DAYBOOKS
Reading,
listening to, and looking at contemporary poetry
|
DAYBOOKS
Reading,
listening to, and looking at contemporary poetry
|
daybook 51 (2002)
24 December | The current issue of Publishers Weekly includes forecast reviews of Carolyn Forché's Blue Hour, Stephen Dunn's Local Visitations, Mary Kinzie's Drift, Sparrow's Yes, You Are A Revolutionary!, Merrill Gilfillan's The Seasons, Madeline Gins and Arakawa's Architectural Body, Brian Henry's American Incident, and Garrett Kalleberg's Some Mantic Daemons.
23 December | Word arrives that Joe Strummer of The Clash has died at the age of fifty.
22 December | Watched (and listened to) Young-Hae Chang's fast and delightful flash-animated text "La Lutte Continue" on the bare-bones website www.yhchang.com.
21 December | The newly arrived Boston Review features Karen Volkman on Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works, Brian Kim Stefans on Alice Notley's Disobedience, and Brian Henry on Alan Shapiro's Song and Dance. The issue also includes brief reviews of books by Devin Johnston, Oskar Pastior, Jacqueline Waters, Pam Rehm, Rebecca Wolff, Dara Wier, and others.
daybook 49 (2002)09 December | Publishers Weekly reviews Slowly by Lyn Hejinian, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet in Richard Zenith's Penguin translation, X.J. Kennedy's The Lords of Misrule, the Copper Canyon edition of Kenneth Rexroth's Complete Poems, Eileen R. Tabios's Reproductions of an Empty Flagpole, and the Station Hill reprint of Don Byrd's 1982 The Great Dimestore Centennial.
daybook 47 (2002)25 November | The current issue of Publishers Weekly reviews Kevin Young's Jelly Roll (A Blues), Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, Saadi Youssef's Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, Ammiel Alcalay's From the Warring Factions, Diane Wald's The Yellow Hotel, and Kristin Prevallet's Scratch Sides.
21 November | Martin Arnold reports in the "Making Books" column of the New York Times that Ruth Lilly, the 87-year-old heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, has bestowed a hundred million dollar gift on Poetry magazine.
19 November | Attended a reading by Heather Fuller and Mark McMorris.
daybook 46 (2002)15 November | Attended a joint presentation on "Art, Writing, and Politics after 9/11" by Alan Gilbert and Roberto Tejada.
14 November | Heard Alan Gilbert and Roberto Tejada read.
daybook 45 (2002)8 November | Drifted for the first time through the English translation of Chris Marker's Immemory cd-rom.
daybook 44 (2002)2 November | Heard Claudia Rankine and Cole Swensen read together at the MSA Conference in Madison. Rankine read a long piece that wove prose commentary on recent political events with digitally-generated sounds and images. Swensen read about eighteen poems from a new book project centered on the human hand.
1 November | Heard Ed Roberson and Nate Mackey read together in Madison, Wisconsin, as part of the Modernist Studies Association conference. Roberson did a thirteen-poem set drawn in about equal parts from Atmospheric Conditions and his most recent book. Mackey opened with a poem from Eroding Witness before settling into an eight-poem selection from Splayed Anthem.
daybook 43 (2002)25 October | Listened to Robin Blaser and Robert Creeley in a public conversation largely devoted to the contemporary political moment.
24 October | Heard Robin Blaser read from his new sequence, Wanders, along with work from the Holy Forest — including "Even on Sunday" — and the recent long poem "Great Companions: Dante Alighere I."
23 October | The New York Times reports that Dana Gioia is the Bush Administration's top choice for the next chairman of the NEA.
daybook 42 (2002)20 October | Watched the hour-long John Cage installment of Peter Greenaway's 1989 film 4 American Composers.
18 October | Attended a presentation on web editing by John Tranter of Jacket magazine and Brian Kim Stefans of arras.
17 October | Heard Brian Kim Stefans and John Tranter read.
daybook 41 (2002)10 October | Heard Chris Stroffolino read from Stealer's Wheel and more recent, as yet uncollected work.
daybook 40 (2002)03 October | Heard Nigerian poet Chinyere Okafor read in the New Writing Series.
