Nail Polish Designer from Grace Miceli on Vimeo.

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Grace Miceli is the author of American Girl Doll, ok cool, Feminist Art Coloring Book, and Teen Angel Sticker Bitch, among others. She holds a B.A. in studio art from Smith College. Her visual art has been widely acclaimed online and IRL, and featured in each just as thoroughly. Please visit www.gracemiceli.com to visit her world.

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TRACKING THE MARVELOUS

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LUPE’S DIAMONDS

She had other nieces
at least eight
but mine was an expensive gift
to never lose
They were jagged freckles of light
My aunts said let her wear her hair down
no importa
burnt red lipstick and diamond specks
How I suffered from feeling blanched
in a world inhabited by amber
women who would never let me
run around like a wetback
in the snake high grass with heavy dust
in the shoes my cousins and I
hopped like grease
shed our skin and listened for rattles:
Have you seen my white son-in-law?
who went to the drugstore for me
The smell of the river is very old
and my back is slight from the liberty of it
When I suffered my aunt bought me diamonds
two flecks of cartwheeling light
to never lose
and when I lost them in the river
I got a second chance

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Monica McClure is currently based in New York City, where she teaches at Bloomfield College. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lambda Literary, The Los Angeles Review, The Adirondack Review, Loaded Bicycle, Indigest, The Lit Review, Paperbag, No Dear and elsewhere. She is co-editing, with poet Brenda Shaughnessy, an anthology, Both and Neither: Biracial Writers in America. [Author photograph by Nick Parkinson]

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MY SOLIDARITY

We meet in a reflective trench and you are skeptical
but then you begin to feel my solidarity
like a short-haired snake between your legs.
The snake starts to hustle, overweening
the lip of pants. Let’s you and I
never be cops to each other. Because we study
elephant lore, and in all the annals of elephant
adventures, there was only one cop. And he
was shit. Elephant stories are like pop songs,
one of the earliest forms of experiential autonomy.
Yes their appearance is in the form of money,
but they go into our mouths and we sing them beautifully
and when our lives are ruined we sing them again
at karaoke. And karaoke is one of the world’s
greatest displays of total solidarity. Almond waves
come out of my phone. Marzipan
insurrection not just televised but broadcast.
If you want to know the status of my solidarity,
look down at the lips on your nipples. We’ll be safe,
or at least in solidarity, reading Bhanudatta’s Bouquet of Rasa
and its comrade in literature, The River of Rasa.
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Brandon Brown’s first two books were published in 2011, The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced Press) and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya.) Poems and prose have recently appeared in Sprung Formal, Postmodern Culture, BPM, Model Homes, and Art Practical. In 2012, his debut play Charles Baudelaire the Vampire Slayer was staged at Small Press Traffic’s Poet’s Theater. His third book, Flowering Mall, is forthcoming from Roof in the fall of 2012.

