I Will Read Better than Elizabeth Alexander & Won't Even Mention God Once

The Last Inaugural Ball - Lamoureux & Peterson @OUtposT 186 Saturday 1/24/09 3 PM

You see it don't you? Feel it? It's all different now. And you might be pooped out by all your inaugural ballin'. But, there's one more. Mark Lamoureux and Katie Peterson are change we can believe in. And in the spirit of change, get affiliated with the Unaffiliated Reading series as we add a venue to our list. The poets will trade off wearing Aretha Franklin's hat. Light refreshments will help us usher in Change.

OutPost 186

1861/2 Hampshire St. Cambridge, Ma


3 (III) Three PM

http://zeitgeist-outpost.org/


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.


Katie Peterson was born in California and is the author of This One Tree, a book of poems published by New Issues in 2006. She teaches poetry and the humanities at Deep Springs College in California.

Christmas Anglophilia

So I made my second Christmas Pudding this year and this time I got up the gumption (e.g. remained sober enough) to ignite it with flaming brandy like you are supposed to. You boil it for 10 hours and then you SET IT ON FIRE. What's not to love? A lot, apparently, since nobody ever wants to have anything to do with it besides me. So I will eat the entire thing myself and most likely give myself a coronary. But it sure does look cool when it is on fire. Otherwise, it tastes pretty much like a fruitcake.

& I didn't take that pic. from the internet, that is (or was) the real deal in our kitchen. Rachel was kind enough to trip the shutter while I was kind enough not to ignite my beard getting it to the table.

Likewise with the wassail, but cookies, on the other hand, are somewhat of an easier sell.

Those are Black & Whites because I may as well accept the fact I am a New Yorker. You'd be surprised how easy they are to make.







Now I am going to go polish off the wassail. Then I will spend the next 6 weeks on the stationary bike. After the fucking thing gets fixed.

Widening Gyre

Copies of my 2008 Dusie Kollectiv chapbook Turning are available at Bronwen Tate's blog Bread and Jam for Frances. Turning is a series of poems about seasons in New York City, and some of my favorite work to date. If you are sick of "New York Poems," don't worry, most of the poems are pretty critical of life in the city in general. If you happen to love New York, well, you'll at least probably recognize most of the locations. Except the ones in Queens, because you probably never go to Queens...

I need a vacation.

But please, check out the book, if not for my sake, then only to see the beautiful job Bronwen has done with the chaps.

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.

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.

My Captain.

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).

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.

ASTROMETRY ORGONON now available

Dear friends,

Happy Halloween! Most of you probably know of the trials and tribulations that my first book, Astrometry Orgonon has gone through in coming into the world, so you should know how pleased I am that the book is at long last available to order from BlazeVOX books. Some of you will note the slight change of spelling in the title, this is to differentiate it from the other version of the book that was ostensibly to be published with a different publisher. But time waits for no man, and neither do I, so the book has relocated to greener pastures.

The book is available on line through BlazeVOX at: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-ml.htm; the buy it now will take you to an Amazon storefront through which BlazeVOX sells their books. Even though the purchase is made on Amazon, the book is still purchased "through" BlazeVOX. BlazeVOX is a fantastic publisher and needs your help in these troubled times, so I must ask that you please purchase a copy of the book in this manner. Due the nature of Print On Demand, I will not be able to be as generous giving away copies of this as I have been with some other projects. But please check out the book, I have waited a long time for this.

Here is the copy from the back of the book (blurbs?, we don't need no stinking blurbs):

"The map of the heavens has long been the place where humanity has immortalized those narratives that are instructive to its understanding of the universe. The named celestial bodies represent a repository of information from diverse cultures, both ancient and modern. Each poem in this volume bears the name of the brightest named star of every visible constellation from both hemispheres. Insofar as mythology, science and religion offer us explanations of the properties and behavior of the physical world, Astrometry Orgonon, like the star-stories of old, creates a new, secular cosmology based on the scientific observations of Wilhelm Reich and Richard A. Muller compounded with various modern and ancient religions. By accepting as fact the theories of these and other disputed or dis-proven worldviewsn, these poems speak of the tenuousness and fragility of human understanding, and offer a critique of the actions of humans during the past several millennia."

http://www.blazevox.org/bk-ml.htm
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Re: Repeats

I was excited to receive a chapbook of poems from my friend Guillermo Parra, from whom I haven't seen an extensive number of poems since Cy Gist published (a portion of) his Caracas Notebook in the summer of 2006. Phantasmal Repeats is an austere black and white volume, produced on an apoplectic typewriter whose "e's" and "a's" appear to be sinking into the ground as if, appropriately, pulled by the arms of the angry dead. ("I can't hold these vowels enough to make the trembling / cease"). Even the bottom margin of the book itself appears rough-hewn, as though itself torn from the ground. The effect of the jagged lines is to make each poem a kind of Rorschach-like piece of visual art. This does not detract from the traditional sanctity of the poems, though, which are in keeping with Guillermo's exilic voice from Caracas Notebook, only this time they seem to be about the shift from North to South, or urban to less-urban (I'll probably receive letterbombs if I call Durham "rural")--Guillermo moved from Boston to North Carolina around the time that I moved to New York, another member of the great Boston poetic brain-drain that occurred around the middle of the decade.

The poems here seem mostly solitary (somewhat unlike Caracas Notebook which feels more "public"), with the narrator appearing to inhabit an empty domestic space with music infinitely looping ("Recurring rhythms make paste") in the background (the loop is a reoccurring motif in Parra's works--the "Phantasmal Repeats" of the book's title and "stress points / compose / phantasmal repeats"), and the musical paeans that bespeckle the poems seem considered and appropriate ("I'm one of the few people who live what's called the low-life" from New Order), and thus less irksome than I sometimes find purloined lyrics. Maybe I only like musical references when they are bands I like. Something I always find satisfying though are ghosts, and there are a number of them haunting this chapbook; indeed the black and white bleakness of the chap seems to adumbrate the spectral white sheet with two full stops for eyes ("like a ripple / of ghosts/ across the window"). Recurrent phrases and motifs ("bass cathedrals," loops, flowers) accentuate the haunted-quality of the book, as do the poems homebound-ness, although the narrator does leave said environs to be terrified by the brick block of a TJ Maxx in one of the bleakest and scariest poems of the book.

Guillermo is one of those poets who is not afraid of the lyric "I," and comfortable (or as comfortable as possible) with the process of mediating between the protected sacred self and the dumb tableaux of the world ("I write fitting spaces / For the sake of secrecy's map.") Probably like me, Guillermo is also one of those poets happiest by himself, with only oblique traces of obvious literary antecedents, choosing the right tool for the job independent of anyone else's kit.

I have no idea how one might acquire one of these outside of Guillermo himself, who I imagine would probably send you one if you asked.