A few summers ago, I assisted as a teaching fellow for a summer writing conference. A student and friend from that class unearthed this list of quotable nuggets spoken by the workshop instructor:

This poem has extra bits of redundancy.

This sequence is more than you want to dump on a single poem.

Am I explaining places where I am explaining?

This is supine--lying on its back not ready for action.

Pathos looms heavily in the wings.

The architecture goes mushy.

This is an abberant detail--we cannot see and judge.

The hell with readers--they will catch on.

This is self-conscious ornamentation.

Be careful not to cultivate a floating tone.

The lofty diction does not work on your behalf.

Get SAVAGE with yourself.

Where does the poem go on automatic?

Does the frame float free?

3 Lights Gallery is a new online haiku project based out of England. Visit their new site here.

Jade Cabbage, National Palace Museum

The NY Times has a wonderful piece on the renovation of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. This jade carving inspired my poem "Brassica Chinensis." To its left, I swear, looks like a piece of pork fat. Carved jade...? Here it is on the Museum's website:


Made from agate and described here in detail.

Meat Stone

in the raw material
of inorganic stone

the artist saw not
mineral but animal

flesh defined by bands
of color, striated quartz

a lattice of atoms in
agate, or chalcedon

the Greek stonecarver
Pygmalion longed

to breathe being into
sculpted ivory

the poet nourishes
language w/ marrow

& meat, the life breath
in each inhalation,

infusing every chisel wrought
by the creator’s hand

the fatty skin & flavor of
a slab of pork served

under glass w/ a side of cabbage
even the herbivore can imagine

A year ago this time I was in Taipei.
Two years ago this time Kort and I were in Marfa.
Three years ago this time Kort and I were in Boston.

This year we are in Dallas.
Next year, the Pacific NW.

Masked Couple, 2004

adhesive and paper collage
3" x 5"

1913: A Journal of Forms

I first heard about 1913 two years ago from Jen Dick. The editrice of this beautifully designed literary journal just sent me a package of 1913 offerings, including their first book-length publication, John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse's Seismosis. More on that visual-verbal project in the future - for now, I am very much enjoying the depth and range of the press's journal which is almost 300 pages in length. The project includes a special section of French poetry in English translation - with translations by Cole Swensen, Keith Waldrop, and Lisa Robertson. Artwork is printed in both full color and black and white, with interior art and text on the inside covers. Some favorite images here include work by Ruth Greisman pulled from the archives of Joseph Cornell and several collages by Theodore Harris. A lot of poetry here utilizing abundant white space...writers in this volume include John Taggart, Hank Lazer, John Yau, and Ben Doyle who includes a sampling of some very Tom Phillips-esque work.

Overlay

Notes from Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory by Lucy Lippard:

"Artists are rebelling against reductive purism and an art-for-art's sake emphasis on form or image alone with a gradual upsurge of mythical and ritual content related to nature and to the origins of life."

"...art has social significance and a social function, which might be defined as the transformation of desire into reality, reality into dreams and change, and back again."

"Some artists fortify their forms or emotional instincts with anthropological information, or superficially graft such information onto currently fashionable styles. Others work from inside, arriving at primal images from their own needs, overlaying personal on historical and perhaps even biological memory."

Curse of the Golden Flower

Curse of the Golden Flower

A lot of critics, including my immediate relatives, are panning Zhang Yimou's latest film Curse of the Golden Flower. The film is a lot darker than the director's recent martial arts offerings, Hero and House of the Flying Daggers. The narrative features family secrets, incest, sibling murder, and suicide. Chow Yun Fat plays a unforgiving and absolute patriarch who beats his third son to death (for murdering his favorite son) and orders his second son to administer poison to his mother in exchange for sparing his life and overlooking the rebellious uprising he has staged against his father. In the end, it's a shock to realize that the root of tragedy is borne from the dysfunction of an ordinary married couple. The costumes worn by the imperial family for the film are ornate and completely stunning, though the costumes of the imperial court reveal far too much cleavage which seems far from the period. Memorable scenes include the palace square filled with millions of yellow chrysanthemum blooms and the emperor's assassins sliding down from the hillsides at night to assassinate the imperial doctor and his family.

SP Spleen

Currently reading David Hadbawnik's SF Spleen. David will be here in Dallas in late March reading for WordSpace at Standard & Pours. SF Spleen is put out by Skanky Possum with w/ a cover design by Scott Pierce of Effing Press. The collection is a sort of daybook/journal that covers July 1997 to March 1999, years in which Hadbawnik lived in San Francisco. The transparent eyeball of the speaker documents eavesdropped conversations, movie shoots, public transportation, the homeless and the multicultural peoples of SF. Not quite prose poems, the book is composed of short descriptive fragments to longer passages of a paragraph or two. At one point, the speaker is accused by a ponytailed Indian of being cop, to be regarded suspiciously for the way in which he looks to hard. And while there is a lot of looking and listening that goes on in this collection, there seems to be a strong detachment of speaker from action, the speaker serving principally as documentarian.

Simultaneous to reading David's book, I pulled Baudelaire's Paris Spleen off of my shelf, curious if I'd find resonances and connections.

Finishing up reading anthropologist Margaret Mead's biography Blackberry Winter. The book is split into three parts - the first section chronicles her childhood, parents, siblings and early education. In the second section, she embarks on field work in Samoa and later, to other countries - interesting that her mentor Franz Boas wanted her to study Native Americans but that she fought hard to pursue research in Polynesia. He relented, but insisted she conduct her study on an island where ships would go back and forth at least once every 3 weeks. She writes of living within various cultures and conducting fieldwork with two different husbands, falling in love with her colleagues. The third part is concerned with her later life - the birth of her only child and the dissolution of her 3rd marriage. A decent introduction to her work in ethnography and primitive cultures, though I skimmed past the passages on her early life and family.

