Hey, look, there's a reading in Queens. Queens! Where I live! It's the first reading there's been in Queens since I moved here a year and a half ago. Woohoo! It just won't seem like a poetry reading without an hour-long train ride...

Sunday, February 11, 3:00pm
Poetry in the Presence of Sculpture

Brenda Iijima, Jill Magi, Sawako Nakayasu and Srikanth Reddy share work that
resonates with the renowned Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988)
in the exquisite museum and rock garden dedicated to his art.

Co-sponsored by The Noguchi Museum.

@ The Noguchi Museum
9-01 33 rd Road at Vernon Blvd., Long Island City
(N to Broadway in Queens, walk west on Broadway to Vernon Blvd.
For information about shuttle buses to the Museum, visit www.noguchi.org)
$10, $5 for seniors and students, Free to Poets House & Noguchi Museum Members

More shameless self-promo: this was Brenda Iijima's introduction for the Segue Series I read at a couple of weeks ago. Brenda has known me and my work for a long time; I thought I'd post her excellent (of course I am somewhat biased) introduction here so folks who were not at the reading can see it. I am going to start carrying this around with me on a little card, so when people ask me, "So, like, what kind of poetry do you write," I can answer with something besides, "I don't answer that question.":

"Tucked in the folds of numerous fugitive, finely construed, delicately manifested chapbooks of Mark’s are soulful immediacies emitted in a syntactic stream of synestetic particulars. The largess of dreams is shattered and shattered again into pressurized miniatures of detail where desiccation and nostalgia meet. Pressures and stresses are psychic. Swirling and careening between planetary cycles, somewheres hover. Mark’s lyric is crowded with the delicate filaments of ghosts, monsters, spirits, mythology, stuff of existence, banal trinkets, detritus and the numina inhabiting the objectified world of these visionary subjects. Planetary cycles and desire pull these details into focus, suture the traces, suspend animation—there is a tug between the ethereal and the terrestrial. This is a revenant’s teleology, a kind of doctrine that tells us phenomena are guided not only by mechanical forces but that they also move toward certain goals of self realization—there are vibes. Each utterance of Mark's is a divining voice. Where is water, where are the gods, what is war, and love’s necessities? Each calibration is a tension aligning beauty and the psyche. This, from his poem Spica.

“A matter of elephantine

significance lumbers

through the flax, its huge

knees, tedious effluvium:

the egg-timer of the sky

ripostes: purple flashes

in the middle places,

invigored motes goad

the flapping field:

the rocks are alive

Do you hear me?

the rocks are alive.”

I finally switched to the new Blogger, so I suppose it is finally time to upgrade my template, links, etc. As I more or less wrote the original one in HTML myself, this is likely to be a somewhat buggy process, so if things look weird here at the blog today, that is the reason why.

On the positive side, I can finally update my links.

FEINTS

Now the wine tastes like melted ice


Winnowing. The night. Split. Like an orange.


Teleological blunderbuss


Take the train into the wide mouth


Liminal door goldfish brain


Aporetic nave, intercapillary umbilical


Sponge-mouthed & needing


A forest of sutures adopts a stance like


Necromancy romantic, thin blue lips


Rock candy cage, splinters


Furrowed broken shattered trussed


This is empty like the air around a ship


Don’t speak


Laburnum walk ghost break


This is the unending end


Doffed & quartered & shunt


The tidemark of the blood


Sugar rain spilled into the inkpot


A copper plain marred by speech


Go into the somber maze


We were all dying for a crack


There was no place, it was said

Just Be

From Yahoo! news:

"A huge explosion rocked central Baghdad just be for sunset Thursday."

I guess it's hard to copyedit when things are blowing up around you. One collosal mistake spawns a million little ones.

I know I, myself, am for sunset.

I am working on putting together an anthology of 20th and 21st century ekphrastic poetry (poetry about visual art) from the U.S. I am now beginning the daunting process of assembling a list of poems to be considered for the anthology. I don't have a publisher yet, but once I have assembled the anthology I am going to try to find one.

I am hoping you can take a moment and list any ekphrastic poems you can think of and backchannel to mark_lamoureux@yahoo.com with the subject heading "Ekphrastic Poems." The only criteria are that the poet be one who has published in the 20th or 21st centuries. I am limiting the scope to published poems in an attempt to control the size of the project a little bit.

I am hoping to display the poem side-by-side with the image (or an image of the work in the case of sculpture) that the poem is about; so the poems should be about works of art that I could hypothetically obtain an image of.

Some more shameless self-promo. Some poems up on Adam Fieled's PFS Post and Drew Gardner on my reading with Frank Sherlock, and my uncomfortable performance that generated a new nickname" "Squidfingers." (Easier to spell than "Lamoureux," so I should probably go with it.)

Also, Brenda says that anyone who wants to review the reading (Segue Reading on 1/13 with Frank Sherlock) will get a free book from Roof Books.

Speaking of reviews, I need reviewers and reviews for Boog City. Backchannel me if you are interested in reviewing something or you have a review to proffer. Generally speaking I only run reviews of chapbooks and/or "larger" books from small presses, but if you have a review of something 'mainstream' you are dying to see in print I could be persuaded if it is a good book or a good review (good reviews of bad books are fine, bad reviews of good books-not so much.) I have plenty of review copies to offer.

Come one, come all:

Frank Sherlock & Mark Lamoureux

Saturday, January 13th, 4-6 PM (please be punctual--we are starting on time!)
Segue Reading Series at The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, just north of Houston
New York, New York

Frank Sherlock is the author of Spring Diet of Flowers at Night, ISO, and 13, and has engaged in collaborative projects with CA Conrad, Jennifer Coleman and sound artist/DJ Alex Welsh. He is a contributing editor for XConnect: Writers for the Information Age.

Mark Lamoureux's first full-length book of poems, Astrometry Organon, is due out from Spuyten Duyvil/Meeting Eyes Bindery in early 2007. He is the editor of Cy Gist Press, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry, and teaches English at Kingsborough Community College.

curated by Brenda Iijima & Evelyn Reilly

Back in the United States of Jetlag. 23 hours and counting, and I feel about ready to leave again...

As befits the birthplace of a civilization, Greece was beautiful and friendly. A place so old it is young again, the way an old human becomes an infant. No drastic catharsis as expected, but rather a place of subtleties--as in the way the innumerable mountains give way to horizons in gradated hues of blue or green depending on the weather. A city-dweller dropped in an always distant skyline--even at the pinnacle of the metropolis--gives way to a new perception of phenonmena and noumena--one's buglike blip on the long curve of the land and the vast expanse of everything after. A funeral stele persists in a museum--etched lists of names pawed at by scholars. Posterity is never what you think it will be. Even after gods die, it is their temples that remain, so it is with humans. A tiny candle burning in the roadside shrine in the hearty winds--somebody had to light it--someone keeps it burning. The boughs of xenia shade even the Ugly American while not so far away we enact televised murder. The man on the beach says Sophocles knew how things were always worse for the victor. "You don't look like an American" = "You don't seem so bad." Sour-faced guards at the Homeland Security checkpoint upon return remind me again that we're the Bad Guys now. Emblems & drastically enacted policies--rules, rules, rules. Immaculate smooth-stoned squares indicate it's not rules but people that pick up the trash. Further proof we are clots of rules and desires and not people. Nobody's trash blowing in tiny cyclones along the avenue.

If you happen to be interested, the inordinate amount of photos I took can be found here.

Happy New Year everyone.