::an old favorite::

HARRY SMITH

“Clear Mirror Care”: some thoughts on Jared Hayes’ The Dead Love: hands and more hands together

0.1          If CA Conrad’s blurb for Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals learns me, it’s that some here these days are still looking for a ‘poet’s poet’, one who will get them writing. And yes, for Conrad, (for all those in the know), Bernadette is that poet! And, I would add to that, Yes! Jared Hayes is also that poet! The poems of The Dead Love take me here by hands, reading-writing in a single ringing  gesture…

1.1          The Dead Love’s first series "Into the Furrows" is the most challenging one for me; and benefits from multiple readings. Or, multiple voiced readings. “Furrows” works through translated language from two foreign-born, non-English writers. Paul Celan and Helene Cixous make a curious pair; each writer’s work stands as bold example of the psychological effects of the most difficult strands of 20^th Century globalization: colonization and ethnic cleansing. For both writers – Cixous of French Jewish descent raised in Algeria, Celan a German-speaking Jewish Romanian whose family was interned and exiled in World War II, eventually landing in Vienna, then Paris – there is an uneasy  sense of belonging, or rather a ‘constitution of exclusion and non-belonging’, in their subjects and language. This exile can ‘trap one in a foreign body/language that does not allow one express themselves’, though both have determined to forge a writing life of bare witness, to communicate despite, and specifically through, this exodus. The corollary effect of their resounding images –  Cixous’ “white ink”, Celan’s “black milk” – shows a dramatic, upsetting disturbance in the dislocation of the natural essence of beings wrought by war, colonization, racism, exile, exodus.

 “Furrows’” dialogic prosody keeps the reader (okay, this reader) poised in the middle space of a conversation of between, of figurative voice-spaces, a bardolike talk state between the living and

The Chicken of Tomorrow!

"There's no driver? The chickens are taking over!"

Uncle Jim's Dairy Farm

"b-but i want to write poetry and act!"

Now Available!

The Dead Love: Hands and More Hands Together

by Jared Hayes

Publisher: Black Radish Books

ISBN: 9780982573198

Price: $15.00

Available at:
Small Press Distribution




"I understand Jared Hayes is conducting here a deep spelunking into connected caverns of other texts. What I don't yet quite grasp is how he's articulated all the ropes, quickdraws, carabiners, hexes, cams, and sundry poetical devices to work in such syntactically spectacular ways. 'I root up (I have brought them) landinwards, hither (I will make them resound here.)' And that's just at the first drop, barely in, still fathoms to go.... Well, some people have the ambition and guts and others just watch. I could say 'tour de force' from my spectator chair, but that wouldn't really do. So I'll say, as a first handle on it, that THE DEAD LOVE joins the masterpieces of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Susan Howe, and Ronald Johnson as one of the most exhilarating 'citational' explorations ever made in American poetry." —Kent Johnson

Jared Hayes lives in Portland, Oregon. hayes is the author of The Dead Love (Black Radish Books) and Bandit forthcoming from Little Red Leaves’ Textile Series. He believes collectivity and community are important and so is a member of Dusie Kollectiv, Black Radish Books, and Livestock Editions. Jared's poems can be found.

redesign

welcome back to the barnyard. slightly redesigned, but still collective and collecting...

READ IT

KOLLEKTIV!

new work [updated]

Some work from some deer left the yard moving day has just been spotted at Elective Affinities - "a cooperative anthology of u.s. contemporary poetry" - deftly edited by Carlos Soto Roman out of Philadelphia. To read, click here.


&&&&&&&


a selection from my some deer left the yard moving day manscript have also been placed gently in The Golden Lantern, an online zine that publishes Buddhist/Taoist inspired poetry. To read, click here. (& once there, you can navigate via clicking on the little triangles at the bottom of each poem...)

summer stock, "a literary journal for animals", returns!