My interview with Texas writer Ben Fountain is now live at Rain Taxi.

Check out Bens' book Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.

Sightings previews:

Wonder Woman, 2004

3 inches x 5 inches
Paper, glue

I had a grueling but good weekend in Houston attending yoga workshops taught by Ana Forrest. The weekend intensive was a lot more yoga than I am accustomed to doing....

On Saturday, I got away from the Houstonian to check out the Menil Collection's Rothko Chapel.



I'd heard great reports about this space and was not disappointed. Rothko's black paintings are housed inside an ecumenical chapel. Wooden benches/pews fill the interior of the space, looking out on huge panels and triptychs by the artist, with undertones of blue and red. The doorways in shadow take on a geometric likeness to the panels and the effects on the eye are subtle. Perfect square stone tiles make up the floor, and the space features rectangular pews and hexagonal ceiling with skylight. Someone had put out two sets of zafus on yoga mats, directly in front of the central panel.

The Menil featured an exhibition on art and chess, Surrealist art, and Klee in America. Housed in separate buildings were Cy Twombly's massive canvases and in Richmond Hall, a Marfa-esque werehouse space (a former grocery store), were Dan Flavin's fluorscent light installations.


ext. Richmond Hall


Dan Flavin installation

Just down the street is the HCP. Great resource room, but not very impressed with the space. Too much sunlight pouring in, bleaching out the space which is one long rectangular gallery broken up by movable walls and partitions. The nonprofit offers opportunities for emerging photographers to have their work exhibited through an open submission policy.

For Immediate Release


a reading for kari edwards
Thursday, December 21, 2006
7 pm
(this is a free and open event)

HIGH ENERGY
CONSTRUCTS
990 N. Hill St., #180
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Please join the Los Angeles poetry community and High Energy Constructs in honoring the life and work of poet, artist, and (trans)gender activist, kari edwards. kari died of heart failure at the age of 52 on Saturday, December 2, 2006. kari's life and work was an ongoing revolution of body and language, as well as a revelation of human potential. Not only a dear friend and supporter of High Energy Constructs, kari was also one of the forty artists included in High Energy Constructs' Fall 2006 exhibition, Many Happy Returns. kari's work as a gender activist, radical writer, and social sculptor was - and will continue to be - some of the most honest, compassionate, and evolved necessary action in today's world.

Friends and poets, Marcus Civin, Jen Hofer, Mary Kite, Eileen Myles, Michael Smoler, Justin Veach, and others gather to read, perform, and speak in memory and tribute to the spirit of kari edwards, on Thursday, December 21, 2006, at 7 pm.

For more information regarding this gathering please call 323.227.7920.

kari's most recent book of writing, have been blue for charity, can be viewed and read at: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-ke.htm

---

kari edwards (1954 - 2006) was a poet ,artist and gender activist , winner of New Langton Art's Bay Area Award in literature (2002); was the author of have been blue for charity , BlazeVox (2006); obedience , Factory School (2005); iduna , O Books (2003); a day in the life of p ., subpress collective (2002); a diary of lies , Belladonna #27 by Belladonna Books (2002); obLiqUE paRt(itON): colLABorationS , xPress(ed) (2002); and post/(pink), Scarlet Press (2000), as well as poetry editor for Transgender Tapestry magazine. edwards' work has appeared in numerous publications, such as anthologies Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard , Painted leaf Press (2000), and Electric Spandex: anthology of writing the queer text , Pyriform Press (2002); as well as been exhibited throughout the United States , including Denver art museum, New Orleans contemporary art museum, University of California -- San Diego , and University of Massachusetts -- Amherst . edwards’ work can also be found in Bombay Gin, Belight Fiction, In Posse, Mirage/Period(ical), Van Gogh’s Ear, PuppyFlower, Vert, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Narrativity, Shampoo, xStream, Rain Taxi, Big Bridge, Nerve Lantern, muse-apprentice-guild, Avoid Strange Men, Bird Dog Magizine, RealPoetik, Raised in a Barn, and The International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies.

XCP: Streetnotes

The Winter 2006/Japan edition of XCP: Streetnotes is now live. Some of the love hotel poems from my Press Lorentz book are reprinted here.

Last week, we rented How to Draw a Bunny on the life of artist Ray Johnson, New York's "most famous unknown artist." Another title for this film might as well have been "How to Live a Life." Kort's convinced that Ray Johnson was a reincarnation of a Zen master trickster, and it would be easy to see how and why. Johnson subverts the art establishment by his approach to selling his work and getting it into major museum collections. When an art buyer offers less than what he asks for as his selling price on a work after several back-and-forth negotiations, he sends the buyer the work, with $500 worth of the piece very neatly removed/cut out. When Chuck Close curates a show at the MOMA, he invites Ray Johnson to submit his work for consideration and to donate his work to the Museum which would put the artist in a position of vulnerability in that they would have the power to choose what they thought was his "best" work. As a workaround, he sends a series of pages eventually comprising a book to the librarian of the MOMA. At the time, the library's policy is that anything that is sent to them is kept in their archive, and thus permanently becomes a part of the MOMA's collections. By using some creative ingenuity, Johnson gets his work in the MOMA his own way. The documentary is well made and features interviews with Christo and Jean Claude and a bevy of interesting artists from the NY scene. At the end of his life, Johnson mysteriously drowns - vanished in the night like a Zen master who has decided that his time has come.