02 October | Attended screening of Jayne Cortez's film Yari Yari: Black Women Writers and the Future.
daybook 39 (2002)29 September | Read Matthew Purdy's New York Times piece, "The Unrepentant Poet of Outrage and Indignation," one of the many articles about Amiri Baraka's poem "Who Blew Up America?" circulating on-line and in print this week.
28 September | Attended a talk by Clayton Eshleman on upper-Paleolithic cave art.
27 September | Attended Clayton Eshleman's lecture on co-translating Aimé Césaire.
26 September | Heard Clayton Eshleman read.
daybook 37 (2002)15 September | Previewed Something Wonderful May Happen: New York School of Poets and Beyond, the hour-long film Lars Movin, Niels Plenge, and Thomas Thurah made on the movement in 2001.
12 September | Heard Benjamin Hollander read his long poem Levinas and the Police in the first fall event of the UMaine New Writing Series.
daybook 36 (2002)09 September | Read a xerox copy of Benjamin Hollander's limited-edition chapbook from Chax Press, Levinas and the Police.
08 September | Read Benjamin Hollander's The Book of Who Are Was (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997).
daybook 35 (2002)02 September | Visited Ron Silliman's new poetry weblog on blogspot and read about Duncan's H.D. Book.
daybook 34 (2002)20 August | Read David Antin's "The London March: An Improvisation in Two Voices," included in the reprint of Talking by Dalkey Archive.
daybook 33 (2002)19 August | Read Karen Volkman's Spar.
18 August | Read David Antin's "Café Europa" in the current issue of Radical Society (formerly Socialist Review—and before that, if memory serves, Socialist Revolution).
17 August | Read George Albon's Thousands Count Out Loud, a thirty-three poem sequence dedicated to Dan Davidson and published in 1999 in a beautifully typeset edition by Lyric&.
15 August | Finished Dan Davidson's Culture.
daybook 32 (2002)09 August | Read Sarah Anne Cox's Arrival.
8 August | Reread Heather Fuller's Dovecote for the first time since January and visited the Perreaoult Daniels webpage referred to on the first page of the opening poem. • Also read "Bureacrat, My Love," the long second section of Daniel Davidson's Culture.
07 August | Read the "Product" section of Daniel Davidson's posthumously-published work Culture.
daybook 31 (2002)05 August | Read Susan Clark's "essay-performance as poetics statement," as lit x: the syntax of adoration, a chapbook in the Vancouver-based Friends of Runcible Mountain "Documents in Poetics" series.
04 August | Listened to Lissa Wolsak's "A Defense of Being" on the Q2 cd recorded by Keston Sutherland in April and circulated not long after to Quid subscribers. The disc also features poems by Andrea Brady and Drew Milne. • Listened to Jerome Rothenberg's "Three Paris Elegies" and David Antin's "Talking at Blérancourt" on the cd accompanying the volume Poésie américaine 1950-2002, edited by Jacques Darras.
03 August | Read Michael Gizzi's chapbook McKenna's Antenna.
02 August | Read Lissa Wolsak's Pen Chants or nth or 12 Spirit-Like Impermanences.
01 August | Read Nicole Brossard's Installations (originally published in French in 1984) in Erin Mouré and Robert Majzel's 2000 translation for The Muses' Company.
31 July | Read John Wilkinson's Parataxis chapbook, Signs of an Intruder. • Returned to Adeena Karasick's The Arugula Fugues, first read about this time last summer.
30 July | Read Dodie Bellamy's Cunt-Ups. • Also read the three volumes George Oppen published in the 1970s—Seascape: Needle's Eye, Myth of the Blaze, and Primitive—in Michael Davidson's new edition of the Collected Poems for New Directions.
daybook 30 (2002)
28 July | Finished Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy. • Read Keith Waldrop's "Claude-Mirror," Thomas Sayer Ellis's "Stalking Another Man's Hands," and three poems by Lytle Shaw in Combo 10.
