in my local community and certainly to the events POG has tried to create over the last decade.

Barbara: So POG being here, inviting in graduate students and having this experimental venue, it becomes a place where students who are interested in alternative poetics can listen to other poets and find alternatives.

Tenney: In the past, I think the MFA Program probably looked down their nose at our aesthetic, but I had probably looked down my nose at theirs, too. In the last decade or so they have actually been pretty positive about letting people work with me, feeling happy when people go do POG stuff and things like that. I also think that the Poetry Center has been pretty consistently supportive.

Charles: I think that's fair.

Barbara: Could you talk about the different poetry groups in Tucson. We have talked about the program and the Poetry Center. And as I see it now the Poetry Center tries to offer to offer writers and programs that cross over different interests, including POG.

Charles: Well there has been a long standing reading series called the Lamp Light Reading Series (run so long by Roberta Howard) which has always been almost exclusively local poets, once in a while with a friend of a local coming in to read, in a once a month series that also has an open reading as a major component of that and when I first moved to Tucson that had been already been going on for a while.

Barbara: Is it still going n now?

Charles: Yes, it is still going on now. One of its key central people at that time was the poet Will Inman who has a long history in poetry and is a very Whitmanic bardic poet and he unfortunately has been in a home for the last several years. Great guy. Difficult, curmudgeonly guy, helpful and still sometimes difficult. I love him but we have not always gotten along.[Will Inman died this past year on October 3, 2009.]

Barbara: What kind of poetics?

Charles: I think of his poetics as somewhat political, definitely humanistic. Not the school of quietude. It is not always that studied and trained by the academy. It is not academic. It relates to the academic, to the spoken words, but it's been a populist poetry movement. If you are around Tucson long enough, you'll probably be invited to read. I've been invited, have you ever?

Tenney: Never

Charles: Roberta Howard was such an important part of that group.

Barbara: Who runs it now?

Charles: I'm not sure. I believe their monthly thing was happening at a Best Western Hotel on Stone. I think it moved somewhere else.

Barbara: I think when Michael Gregory read and I went to that hotel for the National Writers Union Series.

Charles: That's different. That's a relatively new series. That's David Ray, primarily. He moved to Tucson much later but there is a little scene of friends around David Ray and long time National Poetry program on the radio from the East Coast somewhere or possibly the Midwest. I'm not sure. There is intermixing though our friend Tim Peterson who was here in Tucson as part of POG, part of the program and also got together with David and Judy Ray and almost on a weekly basis talking poetry and poetics. I do think of that as a fairly populist political group and it has stretched out to include somebody like Michael Gregory in Bisbee.

Barbara: Michael's work is political.

Charles: Michael's work is political and aware of a modernist tradition but it has a little bit of trouble embracing some aspects of the modernist tradition. I have a lot of respect for his work

Barbara: Is there a group of performance poets?

Charles: In the last ten years there has been a spoken word/performance/ slam poetry group—Theresa Driver who was until fairly recently director of Tucson Poetry Festival has been at the heart of that. They now have a series at Bentley's once a month.

Tenney: Do you remember Dennis Prieto? There were also terrific undergraduates around. Dennis was a lit creative writing major, a nice guy who went on to do an MFA at Iowa and then got a law degree and is now a lawyer in Newark but Dennis actually created the slam poetry at the Club Congress in 1990. That was pretty cool, I thought.

Charles: That takes me back to that period and even the mid 80's when part of my community here was verbal performance art. I wouldn't call it slam poetry but it included the performance group, The Little Dinks that were Imo Baird, Dan Buckley and Craig Zingg, included some of the work of the artist Dennis Williams. These were performed more in art galleries and on the street. They were really smart. Some of them were visual art people and there was a performance scene at the Club Congress that was run by Robert Bray, I think that was his name, who ended up becoming really active in AIDS Foundation work. There was a scene and there was interaction between visual artists and performance arts and at least my end of the poetry world. I at times read with these people and did things on the street and performed with them and was in plays by Dennis Williams and it was exciting.

Barbara: Have we pretty much covered the groups?

Tenney: Annie Bunker, the dance thing was part of that too.

Charles: Yeah Annie Bunker and Orts Theater of Dance often found poets and asked them to get involved with performances and different kinds of poets. And there was also the Casbah. They had a tea house Buddhist poetry scene with Tom Cox. . . I'm sure I'm missing things too

Barbara: I'm trying to get a sense of this. If in the middle of these groups, Charles leaves and you notice something is missing, what is it exactly that is missing?

Tenney: Charles has more energy than me and I'm also centered in the university so I wouldn't have been as enthusiastic and patient with going around to a variety of things that aren't exactly what I was interested in and seeing what the community scene was. For me what was missing was the thing that comes out of the New American Poetry and that again may be very narrow to say that that wasn't going on here. There was probably some of it. But I think what Ron would call formally innovative poetry that I would associate with the Donald Allen anthology. It just wasn't here.

Charles: I got a lot of shit when I was first in town from some communities that thought I was only about language poetry and I brought language poetry to Tucson and what a terrible thing to do. But in fact I was always Language Poetry plus objectivist poetics and black mountain poetics and New York School poetics. I was interested and involved in all of that. It was never that narrow for me. And if you look at the Chax Press publications from the very beginning, it was never that narrow.

Tenney: We started POG as a discussion group.

Barbara: Why did you name the group POG?

Tenney: We wanted an email list with a short tag. I picked POG as having some relation to poetry group, then Dan Featherston said it was a cool name because there's some kid's game called Pog (but pronounced poge) and so we started calling ourselves that. Plus in some way it really doesn't stand for anything, and we liked that.

Barbara: Who else was there besides you and Dan?

Tenney: Dan, Jill McCartney—not a poet, getting a Ph.D. here, high level soccer player from North Carolina—so when she was a graduate student here she became the assistant coach to the women's soccer team and so she left to take a job in southwest Minnesota to become the soccer coach. She was teaching also half time for the English Department—if she finished her dissertation—and the other half was the soccer coach, but she ended up not finishing. But the first couple years of POG, Dan and Jill, Charles and me were doing the grant writing and things like that. Kali Tal was an American Studies person from Yale and she got a job here and she was a poetry publisher of working class political poetry through Burning Cities Press and a magazine Vietnam Generation.

Charles: I think she has to have been one of the most radical professors they ever had at the University of Arizona and I mean that in a very loving and positive way.

Tenney: She ended up getting fired and suing them and winning and it was a very nationally visible thing, very complicated. She was very forceful but with people she liked she was incredibly sweet. She was one of the main cooks for the benefit dinner we did the first time. She was great. Lisa Bowden was a participant. When Lisa founded Kore, she disappeared from POG.

Charles: That's not right. She and Karen Falkenstrom got equipment when I left to go to Minnesota and they formed Kore right then. So Kore was an ongoing thing but maybe Kore hadn't blossomed yet. She worked with me at Chax for five years.

Tenney: For a while there was some ambivalence for some people about the public programming part, but Charles really wanted to do that. Lisa Cooper was more interested in the discussion group part.

Charles: Dan Featherston really wanted to do public programming. I remember having some ambivalence about it myself. I was kind of happy when it happened, but I didn't want to lose the discussion group, getting together to present what we were working on here in the community, to each other and we did lose that.

Tenney: Yeah we did lose it. It disappeared for a year and then we tried to revive it and Lisa actually came to one or two things but the attendance was really low, two or three people, so we gave up on it. I think that the POG-at-home stuff that we started right when you got here Barb was an attempt to revive some version of that. but again that faded. I guess partly because it ran into the potlucks and the need to make money. So the notion that we were going to meet every second month.

Charles: I kind of wish Cynthia was here. I don't remember her at the meetings with Dan and Khali and all, but she was at least peripherally involved. And when we started doing the very first events, they were often in our studio or in an empty space next to our studio and included presentations by visual artists, including Margraret Baily Doogan and Jim Waid and that ended up becoming an important part of the POG directive for the first several years. Sometimes it still surfaces when we have an artist or musician present. And Cynthia is now more involved than ever—plus I think my own involvement would be impossible without hers.

Tenney: What do you think happened to that? Why don't we do it anymore

Charles: Well I think that one thing that happened was that I sort of exhausted the people I was closest to in the visual arts community who I knew could really do a good job and then it was going to become harder work to find others and I guess I felt like Cynthia and I would have to drive that part to keep it going.

Barbara: Well we don't have other visual artists on the board, except for Cynthia.

Charles: Now it seems as if the majority of persons on our board are totally uninterested in that.

Barbara: I don't think they are totally uninterested, but I think our reason for being on the board has to do with poetry and writing even though we are interested in visual projects, too.

Tenney: Sometimes they were kind of flat, but sometimes they were really interesting. Annie Bunker's dance thing was fantastic.

Charles: Victor Masayesva video art thing was great. Barbara Penn's things with great. Jim Waid paired with Will Alexander. That was dynamic.

Tenney: And Eno Washington . . . incredible. He's a dancer and a dance historian.

Charles: It wasn't always visual artists. Musical stuff. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge read and we had an event at the Pima Music Hall.

Tenney: That was great.

Charles: Larry Solomon who is an avante garde composer and pianist was paired with her. He presented a prepared piano event and it was great.

Tenney: It was when an artist would do some combination of performing and talking about what they did. So he talked a lot about what he did. There was always a sense that we had done something fairly right pairing the two people so that they implicitly or explicitly combined well.

Charles: I thought the events, maybe except for one or two, were consistently really good. What I hoped would happen in terms of interpenetration with audiences didn't often happen. For some reason the other artists, visual, dance, weren't able to pull their community into going to what they perceived as a poetry event. So it was the artist doing their thing for the poets. Or the musicians doing their thing for the poets. which was satisfying for me and the audience but maybe not entirely for them.

Tenney: We were hoping in some way to stir the waters a little and get the poetry out and make the poetry more interesting. There was a year or two where we were kind of committed to doing half the people as visual artists and I had a feeling from you and Cynthia that it ceased being a pleasure and became more like racking your brains for somebody plausible. From that point it seemed a little forced.

Charles: And then one of the last people we tried to get was Greg Benson. I thought it was his problem but then it seemed like it was a misunderstanding. He didn't show and I remember being so disappointed with that. Can I do this again?

Tenney: A local Hispanic filmmaker, Pablo Toledo—Joanna Hearne was the contact person who got him on our radar and I worked with him for two years, an endless amount of work to pin him down for a date. One time he cancelled the date and the other time after 30 emails back and forth, he stopped answering. I felt like I was spending way more energy than I should for the little part I was doing. Charles did almost all of it.

Barbara: I just want to back track a little bit. POG started as a discussion group and so the discussion group was bringing your own work and reading it and talking about it.

