West Wind Review 2011 Fall Sale!

FALL SALE!!

Go to West Wind Review for BIG SAVINGS on the past two years' issues!

Sonnagram in The Nation

My Sonnagram of Shakespeare's Sonnet 53 ("What is your substance, whereof are you made") appears in the August 15-22 issue of The Nation. (They failed to identify it as a Sonnagram, however, so for readers who don't know about the procedure, it just appears to be a random piece of doggerel.)

PBS Newshour

I was poet of the week on PBS Newshour a few weeks ago.

Emergent Forms: David Lau

EMERGENT FORMS: A 21st-CENTURY READING SERIES

presents

DAVID LAU

David Lau is a poet, editor, and essayist. He is the author of the poetry collection Virgil and the Mountain Cat (U of California Press 2009) and the co-editor of Lana Turner: A Magazine of Poetry and Opinion. He lives and teaches in Santa Cruz, CA.

TWO EVENTS:

READING
Thursday, May 19th
7:00 p.m.
Schneider Museum of Art
Southern Oregon University
FREE
suggested donation: $10

and, earlier that same day:

INFORMAL COLLOQUIUM
with the students of WR 441 (Advanced Poetry Writing)
followed by Creative Writing Student Recital @2:00 p.m.
Thursday, May 19th
1:00 p.m.
SOAR (Southern Oregon Arts & Research) celebration
Stevenson Union Room 319
Southern Oregon University
FREE

Remaking It New: Contemporary Poetry and Tradition

Remaking It New: Contemporary Poetry and Tradition

Friday, April 29th
602 Hamilton Hall, Columbia University, New York

What are contemporary poetry's formal and conceptual engagements with the poetry of the past? We’ve invited four poets--Kimberly Johnson, Maureen McLane, K. Silem Mohammad, and Eleanor Johnson--each of whose work reconfigures, re-imagines, or reinvents poetic forms from periods prior to the twentieth century. They will be joined by four scholars--Jeff Dolven (Princeton), Erik Gray (Columbia), Heather Dubrow (Fordham), and Michael Matto (Adelphi)--in a day of readings, responses, and roundtable discussions.

We are planning four sessions, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, lasting an hour and a quarter apiece. Each session will feature one poet, who will begin with a short reading, to be followed by a brief response from a scholar. The session will then finish with a roundtable discussion between the scholar and all four poets.

Organized by Michael Golston and Molly Murray

Program

Session 1: 10:00-11:15
Maureen McLane and Erik Gray

11:15-11:30 Break

Session 2: 11:30-12:45
K. Silem Mohammad and Heather Dubrow

12:45-2:00 Lunch

Session 3:
2:00-3:15: Kimberly Johnson and Jeff Dolven

3:15-3:30 Break

Session 4 3:30-4:45
Eleanor Johnson and Michael Matto

5:00—6:00 Reception

Michael Nicoloff & Alli Warren, Eunoia

Together again for the first time since Bruised Dick: Michael Nicoloff and Alli Warren bring the hot poetry action with Eunoia, new from Abraham Lincoln Press!

Using only the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet (and a few Arabic numerals and assorted punctuation marks), Warren and Nicoloff have created in Eunoia sixteen poems of a certain number of letters each that when read by English-speaking readers can be experienced as a series of intelligible or semi-intelligible words, phrases, lines, and sentences referring or seeming to refer to various things.

22 pp.
$5 + $1.50 s&h;

I Have to Itch His Subaru

for Erika Staiti

I've got this ukulele
in a plastic bag
I'm saving it for the clungheads
and spoadies and I hope
this brave decision will be followed
by others Now yell at the sandwich
with the consistent narrative voice
your mama gave you
Sandwich, how'd you get in them jeans?
by failing to signal while holding
hands in the time of the Perseids
with the weird dude who owns
those cabins the dude who invented
coinage What a clown!
clogging the sidewalks of the republic
I remember when this bar was a horsehair
love mat or another man's noodles
what did you do to it
I harumphed
repeatedly
I missiled I'm sorry
I was high
and I totally bricked it

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing
Edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith
Northwestern UP, 2011

Amazon
Northwestern UP

Publisher's description: In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today's writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E [sic], and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.

