five tangents in praise of j/j hastain's livestock edition, .compilate. (available today!!), or a special episode of abc's of attention with guests j/j hastain, robert grenier, andrew peterson, joseph s. cooper, gertrude stein and the duncanator.



in the process of reading and doing the layout design of and for j/j hastain's .compilate. i was inexorably moved outward into the past and future of my relationship with poetry and thus my relationship with the world. in many ways i wanted to write a short note explaining or offering some brief insight or captivating and influential press release to share this book with the world. as i was writing these blurb like phrasings/opinions i was thrust beyond them via the texts own diverse momentums into further thought and other books. so, here, rather than condense my feelings/thoughts/impressions/relations of and to j/j hastain's writing, i thought it might be useful to map the movement of my thinking and reading...those processes being produced by the varying gestures of .compilate.'s text....as an introduction and example set, here is a short sampling of the book (please understand my personal html limitations in formatting produce a text not identical in format to the original):
from the first section:

.amor surgical.

.stolen. books. objections. personas. exiles.
membrane. junky jolted you. in groan and
localized eros. corporeality of any cicala
theory. if it matters when it goes engraved.
salted. strung together to make more than two
hundred miniaturized girls.

.with accommodations the sentences begin to shift.

.the room is opaque often laminatedly related.
something like out of the top of your. who
does the incremental switch belong to. making
beings that extend beyond contradictions in the
fashion. general constructions beading banality.
dead cats then a dress made of cast. calle as
in this to reach renee. the hospital is not
fake. the infant and its numerous furry bulks.

.nomadic taxi touch.

.sockets become unexpected shovels. the
syringe buries. impulses of sea umbrella.
waning circulature. intelligence actually dying.
the sacrilege of dedicated grosspace.

.skewering sonata.

.work itself verge or spill construction.
the trusting blackened. grind to and ash.
tumultuous turning floatations into sanskrit.
or potatoes between hardening hands.


tangents:

I. this text is one that co-operates with language. as i have heard mr. duncan point out in audio lectures: some "use" language others "co-operate" with it. this is something fundamental for/to me as a reader/writer of text/world. i am prompted to continue that premise...knowledge/language exists outside of myself and only in relationship to others/geographies/texts do i (whatever/whoever i may be) collaborate in meaning making....compilate. did not necessarily reveal this to me, yet .compilate. is a text that re-members this consistently throughout. and maybe that is the process that this book encourages in the experience of it...the re-membering of these polysemous cells. i am brought into the biological act of fusion, or no, something more dirty...some prosthetic or transformation process where membranes are introduced to each other and either reject or assimilate themselves. here in .compilate. i believe we as readers/writers both assimilate and reject this prosthetic membrane. we as co-participants in the meaning making process re-member and suture this monster to ourselves (willy-nilly and with momentum). it hangs strangely and comfortably off of ourselves...changes our functions as we learn its own kind of consciousness.



I. in the beginning of .compilate. the reader is given a few brief "pre" poetic texts. these texts act to me as a womb or gestational mediation system viewed from an outside...or maybe through ultrasound.... texts like: "compilate: collect+compile+grate.", "gathers things from many different sources. much duration. this matters." reveal some of the clues of the form and shape and parts of the baby/monster to come...then the book proceeds into the birth, "has no affinity / to the history book". this birthing of things collected, compiled, and grated resembles the ways i have read benjamin, arendt, and jae emerling (on benjamin and arendt). each of these authors has lauded the collector's relationship to her/his/their world...by re-contextualizing objects/words/things through a kind of "pearl-diving" into the past (arendt on benjamin) the genuine collector "exhibits a love of things, a care of things, that refuses to appropriate their alterity...in the presentation of the what-has-been, a past that was never present the as yet unlived." (emerling on arendt and benjamin). from here i suggest also that recent discussions of kenneth goldsmith's work in a parallel fashion, as well as thought in/around/about viktor shlovsky's queering/making strange/defamiliarization can be thought in terms of this kind of idiosyncratic and and times radical collecting/birthing. pulling texts/worlds together through a variety of personally idiosyncratic methods of construction/reconstruction/rereconstruction so that their past breathes in the present. In fact through reading/writing this .compilate. monster i am reminded that maybe this process--of idiosyncratic collecting--is what builds (and possibly has always built) the polysemous human conversation/narrative [and not just what is called "discourse" (but that too)]...is it only now that humans have been so easily rendered useless to their own future through the lack of attention to their past? Or have we always been so forgetful?....compilate., through its attempt at collection and dispersal, is building a narrative in conjunction and in relation to the reader/writer and their world. this monster is growing/transforming on/into us...it is re-membering itself as it attaches its history to you and your room presently.

and don't these notions/notes also reinforce similarities between benjamin's ideas about brechtian performativity and relationships between our objects, ourselves...a dialogic or polylogic dialectics of reading/writing.

