ASEM ALTAR

THESE SIGNALS PRESS 002

2011-07-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

On Feltmaking is availble on NYC's These Signals Press.

Check it here.

FROM SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW: CHRIS MARTIN'S BECOMING WEATHER

2011-05-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

from SHR Spring / Summer 2011:

Becoming Weather by Chris Martin (Coffee House Press, 2010)
Reviewed by Curtis Jensen

Chris Martin, in Becoming Weather, tracks between registers closely situated and theoretically distant, registers loosely coordinate with the particularly experienced the abstractly removed. Becoming Weather is significant in that it addresses the dual registers of human experience, the instant and the infinite, by poems which both contain and enact this duality. That is to say Martin manifests the dualism of Becoming Weather’s content by means of its tensioned form and vice versa. From Disequilibrium, the first section of Becoming Weather:

6
What we ask ourselves
Now is—What is forgivable?

I move to bare
the little splitting
inside as it

reds between
the pink on the end
of my finger

Somehow this coincides
with a faith in
the world as a place

In 6, Martin attends to that which we ask ourselves and the pink on the end / of my finger, the abstract and critical and the close and experiential. In terms of content, the compositional field of the poem is marked. Extending from 6 to Becoming Weather as a whole, Martin’s pathos-rich poetic voice traces across the book a weave both local and global, highly personal and highly public. A sort of inscape is formed, but unlike Hopkins, Becoming Weather does not explicitly intend its instresses of poetic attention to some logocentric being or trope or combination of the two. Martin calls to the reader early in the text:

I’m asking you

if it’s possible to refuse
to go blind—I for whom

the divers tones
of a mental life meld

at once
So is it

the infinite or
the instantaneous

quality of movement
that frightens us more?

Martin marks his registers, instantaneous and infinite, and he situates his poetic voice in a differential position between them, between I and for whom, between subject and object. Martin’s vocation is to voice the inspired moments of his existence, to sing the correspondence between instance and infinity, between spots of time and high virtues, between epiphanies close at hand and the void beyond what is not at hand. Romantic and late-romantic poetics are applicable to Martin’s poems, but fail to account for the formal signature of Martin’s subject/object position. Thus Martin is set with the task of both seeing and saying:

8
Can I say the air
is beautiful?

Can I spend my whole life
as a guest inside the eccentric
balloon?

Let us release
these appearances
and in so

doing hold
fast to what burden
bodies make

thick returning
to us their
unconscious care

Can I spend my whole life as a gust
outside the eccentric balloon?

Can I see the air
as beautiful?

A follow-up question to stanza 2 could be: if not a speaking subject, then what? By inverting the opening couplet into the closing couplet, saying and seeing bind together in chiasm; Martin demonstrates the two acts’ integral interrelationship in the formation of the speaking subject. For Martin the poet must attend to both inside and outside, must attempt both saying and seeing. But how can one do both, how can someone be both inside and outside? In order to manage this duality, an ethics of instability (see Ted Mathys’s interview with Martin, soon to appear on coffeehousepress.org) is practically entailed and a poetics that privileges movement between registers is deployed. Across the poem and the book Martin flickers (and he must) between subjectivity and objectivity, the instant and the infinite in order to attempt both. Martin’s poetic voice tends towards a reflection of something essentially dualistic by function of its demonstrated vocation as well as its chosen subject. In this way, Becoming Weather is a rich working out of Martin’s poetics, a poetic vocation dually composite of a self-declared and content-determined set of imperatives.

I’m a man
becoming weather

None of this is to suggest that Martin aims for the expression of an imagined algorithm of nature—though the moment that one of Martin’s poems seems to alight on a mimetic perch, it just as quickly veers away. But this figure happens less in the way a finch flits instinctively about and more in the way a deliberately composed loop is shaken out from a lariat. Accordingly, as often as the poems of Becoming Weather appear to manifest themselves, Martin clearly composes them.

Now if you would
gently tip
the assemblage
I will breathe
my torrent
once more

Both contingency and composition hold places of privilege in Martin’s poetics. In Becoming Weather, perceptions follow one another quickly, but simultaneously Martin affects a subtle, tense chord between an emphasis on the open field and the particulars brought to position in that field. This tension is reflected in the poems’ movements between registers concrete and abstract. Across the book, Martin achieves the radical Disequilibrium he sets out to enact. Martin both sings, to borrow more terms from Charles Olson, from a position of objectism, and sees from a position of objectivism. Though at times the work tips too far towards it theoretical ground, threatening to topple irrecoverably into the discourses of critical thought, it does not. Thus the work achieves through form an enactment of its own content, and it does so in the pathos-rich timbre of Martin’s poetic voice. Martin’s poetic inheritances are in this way clearly present in the book’s figures (Oppen, Guest, and Berrigan are mentioned the book’s last section, Chorus); the book presents a flush document of Martin’s movement into a deeply dual poetics from a position informed by late modern poetry.

EVENTS IN A SEQUENCE

2011-03-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

Interview w/ Kevin Spenst

2011-02-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

from http://kevinspenst.com/

Through the site Precipitate, I came across the work of Curtis Jensen, a poet who has lived and worked in Utah, Wyoming, Ukraine and now Brooklyn. He maintains a blog at the end of waste and was good enough to answer the following questions:

How do you work your way through revisions? Do you have any tricks or theories to removing commas, words or lines?

I usually work through revisions in pencil, on paper, reading / speaking to myself out loud as I write.

Regarding punctuation, it depends on the poem or set of poems. Over the last year or so I’ve drifted away from using commas and end punctuation, and now I’m sort of drifting back. If I am using punctuation, I usually have an imagined hierarchized scheme for it all–certain symbols mark sentence-interior phrasal breaks, other symbols mark sentence-end phrasal breaks.

If a line sticks in my ears or for my eyes (I try and give my ears more attention as a general rule, but that doesn’t always work out), I piece the line out in a sort of hashed up phrase-level sentence diagram, or I scan it with my own mongrel version of Derek Attridge’s phrasal scansion, or I do both.

I look for points at which more syntactic energy can be built in to the poem (lately this has seemed to be a function of keeping an eye out for the chance to exploit the charge between subject and object by way of predicative ambiguity, but there’s more than 1 way to pluck a goose when it comes to this stuff) and more formal patterning or variation can be teased out of the poem.

Once I’ve moved through a round of all of that, I usually type and print a draft sheet of the poem. More often than not I try out drafts at readings–there’s something about getting a poem in your mouth in front of an audience in the charged space of a reading that can really show where poem is charging itself or not.

Most poems, after a couple rounds of all of this, settle out into something close to finished.

Robert Lowell wrote that “Revision is inspiration.” To what extent do you think that’s true? How would you rewrite Lowell: “Revision is __________”

Revision is usually for me a function more of composition than of generating text. But not always.

Any pet peeves when it comes to editing your work or someone else’s?

I’d rather not do either when I’m out in an icestorm. In fact I’d rather just avoid icestorms.

Are there any lines from an early draft of a poem that you’d like to share? What ideas, principles or gut feelings guided you through those changes?

I’m working on a longer project about John D Lee, a figure from Mormon history. Last night at Prospect 60WANU5, from a new poem I’m working on in which I sort of throw Lee’s voice, I misread

A friend is one’s second self,
& you are my third wife, loyal
To all ends the word of God is holy
As are our bodies our wealth

as

A friend is one’s second wife
You are my third, loyal …

The formal integrity of the stanza holds up with the change, it’s nice to have wife out of the 3rd line, and its pretty ridiculous to take on the voice of a polygamist and say things like that, so I think I’ll keep it. It was a complete moment of parapraxis–I as guided by my inability to read.

WILLIS ARNOLD SESSIONS 1.23.11

2011-02-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

LYMAN WYOMING

See the homestead in white to indicate
No trees no water which is accurate
Though a map of such scale won’t explain.

How to see the homestead see its pole barn
Hand-drilled flagstones
Now there is nothing.

Where the mindeye began on the ground
Memory ends the barn roof assumes
An axon hillock.

Where the blue-blank scoria meets the open
The soma along which we run
I see the map I see us.

With open sights fire on the coyote
Fire across the desiccate flat.

MOUNTAIN VIEW WYOMING

—Season she's done her best to tear down
The southfence to get at the diversion
Ditch how I come to be here let alone

How here come to be
So little water I ought
To be getting in the winter wheat

I mend the line she's busted
She's torn her leg she's tied to it
If she's hurt again she might quit

Giving milk worse still push through
The southfence to the co-op field
O I know I can't hope

To pay for this was back 2 years
Snow so much the mail couldn't get
This far out they held it in town

Which was fine
Because there was no mail.

LOOP KINEMATICS

Loose flights of crows crows seen unheard move
Latidudinal across clay furrows of fields
To woods especially to spruces for their needles
Then back above houses at the road

Leading out of a village down a slope before the ponds
Which have been drained by the pondskeeper
His consorts pluck crucian & carp
From the mud in dozens they do so with tridents

As you come down the slope your legs loose-feeling
& your back each footfall gravels the myelin sheath
You pass the assemblage thin-firing the fish
Someone waves you wave back the electric sun

Dendrite trees beyond which is a station
From there final words neuron by neuron.

