Dottie Lasky is one of my favorite poets, and perhaps my favorite reader of poems. Hear her read, here, hear hear!

One of these trains is not like the others
Originally uploaded by Lodigs

I Complain About New York Because I Am An Iconoclast

Back in Boston, people used to complain about the MBTA. "It shuts down so early, why can't it be like the blessed MTA in New York City." "The trains are so small not like the MTA in New York City, the center of the universe!"

For the record, I don't remember the ENTIRE SYSTEM of the MBTA shutting down WHEN IT RAINS. Actually, I remember taking the T during BLIZZARDS. For the record, many of the stations are also CLIMATE CONTROLLED and the PA systems WORK so you can understand what the announcers are SAYING--despite the fact that they are rarely saying things like "Attention Passengers, there is no N, R, W, F or V services to Astoria, for Queens-bound service...get one of those stupid-ass Razr Scooters!"

Sorry, this hurts me more than it hurts you. I do this not on behalf of myself, but for Rachel, who it took 4 hours to get to work in the LWS today. It also took us 2 hours to get home from the Welcome to Boog City event in the LES on Friday night.

Take Me Down to Boog City, Where The Grass Is Green and Everybody's Pretty

I will be among the readers at this event on Friday night:

WELCOME TO BOOG CITY

Sidewalk Café
94 Ave. A, NYC
free with a two-drink minimum

Readings and musical performances

7:30 p.m.-Lauren Russell
7:45 p.m.-Mark Lamoureux
8:00 p.m.-Rachel Lipson (music)
8:30 p.m.-Joanna Fuhrman
9:00 p.m.-I Feel Tractor
9:30 p.m.-Thomas Devaney
9:50 p.m.-The Passenger Pigeons (né The Sparrows)
10:35 p.m.-David Baratier
11:00 p.m.-The Leader
12:00 a.m.-Nan and the Charley Horses

Directions: F/V to 2nd Ave., L to 1st Ave.
Venue is at E.6th St.

Then, I will be manning a table for Cy Gist Press at the Small, Small Press Fair:

SATURDAY - AUGUST 4, 11:00 A.M., 5:00 P.M.

Cakeshop
152 Ludlow St.
NYC

11:00 a.m.

4th Annual Small, Small Press Fair - Free

Followed by:

5:00 p.m.
Political poets and The Fugs, Village Fugs live
$5

5:15 p.m.-Amy King
5:30 p.m.-Nathaniel Siegel
5:45 p.m.-Christina Strong
6:00 p.m.-Ian Wilder
6:15 p.m.-Frank Sherlock
6:30 p.m.-CAConrad
6:50 p.m.-Greg Fuchs
7:05 p.m.-Kristin Prevallet
7:20 p.m.-Eliot Katz
7:35 p.m.-Rodrigo Toscano and his Collapsible Poetics Theater
7:55 p.m.-The Fugs, Village Fugs.

Stop by the table and do yourself the favor of purchasing all of the new recent Cy Gist Press titles by Sandra Simonds, Ben Mazer, Carrie Hunter and others because, you know, the world could end tomorrow and your life will have been incomplete, not having read these fine chapbooks. No pressure or anything. I'm just saying...

Nobody Gets Too Much Love Anymore

Having just about staggered, crawled and lurched my way through a particularly taxing and soul-draining summer teaching session, it is nice to hear that Eileen digs my Dusie chapbook-exchange project, Sometimes Things Seem Very Dark: Poems for Francesca Woodman, which will be available to non-Dusie-ers in one form or another in the near future. I have a few extra copies of the chapbook exchange version which I could be persuaded to send to someone if they were very nice to me.

For all you "Heroes" and LangPo fans (Both of you)

"Claire, all I want for you is pollen pansied heavy dolls with aerosol rockets."

Carrie Hunter's Vorticells

Cy Gist Press is happy to announce the release of Carrie Hunter's Vorticells ($6 ppd.). Vorticells offers crystallized moments of cognition, Hunter’s responses to 15 San Francisco artists show us the mechanism of tranfixion in pulsing detail. Her word-maps incise ghost images right on the reader’s brain, giving us a kind of synesthetic carnival of moments and non-moments, thoughts and non-thoughts that transcends the ekphrastic continuum and forms a harmonious unit from start to finish. For example:

XV. Accordion Accord (Carbon 9)

paper thistles wavering

we are guarded and uncharged

valiant whilst charred

seabodies of the cradled hymn

diamond scars and the babies dream

***

son as self as shadow as token
not knowing other really is other
cannot be formed, willed, created

we are not shadows of our selves
but selves of our shadows

come fully formed, fully othered

elegant dreams whisper to each other
wishing to be us, to uncurtain themselves

thistle glisten when unshadowed
we glisten when unshadowed

cheap satin drops down slips around
our bodies listen


BLOG SPECIAL: Buy Vorticells with Ben Mazer's Johanna Poems for $5 ppd. each:

Hey folks, if you are in NYC this weekend, come and see the first PFS Post Presents reading series at the Sidewalk Cafe with me, Amy King and Adam Fieled.