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The Hills

A wolf whistle sounds. Street level shot of an apartment complex at night, windows lit. “Heidi and Spencer’s Apartment, Hollywood, CA” say white letters at the bottom of the screen. Shot of Heidi’s torso in a room with white walls. She has on a black, low-cut halter dress with russet trim. As she pivots her body, the tip of her bleached hair appears on her tanned shoulders. She lifts one hand to her face. Her face is out of the shot. Spencer appears to be sitting, back to the camera. He is in the left hand corner of the screen. All that can be seen of him is his torso and the back of his curly blonde head. He is wearing a white t-shirt and is out of focus. Heidi is in focus. Heidi walks across the room, back to Spencer. “That looks good,” says Spencer. “Those the shoes?” The camera zooms on Heidi. She half-turns toward the camera and Spencer, tan cleavage and face now viewable. Her face is doubled in the closet mirror. Spencer’s head prevents Heidi’s breasts from doubling. Heidi clutches at the mirror as her body moves up then down then up. “Think so,” she says. Shot of a girl’s tanned feet and ankles. She has French manicured toenails. One foot is in a black open toed peep toe pump, with a loosened ankle strap. The other foot balances on air, as if wearing a shoe. In the right hand corner of the frame, barely viewable, is an open brown leather suitcase. Wide angle shot of the room. Spencer back is still to the camera, mostly, except that a portion of the right side of his face is now viewable. His shirt has black gothic font near the armpit. He sits on a bed covered in unfolded piles of men’s clothes. Across the room, Heidi steps out of the black peep toe pump. A closet across from her is open, clothes spilling from it. One hanger in the closet points straight up. Spencer whistles again, spins two fingers. Heidi turns around without looking. She looks in the mirror. Close up shot of mirror. Heidi’s real head and breasts can be seen, half-blocked by a white wall in the foreground. The closet mirror takes up most of the shot. There is a silver divider down the middle of the mirror, which cuts Heidi’s mirrored body in half. On the wall reflected in the mirror is a light switch; two of the switches are on, one off. Heidi examines her body over her shoulder. Shot of Heidi walking across the room in bare feet, sweeping her blonde hair over her shoulder. Spencer lies on the bed, head on a yellow pillow. He fiddles with the plastic top of an Arrowhead water bottle with both hands. “I’m dying to see if Lauren, Whitney, and Audrina show up to Frankie’s birthday…” he says. Heidi is still walking across the room, not looking at him. Shot Heidi’s head and shoulders up close. She stands in front of a dark, open closet. Air escapes from her mouth. Shot of Spencer on the bed, still fiddling with the water bottle. “…somebody they’ve known for three months,” he continues. “And they didn’t show up their la—best friend’s housewarming partment—party.” Shot of Heidi walking across the room, only now she is holding envelopes in one hand and greeting cards in the other. “So I wrote Lauren a letter…” she says. Shot of Spencer picking at his fingernails. The Arrowhead bottle is tucked into the pile of men’s clothes next to him. He looks up. “…about not coming to the housewarming party.” Shot of Spencer on the bed with envelopes and cards suddenly in his hands. “Let me read these,” he says, smiling. Heidi’s hand can be seen picking up the cards and envelopes as they slip from Spencer’s hands onto his stomach and the bed. One card has a starfish on it and the other one has a beach scene with a lone palm tree. Under the cards, on Spencer’s stomach, is a silver cell phone. “Well, how bout you don’t read them, they’re personal,” says Heidi. “Ahhhhhhohhh,” says Spencer, widening his eyes. Shot of Heidi’s face smiling and leaning forward. The camera follows her as she bends over and pecks Spencer on the lips. Shot of Heidi straightening. “Okay should we go?” she asks, quickly. Shot of Spencer sitting up, catching the silver phone in one hand. “Look at this,” he says. A rap song with cymbals begins to play in the background. Shot of Heidi holding out a black men’s sports jacket. Spencer puts one arm through one sleeve. He is holding the silver phone with his other hand. Heidi smiles at his back as he slips into the jacket. “God, you come in handy so often these days,” says Spencer. The rap song gets loud.

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Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer, performer, and transmedia artist. She is author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), E! Entertainment (Blanc Press Diamond Edition, forthcoming), and The Fashion Issue (Wonder, forthcoming). She has also written five chapbooks, including, most recently, FASHIONWHORE (Legacy Pictures) and Kept Women (Insert Press, forthcoming). She is founding editor of Gaga Stigmata, an online arts and criticism journal about Lady Gaga, which will be published as a book from Zg Press in 2012.

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Insomnia

I wanna know which friend will die young, so I can spend more time with them now

by Rachel Glaser

you hurt my feelings so I lie and say,
I do wanna fuck my roommate

I say, We’ve pushed our beds so they share a wall
dirty dishes are inevitable

when you were young and bumped your head on the table
your father would make a show of hitting the table

when you bumped your knee in the doorway
your father would kick the doorway

I wanna know which friend will die
so I can surprise my other friends

we climb into the car, lick the cd
pick the mountain with the most views

L e t ’s t r y p r i m a l s c r e a m t h e r a p y
S c r e a m a s l o u d a s y o u p o s s i b l y c a n

I SCREAM

dogs learn terrible truths

I SCREAM

teenagers cry over the telephone

C o m e o n , e v e r y o n e t r y !
but no one else will
W h a t e v e r, I say
Y o u r p e r s o n a l i t y w i l l s t a y t h e s a m e
W h i l e m y p e r s o n a l i t y e v o l v e s !