Tenney: There was a third thing. I'm not sure if it was POG or not. We met at the poetry center, the thing you guys are doing when you meet and talk about a writer. We had a version of that with Barbara Cully and others. It might not have been have been officially a POG thing but it was the same people who were doing POG—Dan, Jill.

Charles: I think it was a thing. Yes, I think several of us were interested not just in presenting our own poetry, but our work of reading, writing about, and coming to understand other poets, poetics, etc.

Barbara: I think of our reading group as kind of a POG reading group.

Charles: Well, at first the reading group came out of classes I had begun as a teacher, first for the Poetry Center, then privately in my studio – but it’s true that one or two members were always part of the reading group. We were pretty new then too and we didn't know where to do it. We never developed a consistent identity in terms of where to do things, at the poetry center, in our houses. . . It never fully reached full fruition. When we started doing public programming, some people loved that so much that it became what we wanted to do it.

Tenney: And other people like Lisa Cooper walked away.

Charles: I remember Dan Featherston only wanting to do the public events.

Tenney: The board is so good now and there is really a sense that there are five or six of us who are really essential to keeping the thing going. Back then there were fewer people so it became an energy thing really quickly.

Barbara: How much work do you want to put into it..

Tenney: It was the same two or three people nudging people. Pretty quickly you say I don't want to do all of this.

Charles: We have a great board right now. We're all great but I'm not sure we are kind of willing to work as hard as we did per person in the earlier years. Some of us are of course getting older and some of us have families all kinds of reasons but even the kind of thing.

Barbara: I guess as poets we're all working on our projects, our families, our lives and like anybody else you have to pull back and look at what you are doing..

Tenney: This could be wrong because Tucson has a very serious writing community. But in some sense in terms of the poetics or something like that you are sort of making it up whole cloth when you do it. So some ideas talked about in recent board meetings of running a series without a lot of work miss the community building aspect of it and I think in some way the context there for the readings to happen only because of rolling around and trying to be communal.

Barbara: All of us have to do so much to make a living. And I've been teaching too much, to have a minute in between to do something, some writing, seems amazing but at the same time I have this thought—wow POG could be like a school, we could have our poetics, so many things to do, but you have to have the energy to do it. We talk about reading groups and discussion groups and magazines and classes.

Charles: I'd love to see POG bring someone out for two weeks and work for the community. . . One thing interesting we didn't touch on in the interview yet is the number of activities carried on elsewhere by people who came through and were involved with POG & Chax, i.e. Tim Peterson and Jesse Seldess.

Barbara: I think that this is a good question, Charles. What poetry projects do you think have spun off of folks' involvement with POG? Can you say a little bit more about this?

Charles: A few people who were involved with POG as students, and involved with Chax, too, have gone on to other sorts of community organizing in poetry and poetics. Two who come to mind right away are Tim and Jesse. Both were somewhat involved with POG, perhaps Jesse more so. I remember having a couple of pot lucks after readings or just to get together, at Jesse and his girlfriend Stacy's apartment, one of those lovely pink adobe complexes that we have in Tucson, in the midtown area. Jesse and Tim also both did internships with Chax Press, and otherwise spent time in the Chax studio, and were a part of my local poetry community in all ways. Jesse went on to found Antennae magazine, very low key (somewhat like him), i.e. unidentified on its cover, yet distinctive in its size and design -- a terrific magazine, since the beginning. Still going, now in Berlin. He was also the founder of a reading series for awhile in Chicago, after he left here, called the Discrete Series. And Tim has done all kinds of things, including the Analogous Series of talks on art and poetics when he went to Cambridge, Mass, after he left here. He also helped get Leonardo, from MIT Journals, off the ground -- that's a journal of digital poetics. And since he's been in New York the last several years, he's curated the Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club for at least 3 seasons, and he's started a reading series at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, and most recently, he's begun the Tendencies: Poetics and Practice talk series at the CUNY Grad Center. Earlier in my life in Tucson, others who worked with Chax went on to found other literary projects, too, like Lisa Bowden's Kore Press, Joe Kish's Ready Press, and a couple of others. But Tim and Jesse are the ones who come to mind who participated either tangentially or fairly strongly in POG.

New Review of Rosebud

2010-02-11T15:49:00.001-08:00

A new review was posted today for Thirty Miles to Rosebud at Paradigm Shift:

Review of Thirty Miles To Rosebud

Conversations with Harryette Mullen

2010-01-28T20:40:00.000-08:00

Below is an intro to a 50 page interview with Harryette Mullen. Sections of the interview are available or will soon be available in the magazines listed below.

CONVERSATION WITH HARRYETTE MULLEN: From A to Z
With Harryette Mullen’s dense, layered and playful poems in Sleeping with the Dictionary, there is often a subtle question, almost present but not quite present, a riddle-like structure that leaves the reader wondering: How did she make this poem? As a prep for an MFA course I was teaching at Long Island University in the summer of 2009, and as a project I knew I would enjoy working on later, I decided to ask Harryette if she would be willing to talk to me about each of the poems in this collection, and then I would share sections of the interview with the class. This interview would be in the spirit of the Oulipo artists who reveal their experiments and constraints and catalogue them in their library in Paris. No secret mysterious inspired “writer-self,” but instead a writer who is seriously inventive and willing to share her methods and approaches. It was very curious and enlightening to the students to discuss and then hear some of the writer’s intentions, context, and the way she had constructed the poems. We of course weren’t searching for meaning, but instead aiming to help writers expand their own repertoire of tools for writing and to think about the reasons writers write the way they do.

For the most part, this interview follows Harryette's alphabetical structure for Sleeping with the Dictionary. Sections are available or forthcoming in The Poetry Project Newsletter Feb/Mar 10 #222(E-M), Sonora Review (R-S), and the online journals, Eoagh (B-D), Not Enough Night (A-B) and Jacket Magazine (S-Z).

Links (I'll update these as available):

Sonora Review Blog until the print version is available

E to M republished on the How2 Blog

New Review of Thirty Miles to Rosebud

2009-11-04T09:27:00.001-08:00

http://smallpressreviews.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/thirty-miles-to-rosebud/
by Marc Schuster

SEPTEMBER 26, 2009...6:32 PM
Thirty Miles to Rosebud

It’s tempting to say that time and space are the villains of Barbara Henning’s Thirty Miles to Rosebud. After all, several decades and an entire continent separate the protagonist, Kate, from the best friend she lost track of during her teenage years, and the quest to find the friend seems, at times, hopeless. Despite the years and miles that separate the friends, however, Kate persists in her journey, intent on returning a shoebox full of memories to her erstwhile friend, Peggy. Along the way, she has ample opportunity to reflect on her life, on the inevitable onset of middle age and all that it encompasses, and on myriad twists and turns that brought her into her life. In other words, she gets a chance to reflect upon time, space, circumstance, and everything else that made her into who she is and, as she does so, comes to a stronger understanding of herself. Time and space, it turns out, are not quite villains and definitely not heroes, but necessary evils, bittersweet agents in the ongoing motion of our lives.

Thirty Miles to Rosebud moves along at a meditative pace, and appropriately so. As a storyteller, Henning is in no hurry to move her reader from point A to point B. Rather, she allows her universe to unfold organically, and Kate’s search for Peggy gives her plenty of time to reflect on a number issues, not the least of which is her ambivalence toward the hedonistic ethos that defined her youth. A child of the 1960’s, Kate recalls being both attracted to yet cautious of the freedoms often associated with the era, particularly with respect to love, and as she moves through her life in the hear and now, her quest to find Peggy develops, in large part, into an effort to come to terms with her mixed feelings about the past.

In a sense, Thirty Miles to Rosebud, is a complex coming of age novel, or a novel that complicates our understanding of what it means to come of age. Or, to put it another way, it’s novel that insists on every page that we’re always coming of age, and that the past is always prologue. We are both creatures of time and creatures of our time, Henning reminds us throughout the novel–but what we do with the time we have is what ultimately defines us.

Warming at Simon Pettet's Hearth

2009-08-23T13:04:00.000-07:00

In Hearth (Talisman, 2008), Simon Pettet is in love and in loss with his lover, the street, his suffering and he's singing and musing about it in an odd slanted way.

Instead of giving an answer, he left.
Later, he wrote a long letter
without saying a word about it.
No one was wiser. (2)

There's an answer in Simon Pettet's poems but it is always a sideways glance. He often yokes the most profound problems and situations with the most ordinary, for example holding back the flood of the Nile that carries "flotsam and jetsam" and "Give up cigarettes. Avoid all forms of poison." Hold back the flood with personal restraint. And then we are swept away with the poem and our lives. There are details that seem everlasting and then the reminder of our fragility--

the robin and the butterfly
and the leaf and the flame
and the extinction (121)

Or everything can be deeply philosophical until Simon turns it upside down and makes it ordinary—

Listen,
You once said that I was
Ruminating deep red was it? but I was
doing no such thing

I was just giving poetry readings. (66)

Many of the poems are humorous, and very 70-80-90 New York School and of course Simon is part of New York School St. Marks Poetry Project community. One of my favorite early poems, and I think it is from the 70's, is "Wireless" dedicated to Harris Schiff. I am not an uninvolved observer here. I know both of these poets and I hear the sound of Harris's voice in between the lines and I definitely hear Simon's voice when he writes. "Wired? Not me, Sheriff, I'm much too old for that" (9).For a moment I think I'm at St. Marks, sitting behind these two, during intermission.

But I'm spoiled ma like our hound dog, or a spaceman,
I can think of nothing higher than the moon. (12)

***

We

will not bother
the scholar
who bought the house

and who wrote
the definitive book

on "the third eye"

and who lives alone now
(possibly in the back there)

in reflected ghost-light,
(the naked bulb),

drinking beers,
and watching re-runs

of
The Twilight Zone (144)

With simple humor and straight out general statements about emotions and love, he then veers off in quirky directions.

Poem

When you permit me to see
With lucidity my anger
Know that it shines straight
Into your dark forest

Cutting through the inadequacies
With which we clothe ourselves
Like brambles So illuminating
That private place like some good soldier
That we call our heart (21)

Anger becomes warrior light into the heart and at the same time little spikes that shelter vulnerability. Sometimes Simon is ecstatic, like Rimbaud, or Elio Schneeman: "O winter of New York!/how decidedly damp you are!.../containing whole universes!" (25) "It's the truth!/ O Jump Now before balmy death/Time shall not take away our breath. (52) Or "it is water!—/our/every/fucking/precious/sparkling/moment!" (174).

Then there are the jagged combination of things arranged in
unexpected ways--
The books on the sidewalk are dutifully arranged
The officer is a moonlighter because he works at the other precinct
Dance performers from around the world are advertised on a torn
poster. I can't see them though, since my dog is blind. I make a wish.
I wish
for another one. The tethered akita is granted a reprieve. All of this
all the
time. Every conceivable moment. All the worlds you'd ever want to know.
(128)

***

The mathematics of birdsong
has eluded me until the present
Laconic cable messages
speeding over the wires (83)

"The mathematics of birdsong", all these poems shooting back and forth over the internet. Here always the hard look at life but with a tender heart, optimism, and a raised eyebrow. And then a wink.