Authors include: Monica AASPRONG, Walter ABISH, Vito ACCONCI, Kathy ACKER, Sally ALATALO, Paal Bjelke ANDERSEN, David ANTIN, Louis ARAGON, Nathan AUSTIN, J. G. BALLARD, Fiona BANNER, Derek BEAULIEU, Samuel BECKETT, Caroline BERGVALL, Charles BERNSTEIN, Ted BERRIGAN, Jen BERVIN, Gregory BETTS, Christian BÖK, Marie BUCK, William S. BURROUGHS, David BUUCK, John CAGE, Blaise CENDRARS, Thomas CLABURN, Elisabeth CLARK, Claude CLOSKY, Clark COOLIDGE, Hart CRANE, Brian Joseph DAVIS, Katie DEGENTESH, Mónica DE LA TORRE, Denis DIDEROT, Marcel DUCHAMP, Craig DWORKIN, Laura ELRICK, Dan FARRELL, Gerald FERGUSON, Robert FITTERMAN, Lawrence GIFFIN, Peter GIZZI, Judith GOLDMAN, Kenneth GOLDSMITH, Nada GORDON, Noah Eli GORDON, Michael GOTTLIEB, Dan GRAHAM, Michelle GRANGAUD, Brion GYSIN, Michael HARVEY, H. L HIX, Yunte HUANG, Douglas HUEBLER, Peter JAEGER, Emma KAY, Bill KENNEDY and Darren WERSHLER, Michael KLAUKE, Christopher KNOWLES, Joseph KOSUTH, Leevi LEHTO, Tan LIN, Dana Teen LOMAX, Trisha LOW, Rory MACBETH, Jackson MAC LOW, Stéphane MALLARMÉ, Donato MANCINI, Peter MANSON, Shigeru MATSUI, Bernadette MAYER, Steve MCCAFFERY, Stephen MCLAUGHLIN and Jim CARPENTER, David MELNICK, Richard MELTZER, Christof MIGONE, Tomoko MINAMI, K. Silem MOHAMMAD, Simon MORRIS, Yedda MORRISON, Harryette MULLEN, Alexandra NEMEROV, C. K. OGDEN, Tom ORANGE, PARASITIC VENTURES, George PEREC, M. NourbeSe PHILIP, Vanessa PLACE, Bern PORTER, Raymond QUENEAU, Claudia RANKINE, Ariana REINES, Charles REZNIKOFF, Deborah RICHARDS, Kim ROSENFIELD, Raymond ROUSSEL, Aram SAROYAN, Ara SHIRINYAN, Ron SILLIMAN, Juliana SPAHR, Brin Kim STEFANS, Gary SULLIVAN, Nick THURSTON, Rodrigo TOSCANO, Tristan TZARA, Andy WARHOL, Darren WERSHLER, Christine WERTHEIM, WIENER GRUPPE William Butler YEATS, Steven ZULTANSKI, Vladimir ZYKOV

Emergent Forms/West Wind Review Lollapaganza

EMERGENT FORMS: A 21st-CENTURY READING SERIES

presents

a WEST WiND REViEW LOLLAPAGANZA READING
with

BRIAN ANG
JOE ATKINS
DERECK CLEMONS
CHRISTIAN NAGLER
ESTEE SCHWARTZ
WENDY TREVINO
JEANINE WEBB
& special guest stars
DAVID BRAZIL
SARA LARSEN


7:00 pm
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25th
SCHNEIDER MUSEUM OF ART
Center for the Visual Arts
Southern Oregon University
1250 Siskiyou Blvd.
Ashland, OR

FREE ($5 suggested donation)

Abraham Lincoln 6

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
issue the sixth
winter 2011
50 pp.
$5 + $1.50 s&h;

Later, awkwarder, stickier, and number-sixier than ever before, the new issue of Abraham Lincoln wants desperately to be held tight to your heaving thoraxes (thoraces?) as you get so excited by the poems it contains that you gnaw the staples out WITH YOUR TEETH and commence slobbering at the moon. Can you afford NOT to throw away your hard-earned shekels on this splendid rag?

featuring work by

Sandra Simonds
Catherine Wagner
Marie Buck
Ish Klein
Lacey Hunter
Estee Schwartz
David Brazil
Sam or Samantha Yams
Ton Van 't Hof
Uyen Hua
Lindsey Boldt
Brian Ang
Micah Freeman
Anna Vitale
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Adam Katz
Nicole Taylor

Purchase Options

current issue $5.00 two issues $10.00 six issues $20.00 ten issues $30.00 lifetime sub $50.00

Unsolicited submissions ate my dingo.

Rod Smith, You Bête [SOLD OUT]

Abraham Lincoln Press presents Rod Smith's You Bête: twenty-six pages of mind-wrenching, gut-expanding poems from the man many consider the Rod Smith of contemporary poetry.

[SOLD OUT]

The New Apparent You

NBC's Kings is a modern-day telling of
elf-inflicted Biting and Voting.

Nothing more.

Michael Gottlieb's Memoir and Essay

Michael Gottlieb's Memoir and Essay, newly released by Faux Press. The blurb I contributed:

A life in, of, and for poetry: Michael Gottlieb generously lays bare the one he has led, putting in plain terms the measures by which the discipline asserts itself as a constitutive force, a shaping regime of identity and counter-identity, community action and individual reflection. In his recounting of his own experience coming into poetry in 1970s New York, as well as his meditations on poets' work (the work of poetry itself and the work that poets do in the world), Gottlieb gives us an immensely valuable document in the annals of Language writing and contemporary literary autobiography generally.

Purchase it at SPD or at Faux Press.

Rethinking Poetics: Some Post-Conference Thoughts

I just returned from the Rethinking Poetics conference held last weekend at Columbia University. I spent several days, both during and after the proceedings, engaged in sometimes heated discussion with people about the event's merits and shortcomings, and now several comment streams on Facebook continue to dispense the fallout.