Poemeleon

The new issue of Poemeleon is live. This online magazine is edited by Cati Porter who lives in my hometown - Riverside, CA. For the Winter issue, Cati edited together a feature on ekphrastic poetry. She includes three of my poems and three of David Lukowski's paintings from our series Nutritional Feed (which is scheduled for publication by Tupelo Press in Fall 2007) here.

It's been a strange and heavy last few days. Yesterday, after reading news of James Kim's death, I got on a train to go into the city for an appointment. Two stops away from my station at Park Street, the train I was riding went out of service and I was forced to climb on board a bus that would shuttle me to Mockingbird Station. Hundred of angry and disgruntled commuters waited for DART buses to come by and pick us up. When a bus finally came, we stopped at Lovers Lane Station before proceeding on to Mockingbird. The disruption had occured at Lovers Lane. A 61-year-old woman tried to sprint across the tracks to make a southbound train and was struck and killed by the northbound train. When we arrived at Lovers Lane station, the police had yellow taped off the entire area and throngs of people were waiting on the sidewalks for buses. Despite being already very full, more people forced their way on board the bus I was riding. The conversations on board were filled with gossip:

"I heard it was a man."
"No, it was a woman."
"I heard she saw the train coming."
"So then it was suicide!"
"Was she white or black."
"Don't know, but there was a lot of blood.

The new print edition of Rain Taxi is out. My interview with Steve Bradbury appears in this issue. When the online edition goes live, an interview piece I did with author Ben Fountain will be up.

I am just heartbroken by the news of James Kim's death.

Autumn Nijuin Renga

autumn foliage scorches    (SP)
the horizon line forest
fires in Esperanza

       in the withered tomato garden      (AS)
       recalling his aged mother's voice

contemplating sameness     (SP)
the artist silkscreens one
more canister of soup

Upcoming WordSpace reading

Sunday, December 10, 2006, at 7 p.m. FREE
WordSpace presents a program of some of this area’s finest poets: Jerry Kelly, Martha Heimberg, Sharon Bailey, Tim Cloward and Shin Yu Pai.

Jeremiah Kelley holds a BA degree from Harvard University. He has published poetry in The Texas Observer as well as a number of little magazines in North Texas, and has forth-coming fiction in Southwest Review. He lives in old East Dallas with his wife, Patty Turner.

Martha Heimberg is assistant professor of English at Northwood University in Cedar Hill, Texas, creative writing instructor at Richland College and arts critic for Dallas Weekly. Five-time winner of Dallas Press Club's Katie Award for arts criticism, community affairs and business writing, she has also won the Texas Historic Commission Griffin Award and the Sierra Club Award for writing.

Sharon Bailey is a poet who for the last eight years has worked as Director of Education for the Center of Nonprofit Management. She holds an MA from the University of Texas at Dallas and her critical interest has been in the work of Flannery O’Conner, Toni Morrison and Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Tim Cloward teaches history and is assistant principal at Yavneh Academy of Dallas. He is the founder of the poetry/ performance troupe Dancing Tongue, and has worked with Poetry Circus and Question Authority, both acclaimed performance poetry ensembles. His work is included in Three Dallas Poets and he holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Shin Yu Pai is the author of The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed)), Equivalence (La Alameda Press) and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books). Forthcoming books include Nutritional Feed (Tupelo Press), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks) and Sightings (Ahadada Books). She is the programming chair and curator of Next on Deck for WordSpace.

I was very shocked to read about the news of poet kari edwards' death. I was leaving Naropa just as kari was starting in the MFA program - she had already been at Naropa awhile, studying contemplative buddhist psychology in the same program as Kort's older brother, who was one of kari's classmate.

Nijuin Renga

My friend Andrew invited me to write an "autumn nijuin renga."

Here's my opening verse:

autumn foliage scorches
the horizon line forest
fires in Esperanza

the aging antiquities dealer
drops the price on his idol

of Shiva Nataraja, sold
to the Dallas art museum,

for 2.4 million to guarantee
the collector’s early

retirement – Chola bronze
buried deep within a well

bears the scars of rope
used to lower the god

down a tunnel to safety
ducking all problems

of patrimony in other
incarnations Shiva as

phallus or lingam

the curator says of
ananda tandava

the dance of bliss –
few people will ever

become buddhas or bodhisattvas

it’s thru the deity that every-
day people enter

the supernatural world
one leg raised in the cosmic dance

freedom from the wheel of incarnation
one leg stamping out illusion

in his hair the holy Ganges
the full moon planets & stars

Brassica Chinensis

at the National Palace Museum
an hour before closing
the galleries are full

with visitors who’ve come
to view preserved plastrons
under glass, turtle shells

incised with oracle
markings – I ask my guide
what must not be missed

the jade cabbage,
        she utters

nature mort
two red katydids rest
on a three-inch tall

bok choy hewn
from a single piece
of stone, material

revered among artists
for its quality
of transparency

the young concubine
who surrendered the nephrite
carving – symbol of

a father’s blessing to
a favorite child –
passed over

to increase the virtue
of an elder sister’s
marriage dowry

Sacred Dice

As a student at B.U., I started out in the CORE Humanities program where I met this kid. Anthony Cristofani. I always noticed the other kids from California, as most of us were homesick, dressed and talked differently, and seemed at least somewhat disgruntled and out of our element, except for Anthony. After B.U., he writes in our alumni mag, he went on a "Bonnie & Clyde"-style crime spree and went to prison for three years where he learned French and how to play guitar. Now he's in the band Sacred Dice with his brother Louis, a jazz pianist. Their sound? Check out their website or buy their album - "True Light" plays on the splash page and has some guitar hooks like U2.