From there final words neuron by neuron
Dendrite trees beyond which the station
Place of departure place of reconstruction
Though 6 kilometers distant from where you run

Now out the village up the long grade
The valley itself a firing place
Firing places in unwitting shapes
Walnut trees a rotten fence chests the tread

Thin bus tire in viscous & other wheels.
Your hand is closed you are not from here
But here you have a home you leave from there
Having run your loop you’ve displaced nothing.

Loose flights of crows crows seen unheard flights
Latitudinal across clay furrows of fields.

INVENTORY

From the left there my 1st wife
My 2nd wife agreed
To the 3rd who entails the 4th
So I have 4 beautiful wives

My 2nd wife agreed
As do I agree to The Principle
So I have 4 beautiful wives
We live together we are a family

As do I agree to The Principle
Of Celestial Marriage eternal cooperation
We live together we are a family
We are individuals we are all agents

Of Celestial Marriage eternal cooperation
Fulcrums at a hard paradox
We are individuals we are all agents
We each in agency choose obedience

Fulcrums at a hard pivot
My daughters & my sons so many work
We each in agency choose obedience
Putting up the season's hay

My daughters & my sons so many work
Don't you find it pleasant to watch them
Putting up the season's hay
One of many things we do here

Don't you find it pleasant to watch them
If you'd like I could name them
One of many things we do here
Then you'd have a clearer sense of the place

If you'd like I could name them
You could compare them to your family
Then you'd have a clearer sense of the place
We might even feel an affinity

You could compare them to your family
Experience is difficult to account for
We might even feel an affinity
In such an inventory

My 2nd wife agreed
From the left there my 1st wife
So I have 4 beautiful wives
The 3rd entails the 4th

ALDEBURGH

As though a spirit or group of entrained spirits come out of the river over me leering from the blunt hilltop I see a vertical form within which as within a lightshaft are held dust particles distinct points in space & so in motion & there is a pulpit whitewashed walls dark pews & their corresponding embroidered cushions a slate roof a triptych window illuminating human forms in a vortex of flame a father & son embracing a gyre over an estuary channel this is a church in which I along with other figures constitute a complex of figures which is a figure itself that shimmers on the neuronal layer of the rear walls of my retinas & so this complex churchfigure I take onto the sulcic surface of my brain in dozens of distinct areas this reflection takes on the damp brainsmell of that place of heartwork so I have taken in the church have you in your mind’s eye achieved stabilization of an image I have not.

I see the frame broaden as the church flickers there I discern perhaps the room in which the churchfigure is worked now I see no longer only the church risen at the hilltop its interior distinct points I see also that from the spire emerges in compliment another spire from the slate roof an inverse roof from the floor a mirrorfloor so are the figures of this church oriented metonymically a complimentary nexus all surfaces intersecting every line expanding arrays of distinct points within & without constituent relational planes perhaps extending to infinity as it seems the complimentary churchfigures do though such distances myself I’ve yet to see perhaps by means of vision I am not equipped to do so I am here here is my conscious self centered in this multivalent churchfigure of distinct points flickering intersecting planes which constitute a figure of consciousness as there at the retina & correspondingly at the unfurling braintopos shimmers the churchfigure as would retinotopically shimmer other figures come there from the hilltop or some field of view or a pane of glass extending in all directions at once

Which the church does hold its center which is composed of distinct points the windows pulpit slate roof pews & so forth which has been discussed which is the center of this church where this began which I see shot through with multiple panes of glass the church-on-church figure intervaled by the infinite glasspanes of projected linear time & on glass is light so the figure takes further shapes as accordingly do the retinotopic figures I discern the panes of glass constitute pairs I discern the pairs of panes move out from the center of the churchfigure which I discern expands & the figures of my experience emerge in the interelational space between the glasspanes now I’ve come into light flickering between the glasspairs that widening space bares something of the external world’s relation to the active topography of the brain.

So. There is light now on dozens of distinct areas of my brain. Dawn shines through words cut through a steel scallop words in color of infinite gradation color beyond the measure by which I could ever hope to discern though there nonetheless are the figures of the words constituted in light these words of Benjamin Britten’s: I hear those voices that will not be drowned. Sulcic in its form is the vertical scallop which shimmers in the dawnlight as is the brain sulcic & as is also the shingle sulcic & iced-over this morning the shinglestones in the ice hold their surface then the ice gives way the stones of the shingle composite of the beachberm these stones move out one foot comes to be between them & on the stones & ice again another foot holds then also comes to be between them again again again as she & I & her father make our ways out of Aldeburgh towards Thorpeness which drifts away.

CHICKENCOOP

& steel mesh there is dung there in the shed
Is shadow galvanized hare-brained feather fibers
Soiled cellulose nestbowls yellow as Father’s
Watchchain elktooth steel to his watchpocket shadow

Beneath the makeshift palletfloor there voles
& mice are beetles too after which hens jab
June grasshoppers vibrate or a worm warm dab
Of sun in the coopshade a wasp growls

From the eaves from empty space thin & freckled
Her fingertips, wrist, forearm plunge out the light
Dab to the nestbox the shadow below a churl-white
Hen slips to darkness in hand she takes mucus & blood

Splotched an oval a keratin-knobbed egg
A warm oblong enfoldment of circles: behold.

PROSPECT 60WANU5

2011-01-26T17:18:00.000-08:00

PROSPECT 60WANU5

A reading with poets Jen Bervin, Corina Copp, Abraham Avnisan, Gracie Leavitt, and Curtis Jensen
Date: Thursday, February 3
Time: 8 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society

PROSPECT 60WANU5, a collective effort, promises one vivifying night of poetry, all sorts. Presenting works centered in/around language, our readers explore, perform, inform other fields (the canvas, the stage, the actual tilled or untilled field), are curious about each other, and ask/invite questions throughout the evening. On Feb. 3 we make available a host of new/exclusive print and sound offerings. Past Prospect readings, changeable and with a budget of $0, have taken place, in all weathers, at pop-up stores, parks, and living rooms. All afterward have migrated from these locales to bars where continues casual, vital conversation, plus general merriment, among readers and audience members alike. More at: prrospect.blogspot.com

Schedule:

* 8:00 PM Works presented (short breaks between presentations)
* 10:00 PM Further casual social interaction at Canal Bar
* 12:00 AM Gowanus burns

About the presenters:

Jen Bervin is a poet and visual artist whose work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses artist books, poetry, large-scale art works, and archival research. Her poetry/artist books include The Dickinson Composites (Granary Books 2010), The Desert (Granary Books 2008), A Non- Breaking Space (UDP 2005, web-only), The Red Box (2004), and Nets (UDP 2004), currently in its fifth printing. Her most recent work,The Silver Book, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse. She recently finished a geocentric scale-model of the Mississippi River, 230 ft. long, composed of hand-sewn silver sequins. Bervin will teach at Vermont College of Fine Arts and Harvard University in 2011. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Corina Copp is a playwright, poet, and wishful thinker living in Brooklyn. Recent work includes essays on Jean Day, Hannah Weiner, and Sarah Ruhl; a chapbook for minutes BOOKS; and texts that can be found soon or now in Cannot Exist, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, SerieAlfa, Supermachine, Aufgabe, and Antennae. Plays: Tell Only One (Small Press Traffic Poets Theater Festival, Jan. 2011); WALTZ (CSC/E. 13th St. Theater, July 2010, dir. Meghan Finn), and A Week of Kindness (Ontological Incubator/Brick, 2008). She’s performed her own work and that of others in London, NYC, and elsewhere. CC is the editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter and co-curator of The Twenty-Five Cent Opera of San Francisco at Barbes.

Abraham Avnisan is a poet, visual artist, and would-be psychoanalyst living and working in Brooklyn, NY. His work explores the space where poetry and the visual arts exchange furtive glances. He has been published in the Brooklyn Review, Boog City Reader, Onesies: a Chapbook Anthology Project and eoagh: a Journal of the Arts (forthcoming). His work has been exhibited at Centotto Gallery in Bushwick, Arts in Bushwick’s BETASpace Festival, and the Figment Arts Festival on Governor’s Island. He received his M.F.A from Brooklyn College.

Gracie Leavitt (sick about the market, charmed by invention, for whom syntax is a function of the soul) is an MFA candidate in poetry at Brooklyn College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sentence, Word/For Word, Sugar House Review, Washington Square, Caketrain, 2River, Fourteen Hills, La Petite Zine, and elimae. She recently collaborated with Kolekt::f to stage the original full-length play PITCH at La Mama E.T.C. and has further designs on such multidisciplinary productions.

Curtis Jensen’s work has appeared in Try!, The Sugar House Review, No, Dear, Precipitate and The Equalizer. He has lived and worked in Utah, Wyoming, Ukraine and now Brooklyn. He maintains a blog at theendofwaste.blogspot.com.

THE PORTABLE BOOG CITY READER

2011-01-03T17:33:00.000-08:00

Get it.