(note to self: write a paper on benjamin's brechtian influence towards a performativity of the reader/writer: a benjaminian performative dialogic dialectic of reading/writing a new art-historical poeisis?wtf?.)



I. .compilate. is a text that meditates, that breathes, that sits and yet transfoms. I am reminded and sent back to gertrude stein's stanzas in meditation, a text in which language comes back to itself...back to its own breath (huh?)....the form of .compilate. is phenomenological in this sense...or attempts to be so...it does not seem like a record of meditation (though it may be)...rather it appears to me to be the enactment or embodiment of meditative states....the reader/writer of .compilate. is confronted with accumulations of meanings and contexts only to be moved steadily, if not swiftly, (on the wind horse) into others...just as during a sitting meditation one's mind may wander and body may begin to fatigue (these never being mutually exclusive), one attempts, consistently, to bring their mind and body back to the immediate moment...it is in in this sense that .compilate. seems to be operating in my mind and body...as i read/write the text i am brought back to the immediacy of each phrasing...then group of phrasings...then back. then back. again. again. consistently. back. again. .this movement is not one that gives a sense of forward linear movement...there is no "progress"....trajectories are rhizomic in .compilate....we breathe. we read. we sit. we go out. we come back. we set the book down. we go back. we hear the gong. and the music doesn't stop. rather, we experience our moments and .compilate. rests itself uncomfortably and monstrously in our breath and seats...



I. so far in writing responses and close readings/writings of texts it has been difficult for me to express specifically what it is that is happening lyrically. now here .compilate. has added another insight into where i find lyric and lyricism most intriguing. in the past year or so a handful of texts have stood out to me lyrically for the simple reason that there forms seemed antithetic to lyric or to use nezval's phrase (i think) antilyric...these texts are joseph cooper's autobiography of a stutterer, andrew peterson's anselm hollo private eye, gertrude stein's stanzas in meditation, and now j/j hastain's .compilate....what each of these texts does in their own ways is to create a music that would at first seem to be impossible. "stutterer" places reader/performer in the place of the author through the use of symbols that articulate the difficulties and seizures of his own tongue. a brief look at the text is dizzying due to the number of disruptions. yet a clear lyric is imbedded and made possible by the impediment. one finds herself working through the text in her own disruptive singing. i have spoken briefly in the past about AHPE by peterson and will again reiterate how a period after every line created a kind of stop. /and. /go. /experience. that motion becomes a kind of music of musics or musics of music as you move through...small voices combining for an overall effect of song. stein, of course, in stanzas uses almost no nouns in her masterpiece which serves to alter your presence with it...the text is most difficult to stay involved with in prolonged readings...yet its music becomes unmistakeable with all of the prepositions and articles repeating in every possibility...(in an ideal world i'd give lengthy examples of all...but...)....compilate.'s music is also at first an interruptive one as well. we are confronted and released by periods on both sides of the text...in a way framing but also a kind of punching through the page...as if the periods were holes in this fabric...or to look back to duncan again in his warp and woof lecture...this is a fabric that is hol(e)y. so even though i am in a way interrupted by its formal architecture i am pressed through these (w)holes into another weaving. into another weaving. into another weaving. and so on. and these are, ultimately, part of the same fabric. (which is why it is possible to be read at all...for anything to be read.?)...but the music is in the movement from warp to woof and back...wait...does that make sense? .compilate. is an interruptive lyric or antilyric in the sense that you come to abrupt holes (metaphorical and lyrical) that move you into and out of cushion-ey...then rocky...then velvet-ey...then abrupt sound spaces...but the only way to travel from stop to song is through those portal period holes. And those portals are revealed two-fold: architecturally [periods (punctuation and length of time)], semantically [meanings (relationally created)]. the result is a movement of sound that traverses underneath between, over and through the accumulated text...a kind of superstructure...or ego...there it! is!...the sound of compilate is the accumulative identity binding its monstrous baby system to our own as readers/writers/experiencers...the lyric of .compilate. acts as a barb extending out of its tentacles which have wrapped themselves around yr torso...sticking its lyric inside of your body this monster releases its genetic sonic fabric changing again and again the way yr ears make their sense.