Taha Muhammad Ali at the Dodge

The Dodge Festival has just posted this Quicktime video of Taha Muhammad Ali and Peter Cole reading Taha's poem Revenge. Taha was one of the highlights of this year's Dodge Fest for me - an amazing voice in international poetry.

a day without an immigrant
            May 1, 2006

in Dallas eating out meant
Chinese not the corner

taqueria, last week
a finger was served

up in Friday’s burger
never would have happened

if the worker had been a Spic
bring back those Mexicans!

a co-worker quips
how a regular boycott

would shorten his morning
commute, at the train

stop two brown-skinned men
dressed in painters’ pants and

bleached cotton tees stand
out in a sea of white faces

speaking Spanish at
the pass machine they

want to purchase
one-way trips spend

only a dollar fifty

I try to explain the difference
between fares, that there is

only one roundtrip fee
to back where you came from

si´, I know but a dollar fifty
is a lot of money he says

in English when I can’t
understand ¬ it’s the transit

police I’m worried about
busting these two guys for

shortchanging a faulty system
when the train pulls up

I climb aboard to my seat
see them start again

realizing too late, I might
have paid their passage

Blossoms from a Japanese Garden

I find the gutted tome resting
on a crowded shelf between

children’s books, next to
bins of printed ephemera

the illuminated pages have
been torn out clean

sheet by sheet, leaving
only a crumbling spine

a handful of poems
a table of contents,

dissatisfied, I thumb thru
stacks, find each blossom

plastic-wrapped and marked
up to twelve dollars a page

my neighbor’s bamboo

the fadeless flowers

what they saw in the moon

watercolor sketches
by unknown artists

match each art plate
in the visual index,

the moniker Fennollosa
as foreign in these parts

as the names of Kazuko
Jiro, or Taro – characters

from the simple tales that
the curator’s wife put down

in poorly rhymed verse

at cashout I argue with
the proprietor for the book

as art object, cultural document,

flowers to be studied together
in the garden of the reader

Notes on Desikachar's "Health, Healing & Beyond"

"When we encounter problems, the counsel of someone who has mastered similar problems can be of great help." - Patanjali

Krishnamarcharya traveled into Tibet to study at the Ramamohan Ashrama which was basically a cave in the mountain. During his studies, he ate fruit given to him by the guru. At the end of his studies, payment was due to his teacher. A student must always pay what is asked, or a debt is incurred, breaking the holy chain of knowledge. The guru asked of Krishnamacharya that he "take a wife, raise children, and be a teacher of Yoga."

Anniversary Poem

at my refuge vow ceremony
my instructor slips me
a white envelope that

I promptly forget about
caught up in the ritual
of rice toss and hair cut

anxiety of arriving to greet
the guru without a white kata,
the German girl rechristianed

Pema offers me her own
and its her heart I really want
but instead I must live with

“liberatress of the Buddha”

inside the card
three square sheets
of recycled paper

stamped with gold
& brushed with orange
I recognize them from

the Chinese grocery store -
the aisle my father refused
to travel down, the path

he would not talk about

seven years later,
I rediscover Donna’s note
buried in a stack of correspondence

welcome, dharma sister,
welcome she says again
and I see now the gift

three squares for three jewels
to set fire today to the past
& all of its attachments

corps de ballet

within a wooden frame
a sequence of lobsters scuttle

from kitchen to parlor
trading the ocean’s deeps
for the depths of a smackman’s p(l)ot

lured by the perfume
of herring & live bait

lobstermen haul
boxes aboard
throwing star
fish scattered in
all directions
undersized specimens rejected
at the weigh-in

trapped in beaded necklaces
and netted skirts
pincers rubber banded
tight the taping
of a ballerina’s feet
measured lengths of silk cord
wrapping

a line of boiled red crustaceans swimmerets spread

teasing the diner towards another course

A Pantry Ballet for Jacques Offenbach, 1942

(click on image to enlarge text)

Akshobya*

In Yehlio, I contemplate a jagged scar
running across the narrow neck

of Queen’s Head Rock,
read in the visitor’s guide

of a vandal’s foiled plot to
saw through earth to sell

an ancient landmark
on the antiquities market

scarred stone hardly bears
her noble profile, years from now

to fall like Franconia’s
old man in the mountain,

disappeared in a landslide
of rock, a tale of Akshobya,

swaddled in blankets
throat slit with diamond saw

sledge-hammered crown
of the Buddha stolen

from Shentong Monastery’s
Four Gate Pagoda, five years later

bought on the black market
by devotees and donated

to the head of the Dharma Drum
order Master Sheng-yen returns

the Buddha to the People’s Republic
in a ceremony that makes headlines

on both sides of the Taiwan Strait



* Sanskrit for “imperturbable.”

Dancing Tongue at the Undermain

Dancing Tongue

Sometimes I lose track of my work and discover it later.

American Born Chinese

Gene Yang's graphic novel on growing up ABC was recently nominated for a National Book Award!

Making some headway wrapping up old projects. Four interviews with writers have recently found homes. Rain Taxi will be publishing my interview with Steve Bradbury, discussing his new book of translations of Shang Qin poems, and a piece with Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. Eclectica will publish my interview with prose writer Evelina Galang in January. And Trip Master Monkey just took a piece I wrote on the work of Mong Lan ages ago.