when you got a paper-cut
he’d march that paper to the shredder

I wanna know which friend it’ll be
so I can tease that friend about it

we all did our part in making the bathroom disgusting
one of the cats we hated, one we revered
both we tried to lose on Craigslist

there were so many views I felt ill
on our way to the mountain, the mountain was the view
on the mountain, where’d we been was the view

I met a boy
he had a thing you could put
I had a place you could go

my boobs looked so good I had to show his kitchen
clear stuff was all over his hands
There isn’t even a name for this, I said
That’s how elusive it is

I wanna know which friend
so I can become less good friends with them

MTV had already ended
our parents were still familiar

I’m a feminist, I said to his pillow
That means I get two orgasms and you get one

I pushed the boy’s balls into a shape
Stop making dick art, he said
I pushed them into another shape

Rachel Glaser is here

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SONNETS by Bernadette Mayer

WHAT’S YOUR IDEA OF A GOOD TIME?

(To sum up our tryptych of posts for Dorothea Lasky, I present a brief and delicious interview)

It seems like some of the best writing that’s happening right now is coming out of the Amherst/ Northampton area. I’m thinking of Natalie Lyalin, Heather Christle, Emily Pettit. Matthew Zapruder went to school there. So did you. What’s the secret?

My instinct is to add to that list with the large number of great poets, writers, musicians, and artists who have come out of there also. But I am not sure where I would stop with this list. So, I will just shake my head and say yes, I agree.

That area is a generative space. Of course, I think so because I went to MFA school at UMass-Amherst (all of these people went to UMass, if not for MFA, then for undergrad.) The MFA program there is wonderful, it just generates. My teachers were Dara Wier, Peter Gizzi, James Tate, Noy Holland–they all taught me so much.

When I lived there, people always called the area the Happy Valley. I am not sure the origin of this, but there is something to the name. Amherst/Northampton, on the whole, is a very tolerant place. As an artist, I never felt more free to exist there and be myself. Where I hung around there, there was a dominant culture of acceptance of behaviors (although, probably this is a bit skewed as most behaviors there are pretty normative.) Still, I think tolerance is the ideal space and culture to create from within. And I think, despite the constricting other places I have lived, I carry this freedom with me always and probably these other poets do, too.

Sure. I developed my style after a long period of trying to hide what I was saying as much as possible in my poems. That is to say, for a long time I was interested in being as mysterious as possible and creating circles of language that the reader would never be able to follow. I think I distrusted my reader for a long time. Then somewhere in there, I realized that my reader was a person, just like me, who I trusted, but who existed outside of myself. So then, I decided I’d rather try to be as clear as possible and I combined the two instincts into the way that I write today. Still, I think my first instinct–mystery–always governs the poems a little no matter how plain-spoken they seem.

I think language can always bring about physical change. I think language has weight, exists in the material world. It creates new materials by turning into and/or changing a thought. Thoughts, spells, and poems are physical things (they *almost* literally take up space in the brain.) And changing thoughts also make all kinds of physical change and actions quite literally. Words are the finite forms of a changing thought. They too have weight.

Anyway, casting a spell is like changing a thought, so I guess, yes, I do believe a poem can bring about actual change in the physical world. And, yes, I do believe that a poem can act as a spell. (And vice versa.)

I think of Poetry Is Not a Project as an educational text and I take this category very seriously. I believe in sparseness, elegance, and clarity when explaining an idea to someone. I don’t like to flaunt the complexity of an idea when presenting it to a reader, because I think more often than not this turns off the very readers who are most important to me. In terms of discussing poetry, I don’t think less is more. But I don’t see the book as poetry scholarship, so I think my method is ok in this case.

I spend a lot of time listening and talking to people. I think the things people say, the ways people feel, and what lives they lead are my greatest influences outside of poetry itself.  Other than people, the visual world is a great influence to me and also, dancing and performance. The physical, spatial world and the arts that are closest to this world are among my biggest influences.