LIT 19 COVER

2011-01-03T17:32:00.001-08:00

NEW YEAR'S DAY MARATHON READING @ POETRY PROJECT

2010-12-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

from poetryproject.org

37th ANNUAL NEW YEAR’S DAY MARATHON READING
January 1, 2011
2:00 pm
Saturday

Poets and Performers for 2011 include: John Giorno, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Philip Glass, Suzanne Vega, Taylor Mead, Eric Bogosian, Anne Waldman & Ambrose Bye, Foamola, Anselm Berrigan, Ariana Reines, Peter Gizzi, Liz Willis, Ted Greenwald, The Church of Betty, Thom Donovan, Tim Griffin, Todd Colby, Tom Savage, David Shapiro, Jonas Mekas, Josef Kaplan, Judith Malina, Albert Mobilio, Alex Abelson, Bill Kushner, David Freeman, David Kirschenbaum, Diana Rickard, Don Yorty, Dorothea Lasky, Douglas Dunn, Alan Gilbert, Alan Licht w/ Angela Jaeger, Charles Bernstein, Christopher Stackhouse, Citizen Reno, Cliff Fyman, Corina Copp, Aaron Kiely, Adeena Karasick, Bill Zavatsky, Bob Holman, Robert Fitterman, Rodrigo Toscano, Brenda Iijima, Brendan Lorber, Brett Price, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Curtis Jensen, Dael Orlandersmith, David Vogen, Derek Kroessler, Diana Hamilton, ARTHUR’S LANDING, CAConrad, Akilah Oliver, Douglas Piccinnini, John S. Hall (King Missile), Samita Sinha, Sara Wintz, Secret Orchestra with special guest Joanna Penn Cooper, Shonni Enelow, Bob Rosenthal, Brenda Coultas, John Yau, Julian T. Brolaski, Evelyn Reilly, Filip Marinovich, Douglas Rothschild, Drew Gardner, Eleni Stecopoulos, Elinor Nauen, Eve Packer, Jo Ann Wasserman, Joanna Fuhrman, Dustin Williamson, E. Tracy Grinnell, Ed Friedman, Edwin Torres, Eileen Myles, Elliott Sharp, Emily XYZ, Erica Hunt, Erica Kaufman, Evan Kennedy, Joe Elliot, Joel Lewis, Frank Sherlock, Gillian McCain, Greg Fuchs, Janet Hamill, Jeremy Hoevenaar, Jeremy Sigler, Jessica Fiorini, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jim Behrle, Julianna Barwick, Julie Patton, Michael Lydon, Lisa Jarnot, Maggie Dubris, Marcella Durand, Marty Ehrlich, Merry Fortune, Michael Cirelli, Kristen Kosmas, Laura Elrick, Lauren Russell, Leopoldine Core, Nina Freeman, Paolo Javier, Patricia Spears Jones, Paul Mills (Poez), Michel Scharf, Mike Doughty, Karen Weiser, Lewis Warsh, Linda Russo, Penny Arcade, Peter Bushyeager, Rebecca Moore, Mónica de la Torre, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Nathaniel Siegel, Nick Hallett, Nicole Peyrefitte, Pierre Joris & Miles Joris-Peyrefitte, Kathleen Miller, Katie Degentesh, Kelly Ginger, Ken Chen, Kim Lyons, Kim Rosenfield, India Radfar, Tonya Foster, Stephanie Gray, Susan Landers, Tony Towle, Tracie Morris, Valery Oisteanu, Wayne Koestenbaum, Will Edmiston, Yoshiko Chuma, Nicole Wallace, Arlo Quint, Stacy Szymaszek and more T.B.A

General admission $20/Students & Seniors $15/Members $10.

PRECIPITATE 1.3: HELL'S GATE

2010-11-06T16:10:00.000-07:00

get it while its hot:

http://precipitatejournal.com/home/journal/issue-3/

PERIPLUM

2010-11-06T09:33:00.001-07:00

FROM BLOG.BESTAMERICANPOETRY.COM

2010-11-03T06:28:00.000-07:00

from http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2010/10/ben-and-amy-read-chapbooks-.html

November 01, 2010
Ben and Amy Read Chapbooks

Here are some chapbooks we like. Maybe this will make you read them.

The End of Waste and The Harrowing Halychyna by Curtis Jensen

Self-published. See curtisinterruptus.blogspot.com.

Poems: Welcome to the greatest “zine” moments of the year. The typos do not detract from the enjoyment of this chapbook. Obsessive editing can be really annoying anyway. Sandbox in Hell V1.2 is a great poem; coupled with the visuals of cow/boar/horse/deer skulls creates a "bad-ass" feeling.

Construction: Feels like a skate/punk/straight-edge/vegan recipe zine your little brother photocopied at Kinkos back in high school. Probably goes well with Black Flag or Gorilla Biscuits. Deer skulls a-plenty.

SANDBOX IN HELL VI.2

You are Sisyphus,

Not pushing the rock, but in the sandbox.
Really not many likenesses except that
Whatpowers may be have doomed you here,
From now until the rest of whatever.

The trick is that there’s nothing under
This sandbox, nothing but a way out
Six inches beneath your big dumb feet,
Nothing but a change of scenery.

You’ve geen given a flat-nosed shovel.
You’re on your hands, you’re on your knees.
You’ve choked way up the shovel-handle:
You could cut through the ceiling below.

Maintaining the level sand around you,
You are diligent in senseless effort;
You motor your perpetual doom;
You are in this eternity, youre in it
On your hands and on your knees;
You bring about your own impulsion,
You’re in the sandbox with yourself
Till all the lights at last go out,
Til maybe even after that.

Whether your sandbox surface lays plumb
Has no bearing on your place in torment.
You being you, you’re there with yourself.

NOV 8 @ POETRY PROJECT

2010-10-31T14:01:00.000-07:00

http://lesfigues.blogspot.com/2010/10/nov-8-poetry-project.html

holy smokes:

Monday, November 8th
8pm

Brandon Shimoda
& Jennifer Karmin with guest performers
Cara Benson, Claire Donato, Thom Donovan,
Curtis Jensen, Pierre Joris, Michael Leong,
and Ronaldo Wilson

at The Poetry Project
131 E. 10th Street
New York, NY
admission $8
students & seniors $7
http://poetryproject.org

BRANDON SHIMODA was born on the west coast of the United States, and has since lived in nine states and five countries. His collaborations, drawings and writings have appeared in print, online, on vinyl and on walls. Recent books include The Alps (Flim Forum Press, 2008), The Inland Sea (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008), Lake M (Corollary Press, 2010) and The Bowling (Greying Ghost Press, 2010), a collaboration with Sommer Browning. He is currently on the road, and lives nowhere.

JENNIFER KARMIN, in a polyvocal improvisation with seven NYC writers, will perform a selection of cantos from Aaaaaaaaaaalice, published by Flim Forum Press in 2010. Karmin curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run spaces, community centers, and on city streets across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. A proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv, she is the author of the Dusie chapbook Evacuated: Disembodying Katrina. Walking Poem, a collaborative street project, is featured online at How2. In Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools.

CARA BENSON is author of a book of interconnected pre-elegiac texts for plants animals humans and earth called (made). She teaches in a NY State prison.

CLAIRE DONATO lives in Brooklyn, NY and received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Recent poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Octopus and Action Yes.

THOM DONOVAN edits Wild Horses Of Fire weblog, now in its 6th year!, and coedits ON Contemporary Practice. He is an ongoing participant in the Nonsite Collective and the Project on the Commons.

CURTIS JENSEN's work has appeared in Try!, the Sugar House Review, Precipitate and The Equalizer. Previous to Brooklyn, he has lived and worked in Utah, Wyoming, and Ukraine. He maintains a blog at theendofwaste.blogspot.com

PIERRE JORIS is a poet, translator, essayist & anthologist. He has published over forty books, most recently Aljibar II (poems) and Justifying the Margins (essays). With Jerome Rothenberg he edited the award-winning anthologies Poems for the Millennium.

"MICHAEL LEONG" is an anagram of "helical gnome"; he is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry including e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009), Midnight's Marsupium (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2010), and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, forthcoming).

RONALDO V WILSON's Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, won the 2007 Cave Canem Prize, and Poems of the Black Object, the 2010 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry.

TRY MAGAZINE: MAITLAND GLOSS OF MIDDLING LOVE

2010-10-23T07:28:00.001-07:00

just got the word that rj maitland's gloss of middling love (from the harrowing of halychyna) will be in try! magazine

SPILLWAY

2010-10-16T08:09:00.001-07:00

Sugar House Review: Review of Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foreing Secretary

2010-10-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

Duties of an English Foreign Secretary by Macgregor Card (2009 Fence Books)
Reviewed by Curtis Jensen

An electric generator is a device that transmits mechanical energy into electrical energy. A simple AC generator consists of a strong magnetic field, conductors that rotate through that magnetic field, and a means by which a continuous connection is provided to the conductors as they rotate. Each time a complete turning-over is made by the rotor, a cycle of alternating current is created. Thus a rotational energy is converted into an electrical energy. Rotation over time can be graphed as a sine wave, fixed points along the wave’s curve corresponding to events along a rotation’s unfolding in the flow of time. If such a waveform is centered on 0, its point of equilibrium, and its high peak is 1, then its low peak must be -1. The line of a sine wave turns and returns (or returns and turns) to its high and low peak as it unfolds in time.

