p-ramblings

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:53:00 +0000

The Daily Glance

Amal Al-Jubouri's Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar after the Occupation (trans. Rebecca Gayle Howell with Husam Qaisi) presents the reaction of an Iraqi poet to what has happened with the war. She presents the problems of life under a dictator, but she also examines the problems that the occupation has created. Take, for example, a few lines from "Men After the Occupation:"

Who are the real men?

No one knows

Disguises lauding

the demise of manhood

A circus

wild with masks.

Al-Jubouri does not stray from talking about the problems caused by the overthrow of Sadam, just like she does not stray from discussing what it was like beforehand. Still, she doesn't really offer any solutions; she documents. In this way, she reminds me of Akhmatova in "Requiem." Her witnessing, through exile, is a way to open for us what has changed, has happened in her native space.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 04:28:00 +0000

I'm looking for poets and fiction writers who reside in Chicago to send me work for an upcoming issue of PoetsArtists.

The call is here: http://poetsandartists.com/the-chicago-issue/

Also here:

PoetsArtists invites poets and fiction writers who reside/work in the Chicago area to submit work to our Chicago issue. Send your work along with a short bio to William Allegrezza (wallegrezza@gmail.com), the guest editor for literary submissions. Please attach your work as a doc., .txt, .docx, or .rtf file and put CHICAGO in the subject line. If we are interested in publishing your work, we will contact you for a photograph of yourself and for you to approve the layout. (Please note that you do not need to write about Chicago, just live/work in the area.)

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:37:00 +0000

Bologna in Prosa has silently returned.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 06:09:00 +0000

some years ago, in temporal nomads i wrote the lines:

you could ask for pillan
when the columns are dense
when thirteen is your number and you
are infinite
on wings
as the circle closes

they seem to apply again tonight. pillan is the supreme god of the araucanian tribes in south america. in essence, he is a thunder god, and in these lines he is being called upon “as the circle closes” in the midst of battle. the person is lost though is growing or feeling “infinite” at the end.

not long after penning these lines, i wrote the following ones as the beginning to a poem in Fragile Replacements.

closed gates within

i unplugged the cords and
switched off anything switchable
into silence

the two poems are connected in my head, and though tonight i feel ready to write the third of this triptych, i find that the first two express what i want to say, and that makes me, in a wild jump, think of emerson and how he states that poets express what the rest of us want to say, so i am left wondering how many poets feel their earlier poems explain their present sentiments.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 01:13:00 +0000

Out from Otoliths — Densities, Apparitions by William Allegrezza
Now out from Otoliths.

Densities, Apparitions
William Allegrezza
80 pages
Cover image by Deborah Meadows
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9808785-8-5
$13.45 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/densities-apparitions/17278481

This book explores influence by crossing out or responding to poets who have influenced me. The Whitman and Andrade pieces are cross-outs, and anyone familiar with the first version of Calamus will notice that I did not respond to the entire collection. I left out pieces that I did not think would cut well for my project or pieces that have too much personal meaning for me. The response pieces to Leopardi and Neruda are probably even more telling, for in these pieces, it is sometimes difficult to see how the pieces directly relate to the original. Still, the influence is there reworked through my experience. —William Allegrezza

William Allegrezza edits the e-zine Moria and teaches at Indiana University Northwest. He has previously published five books, In the Weaver's Valley, Ladders in July, Fragile Replacements, Collective Instant, and Covering Over; two anthologies, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century and La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; seven chapbooks, including Sonoluminescence (co-written with Simone Muench) and Filament Sense (Ypolita Press); and many poetry reviews, articles, and poems. He founded and curated series A, a reading series in Chicago, from 2006-2010. In addition, he occasionally posts his thoughts at http://allegrezza.blogspot.com.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 04:18:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 03:43:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 03:29:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:17:00 +0000

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 04:36:00 +0000

check out my new e-book, inshore seeds, with argotist at http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Ebooks%20index.htm or download it here.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:06:00 +0000