I am squatting like the proverbial egg on a wall
White concrete, it will hurt me if I fall
It is the hour of mid-to-late afternoon
Summer seems—and actually is—endless (170)

Simon Pettet's poems are at times philosophical, lyrical, spacey, funny, sad, weird, leaving us with the image of Humpty Dumpty, teetering on the edge of the wall. He is fragile and he will fall. And so will we. We can endlessly worry about it or we can celebrate our endless summer with the sun on the back of the squatting boy, the hearth of the present. Thanks Simon for giving us this Hearth.

New Novel by Barbara Henning : Thirty Miles To Rosebud

2009-08-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

My new novel is now available from BlazeVox. Any one interested in reviewing let me or Geoffrey Gatza at BlazeVox know. Thanks to all. Barbara

Order from

BlazeVox

Order from

Amazon

Soon available to order from

Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org

Here's some of the PR:

Title: THIRTY MILES TO ROSEBUD 232 pp.
Author: Barbara Henning ISBN 13: 9781935402251
Genre: Literary Fiction LOC 2009923618
Release Date: November 15, 2009 $18.00
Publisher: BlazeVox
www.spdbooks.org 800-869-7553
Cover by Miranda Maher

Description—

Thirty Miles to Rosebud is a mystery, a journey of self-discovery, a love story, and a story of bohemian life in the United States in the 70s and 80s. As a young teenager, Katie runs away from her home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with a boyfriend, a van and little else. She leaves behind her father and the cabin where she grew up, along with visceral memories of her mother and the landscape of her childhood, the dense forests and dark blue of Lake Superior. The novel shifts between rural and urban landscapes—jazz clubs in Detroit, Hari Krishnas in Tompkins Square, Vietnam War vets in a VA hospital, driving through the desert, a makeshift apartment on a rooftop in NYC, underground music clubs in the East Village, and a yoga shala in Mysore, India. All of these stories unfold seamlessly with a lyrical, calm and almost contemplative narrative voice as Katie searches on the road and through memory for a long-lost friend and the roots of her fractured sense of self.

Blurbs—

Thirty Miles To Rosebud depicts a series of imploding families and fast interstates. Barbara Henning's landscapes—a rust-belt childhood, a nearly forgotten East Village Bohemia and the arid Southwest streaked with the setting sun—are populated by runaways, lost loves and lifelong betrayals. In this remarkable novel, Henning's eye for detail and her emotional honesty enables the past to loom in the rear-view mirror long after the car has sped by. Donald Breckinridge

One of Barbara Henning’s great accomplishments is the voice we came to appreciate in You, Me, and the Insects. It presents her world with a candor both companionable and profound, both disengaged and intimate. She has no agenda but to tell her own story, which is the story physical, emotional, and spiritual, of her generation. Wisdom enters her telling as easily as a deer crosses a road. And many deer do, because this is a book in line with Celine’s crazed Castle To Castle, Douglas Woolf’s Wall to Wall, Kerouac’s romantic On The Road, Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thirty Miles to Rosebud stands with all of them as one of the great memoir road novels of our time. Steve Katz

Author's Bio—

Barbara Henning is the author of two other novels, You, Me and the Insects and Black Lace (Spuyten Duyvil). Her books of poetry include My Autobiography, Detective Sentences, Love Makes Thinking Dark, Smoking in the Twilight Bar. A collection of prose and poetry, Cities & Memory, is forthcoming from Chax Press in 2010. She teaches creative writing courses in the MFA programs at Long Island University in Brooklyn and for Naropa University in Boulder. A native Detroiter and a long time resident of New York City, she now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Review of Absolutely Eden by Bobbie Louise Hawkins

2009-07-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

Check out my review of Bobbie Louise Hawkins' book Absolutely Eden at Big Bridge

http://bigbridge.org/BB14/REV-BLH.HTM

New Poems at Jacket Magazine

2009-07-07T17:49:00.000-07:00

Three new poems published in the current issue of Jacket Magazine --

http://jacketmagazine.com/37/henning-5-prose.shtml

John Godfrey's City of Corners (Wave Books)

2008-12-19T18:34:00.000-08:00

Last year between Christmas and New Years I was in nyc staying in a friend's apartment. One night I was walking along First Avenue. It was cold and dark and kind of miserable with very few people on the street. It gets like that in the East Village around the holidays. Quiet. The homeless huddled under blankets. My nose was bleeding. Then I looked up and John Godfrey was coming down the sidewalk. Hi. How long are you in town? Just a few more days. Hey, John, you're just the person I wanted to see. I need a nurse. How come my nose won't stop bleeding? This has been happening on and off ever since I got on the airplane in Tucson. I was standing there on the corner in the cold holding a bloody kleenex against my nose. Nothing to worry about. It's the dry air. Just pinch your nose and hold your head forward a bit until it stops. I thought something terrible was wrong with me. No just the dry air, the heat, you know. We say nice things to each other about our writing and then along we go. Just an ordinary encounter on the corner.

This week I've been reading John's new book City of Corners (Wave Books).

Right at the beginning, there is a bounce:

And you go down that street
Rainbows ahead bling you
like midnight never does
and I wonder where
evening will be tonight
My loved ones waiting there

Who are these loved ones? I wonder. This tough poet guy is a nurse who for many years has gone door to door helping aids patients in poverty ghetto areas of Brooklyn. The poet-speaker-narrator in this first poem "pretends his swagger" as he moves through the street passing in and out of the pages in this book with the orphans, barflies, beggars, prostitutes, drug addicts and all of us. Nothing else to do but keep walking: "Hips do the work/and I cross the world."

After a few poems, I realize I am trying to construct a narrative, to solve the shifting pronouns in these poems. Who is this "she" that appears here and there and then sometimes segues into the "you" and the "you" is often the poet talking to himself. And the "she" is the illusive woman on the street: "She sees herself scurry and hide/She claps an eye before white lines/and lives on up close/to where the beautiful king."

Is the poet in love with the woman? Yes, he is, and is not the lover. He is a brief encounter, an imaginary doctor. "I had better not help you" (12). "The idea of a rematch is repugnant/ . . The heartless appear in a flattering light (13), With these brief encounters, there is this heart beat and a restraint as the poet looks on the suffering of others and of the self. "I'm talking about you/The vein is exhausted/Press back on the wind/Lips not fit to kiss" (15). And the passersby merge into his consciousness and he is one with them "the inside and the outside corners overlap/The path she has chosen treads to a window/Things they hurl at the indigent/She is so very far from the scramble" (16)

And this woman, this she, who appears on a corner is the muse who disappears in a shadow. "Gust conforms her clothing/When she walks she rides" (20). And the poet walks on. "She seems to wait for me/Left no other choice/We cross with the light" (17). Whenever we meet on a corner in the city, or anywhere for that matter, there is the possibility of anything happening: "Require breath in identical ways/Diverge because it is hip/Do not save changes" (18). Yet most of the time, we continue to the next corner.

Under the clothing, there is a body to be examined, diagnosed, and saved even though there is no saving possible. "Glory in her pocket" (23). "You loosen the rope/You hang better/across her back" (24) The interaction between the abstract words and clauses bump up against each other like a mind making sense in a random chaotic way and then suddenly an image, a person appears.

Events fly in the face of ingenuity
Clutter in the descent from birds
Reconstitute suspension of self
I notice the skin between breasts. (19)

The abstractions are like shards of glass in the sky—abstract words and phrases collaged with prepositions becoming philosophical wondering layered into a world-text. And then boom, the syntax evolves and an image, a person, a narrative appears.

Impulses chafe and become brittle
Clap of thunder herds the one-armed
Depravity compares well to contagion
Anatomy deflates upon its ideals
Ravages denied to the degree they're untamed
To use denuded land to sour the blood
The wild girl offers you her card
and the brown waters of her skin become fluent.

When I stand in the cradle of blasphemy
Ambrosian tongue of flame degrades exposure
With no effort I admit ballast
to the stage peopled with clowns and thugs
I can dig how some grasp life as a swap meet
But my chains lack that link
I watch a hand convert a child's forehead
The curl of a rind in sunlight
Lower eyelid hovers above a blue shadow
I am the only one left to consume.

This dark melancholic wandering. "I can't understand how discipline/is of any concern to the annihilated" (27). Neither can I; that is, after you accept yourself as annihilated, there is no more need for discipline. It's over. But until then, discipline helps. And the woman goes on—"she dodges calamity" (27).

There's an acute awareness of the body and desire and annihilation in almost every poem in this book--the nurse-poet's wandering body and the bodies that he encounters on all those corners. You go this way. I go that way around the space to the next line. In between I offer you a remedy for a moment, to avoid calamity. "The women linking the stairs are biased/and she hides in one palm the gold gaming chip" (55). "What color they will paint her/when she dies depends on/how quickly they forget/what you call paradise" (79). The game. And then the wounds and recovery. "I dream myself large/to overcome the forgetfulness/your death enables and/the fraction of survival" (68) Our ghosts and dreams dissipate. "I spy her through an orchard of smoke" (74) This book reads like a series of riddles, like love is a riddle, death is a riddle, these are love riddle songs in the dark—

Through the Wall

I forsake your lips
to get in on the action
Then you are gone
and I get along

Direction all I lack
I catch myself in time
Angles all discordant
No way through the wall

I take what I need
Between me and nothing
stands what I want
When that's enough I know

Will you know me
Not at twenty feet
You pass like water
I can always call your star (72)

The muse here is the other, the otherness of the body across from us, around the corner, over there, back there in the past. "This otherness has grown/onto us from the earth/If you all/hear the supreme/Artificial sky opens/You an island in it." We can stay lost, suffer deeply, wander around corners and still realize a direction as the poet does here: "I have no purpose at last/and put myself to use" (93). John Godfrey is a karma yogi—to be useful in the world to those who suffer, and to write these black jewel like fractured poems for our contemplation. How does one find joy when one sees annihilation around every bend? Look for the beauty in the shards, in the poetry. I am happy to have spent this week reading John Godfrey's City of Corners.

Dominique Fabre's The Waitress Was New

2008-09-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

This week I read Dominique Fabre's novella, The Waitress Was New (Archipelago Books, 2008, Jordan Stump, trans.)