In the poem, “Nary A Soul” in Macgregor Card’s Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, Card’s speaker states:

If I could
If I no could

If I could: high peak. If I no could: low peak. Here the waveform is centered on I, the couplet’s subjective equilibrium. The peak to peak voltage of the couplet is something like the relative value of could + the relative value of no could. In this case, the peaks are understood to be of a class of subjective possibilities, If I could: the speaking subject in the conditionally possible mode; If I no could: the speaking subject in the conditionally impossible mode.

As the figure rotates its conductive high and low peaks through the charged field of the poem unfolding in time, energy is generated. Of course various devices might be operationalized to conserve and/or also generate more energy:

If I could
If I no could...

If I could could could
No, could NO could could...

The figure of the first waveform is present in the second couplet, but its material spine has been reordered in rhythm, repetition, and variation. If oscillation can be understood as repetitive variation in time about a central value (a point of equilibrium) or inversely between two or more different states (in this example could and no could, but the states need not be opposing), then oscillation is what’s happening here.

From “The Merman’s Gift”:

“Take care.”
“Take care forever, no!”

Another reversal, another oscillation. From “The Libertine’s Punishment”:

Something is moving beside me
Nothing’s supposed to be there

Equilibrium here is the position between the something that is and the nothing that is not. Oscillation occurs in the charged field of presence, absence, expectation, fear, doubt... Cartesian geometry is insufficient to the task of this field’s mapping as there are too many planes for it to express.

In Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, Macgregor Card searches for (and finds!) those figural planes capable of expressing and so transmitting the energy of his nimble, terrifying, hilarious, melodic and significant poetic oscillations between sets of peak values: contemporary cityscapes to depth charges of historical conventions and texts; plunges into the complexities of a relationship (romantic and platonic modes both) to recoilings back from the social milieu; the subjective plane of present earth to the objective heights of the air, which turns out to be just as contingent in its flickering phenomena as anything perceived at the firmament. In the wash of the work’s music, points of equilibrium blister out of the text as certain subjective perspectives. Often roles such as juror, maudit, and my favorite: the sun’s own paned ajudicant. Roles are taken up or avoided, embraced or shunned, constituting another oscillational plane of the text. Oscillations set into the fields of other oscillations, e.g. in “Gone to Earth” a social interaction in the air permutates to a private kind of night in the tomorrow possible on the ground.

Often feeling talked about
or bored
I’ll start to count, but it will pass
Haven’t seen one beast today
Gone to Earth
It is too near–maybe I can tell
It’s difficult to clear the air

Tomorrow I will find a kind of private night

Card is at all times clearly conducting the oscillations of the poems in Duties. He does not do so from behind a shroud, like an idiot tractor-driver with a paper bag over his head expecting the children at the field’s edge watching him to believe the field plows itself; nor is he standing on one foot on the tractor seat, with his scalp dyed red and his clapping hands, screaming at the children over the knocking engine to collectively acknowledge a projection of his self. Card is clearly present as the conductor within each poem of Duties, driving the works’ turns and returns phrase by phra se. Card shows the movements of his hands in his struggle with the material of the text in its necessarily non-Cartesian geometry, and Card’s secret suit lies in this open handling of the poems’ material. Furthermore, through motif, melody, pathos, humor, rhyme and theme and variation, and other devices, Card beckons the reader to join him in the poems’ oscillations and transmission of energy, in the working out of its movements. It is in this aspect of his work that Card draws his cues most significantly from the Spasmodics, the group of Victorian era poets characterized by their verse dramas and lengthy introspective soliloquies. The Spasmodics ascended quickly to popularity, and just as quickly to derision, their namesake taking on a derogatory aspect in most modern criticism in spite of its link to canonical figures like Tennyson and Browning. Sidney Dobbel is a Spasmodic Poet who Card has promoted outside the text at firmilian.blogspot.com and acknowledged within by Duties’ title and inscription.

Card’s struggle to manage the sonic/linguistic material of the poem is something that can be heard and read throughout Duties. In essence, Card shows his work at every turn (or return), thus his authority is transparent in his open struggle with the text’s material. We see, in fact, we hear and therefore feel, phrase by phrase, how Card made his compositional choices. Paradoxically it is Card’s quickness and poetic skill, his nimbleness in music, word play, and phrasal movement that makes the book wholly his own. So we have another oscillation, between transparency and mastery. But at certain moments it is this mastery that can sling the reader from the text. Certain moves perhaps might be considered over-nimble, moves so quick as to wrench the reader from the poem and into the dirt of pragmatics’ arena. Perhaps that is the cost of such productive experiments in the generation of energy through poetic oscillation. Nevertheless, through his precise management of affective devices, the motifs, melody, pathos, humor, rhyme and theme and variation mentioned previously (devices of which Dobbel was a master), Card by in large supports the reader through Duties’ interelational unfolding, and in so doing he harnesses Duties’ high-charge oscillations to powerful poetry.

What geometries then could describe the energy dynamics of interelational oscillations such as those that Card executes in Duties of an English Foreign Secretary?

CENTER PIVOT IRRIGATION

2010-09-24T11:02:00.001-07:00

POETRY TIME 9.25.10

2010-09-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

Poetry Time

Season 3 Episode 1
SEPTEMBER 25th 8pm

JUDITH GOLDMAN

CURTIS JENSEN

CATHY WAGNER

390 SENECA AVE.

CORNER OF SENECA AND STANHOPE

ENTRANCE ON STANHOPE

BEER

RAFFLE

POETRY

+videos by Brandon Downing

POETICS APPLIED 2: BEN MIROV'S GHOST MACHINE

2010-08-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

from Electric Literature:

Smash The Construct To Remember Its Ghost: Ben Mirov’s GHOST MACHINE

Sean Patrick Hill, in his review of Ghost Machine for Bookslut, keys in on the GM’s formal likeness to Berryman’s Dream Songs. If Berryman drew upon a stansaic frame and meter and rhyme as formal vehicles for his work’s constellated expression of ‘character,’ what then does Mirov draw upon? Parallel syntactic structures and repetition set in a field of recursion. With these devices Mirov reifies GM’s figures and tropes where they set in their sentences into symbolic objects that hold meaning (though that meaning is never wholly clear), echoing and refracting one another across GM’s.

From Eye, Ghost:

Eye wake up in a construct. Eye lay on my
bed and sweat. Eye replay final moments. Eye try to
picture her face. Eye program a future version of myself
to remember it, slick with seawater, ringed with wet hair.
Eye go to a little shop where they sell machines
that keep you up. Eye lay the crumpled body next
to a convenience store.

Mirov recursively gathers the key figural elements of Ghost Machine into “Eye, Ghost,” the long significant section at the center of the book, substituting the speaking subject’s prior I, with the psychically-charged eye. I plan to be another language in the body of deer in “Sleepless Night Ghost” permutates to Eye plan to be another shadow in the body of deer in “Eye, Ghost.” In such recursions and refigurations, GM’s symbolic objects take on the status of motif. Grave and persistent motifs, to borrow language from Valéry, which affect the ear, the open path set deeply and directly into the reader’s cognitive copse. In so doing, Mirov lays and overlays feedback loops of sound and syntactic shape on the reader’s short term memory.

Mirov’s genius lies in his ability to centripetally reel those loops towards the book’s gravitational core. This reeling-in has an obverse aspect: it amplifies the skips and twitches of the poems’ associative nimbleness and stop/start iterations and erasures, essentially heightening the centrifugal dynamics of the text while deeply compressing its figures. The result is overwhelming, a gut-wrenching torsion, a whirl of implosion and disbursement something like the psycho-emotional blastvaccum of love’s abrupt termination. As such the emotional terrain of GM is figured into the motif-rhythms of the poems themselves. The shape of the blastvaccum in its inertia of absence manifested in the medium of memory is taken up in the recursive form of GM, and it is in this figuration that Ghost Machine is noteworthy literature.

Mirov’s speaking subject is never seen. We perceive the character, the subject of so many of GM’s predications, by its reflection in the poems’ mise-en-scène. This array consists of the bars, public transportation, streets and bedrooms of the poems, and these settings’ correlating locational props, all which reflect the presence of the speaking subject in the text, but do not explicitly show him. Instead GM’s character emerges in a sort of gestalt from the collage; those other characters the speaking subject encounters are reflective detritus as much as are the coffee, drunk food, clothes, furniture and the rest of the array of twenty-something object-markers that populate, nearly wash out, the poems.

From “Wave Machine”:

… J calls me a shitface with tears in his eyes. We meet
at 8 and grab a bite to eat. Someone says my name is Booth. She
Gives me my third drink for free. Z laughs whenever a kid starts
a fight. There isn’t enough sex to go around.