27 July | Read books ten through twelve of Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy. • Also read Far Out West by Clark Coolidge.
26 July | Continued with Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy, reading books seven through nine. • Browsed in the eighth issue of the St. Louis-based annual Delmar, which features a reprint of Laura Riding's 1930 collection Though Gently and about fifty pages of essays about this work previously known only in an extremely restricted edition by The Seizin Press. Also spent time with poems by Chris Stroffolino and several other contributors to the "open" (non-themed) section of the journal.
25 July | Read poems by Martha Ronk, Veronica Corpuz, Kerri Sonnenberg, Brandon Downing, and Hung Q. Tu in Aufgabe 2. • Continued with books four through six of Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy.
24 July | Read the first three books of Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy.
23 July | Read "Happily" (which I missed in its stand-alone format as a Post-Apollo book in 2000) in Lyn Hejinian's The Language of Inquiry.
daybook 29 (2002)22 July | Read Jean Donnelly's Anthem. • The poetry forecast in today's issue of Publishers Weekly includes a starred review of Juan Felipe Herrera's Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler along with capsules on Lytle Shaw's The Lobe, Steve McCaffery's Seven Pages Missing, Volume II, and the Creeley- edited Best American Poetry for 2002.
21 July | In the summer issue of the Boston Review, Barbara Fischer reviews Forrest Gander's Torn Awake and Cole Swensen's Such Rich Hour, Yunte Huang reviews Marjorie Perloff's 21st-Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics with Charles Bernstein's With Strings, Brian Kim Stefans reviews Christian Bök's Eunoia, and Cole Swensen reviews Chelsey Minnis's Zirconia along with Catherine Wagner's Miss America. Among the works that receive briefer notice are Nate Mackey's Atet A.D., Philip Jenks's On the Cave You Live In, Dominique Fourcade's Everything Happens (in Stacy Doris's translation), and Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary.
20 July | Read David Perry's Range Finder.
19 July | Read "Talking at Pomona" in the Dalkey Archive reissue of David Antin's 1972 Talking.
daybook 28 (2002)14 July | Read Marcella Durand's Western Capital Rhapsodies.
13 July | Glyn Maxwell continues the TLS's mission to stamp out the nonsense that is "language poetry" in a review of A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (recently out from Blackwell and a rather flimsy pretext for Maxwell's broadside) in the July 5th issue of the British review journal. Interestingly, a short poem by John Ashbery—called "The Seventies," no less—runs as an inset on the closing page of Maxwell's attack: I couldn't tell whether it was a coincidence or an editorial wink at Maxwell's tired polemic. • Elsewhere in the U.K. press, the music journal Wire casts an appreciative glance at Kenneth Goldsmith's Ubuweb in their June issue.
12 July | Read Tyrone Williams's c.c.
10 July | Read Robert Fitterman's Metropolis 16-29.
daybook 27 (2002)08 July | Read the work of thirteen contemporary German poets—including Elke Erbe, Gundi Feyrer, and Waltraud Seidlhofer—as selected and translated by Rosmarie Waldrop and Andrew Joron for the second issue of E. Tracy Grinnell's magazine Aufgabe.
06 July | Kenneth Koch died of leukemia today at the age of 77.
04 July | Read Maurice Scully's 5 Freedoms of Movement.
daybook 26 (2002)26 June | Read Lisa Lubasch's Vicinities. • The news arrives via the Poetics List that Philip Whalen has died at the age of 78.
25 June | Read Noelle Kocot's 4.
daybook 25 (2002)24 June | Read Avery E.D. Burns's The Idler Wheel.
23 June | Read Lisa Robertson's The Weather.
22 June | Read John Ashbery's As Umbrellas Follow Rain.
21 June | Read contributions to the inaugural issue of 26 by Kit Robinson, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Lisa Jarnot, Rosmarie Waldrop, Rob Halpern, E. Tracy Grinnell, Claudia Keelan, Erica Carpenter, and George Albon. • Also read "The November Exercises" from the Dalkey Archive reissue of David Antin's Talking.
