Chicago Poetry Calendar

Chicago Poetry!

I was in Chicago once for AWP.  I liked the place.  Wish I had more time to explore.  Lots of great poets there too.  I’m thinking aloud here due to recent incidents that have brought Chicago and its poetry scene to my attention.  If you’re actually interested in just how asinine one tiny pseudo-poetry promoter can be, check out Daniela Olszewska’s blog, Jenny Boully’s blog, and Becca Klaver’s blog.  And for those of you who might think C.J. Laity’s apology to Kristy Bowen is sincere, know that he has started a series of hate blogs dedicated to her.  Some apology.  Go twiddle yourself and stew in your woman-hating juices, Laity.

Moreover, if you want to know something about Chicago and the poetry that great city offers, visit the official Chicago Poetry Calendar here. Or check out what publishers like Kristy Bowen are doing here.

Likewise, visiting or living in New York City?  Go no further – the New York City poetry calendar awaits.

Bible Belt much?  Atlanta, GA calendar!  How about further south?  Austin, TX po po calendar!  What’s that other coast?  San Francisco, CA Poetry Calendar!  You mean LA and Buffalo have a poetry scene too?   Oh, I realize I’ve missed oodles of cities and scenes and calendars, but that’s the good thing about blogs — if you want to list your site, pop it in the comments box, please!

Except you, CJL .  “What cracker is this same that deafs our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?” – Shakespeare

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Categories : Sexy

"The Burden of Happiness" by Orna Ben-Shoshan

by Alexander Dickow:
Catherine Daly’s Chanteuse/Cantatrice (Factory School, 2007)
Sampson Starkweather’s City of Moths (Boston: Rope-a-dope Press, 2008)
by Adam Fieled:
Brooklyn Copeland’s Borrowed House: 15 Poems (Greying Ghost Press, 2009)
David Prater’s Morgenland (Vagabond Press, 2007)

Well, Rob McLennan asked me some fun questions, so I had to think about me, me, me. I think I had fun with me. Visit me here.

Or go to the complete archive and have fun with lots of other poets like Juliana Spahr, Adeena Karasick, William Allegrezza, Matthew Zapruder, Rosmarie Waldrop, Maxine Chernoff, Cole Swensen, Mairéad Byrne, and about a hundred others!

Industrious much? Thanks lots, Rob!

a bodyfeel lexicon. (gordon/bozek)  dimestore operetta say. (bowen)  developing poetic ideas. (chirot)
   time space repetition. (armentrout)  vie et pli. (giovenale)  afar buzzing stars. (scappettone)
props of henwifery. (sprague) digress into residency. (berridge)
  laced with forethought. (murphy)   postcard of the. (tate)   I posit no. (fieled)
erratogenic paraparasitic postpoem. (goodland)  erotic false consciousness. (ward) first swifts come. (shaeppi)
will be waxing. (art)   &lipstick&moss&bodice. (carignan) flamenco pierced her. (tabios)
a citizen I. (snyder) engirth, discorrupt, linger. (workman) correspondence, obscure, reveal. (fletcher)
enhanced ego-interference patterning. (orange) fairly clear the. (boyer) telephone as intermediary. (hunter)
vista of verdancy. (stengel)  pale blue twilight. (phipps) (an historical site) magi.
little decisions thrumming. (boykoff)  writing records eden. (farr) production of hormones. (marcacci)
our crops far-flung. (sand)    going not gone. (hofer) informed by light. (compton)  my embroidery she </span>(abulhassan) ruby large enow. (gardner) composition as process. (hayes) like you tiger-shock. (smith)
  distance presence print. (pusateri)    certain fields escape. (muench/allegrezza) fragile engines flashing. (detorie)
the great desire. (nakayasu) behold a glimmering. (quimba) splendid drifts of. (kunz)
salt, line, obedience. (cox/cox-farr) eyes glass hands. (lamoureux)
template, some vicissitude. (mauro)    little red song-book. (newman)  imagistic kinetic dizzy.  (stamatakis)
  a need for. (behm-steinberg)   gaga futurism pales. (cooper)   a lavish spectacle. (deming)
him, wings adjacent. (heide) hands half face. (king)   presently be said. (stempleman) known as "we". (nelligan)
underground I go. (graham)    adorn honour bright. (mangold)  paced awning graces. (klinger)
  courting in earnest. (spahr)  grew inside we. (madison) a running plotline. (janssen)

Or rather, Ashok Karra's thoughts on my political side. I am most grateful for his ongoing engagement and interest in my work.