That is, with the exception of her. The compliment of GM’s speaking subject, her, is in memory a subject previous to the speaking subject of the text, a prior agent which predicates the speaker in having caused the determining factors which constitute speaker, which bring the speaker into existence. In Eye, Ghost, by a similar degree as to which her lies prior to the speaker, the figure of the eye, the perceiving organ of the ego, projects the poem away from the speaker. In this the speaker exists in the space between the absent her and the present eye in the pronoun of pure consciousness, I (more Valéry), which has by displacement become absent itself.

…Eye remember
being in the ocean with her. Eye probably won’t see her
for years. Eye put on a clean t-shirt.

GM is the powerful poetic trace of its speaker’s slow, painful reorientation towards recovery in the vacant, psychic wake of failed love. But the speaking subject does not recover, and so Mirov avoids the most abhorrent pitfall available to him considering the essentially not-quite-adult preoccupations and material of the world of the poems. In fact the speaker does not even enter the state of recovery; GM closes with the ghost of recovery looming in the figure of “Ghost Couple”:

I’m granted a dream of an unglowing girl.

Recovery projected through the dream-ether onto the object of desire. An adjective, an authorial gesture, unglowing, traces the attempt to demote recovery, the speaker’s object of desire embodied in the absent her, from its ideal status. But the adjective is an inadequate lever for the mass of the dream, the gesture fails, and nothing in the dream is shifted to the plain of the real.

What is Machine? It is authorial resistance to collapse made manifest in poetic form. It is the material surface of Mirov’s poems brought about in the unfolding of time amid the collapse-zone of a failed relationship. It is the speaker’s gestural traces drawn into sentences, sentences constituent of predication, subject through the verb to the object, sentences which function as charged syntactic units patterned into Ghost Machine’s emergent form. What is Ghost? It is that which has brought the speaker into existence, but also that which the speaker cannot apprehend.

“Ghost Transmitter”:

The knowledge of my receivers grows dim.
I can only misquote what the voice tries to say.
I will probably never see it in the mirror.

* * *

Previously: Juxtaposition, the Modern Sublime, Poetry Responding to The Deepwater Horizon Disaster.

-Curtis Jensen works and studies in Brooklyn, but he’d rather be here. He maintains a blog.

POETS FOR LIVING WATERS

2010-08-11T18:57:00.000-07:00

Gulf Coast's Poets for Living Waters project has posted three poems, which is awesome.

http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/three-poems-by-curtis-jensen/

ALTERNATING CURRENT

2010-07-21T14:40:00.000-07:00

POETICS APPLIED I: ELECTRIC LITERATURE

2010-07-14T07:20:00.000-07:00

From electricliterature.com/blog

Column Note: POETICS APPLIED
In pursuit of those methods, techniques, theories and figures that can contribute to one’s own poetry by their application in poetic praxis, Curtis Jensen comments on, reviews and analyzes contemporary and past literatures from the perspective of an emerging poet, which he is.

Say for instance a subject is confronted with the endless array of a system of signification, as is often the case in the postmodern context. This array of unending signification happens to resemble a cloth of red silk, extending in all directions at once. The subject is struck by the overwhelming vastness of the array and the beautiful silken resemblance, and sets about to express this. The subject, an artist, selects elements that are distant (and so contrasting), and draws them together in juxtaposition, fashioning their figure into that of a cloth rose. The figure is a fine aesthetic object, and each time the artist re-encounters it, she projects the unbounded context of the vast and terrifying array of signification into it, re-expanding the array’s unbounded context, and re-accessing the sublime.

Now say for instance this example permutates: the unbounded array, a horrific oil spill, and the artist, a poet powerfully struck by the vast unbounded context of the spill’s disastrous unfolding. The poet selects contrasting elements from the complex of the oil spill, perhaps a little girl playing on the beach with a broken containment boom and a dead, oil-drenched turtle; the poet fashions these elements into a juxtaposed figure, perhaps including a couple other figures to go along with the girl and the turtle; the poet attaches a title to her work, something like Oil Spill, or Oil, or The Girl and the Oil Spill and the Dead Turtle, and then the poet posts her poem on her blog. Again, it is likely that the poet, when re-encountering Oil Spill or Oil or the Girl and The Oil Spill and the Dead Turtle, is able to access the sublime that sparked her poem. Other poets and readers who share with the poet an awareness of and a perspective on the disaster’s unbounded context (its material, social, political and human implications) are able to project this context into the juxtaposed figures of Oil Spill, or Oil, or The Girl and The Oil Spill and the Dead Turtle. Such a projection invokes the fear, despair and terror of the unbounded and uncapped disaster still unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, and so accesses the sublime. In this way the Oil Spill or Oil or The Girl and The Oil Spill is an affirming poem.

But what of, say for instance, the poet’s brother-in-law? He encounters the rose figure at work one afternoon while responding to the day’s emails; he recognizes the figure as an aesthetic object of great skill and craft, appreciates it as such, and goes on with his business till knocking off early to stop by the local pub for a tall glass of cool beer before heading home to dinner with the artist/poet’s sister and their two small children. The rose figure does not facilitate his accessing the sublime because he is not already familiar with the array’s unbounded context, he is not informed previously of a theory of signification systems, and the rose figure in its compression does not bring him any closer to becoming conscious of it. This is not to suggest that the brother-in-law is not capable of becoming conscious of semiotic theory, but that the rose fails to invoke an encounter with the sublime, the encounter that the artist had set out to express.

When the brother-in-law encounters Oil Spill or Oil or The Girl and the Oil Spill and the Dead Turtle, he does not share with the poet the same consciousness of or ideological perspective on the disastrous oil spill, and recognizes the poem as an aesthetic object only, knocks off work early to enjoy a cold beer at the bar before heading home to dinner. Again, this is not to say that the poet’s brother in law cannot become conscious of the disaster’s unbounded context, but that the poem failed in invoking for the brother-in-law an encounter with the sublime nature of the disaster.

As a class, poems in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster seek to express and comment upon the horror, fear, despair, disgust, anger, and frustration felt as a result of the disaster’s unfolding. Most of these emotions are attributes of the perception of the sublime. The postmodern sublime differs from the romantic sublime in that it is a refiguration of the subject-object interaction characteristic of the former. In postmodernity, practically all aspects of the natural world have been effected by human activity, hence the postmodern sublime is understood to be the subject and a human-effected object in its unbounded context. In theory, such an encounter sparks overwhelming sensations, and so accessing the sublime initiates a powerful affective mode in poetry. Accordingly, poems written in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster (Gulf Coast’s Poets for Living Waters features the bulk of the best of these) share a tendency to attempt to access the sublime. Such attempts are intended to further the poet’s expression of, comment upon, or protest against the disaster.
I suggest that the poetry responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster over-relies upon the device of juxtaposition, and that in this over-reliance, it has failed to access the sublime.

The ecopoetics movement has taken a vanguard position in contemporary poetry, its supporters writing and criticizing some of the most compelling poetry written today. The poetry circulating in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster is not all the result of the ecopoetics movement, but the primary themes of the two camps, ecopoetics and practically everyone else writing about the disaster, overlay one another.

The poems circulating in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster are influenced by a prominent maxim of the ecopoetics movement: show the bird and the bulldozer together. This maxim presumes that the bulldozer and the bird are causally related, which, in the postmodern context, they often are, perhaps as a function of the destructive development of habitat as in the case of, say, a landfill or a subdivision or a catastrophic oil spill.
Though the bird and bulldozer maxim does lend itself to juxtaposition, it does not oblige the poet to rely upon it as a primary figurative device. Juxtaposition, by bringing together unlike terms for comparison, engages a contrast that results in powerful compression. Often juxtaposition is deployed for rhetorical purposes, say perhaps to defamiliarize some traditional literary convention, as the modernists were apt to do, or as in the case of poems in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, to convey that the disaster is a giant horrible mess and a manifestation of a deeper set of highly destructive practices. (Jonathan Skinner mentions the bird and bulldozer maxim in his excellent and free literary journal, ecopoetics. See his statement from a talk presented at AWP in issue 4/5, specifically for his compelling (and I feel accurate) ethical arguments. For another treatment of the bird and bulldozer maxim, Christopher Arigo works at the topic in his review of Juliana Spahr’s last book in How 2, as well as explicating the role of the postmodern sublime in ecopoetics).

But for those that don’t share a similar awareness of the context of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and who encounter these highly compressed poems, what then? The poems’ figures are art objects that elicit an aesthetic response, but because of over-reliance on compressive devices such as juxtaposition, the poems do not facilitate the reader’s access to the sublime, and therefore fail in achieving their intentions. Furthermore, such poems do not bring the reader, the poet’s brother-in-law, or anyone else not broadly sharing the same ideological perspective, any closer to sympathy with the poet’s position in regards to the material, social, political and human aspects of the disaster.