20 June | Read Katy Lederer's Winter Sex.
18 June | Read Geoffrey G. O'Brien's The Guns and Flags Project.
daybook 24 (2002)17 June | Read John Ashbery's Girls on the Run , having earlier in the month attended the Henry Darger show at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
14 June | June Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley. She was sixty-five years old.
12 June | Read Louis Cabri's The Mood Embosser.
11 June | Read Pascalle Monnier's Bayart in Cole Swensen's translation. • Also read "Moon," the second section of Bruce Andrews's Lip Service.
daybook 23 (2002)10 June | Read "Earth," the first section of Bruce Andrews's Lip Service.
9 June | Read George Elliott Clarke's Blue.
8 June | Read Philip Jenks's On the Cave You Live In. • Also Beth Anderson's Hazard.
7 June | Read Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary. • The "NB" column of the June 7th TLS reports that Black Sparrow, founded in 1966 by John and Barbara Martin, will cease publishing new books. The rights to works by Charles Bukowski, Paul Bowles, and John Fante have been sold to HarperCollins for its Ecco imprint—as for Spicer, Reznikoff, Yau, Myles...?
6 June | Read Karen Weiser's Eight Positive Trees.
daybook 04 (2002)
24 January | Read Michael Scharf's "I Love Systems" on ubu.web.
daybook 03 (2002)23 January | Pierre Bourdieu died in the overnight hours in Paris at the age of 71.
21 January | The BBC reports that Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband has been selected for the 2001 T.S. Eliot Prize.
20 January | Read Heather Fuller's Dovecote. • Also read Hervé Castanet's interview with Christian Prigent in "Le Cahier du Refuge" 102.
19 January | Read Joanne Kyger's Again: Poems 1989-2000.
18 January | Read the fifth and final section of Alice Notley's Disobedience, "Four Scarves and a Lion." • Received and began reading around in the inaugural issue of Cahier critique de poésie, a bi-annual review of French poetry edited in Marseille.
17 January | Read "A Private Occasion in a Public Place" and "A More Private Place," the final two talk pieces in David Antin's Talking at the Boundaries (New York: New Directions, 1973).
16 January | Read David Antin's "Duration" in What It Means to Be Avant-Garde.
15 January | Read the "Leveling" section of Alice Notley's Disobedience. • Also read "The Fringe" and "Spring Love Noise and All" in David Antin's 1993 New Directions book What It Means to Be Avant Garde.
daybook 02 (2002)14 January | Read Rodrigo Toscano's The Disparities. • Also read Mary Jo Bang's Louise in Love.
13 January | Read the middle section of Alice Notley's Disobedience, "Shit, Fire, and Crystal." • Also read Rod Smith's chapbook The Good House.
12 January | Read "The Strike" section of Alice Notley's Disobedience.
11 January | Read Vannina Maestri's Avez-vous rencontré quelqu'un en descendant l'escalier and Jacques Sivan's La jeunesse d'hercule, two chapbooks by the co-editors of the journal Java that have been published in the "poésies mécaniques" series of a Rouen-based press called Derrière la salle de bains.
10 January | Read "Veil," the section of new poems concluding Rae Armantrout's Veil: New and Selected Poems. • Also read Nada Gordon's Foriegnn Bodie.
09 January | Read the first section of Alice Notley's Disobedience, "A Scarf of Bitter Water (July 30- October 6, 1995)." • Also read Jacqueline Waters's A Minute without Danger.
08 January | Read Allen Grossman's How to Do Things with Tears.
daybook 01 (2002)07 January | Read John Tipton's Clause Automata, the first chapbook in a new series from Rick Snyder's Cello Entry. • The editors of Ubuweb posted their top ten titles of 2001 to the Poetics List today. They were: (1) Christian Bök's Eunoia, (2) Brian Kim Stefans's Dreamlife of Letters, (3) Kim Rosenfeld's Good Morning Midnight, (4) Bruce Andrews's Lip Service, (5) Steve McCaffery's Seven Pages Missing,, (6) Marjorie Perloff's Twenty-First Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics, (7) Morton Feldman's Give My Regards to 8th Street, (8) Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan's Swoon, (9) David Antin's Talking (re-issue), and (10) Charles Bernstein's With Strings.