I.…ralph the naropa bookstore owner while i was attending (whose been at naropa since its beginning) would bring certain books in (i can only imagine his stashes from previous 30 odd swp’s) one at a time to be found by the most steadfast explorer of books. some of us understood that if we spent the time to look (three to four x's a week) we might find some crazy textual rainbow loot! something not visible (and most likely not even there) the day or two before and placed there just for us (or so it seemed)…this is just how i came across robert grenier’s attention, a curriculum of the soul book, #28 that was put out in 1985 by the institute for further studies at glover publishing…so, here (in portland), the other day i see it sitting next to .compilate., as if placed there by the ghosts of kerouac and stein, and i pick them both up and read them into each other...and so here is part of that experience.

here are grenier narratives, IV., V. and .compilate. poems, .susceptible variations., .borderlands as in late noon., .the magma of the alley., .lace vortex., .this is a party., .so what nests after woman.:

“IV.: What’s the ‘connective tissue’? what does “it makes another syntax” mean? ‘Syntax’ & ‘narrative’ clearly indicate (?) ‘the same thing’? What a charming muddle!—Darling, don’t leave!

.susceptible variations.


.invoices. repetition polarities. seek tendencies
authoring what differentiates the frogs. forums
filled with buttered corn. scrolls and apparatus.

Almost everything remains to be undertaken in the investigation of ‘narrative’—we don’t know what it is—what’s the ‘symbiosis’ between language (apparently a ‘structural event’) & human (animal, generally, huh? Semicolon; rocks?) ‘mental process’—“language”?/”mind”?(“language are”—‘in’ the brain?)? Almost everything is “in quotes” including, particularly, that previously casually supposed copy-relation among /between “language” & “the world” (now presupposed to be merely the image, purely projected by men’s and women’s wills, as language, within which ‘we’ are trapped, rather unfortunately, but within which we can alter the environment by transferring ownership or employing a competent & highly recommended gardener to reduce traffic noise?—the notion of ‘syntax’ as some total ‘governing’ language’s pre-programmed ‘narrative’ of ‘events’ arrived?)?

.borderlands as in late noon.


.what loops it to itself. a regional frothing
of circular. the revolt of parabolic literals.
playing music out of the tips. of a war
who can speak for halle barry leaving her
husband. the most complex biological slates.

What’s the ‘comparative time’? Eh!? How, then, ever know what follows? One thing after another?—“one one one”—what does that language mean? Form is what it looks like afterward, depending ‘from’ what happens?—well, then, on same old question, how such? Mark what happens, extant sort!—how ‘then’?—how did what happen?—the past, It Was—outcome of what mysterious ‘flesh’…? What made it?—something make it?

.the magma of the alley.


.form of how it does or does not respond
to the cat the henchman. the reach. akin to
over fifty. retaliations against the etymology
of darwin drawing. dissolution of embedded
organs. self-invention in break with god.

“Don’t mess with narrative!”—absolute dictum of society which would phase you in, phase you out, ‘finally’—assumption of “beginning/middle/end” & series form through which we are supposed to ‘live’, so heavy-handed & pervasive it’s not even noticed—until you step out, on occasion—with ‘narrative’ as henchman of this awful mind-control, that spreads abroad, with intent to aggrandize whatever it can push/persuade the world is this the way to—the whole thing ‘organized’—synchronized/in sequence—in our lifetimes!

.lace vortex.


.not named but nameable transmissions.
disintegrating loons taste the great arousal.
upside down pineapple. hive. closest. flute.
ferret running in its passage. they go. because
they made it.

V.: What is the passage of time to time, that's narrative, what is the order in which 'things happen', in 'language' of course--i.e. in & through language--but more primarily order of events through man perceived to share that same 'structure' that...
All writing is essentially ‘narrative’—not only storytelling/prose—but any combination of letters, that moves in time.

You always have to tell the story of.

It does its activity as a major means to salute & acknowledge, recognize & ‘define’ & manifest itself, I write.

.this is a party.


.send out the coaches. accesses of
ontology. zoo roams. protruding
reimaginings of refused vestibule.
this is a cup is an orb calculation.
caress. am still leaving. the me
of my doctored herbs.

The mere activity of a reader ‘reading’—by moving through words and syllables (at high speed or at a crawl) while thinking almost anything about/never everything by any means of what the words ‘say’, in toto—makes a small (unwritten) ‘narrative in itself’, for itself.
Essentially, the reader makes the narrative—the writer, as a reader, makes the narrative?

.so what nests after woman.