I like holding this book, 117 pages, paperback, 5 by 6 inches, just a little bigger than a pocket book. I feel as if I am carrying around something personal, a little bit of Pierre the waiter-barman at Le Cercle Cafe in Paris. I put him under my pillow for a few nights. The title leads me to think at first that the narrative will be about the new waitress who appears in the first sentence, but then I discover that she is incidental to this story. She replaces the regular waitress as a temporary worker and then as the days go on, the owner disappears leaving Pierre and the cook to deal with the owner's wife and a cafe in need of supplies and the owner, and then the new waitress leaves too. The events are not as important here as the tone and continuity of these rather "incidental" characters. Pierre has worked here for years and the regulars have come in regularly. Then the owner has a new affair and he disappears. Nonetheless, Pierre seems to accept whatever comes next. He consoles the wife and accompanies her as she anxiously wonders about her husband and his infidelity. Pierre has no lovers now. He goes home alone and we are alone with him. And then the wife disappears too. No one is thinking about Pierre and the cook Amedee or the regulars. Just buy a cafe somewhere else and let them go where they will. Pierre is reading Primo Levi's If This is a Man. He admires Levi and his courage. Pierre looks around, and then goes home to figure out his retirement. He hadn't thought about it before. And now when he counts his paychecks, he discovers that after many years he must find another position. There is something delicate and beautiful about Pierre's resignation.

It doesn't really matter what happens in the novel. What I like most is the intimate catalogue of Pierre's daily life, the thoughts he records as he observes the drama of the lives of those in the cafe and then at night as he withdraws to his own apartment. I put his book under my pillow when I go to sleep. The book is like a window into the community of people in this neighborhood and into Pierre's internal life. As a writer I am attracted to this type of intimate casual voice, seeming like text clipped right out of a life. I'm looking forward to reading other novels by Fabre as they are translated.

Here's an early paragraph--

"The new girl was already setting tables back in the dining room. There's nobody here in the morning but the kids from the high school, usually just two or three of them, this is where they come to skip class They don't always have enough cash for a Coke, or even a coffee. I'm well known around here, they call me by my first name, I can't always keep them straight but generally it's a pleasure to see them. We also get people waiting for a phone call to set their course for the day, and housewives from the villas behind the train station, they come in together for a cup of coffee before the head off to the shops. He gave a big sigh and asked what he owed. Without my noticing, the boss had left by the back door, next to the old dumbwaiter from before they renovated the cafe. Sometimes he uses the front door like every-one else, but now and then he slips out on the sly. They live above Le Cercle." (14)

The dark labyrinth of conceptual poetries

2008-06-14T23:02:00.000-07:00

I just finished writing the following for one of my prose poetry classes and without modifying it much, I'm including it on this blog.

The dark labyrinth of conceptual poetries . . .

Learn the language of mathematics . . . or wander
in vain through a dark labyrinth. (Galileo, Opere V1232)

A week or so ago I attended about half of a poetry conference at the Poetry Center in Tucson curated by the critic Marjorie Perloff. Following various links from the Poetry Center's website for the conference, one is bound to locate an anthology of conceptual writing by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (UBU). Throughout the conference participants seemed to be responding to the definition of conceptual poetry on this UBU site, and to differentiate it from other poetry movements or approaches in the past. The term conceptual has been used in the past for art and writing, but not as the name of a poetry movement. That and the addition of multi media possibilities seems the only major difference between the 70-80's work and now. Wikipedia, my somewhat democratic mostly reliable sometimes not website offers a simple description of conceptual art.

art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. . . . ' The idea becomes a machine that makes the art' (Sol LeWitt). . . . The inception of the term in the 1960s referred to a strict and focused practice of idea-based art that often defied traditional visual criteria associated with the visual arts in its presentation as text.

In the early nineties I edited a journal with a conceptual artist, Miranda Maher (and also with contributing editors Sally Young, Lewis Warsh, Chris Tysh, Don David, Michael Pelias and Tyrone Williams). In Long News: In the Short Century, we published conceptual-based art and writing mostly from the New York and Language schools. See:

http://myweb.brooklyn.liu.edu/bhenning/long%20news.html.

I was surprised when I read the introduction to the UBU anthology to find that their description was very close to what Miranda Maher and I had written as the philosophy for our journal seventeen years earlier—non-expressive, not led by emotion, a direct presentation of language, using procedures like appropriation, collage, erasure, oulipian constraints, making poetry new, etc. Writing that is off-center, non-mainstream mostly non-referential, idea-generated writing. (With time passing, I've revised my interests to include autobiographical and emotive language and description as it is or reconfigured and re-examined with various conceptual frames and experiments.)

I just emailed Miranda and asked her what she thought of the wiki definition. (To see Miranda's work, go to http://www.mirandamaher.com/)

Hi Barb,

I would say that is a very good working definition. Love Wikipedia. Sol LeWitt was the big daddy of conceptual art. . . . Also, it might be helpful to be aware of some subtle (and not-so-subtle) visual art world distinctions.. 'Conceptually-based' is separate from 'conceptual'. My work is usually described as conceptually-based, rather than conceptual. I think this is because I am interested in what is conveyed by aesthetics and materials and they also play a role in my work. A lot of conceptual visual art is anti-aesthetic... meaning they add nothing that is not about the concept -- some even strip down existing objects/systems to their non-material/aesthetic idea-core.

Another undertone is that "pure" conceptual work tends to valorize the (ego) intellect. Especially the early (60s) work sometimes implied that it is possible to set up a premise and follow it through unsullied by human emotion, subjective foibles etc. Also, the early artists were predominantly white and male. Probably because their working idea of "intellect" was the white/male in power version. For me, the "pure conceptual" still seems to have that going on (either actual white males or women who are exceedingly male-identified). This is rarely spoken of however. Seems to be non-PC. Another under-cover association is that conceptual is the highest art form and all other approaches would be conceptual if they could (but aren't good enough). Many practitioners are heavily invested in that hierarchy. I'd be interested to know if this sort of B.S. has translated into the poetry community...

It's not that I dislike conceptual art -- the rigor of well-executed conceptual art is gorgeous. And when done right it has an austere, intellectual beauty similar to the beauty of pure mathmatics (not that I can understand pure mathmatics). The B.S. comes into it in attitude and personal interaction. . . Perhaps there is a fundamental, internal contradiction . . . . -- Conceptual Art carries an implication of rigor not only in the structure of the work, but also in the makers' self-examination and self-awareness. But artificial, self-soothing hierarchies such as "my art-camp is better than your art-camp" would be the first to go if we were really being thorough in our thinking.

Ironically, it seems to me that truly strict rigor will always (eventually) dismantle hierarchies and lead to compassion.

I hope this helps.

xxxM

Back to the conceptual & other poetry conference. Tracie Morris and Charles Bernstein opened the conference. Charles Bernstein performed a monologue, recanting his involvement in radical inaccessible poetics and promising to never ever again partake or promote it. From now on he'll follow the poetics of the workshop writers of the 70's and 80's. Bernstein apologizes for his past involvement with meandering, obscure, intellectual, collaborative, social oriented prose. He apologizes for his techniques--fragmentation, collage, seriality, discontinuity, appropriation, multi-lingual languages, broken sentences and words. For all this nonsense. And for thinking that poetry could be a way of thinking. Instead he now promises to honor Poetry month and poetry contests and to write accessible poems that are appealing, emotional, narrative-oriented, sincere, authentic, traditional, in fashion, in Standard clear creative English, with right thinking, the best, the finest, the most profound, responding to the lives and feelings of ordinary run-of-the-mill folks. From now on he'll work in solitude and stop writing criticism.

Bernstein used the framework of Galileo's abjuration written when the Catholic Church forced him to recant his thesis that the world moves. Galileo's writing was banned and for a period of time he was imprisoned. Charles' performance was dramatic and set up some of the conflicts that have occurred in the past between mainstream poetics and other radical poetics. Of course, he's being sarcastic. Like Galileo, his narrator is not apologizing for anything. Unlike Galileo who was a reverent catholic, Bernstein is not a member of the school of accessibility. There was a lot of laughter in the room. Bernstein was one of the central language poets (although he's always been open to other poetics, too, and his own poetry is varied and more accessible than some. This piece was quite accessible). One might presume he's laying out the historical differences between language poets and mainstreamers. We have to remember though that there was also a tension between these mainstream workshop poets (I believe Perloff once called their work Mc-poems) and the Beat poets, New York School, the Black Arts Movement, etc. And there was also a lot of tension (and overlapping) between the Language poets and some of these other radical deviations from the norm/the center. These disagreements didn't show up, however, in Charles' monologue. Of course there isn't one poet we can focus on as representative of all the slamming and exclusion off-center poetries received. Historically, it looks like (to me and I might be wrong about this) that Galileo was singularly persecuted and later honored for his discovery. I'm sure I'm carrying this too far, as if it is an analogy between Bernstein and Galileo and it isn't, it's simply a rhetorical/fictional framework that was a very helpful opener for the conference.

Tracie Morris performed some of her verbal sound poems and variations, the sound of a vowel or a consonant becoming a thing of it's own, and then morphing into something else that reveals something new. Conceptual performance poetries. Now and later in the conference --she sings, talks and analyzes African American sonic cultural practices, poetic tools and theories, transforming with against and in other contexts. The poetics of utterances and identity. I loved the sound of her voice. It was beautiful and sublime (to use subjective terms from the old world) and I liked witnessing how her poetry has changed over the years. Fifteen years ago when we were both semi-finalists in a poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe—she was performing "My Boyfriend Says" and I was performing an Oulipian repeating and transforming poem, called "Satin Ribbons". She won and I temporarily quit my career as a performance artist.

In the evening, Marjorie Perloff gave the keynote address, talking about conceptual poetry and the connection to past poetries – Language poetry, concrete poetries, Oulipo, and the effects of digital technology. She described conceptual poetry as attempting to avoid subjectivity and originality. She described a book by Kenneth Goldsmith in which he copies an entire issue of the NYTimes, and publishes it under his name. She talked about appropriation of other texts, montage, juxtapositon, using documentaries and assembling a new work of art from other texts. Perloff concluded by describing Benjamin's Arcades as a conceptual project.

The next day I attended one group reading – Cole Swenson, Christian Bök, and Caroline Bergvall. Cole read first; I remember a poem about a French garden that eventually becomes a public park, from her book Ours. As she writes about this garden, she makes forays into philosophy, art, history. Her life history never seems to directly enter into the poem, but then it's everywhere. Perhaps she has visited this park and walked through it (as well as walking through many books). That's personal history, too, but the particulars of the walk (even if it's only a walk in books) are hidden within the fictional framing. Through the lenses of other texts Cole takes the voice of others, shifting interest and point of view, refracting away from speaking or making a singular point. After she read this poem she talked about the politics of turning private property into public parks. I liked that segue. I'm attracted to conceptually-based writing or "otherness" like Cole's, with her displaced "I", and her way of morphing history and lyrical language, definitely an investigative poetic exploration.