The Daily Glance

Thomas Fink's Peace Conference is filled with shaped poems and lyric utterances. Partially, this book seems like an exploration of form that takes up what Fink has done in other books. The shaped poems that begin the book are fascinating because they are non-standard shapes with some stanzas (if they can be called that) that are formed like x's and some that do not connect. These forms complicate the reading process, especially when Fink plays with narrative lines with quick shifts in topic. (I wish that I could reproduce these here, but I think I'd have to use a pdf or photo to do that.) Beyond the shaped poems, Fink plays with new forms; for example, he creates a series that combines a prose poem with a hay(na)ku. It looks like a haibun but is something different. It's amazing how much he manages to pack into his pieces:

Why are you worrying about teeth? They'll be dead teeth. I'm careful about
what I buy. We found ourselves--ages ago--strewn together in a store, on a
rock. Nowadays he really favors the candy-stripper variety. They're perky, so
I indulge him.

This section is from a series titled "Dusk Bowl Intimacies," and the series seems to me to be one of the most interesting poetic series that I've read in quite some time. He plays lyrically with different voices, explores a new form, and combines cultural poetic traditions.

One last note, the poetry in the book is wonderful but so is the front cover art. Fink is a painter as well, and the piece displayed on the front cover is fabulous and contains forms that repeat in the book.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:05:00 +0000

po-biz lesson of the day, #168790

when you hear strange footsteps
at night, do not try to reach enlightenment,
just shoot.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 16:16:00 +0000

The Daily Glance

Deborah Meadows’ Saccade Patterns is firmly rooted in experimental poetic practice; she uses a variety of techniques to explore difficult topics, from how we relate to each other to the erotic, and the poems themselves are beautifully put together, even when very dense. Ultimately, she raises more questions than she answers. Take the first lines of “Historically speaking”:

This precise eucalyptus bark peels down—
it’s how the tree narrows down possibility

yet placed here, they must adore
the equation: the hinge between
here and there, zero and quadratic items,
unripe earth and fraught sky, loose confederacy towards
a skimpy democratic plan.

Well, are we talking about peeling bark or something else here? Just look at the lines. "This precise eucalyptus"--which one? Just some tree she's looking at, or is the poem metaphorically a tree shedding bark? And the peeling, does that narrow down possibility? Why, because of the shedding of other bits? Then we skip a space and begin a new stanza. Is the narrative continued or have we started something new? For example, if the bark or tree is placed here, wherever here may be, then, it becomes an equation for narrowing possibility? Or is that some other equation? Is it a hinge? Or is that something else? It's easy to see how the myriad bark pieces could be a loose confederacy, but are we still talking about the bark? Is this about the poem, the words becoming a confederacy? Or is this some accumulation of equations, or coupled items ("here and there," "zero and quadratic items," earth and sky)? Basically, is she leading us through a complicated analogy or using quick shifts from idea to idea (which would go well with the title of the book)? I'm not sure, but the questions that arise when reading the poems are fascinating, and the language of the book carries me through it easily.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:04:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Jen Hofer's Lead & Tether is a collection of daily cut ups from newspapers in the town she's in for the day--L.A., N.Y., Washington, and Tijuana. The cover of the chapbook is made with newspaper laminated and sown together. The poems themselves, in both English and Spanish, vary, but there is definitely a layer of social/political commentary that carries throughout the collection:

muted
incessantly
revolution
to market
People now
want something

[Please note that I have not retained her spacing and her text comes from a cut up]

Hofer's use of the newspaper text for criticism news makes the individual pieces interesting, but even more, this chapbook typifies what is great about the Dusie Kollectiv project. Hofer tells us where she was on a specific day, she tells us that the chapbooks are hand-stitched, and she tells us in a note what the project is for. Basically, she grounds the project in a specific individual at a specific time, and to have a copy of the project is to have a craft object in your hands. In essence, it's a stand, granted a small one, against the corporate nature of contemporary art, and it does so by mixing mass produced text (the newspaper) with individual crafting (arrangement and sowing).