.snorting vein along the coast of your
squiggling cuerpo. ligatures activate
the temporary barn. each other politic
hygiene. shines exquisitely press-on
can’t say blatantly. moss-complications
meaning you stay if not one shape.
then dividable in the cleanest. the
final body becoming the first.

Ok, then, the issue is the same thing (as if the writer makes the story up, out of the Imagination)—its glory forth—




:: ummm, so ya....compilate. is available today!!!
email me at livestockjared[at]gmail[dot]com and order yours!

livestock editions does not charge for their books...but is always happy to accept donations or trades!!

"It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." - WC Williams

Revolutionary Letter #9 By Diane di Prima

advocating
the overthrow of the government is a crime
overthrowing it is something else
altogether. it is sometimes called
revolution
but don't kid yourself: government
is not where it's at: it's only
a good place to start:
1. kill head of Dow Chemical
2. destroy plant
3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM
to build again.
i.e., destroy the concept of money
as we know it, get rid of interest,
savings, inheritance
(Pound's money, as dated coupons that come in the mail
to everyone, and are void in 30 days
is still a good idea)
or, let's start with no money at all and invent it
if we need it
or, mimeograph it and everyone
print as much as they want
and see what happens

declare a moratorium on debt
the Continental Congress did
'on all debts public and private'

& no one 'owns' the land
it can be held
for use, no man holding more
than he can work, himself and family working
let no one work for another
except for love, and what you make
above your needs be given to the tribe
a Common-Wealth

None of us knows the answers, think about
these things.
The day will come when we will have to know
the answers.

...a lot of things in the world today have been reminding me of this old ginsberg quote...something like..."Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the Work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow." ...

kenneth goldsmith via linh dinh via tony tost

(for Linh Dinh)



"I thought to myself, wow, writing is so far behind other art forms in this regard. . .

Twenty five years after Baudrillard, these poetry students were still prioritizing Romantic notions of authenticity -- "truth", "individuality" and "honesty" -- over any other form of expression. My god! Is it a case of naivety, amnesia or just plain ignorance?. . .

Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all. With digital fragmentation any notions of authenticity and coherence have long been wiped. When we're everywhere and nowhere at once -- pulling RSS feeds from one server, server-side includes from another, downloading distributed byte-size torrents from hundreds of other shifting identities -- such naïve sentiments are even further from what it means to be a contemporary writer. Identity politics no longer have to do with the definition of a coherent self, rather it has to do with the reconstructed distributed, fragmented, multiple and often anonymous selves that we are today. We're infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute. Shouldn't our notions of art expand once again to include these as well?"

-- Kenneth Goldsmith

Sunday afternoon

naptime

re-reading Don't Let Me Be Lonely

in preparation for teaching this fall

butterfly swarmed my head

whispered wing motion in my ear

before landing on my shoulder

to extend proboscis

eat something I could not see

rested there for some time

turned and looked right at me

it only had one eye

this morning, taking out the trash

wolf spider perched

just at exit of white hornet nest

waiting

I am being told something

I cannot completely

understand...

AFTER ANNE WALDMAN

joseph cooper is a race car. joseph cooper is a fast machine. joseph cooper is fast. joseph cooper is a machine. A desire machine. joseph cooper is a desire machine incarnate. joseph cooper is intent upon languaging desire. What languaging desire means for joseph cooper is hot...is fuckin hot....what languaging bodies means for joseph cooper makes people hot...they won't let you know it either...cause it can be dirty..but it's fuckin hot and they know (it)....joseph cooper is desiring the fuck of hot language. thrusting it into itslf into you yrself it language it yrself thrusting yr desire into it...anyway cooper u it hotness...language...desire...hot...fuckin...hot...it....hot.

Collaborations of Hayes and Cooper

yes, yes that’s what I wanted between the invention of writing and the birth of modern science; I always wanted to return to the body, where I was born. The sudden interruption of affect, skin peeling off in long tatters revealing the musculature beneath. I am speaking of compassion, now blurred or the window, so weak and subject to so many evils; it is an empty house. The strange baby is the opposite direction to a human baby; the body bearing no mark of its debt to nature, when it is sheltered in a body that is unleashed only with the help of masculine degradation. Remember the way you italicized only the word harmony. Two unyielding protagonists appeared, disposable for this purpose, slightly blemished, thriving on hazard. Pedagogy cannot help but encounter the problem of imitation, velvet couch, red velvet, all the people I’ve ever known. Between the theme of love and sick body, this being occurs at the center of fear. It still makes sense, the inscription within a system of differences, to know the song after all. The speaking being as separated by sex and language, locomotion and digestion, as functions, stay intact. He feels small as he awakens, writing himself in that first instance. Fluctuating inside and outside, this was monstrous: the inability to assimilate. As I said to my friend, “we must now form and meditate upon the law of this resemblance.” I am writing to you, the frailty of symbolic order itself.