Livestock Editions is proud to announce the release of summer stock, an online lit journal for animals! (Available at: summerstockjournal.com). Our premiere online issue features a happily varied company of lyric/conceptual/serial poetry, prose, vispo, collage-postcards and photography by some very talented animals:

Cara Benson, Megan Burns, Reed Bye, Amina Cain, JenMarie Davis, Susana Gardner, Geoffrey Gatza, Elizabeth Guthrie, j/j hastain, Jennifer Karmin, Kevin Kilroy, Ella Longpre, Travis Macdonald, Bianca Moscatelli, Jefferson Navicky, Tanya Phattyakul, Abbey Pleviak, The Pines, Jai Arun Ravine, Marthe Reed, Robert Roley, Linda Russo, Rowland Saifi, Kaia Sand, Kathrin Schaeppi, Brandon Shimoda, Danielle Vogel, & Andrew Wessels.

This summer stock issue is dedicated to the memory of our friend Akilah Oliver, an inspiring poet, performer, and educator who passed on in 2011. We are honored to include Jai Arun Ravine’s touching remembrance to Akilah in this issue.

Please keep in touch and let us know what you think of summer stock. Email us at livestockeditions@gmail.com.

We hope you're enjoying a fine, productive summer, and hope to see your friendly silhouette along the field's folds sometime soon. Thank you for keeping the world safe for poetry and prose.


honk, gobble, moo,

The Livestock Editors


I think I was thinking when I was
ahead I’d be somewhere like Perry street erudite
dazzling slim and badly loved
contemplating my new book of poems
to be printed in simple type on old brown paper
feminine marvelous and tough
– Ted Berrigan, from “Sonnet XXXVI”

New Chapbook from Elizabeth Guthrie Available!

Crater 13: April 2011. Elizabeth Guthrie: X Portraits.

The new Crater, the 13th, is Elizabeth Guthrie’s X Portraits; 10 odd and unsettling lyrical non-lyric realizations of portraits of America and Britain. Accurate representations of modern life! Each copy includes an individual painted iteration by E.G. reminiscent of 3 stoppages etalon's dropped string measure; they all include a wood block by Dirk E. Lee and are letterpressed, handbound &c. Requires paperknife. £7 + p&p. Tim Atkins on Guthrie: ‘Elizabeth Guthrie’s poems - thoughtful, unusual, tender & (of course) tough - do far more interesting acrobatics than so so many of the more - shall we say? - pumped up ones. It is a joy to see her appearing in this latest Crater. Who can say no to it?’

http://www.craterpress.co.uk/

New Journal: Buddhist Poetry Review

Buddhist Poetry Review is edited by Jason Barber. Issue 1 includes poetry by Alison Clayburn, Yvette Doss, Peter J. Greico, Paul Hostovsky, Becky Jaffe, Stephen Jones, Ed Krizek, Hal W. Lanse, J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden, Andrew K. Peterson, Ron Riekki, Stephen Rozwenc, J.R. Solonche, and A. Stein.

www.buddhistpoetryreview.com

from a psychoanalysis discussion board content stream

along the lines of topology and psychoanalysis and poetry in this stream...here is a thought and two poems: formal topological procedures, done inexpertly and idiosyncratically within the context of language production...(this is not your standard borromean knot necessarily...but it is my own idiosyncratic formal relation as reader/writer)...these procedures, create their own remainders...and these remainders are art/artifice's unconscious/poetry...maybe? poems (both created through inexpert psychoanalytic topologies: YOUR LOVE by joseph s. cooper, There is no end to it // And this was off-putting // In the classic sense // No end to the drifting wreckage // The years of gravel roads like unfamiliar lakes // Sentiments crumbled into cursive // Fog concealing the navigable waters // With relative ease-- // The space between this figure and that figure // The marred foundations we forgot, // The wind in the rosebush cussing and coughing, // An end crawling over a universal statement // As if blown toward me, half recalled // By coupling a roadmap with the road....AND from INTO THE FURROWS by me, (in life, as soon, as // I say my) roaring shadow // (as soon as I forget) // through thought showers the steely // (other way around) blood-red // (surviving is not what we // think) rain hard through your // pores (half the body) like // eternity-teeth (deported) so deeply // (a metaphor avowing the unavowable)

Using Cut-up from Roland Barthes “a lover’s discourse: fragments”

Dear friend,

I haven’t been around lately. How are you –this memo is collecting dust in times of haste. You moved on too fast for me to catch the trail for your sent and the recollection of this comes without warning, either by effect of an unendurable image or by an abrupt sexual ejaculation – how appropriate.