                         SOLD OUT

The importance of good translation

I've been a fan of Eileen Chang's work, ever since I read her short stories in a contemporary Chinese women's lit class at B.U. So when I found her book Naked Earth (1960s Hong Kong Union Press edition) in a used record/bookstore on Yongkang Street in Taipei, I snapped it up. In getting around to finally skimming the book, my mind stumbles on phrases like

Her skin had the bluish pale translucency of fresh-peeled lichee flesh and her eyes were wide splits in the ripe fruit showing the moistened lacquered surface of the purplish black seed within.

I think I am going to have to postpone reading Naked Earth until I can find a better translation.

WordSpace at Paperbacks Plus

WordSpace is hosting its fall Next-on-Deck: Poets in the Universities reading at Paperbacks Plus on Friday, November 3, at 7 p.m. We are excited to offer a reading with poets Renee Rossi, Susan Briante, and Karen X. Please help spread the word about this upcoming reading!

About the poets:
Renee Rossi is currently pursuing an MFA at Vermont College and works part-time as an otolaryngologist. Her poems have appeared in Ilyas Honey and the anthology Body Language. The Dallas Poets Community awarded Renee with its second place prize in its 2005 National Poetry Competition.

Susan Briante is Assisant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Dallas and is currently working on completing her doctoral dissertation for the University of Texas at Austin. Her first poetry collection, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, will be published in 2007 from Ahsahta Press. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, New American Writing, Indiana Review, Chain and Sentence among many others.

Karen X is a veteran performer of punk rock, poetry, producer of avant-garde events. The Dallas Poets Index describes her as "the neo-beat queen of the East Dallas poetry scene." After 10 years in Austin as a music writer for The Austin Sun, she moved to Dallas and began writing poetry. Allen Ginsberg invited her to study as a Poetics Apprentice at the Naropa Institute in 1980. As a special friend of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, she co-produced Paris Records recordings of Anne Waldman, Robert Creeley, and Ginsberg. Her shouting poetics band The Panics, with Les Michaels, performed on the same bill as Flipper, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and John Cale. She has toured solo with Frank Black and Reverend Horton Heat with ambient music provided by Ministry. Karen has performed at Caravan of Dreams and Sita di Limur's Starck Club with Karen Finley and Laney Yarber, traveled to the Assiniboine Reservation in northern Montana to perform with Townes Van Zandt and Roxy Gordon. She has also performed at the Austin International Poetry Festival and in 1994 she was invited to read at Lollapollaza Music Festival. Karen is currently a creative writing istructor at Brookhaven Community College. She has read and lectured at colleges and universities around the country.

NEXT-ON-DECK: Writers in the Universities
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3
PAPERBACKS PLUS
6115 LA VISTA (Dallas, Texas)
FREE/DONATION
7:00 P.M.
214-827-4860

Great article in today's NY Times on Viggo Mortenson's Perceval Press based out of So Cal.

While researching lobsters this morning, I came across Trevor Carson's blog. Trevor is author of The Secret Life of Lobsters. I've also been reading about the use of spoons as percussion instruments. Lobsters and spoons both figure prominently into Cornell's Pantry Ballet.

Eating in Public

Eating in Public
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

Susan Schultz from Tinfish recently sent me a copy of this great little pamphlet book from Nomoola. Eating in Public is part performance art part community activism. Gaye Chan, who designs books for Tinfish, and a collaborator decided to see what would happen when they planted several papaya seedlings on public land, in the tradition of the Diggers. They put up a sign advertising their free papayas and offering them to who ever should want them. Joggers tramped several of the seedlings, ignoring the signs, but eventually, a handful of plants matured. In the mean time, Chan and her friend would receive handwritten notes from the representative of the owner of the land, saying that the papaya plants needed to be moved or they would be removed by the owner. Eventually, the papaya seedlings were cut down. The entire experiment inspired Gaye Chan to open a Freebay store, much in the spirit of Freecycle, where free plants, free building materials, and free labor have been made available. Participate in the gift economy! Pass on what you no longer need or use to someone who really is in need.

greenhouse effect

           after Carsten Höller

At the 54th Carnegie International, Carsten Höller installed his Solandra Greenhouse. Museum visitors entered a glass-walled structure filled with Solandra Maxima (golden chalice vine), a South American plant that exudes pheromones capable of inducing the hallucinatory effects of falling in love.

five-lobed corolla
blooms deepen
to gold with age

a billet-doux
inscribed on hand-pulled paper
the perfume of golden chalice

a car parked in sunlight
radiance of two lovers

a vine trained
to grow upwards
can be trapped

take the form
of a box-like hedge,
left untended

a clumped mass

smothering
the native vegetation

the heart’s desire
sustained inside

transparent walls

what makes the earth
suitable for life

cultivate enough
to feed a starving nation

We Japanese

At about 10:45 last night, I won the bid for this lovely item on e-bay.



I should say that I am a total neophyte to online auctions. In the days leading up to the auction's close, I read about sniping and how to increase your odds of winning. There were three different auctions going on for this book, being bid on by the same buyers. I lost the first auction on the 1946 edition of this book, which also included an author's signature and a photo of the author. All the action happened in the last 15 seconds, and I was surprised in reviewing the bidding history to see a third buyer jump in from out of nowhere to increase the bidding. So I got smart on Auction No. 2 and set a maximum bid and then waited and watched with heart palpitations and the constant refreshing of pages. Didn't get sniped. Kort says it's not really winning if you are competing to be able to spend your own money. Perhaps more akin to gambling. Somewhere, I do feel that's true.



So what exactly did I purchase? We Japanese was a book written and made in Japan by multiple authors who were basically commissioned by the Fujiya Hotel to create a book that could introduce Japanese customs, cultures and rituals to Westerners. It is chock full of illustrations, hand-bound in fabric covers, and a beautiful example of the book arts. It's a very interesting piece of visual culture that will be great for anthropological research.

