Nov 29, 2008

Herd

THIS tells us, at least, three things:

1.) Yet *another* reason never to set foot in a Wal Mart.

2.) Why our society is doomed.

3.) Why our society deserves to be doomed.

Nov 23, 2008

Fall



FALL

Searchlight-spot huge white
moon in the blue morning,
September balm withered-- trees
sanguine, give up
in the thick haze. Through
factory windows beside the train see
inverted glowing buttercup
lamps light who knows what.
Woman in the seat opposite
metronomes, syllables spurt
from her lips like the rail shrieks
as light-flowers are prized
open by the dawning day,

September, never any rest
for the dead, 6AM the moon
steals away, guilty. Summer
drops down to the curb
with the illegals waiting
for some work.


From my chapbook Turning, soon to be available as part of the Dusie 2008 Chapbook exchange project.

Nov 5, 2008

Thanks, United States, for not sucking my soul out through my eyeballs. It's nice to have something happen that is not utterly disheartening and horrific. And so the careening behemoth begins to slow. Not a victory, though, not really--but a better place to start--something we haven't had for...8 years (at the very least).

Nov 2, 2008

If you are in upstate New York on November 15

Mark Lamoureux and Joan Retallack
November 15, 2008 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paint
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at http://www.rfpaints.com/

Mark Lamoureux lives in Astoria, NY. His first full-length collection, Astrometry Orgonon was published by BlazeVOX books in 2008. He is the author of 5 chapbooks: Poem Stripped of Artifice (winner of the New School 2007 Chapbooks Contest), Traceland, 29 Cheeseburgers, Film Poems and City/Temple. His work has been published in print and online in Fence, Mustachioed, miPoesias, Jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, Lungfull!, Carve Poems, Coconut, GutCult and many others. In 2006 he started Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry. He is Reviews Editor for Boog City, a Manhattan-based literary paper, and teaches composition in the CUNY system.

Joan Retallack’s most recent publication is her Gertrude Stein: Selections with an extensive introduction/discussion of Stein’s work, brought out by University of California Press. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Memnoir, Mongrelisme, How To Do Things With Words, Afterrimages, and Errata 5uite which won the Columbia Book Award chosen by Robert Creeley. Currently at work on a poetic project, “The Reinvention of Truth,” Retallack is the author of Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, Wesleyan University Press, recipient of the America Award in Belles-Lettres. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave MacMillan, co-edited with Juliana Spahr) came out in 2006. The Poethical Wager, a book of interrelated essays, was published in 2004 by the University of California Press. She was the recipient of a Lanan Foundation award for poetry in 1998-99. A collection of Retallack’s procedural poems will come out next year from Roof Books. Retallack has had the pleasure of living in the Hudson Valley since January 2000 when she became the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

In the Gallery at R&F until November 22, 2008: Fabrication vs Verse, a solo exhibition of recent encaustic paintings by Kingston-based artist, Denise Orzo.

For this recent body of work, Denise Orzo was thinking about expectations, and how they often fulfill their conclusions. Using a highly innovative and original approach to cut-paper stencils, Orzo explores the formal interplay of positive and negative space, while constructing stories about the all-too-human tendency to form our realities with incomplete fragments of information. Using photographs as source material, the artist translates these flashes and glimpses as if they were manuscripts of light, shadow and time, illustrating how what we see is informed by what we have previously seen. The controlled precision of mapping an image, the fallibility of the human hand, and the wild, tempestuous nature of painting with hot wax all combine to augment the mutability of perception.

Denise Orzo was born in Queens, New York in 1972. She spent her early years on the piscine shaped island, dually informed by the powerful expansiveness of the ocean and the crippling claustrophobia of suburbia. Orzo holds a BFA in Painting from SUNY New Paltz. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, The Wright Gallery and The Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art, among other Hudson Valley venues. The artist currently lives and works in Kingston, New York.