Christian Bök then performed his dramatic sound poems, manifestos and monologues, ironic, loud, sarcastic, a narrator explaining and as he explains whatever it is he is explaining, language morphing into sound. Some of his work with repetition reminded me of some of Anne Waldman's performances and some of those wild performances in years past in the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe on the lower east side and also of Marinetti and the Italian futurists.

Caroline Bergvall, read her monologues with language morphing from English into other dialects and languages. I enjoyed the rhythm and anticipating when the talk would slip into another register. Again all three of these poets worked with narrative framing while making weird turns and allowing eruptions in the texts. I enjoyed these readings the best of everything in the conference. I was unable to attend the Dworkin-Goldsmith reading.

After listening to the other readings on line, I still find it difficult to find much common ground between these poets except that they are all writing in opposition to the academic non-experimental workshop-model of the latter part of the 20th century. Some are conceptual purists and some are conceptually based as Miranda describes above. A little branching off here and there, but nothing really that astonishingly different, nothing that requires or demands a new name, a "new" movement.

Let me go on to the panels...

I attended three panels. The following is a compilation/collage of my notes. Beware—most of these quotes are not exact. There was a discussion of Poetry pregnant with thought and what this could mean and whether a birth takes place when we look at poetry as news that stays news. A comment was made by someone about conceptual poetry: way back when it was language poetry. At this conference, what I see is a generation of professional-poet-critics who are appropriating texts and manipulating language so reference is interrupted. Yea, and . . . performance poets and the New York School did this, too, but not so professionally. The work read at the conference seemed more accessible than language writing—perhaps because of those fictional frameworks. Charles Alexander pointed out that expression is always there even with a blank piece of paper with only the outline of a box. Someone said somewhere, written in the margins of my notes: And what is materiality, anyhow? Conceptual writing is project-based writing. Yes, projects from Homer to Pound to H.D. to Olson to the investigative poets and here in the world of the similar and not so similar perhaps but perhaps not conceptual writers. As points were made and unmade, I remembered Derrida's little trace in an argument that can always be pulled out and unraveled. Some unraveling here. Brian Reed thanked everyone and acknowledged that it was an unusual circumstance for a critic to be able to hang out and talk with writers of this caliber about what they are doing. Vanessa Place brought the woman's body into the room, assembling a response around the instructions for inserting a tampon, and taking us in and out of the intellect. While passing the mike, Marjorie Perloff admitted, We don't even know what conceptual writing is... Everyone laughed in agreement.

Some of the points Bök made (again I'm paraphrasing): Poets have nothing to offer visuals artists anymore. If you want to find poetry, don't look for it in poems. Students hate poetry. They know nothing about anything. The avantgarde is suffering from a lethal dose of seriousness. At one point he says that "newness" is different now, but he never explains what's new. The value of the obvious. Bök can be entertaining. Charles Bernstein's slide show: The absence of conception had itself to be conceived. At one point Charles intervened to remind everyone that You can't be for or against subjectivity or emotion. Meaning is social and depends on context. I think that could be a helpful chant that could be played over and over at conferences like this, just so writers and critics don't get too caught up in their individual discoveries and ideas.

Wystan Curnow: Pretext. . . Is the idea now more interesting than the application? Graça Capinha brought up some points about thingness as a reproduction of the market and an absence of perhaps political and emotional engagement in this post post modern writing. That point was later debated. She made an argument for attending to the emotions: No language is possible if the emotional part of your brain doesn't work first. Stephen Fredman argued for a cross fertilization of art forms. He quoted Emerson: It's as difficult to appropriate the work of others as to invent.

And then the conference closed with a question that made some of the participants uncomfortable, a question about why women at this point in time were pretty much excluded from the UBU web anthology. This is one of six or seven questions that Laynie Browne asked in a survey of 100 writers. She constructed a collage using some computer analysis program from the responses. Marjorie was upset about the question, referring to it as foolish and a non-issue in our times. Laynie noted that of all the women she had surveyed, Marjorie was the only one who was not disturbed. I was surprised at Marjorie's response and at Barbara Cole's "Hey I'm a gal and I wasn't part of the survey . . . there is always an exclusion." Words like essentialist and humanist and identity politics were thrown around. But when an anthology is presented as being a historical text and there were definitely women involved in this poetics and they were not included, this isn't essentialism or humanism—it's a straight out misrepresentation. When I listened to the tape of this discussion over again, it's clear that Marjorie didn't understand Laynie's project—the collages were part of a survey of 100 poets. A conceptual computer framework was used to analyze/compose the results. And the point was not about asking for adequate representation for women despite their contribution. It was about publishing something and distorting history. It's too bad this point wasn't brought up earlier in the conference so there could have been more dialogue about it.

At home I started thinking, yea Miranda, a little white male b.s. here, too. I was wondering if I would have attended this conference if I were still living in NYC and the conference was held there. I'm not big on conferences; I've spent the last fifteen years trying to work myself out of the academy. Well, if it was a symposium at St. Marks, way back when they had symposiums, I would have attended, but then it would have been utterly different. First of all, the conference would have been organized by poets; the mission of the Poetry Project has always been poet-experimental oriented. The Poetry Center in Tucson does not have that same focus; they are a university organization and they represent a wide range of poetry. They do a good job at that and it was beneficial to have all these poets in Tucson at the same time and to have these discussions. Perhaps there were more attendees from the west and midwest because the airfare is cheaper. Or perhaps there are differences in emphasis depending on where we live. If the conference had been held in NYC, Bernadette Mayer probably would have been present and then the discussions about subjectivity and conceptual projects might have been quite different.

As I look back on a week of conversations during and after the conference, I finally agree with Vanessa Place's assessment in her blog that one of the outcomes was a rejection of the narrow UBU definition of conceptual work and an openness to perpetual possible conceptual poetry projects and I'll add "under various names, constraints and approaches."

Most of the conference is now available on the Poetry Center's website. You can listen to it--

http://poetrycenter.arizona.edu/conceptualpoetry/cp_index.shtml

You can also find the UBU anthology at http://www.ubu.com/concept/

Here is Vanessa Place's response to the conference –

http://lesfigues.blogspot.com/2008/06/conceptual-poetry-conference-fit-to.html

Steve Katz's Kissssss

2007-12-21T20:11:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Steve Katz’s latest book. Kissssss: A Miscellany (Fiction Collective 2, December 2007).

This is a very inventive book with stories spanning from poetic narratives to a manifesto to a full blown novelette, all grounded in the ordinary but inside that ordinary one or more extraordinary weird details or tendencies spin the characters off into a different world that reads like a spoof on the crazy world we live in.

There are kisses in every story in this book and they mean something different in each spot. In “The Derivation of the Kiss,” the first person narrator tells the story in lines and it’s about the narrator’s desire, as well as the author’s desire. Katz begins, “It was nineteen sixty-nine, in Iowa City.” The narrator has a thing for a clerk in a bookstore; he calls her Helen. He’s a writer. They go out to a club, but it turns into a nightmare with bikers attacking people, humiliating them and going off on the narrator and his fedora hat. One of the biker’s kisses him. Any minute a rape could occur. Lots of action in five pages. And Helen’s hiding behind a musician on stage when the narrator gets out and then the story ends with the writer’s desire:

What I have told here is the origin of the kiss, on page
Five hundred and thirty-two of Swanny’s Ways,
My novel, winner 1995 American Award in fiction
Which you can check out, if reading is your predilection.
If you’re curious did I ever kiss Helen, I can’t remember.
I could have once, maybe later, maybe in December.

Funny and a quick read. My favorite two stories in this collection are the last two and they are both great stories.

“Parrots in Captivity” is written in the first person, and I have a predilection for the first person. I like the range it allows, the width and breath of consciousness. How much wider can one get? The narrator here, Andrew, used to be an artist but now, he’s involved in some kind of straight job and he has an appointment with the President of the United States. The other characters are his girlfriend and his African Grey parrot whose name is also Andrew and who openly critiques Andrew: “I never thought I could do this, Andrew,” he mumbles, beak full of what-polly-wants. “But I was perched there in a quandary, saying to myself, Andrew, you good for nothing parrot guy, what the hell are you doing with your life? It’s crisis time. So just like that I went for it. And you know what? I can do it. I’ve got the right stuff. Andrew, my man, I’m a goddamned helicopter of redemption.”

It’s writing like this that makes Katz’s work so hilarious, and yet serious at the same time, offering a social critique. The language of ego psychology and Trump’s Apprentice. You can make it. You can do it. Here the artist who takes up another career, with money at the center.

The narrator Andrew (not a parrot but maybe a parrot) has a girlfriend named Ilayana, a performance artist who sticks her hand into CD slots “and a green mustard glow worms through the veins of her wrist.” She writes poems for her HIV, anti-war sequences: “I made this for the NEA. It’s in a form I invented called the Rumcroft.” Katz is making fun of politicians and also the stylized off-center artists for whom a political/human crisis is an opportunity for a successful artistic project. And I’m wondering: how can art critique or counter the politics of war and destruction when the image and the line is so quickly meaningless?

Narrator-Andrew is on his way to meet with the President. We aren’t sure why, but the Parrot-Andrew says,. “You tell the president not to blast Iraq so much with his technologically advanced boom-booms. He kills too many parrots.”
“Those are people, Andrew.”
“God is a parrot. You tell that to the president.”

The narrator-Andrew passes by the homeless, with signs playing into the mythology of the politican-war-mongers. Give me a dollar. “I am dying of aids... I am the enemy of all the enemies of my country. . . “I will kill for my country. . . I have no hope. I have no money.” At one point Andrew seems like a condescending used-to-be-an-artist liberal with friends in commodities and junk bonds. We don’t know why he is talking to the President, but he is. And Bush is posing, his secretary is posing; everyone is pretending they are in the movies. Katz goes on (and we think maybe Andrew is thinking this, too): “We must love him for his John Wayne swaggerette as he strains to make us think he’s a real Texas cowboy and not the mediocre Yale punk we know him for. It’s hard to make out just where evil resides. He has help, of course from the vice one, Cheney, smirking over his various oil fortunes, but making more; and the Goebbels of the bunch, Rumsfeld, small and self-important; and John Ashcroft, the poor, bloated fundamentalist.” This is Katz talking and/or Andrew has a social conscience. Back at home he finds Ilyana in bed with Andrew the Parrot, but nothing too serious. She’s actually rehearsing for an NEA performance. When the parrot questions Andrew-narrator about his interview with the President, Andrew says he “asked him whether he thought that in order to defeat the beast, we had to become the beast?” And the President says over and over, no matter what the question, like a stupid parrot: “God is on our side, and our weapons have pinpoint accuracy.” The parrot keeps asking, “Did he say anything about the parrot’s dilemma?” “He says it will take as long as it takes, and to stop whining.”