Justice

Click here see Dorothea Lasky’s new book of poems Black Like. Click here to see her chapbook  POETRY IS NOT A PROJECT.

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by heart

Dorothea Lasky’s POETRY IS NOT A PROJECT made huge waves when debuted at this years AWP. The newest book on UDP‘s Dossier imprint, Lasky lays out, in 19 quick pages, a theory of poetry that reaches back through High Romanticism into a more hermetic time. Illustrated beautiful throughout by Sarah Glidden, Lasky’s theory pushes against the limits set out by conceptual writing, striding toward a more cosmic and otherwordly approach to artistic creation. There’s a lineage of deep thought coming from poets back from Blake to Spicer’s ideas of poetic dictaction and Barbara Guest’s short collection of writing on art, Forces of Imagination. I was graced with the wondrous task of editing this book, and I present to you a soundbytey narrated version of the greater text, so you can get a flavor of what’s happening here.

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“I once heard a scholar use the term “project” as he introduced another poet at a reading. He went on and on: “Her project echoes Dickinson’s project [blah blah blah].” The comparison seemed fine, but I wasn’t really sure the poet in question really had a “project” per se. Nowadays, poetry critics and scholars often refer to an entire body of work by one poet as a “project,” but I don’t think poems work that way. I think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain”

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“One day, many years ago, I was walking along the street, minding my own business, thinking of my future, and all that. As I turned the corner, I ran into an acquaintance of mine. He happened to be a poet. This acquaintance asked me what I was doing and I think I said “nothing much.” I asked him the same and he told me that he was working on a project where his goal was to go to the local art museum every day for a month and write a poem about a different piece of art each day. I told him I thought that was nice, because I thought it was. I like when people write poems about art. I like the idea of poetry being alive in museums. Months after our meeting, I went to see my acquaintance give a poetry reading. He was reading from his museum project and I was interested in hearing his poems, especially because I knew the museum he had written them in and liked a lot of the art there. Before he started his reading, he read an essay he wrote about his project. His logic was interesting. Then he read his poems. I did not like them. After the reading, people talked to him about his project and in general, most people liked the idea behind it, as did I. No one talked to him about his poems. His poems were not important to his project. His project was important to his project. Everything that mattered was in the idea.”

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“being able to talk about the process of your work as a poet can sometimes breed its mediocrity”

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“I am indebted to and in love with Bernadette Mayer’s writing experiments, with the experiments and exercises of the Language writers and the French Surrealists, and with beautiful forms of Flarf…but the poems were the most important parts of the whole thing. If a project does not get to a real poem, then it is not that important to your work because it generates nothing.”

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“In a great poem, there is no certain beginning, middle, or end to the real human drama which incited it, propels it, and will finish it. What differentiates a great poet from a not-great one is the capacity to exist in that uncertain space, where the grand external world (which means anything and everything) folds into the intense internal world of the individual. In this moment, the issues of the self become one with the universal. In a poem, the poet makes beautiful this great love affair between the self and the universal. And like all kinds of love, linear intention (a plan) has nothing to do with it.”

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“When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.”

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“Poetry is not the project of a poet—it is the very life of the poet.”

To see more about UDP, or to order the book, click here

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See more about Dottie Lasky’s POETRY IS NOT A PROJECT here

Get it at AWP while the ink is still wet. Available at the UDP portion of the “table X publishing commune.”

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Book Review: Map of the Folded World (John Gallaher)

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Concerning all the recent discussions about memory, recitation, etc, I thought I would try it in my own way. I should disclose that I never recite my own poems from memory at readings. I think it is corny, weird, it makes me uncomfortable, and frankly, to spend that much time memorizing your own work is kind of sick.

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I want to rebel against my own ideas.

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I tried to write a poem entirely in my head and memorize it. I would never write it down. All editing would take place in my head. Line for line. The entire building and reconstruction could only exist abstractly. No writing as an aid. I would memorize the final poem. I would recite the poem and that is how it could live.

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This is how it went: First I had a few lines, but I could only get at it by starting from the beginning over again each time. I imagined the line breaks and pauses to help remember it. I decided maybe I would to add three lines a day. I would imagine the form entirely in my mind. Maybe 12-16 lines total. A good length lyrical poem. It would be difficult.