Japan Festival

Yesterday we went here:




The Fort Worth Botanical Garden hosts a Japanese festival every fall in their Japanese gardens. They invite taiko drummers, haiku poets, dancers, a local bonsai club, ikebana practitioners and more to their annual culture fest. Because we have a sweet tooth and a love for pretty things at the Makura No Soshi, here are some pictures of imported Japanese sweets.



Wasanbon sweets made from pressed sugar, individually wrapped.



Sweets made from agar agar, a jelly like-substance that is not overly sweet. About the consistency of a New England jelly fruit slice.



Yokan embedded with chestnut and various goodies.

A Pantry Ballet for Jacques Offenbach

A Pantry Ballet for Jacques Offenbach
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

I've decided to write about Joseph Cornell's box piece "A Pantry Ballet for Jacques Offenbach" for my commission for the Dallas Museum of Art. Listening now to Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffman, a tale of a poet. Offenbach was known for writing light operas and for the Barcarolle (boat song) that appears in Hoffman. His opera Orpheus in the Underworld includes a legendary Can Can.

There is a poetry-writing exercise out there that proposes to take the structure of a poem from a table of contents. The idea always seemed to be a bit strange or artificial to me. Today I opened up Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler. The way that the TOC is laid out unfold in a very interesting and poetic way:

CONTENTS

1
If on a winter's night a traveler
2
Outside the town of Malbork
3
Leaning from the steep slope
4
Without fear of wind or vertigo
5
Looks down in the gathering shadow
6
In a network of lines that enlace
7
In a network of lines that intersect
8
On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
9
Around an empty grave
10
What story down there awaits its end?

Congratulations, Sherwin!

Anchee Min

Anchee Min has been in town for the last two days giving talks and workshops for the Highland Park Literary Festival. She came thru last year for the Museum, but this was my first opportunity to really get more familiar with her work and her life. She grew up serving in Mao's Red Guard and was sent to a labor camp at 19 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. When she was in her 20s, she was discovered by a film crew working for Madame Mao who was looking for the ideal proletarian woman. They whisked her away to a Shanghai film studio and cast her in a propaganda film which would never be made. Eventually, Anchee Min was denounced and had to take minor jobs at the studio when her friend, the actress Joan Chen, wrote to her from the U.S. and suggested she move to America. Knowing no English at all, Anchee Min memorized basic English conversations and interviewed at the consulate where they approved her passport. She was accepted for school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (my alma mater) and received her BFA and MFA degrees there. She was a gallery attendant during the legendary exhibition of Dread Scott. Anchee Min is an incredible and dynamic speaker - my dad would hate and make fun of her for singing Maoist propaganda songs on stage and in American classrooms, but these are all parts of her experience and she is educating the American people on a whole lost generation.

Poetry in Motion Dallas will be using "Stones" excerpted from my poem "Yes Yoko Ono" for their light rail and bus posters for the DART transit system which will encompass several hundred placards in all. Hopefully to be designed and installed by January. Thank you Richland College and Martha Heimberg for selecting this work!

Love Hotels update

There are about 25 copies of The Love Hotel Poems remaining. After that, there will be no more. Order them while they're still available from Press Lorentz.

Noon 4

NOON 4 is now available, in case you would like to buy a copy (the edition limited to 200 copies), mention it to friends who might be interested or request a sample or review copy. Contributors are Bob Heman, Andrea Strudensky and Geoffrey Hlibchuk, Saito Sanki, Hirahata Seito, Watanabe Hakusen, Sugimura Seirinshi (trans. Richard Gilbert and Ito Yuki), Marlene Mountain, Jeff Harrison, Duane Locke, Guy Simser, John Levy, Cralan Kelder, Jonathan Greene, Graham High, David Giannini, Michael McClintock, Victor Ortiz, Addie Tsai, Elizabeth Robinson, Sheila E. Murphy, Theodore Worozbyt, Boyer Rickel, Alexander Jorgensen, Christophe Casamassima, Kit Kennedy, Grant Lee Phillips, Rick Roth, Shin Yu Pai, Tom Gilroy, Jim McKay, Patrick So, Allison Roth, Joan Brossa (trans. Philip Terry), Rob mMclennan, John Martone, Scott Metz, John Parsons, Giles Goodland, and Leslie McGrath.

Single issue: ¥1500 / US$14 / GBP 7.50, airmail p & p included. Please make British bank cheques or international postal money orders in U.S. or Japanese currency payable to Philip Rowland. IRCs and U.S. bills also acceptable.

Thanks for your support and best wishes,

Philip Rowland, ed.
Noon: Journal of the Short Poem
Minami Motomachi 4-49-506
Shinjuku-ku
Tokyo 160-0012
Japan

Works on Paper

Haden the cat, the unofficial mascot of Convivio Bookworks, likes napping on my poems. Here he is snoozing on "An Abbreviated History on the Way of Tea." More printing is in progress this week and the publishers hope to have the book available in November for the press's annual open house.

The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion (2004)

cool and dark as
                   Sensei Nakashima’s home
                         each Monday night
                   the gakusei wear
wool sweaters, stockings
                   beneath ankle-length
                         skirts gathered neatly
                   under knees
kneeling in tea practice

the cold that penetrates this room
                         penetrates the bones
                         penetrates still
                                                         the mind

columns you pass through
tall as stalks in
a bamboo forest

a tickle in the throat
or the heart stirring awake

the white-haired docent
                   instructs her group of students,
                         let’s walk out silently

Locus Point

Some how I missed the launch of the new poetry e-zine Locus Point. The featured cities of the moment are Boston, Seattle and St. Louis. I have never heard of a single one of the Boston poets highlighted in this issue, except for Peter Jay Shippy who teaches at Emerson and is already quite established. I wonder if these poets are new to Boston or there during the whole time I lived there.