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:35:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Deborah Poe's chapbook the last will be stone, too contains five short poems. It's no big secret that I typically like Poe's work, and this short collection is no exception. The poems are full of interesting juxtapositions and sonorous language. Take this lines from "A Lot Names Marooned":

Language and meander when geographies yesterday. The fragments all map.

So much is happening in lines like this one that this chapbook demands contemplative reading. These two sentences seem to relate, but the relation is not clear. Is language on the map? Are the fragments language? Are we meandering in yesterday's geographies when using language? (Or did I just rearrange the syntax for my own meaning purposes?)

My favorite poem in the chapbook is "Death Mix," a poem that takes its line from Paul Celan. I don't know that I can say what the poem is about, if about anything, but the sound of it is enchanting.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 15:25:00 +0000

Sometimes I will rewrite a poem from scratch over and over until I think I have come up with something. Often, I come up with nothing, and I abandon the piece. I abandoned the following piece(s), but I enjoyed the process. The following are a response to a poem about stone arrangements like Stonehenge in the U.K. I will leave the poet I’m responding to unnamed. It was not an especially good poem, and these are not especially good responses.

in looking at stones,

you imagine a story

of the gods, of the

overwhelming sense

of the sacred they evoke,

assuming it rests in

the stones and not

in you.

the stones, you say,

are sacred, but

they are just stones,

while you, poet, friend,

are a creator

looking for redemption.

you hold a stone,

turning it in your hand,

trying to figure out

how it came to be,

seeing in it shapes,

potential places

it could be.

poet,

fuck you and your stones,

you and your smug

academic lines.

the stones stand beyond you,

if they stand, and you,

with your alliteration

and scattered diphthongs,

will die.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:17:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Tilla Brading and Frances Presley's piece for the Dusie Kollectiv is essentially a short one page form that can be read as many poems or a single one. The page is divided by lines into squares (24 of them), and each square contains at least one word (only one has two words) or number. There is no clue as to whether or not we should read the page up, down, diagonally, top to bottom, etc. . ., and there's no indication as to whether or not all the words should be used. Basically, the reader is left with all the decisions about how to interpret this piece. The only guides are the words, but stripped of their syntax, they require us to do much more work that we might ordinarily do. The words themselves, things like "Bolivian," "porous," "tidy!", bring up questions of word choice by poets. Are certain words more poetic? Are certain combinations poetic? How much of the poetic is learned? (These questions I think are incidental to this work, but interesting deviations.)

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 19:44:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Maria Damon's meshwards defies expectations of poetry chapbooks. It looks like a traditional one, but it consists of pictures of words and letters stitched on fabric. Below the fabric photos are brief descriptions of the occasions that gave rise to the stitching. Some of the projects are directly related to poetry events or people, such as one for Charles Bernstein's family and one for Mark Nowak. Some, however, just contain words, such as one with the word Respect for Damon's mother. The projects are fun to see, but really they add a layer to the way I see Damon's work as a whole. I was already a fan, but now I imagine her playing with words like thread in myriad colors.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:40:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Carrie Hunter's Poetry Reading traces her experiences of poetry readings. The chapbook consists of quotations of poetry readings with each reader's words being given a different font. A list of the readers and fonts is provided, but really this chapbook is a found piece that relies on jarring juxtapositions and interesting turns of phrases. To me this poem is interesting in what it connects on the page but also in what it points us to in the readings. With it, I keep finding myself asking how the fragments would fit into the original context.

"That voice trajectory can't hear us"

"Possibly with a typist or an easel"

"Is a shadow a real shadow?"

