Night classes

Working at night means I get up, drink coffee, read poetry, do yoga, read some socialist shit in Jacobin, meditate, take a shower, listen to some socialist talk on YouTube, make lunch, pour too much garam marsala into my stir fry, grade, do a little bit of philosophy homework (listen to an online lecture), go to bi-rite for a sandwich, leave early to fill up my tires with air(light is still on), listen to Caribou in the car in preparation for the show tonight!

if I were rich I'd have a desk in every room and they'd all have different categories

Green Arcade Books, Kevin Killian with Brian Blanchfield, Laura Moriarty, George Albon, and Brandon Som. April 11, 7pm,

GA

The I was fore
under the treelike.
It uttered circles.
A megaphoned whisper.
Study of the vanished.
The copula on stilts.
Where the continents slough.
A speech act in the ladles.

KK

Freedom flaps
reducing you to splinters
Kings to Queens.
We're duplicating all the functions you used to.
Some ancestor of K but less Kafkaesque.
All royalist humbug is all it is.
Marnie and the monotheists.
God had been made man.
The other attribute is to mise en scene.

BS

I'm going to start with a poem.
by what was left behind.
     exchanging ong for som
resonator, Sundays, when time told bells.
Li Po translation called Oulipo.
erasure, the song, sung.
Truth bends when you hum.
Trouble the sea for a song.
Stop writing when I start to hear what he's doing with vowels. Insane vowels. Everywhere.
A bridge of magpies.

BB

[For whoso list to hunt, casually]
Oh sigh into winter.
One hitch 7
The beaten path once beaten will meet
interdiction feel
In poetry too we all face forward.
And let stand a syllogism.
Contempt stirring devotion.
This is the shore of the worst thing possible.
We saved the wrong thing.
The bridge ethically dubious documentary.
Crisis apparition.
An Idaho of unstory.

LM

Remember Cody's.
waltz occupy doubt
The first drum circle.
Debt was not a crime.
Walz.
Autonomy automizes.
Not losing is not winning.
Mughsot or something gold.
Fact as chance.
Reverse allegory.
Watching what continues to decay.
Boardgames appear and must be played to the end.

Poetry Night @ The Yurt February 21, 2014 Angela Hume, Carrie Hunter, Claiborne McDonald, Eric Sneathen, Nich Malone, and Zack Haber

AH

Medicate the withdrawal of history
diffusely social
to make the body more bearable
beyond the canopy's blot
morning's dehiscence

from separate bodies
     we were the limit
where does the bird end
lodged like yesterday's sex.
Like a tear on the skin
     that does not end.
Hooooo-se (who's) estrogen
all the windows clanging shut
I will fidelity
a temporality of the middle is

CM

To each its own deluge
& the pools cannot be reached by air tongues
each to an each
an undecaying house of planks
chili salt body

ZH

So fetish yourself
the echoes stiffen
we die and we die
     and the echoes loosen

ES or NM

the reoccupying memories of our bodies
     I realize I can't sleep without a blanket
common property is arousing

NM or ES

and arguing about verb tenses
a mere helix shell

Quiet Lightning Book Launch: Zack Haber + Tupelo Hassman, Amy Berkowitz, Carrie Hunter, Stephen D. Gutierrez, Dan Sanders and Stella Peach music April 7, 2014

The violin’s vibrato the fire in the street

The musician doubles

Only the i’s lowercased

The line of smoke you shouldn’t walk through.

Wanting to tell a lie but being prevented.

—

blind apple freeze hole patch

sugar so as to ruin it.

—

The mountains don’t care 

The aperture the deluge

The body briefly lent

Rain comes from where I come from — Lindsey Boldt

Ears of the tree

Lets all do Turners like Christ or Nat Turner

As if the market had a heart

—

Mayhem & hilarity

I’m just giving you a bad time but go on.

As I’ve been told, I’m easy to talk to.

If I’m talking to you I’m going to pay attention to you.

The woman is physically extremely stoic.

Environmental Poetics in the Risk Society: Angela Hume and James Sherry March 18, 2014

AH

On endocrinology.
One might almost think that nothing was wrong.
Non-negotiable contingency.
Sub-social risk theory.
The concept of the threshold.
Risk is ubiquitous, the threshold does not exist.
Touch manifested as symptom.

JS

Against one model alone
The root cause of global warming is desire.
Resist the urge to remove contradiction. Inclusive hierarchy.
The flower or the shrub
color or the shape
External cognition
I don't have this discourse.

