Alli Warren & Michael Nicoloff, Bruised Dick

A stapled chapbook of fourteen poems, none over a page long. No press name, date, or other publishing information other than the title page: Bruised Dick, Alli Warren & Michael Nicoloff.

Warren and Nicoloff collaborated on the poems by emailing each other back and forth--that's all I know about the process; whether the collaboration was line by line, or phrase by phrase, or some other method, I can't say. What I can say is that the finished poems are required reading. "Required" in that loose sense of if you don't you will be like the lone person in the room who doesn't know about the very cool thing that other people are having a wonderful conversation about, or like the first little mouse who drowned in the bucket of cream instead of the second little mouse who thrashed about, churning the cream into butter, and finally climbed out (I got that from Christopher Walken in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can--the perfect all-purpose analogy).

The language of these poems gets in your head and takes up residence there, bringing its own definition of habitus, which it guards jealously against the coercive grammatology of classical landlord/tenant ideation. I hope the authors won't object to my quoting an entire poem, the first one:

Bad Twin

and I was there
and fought him strangely on the roof of it
how men in each state voted
for us to mimic namesake features and how I
specifically was to be the one
to love to handle the kerchief
and I did I loved as if
a vivid and sympathetic policy
to breakfast out of doors
swathed my tats
in full light of appearance rearing
this drafty expanse
and I was facing forward
and I realized bread
not reclining tipsy on the sectional
severe to our employees
and employers denying a tidy message
of how to bruise the hands in public
in sight of baggage tractors and nationalities
of all persuasions--about a quart per hour
per worker goes the rate of toxic blight
need not marvel at the slump

I love the clausal movement of this piece, the way the syntax proceeds more or less unbrokenly down the length of the verse until it hits bottom and fractures at the last line. As a tissue sample, take the application and distribution of the word "and": it appears nine times in the poem, six of those times as the first word in a line, and in the first case as the first word of the poem. That first instance is followed hard upon by the second instance, in the second line. Having thus established the basis of an anaphoric pattern, the poem breaks the pattern by inserting the third and toward the end of the fourth line, where it engages in a subtle constellatory pirouette with the second of the poem's three hows. When and next emerges, it is again the initial word in the line, as though attempting to effect a temporary renewal of the anaphoric principle, but just as quickly deferring it again in the next line, where it is the third word. We then have the longest stretch of and-free lines in the poem (four of them), before we have the second and last instance of full anaphoric repetition: two more lines both beginning with and. The remaining instances are spaced fairly evenly across the rest of the poem, leaving three lines at the end in which it does not occur.

I've paid so much attention to and because a) it's the first thing formally that jumped out at me, and b) it's obviously an important word to discuss in the context of syntactical extension. I could go on from there to observe that in addition to the nine aforementioned occurrences, the word is also embedded in the words handle and hand, six lines in from the beginning and then five lines up from the bottom of the poem. Or I could note that in five of the nine main deployments of the word, it is coordinated with the subject "I" (six if you count the second line, in which the grammatical structure carries over from the first line). The important point, maybe, is that we're only at the first poem in the chapbook and already I can't resist playing Roman Jakobson. These compositions provide the reader with numerous low-key intricacies--designs, or design-like tendencies--that are almost impossible to separate from a general undercurrent of pregnant pre-sense, or motivated reference in a tightly wound state of potentiality.

They also have some great titles, like "People in Berkeley Need to Get Down with General Spatial Awareness," "Chiseling My Basket," "Tomorrow I Will Mow You," "You Hold It Right There While I Hit It," and "Alli and Michael's Institutional Critique." There's even one called "I Accidentally Domed Your Son," which I recognize as the title of one of the lowest-rated movies on IMDb. Should I put this on my Netflix queue? And of course there's the title poem, "Bruised Dick."

I guess you'll have to contact Alli and/or Michael via their blogs to find out if it's possible to buy a copy.

Flim

Chris Piuma has made available the archives of flim. Fun!

3 Chapbooks

I have two big stacks of recent publications flanking my chair as I type this, and a lot of them I haven't cracked yet. There are three chapbooks, however, that I have been neglecting to mention here for a few weeks now.

Rob Halpern's Imaginary Politics, a TapRoot Edition, contains some of the material that will be included in a longer work in progress, Music for Porn. It's thin both in its cover dimensions (about 5" by 10 1/4") and its length (fifteen pages of text), but not in its quality as a piece of poetic composition (or as a physical book--it's some of the nicest letterpress work I've seen). I saw Rob give a passionate, bracing reading at one of the open mike nights at the Orono Poetry of the Seventies conference, and I'm not sure if the work in here is from the same project, but it has the same intensity and complexity of emotional range.