I am not interested (Werther says) in my mind; you are not interested in my heart.

isayisayisay
isayisayisay
isaythe moment lives in memory

the lack thereof you grace my presence in pancakes and a coffee
we clink the remembrance of Derrida and share a sigh
you migrated space translucent all the bullshit and pause
Akipoet a grace amongst us all – vigilant warrior naked lady
Leaving is too soon – never enough of now

akilah

New Work

Some new writing up at Otoliths. 2 pieces from a conceptual series "31 branches", and an excerpt from a found poem-assembly, "Mist Connex".

the-otolith.blogspot.com

love,
andy

Dinner Poem/ Transcribed into Phonetic Alphabet, Sound Patterns Color Coded/ Assignment from Lisa Jarnot/ One's Own Language/ 2004

Joe Cooper reads "The Sweeper" by Ron Padgett

Now Available! Here Come the Groovies by Joseph Cooper & Andrew K. Peterson

LIVESTOCK EDITIONS, LIMITED presents Here Come the Groovies,
a collaborative poetry chap/book by Joseph Cooper & Andrew K. Peterson


ABOUT THE GROOVIES...

...Joe says, "Working with Andy is always maniacally educational. His profound insight into humanity makes even the most mundane moments scintillate with creative energy. Andy is a writer whose poetic aspirations, while certainly emotionally charged and deeply personal, selflessly reveal our various relational symmetries through playful experimentalism and a journalistic interrogation of truth. Groovies deeply embodies his brilliance and inventiveness, as much of this text was composed on bar patios stealing observations and menu specials, riding shotgun while transcribing our absurd dialogues, storefront advertisements, and coffee house sessions with MuuMuu House diatribes. Every Goon visitation is an effort to encapsulate, often a year's worth of phone conversations, poetic invention, suppressed delight, into about four days. This particular Buffalo venture culminated in dozens of pages of work, one hangover after another and interminable laughter. Though, never before have our adventures so honestly depicted the madness of these encounters. Here Come the Groovies is a compilation of poems delivered truly by friendship, frenzy, and an insatiable desire for the poetic."

...Andy says, "Working with Joe is a delightfully maddening challenge, because Joe is a poet and lives that way with gusto. Joe's action-speech is always provocative and personal (therefore universal) and solicits meaningful and intimate conversation. About what you said, what he said, what you thought he said, what he thought he heard you say about what you thought about what he said, etc. Mostly this book blossomed during my recent visit to Buffalo, & unspools that experience in a variety of unconscious collaborative forms: personal poem, found language, minimalist dialogue, invisible imitation, notation's dream, and mystery text. I hope these poems capture honest, collapsible joys and exhaustions of a friendship fueled by poetry, presence (over distance) and other ephemeral substances. A kiss for good company."

Groovy info: 76 pgs., 26 copies lettered A-Z & printed in October 2010: side-stitched, laser-printed on fine business paper with Coconut cardstock covers, & some extra-special limited covers printed on brown ("summer") stock.

Please contact either Joe or Andy with your mailing address to receive a complimentary copy!

Xoxo,
Livestock Editions

*

Joseph Cooper is currently writing and teaching in Buffalo, NY. He is the author of the full-length books TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009)and Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007), as well as the chapbooks Memory/Incision (Dusie 2007), from Autobiography of a Stutterer (Big Game Books 2007), and Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion co-authored with Jared Hayes (Hot Whiskey 2005). He is the 2009 winner of the Equinox Chapbook Award from Fact-Simile Editions with his chapbook, Point of Intersection. In addition, his work has appeared in numerous journals including most recently The Ash Anthology, Counterexample poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry, Bombay Gin, Brown Bagazine, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Sex and Murder, and Sous Rature.

Andrew K. Peterson is the author of Museum of Thrown Objects (BlazeVox 2010), bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile, forthcoming 2010), and Between Here and the Telescopes (with Elizabeth Guthrie, Slumgullion 2008). He lives in Massachusetts.

THE CROWNING

            Lucy’s pond reflective skin

                        simulated a steady infusion of surprise

                        and delight.

            She licked each finger absorbing civility and consciousness.

The sketch is fading.  “I don’t believe it should be this way,

            but I’ll do it anyway.”

“Isn’t it a lovely night Dynamo?”

“Did you say sentiment or sediment?”