An interpretation of resistance throbs with blood as you ask the question. What I call the erasure of concepts night, good, night, good, good, night, ought to mark the places of that future meditation. An economy of analytic listening, historical manifestations, is undisturbed by the extraction of foreign body. The eye I look out of would be a relationship of translation. Even when human beings were involved with it, they complained of violent spasms. It’s expanse of sky, contradiction, between desire and pleasure. Ornery experience of the intimate recasting syntax and vocabulary. What I am to myself, shall constantly reconfirm that writing is the other that must be remembered. Incandescent, unbearable limit between inside and outside separated from mouths. It is the question of a supplement, where it cannot, my mind sinks, falling short of itself, is born. The violence of poetry, and silence, a depression visible in satellite photographs. Earlier in the evening the moon became capable of being imperceptible, going to bed, making love, the age of writing begins. When narrated, identity is a latticework mating to disperse your body as referent. As I said to my friend, the presence of a spectator is a violation, a silent and immobile darkness surrounds us.

Brown Bagazine Season Two

Hello,

I'm glad to let you know the newest issue of Brown Bagazine is complete. Issue 5, "Borders/Exclusion/The Other Politics," includes the work of Tim Armentrout, Amanda Haney, Harish Thakur, David Trame, David McLean, and Puma Perl. It is printed in color on tabloid-sized laser paper and folded to resemble a road map. The writers represent India , Sweden , Italy , and the United States .

Information is available on the website in regards to future issues, submissions, and subscriptions.

Please also be aware the following publishers are actively accepting submissions and publishing new work:

bedouin books is an independent publisher of handmade works of literature and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Information is available at www.bedouinbooks.com.

Fact-Simile is accepting submissions for Fact-Simile 1.2 (Fall 2008). If you haven’t seen their flagship magazine, yet (Featuring an Interview with Jerome Rothenberg), you can check out a PDF version on their website: www.fact-simile.com.

Have an excellent week!

Yours in Art,
Amy

Another TriUMPH for Goonpoetique!

Check out GALATEA #10 where Michael Koshkin's Orgy in the Beef Closet reviewed by Eileen Tabios!

Then go to TRANSMISSION PRESS and buy it.

Fair Dream w/Ginsberg (to be read as a monologue by Bobby Louise Hawkins)

A large crowd cued up in the Marshfield/Pembroke Burger King anticipating the beginning of Opening Night for the Marshfield Fair ("New England's largest and oldest fair"). A more antique Bohemian flavor than your usual fast food chain. Steven Tyler mingles and greets people, Steve Correll brings guests unusual food and drink. ST come up and talks to us in anticipation of arrival of featured reader & main event at fair first night - Allen G! There is a swirl of unusual, artistic, old world peoples, elaborate animal clothes, foreign languages & accents. We talk w/ ST when Allen's entourage enters - he is frailer, w/ a much bigger beard than usual. There is a great rush for him but he navigates with ease & comes right over to us, - informal introductions, - he has heard of us through the Naropa circles. We are all pleased & conversate like old friends tho soon time to go & the great rollicking energy of the place is let out when Allen leaves. We agree to meet after the reading - a great party being thrown by an old Russian restauranteur.

We stop at liquor store Rte. 139, a great buzz & crowd of townies in parking lot, many I used to go to high school with. They know nothing of Allen or the great reading, but are planning to visit the Demolition Derby at the fair that nite. We turn them on & soon everyone's excited to go; the entourage doubles. The line around fairgrounds entrance seems endless, but we pass right through into this large barn with a grandstand; tiered medieval looking room lit with huge warlording candled chandeliers. Crowd, raucous as before - barbarian furs, eastern Euro- roughstock, accented, bearded, elaborate evening dress, men & women hard to tell apart. A friendly man I recognize from around town approaches w/ large suitcase - he's been put in charge of what Allen should read tonight and what do we think? He opens suitcase to find all of Allen's books, bound in elaborate, 18th C. type leather, gold calligraphied handwriting on spines, etc. We ponder set list like excited music fans - old farovites chosen - "Howl", "Green Valentine", etc. - I want to suggest "Wichita Vortex Sutra" but we somehow mutually agree on one of his more obscure favorites called "The Beginning." (Later, awake, I check: Allen has no poem called this.)

