Friday, June 22, 2012

summer stock accepting submissions

Livestock Editions is now accepting submissions for the upcoming issue of summer stock, an online lit journal for humanimals.

We like poetry & all hybrid sorts, outrider forms & trans-genres unlimited: vispo, poetic prose/plays, translation, collaboration, experimental review, founds, serials, languagy artwork et al. Please visit summerstockjournal.com to read past issues.
 
To submit: email 5ish pages of 'writing' to livestockeditions [at] gmail [dot] com by August 15th. Include a brief bio, & a note on your process, if you'd like. (Word doc, & jpeg for visuals please).

honk. gobble. moo.
Livestock Editions


Monday, June 11, 2012

towards a personal summoning: rereading j/j hastain’s long past the presence of common



long past the presence of common
by j/j hastain
Interbirth Books / Say it With Stones (2011)




An admission: the first draft of this review has gone to  the digital ethers, in a bobbled arrival from hard drive to memory stick. Though here I am careful not to say, or pause, to reconsider an initial choice; so, to dial back from what sticks: the first review recalled Will Alexander’s astro-physical planar delving, Simone de Beavoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, Elizabeth Guthrie’s poetic plays, erotic abstractions, deflated pink rabbits, bank-vault-turned-art-gallery meditations on a cyborg lover. I will attempt to cull from memory the husk of sticks mistranslated, as mere sign:
­

¬{ ¯S®RÅ>äõT?°àÿåTßP^€à0çùåT%à$4€ð䐀ð€à0àù€àT

`åT%à$4ÿK¿î

*

j/j hastain and I met in a Frank O’Hara lunch poem. We had been tasked to enact words in Jena Osman’s Summer Writing Program class. j/j, Felize Molina and I sat  in deep Colorado grass pulling lines apart into the sunny morning. When it was our turn for performance, we improvised walking around the room reciting nouns; our bodies charged vessels for the nuclei of words. I remember feeling self-conscious with my moving body and voice on display; watching j/j move with improvisatory, natural force gave me a certain mode of, if not comfortableness, then brief assurance. j/j’s assured fluidness proved the accuracy of our translation’s re/enactment. Recalling our initial collaboration, I’m struck by those energized elements then that continue to present and unfold in hastain’s poetics of 2012: a keen imagination built on performance and physic, a transitional engagement with language charged by inner vision, modest self-assurance and collaborative spirit. With this memory and homage to our meeting place, I constructed the following, “Alternating Lines of j/j hastain and Frank O’Hara”:

After making sure my guests are sleeping
On the poetry of a new friend
And bold bodies in prominent minor key
In it, and a phone call to the beyond...

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Now Available: Karaoke Lipsync Opera


Now available:

karaoke lipsync opera
by Andrew K. Peterson
2012 White Sky Books
West Hartford CT / Puhos Finland
205 pgs.

* * *


j/j hastain has this generousness to say:

Peterson’s “atonal rain” pounds gently and hard over the “lily of the rocks” where “a wise woman averts her eyes”—Karoake Lipsync Opera, although certainly a cultural document (in that it is composed of varying points on a map, passages within thoroughfares) definitely makes the feeling in us while we are going through it, that we are somehow inhabiting deliberate, a-cultural space. This is one of the wonders of all of Peterson’s writings, but I feel it particularly here, in the way that KLO moves from form to form, interior to exterior, then beyond those. A wrought spectrum indeed.

A barrage--like a bible mysteriously having been brought back to its glyph state, its insinuation state—KLO is a place of lists. Images--images in positions of strain. Chunks of writing in varying forms, line breaks, paragraph structures, syntax (and not), dashes, usual narrative structures, alternating lines between dyad pairs of poets (eg: Joseph Cooper and Maureen Owen). It is all here in this exciting book!

If I pointed individually to each of the gleaming gems in this work, I would spend my entire life (and another and another) with my appendages aching from extending to the points. Come here, into the land of e-book territory, where thought, movement, impression and image can converge in ways that only add to the lives and imaginations of trees (without taking anything from them (by way of paper)).

Oh my, this work! Peterson’s “fat gesture”--a gesture that goes, that takes us far (its “I center
subsiding”).
* * *
To read or download for free, click here (you willl be redirected to KLO's page at archive.org).
This and other experimental literature can also be found at: http://whiteskybooks.blogspot.com/