"Transparent nudity grew"

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:49:00 +0000

With sadness I’ve read the many articles of late claiming the death of Comparative Literature in the U.S. The programs are dying here while they are expanding rapidly in countries on the rise (India and China, for example). The complaint in U.S. against the program usually goes that Comparative Literature teachers often usurp others’ areas of research and that their presentations are limited because the teachers/scholars do not know as much as individual area scholars. Embedded in this complaint is also the idea that Comparative Literature scholars are too concerned with concepts of national literatures. Such scholars are even the butt of jokes, e.g. “We need someone to teach these three totally unrelated things. Let’s get a Comp. Lit. person.” Ironically, these complaints come at a time when the Humanities are being asked to justify their places for academic funding, and, if you’ve heard some of the arguments, they seem to be fumbling in finding justification. To me, the arguments for keeping Comparative Literature, especially in our more global world, are apparent, and unfortunately, the decline in Comparative Literature programs in the U.S. signals to me are more fundamental decline in the U.S. university system.

Comparative Literature came of age in the U.S. in the postwar period. The original stirring for such a field came out of the 19th century desire for a world literature and to explain how we are all connected. In the postwar period, Comparative Literature steadied then grew briefly as a field mostly concerned with European literatures, and it is easy to critique the works from this period as being too highly focused on national literatures. Since then we’ve seen the rise of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature has become a home for theory. On the one hand, the field seems to have deconstructed itself, and on the other hand it seems to have become, at least some would suggest, irrelevant because Cultural Studies has taken over. By the time I took graduate classes, the field seemed wide open as long as one could jump through several language traditions. That was its saving grace for me because I found English departments mired in academic traditions, personalities, and national literatures. I started in a large English department filled with theory classes but with only literature classes from the British, Irish (represented in its entirety by Yeats), and American strains of English. What about the other Englishes? Of the islands? Of down under? Of Africa? What about looking at influences on English speaking writers from other languages? Comparative Literature was the field I turned to that allowed for such exploration.

I understand the complaints against Comparative Literature. Will a Comp. Lit. person know as much Middle English as a Middle English scholar? Probably not, and in a decent-sized department, the Middle English scholar should teach classes in that area. In a large department where there are scholars in other Englishes like Australian, Indian, West African, East African, etc. . ., then such scholars should teach classes in those areas; however, Comp. Lit. scholars definitely have an advantage in a smaller school; plus, they have linguistics training beyond that of most other scholars. In addition, I have heard from many English graduate students how they could complete a minor exam for their language components for a doctorate. That is not true for Comp. Lit. students. Where I went, we had to take classes in three language traditions, and that is the bare minimum for most programs. That meant that we had to work in the different fields, to talk to people really in other disciples, and see the connections between language traditions and literary traditions—also clearly experience the loss of translation.

I’m not suggesting that everyone head to Comp. Lit. I have some brilliant colleagues whose knowledge of their specialty areas is marvelous to explore, but the decline of Comp. Lit. programs seems to me fundamentally tied to a problem in higher education. We are shrinking one of our most diverse and global humanities programs at a time when we should be growing it. Essentially, can global Cultural Studies realistically take place in English departments, i.e. single language tradition departments?

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 14:27:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Michelle Naka Pierce's Symptom of Color is an amazing chapbook, and I didn't expect it to be. I don't mean that because of the poet--this is the first time that I've read her work. I mean that when I picked up the chapbook and flipped the pages, it just looked like another prose poem collection, but to classify it as that would be a gross understatement. When I began reading, I quickly realized that the prose poems continue across two pages. While my first reaction was to read down one page as is typical, I realized that the lines did not fit exactly and that they continue across the border of the page. In addition, I quickly realized that the poems continue (literally the lines break) on subsequent pages. She's crossing both the border of the page in the book but of continuing pages. You might not think crossing pages is that significant, but with prose poems of five lines, it seems quite different. In addition, as the narrative builds in the collection, she adds another short poem below the main ones on the page. The short poems continue in the same way, and it causes the conundrum of how to read one narrative at the top of the page while not letting the one at the bottom slip by.