Amy King, Adam Fieled and Mark Lamoureux
8:00 PM
Sunday June, 24
Sidewalk Cafe
6th St. and Avenue A
New York, NY

Japanese Seppuku Binding

OK, so you think you're Mr. Badass bookmaker--that is until you drill a hole in the kitchen table and then can't figure out how to sew the binding when you're trying to Japanese Stab Bind a book. Um...any Stab Binding Masters out there who can give me some pointers? My new binding style is...stoppable.

Automatapoeia

Went to MASS MoCA this weekend and was lucky enough to see one of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests, Animaris Percipiere, in "person." Jansen's sculptures are kinetic sculptures that he has designed using PVC pipes that employ the wind on the beach to move around in the manner of an "organic" being. He simulates the process of natural selection by nurturing, testing and discarding models which do not work. The Strandbeests have reached a level of sophistication where sensors tell them if they have strayed into the water or into the dry sand of the upper beach where they can't walk, and also if conditions are such that they have to drop anchor until a storm passes or more favorable wind conditions occur. Jansen is another one of these people who are challenging the notion of "Artificial Intelligence," with the concept that, if it acts like it is alive, then perhaps it is alive; sort of like the programmer of the A.L.I.C.E. program who controversially won some AI competitions because his program acted as though it could hold a conversation, based on generic linguistic prompts. The AI community eventually denounced him because the program did not conform to the standards set that determine what "cognition" is, despite the fact, that, to the participant, the program exhibited every characteristic of being "alive."

Jansen hopes to some day release his creations into the wild and allow them to live out their own autonomous lives--to the eye, creatures, despite the fact that they are inorganic. Looking at the Animaric Percipiere got me thinking about poetics, the idea of authorship and the agency we attribute to poems and the creators of poems. It struck me that Jansen's sculptures correspond to my idea of poetics in some pretty profound ways. What I wish to do with poems is to give the veneer of 'intent,' without actually imbuing them with any intent as such. The poem exhibits all of the trappings of life, yet it is inert. It can exist in the wild following the program of its own primitive existence, yet it is only a simulacra, not a living, breathing thing. Yet the difference between the poem and the author seems ultimately academic. I may be an organic being, but generally what I do is react to outside stimuli in a way that is somehow hardwired or preordained. The rituals of my consciousness are not so very different from the programed motions of the Strandbeests. The beauty of the sculptures lies both in their ability to function autonomously, and to the way that they are also avatars of Jansen's own consciousness.

What I want for my poems is to give the illusion of intent, of life, of quickness without instilling in them any actual 'intent' as regards the traditional understandings of cognition. They will make their small motions and protect themselves, as they have been fashioned; but their actual purpose or intent is as obscure as my own actual purpose or intent. If adequately fashioned, they will stumble their way into the world and persevere. Much in the same manner that I, myself, have. Ultimately their purpose is ambiguous, as is the purpose of the herd of Stranbeests lurching along the shore, to eventually dissolve into the sea or to wind up as skeletal debris.

Gazing at the lattice of the Strandbeest I wondered about the Romantic 'I,' and the sacred conventions of art that dictate that the creations of I should be merely shed skins, the scratchings and leavings of I and not entities unto themselves--that the poem I write is simply a trace of my own unmalleable consciousness. That my consciousness exists at all. Perhaps it is the poems that create the person and not vice versa. Most of the time I feel not altogether different from a Strandbeest, lurching around in my preordained ways, my eyes blank windows on the word--betraying every semblance of consciousness, but yet I am merely a process, as the poems themselves are processes. When the wind blows too strong I hammer my little stake into the sand and wait for more hospitable gusts and when the wind blows favorably I scrawl my poems, who, in turn will do the same. Someday you will find them on the beach, fanning their fragile wings and nailing their nails into the strand--perhaps even when I am a significantly less animate but perhaps no less sentient skeleton.