Allen reads, all a great success, we rush off to restaurant - again, a dark, unusual other occult country feel - old friends are met again at an overflowing bar - talk abounds again with Allen, & other poets.

I end up in conversation with the owner who ushers me away into separate seating area where other non-reading attendees are dining in black tie & dress. There is a large table set for the reading guests that have arrived, tho nobody interested in sitting to eat or casual conversation. The owner - old, eastern European accent, kind dark eyes' penetrating gaze - makes me sit at a table for two with his mother (or ancient wife?). He pulls up a chair & together they take food from her plate & waiters & waitresses continuously bring & feed me the most unusual elaborate & delicious appetizers I have ever tasted ...

where to begin with a bit of hard sausage or SWP wk 1 sat.

the death dream in pool repelling seemed to be the century
gradually less expired endeared juniper/a miss list greeted these
breaks a plurality in asphalt placed semantic in so many spaces
to experience feet on trophies so that spectator implies dig
just like we the moment who shake a trick in discourse falls
language proposed a memory in body: the pronoun fits in curves
low to the right leg should make time for an address: it playing
the coming and soft like it just gelled in that not tomorrow before

dear disconnect,

we speak of resentment as an old hat bent one too many times around the brim. but our collective intolerance became things that were essentially different. ever narrowing circles. the anguish of answering questions. voluptuous imaginings. pushing rude sex back into the obscene. I never uttered that loose word. that interdiction or concealment. it was hard to know this as politics. an entirely theoretical elaboration. sexual manuals newlyweds. and never has perversion noted such strange ass. the most numerous and searching details. nakedness persuading shapes of rationality. unusual erotic art. sustained--but not without trembling a little.

Robert Duncan's warp and woof lecture/naropa university...year not listed...

part 1

part 2

Now Available!

Slumgullion Press Presents

"Between Here and the Telescopes"

Collaborations in Poetry by Elizabeth J. Guthrie & Andrew K. Peterson

...

"As happy proof of the truth of no boundaried person, the two find speech between and string it with bright word-shapes and their fellows. This book of poems is happy to have been made in that garden where "half my voice/is yours, all of it here" and "sings there here, hear." These are almost invisible collaborations, and a wonderful contribution to the growing literature of that way of making." - Reed Bye

.

"With "Between Here and the Telescopes" Elizabeth Guthrie and Andrew Peterson have generated work that is as unpredictable as it is inevitable. One is drawn in by its unfailing focus, then held by the certainty of the language." - Junior Burke

.

"Somewhere some poets are having a dialogue and in doing that they skip across borders of authorship, narrativity, and what I imagine to be imaginary constraints, to unveil the mind as a collection of possibilities. It's happening here, where "Between Here and the Telescopes" restages collaboration. In these gorgeous poems, (Peterson and Guthrie) play with experimentation, voice, location and dislocation, cut-ups, abstractions, the quotidian and the familiar, to gather, gorgeously and unselfconsciously, a poetics of possibility. That is what is happening now. Glad I'm here in this new century to receive it. - Akilah Oliver

.

...

$5

Chapbook: 48 pages, side stich binding.

Wood engraving, cover design/printing by

Dirk E. Lee at Naked Man Press, Missoula, MT.

...

...

For ordering, contact:

Liz at elizabeth.guthrie@gmail.com

Andy at akpeterson79@hotmail.com

&/or visit:

Slumgullion.org

yesterdays tomorrow

on roman jakobson's early piece..."the tasks of Artistic Propaganda," Stephen Rudy has to say..."...formulated according to the Formalist credo that any work of art is a deformation of previous works, which affords literary evolution a dynamic nature. It goes on to debunk the notion of popular appeal as a measure of a work's value, a conservative tendency that is opposed to 'truly revolutionary artistic enlightenment,' the task of which is 'the revolutionizing of cultural, in particular, aesthetic habits' and 'the overcoming of artistic statics."

the devil begins to write
a marvelous animality of asses and mouths

by diminishing or destroying the locus proprius
tortured bodies written by law

after falling into a magical sleep she gives birth
dismembering orgiastic

swallowed up like atlantis
peaks beaks arrows and sharp points

doubtless, there must always be death for speech
nocturnal feeders where bodies are lips

do we exist to speak to the other or be spoken by her
an androgyny halfway burst open

a challenge of and dedication to
cutup bodies that can be disassembled like dolls

Slumgullion Issue 4!