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I felt I was cheating. Picturing a form, with lines, line breaks, and any visual form seemed to me a kind of writing. Since I wasn’t marking anything down, why should there be “lines?” It’s just words in my head. There was also no need for form. When you recite a poem that you’ve seen on the page, imagining the stanzas certainly helps, but for this particular project (and yes it was becoming a project and yes I hate projects!) I felt that if I pictured lines, or stanzas, then that would essentially be the same as writing it on paper, because those forms are meant to see written and seen as a way of organizing thoughts on a page. To be true to the imaginative strength of the mind, it would just have to be a string, the rhythm of which would intuitively generate itself as I repeatedly said the poem allowed or thought it.

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To order these words, these thoughts, I began imagining the actually words. Not just the sound. I saw the words in sequence. But to fix the words in an order seemed to me to always constitute a kind of writing. I felt I was cheating. It was also the kind of writing I could not get space from. It would be impossible to reflect upon the poem if I constantly had to carry it around. It would never sit and get cold. I could never see how shitty parts of it were and try and mend it. I got upset. It was becoming a drag on all accounts.

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I decided that the only way this poem would be good, and interesting, and truly exist on the level, was if I created it anew from nothing every time I recited it. I would have to make up a new poem everytime. That would keep it from becoming this totally limiting enterprise. Because to go from memory is so safe…the only danger is forgetting, and thats more of a social anxiety than actually having anything to do with whats at stake in the greater art of it. Because to memorize my own thoughts, as megalomaniacal and funny an idea as it was, was really just writing another poem, and it wouldn’t be good. I am very happy to have moved on from this ludicrous idea.

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Ben Luzzatto’s THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, ABRIDGED (UDP, 2010) is one of those rare artifacts that transfers its own actual magic—and it is real magic—until the possessed begins to lift a bit toward the sky.

Ugly Duckling Presse has been summed up quite well here as “a publishing collective specializing in experimental poetry and new editions of forgotten textual artist, producing lovely, cheeky books by authors you’ve probably never heard of but your grandchildren will likely read in college…a nesting ground for swans of the avant-garde poetry scene.” It’s true that I do feel personally attached to many titles UDP has produced (such as this or this). THEORY is the most recent in its Dossier Series, which produced the wonderfully heady though deadly pretentious  Notes On Conceptualism, and soon will bring out Dottie Lasky’s Poetry Is Not a Project.

When I first held this particular book though, I do what I do with most books, hold it open it at a distance so I could see the entire cover spread. There was a figure of a someone umbilically attached to something, floating away, or recoiling. An astronaut? A cosmonaut? Where does that road go? You can’t see because of my shaky camera hands, but this is spot glossed over all the silver. This book was printed in Iceland by Oddi, and I haven’t read one word of it as of this point in my engagement and it’s practically trembling in my hands.

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, ABRIDGED, is broken into three sections. 1) The Aqueous Humor, 2) From Nonsense to New Sense, and 3) The Theory of Everything, Abridged. Each is a section of conceptual projects narrated by Luzzatto. The first section, The Aqueous Humor, we get what Luzzatto is after in his writing that oscillates from lyrical dreaminess to the more squared off language inherited from the Era of Theory:

“I don’t want to solve the mysteries of the universe, I want to know how I am a part of them…

The more you understand how you are already a part of something, which is the same as understanding how you see something, the more you can separate yourself from it. It is what it was, which already included you, but then it is also something else, which you know does not include you. You have remained together, but you have also become separate.”

Luzzatto’s ideas as he talks them out seem small compared to the immensity of his ideas as he documents them in photographs that accompany the text . We see images of the Cosmos, an umbrella made of funnels, and in section two, From Nonsense to New Sense, an ontological experiment where the subject ties a bungee cord to a tree (then dashes away from the tree without knowing the length of the rope)

Section three takes up most of the book, and one huge thing I’ve not mentioned yet is that this section involves yet another magickal feat of design, about 80% of the book has a hole through it:

This flip section shows two images of Luzzatto standing on a streer corner. The image below shows through the hole and remains static while the images above narrate a street scene in a city. The animation allows Luzzatto to complete his theory of everything:

“I see two of everything but I am usually not aware of it. A world that comes from me, which is expectation, and a world that comes to me, which is what I do not expect. Most of the time they do not appear to be separate.”