Chicago Calling: A 24-Hour Festival

This week, one of my SAIC classmates, Jennifer Karmin, is participating in this festival. She'll be incorporating my poem "Meditation on Frank O'Hara" into her "Walking Poem" performance piece. Highlights and details here. Other classmates in the fest include Amina Cain, Alice George and Cecilia Pinto!

Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art

I will be working on a new commission for the Dallas Museum of Art for their upcoming show Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art which will showcase the new additions to the Museum's contemporary collections donated by three major Dallas families - the Rachofskys, the Roses, and the Hoffmans. The exhibition will be on display from February 11–May 20, 2007. Just received the object list which includes works by Marden, Richter, Polke, Beuys, Gonzales-Torres, Messager, Antoni, Judd, and other contemporary superstars. Not sure yet what I'll be writing about, but I've got until December.

Hotel Palomar and exhale grand opening

Hotel Palomar
Originally uploaded by shinyu32.

The Hotel Palomar which houses the exhale spa in Dallas had its grand opening last night. The scene was truly Zoolander meets Paper City society pages. I got there around 8 p.m. with my friend Nicole and as we approached the building we could see acrobats outfitted in red costumes scaling the wall of the exterior and repelling off of the building. The spa offered free treatments and classes for three hours last night and next door at the Palomar, a fashion show took place in the main ballroom. The renovated space is gorgeous - the hoteliers had a decent display on the walls of minimalist painting and some black and white photographs which looked very Keith Cartesque, though the print quality was terrible - dust spots everywhere. Downstairs, the hotel offers the "214" bar/restaurant - Dallas' zip code. We think we saw Andrew Firestone of The Bachelor making the rounds of pretty girls at tables. Upstairs at the outdoor pool, my brother-in-law reports seeing guests having catwalk/walk-off competitions by the infinity edge pool. Across from the pool, a projection of Breakfast at Tiffany's played silently, while back on the rooftop terrace a string sestet with conductor offered the accompanying music. Trendy "bed" couches surrounded one side of the pool, with the couches being set off in an area where the striped curtains could be let down and drawn for privacy - very Middle Eastern tent in the desert effect I thought. Dallas has never seen anything like it.

I've had a bad head cold and felt very close-mouthed since returning from the East Coast. Something has to change soon.

I was liberated of my job at The Dallas Morning News three days before I left for Dodge in September. Overspending in the department, buyouts and layoffs upstairs, and the freelancers are first to go. This was after the departmental head made cuts to her "liquids budget" and monthly "birthday bashes." I think my co-workers started sweating it when the coffee budget was slashed and there was no longer any half-and-half available. And we went thru a two- or three-day period where there was no water for workers except for what runs thru the taps, which is rumored to be laced with gasoline. Since my last day, I've received weekly phone calls from The Dallas Morning News subscription department asking if I'd like to become a subscriber. Dumbasses.

But in a profound way, I do feel liberated from the inaneness of that environment. The build-up of inks and toxins in the flooring beneath the basement where the advertising department resides, and where once the printing took place. The "Office Space" atmosphere of too many people jabbering on the phone in cubes to children, potential cyber-spouses, office pool betting, daily sexual harassment usually involving bad dick references, and bad humor directed towards third world countries and the disabled. The co-workers hedging bets on who's a "plant" and whose most likely to go postal. The slow mental and emotional death of co-workers and the death of the American newspaper. The compulsive reading of the Frontburner blog and the buyout blog by DMN staff, looking for hints of where the axe is to fall next. Retool those resumes!

I was an easy target to be let go of - young enough to be able to find another job, no children, no mortgage.

So to the Dallas Morning News, I say thank you for making my decisions easier and for this extra time to devote to the writing life.

In the same vein, farewell graduate school. I was accepted into 1 of the 14 spots in the graduate anthropology program at Goldsmiths College in London. I can't say whether it's typical of the British or their educational systems, but my application was handled administratively by three people (none of them in admissions), two of whom left the college without notifying me of who would be taking over my application. The second handler lost my letters of reference. I received a total of 4 letters from the college, 3 acceptances, and 1 rejection. One after the other. There is no notion of "customer service" and if that is indeed the case, I know for certain intuitively that I would be miserable in an environment where my contribution to the academic community means yes, you're welcome, but give us first your tuition dollars and no we won't call you, but you can call us.

Yoga teacher training starts in a month. We're thinking now about moving to Seattle. State law mandates insurance claims pay for acupuncture. I look at the proliferation of jobs in the Pacific NW related to the environment, sustainability, community, and the choice seems clear. Get out of Texas.

My new poetry book which is in the final stages of being designed is now available pre-order at the Ahadada website. Check out the press' new offerings from Jerome Rothenberg and Jim Daniels.

Seven years ago, I had a teacher in Chicago who felt strongly that I should write a poem about perfect pitch in Chinese-language speakers based on an article she had read in the New York Times. I printed out that article and have carried it around from apartment to apartment in my idea file, thinking that someday I might write about it, because she said it was a good idea and that she was "throwing me a bone" and that I should quite literally, listen. Today, I pulled out my idea file and reread an article about Princess Sayako and later, came across that old NY Times piece. While it's an interesting notion, my pitch is good, but not perfect, I don't speak Mandarin and I don't plan on teaching any future babies Mandarin to preserve their perfect pitch. Old ideas that no longer fit or engage.