Beyond the actual experience of reading is the content, which is mostly about being on a border. In one sense, it's about being on the border of a painting and what that means in the context of a museum. In a more personal level, it's about being on a cultural border and trying to negotiate that. For her, it's about being from a Japanese family in the U.S. She brings up how people in the U.S. see her and also how she is seen in Japan ("you will always be a gaijin"). The way she structures the reading experience in this book mirrors the content. It makes us, readers who might or might not be negotiating borders in a similar way, negotiate the borders of the book, a cultural experiment, to figure out how to make sense of it.

This chapbook definitely makes me want to check out the rest of her published work.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 14:03:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Chris Pusateri's Molecularity is a book that plays with sound. As a sonic experiment, the content of the work seems secondary, especially since many words repeat in ways that shift meanings. Sometimes such experiments can be tedious, but this one is not. In fact, I wish this one came with a cd of Pusateri reading it.

new origin spigot. electric saw starting. live-fire exercise, the world in which you work.

new origin spigot. were cold corporeal. fall foul. full stop; something in the chill of it.

In many ways, lines like these are assonance experiments. Just look at the s's and w's in the first line and the c's and f's in the second line. Add on the anaphora, and the lines become sound play, with the spigot perhaps just beings the vocal cords/mouth cavity. One could even go through this book looking at the arrangement plosives and fricatives (and glides, considering the first line here). It's short enough to be exciting without being overwhelming.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:46:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Krystal Languell's many lost cause creatures could form a very sad list is a fun book to read because it's like one giant rant through individual prose poems. Languell packs a lot of energy into her mostly four to five line prose poems. She gets in rants about sexism, academia, mortality, the poetry world, prepackaged food, and capitalism.

Will I know what killed me? The fish sticks the hot dogs

Or

Advanced degrees are not inherently evil but people are working hard for change. Every academic is guilty of "my diamond shoes are too tight" logical fallacies.

Are there arguments here? Not really, but the rants are fun, and this is poetry, not a philosophical treatise on the evils of contemporary life of which we are part.

Formally, the prose poems works well here. I've grown less fond of the form lately because so many people use it, and they often use it in ways that seem to lose its power. Languell does not have that problem. These are fast and interesting.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:33:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Paul Klinger's chapbook Jumblefate is a pocket-sized work that is sown together. While I enjoyed reading it, I'm not sure if I understand the concept that ties it together. The short pieces in the book could either be individual pieces or, more likely, part of a long poem. They are interesting on their own, but there seems to be some nature/woods/forest theme tying the book together.

In a field

Allure

rim

On a tiny

Shallow

Vine-like
Step

Fairly late

Most of the poems in the work have this weightless feel, except for the opening poem. I'd interested in seeing how this piece fits into the context of a book of Klinger's work.

noreply@blogger.com (bill) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:21:00 +0000

The Daily Glance (The Kollectiv Series)

Lynn Behrendt's Acquiescence is quite disturbing if read on a surface level. It's like having the title of Levertov's Breathing the Water turned into a poem. By that, I mean that the chapbook is one long poem describing someone acquiescing to water. Each stanza is two short lines, as if the lines mirror the slow process she's describing of drowning.

let go the edge
blue rim, water

sink down into it
stop breathing

if it hurts
just stop

The actual description of someone drowning is not fun to read, but the way she describes the process is interesting because she brings up giving into something deeper, giving in to that which surrounds you. Also, she shifts between first person and second person, almost suggesting that the experience is bigger than a single person, as if it is something we all experience. And that, of course, brings up the question of whether or not we need to read the experience of drowning, of giving into something, as metaphoric for something else. Basically, are we in the realm of allegory? Funny enough, I don't find myself asking that much with contemporary work.

Beyond the content, the chapbook is a great example for showing why I like the Kollectiv. The chapbook is just larger than a business card, and it folds out like one long piece of paper. It also comes in a sleeve made from a cut up map--mine includes water and land, but I'm sure they are all slightly different.