                        He wouldn’t wear any clothes.  Everything

                                    was whispers, the corrosion of

            satisfaction.

“You have lost almost everyone you love,” cried Lucy,

            her fingers        grappling

            her belly.                                  “Call my lover,

            for your final seconds.”

“Your breath is voluntary

            making you making me

            love you, still.”

                                                            “Make me beautiful again,

            without searching your

                        pockets for razors.”

Look at me, I am your reflection.

I’m always looking at you, for you.

Do not rush this ceremony, the deducing of shadows.

            “I am happy here                     detached from my body.”

            “There is nothing                     to stop this incongruity.”

                        Thump.

                        Thump.

“I am met with constant hostility.”

“You are a trained lover.”

                        Dynamo walked through the forest

                                    dreary and heavy.        “She is a pleasure.

She gives me pleasure.

She tries.”                    Father and Mother and Margaret deprived

            of moisture choke down the mirth in death.

Their love became mercenary,

            a savage trivia,

                        especially during sexual punishment.

Lucy is a watercolor,

            a half-imagined thing,

                        a salvation of cloak and dagger.

Her mouth is a tower in flames,

            smiling politely as the dead

                        peer out from inside.               This is paradise,

a framed transparency

            the position of her hips

                        stained in agony.                      This is paradise.

Everything has been said.  Only the tribal confrontation

            for tongue remains.

Yet, no city, no images come, no poppies in the rain, no severance,

            no Jesus, and no chains. 

“Only cover your eyes and sigh.”

            It is called morning, a revolutionary pleasure,

                         the profile of a tongue in a knot.

            “What is the truth about this landscape?”

            “To whom do I sing as I wander up the path?”

            “You are beautiful and mad, the mirror of a city.”

            “Even when we are talking of ghosts,

                        with our clothes off, the afterlife

                        only strategic for demons,

                        our legs and our arms

                        make motion of these words,

                        the trees and the leaves

                        the dead and the living

                        the argument

                                    continues.”

Lucy sank her teeth into Dynamo’s chest

            and began sucking at the anti-image.

            “What we call the beginning is often the end

            And to make an end is to make a beginning.”[1]

“The afterlife is time travel.”

            “Who invited you to dinner?”

            “Be serious.”

            “The screams of ghosts are vanishing

                        desperately in the company of disappearing ink.”

            Dynamo awoke to the stench of horseshit,

                        a wafting invasion of spirit.

                                                Lucy crawled into his armpit and

nestled her tiny body

                        into his caves and holes

            and there disengaged from

his throat and loins

            a treachery not quite her own.

                        “You wait this time in hunger.”

                                    “You behave like a goddamned wheelbarrow.”

                        “All our faces have wings,

                                    and all our wings are clipped.”

                        A dead forest is a prison, a riddle,

                                    an angel watching foolishly

                                    slick music

                                                burning their backs     

                                                bent in morning.

“Around me you animate yourself.”

            “I don’t know if there is time in this world

                                    for miscommunication.”

Dear Lucy,      

            Being with you is like hunting

for a drunken comment

                        stranded on a dry tongue.  At a great distance

            you never tasted so strange.  But when we mirror

each other, you become science fiction.  The door

            opens and you are merely domestic

            skin disguised as art.

                        And upon your revision

at the edge of withdrawal

            when deep emotion clings      

                        to each squinting map of your youth

you will turn

                        mysteriously,

sigh,

            a translation, or

            a symbol                      an immediate telegram

                                                a new language

letters and numbers,

            a rose petal antiquated

                        with yesterday’s lover.

Remember eternity,

            how directionless its graceful miles

                        lead between song and myth, how pure

            the air was before our dreams,

                                    nasty, short, and brittle

skulls half-eaten,

            and the naked loss of metaphor

                        trembles

            remembering the very bones

                        we have left behind.

                                                            Dynamo

“I love you, yet, I wander,

            through your weary prose,

                        impatient for poetry.

I tell you darling,

            this transformation,

            this bursting forth,      

                        a bouquet of flowers

                        bloodied from bullfighting

            the substance of a single image.  Adam and Eve

a comprehensive melancholy,

            all the unemployed coffins,

                        the bridges and rooftops,

                                    the drawings of still clouds,

I feel sorry for you,

            unaware of your attachment,  

                        to the few strings left to pull,

            your teeth from the doorknob,

                        your hair shaven by shaky hand,

you eyeballs stitched into sand castles

            your faces screaming at the tide, to love, to love,

                        unaccustomed to magic, the sacrificial loneliness

in beauty.

