Going digital

This semester, I've discovered teaching writing and literature through glogs. My Piedmont College ENG211: American Literature from 1865-present class made a great cluster of glogs--and I, for one, am hooked! Participatory culture! More swoon!

Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake

Bloggerissimo, it's been a busy stretch! But I've done gone and completed a full-length version of Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake, A Memoir. You can pre-order your copy at Caketrain. I had a hard time writing this book, of moving into the material and through it and to its gift. But I'm so glad I did, and I hope you'll be glad too.

all codes lead to roam

Hannah Silva, wow

Hannah Silva combines sound poetry, theatre, dance, word...this is truly bountiful. So dynamic.

all codes lead to roam

Through much of the impressionable identity forming ages 8-18, I walked and slept outdoors in the North Florida pine scrub bayou Gulf ecology--the place has informed this psyche this body's rhythms and listens and profoundly. I felt the BP oil assault not only on the visible, locatable coordinates but within my own self the mindbody, where I had already located trauma related to the over development of the region. Poet and theorist Thom Donovan articulates body and place with terms that define both through a dynamic interplay with one another, helping to explain how we are ourselves extensions of a place, how if our waters are driven mad, so too are we.

The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico impacted me physically in a way I have had difficulty making of pain into plain. I was not literally onsite. Yet, the site is in this site, I. How to explain this? See Donovan below.

from "from Somatic Poetics" by Thom Donovan

"Since to any place inhere the things that have been there, and that (sometimes literally) remain there through their ‘half-lives’ (that remain undead, in other words). And since any body is not just a body, which is to say, never only a finite membrane or container but a complex extension, a bundle of what it has encountered, consumed, sensed, felt, and touched—the body is many different places at once (in neoliberal terms, it has ‘gone global’). Place is, then, extended by many different bodies at once (the logic of virus, outbreak, contamination, plague). Somatics is a site—the aesthetic site—where we undergo these places. The existences of these places within the body become framed, but also possibly moved (expressed, transformed, en route). ‘Remediation’ (the shibboleth for any number of public and corporate earthworks projects post-disaster) then not only occurs within a particular geography or topology, but in or at the body as a site coextensive with such places."

maid public

Happy Poetry Month bloggerissimo. For National Poetry Month, I helped select a poem as part of Danielle Pafunda's Cento contest. Here's one of the winning entries:


Isabel Shark "A Dog's Skull"

A Dog’s Skull
for Vanessa Place

in our hearts
a dog’s skull
you have lived
a dog’s skull
learn to petrify
a dog’s skull
to rescue
a dog’s skull
how fibrous and incidental
a dog’s skull
when my tweet time’s up I’ll collect
a dog’s skull
something offensive?
A sleepily indifferent dog’s skull.


Let silence drill a hole in
a dog’s skull
When my tweet time’s up I’ll go for
a hole
in a dog’s skull

the mystery of
a dog’s skull in one cento
Something offensive?
a dog!
Something offensive?
skull!
When my tweet time’s up
a dog in one cento
When my tweet time’s up
I’ll collect
A dog
wrapped in duct tape

Let silence drill
a dog
Let silence drill
hot black dunes

when my tweet time’s up
the wired
dog’s skull
The trick is to make
One cento or
a dog
The trick is to make
a dog’s skull cento

hey howdy bloggerissimo

Bloggerissimo, I am on Facebook so often these days I do neglect the blogging. But here's a poem for you on this holiday of love, that surge doth move us all:

LOVE SONG
by Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

ecopo

Check it out my bloggerissimo:
pressing on is a publishing initiative started in 2010 by Heidi Lynn Staples, using 'locally thrown' trash and rubber stamps to produce hand-made limited-edition chapbooks of poems first published at Poets for Living Waters.

The idea behind this project originated in response to two impulses. Firstly, the publishing onto fused plastics of poems written in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico fulfills the urge to suggest connections between practices dominating the more-than-human world--specifically linking the widening trash gyre in the Pacific Ocean with Macondo. Secondly, and as a complication, treating the trash as a material with aesthetic potential--transforming it into archived poems--seeks to answer a call by Slavoj Zizek in his lecture "Examined Life" that we refuse the conservative and ideological impulses of ecology and instead find a way to "truly love the world."

The first of these chapbooks will feature "Spill," by Angela Sorby in a limited edition of 3, the number of months the Macondo well let oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Ecologia

POETS FOR LIVING WATERS

Join poets Nicole Cooley and Tonya Foster, poets and editors of the Poets for Living Waters initiative Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples, and guest readers Jan Heller Levi, Marcella Durand, Julian Brolaski, Ana Bozicevic, Joanna Hoffman, and Brenda Iijima for an evening of poetry and eco-poetics in the wake of the large-scale catastrophes in the Gulf and surrounding regions. The online poetry forum and activist group Poets for Living Waters features daily poetic responses to the recent oil spill. For more information visit: http://www.poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/

Friday, October 22, 6:30 pm

The Skylight Room (9100)

The Graduate Center, CUNY

365 Fifth Avenue (btwn 34th & 35th)

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

No registration. Please arrive early for a seat. 212-817-2005

http://www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/

Wildlife

Last weekend, at the invitation of Joseph Woods and Patti White, UGA Poetry Bus headed down to Tuscaloosa for the Slashpine Poetry Hike and a reading in the Cahaba Wildlife refuge. UGA sent Lily Brown, Jessie Eisenmann, Laura Leidner, Claire Paffenhofer, John Stovall, Drew Wright, and myself for some am maze singing Outdoor Poetry Experience Nutrition (OPEN) [my spill ye acronym].