In the end, Andrew sits in front of the television. We all sit in front of the television, waiting to see what happens. “I have, I know, an illusion of separation from the misery out there by this thin green veil of money. This is money I have earned. We have seen how volatile the green veil is. How quickly we can be exposed, and onto the street. An omen of conflagration, and it’s gone, all security. I live there in a world of bubble wrap and Styrofoam peanuts. Andrew lives with me. Ilyana is here sometimes. Outside of where I live the life blisters, the life of others. Inside, the pressures are slight, and have little significance. But what is outside, and what is inside all is taken into the heart, weighed and measured there, and it does weigh, and this is what is meant when the heart is heavy.”

And the parrot repeats: “The heart is heavy. The heart is heavy. Grawk.”And “so what” I think. We of heavy hearts sit. And the war machine goes on. Katz’s story is witty, ironic, ridiculous and devastating.

In the last story in the collection, “Nowadays and Hereafter, there has been a natural disaster, a storm, and we are on the shore with Tignee, a net maker. He has just lost his wife and his son and his baby in the storm. He is migrating away from the ocean. The story is told in the third person, but the voice is very close to the subjectivity of Tignee. And the reader is very close to the loss Tignee has just experienced. The story begins from the heart rather than from the witty mind as in many of the other stories. Tignee is grieving, a wanderer in a world of strangers who all seem as if they could be his family. A boy runs by with his arms outstretched. Was he his son? It doesn’t matter anymore. Tignee comes to a place where the children live in the trees. Little by little we come to know, and so does Tignee that he is living with ghosts. Some of the people are fleeing from the sea and others are fleeing from the “power of hatred and war.” Tignee comes to know so much. “Life is the most temporary acccident.” He and the ghosts build a new world from the bones of others. There is a mythic quality to this story.. The war machine is eating people and ghosts. Finally Tignee organizes a group of ghosts and they make a big net a trap for the war mongers, and then they head back, returning to the sea.

This last story is a beautiful tale, a fine conclusion to Steve Katz’s Kissssss. Kisssssss off war mongers. We are going back to the sea, from dust to dust, from bones to seed, to start over again.

Recent publications and Excerpts from Reviews of My Autobiogrpahy

2007-12-20T10:53:00.000-08:00

NEW PUBLICATIONS

"Dear Hunting" – Forthcoming in print newspaper, The Brooklyn Rail, Winter 2008 (http://www.brooklynrail.org).

From "An Arc Falling Into the Bougainvillea." Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry / Literature and Culture. Issue 1, 2007.
http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/2007/11/barbara-henning-arc-into-bougainvillea.html

"Cities and Memory". Photographs and Text. Upcoming at Cyberpoems. http://www.cyberpoems.com
Originally published by Imaginary Cities, a journal connected with an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, entitled "Shrinking Cities", 2007. Also as a limited edition photo-poem booklet (Long News).

From "The Animal I am". Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Number 34. Winter/Spring 2007.

"Little Tesuque." In Eoagh, Issue four. 2007 http://chax.org/eoagh/issuefour.html

"Seventh Street" Forthcoming in Zen Monster, Issue #1, 2008.

"A Telephone Interview with Maureen Owen on Erosion's Pull." Talisman, Number 35, Fall 2007. WILL BE AVAILABLE SHORTLY ON MY WEBSITE AS A PDF.

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

My Autobiography, reviewed by Mark Terrill in Rain Taxi, Print Version, Vol 12, No 2., Summer 2007

The idea for Barbara Henning's book My Autobiography stems from a collaboration with the artist Miranda Maher, who clipped off the corners of 999 books from Henning's personal library for an installment entitled "999." Henning then constructed a series of seventy-two untitled sonnet-like poems consisting of seven couplets each—selecting a word, phrase, or passage from each of the 999 books, using alliteration as a rough common denominator. . . .The result is a neo-Oulipian synaptic joyride through a series of evocative, hilarious, and surprising contrasts, parallels, and combinations. At the end of the book is a comprehensive index listing all of the various sources for each individual line. One can either read the poems just as they are, letting the lines play off the mind and ear without knowing who wrote what, or one can work their way through wile comparing each line with the index, only to be all the more amazed at how seamless and fluid the transitions actually are, who's doing it with whom, and what magic has been created in the process. . . . While the use of such generative constraints is nothing new, My Autobiography is not just a derivative spin-off from William Burrough's cut-up oeuvre or Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets, nor is it just another cento exercise in the vein of John Ashberry's "The Dong with the Luminose Nose." It was Oulipo member Harry Mathews who said that "writing the truth means not representation but invention"; in My Autobiography, by way of a deft combination of constraints and supple editing, Barbara Henning has conjured up a sort of truth by proxy by merely letting the language speak for itself in an inventive way.

My Autobiography (United Artists 2007) Reviewed by Bill Kushner in The Poetry Project Newsletter, December 2007/January 2008.

These sonnets are truly Objectivist creatures (Henning dedicates her book to Louis Zukofsky). What's more interesting about these poems to me? Woven, as they are, with the raw material of language I think they are often funny, and they give a picture of our times and poetics in a weird way. . . . It's stuff like this that refreshes the language. It's langaue giving back to language the beauty of the unexpected. . . . I strongly urge more readers to take My Autobiography in hand, and find your own favorite passages in this most challenging and adventurous book.

Brenda Coultas, The Marvelous Bones of Time

2007-12-06T16:08:00.000-08:00

The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations, by Brenda Coultas (Coffee House Press, 2007)

When I first turn the pages of the The Marvelous Bones of Time I take a breath—the beauty of the space and the fractured lines. I love unevenness. In Book 1—The Abolition Journal—I find myself following Brenda—I'm sure it's Brenda and not a narrator—as she explores and maps out the place where she grew up. She wonders who am I, where do I come from, what is this place, what is this language: "I was a Midway Panther", "I (am a color", "I knew the names". We are following her on a poetic research project, through memory, observation, digging through texts and talking to people. And the past is always there in the present, the language transformed over time, but still when you set it side by side, piece by piece, Hoozier, Yankee, and those lyrical wonderings and speculations, Whitman-like repetitions, one poetic moment beside another moment, Brenda maps out a life and the uneven traces left behind. How do we define ourselves? Who are we? Here the emancipation proclamation comes back again and again as the border between then and now, between him and her, between them and us. between Kentucky and Indiana. At one point we get on a train with Brenda and she's talking to "the only African American passenger on board" and he tells her "Owensboro [is] Heaven". The next thing you know, in the next poem, we're in Owensboro, Kentucky, walking down the street as she reports on her project.

The second half of the book is a collection of short ghost stories. The three stories I like the best are "A True Account of When We lived in a Haunted House", "Where You'll Be" and "The Shed". The first one is a story of a welder and fashion model (Brenda did work as a welder) who is stalked by an unknown man who eventually forces her to relocate. A haunting? The fear of the unknown stalking you. "Where You'll be" is a story about a father who dies; it's an anti-ghost story, an ordinary quirky story about living with death.

"My sister placed a brand new set of socket wrenches in my father's coffin. The coffin was not very plush: in fact, it was bottom of the line; my mother wanted to spend a thousand dollars more for a plumped-up one, but we talked her out of it because he had always said not to worry about the dead, it is the living who suffer. The burial policy and veteran's benefits give us about five thousand to spend, just enough to cover the cost, including something for my uncle Harry who worked part time for the funeral home. My father said he didn't want any flowers, just a rose in a Coke bottle. But he did get flowers, some with angels that played music; he got basket and plants, most still living. My father didn't have a suit, so we buried him in Uncle Jim's old clothes and thought we better call Little Jimmy and warn him, so he wouldn't be shocked to see my dad laid out in his father's suit. We sent my father out into the cold darkness, wearing another man's clothes.

"When I think of death, I tell myself that I'm going to where my father is, and if he's there, that's a good place to be. I'm going to the place where all have gone before me, and that's what makes me human."

Great advice for living. I love the simplicity of this story growing out of ordinary daily life. But finally the story I like the best is "The Shed," a continuation of Brenda's earlier film project. First there are stage directions to make a film in our mind of a pig shed and life around the pig shed, but the pig shed doesn't exist anymore. It's there in the film and it's also gone. And the story is about that process of being and not-being. There are directions for us to create this film in our minds: "Dig a wallow and fill with water." Then there are children throwing their dinner scraps into the "hog slop" and a reference I think to the ghost child in The Scarlet Letter, Pearl: "Can you film the ghost of Pearl? Pan out to the humans, on bicycles and foot, rooting in junkyards on the old Moore place, rooting in ravines full of abandoned cars." Then a close up to perhaps the center of the memory, inside the consciousness of a little girl in the pig shed: "I am a small human, so small that my underpants come up to my armpits". And then we move back in time with the narrator for an overview: "I dreamed of so many treasures buried in the earth or of just bones, all the bones buried by time, nature, or natives. Given eternity, we could find marvelous bones." Coultas is a collector, a collagist, a materialist, an objectivist, placing bits of language and narrative side by side, or at angles, and the white space around them gives the impression: yes we were here, yes all is lost, but yes with a little digging around, we'll discover again the past in the present—quirky, deep, ridiculous, outrageous, frightening and sometimes reassuring. In this collection, with this investigative project, Brenda excavates the marvelous human and pig bones in time and place. Thanks, Brenda.

Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile

2007-10-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

By Night in Chile. Roberto Bolano. Translated by Chris Andrews. New Directions. 2003. 130 pages. A challenging book to read when you are busy and can only read ten to twenty pages a night. But worth it. One long paragraph in the mind of a dying priest who is looking back on his life, not confessing, instead justifying his way of living. Very long spiraling sentences. He's agitated by a "wizened youth" who I keep expecting to turn up in the text, but he never does, just a fly buzzing around the priest. A dying priest who writes poetry and criticism and enjoys the benefits of Chilean literary society under Pinochet. He makes the sign of the cross and at the same time ignores what is going on around him. He secretly teaches Pinochet and his military leaders about Marxism, knowing they are going to use this knowledge to oppress leftists. His compassion for the poor is just a ritual. Mostly he is disgusted by them. But he sometimes says he admires Neruda (but not for his politics for a poetic phrase or stance) and a critic he calls Farewell, another compromised human being who advocates high culture writing and socializing. In the tunnels in the basement of all this high thinking and elitism, there is a secret. We come to realize that the wizened youth knows this secret and he's been tormenting the priest with his knowledge and writings. As the priest tunnels down through his memories, never really looking deeply into the rooms around him (but the reader gets the idea that something isn't right in all of his rooms) and finally under the house where the literati meet there is a room with a naked man, tied up and suffering from torture. Religion, high culture and the military join hands to oppress, murder and destroy.