I do not mean to insist that poetry must take a rhetorical position. I mean to insist that in relying upon highly compressive figurative devices such as juxtaposition in its treatment of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the poetry circulating in response to the disaster is affirming, but not convincing, thus failing in its rhetorical intentions. Showing the bird and the bulldozer is an ethically sound maxim; I hold it as an imperative in my own work. But reducing of vastly complex material, social, and political contexts to selected elements figured in compression results in poetry of affirmation, whether it is poetry in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster or otherwise. And, Poetry of affirmation is poetry which holds very little significance.

-Curtis Jensen works and studies in Brooklyn, but he’d rather be here. He maintains a blog at theendofwaste.blogspot.com

MICROBURST

2010-07-12T06:04:00.001-07:00

DEEP BOREHOLE DISPOSAL

2010-06-22T08:17:00.001-07:00

VESSELS OF OPPORTUNITY

2010-06-21T13:42:00.001-07:00

VESSSELS OF OPPORTUNITY
BP_Summary_Report_VOO_Incident_5_26_2010

Why don't you provide respirators?
In the effected estuaries
Volatile organic compounds [VOC's]
Rarely present as negative indicators

What happened? Whether these individual
Health complaints were due to exposure
Or otherwise weathered cruedoil as a source
Of inhalational exposure is unlikely

What you need to know: vessels were provided
A hydrocarbon-based degreasing terpene
[Pineoil] & the likely cause of the problem
Was its use when unproperly dilluted

What we changed: as a result of this
The terpene was recalled & replaced
Moreover if used under high temperatures
Stress & stroke risks are increased by respirators

NO OFFICIAL REGISTRATION, NO ACCOMODATION, NO CLAIMS

2010-06-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

The Russia Journal
What do you think of Moscow's immigrant workers?
Mon, 2001-11-05
Issue Number: 368
Elena Berezueva
2001-11-06

Michael Dobrushin, pensioner
I sympathize with immigrants, they are looking for the way out. The principle cause of this social phenomenon is a personal disaster. I doubt that anyone would leave his motherland, if he were happy. For some of them Moscow is a final destination, for others it is a transitory shelter. In the cases of immigration that I am aware of, the people are from Central Asia and Moldova. All of them work on construction sites. I doubt that this kind of job could be well-paid. But compared to their incomes at home it is something. I can only guess at what difficulties they undergo: lack of accommodation and poor treatment to name a couple. Some of them fall victims of illegal manufacture of substitute vodka. Immigrants are a real find for these procedures— they have no official registration, no accommodation, no claims. Many new-fangled businessmen take them as a cheap labor force. I have seen cases like this on TV.

EPHEMERELLA EXCRUCIANS

2010-06-17T17:29:00.001-07:00

VESSELS OF OPPORTUNITY

2010-06-17T07:37:00.001-07:00

MAY 26 2010: A LOCAL REFIGURING OF THE SUBLIME

2010-06-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

Like a blowout-preventor belching so
Much oil & at its tubing string it traces
Dark parabolas we see brown we see green
We see mechanisms steady the device
Release it steady it then release it again
The plume takes up seadebris & pressure
Who knows what else an old woman on her back
In the pathway slaps one then the other of
Her hem-stitched pantsflanks she laughs
No she cackles & delicate dandruff flecks
Nearby her thick bag & other things
– If pumping mud down the valvebody fails
Then cut & patch siphon & cap or a second well
Bored further along we have other viable options.

THE TRUE SECRET OF PILTDOWN

2010-06-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

All the mules in the entire world double
In size and bear double-sized foal
Who grow up to bray on about their sick
Old sire or dam to the moon when it is full.

One mule brays to another, this goes on
For dynasties - emersed in mulish chatter,
It is difficult to find oneself in the ecliptic,
Low down on the Book Cliffs when the moon is full.

The full moon is a swirling vermillion burner
Under a pot of mule fat evolving at an un-
Knowable rate. A limnologist purses a pair
Of deliberate lips and stirs a final recursion

Of mule into a hard jar held under water
In which we individually live alone.

EMPATHY

2010-06-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

Man on the train:

We got fried chicken
(holds up
a bag of fried
chicken)

and we got sandwiches
(holds up a
2nd bag of
chicken)

Anything you can do
to help what we've got

PROSPECT 2 - 6.26.10 - 7:00PM - http://prrospect.blogspot.com/ - @ Château Trout

2010-06-06T20:10:00.001-07:00

PROSPECT 2 - 6.26.10 - 7:00PM - http://prrospect.blogspot.com/
@ The Kilgore Trout Home for Wayward Writers
221 E 21st Street, Brooklyn
B/Q @ Church Ave

AARON POOCHIGIAN http://aaronpoochigian.com/
Poet - Translator - Classicist

CORINA COPP
Playwright - Poet - 25 Cent Opera

GRACIE LEAVITT
Poet - Playwright - Surveyor of birds

CURTIS JENSEN http://theendofwaste.blogspot.com/
Curator - Poet - In search of a videographer

BYO__
7:00 PM Potluck hors d'oeuvre on the pati-oh
7:30 PM Works presented/received/discussed.
9:00 PM Further casual social interaction
12:00 PM Flatbush burns

PROSPECT 2 is changeable
- is an event centered around/in language
- is something to which you could bring your friends
- is of material economy across all its fields
- is of vectors of authority which are transparent & so
- is open to curatorial proposals
- has a budget of $0.

THANKS to the Electric Literaturers http://www.electricliterature.com

Gulf Oil Spill: Poems of Protest and Relief

2010-05-28T15:49:00.000-07:00

Date: Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Time: 7:30pm - 10:00pm
Location: Happy Ending Lounge
Street: 302 Broome Street
City/Town: New York, NY

Please come out for an environmentally conscious Southern Writers Reading Series featuring:

Curtis Jensen
Jeffery Berg
Myron Michael
Ted Dodson

$5 suggested donation. All proceeds will go to clean up efforts in the gulf.

Curtis Jensen is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Brooklyn College. His work is published in The Bridge and forthcoming in Precipitate and The Equalizer. He is the author of 5 chapbooks, and he curates the Prospect literary series. Previous to Brooklyn, he has lived and worked in Utah, Wyoming, and Ukraine. He maintains a blog at theendofwaste.blogspot.com.

Jeffery Berg's poetry has recently been featured in Harpur Palate, Hiram Poetry Review, the Gay & Lesbian Review, and is forthcoming in Inertia Magazine. He recieved his MFA from New York University and co-edits the online journal Clementine. He grew up in Six Mile, South Carolina and Lynchburg, Virginia and currently resides in New York.

Proprietor of Rondeau Records Myron Michael is a recording artist and writing instructor. He received an MFA in writing from California College of the Arts and is a Cave Canem fellow. His poems appear online and in The Blink, Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds (City Lights, 2009), Tea Party, Reverie, Pluck, and Nanomajority, respectively. He is the founder of Move Or Die and lives in the Bay Area where he curates HELIOTROPE a monthly reading series.

Ted Dodson is a poet and translator living in Brooklyn. He was born and raised in Middleburg, VA, serves as the senior poetry editor for the Brooklyn Review, and holds an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, where he also teaches. Select publication and an interview can be found in the Providence-based journal, Interrobang.

PORT OF REGISTRY: MAJURO

2010-05-27T05:45:00.000-07:00

ENTRAINMENT

2010-05-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

THE BURNING & SINKING OF DEEPWATER HORIZON

2010-05-02T07:41:00.003-07:00

6 forms in a loose circle
Toeing rocks going on about God knows
I am the 3rd & I am the 4th
I dream the others I am all 6
With infinite more the surface
A euclidean disk drifts
Towards the river's mouth.

PROSPECT 1 - 5.22.10 - 5:30 PM @ PROSPECT PARK

2010-05-02T07:41:00.001-07:00

PROSPECT 1 - 5.22.10 - 5:30PM - http://prrospect.blogspot.com/ - @ PROSPECT PARK

WYTHE MARSCHALL http://chronolect.com/
Fictionist - Historian - Atlasist Esotericum

KATIE BYRUM
Poet - Pushcart Nominee 2008 - Copy Editor

MARDI JASKOT
Fictionist - City College MFA - Public Transport Rider

CURTIS JENSEN http://theendofwaste.blogspot.com/
Curator - Poet - Jack Mormon

BYO__ discreetly
4:30 PM Potluck hors d'oeuvre
5:30 PM Works presented/received/discussed.
7:30 PM / dark (whichever comes 1st):
- Further casual social interaction @ Double Windsor
12:00 PM Park Slope Burns

PROSPECT 1 is changeable
- is an event centered around/in language
- is something to which you could bring your friends
- is of material economy across all fields: textual - architectural – financial
- is of vectors of authority which are transparent
- has a budget of $0.

THANKS to the Electric Literaturers http://www.electricliterature.com

*If you'd like not to receive notices of future Prospects, email an indication of such to curtis.m.jensen@gmail.com.

GULLY

2010-04-23T07:36:00.001-07:00

TOPDRIVE COLLISION

2010-04-21T06:28:00.001-07:00

THE TRUE SECRET OF PILTDOWN

2010-04-16T06:46:00.000-07:00

All the mules in the entire world double
In size and bear double-sized foal
Who grow up to bray on about their sick
Old sire or dam to the moon in Autumn
when the moon is full.