06 January | Read Beth Anderson's The Habitable World.
05 January | Read the long collaborative collage piece based on Ada Lovelace Byron's life by Sydney Levy & Jessica Reichman, a suite of eight poems by Anne Talvez, and Henri Lefebvre's "Les Unités Perdues (feuilleton 2)" in the current issue of the French journal If, edited by Liliane Giraudon, Henri Deluy, and Jean-Jacques Viton in Marseille.
04 January | Read Juliana Spahr's Fuck You - Aloha - I Love You.
03 January | Read Eileen Myles's Skies.
02 January | Read Charles Bernstein's With Strings.
01 January | Finished Devin Johnston's Telepathy.
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daybook 52 (2001)31 December | Began Devin Johnston's Telepathy.
30 December | Read Brian Kim Stefans's review essay on Lyn Hejinian's The Language of Inquiry and Bruce Andrews's Paradise and Method in the December 2001 / January 2002 issue of the Boston Review.
daybook 48 (2001)01 December | Reread Laura Moriarty's Nude Memoir (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2000).
30 November | Read Damon Krukowski's review of Nam June Paik's musical Works 1958.1979 (Sub Rosa) in the December Artforum. "In fact, the traditional symphony orchestra could easily be an elaborate Fluxus joke."
29 November | Publishers Weekly's selections for the five best books of poetry in 2001: Argha Shahid Ali's Rooms Are Never Finished (Norton); Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy (Granary); Nathaniel Mackey's Atet A.D. (City Lights); Czeslaw Milosz's New and Collected Poems (Ecco); and Alice Notley's Disobedience (Penguin).
28 November | Listened to a 1960 recording of Piero Heliczer reading his 1958 collection you coul[d] hear the snow dripping and falling into the deers mouth.
26 November | Read A Purchase in the White Botanica: The Collected Poems of Piero Heliczer.
daybook 37 - 47 (2001)It is the air of atrocity,
An event as ordinary
As a president.A plume of smoke, visible at a distance
In which people burn.—George Oppen, Of Being Numerous 18
daybook 36 (2001)07 September | Read Rae Armantrout's new book from Green Integer, The Pretext.
03 September | Discovered "Nobody Knows a Thing," the terrific last track on Jayne Cortez & the Firespitters' Taking the Blues Back Home (Harmolodic 1996). "What can you do for us / that's not dis-as-ter-ous?"
daybook 35 (2001)28 August | Read Kevin Killian's Argento Series.
27 August | Gave a first listen to Aaron Levy and Andrew Zitcer's cd .aural, an hour long piece that takes John Cage's voicing of his diaries as raw material for a gently distorting remix. • Came across Bill Berkson's February 2001 interview with Chris Villars on the latter's interesting (and very lo-fi) Morton Feldman website. "I'd love to write something about Feldman," Berkson says, "but every time I think about it I get no further than the image of him leaning forward over a small lunchroom table on Lexington Avenue in the mid-'60s, huge bafflingly thick eyeglass lenses in tortoise frame, checked sports jacket, tie, delicate fingers wrapped around a cheeseburger, no pause in the talk."
daybook 34 (2001)26 August | Read around in the 2001 issue of Naropa's literary journal Bombay Gin, edited by Veronica Corpuz and Michelle N. Pierce. Jeff Derksen's "What to Do About Globalism (Bombay Gin / Led Zeppelin Mix)," Harryette Mullen's "Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language," and the twenty-four stanza excerpt from Anselm Berrigan's "Zero Star Hotel" are three of the strong pieces in an excellent issue that also features four b&w reproductions of Barbieo Barros Gizzi's collages.