ISSUE FOUR IS DONE. And here it is.....It isn't available everywhere yet because we have not yet made enough to stock both the Bookmobile and Haus Frau. These are wayyyy labor intensive so they are taking a while to get enough together. But if you want one, they are $10, and you can either buy one from Courtney Blazon at her booth at the Saturday Market, or from the Bookmobile there, or at upcoming events. Soon to be at Haus Frau as well! Very soon. See below the photo for updates on recent events, upcoming plans, and so on!

Did you know there is a real treasure map inside that leads to a real treasure buried in Missoula? Did you also know that you will find work by Courtney Blazon, Katie Ludwick, Nabil Kashyap, Jonathan Marquis, collaborations by Liz Guthrie & Andy Peterson, and that the cover is made by Kayla i dont know her last name? And more? Yes, there is more.

[from Slumgullion.org, Missoula, MT]

*

Also:

LIZ & ANDY to read poetry on the radio!

In support of forthcoming collaborative chapbook,

BETWEEN HERE AND THE TELESCOPES (Slumgullion, 2oo8)

(more details on the book soon....)

NEW LAKES POETRY RADIO
Thursday, May 22, 8-10 p.m. KBGA 89.9 FM, Missoula, Montana

slumgullion.org

kbga.org

thenewlakes.blogspot.com

Tell yr Mother ya Love Her

(click poem to enlarge)
poem by andrew peterson

Inspired by reading Celeste

My newest book Touch Me, has been a barrage sexuality, anger, lust, reflection, memory, and relationship. For me, getting away with something, has never really been the issue. this is about committing to truths of human emotion and desire. desire being the key factor to initiate lust, to initiate demand, acting upon this desire is feeding appetite, is disregarding denial. we have been taught as a culture to ration, to take only what you need (there are variations obviously), but in writing there is freedom to expose and be exposed. l feel like writing is a process of expression and mine surfaces in sexual violence, and this i make no apologies for. i have been receiving flack recently for the difficulty in accessibility, the circuitry of encoded language. it is considered by some to be a game, and one of alienation of audience. but we need to consider, very much so, our INTENDED, audience. who are you trying to reach? if audience finds discomfort, the only question or conern that should exist in the writer is whether or not they continue, and furthermore, if they do or do not continue reading, who do they tell of this experience and how does that further, communicate, network, market accessibility? there has always been and will always be a market for the grotesque, the sexual, the violating (by a show of hands, how many own porn, or have enjoyed it on some level?) your audience is there, as i wouldn't be writing you if you weren't audience.

But if i had to examine, perhaps, reasoning for success in this genre i would have to say that on some level i rely on form, on constraints, for this allowance. As Dodie Bellamy relies on Horror, Bhanu on identity and relation, i escape insecurity by recognizing body, using the grotesque as writers before me have as well, see Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", among others who have used exposure of reality and truth of bodily action as methodology. this is contact. this is bodily significance that reaches further than regulation, than the bindings of flesh necessity. we are investigators. we are interrogaters of body. this needs no apology. this needs no forgiveness. i do not apologize for my love of pornography, for my absolute unsatiated desire for erotic body, for the text that is provision.

in truth, it is all about body, recognizing that body is character, body is element, body is exposed to action, and circumstance. as hot as is the stench of your and my ass, we are body. as much as my genitals find satisfaction when aligned with another's we are body. as much as beer is smooth, and glass divides flesh, we are body. we cannot avoid what happens to body in life, body is subject to desire, to injury, to want, to fluctuation in size, to dismembering, to memory. but what i consider equally communicable is the tangential transference of memory. in essence, memory is mine and yours, but neither one is reliable, is consistent. because i have memories that i truly believe are my but are actually hearsay, memory is manipulated, therefore human identity can be manipulated. it is the fear of succumbing to desire that forces purity of memory. religion, corporation, gender role identity, these things REGULATE what is acceptable, what is reliable.

but this is whole other side of erotica and acceptability. a text like dodie bellamy's Cunt-ups, a derivitive of the William Burroughs/Brion Gysin experience expostulated upon in Third Mind, dissolves REGULATION, by hermaphroditic identity. body is omnipresent, and not subjugated to corporation but is therefore pronounced manipulated, and manipulating of human experience and sexuality. while every text cannot be hermaphroditic, because of human obsession with authorship and the demand for recognition, it can stimulate the ambiguity that must exist in text for univeral, experiential transformation. so the question is, how does text exhibit ambiguity whie demonstrating human experience? is collaboration the key to denying authorship (see wickerman, consultations)? are we defined as writers, as thinkers, as bodies, by regulatory knowledge and experience? is memory defended and moreso responsive to ethics? can dissolving memory constraints dilate textual inhibition, to widening audience and accessibility?