            My poetry is suspicious of you,

born from dance,

like a dream of your watery eyes,

            the silhouette of an imaginary rose.

There is nothing more desperate

            than yesterday.”

                                                This is paradise,

                                    that boundary line

where love is outlined white,

liberated like a ghost,

            many miles forward and backward

                        a childish grace answered by the last

                                    abyss, a fake dream, a camera flash,

                                                a time traveler invited to dinner

                        for the last time.

            Lucy invited Dynamo inside.  All of their children

crawled the floor with apples in their mouths,

                        a mild garnish lathered their bald flesh.

            “Which do you prefer?”

            “None.”

Lucy crossed and uncrossed her legs

            in a dream of lilies, more beautiful than her

                        ravaged city.  “Say nothing more.  Say nothing

            that will erect staircases between us.

                                    Say nothing more.”

“We are both independent of images.  We are liars. 

            I am covered in cloud,

                        and you are the taste of lemon

                                    on my cunt.  In these erotic musings

you are a beautiful boy

            decayed an equivalent being

                        a crow cawing its head off,

                                     a Valentine pretending

                                                a bullet hole.”

“One touch of moonlight

            stronger than my fingers tight

                        the unsuspected shooters glance

                                    the proposition of a dance.”

“‘I hope that we shall find that we have one tongue,’[2]

            that poems mistake pretending

                        for a hovering threat.”

            Dynamo and Lucy lay upon the shared grave

                        of his family.  “Could this have ever

been an alphabet, a place for answers?”

            Lucy made a fire in her mouth and sucked

Dynamo’s skin until he was comforted

            by bones, a real child

                        born a silhouette,

                                    sucking every memory

                                    from an imaginary rose.

Birds fly away.

            A little boy in the forest splashes in the water

                        dancing,

                                    listening to unfamiliar sounds.

                                   

---

[1] Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot

[2] Letter to James Alexander (1958-1959), Jack Spicer

Opening soon!

Cornered Rooms. Facing In Facing Out
Seminar: Poetic Corners. From Modernist Spaces to Homecomings
4 pm, 16 October 2010
Waterside Project Space, London

The exhibition "Cornered Rooms" is about corners and being cornered
within the context of contemporary architectural exit codes. The
exhibition will take place from 2 September - 17 October at Waterside
Project Space London. Works by the following artists will be shown
Hreinn Fridfinnsson (b.1943 Iceland), Karim Noureldin (b. 1967 Switzerland),
Anna Ostoya (b.1978 Poland), Damien Roach (b. 1980 England),
Egill Sæbjörnsson (b.1973 Iceland), and Patrick Tuttofuoco (b. 1974 Italy).

Near the end of the exhibition on 16 October there will be a seminar
with Stephan Trüby. Trüby is the author of the book "Exit-Architecture.
Design between War and Peace". He will speak about his concept, 'exit
architecture', and discuss how the corner is presented in "The Poetics of
a Wall Projection" by Jan Turnovsky. Alice Gavin a PhD candidate from
the London Consortium will speak about how Samuel Beckett and his
contemporaries install characters in tight corners, both architecturally
and ontologically. The poet and PhD candidate Elizabeth Guthrie will perform
"Dub-Notes - to Refrain (from Condition)" a body of text projected onto the wall.
"Dub-Notes" is the superimposition of the psyche, the dreamscape of the
dislocated voice within a room. As once said by Gaston Bachelard in
"The Poetics of Space": "Our house is our corner of the world. As has often
been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word."
The concept of the 'home' today as between longing and leaving will be explored
by the London Consortium PhD candidate Elia Ntaousani. As our relationship to space
has changed so have the dimensions of home and homeland. Ntaousani will open up a
dialogue between staying and leaving, homeland and homepage, of alterity and foreignness.
The goal is to engage the audience of artists and students of the London Consortium with the speakers in a form of dialogue within the context of the exhibition "Cornered Rooms".

http://watersideprojectspace.org/