25 August | Paul Dutton's 21-track cd Mouth Pieces arrived from U.S. music distributor Forced Exposure. On a first few listens, it's the sublexical labial and nasal cavity compositions that interest me most, followed by pieces like "Untitled" (voicings of the phrase "I don't know what to call this" that use pace and impedimentation to create different emotive shadings) and the ingeniously "accessible" piece "Beyond Doo Wop" (which lets you in on the percussive lipwork of "Blue Moon" and drops you off in a Hank Williams twanging throat drone, visiting each part of the vocal apparatus in between).
24 August | Read Ben Doyle's Radio, Radio, Susan Howe's choice for the 2000 Walt Whitman Award.
23 August | Returned to the opening poem of Lusk's Ogress Oblique, "For D.M. Fraser." Things to notice about this short poem: the unfamiliar proper name in the title, the riddle-like quality of the dedicatory line ("Rich in Russia, owed wot an Etruscan earned"), the blank because non-contextualized deictics of the first line ("& here it abounds": but where is here? and what is it?), the variation in stanza shape (shifting between variable left margin, fixed left margin, and paragraph forms), the way the semantic contrast between abundance and dearth is worked throughout the poem's thirty lines, the elegiac frame established by the third stanza, the omissive quality of the syntax, the love of lexical oddity, the emphasis given to sonic patterning at the syllabic ("rubbled breccia but") and lexical ("malison prehensile") levels, and the unexpected allusion to Arnold's "Dover Beach" in the final stanza.
22 August | Read Bill ("Reverend Billy") Talen's "Free Us from This Freedom" sermon in Open City 13. "Recent studies indicate that images of happy freedom are forced on us nine thousand times a day." • The New York Times reports that Jack Kerouac's archive (valued at around $10 million) has been acquired by the New York Public Library for an undisclosed sum. Access is to be restricted through 2005 or until Douglas Hinkley's biography of Kerouac is published.
21 August | Read the second installment of Peter Gizzi's long interview with Keith Waldrop in The Germ 5. "I'm not sure death is the mother of beauty," Waldrop says, "but without it—without, that is, its prospect—nothing would be serious, since it could always be done over. Of course, it can be done over—and probably will be—but by then it'll be somebody else's collage-element.... Maybe what interests me is the interruption, which at best makes a notch in time—of the sort that might be expressed by 'That couldn't have been written at any other time,' or, better, 'Nobody else could have written that,' or even just 'Well, that's the way they used to write" (315).
20 August | Read Accomplices: Poems for Stephen Rodefer, one of three Equipage chapbooks that arrived from Cambridge (UK) this morning and easily the most fucked-up homage volume I've ever seen. Ambivalence reigns, and it makes for some surprisingly good poems: Geoffrey Young's "The Break" is riveting, Ben Friedlander's "I Died of Shame" draws a wince, and Drew Milne's "Cut to the Quick" seems simultaneously to name the intention with which most of the contributors have written & the memory they seek retribution from Rodefer "for."
daybook 33 (2001)19 August | Reread Rae Armantrout's Made to Seem for the first time since its publication in 1995. "'When names perform a function, / that's fiction'" ("A Story").
18 August | Visited the bilingual (French and English) web magazine Double Change, a quarterly that has one issue loaded & another forthcoming in October. Jerrold Shiroma's page design is simple but elegant and the first issue—which unfolds beneath a Trevor Winkfield graphic—includes interviews with publishers Damon Krukowski (Exact Change) and Steve Clay (Granary Books); poems by Kimberly Lyons, Ron Padgett and others; a brief review of Burning Deck, Black Square, and Duration presses by Kristin Prevallet; and, in the "presses | maisons d'édition" feature, an easily accessible directory of interesting presses active in the U.S. and France today. • Flipping through the July issue of The Wire, came across a review of former Four Horsemen performer Paul Dutton's c.d.Mouth Pieces (from Quebec based Ohm/Avatar). Reviewer Julian Cowley makes things sound interesting with the following predicateless sentence: "Grunts and snorts, squelches and rattling, overtones that hum and buzz, braying, moaning, whimpering, whining, susurrations, hesitations and growls."