What Touch Me affords me, as a writer, is that it is based on the memory game Simon, if you recall. incorporating childhood memories bashed with sexuality and conflict of relationship's present, affords me a certain tenderness in violation. the significance of gaming is that it draws upon deep childhood memories (obviously audience is reduced to those exposed for complete textual satisfaction, but even on the internet you can play Simon). everyone has relationships with gaming. this is notion of connection, of affiliation between writer and reader. drawing upon relation, upon that communication is essential to textual connection. and by tampering with memory, writing is priveleged to the indistinguishable patterns which memory creates. Perversion through memory.

make it universal, make it organic. if it's bodily how can audience refuse it? make it somehow relational, a place for communication. if there can be an interaction, a dialogue between author and text, a textual relationship between them, then refusal of bodily relation is the pain of audience, not the text. while audience is necessary for the respiration of text, there committment to it, raises them from the operating table. they are patient and surgeon alike. ultimately by making the text interactive, providing the privelege and responsibility to partake, see shelley jackson's Patchwork Girl, or in some respect, Jamba Dunn's Fossil 23, the reader will become more immersed in their responsibility and action with said text. by placing commands on the reader, do this, do that, they are forced, or less commandingly so, convinced to obey the requirements of the text.

command vs. request is really the two forms poetically we're experiencing here. demanding a reader to partake, to experience, forces them, verbs the shit out of them, imposing interaction. more commonly is the voyeur text, the inclusin based luring, on teasing a reader inside a text. even the most widely accepted writers, such as Billy Collins, or Charles Bukowski, commit to luring. Collins does so in form, in the hynotics of language, the charisma of the line, forming a sense of perfection and neatness, which promotes populous, promotes readership, a sense of reliability and committment. this is luring, this is the basic form of seduction. Bukowski, on ther other hand, while committing to the "art of seduction" entices readership through setting, and the unfamiliar. he still fails to promote command, in the sense that we're speaking, but lures a reader through a series of interactions: whores, race tracks, alcohol, isolation, etc. ultimately this a language of committment and communication in its most simplistic form. without communication, language is essentially useless, therefore audience is a required condition. but again, there are various methods of infecting audience with these notions of request vs. command.

in my text, Autobiography of a Stutterer, i have placed readers in an uncomfortable situation. they are forced into impediment. when i was younger, i watched the terror and discomfort in people's faces as they watched me struggle for voice. some so uncomfortable with the action taking place they offered to call an ambulance. so i am very much associated to discomfort, but essentially you must not consider offense as hindrance. offense is for those who choose discomfort and are blinded by such, unwilling to explore the various avenues of discovery capable in human dissection, both literally and figuratively. the impediment forces discomfort; if read aloud the audience/reader is forced into authorship via experiencial dissertation. they are speaking pain; they are speaking violation; they are essentialling committing themselves to the act of impediment, the action of violating language...which brings me to a whole new point that this is ultimately, first and foremost, a violation of and through language. we are not pornographers; we are not visual artists in the most mechanical, fundamental regards of that expressionism. we are literary, we are read. writing up to the twentieth century required a violation of language because the option of media was unavailable. now in this mediatized culture we are subjected to simplification through language, furthermore the reduction in comprehension and willingness to postulate, learn, discover, and then erradicate their willingness to be exposed and therefore are discomforted by this "new" exposure through language, when in actuality we, as a mediatized culture, are violated quite heavily and regularly by media.

what shakespeare would have done in words, what jonathan swift would have done in words, etc, would have been accepted for the sake of visual representation, for the sake of communication and the discovery of signficance, human elements, entertainment, and truths. now what dodie bellamy does, what daphne gottlieb, etc., is considered, if not underground, avant garde, an experimental text that is certainly not considered by wider audience. but really how often to the arts, those that abscond from formula, monetary advantage, find exposure and wider audience. not often. so basically, through a mediatized culture, one that is exposed visually to horror, violation, murde, be it news updates, or simpy visual arts, movies, television shows, we as a culture should be accumtomed to it, but somehow reading the words aloud is more violation than a simple viewing. while it is no longer necessary to write horror in the truest sense of writer/reader relationship it has been discomforted and banished to "underground" audiences. but this mentality, this erotica, this impediment, this violation, this sexual violence, this experience has never been detached completely, simply traveled the various back roads of artistic community.


jared and i have done extensive work in collaboration based on violating the grotesque body, see www.aplaceforcrazies.blogspot.com. with this work we have pushed audience to a level of actually standing over the operating table, violating text through thievery, violating body through murder, dissection, disembowelment, and various other methods of cutting.