My favorite experiment of Luzzatto’s comes in section two, where the artist makes clouds (!) from helium-inflated urethane cells. I had a dream recently where I was back in my hometown hanging out with my buddy Cori and there was a street that was the actual place where all clouds were made. We were watching them appear out of nothing until they were heavy enough for the wind to lift towards to sky. Amazing. I don’t know what it means (what would Freud say?).

Luzzatto however makes clouds while he is actually awake, and it seems, he is quite good at talking about the whole thing (text following the images):

I assume there is a specific moment/distance at which the cloud disappears as it is rising up into the sky. When it is on its way up, still close to us and clearly a manmade cloud, it is more difficult to see the world that comes from me; it is more difficult to see a cloud that comes from my looking At a specific distance the cloud disappears. It looks like the other clouds in the sky…by making clouds disappear I am able to see how I see.

To see more about UDP, the book, and clouds, click here

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Hope is: Wanting to Pull Clouds, (Sigmar Polke, 1992)

Sunday evening I encountered this artifact created out of the weekend’s leftovers. I had been showing family around who had never been nyc before. That meant three miserable days of walking in the rain while forcing myself to be cheerful. This stream or river or rainbow or spittle-barf of umbrellas was an affirmation to me of whats most at stake in being conscious, (which could be described very quickly, I guess, as a reaction). Whoever made this left no trace of themselves nor stuck around to explain. Less is almost always more. I love you, whoever made this, for that.

With the creation of one of the high achievements of mankind, Twin Peaks, David Lynch made a world so ecstatic it demanded its own reality. I’ve been really thinking about Julee Cruise and Twin Peaks SO MUCH lately. What makes it so good? Where did this music come from? Who is Julee Cruise *really*!? Why is this music so appropriate after dark?

Lynch obviously takes a lot of cues from Kenneth Anger, particularly Anger’s bike films Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos. With these, Kenneth Anger added simple bubble gum pop songs over ritual cruelty and raw sexuality, (not only inventing music videos,) but also exposing basic desires as a violent, cold thing.

David Lynch uses Julee Cruise in his work the same way, but also in a new way. Lynch and Badalamenti wrote the songs that she recorded for the soundtrack, which are pretty much 60′s pop songs with a lot of 80′s dream-synth-wash. They use this heavy dream-style kitsch to provide emotional information outside of the acting and dialogue. Isn’t that what every soundtrack does? Ok, yes.

BUT It’s no secret that Twin Peaks is a world that is not our own. Most TV shows succeed by mirroring reality enough that we look for our own lives in them. Twin Peaks is the opposite. From the music, to James Hurley’s face, the black and white zig zag floor, the Twin Peaks feeling is so deep and uncanny, that when something happens in our day-to-day world that resonates with David Lynch’s world, well…I guess you make of it what you have to. Here’s all of this really densely in Blue Velvet:

So what happens in a world, our world, when we’ve gone through the looking glass, and come out and still wanted to say something true to our human concerns, but, like, to actually get up a do something serious as an “artist” is kind of a joke, (this is, after all, 50 years after Scorpio Rising, 30 yearrs since Ian Curtis died, and 20 Nirvana got signed to a major) ?

Maybe the people who are getting it right are the ones who don’t seem timeless at all is what I’ve come to understand. Maybe to deliver the absolute truth (don’t quibble) you have to go around a million galaxies (or so it appears) to get at the “real talk” of it. Ryan Trecartin comes to mind. His work is poetry-times-a-million.

I recently saw on TV that one of the farthest flung objects in outer space is a satellite containing almost a hundred languages detailing the instructions of our world to extraterrestrials. It gave me a good visual image of what I was kind of feeling. I guess sometimes you have to go that incomprehensibly out of this world to get an explanation for what the hell is going on, and how the hell we are actually feeling in 2010:

I really love this book.