*Norinomiya

The Emperor gave
this advice to
his departing daughter

polish virtue

when at the age of 36,
Princess Sayako left the royal
court to claim a place
among the unwashed masses
surrendering her name
her title, a royal allowance
to become simply

Mrs. Kuroda,
taxpayer, dutiful daughter-in-law
occasional ornithologist.

My mother Noriko
married outside of her caste
the youngest descendent
of immigrant tenant farmers
Renounced her society to travel
to a far country where
she learned
to drive, handle
money, write checks,
her offspring spelling
out the numbers
of a foreign tongue.

Sayako learned
to bank
to cook
to clean
to shop
to park the car
to pay the bills.

At the age of 62,
my mother still dreams
a princess’ life-
time spent sleeping
late, watching soap
operas, pruning fruit trees
feeding bread to koi
skimming the net
over lotus pond,
polishing an image
trapped in a tangled
mirror of unanchored roots
and overgrown reeds.


* the informal name of the former Princess of Japan

Ever wonder what the process is of the Academy of American poets in choosing poets for their online poetry encyclopedia?

Additions to our poet pages are based on committee decisions by our staff, often with input from our chancellors. Because our goal is to create an online encyclopedia of poets, we regularly add new authors to the site. However, due to limitations in funding and staff time, the number of poets we plan to add always outstrips the number we are actually able to add. There are many fine and deserving poets that are not yet included on our site. While we have over 500 poets on our site, our "to do" list includes over one hundred poets, many of whom won awards from the Academy of American Poets, or participated in the Academy's programs, dating back to 1934.

The poets featured on our site are selected according to three primary
criteria:

1. To create a representative selection illustrating the history of poetry
in America.

2. To provide background information in support of the Academy's other
programs.

3. To provide resources on those poets who are most often researched online and taught in classrooms--as determined based on requests from our site's visitors, poetry-related surveys, and statistics garnered through analysis of search patterns and traffic on our website.

* * * * * * * *
Robin Beth Schaer | Chief Online Editor
The Academy of American Poets
584 Broadway #604 | NYC NY 10012

On teaching

While I was in New York, this past week, I took a Core Fusion class at the exhale spa at Central Park South, a few doors down from Trump Towers. I've been now to several classes, taught by three different teachers and it's been interesting to enter into these classes as both participant and observer. Thinking back to grad school now, I wish that I had been as attuned to how my teachers taught as much as what they were teaching. I don't know why teacher observation isn't a part of everyone's training who wants to go into teaching.

I see nuances in the way in which each of the core fusion teachers approaches a set of leg-lift exercises which can alternatively be done at the bar, on the mat on all fours, or lying on one's stomach (probably the hardest to get right). Though they are all meant to work the same set of muscles, self-correcting and getting the form right seems to be the easiest from a standing position at the bar. The teacher in NY was very good about correcting form, and also incorporating squeezable rubber balls into the workout to better target lower-body muscles. But she also encouraged a full range of motion on the plies, down to the floor, and for those with a knee injury (i.e. me), that would only exacerbate the tension already in my knee. Whereas the Dallas teacher emphasized very short movements and a small range of motion which is also effective.

Noticing all of these subleties and how things feel in the body, I'm excited to move forward with yoga teacher training next month and to better fine tune what works for me.

Musicians I would love to see in a future Dodge Fest dream lineup:

Leonard Cohen
Damien and Naomi
Sonic Youth
The Scholars
Girls Against Boys
Steven Taylor
Patti Smith

The Dodge Poetry Festival

Gerald Stern, Anne Waldman and Taslima Nasreen spoke on a panel on "the poet and the community." Taslima was exiled from her home country of Bengal for writing feminist poems which caused women to resist the patriarchy when realizing their god-given rights. She became a threat to the state and was threatened with hanging. She now lives in Calcutta. Gerald Stern said, "Well at least poetry is read in your country and you're not ignored."


Ko Un is a former Buddhist monk and an activist. He went on silent retreat for 10 years, during which time he did not write a single poem. His books are becoming more widely known in the U.S. - they include Three-way Tavern and Flowers of a Moment from Boa Editions.


This was a panel on the notion of silence in poetry with the international poets in attendance at the fest.


Elizabeth Alexander and Terrance Hayes spoke on their experience of Cave Canem - the retreat for African-American poets founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. A woman in the audience questioned the "eliteness" of the organization, asking if everyone who is accepted has a M.A. or MFA degree. Terrance countered by saying that the retreat has taken students from age 19 to a woman in her 90s. They'd even accepted someone who had been in jail for 7 years. Did that person get a M.A. during that time in jail, the same woman asked.


Matthea Harvey read delightful and unusual poems about a baby in a washing machine and hidden beauty - i.e. cakes with icing on the inside and petticoats on top of skirts. She was very nice. Her husband Rob works for CLMP in NYC.


Brian Turner is the poet of the moment. He wrote Here, Bulletwhich was published by Alice James Books which effectively exploded his career. The poems are of the landscape of war. He is softspoken, kind and full of humanity.


Ekiwah Adler-Belendez was the youngest poet to ever grace the mainstage at 19 years old. He writes surreal and emotionally evocative poems that awaken the heart - poems that are far advanced for his age and experience. He was born with cerebral palsy and a kind of scoliosis which has kept him in a wheelchair for much of his life. In this photo, Ekiwah had just read his last poem, accompanied by a drummer and vocalist Lori Cotler. As Lori closed down the song, Ekiwah began to make very slow and purposeful hand gestures. I just about burst into tears when I realized that he was dancing.

The new book