From "Imaginary Politics, or The Towers as Architecture":

Now a word for all my Christian Zionist friends. Love, being a model for the war. Take the IMF, an AK-47 or machete, my purest intermediaries. Fuck me with the things our meanings make. Please take that burka off. You can be a manufactured non-event, but I am the towers! as architecture wipes out the commons. This is about the love we make.

For ordering information, call or email Blake Riley at 415-928-4753 or taprooteditions@hotmail.com.

Anne Boyer's Art Is War, from Mitzvah Chaps, is a small anthology of the author's conceptual oeuvre thus far: it includes her "Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry" proposal, an excerpt from "cities gardens houses villages systems of government or space colonies I have imagined," and several shorter works. Designwise, it's very hot-pink-and-pea-soup, and there are several layers of book-object apparatus I can't even process intellectually. Advanced. Here's part of the intro to "Difficult Ways":

...I have written, and then blocked out with thick black permanent marker, many difficult ways to publish that involve overt sexual content, like two or more attractive amateurs making love on film and climaxing with a punctuation mark of fluids (this is particularly useful for the many poems that involve punctuation points). Indeed, my advisers have cautioned me not to make public any difficult ways to publish poetry that involve human or animal fluids, including but not limited to ejaculate, urine, saliva, gushings, and leakages. I have not included any ideas about using the heat-fluids of fertile raccoons. I have not included my many ideas about Stallions.

It is difficult to say whether we, the reading public, are poorer or more fortunate for these omissions.

And from Kenning Editions comes Kyle Schlesinger's Pink, seventeen pages of carefully tuned, uncluttered lyric with a precipitate cadence that reminds me at times of Tom Raworth. From "Shedding":

And if you think
This is too fast
Try rereading
One phrase
Tear at this veil
At a time when
Bedeviling coevals
Ease into luke
Warm water together

Again when all else
Pales by comparison
Composition is a form
Of literary allusion
A makeshift blackbox
To kiss or cry
Shifts meaning over
To you the reader then
Gives you the shaft

With a striking, minimalistic, cardboard cover by Quemadura (which actually doesn't have as much pink on it as Boyer's, though it's got its share).

Nonconceptualism...

is over. It's back to just being Flarf.

Nuisance Value and Slow Poetry

I love this post at Poetix, which presents one of the more compelling recent versions of the claim that poetry operates via a negative principle of built-in inefficiency / irrelevance.

Interesting to compare this to Dale Smith's recent remarks on "Slow Poetry" at Possum Ego (here, to begin with, and in several subsequent posts). I'm all for loafing, so I'm sympathetic to a lot of what Dale says. I like his idea of a move towards a translocal (my term, not his) mode of poetic address based on commonality rather than a totalizing global one based on (largely ineffective) resistance. I wonder, however, whether there aren't some missing moments of exposition in his account, and whether slowness as such is really the most useful framework.

Dale writes:

By turning away from innovations that increase the speed of production, poets could rediscover valuable skills from older methods. Pace in this slow poetry sense becomes a greater concern. Value could be placed on the withholding of vital details and the slow release of vivid particulars within rhetorical situations driven by a desire to disclose new knowledge.

Dale starts to lose me at "turning away from innovations that increase the speed of production." Which innovations, exactly? In what way has the process of poetic production been affected by them? Is composition, on the whole, really "faster" now than at any other point in history? I don't think Dale means anything as trivial as that, for instance, we should write using pens instead of keyboards. So what does he mean, exactly?

Thesis (not quite a counterthesis): all poetry is slow poetry, practically by definition. Shklovsky's criterion of attenuation (and tortuousness too, really) as a key element of defamiliarization seems relevant here, and entirely in keeping with Dale's description of "the withholding of vital details and the slow release of vivid particulars." It's almost a commonplace that poetry by its nature is something read (and written) against the grain of more efficient, "practical," streamlined applications of language. Even some of the more souped-up recent examples of conceptual and pop-culture-tinged poetry are, at their base, ways of slowing down "fast," dominant-system-supporting language use and poking at it with a stick, no?

As for turning to technologies like letterpress and xerox, well ... isn't that already happening, and hasn't it been for a long time? Dale acknowledges as much, but then says that "these relatively inexpensive printing costs have produced a glut in term of over-production of work with an under-production of relative value." But doesn't the point then have to do not so much with speed as with economy and/or degree of circulation? And what is the point, exactly? That many poets write substandard work? Well, certainly. But when has this not been the case? And are there really detrimental consequences, in the larger scheme of things, to there being too much bad poetry?

I guess I'm not entirely seeing how SloPo defines anything fundamentally different from the actual current state of material poetic culture at the level of production and distribution. Even at the "corporate," "mainstream," "establishment" level, the circulation of poetry remains largely an archaic affair, rooted in pretty typesetting and anachronistic humanist rhetoric.