17 August | Read Pam Rehm's Gone to Earth from the new Chicago-based Flood Editions (which has also brought out Ronald Johnson's The Shrubberies, edited—or, to use the figure preferred by the author, "pruned"—by Johnson's literary executor Peter Leary). • Tipped by a posting to the Poetics list, visited the SF Bay Gaurdian website to read Johnny Ray Huston's appreciative review of Kevin Killian's Argento Series.
16 August | Listened to Christian Bök's sound poem "Motorized Razors" on the Poetry & Literature digital audio archive curated by Joel Kuszai for the Factory School site. • Took a first browse through Chain 8, the "comics" issue introduced & guest co-edited by Gary Sullivan. Catching my eye immediately were "The Scariest Movie I've Ever Seen," a ten panel strip written by Tamara Paris and drawn by Ellen Forney; Phoebe Gloeckner's melodramatic "Girl from a Different World"; Jeffrey Jullich's strip from childhood "Tales of the Legion of the Super Heroes: The Lone Wolf" (drawn when he was around 10 years old); and Thalia Field's imageless excerpt from "Rest/less" ("a hand-eye project rather than a journal").
15 August | Read Matthew Rohrer's Satellite, one of three new books from Verse Press.
14 August | From Andrew Epstein's "Real Poetry" in the June issue of Mirage #4/Period(ical): "I took this book to everywhere I was / going one day and finished that book / in 3 days after going 19 places."
13 August | "Le Canale:Synopsis" functions as a kind of appendix to Alexandre Delay and Emmanuel Hocquard's Le voyage à Reykjavik, but this photo essay is also an excellent primer for the topography enountered in A Test of Solitude and ma haie. • The New York Times today reported that David Yezzi, 34, will assume the directorship of the Unterberg Center at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Yezzi's institutional trajectory proceeds from Carnegie Mellon (undergrad) to Columbia (MA '95), to a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, to a teaching gig at NYU, with poems in Paris Review and New England Review, an editorial role at Parnassus, and reviews in the New Criterion, New Yorker, and New York Times Books Review.
daybook 32 (2001)11 August | Read Ray Ragosta's Opposite Ends, the second of a three chapbook sequence that Gale Nelson's Paradigm Press is publishing as part of the Isthmus Project (three chapbooks each by six poets).
10 August | Returned to Lusk's Ogress Oblige.
09 August | First reading of Dorothy Trujillo Lusk's Ogress Oblige, one of the four books in Krupskaya's 2001 series. • Also Rosmarie Waldrop's chapbook Cornell Boxes, handsomely produced by Seeing Eye in Los Angeles.
08 August | Back from a few days in Providence. Read Keith Waldrop's Semiramis If I Remember, the concluding volume in his trilogy from Avec.
daybook 31 (2001)04 August | Continued with Hocquard, rereading the interview with Henri Deluy that originally ran in Action Poetique and the "Projet de bassin 4" and "La Taupe." • Read Juliana Spahr's Dole Street, her latest chapbook under the subpo "self-publish or perish" initiative. Also listened to a 1999 recording made in Paris of her reading from "LIVELIVELIVELIVELIVE"—one of fifteen tracks on the c.d. that accompanies the special issue of "Le Cahier du Refuge" commemorating the tenth anniversary of cipM (the centre international de poésie Marseille).
03 August | Continued with Hocquard, finishing up the installments of "Les dernières nouvelles de la cabane" and reading "Cette histoire est la mienne" (also available, since 1999, in Norma Cole's translation as an Instress chapbook).
02 August | Began reading in Emmanuel Hocquard's massive new P.O.L. volume, ma haie. After taking in the epigraph from Bill Luoma explaining what a "level cut" is, I started with several installments of "Les dernières nouvelles de la cabane" (published weekly—"time permitting,"—in an edition of one) before reading "Ma vie privée" and the hilarious "Quand je n'écris pas."
01 August | The Germ's fifth issue, devoted to French poetry in translation and with a striking cover by Xander Marro, arrived in the mail.
31 July | Read Linh Dinh's A Small Triumph over Lassitude, from Renee Gladman's Leroy Press.
30 July | Read Adeena Karasick's The Arugula Fugues, newly arrived from Zasterle.