The first OPEN was a filming of poetry offerings, organized by Patti White and Joseph Wood at the Cahaba Wildlife Refuge. All aglimmer and noon a purple glow gleam glam film fish flesh nests friends winds lush shush and stir whirr land's word. Sod tomes whirr bade wide all. We shared the air with many fine multitudes. Gratitudes.

Co-labor elation

From right to left, bloggerissmo, you're beholding Claire Paffenhoffer, John Stovall, Lily Brown, and Laura Leidner,--half the Co-labor-elators heading to Tuscaloosa for the Slash Pine Press Poetry Hike and the first dish of the student-exchange between UGA and UofA. With the help of the Amazemint Jordana Rich and the support of the Wanderfull CWP program and English dept, we scored a van--aka UGA Poetry Bus. Thanks!

all codes lead to roam

Tribute poem to Leslie Scalapino over at Delirious Hem.

I composed this tribute piece by using 'Deep Sea Plumes' 'Loop Current' and 'Spill' to
read through an excerpt of Scalapino's poem 'that they were at the beach'.

Infusing her poem with these words of such high currency at the time of her passing enacts for me the meaning unfolding in the contemporary experience of reading all 'water' and most especially 'beach.' What a fright these words bare as the ocean becomes a site of wide-scale biotic trauma and systemic collapse--as the creatures 'whale' 'shark' 'porpoise' 'marlin' become 'mere-myth'...

In analogue to this decline in bio-verse-entity, our psychologies (the logics of our psyches) endure many deployments of profit-motivated poesis-cides. Daily, we try to be deeply in the invisible toxic deep sea plumes of modern commerce. We are caught in loop currents of manufactured associations, closing our I's and falling into our undreams. Hour flights of fancy and imagination seam gunked unto junk.

Yet, Scalapino she rows us now's tune sea. Thank you to Scalapino for the text ample of attention and active engagement in the me-ing May-sing, am's mazing, meaning making, thy aching springs.

co-labor at

We're 5 poets in two deployments from Athens, GA to Tuscaloosa, AL next Friday for Slash Pine Press Poetry Hike Weekend...which includes the U of Alabama/U of Georgia undergrad poet student exchange. I met with the participating students tonight for cafe and collab. They wrote an a maze singing poem calm's leap with marshmallows, fierce hippos, and "serious serious serious serious serious pillows." They've been collaborating weekly over the last three months in preparation for the event and have developed a reliable ability to improvise with one another--to listen, to respond, to find the edge and make it thrum. We're going on a reel poetry re: treat. Hop to see you there bloggerissimo! If nay, no worries. Pics and vids swoon to full 'lo!

I dawn lit...

Past the comps! Yay and yey and well, that was like two months ago my bloggerissimo. And them things did splay me nerves. Much enjoyable reading must be sped. Yet, yes PhD studies comboed with international move and preschooler done made me bleary-I'd...

Florid ideas, once up sun a pine...

reading for comp exams, i'm struck by how many poets have been inspired by the lush of the land we call Florida--our imaginations now to be glopped and lopped with loss.

here's one i happen to be reading right now by louise gluck, the tone of which seems right...

TO FLORIDA

Southward floated over
The vicious little houses, down
The land. Past Carolina, where
The bloom began
Beneath their throbbing clouds, they fed us
Coldcuts, free. We had our choice.
Below, the seasons twist; years
Roll backward toward the can
Like film, and the mistake appears,
To scale, soundlessly. The signs
Light up. Across the aisle
An old man twitches in his sleep. His mind
Will firm in time. His health
Will meet him at the terminal.

The O sheens

One reader of Poets for Living Waters asked: What is a ‘poetry action’? Or a ‘reading action’? He went on to suggest that poetry is a failure to act. Many folks may be wondering the same thing, so I thought I'd post a reply...

The phrases ‘reading action’ and ‘poetry action’ have been specifically created to point awareness toward the fact that self expression, listening, and independently distributing ideas are all indeed actions. One typically may not think of them as such because they are quite miniature in scale. Any type of ‘poetry action’ is profoundly nonheroic. By asserting ‘reading actions’ and ‘poetry actions’ we are enacting a value-system of the nonheroic and instead promoting a value system foregrounding the systemic, the relational.

A poem is more like a plankton than like a vigilante. Whoever thinks of plankton as particularly active? But did you know that within the plankton are the seeds of the clouds?

Poets are cultivating new climates for change.