every blond primary school cohort is not named glen
if a man’s hands are soft it doesn’t mean he’s gay
farmer is not synonymous with straight
there are more than 3 options
married (“normal”) living with a special friend (gay)
or single over 30, therefore pedophile
Leslie Scalapino's reading
Both Giscombe and the second speaker of the evening of January 31, Scalapino, have been publishing for decades and the world being the unpredictably variable size it is, they had not seen each other in 22 years before they encountered each other again as co-readers at The Poetry Project.
Scalapino has published around 30 books of poetry, plays and literary criticisms. She likes to deconstruct understanding as well as syntax to see the underlying ways we construct meaning. It gives something of a Picasso effect to syntax.
Scalapino was profiled in depth by the online journal How2, with a focus on the “spirit of inquiry into modernist and contemporary innovative writing practices by women”. Critical Feature on Leslie Scalapino, including reviews, interviews and her on her own poem, Cat is night. To get a sense of how the work flows together that would be the best bet.
She read from excepts of her work that is forthcoming, Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night. She preambled by saying picked non-sequential excerpts to go beside each other to see if they would interact and bounce new concepts out by their being near each other. I suppose I amplify that process by having written so illegibly that there are gaps and shovings together that she didn’t have.
It is a much dense poetry to be in the air as opposed to the page. She spoke to the Iraq war and night and conscience, Creeley and how one is actively engaged in making meaning or else accepting premade meanings imposed on you. You have to be actively aware, engaged to step outside the dialogue that comes pre-canned and think critically.
night sky would
be
dualistic in
night crushing language
sky reversing language
yet the dawn also
[…]
future is sound
ones motions
without extension now
a man’s trunk can
a man is a
tango[…]
repeats just space
oppression is the social
[…] action isn’t vertical
or horizontal the gap
between sleep
and not dreaming[…]on the mere allegation
of their terror
ism dead
their decom
position acceptance
as if that we the being
Scalapino’s recent book, The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence of poetics and poetry criticism has already had a couple titles past it. She’s a prodigious writer with some some political and poetical fire.
Gisbombe at St. Marks
St Mark’s on 10th St. NYC has The Poetry Project which has been running over 40 years. It has public readings at least twice a week, and a few workshops series that run thru the year. The next session is run by Douglas Rothchild and a couple others.
It’s a pretty healthy organization from the looks of things, with the night we went having somewhere over 70 people in attendance to hear C.S. Giscombe and Leslie Scalapino read from their works in progress, Prairie Style in the case of Giscombe.
For over 20 years Giscombe has been exploring social, geographic and identity boundaries of place and race and ending, in poetry. He has done a fair bit of exploring of different geographies physically as well. Physically he’s been in north-eastern North America, and is next switching to a position at the University of California at Berkeley. A recent book entitled Into and Out of Dislocation is something of a travel memoir of exploring BC, Canada for traces and stories of a pioneer who shared his family name.
Giscombe’s writing is accessible. He has some spectacular lines as he meditates on the nature of landscapes that form us as we form them through skylines and the cycles that comes out of it. From jottings of lines from his reading that struck me…
[realize] this far inland
it’s only erotic from a distance
…
juxtaposition is a kind of melodrama
…
some are descendants of their own property
for others history
is one surprise after another
…
Samples of his current manuscript in progress cycle through ideas of landscape and love, what we create and how we are created. His current work is an exploration of the regional consciousness of the midwest.
It would make an interesting dialogue to pair what he is discovering with what Tom Montag is finding as he also studies the literature of midwest regional culture in his Vagabond in the Middle Project. Montag seems to be going from the specific instances of local characters saying particular things in order to generalize to the defining overall regional culture and Giscombe seems to be coming from the holistic to get to the particular word.
In Giscombe’s chapbook Inland there’s a piece entitled Prairie Style (2) that illustrates more of his longer flow of how one idea merges into the next in a melodic way. It reads in part,
Male, female. Black men say trim. An outline’s sameness is, finally, a reference. Towns, at a distance, are content and reference both — how they appear at first, a dim cluster, and then from five or six miles off; how they look when you’re only three miles away. In between sightings is the prairie itself to get across: trek, trace, the trick of landscape. Love suffers its wishfulness — it’s an allegorical value and the speaker mimes allegory with descriptions of yearning, like the prairie’s a joke on us (among us),
—
Cross posted at Humanyms with there having a photo.
Second Time Around
Second Time Around Poetry Contest: Open to everyone
1st prize – $200 2nd prize – $100 3rd prize – $50
plus five $20 honourable mention awards, plus publication in “verse afireâ€
*all cash awards paid in Canadian dollars only
Poems must be previously published
Rules & guidelines: each poem to be no longer than 50 lines and the spaces between the stanzas count as lines. All themes and styles welcome. Blind judging: no author i.d. To appear anywhere on the same page as the poem. Include a separate sheet bearing poem title, or first line if no title, author name, address, phone number & e-mail (if possible) and publication credit(s) are a must.
entry fee: $5 per poem
deadline: entries to be postmarked no later than Mar. 31st,2007
send entry with cheque or pmo payable to:
The Ontario Poetry Society
31 Marisa Court, Thornhill, Ontario L4J6H9
enclose a #10 s.a.s.e. for winners list
—
I’m not affiliated with them but it seems like useful info to pass along.
—
heart rate jump
face, fire hydrant flushing
arterial feeds neck heats
push bass thru enamel
does pulp in teeth, pulse?
is it lips, the petals too swollen
for words, filled with slow buzz
if they opened, pressed against air,
would close around a gulped
pocket of thermal plume of stimu
lus of room where he was
thoughts disperse as hornets