Another Fantastic Bill Kushner Poem

2007-10-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

IT’S SOMETIMES A LANGUAGE

It’s sometimes a language that when you hear it
you think oh I’ve heard that. You may even think
you too could speak it, just repeat after me. You
may even think you understand it, well of course
I understand it. It’s when you’re on the sidelines
I mean on the wrong side no not even that you’re
just like a tiny listener standing sideways listening.
So don’t get too wet and upset about it, but that’s
just me talking in that language, or pretending to be
talking in that language and don’t I just sound smart?

“People don’t do things like that,” he would say,
chewing fast. Inhaling his wisdom, I sat at his feet
and listened, him wet paint splattered pure red, “I
got these great lists, kid, I got all these lists, alls of
do’s and don’ts and alls mostly don’ts, great don’ts,
and so don’t get all screwy, not to do.” Him jumping
like high up to heaven and then down and all the while
talking, are you one of them talkers, huh, too? “Like
think of Madonna, mother and child, and how trembling
they came to the window looking out over vast Wicked
City, and then turned back, and I mean they turned back.”

Me, I still sat as a thief at his feet and I listened, chewing
on air, dreamy as one. “People don’t walk, kid, like that,”
into Motel 8 round midnight, as if who gives a flying
you know, “my way or the highway,” and so there I was,
and such as I was, poor little Mr. Scarecrow, thumbs out,
and no ride for miles, “mmm,” licking it up. So he wrote
on my feet, “Careful, dreamboy.” We who walk around
moaning, bumping against all these earth things, the hush,
the mush. “I don’t require much,” I told the nice therapist,
who then told his wife, who then told her puppy, Lucky.
“Lucky,” she’d whisper, holding him to her and stroking
his trembling fur. He said there was no future for such a
one as me, and then he bit me hard, hard enough to draw
blood, it came out like red words red, and him licking it up.

Bill Kushner 10/2/07

Roberto Bolano

2007-09-13T18:45:00.001-07:00

A month ago, I bought Roberto Bolano's novel The Savage Detectives, and I was so excited after reading it that I ordered all of his books translated into English. He's one of the best contemporary fiction writers I've read in a long time. The Savage Detectives is a 600 page novel about a group of off-center/underground poets in Mexico; he calls them the vicereal realists. Here and there in the middle of the book, poets we know and love are mentioned or appear--Ted Berrigan, for example. The narrative is fractured. In the middle section of the book--most of the book--the story takes place in and out of a series of oral histories with familiar and unfamiliar people appearing and disappearing. And little by little the mystery unfolds -- the life of a group of poets who believed in their poetics, their opposition to the mainstream ideology and poetry -- Octavio Paz figures large here--and this zig zag mission ends up being a search for a woman poet, one of the original vicereal realists who disappeared into Mexico. What I love about the book is the way the narrative voice unfolds so easily, the lives of the these poets on the borderline between violence, poverty and stability, reminding me a lot of many poets, artists and muscians I've known both in NYC and in Detroit, people who live their lives and poetry challenging the lies inherent in the status quo. Robert Belano and the character Arturo Beleno have had an extra difficult struggle and insight--some of them escaped after the coup in Chile and lived as exiles in Mexico and Spain and Africa.

Last night I finished a collection of his storiesLast Evenings on Earth; these stories are beautiful, starting out ordinary and then these incredible twists and turns, so fluid, the lives of poets, a poet, Roberto Bolano writing with the freedom of fiction. Like many of my friends, he died from liver damage, from hepititis.

At night when I finish one of his stories, I think, I love this guy, I really do love his sensibility, and I think, yes, yes, just write the truth and just like that, in the ordinary intimate voice in which you think and speak. In his stories, the fractured inventive form grows right out of the ordinary intimate, the ordinary fractured reality of the lives.

Burt Kimmelman

2007-06-25T18:26:00.001-07:00

The poet, Burt Kimmelman, sent me an email a few weeks ago with a poem about reading a few of my little photo-poem pamphlets. I liked it and so I'm posting it here... Thanks Burt.

Reading Barbara Henning's Poems

I think of the possibilities, the

worlds we move through, of what can happen in

the heat of a summer day or the chill

of an autumn night whose bare stars cover

the hills outside Santa Fe, or a street,

emptied of people and even moving

cars in Manhattan's East Village, music

intruding from an open window. The

next day people everywhere talk past each

other. We all borrow someone's precious

words for awhile and then we make them

our own, and then we turn them around in

poems, not what we expect. They are a

toilet overflowing in Delhi. They

are flowers pushing up out of the soil

in Aunay. And they are a woman in

Detroit who "carefully winds her daughter's

hair into little curls." Everywhere, in

the daylight, people go through their routines -

as if we can live out our lives without

poems - but at night they haunt us, we who

dream when awake, we who dream when asleep,

they having come from the desert beyond

the city to settle in for some time.

Bill Kushner's In Sunsetland With You

2007-06-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

Last week I finished reading a new book by Bill Kushner, In Sunsetland With You (Strawgate Books/Phyllis Wat) and I was incredibly moved by this book, so fluid, so funny, so heartbreaking. After reading the book I fell asleep and dreamt I was in lala land with Bill.

All Those Old Weird Songs

Lincoln in the bathroom, what’s he
doing? I hear him humming singing
weird songs, it’s whenever he’s sadlike
all these old weird songs, songs I
do swear that I ain’t never heard of
all these damn sad hymns. Lincoln’s

Voice is what gets me to shivering. Lin-
coln’s voice, as deep and as true as the win-
ter wind, cutting deep into every part of
me, shivering along. I open the door for
a tiny peek in. Old faucet dripping. But
where have you gone, Linc? Lincoln gone.

*

That Night

Skateboarding at midnight, me, Mister
Rabbit, and the big guy, Mister Honest
Abe. “Why they call you Honest, huh?
I tell lies all the time. Hell, I even like to
lie to myself all the time. Hell, I like to
tell lies. Hell, Lincoln, the holy truth
sucks. It’s a fucked world and the
damned truth sucks. Our almighty leaders
have led us fucking amuck!” “My word,”
said Mister Rabbit, “such a naughty
tongue for a little ten-year-old bunny.”

“Rabbit’s right!” the Lincoln chimes in.
“The truth is what we the people don’t
want to hear, and so that’s why I tell it.
And the truth’s you’re growing wild as
the wind, boy, what’s the big problem?”

“That’s me,” I says, breezing along
down Main Street, USA, “the fucking
wind! For I am America, the beautiful!
Now you see me, whee! Now I’m gone.
Kaboom!” When I stop and look around,
I see I’m alone. “Alone!” No one
on the dark street, no, no one. “Fuck
you both. Fuck you all, then!” One
purple neon sign flickering something,
nothing, off, on, off, then gone, alone.

Bill told me the other day ago when we were eating lunch at Angelicas that he wrote this book right after he was ill a few years ago. And he told me he has always had an imaginary friend. Reading some essays today for a class I’m teaching on Saturday on the French New Novel, and Nathalie Sarraute writes about writers and imaginary partners "who emerge from out our past experiences, our daydreams, and the scenes of love or combat between us", populating the space where our novels emerge and movements "are set in motion." That’s what Bill does in this poem-novel, remembering/living the life of Billy, old and/simultaneously growing up with his friend Abe Lincoln, with his gray eyes and his glistening body. And Abe’s there to talk to about the war in Iraq, and the last war, and all those wars before, about those dying, Billy’s father dying in the world war two, his mother dwindling away, about his loneliness as a young man, “seems like them fairies, they always/need saving,” says Lincoln, and then just as suddenly as his father dies in the war, his mother dies, Lincoln takes off, leaving Billy running along the highway, alone. And then a new poem, “Born”, and the voice is no longer that man/child’s voice, but now the voice of an old man of the city.

Old as methuselah, I was born yesterday
In the baths, a man took me to the moon
& when I came back down to earth
Why I was the same old fool I always was

Coughing exhausted cars buses taxis go by me
Where am I going? looking for somewhere
something to believe in besides last night’s trick

. . .

You take the wheel, old man says, old
Bag of wrinkles, what wars he’s seen?
How many sailors seen off at their piers
Waving his hanky, tearing his tears? You
Take the wheel while I blow you, yea,

Bill writes lyrical, personal poetry that celebrates and mourns dailyness, laying out the secrets of ordinary nyc life, apples and buses and blowjobs and . . .”Oh Spring, you arrive on a song” One of the things I admire about Bill Kushner is his practice. He writes poetry every day. In a coffee shop at night, he watches two young women kiss and he says “I stop to write this tiny souvenir of our life on earth”. His poems are collections of these souvenirs of our life on earth. Utter honesty. Beautiful Song. He’s sailing over the city like a modern day Whitman and he ends the book “by this dark church, St. Mark’s/ They say you are haunted, St. Mark’s /they say the ghosts of great poets wind down your stairways.” Buy this book. Read it is terrific. Bill Kusher is one of the real live living singing and loving poets I’ve known in NYC. I love him and his poems.

News from Spain: A poem by Laurie Price

2007-05-18T18:51:00.000-07:00

the master recycler puts her shoulder to the wheel

There is no time. It is stooped and frail.
However, am glad to be alive. The apparitional
single phrase: echo she is the knowledge he was
after, wasted, not what he was expecting, it could be
to torment your graces, expressed, is
to value them; do them no harm no harm
to anything, constantly, dispassionately, inevitably
free to be nothing or nothing in particular,
consider the griefs in trying to be special.

Hungry Ghost by Lewis Warsh

2007-04-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

Here's a poem Lewis sent me in an email this month.

HUNGRY GHOST

A gram of desire for breakfast;
gruel for lunch. Dinner on the town,
some place not too fancy.
Who'd you call cheap?

From Harris Schiff's Reading at the Poetry Project Last Week

2007-04-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

I wasn't in NYC last week for Harris Schiff's reading, but I read the poems and here's one I really l ike --

It was great to be young in the twentieth century
before Dracula threw down the prison mesh grid over the world

YOU ARE WHAT YOU BUY

Fight the war and warming conglomerate

today I don’t have to shave and dresss for scuzzy job
they subway ride
or abuse

I make poems and be
lover

funky in April chill baby baseball season

amused stead of so damn serious so worried

one more season of discomfort in the latitutde

My Autobiography

2007-04-26T20:27:00.000-07:00

On March 14th, Charles Alexander sent me the following email about my new book "My Autobiography"--

a book (for barbara)

a book on its side on top of my bookshelf
about six feet high its spine exposed looking
at me

do you have 999 books with a corner cut away
so that the books now have five edges instead
of four

can the books balance on their fifth edge pre
cariously or not can a book be unbalanced
can we

unbalance the space of the book the space
of our habitation are you in the book can I
find you

can a book unbalance will the words spill out
from the pages or perhaps recombine themselves
to rebalance

steel comes to mind is there a place for steel
here not steal this book but book of steel like
man of steel

or steel curtain or we steel ourselves against
the onslaught we cut off our corners and balance
on edge

charles alexander / chax press

Audios on the line

2007-04-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

At Frank's Home (http://frankshome.org), Frank Parker just posted an audio file of my reading at Dinnerware Gallery in Tucson on November 18, 2006. You can hear me reading with his choreography at

ttp://frankshome.org/Barbara%20Henning.html

Also, I recently discovered another audio recording from a reading at Left Hand Books in Boulder in 2002
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/LHRS.html
Scroll down to April 19, 2002

Thanks Frank, Laura Wright and all--

Tyrone William's next book

2007-03-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

I read the manuscript for Tyrone's new book, I loved it. Backwater's Press out of Omaha Nebraska will be publishing it.