I won't talk about the specifics of the panels or the particular issues that aroused the most controversy (or lack thereof?), except to say that as with any conference, there were some panels I found interesting and some I didn't. What I'm most struck by are what seem to be the two prevalent types of overall post-conference discontent as expressed by both those who were there and those who weren't. I think these reactions point up two very different desires/anxieties within the larger poetic community, one having to do with its design as a group event and one with its execution on the level of individual presentations.

1) That it was too exclusively academic, and "exclusive" also in that it was perceived as invitation-only (though I think this was more a factor of insufficient pre-publicity than of any exclusionary intent on the parts of the organizers)

2) That the talks were themselves unsatisfying in various ways, including that they were either too academic, or not rigorously academic enough; that they were either antagonistically wrongheaded in being over-committed to a narrow poetic vision, or too centered on broader things like ecology or sociology instead of "poetics per se"; that particular trends or concepts were under-represented, or that (often the same ones) were over-represented.

Some of these objections are inevitable with any conference, but I think this one, for some reason, touched a particular collective nerve. Based on my own and others' experiences of the event, I think the whole thing raises two crucial questions:

1) Is there a coherent or even usefully diffuse "we" within contemporary poetry? Should there be? Or has even experimental poetry splintered into different communities with aesthetics and objectives that are irrelevant or even antithetical to each other? Further, if the latter is the case, what are the divisions that mark these different communities? Are they academic/non-academic? generational? stylistic? something else?

2) If there is still something like a "we," what rudimentary definition of "poetics" would satisfy a significant percentage of its members, at least as a starting point for continued discussion? Is this even a desirable goal? Is the problem with "rethinking poetics," when "poetics" is posited as a concept across which multiple subcommunities are supposed to be able to hold some coherent conversation, that it hasn't been sufficiently thought in the first place?

One anecdote, I feel, demonstrates the difficulty in question. At one point during the conference, Marjorie Perloff admonished the organizers for not involving other representatives of poetry within the academy: namely, the creative writing community, for instance the Columbia MFA program, which, as she pointed out, was "right down the street." I sensed that the suggestion was widely perceived as ridiculous (partly, of course, because increasing the number of academically aligned participants hardly felt like the solution to the problem many sensed with the conference's makeup), and in fact, I admit that this was my own feeling at the time. What could someone like, say, Richard Howard possibly have to contribute to a meeting like this one? And why would he ever consider it? In fact, I still feel this way, but upon reflection, this feeling provokes uncomfortable further reflections. Yes, the values and priorities of the "mainstream" creative writing industry and those of the experimental community are so fundamentally at odds in so many ways that the thought of a room full of half one, half the other, all struggling just to figure out why they were even bothering to try connecting with each other in the face of their obvious antipathies, does seem absurd and gratuitously painful--or, alternately, in what might be a "best-case" scenario, like a recipe for the worst kind of compromise built on a platform of bland eclecticism or "hybridity" (which, based on several of the presentations at the conference, it seems clear "we" all oppose). But one could ask, as I guess I'm asking right now: how is that not already the case?

As far as I can see, the current experimental poetry community, as represented both by the participants in the Rethinking Poetics conference and by those who have been commenting on it before, during, and after its proceedings, is full of exactly the same kinds of prejudicial conflicts and bad-faith rapprochements (I was, two days ago, accused by someone, perhaps justly, of being myself an "accommodationist") as those that mark the mainstream/experimental schism. Sometimes the conflicts are dramatic and pronounced, sometimes they're sublimated, but we all know they're there.

And yet, of course there is still "community." Eco-poets and conceptual writers, abstract Marxists and Wittgensteinian neo-idealists, all often have perfectly satisfying friendships with each other, brought about by their mutual involvement in the poetry community, despite what is sometimes their complete lack of sympathy or even tolerance for each other's poetics. Sometimes, of course, they hate each other's guts, but that can also be said about members within a single movement. So my point is: maybe we shouldn't expect that "poetics" can be the coherent and cordial object of discussion across subcommunities which are, after all, often defined by the radical difference of their poetics from each other. Maybe the best we can hope for in the way of mass convocation--if we must have mass convocation--is a provisional and occasional space of conviviality in which we recognize each other as driven by a related passion (e.g., for "poetry" considered in the broadest sense), but make no attempt to reconcile, define, or even discuss our incompatible poetics. Something, that is, like the AWP.

K. Silem Mohammad, Crush

Abraham Lincoln Press presents K. Silem Mohammad's Crush, a 21-poem chapbook.

$5 (includes s&h;)

MY MONEY

I've become better with my money
I never seem to have any
today I departed for London yesterday
that's about it for yesterday

I was sad that I lost my backpack
with my camera and my money in it
it pretty much sucked
on the camera/profit front

older, chillax-ier sea turtles are getting all my money
because it's such a good environment
there is a video on YouTube
of lions attacking a giraffe

if you want to view any of these things let me know
PayPal will keep my money

The Front Reviewed in Rain Taxi

Morgan Myers reviews The Front in the spring online edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books.

Flarf in the Wall Street Journal

Gary Sullivan

In today's Wall Street Journal: "Search for a New Poetics Yields This: 'Kitty Goes Postal/Wants Pizza,'" by Gautam Naik. (The uncredited title phrase is from Rodney Koeneke's "Pizza Kitty.")