One mule brays to another, this goes on
For dynasties - immersed in mulish chatter,
It is difficult to find oneself in the ecliptic,
Low down on the Book Cliffs in Autumn
when the moon is full.

The full moon is a swirling vermillion burner
Under a pot of mule fat evolving at an un-
Knowable rate. A limnologist purses a pair
Of Book Cliff lips and stirs a final recursion

Of mule into a hard jar held under water
In which we individually live alone.

THE SUN

2010-04-09T19:36:00.001-07:00

Two mules marking one spiral of a mill's
Archimedean scroll pump have frozen themselves,
Their mule-selves, in a pump-eddy this winter.

At one time these mules moved magnetically
Through wholly other fields in the burning mill,
Through spicule pools, through flaring filaments
At the surface of the mill's incandescent currents.

Now at the quicker turnstyle of death and of birth
Our mules are former tree-dwellers on a plain of ice
In another time, in our time, we lift our mule snouts
And we wonder at the mill reflected in the moon.

Surely we thought the spiral would freeze here with us,
Slowly in from the sides with us, we mules have frozen,
the scroll pump has not - the mill has not gone dark.

PROSPECT 0.2 - 4.16.10 - 7PM @ ZERO FRIENDS

2010-04-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

PROSPECT 0.2 - 4.16.10 - 7PM - http://prrospect.blogspot.com/
@ ZERO FRIENDS: 437 E 9TH Street - Between 1st Ave & Ave A

CHRIS MARTIN Copper Canyon Press
Poet - 2006 Hayden Carruth Prize - Choral Rapper

ABRAHAM NOWITZ http://abe.nowitz.com/
Poet - Artist - Inventor

CONNIE MAE OLIVER
Poet - Constellationist - Rasputin-a?

CURTIS JENSEN http://theendofwaste.blogspot.com/
Curator - Poet - Jack Mormon

7PM Works presented/received/discussed.

PROSPECT 0.2 is changeable
- is an event centered around/in language
- is of material economy across all fields
- has a budget of $0.

7PM Works presented/received/discussed.
9PM Further casual social interaction @ B-SIDE BAR.
12PM East Willage burns.

@ KEN SANDERS w/ SCOTT CARRIER & EAGLE TWIN

2010-04-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

@ KEN SANDERS RARE BOOKS w/ SCOTT CARRIER & EAGLE TWIN
4.5.10 SLC, UT

thanks d.

GNATHOSTOMATA

2010-03-17T06:52:00.000-07:00

GAS STOP IN CHUGWATER

2010-03-10T06:08:00.000-08:00

HORTUS DELICIARUM

2010-03-09T04:10:00.001-08:00

COMMITMENT

2010-03-02T19:58:00.001-08:00

COMMITMENT

One vermillion, one dull as mustard
Pestled with sift of a House of Bread,
Before my widow's coals, my moabitess
Eyes, two deserts constitute themselves.

Emergent form of alien maize:
Bewildering fields of my lonely heart;
Double-dendrite rows of my familiar mind:
Synaptic present-nest of barley spikelits.

I find the coarse weave of night's apron,
And in the dark I hiss to old Boaz,
I've come in from the fields.
He stirs over, a pale and fleshy fish,

And fearfully he droops, Who's that there?
Your convert handmaiden, I answer.

THE BRIDGE ...

2010-02-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

I have a poem in this.

THE LAST GUARD AT BELZEC

2010-02-27T09:20:00.000-08:00

Has been given the farm:

(Later will be under which
Discovered a stinking fat ditch)

(This guard is not from there-
His nationality is left to conjure)

(An inverting exchange for the tmeses
Of his (our) growth plate (physes))

A simplicity of essences
In a world wide open
Wallowing in the evident.

9.22.38 FORT PECK DAM

2010-02-26T08:34:00.000-08:00

RATSKULL METHOD FOR THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION

2010-02-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

MEMORILUVIUM SET: WHAT GOOD IS A WAKE WITHOUT

2010-02-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

The mare, in her smart harness

stamps her trim hooves

As you, with an old scrap of blanket,

rub down her legs

Her forelegs. Sweet smell of grain,

sicker smell

Of mice. You hoist yourself up behind her,

the reins you take

In your hands hold within them something

of the mare's mane.

The cart box booms with the tools

like ice shifting.

Out of the barn and away in the town

You see the friends this whole time

you have held.

Perhaps you see your children

playing in the mud

With their sticks. At the edge of the town

you see gnats

And honeybees attending to

the cornflowers and poppies

Above the green crop-stalks.

You look down and you see there

are no leg muscles

Nor foot muscles, nor skin, nor bloodmuscle.

There is nobody

At the edge of the town, in sight of the fields.

CONFOCAL

2010-02-13T06:38:00.000-08:00

MEMORILUVIUM SET: PROCESSION

2010-02-13T05:51:00.000-08:00

The dark wheel of the hearse

about to turn over

about to flatten

The precise light.

The thin faces of the mourners

droplets their beads,

droplets beads their coats' wool,

Lips pursed to sing.

The rain is nearly snow.

Oh Lord, it comes quickly.
Oh Lord, it deliberately comes,
Oh Lord, they see me, they know my name,
Oh Lord, to be left alone.

GUSTAVE DORE

2010-02-12T08:12:00.001-08:00

CLOCK

2010-02-07T12:22:00.000-08:00

Then I am young and a part of some
Modern expedition that's flung all its members
Along the slower plane of a long desert,
A great, full distance- clinking tin cups.

A lizard sucks his teeth in shade,
Archonic wind glazes the lizard-
For a season I live at this slower plane;
I move up and down its canyons, so many

piñon boughs.

The lizard pumps himself to his eyeballs,
Weird blood-clock thumping on dust
Of the longer plane of the slow desert,
Each tick one thump of the thousand-full eye.

You and I could slowly settle there together

to sleep,

And sleeping we could be there together

in some longer way.

CERTAIN MEMORIES

2010-02-02T20:47:00.001-08:00

A whole school of children in blinders,
Assembled by height in lines, stupidly
Looking about. In some other place is rung

A bell- hundreds of children surge forward
At doors too narrow, this the children can't see,
The lines come apart, the field writhes:
A scourge of blindered children

Shrieking, colliding, flapping their arms.
In certain memories, your face no longer holds.

CROWN HEIGHTS

2010-01-31T21:04:00.001-08:00

A hell-coyote stalks a frozen plain
Of the faces of the damned, scratches
Her provision from their eyes with her hell-claws,
Muzzles the quicklime in their sockets
Always hungry.

In all seasons the damned see
The hard laws of Hell carried out.

HELL'S GATE

2010-01-27T06:57:00.001-08:00

Sand fills a nose and then an ear -
The particulate sleep of death.

A skinbag of sleep tossed from a railcar
By ankles, by your slippery hands

To a barricade at Hell's Gate
Built to hold the sleep-flood back

A few grains longer, a few moments
Spilt; the difference between

Either gorge edge, either gate post
Either paddle wheel, either Flood Rock's

Detonation or an anarchist riot-
300,000 from Patterson

Blowing into ears, into teeth
and soon you are wholly of death.

BADLANDS SET

2010-01-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

BADLANDS ITERATION
Iron is the tongue that flares
Along the sand's quick belly,
Double-current tongue that shares
Its scumline with headland and sky.

As sky recedes the sea, the tongue
Thumps out its life's-length music
Along skin-dunes
Along the continental sea bed.

The tongue goes black,
As black as an iron tongue,
As black as a sediment rung.
The bone collector rubs his thumb along

The dark scumline,
A lime ladder
In a forest of lime ladders,
In the evening while returning
To his dry camp.

BADLANDS CHIASMUS
As sky recedes the sea, the tongue,
Its scumline with headland and sky,
Thumps out its life's-length music,
Double-current tongue that shares,
Along skin-dunes,
Along the sand's quick belly,
Along the continental sea bed,
Iron is the tongue that flares.

The tongue goes black
To his dry camp,
As black as an iron tongue
In the evening while returning,
As black as a sediment rung
In a forest of lime ladders,
The bone collector rubs his thumb along
A lime ladder,
The dark scumline.

BADLANDS ZACCHEUS
The bone collector runs his thumb along
the rim of the Lord's cup.

The Lord his cup presents to his judges.
First judge ten pennies plunks in.
Second judge five pennies plunks in.
Third judge two pennies plunks in.
Fourth judge stuffs his fist into his pocket

And from the depths extracts a clouded penny,
Huffs up his penny's cloudedness,
Shines his penny's cloud face in his beard
And like a leper in a sycamore
Fourth judge his offering plunks in.

The Lord His cup overturns
And the Lord's cup takes the place
Of all other cups throughout history.

THANKSGIVING, 1993

2010-01-20T19:50:00.001-08:00

There is ice between the bullrushes.
The water on the marsh this year is higher
Than other years - an early cold snap
Together brought about with the high water
The ice between the bullrushes.