Today, Ashok was moved by a recent poem that appears in Jacket, "Two if by Land, I Do":

…As always, Amy King is well-aware of what I, as a student of Leo Strauss, would call the ancient/modern distinction. The fundamental difference between us and the medievals/Romans/Greeks is that we base politics on the fact men are not angels…

~~

In the past, Ashok has explored "Everyone Has a Decision To Make":

I want to meditate on the above poem in order to see the relation between speech and coming to a conclusion within one's own thought. My own feeling is that this has broad implications for how we conceive of politics. If we cannot be sure of our own moral stances, how can we be so sure others are wrong?

Many, many thanks, Ashok for your thoughts on and with these poems!

~~

"The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure. –Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

~~

~~

This semester, I've shown the films, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" (trailer above) and "An Inconvenient Truth" (good curriculum materials on that site too) to several sections of my basic writing classes. Shockingly while Generation Y cares about the environment and wants to take better measures than their predecessors did to protect it, most of them haven't seen Al Gore's film, which is essentially an encouraging primer on global warming and its effects.

I've had fun asking these twenty-somethings to research where the U.S. currently stands on the Kyoto Treaty, what the fuss is over a few melting ice caps, who gets to define "moral imperatives" and how, what the difference is between "fact" and "hyperbole" and how one can feed the other, what each individual can do to lessen their carbon output, how Halliburton and the industrial rebuilding of Iraq and New Orleans are related to big government & Mr. Cheney, among other things.

I'm learning a few things along the way as well. I keep running into the ways in which scientists and evangelicals are overcoming their differences in favor of a higher calling.

I find that solar research is expanding at a wonderful rate with new applications, thanks to folks like Stan Oshinsky. That grassroots movements to correct these "gradual", now accelerating, planetary changes are picking up steam; check out Plug In America, Care2, and Sierra Club.

Fresh water is taken for granted at the moment, but too soon, we'll buy it by the gallon, watching the prices go up, like gasoline right now.

There are so many more things to educate one's self about and respond to. If anyone would like to contribute to my pursuit, I have a few more dvds I'd like to acquire for my classes and for my own benefit. I probably expose 60 - 80 students per semester to this info. Please view my Amazon Wishlist here if you'd like to help out. Otherwise, I'd simply recommend sharing the films mentioned above with as many folks as you can, get into heated debates, and generally ask yourself and others, especially those planning to have children, "Just what would Jesus drive?"

p.s. Even J.R. Ewing, Oil Tycoon, has gone green. Check it!

TV's 'J.R.' goes green

* * *

Alexander Dickow reviews my book, I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU, in the most recent issue of Jacket Magazine. A few excerpts:

… King displays her taste for paradox, conceptual knots and conundrums:

[…] I named my dog for the future except
I couldn't remember what we'd all been calling her by then […].

My own preference for the baroque attracts me to these occasionally excessive verbal ripples and folds (is excess a negative quality?). Only Lautréamont's contorted syllogisms can compare: they are never opaque, never senseless, but disfigured just enough to provoke a double-take:

What comes now? None of us died
the very moment that so many of us are still alive. … ('La Vie Quotidienne')

Amy King's lexical palette is enormous, but her language remains economical to the extent that it evacuates the flabby redundancies and laziness so common in everyday speech (and in the poets that adopt a related esthetic). King is aware of the artifice at the heart of her poetic idiom, an artifice rare and refreshing in the thoroughly colloquialized landscape of contemporary American poetry. …

… I would suggest King should be read first of all as an unequivocally committed feminist: she often lampoons our inherited 19th-century conceptions of gender (see for instance, 'This Is an Acting Marriage,' quoted below, or 'The Monster Within'). However, if she feminizes the internal storyteller, she by no means exclusively addresses a female audience (in other words, she feminizes your internal storyteller: yes, you). One of the collection's most persistently recurring motifs is the inherent reversibility or interpenetration (!) of gender and sexuality …

King relentlessly flirts with her reader: eroticism is a privileged mode of interaction between reader and poem:

I know we can live without love from the waist up
and the kind that flows from up above, even horses
that speak our language, but the rest remains
a place we frequent with panty-laced desire and rely upon
for everywhere with bonus scenes as yet in production,
postoperative and pre-season. Like an apricot foam,
the hand that strokes a felt-like rose stem assumes
where it's moving and when it's moving in. ('Mildly Free')

Here as elsewhere, King's poetry accomplishes a paradoxical synthesis of the cerebral and the sensual, viscera and intellect, summed up by the expression 'scientific copulation in / religious veils' ('The Marriage of Birthdays'). Sex always involves an ironic ingredient, suggested here, for instance, by subtle comic allusions to the sexually ambiguous, male-and-female rose stem of the Romance of the Rose, not to mention Mr. Ed and Swift's Utopic land of the Houyhnhnms. Such allusions suggest a sexuality filtered through layers of literary representation, complicated by culture, but no less invested with desire (indeed, all the more so).

–Alexander Dickow (from Jacket Magazine 34)