Tyrone Williams
Hero Project of the Century

This is a brilliant book. In these new poems, Tyrone Williams slants away from definition and memoir, teasing us with a detail or an anecdote and then slipping names, slipping markers, the news, tradition, religion, art and history unravel into dualities, redundancies, shadows, veils, slights of hand. In Hero Project of the Century, Williams reveals the news we need to hear. The American chasing after the big S Capital Self is a project that can never be fulfilled. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but after the clapping is over, there is this empty space and Williams, like an abstract jazz musician, has taken us there, deftly, cutting through the terrain of emotion and intellect.

Upcoming events

2007-03-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching a class at the Poetry Center in Tucson on the Prose Poem , Tuesdays, for 8 weeks, beginning March 6th.
I'm teaching a yoga class at 5:30 on Fridays at Yoga Flow on Cherry and Fort Lowell

Cynthia Hogue & Brent Cunningham are reading at El Ojito Springs
Center for Creativity at 452 S. Stone Ave. (at 15th St.) in Tucson on Saturday the 17th at 7 pm

Gloria Frym, Tory Foster and Anna Fulford reading at Cushing Street Bar and Grill in Tucson at 8 pm on Tuesday the 20th of March.

I'm reading in Bisbee at the Central School Project on Friday March 23rd at 7:30.

Harryette Mullen comes to Tucson on the 27th of March and reads on the 31st at 5 pm at St. Andrews Church in Tucson. She's giving a paper at 10 am on the 31st for the Arizona Quarterly.

Then on April 7th Rodney Phillips (New Yorker!) and Cynthia Hogue will read at 7 pm.
Then on April 14th Frank Parker will read and we'll celebrate and support him.

Then on the 1st of May I'm driving bck to NY for a couple of months to teach a class there (and hang out with family and friends)

My schedule in Tucson is busier than it was in NYC!

A beautiful poem by Maureen Owen

2007-02-17T16:43:00.000-08:00

Today I am rereading Maureen Owen's book Erosion's Pull. Every time I read the poem I'm typing below, I take a deep breath -- yes, that's it, exactly how it is sometimes ... Saint Maureen Thank you.

Now This Vague Melancholy

Now this vague melancholy adores me

of hours spent in your facade

it's best described as she can

if she could likewise bitterly

since the forecast dented

with our dinner window cut in two

, as if her life

her life dissolving

in what had been ageed

not to tell to one another

what was is the danger

the story of the stories

And this melancholy.

if then we couldn't stretch the seams

of our need while being chatty

we could discuss

long into noted

all else

sweet melancholy dished

each by itself into a darker ness

where the hangover begins before midnight

& I could talk to you forever

for no good reasons science could explain

for we are two of repelling cogs

set in their motion fast by some diligent

terrain rising flat as the prairie

as a word I fell in love with you then

with a word can such a thing be done

because of a word you said Nebrska

& all the chairs drew back their doors

& all the floors burst into flame

& in the night a single fire swept

swept through it all & I woke kneeling on

charred ground & it was as the saint

proclaimed

Gloria Frym's Solution Simulacra

2007-02-17T16:39:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following review of Gloria's book for the Poetry Project Newsletter, published the issue before last...

Gloria Frym. Solution Simulacra. United Artists Books, 2006

Gloria Frym's new book of poems Solution Simulacra is a yowl, a scream and a stamping of the foot at the U.S. government and its stupid citizens. Murder, mayhem, destruction and we go on shopping and believing our myths about freedom ("I don't understand why I can't buy a burka in the surplus store. Did Milan or Paris get hold of them?").

Frym opens the book with an overture, looking back on the present as many historians will surely see it: Afghanistan occupied, the US terrorizing it's own citizens and others, the whole world fracturing into a state of hostility, violence and suicidal activity. And it doesn't have to be like this. She invokes Emerson: "A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us." Frym uses all of her poetic tools, repetition, rap, word play, concrete manipulations of the alphabet and symbols in an active engaged response to daily news, reports, overheard conversations, hammering away at those words, fracturing the glib lies and excuses.

Homer's rosy fingered dawn reappears when the heroes return after ransacking other far off places. But here there are no heroes. "Dawn seemed as though it would never arrive. . . . One's empire [is] choking. One doesn't believe one's president who attends church, his slightly perfumed wife by his side, his daughters stoned out on downers. He read the bible in Cliff's Notes.. Forgot the past about gluttony as a sin." (23). She imagines punishing the politicians for catapulting us into a disastrous future.

And we're standing there like a bunch of dummies. Frym ruminates, "Why should dawn want to face the day, considering its quiet, fragile light? Dawn can't save one civilization from unraveling, or another from erasing words for a living." This is a classic Frym move, a spiritual understanding segueing immediately into a political observation. I stand back watching the sun rise and then set again, as humans do what humans are doing. But while I stand here on my porch, shop for groceries, read the newspapers, groups of people are working in think tanks to come up with ways of maneuvering and manipulating the public. "A government goes after an enemy it installed itself" (38). "Frustrated with one's adversary? Annihilate him. Otherwise one will remain impotent, and that will disturb one's sleep" (42).

You can put your finger into this book, begin anywhere and experience a type of revelation, the work so witty it might make you laugh, but it's that kind of laugh that in the next second, hey you're shaking your head with your tongue stuck in your mouth. "I is mad at I's country" (68). Yes. Yes.

Day-by-day, poem-by-poem, Frym cracks apart the way we talk and the lies we hear. In the title poem," Solution Simulacra", she elaborates on a recipe for empire building.

First, suck all the money out of the house to fashion the haute couture weapons. . . . Color in the sections of the world one would like to have. . . . Demand that first adversary hand over his arms and the arms of all his doubles, and send them Fed Ex. When they arrive, thank him, and demand he do the same with his head and the heads of all his doubles and theirs. When they arrive, have these parts well-photographed in color and printed on the front page of The New York Times and every other medium will follow suit. Eliminate the text. No one wants to read seventeen pages about reasons. Reading is treason in a simulated solution. (42)

Solution Simulacra is cathartic, as well as an exposé. This book should be required reading in as many college and high school lit and poetry classes as possible. Then there might be a chance that some folks might actually start to read the world and the word as the great Brazilian educator Paul Freire advocated, their thoughts and dialogue rushing in between Gloria Frym's sharp analytic thought twisting poems. Maybe then dawn could come sooner with a lot less grief.

New Readings in NYc

2007-01-21T19:27:00.000-08:00

Hi Everyone--

Just a note to let you know that I'll be in NYC area (my daughter Linnee had a baby boy).

Besides visiting her on LI, I'll be in NYC a bit and reading at two events.

On Saturday the 3rd I'll be reading with Chris Stackhouse in the Segue Series at the Bowery Poetry Club from 4-6 pm.

For more information, check out this link--
http://www.seguefoundation.com/calendar.htm

On Thursday the 1st I'll be reading with other United Artists authors at the 40 Anniversary Party for United Artists. Those reading include --

Barbara Henning
Mitch Highfill
Bill Kushner
Bernadette Mayer
Dennis Moritz
Tom Savage
Harris Schiff
Anne Waldman
Lewis Warsh

music by Legends

The reading and party will be at ACA Gallery, 529 20th Street, 5th Floor from 6-8. For more information, see this link--

http://wilderside.wordpress.com/2007/01/03/boog-celebrates-kurt-cobain-40th-bday-more/

Hope to see you.
Xo,
Barbara

2006-12-17T15:31:00.000-08:00

Some poems Harris Schiff sent today ---

Some choices at Starbucks

support big oil and the war in Iraq by stirring the coffee with a plastic straw

or

help burn down the rain forests by stirring it with a stick

* * * *

Slow Moving Vehicle

I need some red flashing lights to put on my butt

I'm moving so slowly

working in midtown

Harris Schiff

2006-12-09T17:32:00.001-08:00

Mark Wallace on Feminism

2006-10-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

Hi Barbara:

Five Things I’ve Learned From Feminism

I could list many more than five no doubt, but here
goes:

1) The problems of power are built in to the
instability of pronouns.

2) Too much emphasis is placed on the politics of
speaking and not enough on the politics of listening.

3) It’s easier to feel that you believe in common
ground than it is to actually find that ground.

4) There’s a connection between verbal and physical
violence.

5) It’s not enough to reverse the terms; instead,
you’ve got to show that the opposites have always been
part of each other.

Mark

feminism

2006-09-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

Last night Charles Alexander sent me an email (a tag); he was tagged by Elizabeth Treadwell < http://secretmint.blogspot.com > (who had earlier been "tagged" by Jessica Smith < http://looktouch.blogspot.com >) to write 5 things I had learned or gained from feminism.

I'd never been tagged since I was a child playing tag. And I didn't have a blog, but I'd thought about setting one up for announcements and such. So today I have a blog and below are the two paragraphs I wrote in response to this question.

You can also check out Charles' response at chaxblog < http://chax.org/blogspot.com

About Feminism --

My grandmother came over on a boat, alone, from Switzerland when she was sixteen years old. I don't know if feminism gave her this courage or if it was pure guts. My other grandmother had nine children and so so many grandchildren; she rented out rooms and ran the house after her husband died. They were my first feminist models, then the Victorian women writers, then my teachers in the university who would perhaps never have had their jobs without the feminist movement, The Detroit Cass Corridor feminist take-back-the-night girls, Rigaberto Menchu et al, the French feminist writers who aimed to write off key, angling away from phallocentric logic into the feminine, figures and slippage.

If it wasn't for the feminist movement, perhaps I would not have quit wearing lipstick, started wearing lipstick again, perhaps I would not have given birth to my children at home, perhaps I would not have persisted on continuing my education, perhaps I would not have been hired in the university, perhaps I would not have been able to talk to all the young men and women in my classes about the rights of women and men, perhaps I would not have met my husband or decided to separate from him, perhaps I would not have traveled to Asia, perhaps when I was in the airport in Bangalore and the man asked me, "Where is your husband, your son? Who is taking care of you?" Perhaps I would not have been there and I would not have been able to say—"I am alone, but I am free."