In that ice there is a ratskull:
Two icesockets and a snout full of ice
Held in the ice over the mud (there was
No time to get the skull down into the mud,
So in the ice there is a ratskull.)

The ice is firm to feel underfoot,
A new boot holds well at this plain curving
To open water where an airboat whines -
Another, an empty plain unfolds in awful dreams.
The ice though is firm to feel underfoot.

An airboat whines back and forth on the lake.
The lake seems very far from here until
The airboat slams into the ice edge -
I feel that terrible flicker up through my knees
And then I can hear again the airboat on the lake;

A cold snap comes in at once from all sides,
And it is the cold that I feel against my legs, not canvas.
A catfish frozen where it swam in the Platte,
All ten fingertips ache now like they did then,
And the cold comes in from all sides at once.

THERE IS AN OCEAN

2010-01-09T12:03:00.001-08:00

There is an iron ocean, and in
This ocean are steely swimming fish,
And above these fish hangs a galvanized sky,
And across this sky wires exhaust
Of filigreed planes which slag between
Two cities where we live, two cities
Bolted to either burled coast
Of the ocean. Beyond the sky
A bivalent forge comes apart.

FOREMAN'S PRAYER

2010-01-04T02:20:00.001-08:00

Lord we shall not rest, the foreman's prayer begins.
Give us a night without this fire, we forgive them
What've fucked us, deliver us please from death,
Hallowed be Thee, Amen!

Roughnecks in a circle, around each shoulder
A heavy arm, on heads hard hats worn,
Soot-smudged lips chorus Amen!
Which no ears hear because at that self same

Moment the refinery explodes in flame
The roughnecks incinerate like match heads
And in heaven a circle of steel-toed boots
Sprouts heel first from a bare patch of Elysium.

Another ring of roughnecks to be dead again,
Immortality is the repetition of death.

2009-12-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

EDEN

2009-12-31T02:22:00.000-08:00

A flying fish cracks into a foremast
And rips away from sound - the fish
Slams dead on a quiet deck of eyes
Eying the glowing fennel stalk clamped
under its fin.

Another boat at another plain floats
Alone under the sun - the fine buzz of gnats
In the dead ears of the choleric crew, dozens
Snoring and bloating and stinking and another

Flying fish rips the air and cracks time
And thunders down fennel stalks which ignite
Both crews - the live eyes and the ears of the dead.

After the flames is heard one thud
Of the organic body of the first.

WEST

2009-12-24T10:24:00.001-08:00

WEST

And it is about to rain. Here that doesn't happen
Often: clouds stacked like anvils, the sun
Even further west, pinking the jack rabbit
Ears in among the blue, fragrant sage brush.

What road got me here isn't so much a road
As a line across a plain. I can imagine
An engineer at the far end, pointing his hand
And saying that way, boys, we're going that way.

Then the refinery gates wheel back, and in the flare
I see you, the only person I know in this country,
And the sight is wonderful and it is unforgettable.

But the plain has become the empty plain that unfolds
In dreams; the refinery gates have disappeared,
And I stand on the empty plain. There is nothing else.

OF FELTMAKING

2009-12-21T03:16:00.000-08:00

OF FELTMAKING

The secret of feltmaking.
Wool pressed in tin miners' boots like the charge
Felt on inner seas which twin mallets drum
In the wooly twists of each cochlear nerve belt.

Felt boots on snow, mallets wound with wool,
A whispering evasion: consonance;
Cracks in teeth, cracking joints, a wordless
Dawn beneath a blanket: assonance

Frames days, press frames, the ancients' method:
Adaptation: tin miners' boots of pressed wool,
Electric felt drummed on wooly seas, the wordless
Music of belted blankets along snow,

The whispering method felt, drummed, heard
At dawn, in press frames of cochlear wool.

BIRTHQUAKE

2009-12-18T04:17:00.000-08:00

from Salt Lake City Weekly
http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-9981-birthquake.html

Birthquake
Born Again: Salt Lake City's Birthquake are not your mother’s mathematics.
By Curtis Jensen

Birthquake are their mother’s mathematics. Scott Whitaker hunkers down, neck of bass in one fist, stick of chalk in the other. It is summer. It is dusk, and you are behind the buildings with a cold beer in your hand. It’s desert-summer-night-warm and beyond the cars in the pay lot to the west, the sun moves to the back of the city and you and the six or eight or nine dozen others on the pavement and the rooftops and the bike saddles watch Birthquake. Scott Whitaker, on the asphalt in front of the band, writes in long, proud letters: Thank You.

Then Whitaker is up and sprawl-legged, facing his brothers—Nick Whitaker is eyes-low and with arpeggios, counting the pebbles in the tar; Matt Whitaker is head-back and then a twitch at the snare and then a swing at the high hats. “Drip-chirp” sounds an electrified underwater headstock and the bass grumbles. The cymbals build and the kick-drum pumps and the chord and the melody and the beat are off and what a thing it is, to be young in the evening in the desert in the summer singing along to a song without words.

That was months ago. Birthquake are figures of periodicity, and Rejoice the Noise! is Birthquake’s present document. Sequence, chiasmus, alternation and envelope are all executed on Rejoice the Noise!. Melody on Rejoice the Noise! is fleeting, as fleeting as an ex-flautist or a guitar variation or a choral shout: “Que Cuuuullllllooooo!” and suddenly there you are again with Birthquake and everyone else in a parking lot back of the whole city beneath a rippling July evening sky.

Rejoice the Noise! is riffs and rhythms and their respective grammars unfolding in the time/space of the record’s sound-stream. Rejoice the Noise! is its own narrative, and melody is its soundtrack. Melody enters the record at moments requisite of a particular affect, as an underscoring flourish, like chalk on asphalt: the first bars of the guitar solo on “Farewell, Fare thee Well, Well?,” the cadenced punctuation of “I love you brother,” the first and second time through the flute line of “Que Culo.”

This is not a new strategy—foregrounding rhythm, repetition, cosmopolitan chord voicings and polyrhythms over melody and textual content in guitar-based post-rock—especially for three young men who came to music through punk-rock and hardcore in a DIY context. The middle-class and college-enrolled (or college-dropped-out) of the Midwest have, finger and thumb, tapped along on their cans of Old Style and Grain Belt in however many basements, community halls, and watering holes with the same strategies since the mid ’90s, even before the The Fucking Champs and Oxes and Hella and Battles and on and on. Birthquake swim in that current, and the gestures and postures and authorities of those bands before them inform the structures of the trio. And Birthquake are now a trio—winds player Mark Herrera recently left the project; three Whitakers remain. Hopefully, Herrera didn’t take with him the densely voiced reed-chords and textural touches that do such fine variegating work on Rejoice the Noise!.

It is significant that the Birthquakers are brothers: Birthquake make masculine music, not male-chauvinist music. Masculine themes are constructed brick by brick, variations wrestle and rough-house one with another, riffs and rhythms are objects manipulated along with the other objects existent in the field of the song. In fact, the songs are decidedly not macho. It’d be tricky work to find the slimmest doric shade on Rejoice the Noise!. But somehow in this position away from machismo, Birthquake’s music is all the more masculine—like monks playing soccer, like elders on P-day, like Ian McKaye. This is music by which one can strut within the highly ritualized protocol of the American DIY Rock Music Event. This is music that brings about smiles and releases energy in a positive way and offers the opportunity of a banging good time while doing little harm and maybe shaking a leg or two.

Birthquake quake best in the inscape between iteration and excessive repetition. On Rejoice the Noise! this inscape is achieved often—not always, but often. Maybe that is where empathy and community emerge, in the inscape between iteration and habit. Either way, Birthquake brings about a sum greater than that of its individual histories, be those histories musical, familial and/or otherwise.

The individual histories of the Brothers Whitaker, their Brotherhood, and Birthquake are bound up through sublimation with the condition of the Salt Lake Valley, which is more a condition than it is a fixed geography. Maybe that is your condition, too, the condition of the Salt Lake Valley, as I think likely it is mine. This is serious stuff. Birthquake’s Rejoice the Noise! is a field of action wherein synthesis presents culture, community, brotherhood, individuals. In this, Rejoice the Noise! is singular.

BIRTHQUAKE CD RELEASE
Kilby Court
741 S. 330 West
Friday, Dec. 18, 7 p.m.

Urban Lounge
241 S. 500 East
Saturday, Dec. 19, 10 p.m.

IF YOU WERE TWO

2009-12-13T21:24:00.000-08:00

I am a meadow forged by the sea,
A willow, yellow, in the snow,
A sod slab spaded for Mykhailo.
If you were two, which would you be?

In the dark hall, if asked what was said
Arm in arm on the garden path, the implic-
It with identity - such fine bliss
In this flickering carriage, not yet dead.

Three steeples, two chruches, glass.
A jar underwater: a fugue improper
Episodes along the swinging creek center,
Suspense, dissonance; suspense, stretto, class.

First two entries: to take in breath, to pick
Away lice, thumb and finger; to move lightning-sick.