(They're living them but we're naming them)

Hearts Desire Reading Series: Ted Rees, Carrie Hunter & Divya Victor March 15, 2014

TR

The animal reconstituting itself

in red neon

a hell we must affirm

in mausoleum savage

forgettable identities

towards the banality of structure

a more palatable invasion.

Turn them off its gross

the rope from hell 

hemoglobin (from?)

hemoglobin

shafting byons

glopt skin

liquefaction guarantees

estuarian silt

Further tinkering with downy (widowy) things

The best Sonic Youth member

hermatic pseudo sea

biblically nameless

kelpy pulsations

severing the valley

jaw vibrating allegro

back pats contortion

portends fungus

aromatic rings necessitates

how sharp the shears

and antiquation

delirium sits on my face

unforgiven crystalline rose

the particle conjuries

unicode attempts

(a millay of)

stone and spiderwebs

jism all over my tusk

dihedral cumulous severance

DV

The same week I decided to trim my eyelashes.

A cat because its soft.

You’re kissing the TV again.

Small bay birds.

And then I would eat you.

From now on all your scars will be of your own making.

An attempt to collect all my moles to make a molehill.

As the damp makes them drop to pieces. 

Woolsey Heights presents Alan Bernheimer, Jean Day, Jason Morris, February 15, 2014

I don't follow football but I'm curious.

You will always be the object/subject.

Never felt inherited desperation.

Everything becomes so likeness.

Life is a trigger warning.

I will hurt for you.

Polyphony in all the right places.

Are you really a doctor?

Have you been crying?

anthropomorphic bowing

steel-cut edge

shirt mea terra

in the blue veins of a dry

chirp unheard

I found myself

of touch they are

wheels wheel

don’t belong on the map.

One Ravel.

Copying is hoard and

attention to sky

tendon could survive

her late crown

on primitive nouns

by prior arrangement

how to work the clock

copulations of extra pairs

to my facilities

but not apposite

everything begins with -re

watching others read

no time in man years

Has anyone seen Hermes?

And after that it is all open water

woman who cannot discern when she is loved

Yul the second

undiscovers solitude.

the unironic vocative

“you can do the ragged thing well”

“You can tell its fashion because its unzipped.”

BE ABOUT IT presents: Rauan Klassnik, Erica Lewis, Kimberly Kim, Carrie Hunter February 7, 2014

The relation of the past has nothing to do with memory.
Everyone is a heart breaker.
We are not this dance but that one.
The difference between jam & jelly.

The glass delusion
believed she was made of cork.
An Abstract heaven.
Everything is distant.
Let me start again.
Dictionary of the visible.
More like a mongoose or a mink than a fox.

Don't wear it, but use it, somewhat (slightly) rectangular, not of any particular color, American, but not a particular region.
This is the one true thing that he said to me.
There are no errors only
epiphanies were so common in our lives.

Lana Turner Glamour Reading January 26, 2014 Ang, Morrison, Joron, Spahr, Hillman, O'Brien, Warren, Palmer, Levin, Clover

The dead should keep their pronouns.
Time passes on clit or cock.
Begin a sequence every time a bell resounds.
I stick my head in it I lose my coat.
The dancer and her double.
Only when we can say everything at once.
Like an evacuation of vowels.

Heart's Desire with Jerome Rothenberg January 25, 2014

Art is junk.
Dream can't save the dying
opens to sing but freezes shut.
They took me from the white sun
and put me in the black sun.
Down here the rain falls upside down,
emotions roll between the palms.
I reached between my legs & I wallowed.
Where sunlight makes the world grow darker.
Beat the moon with oars the way I do.
The bowels shem-shaun/
It is as if nothing happened.
The feat & the subsequent refusal of the fear.
The times are never right.
The days are never right.
My heart is never right.
There is no truth to time.

Hearts Desire Reading: Cassandra Gillip, Nathaniel Ottig, Andrew Kenower 1-19-14

CG & NO

Die fucking. I can't tonight.
Every poem has its 20th of January.
I'm so sick of these crows.
Redundancy doesn't comfort me.
Just as complicated as I remember love to be.
Smallest little JK.
Lemonade is not infinite.

AK

Everyone's drunk on schedule.
What's an accent.
Aquatic death spiral.
In the fact of my gigantic error.
The chimes of rabies are ringing again.
Sleep without dreams.
The non recuperative rest that is passing out.
I tapped my meridians to see if my body was there.

Andrea Abi-Karam, Carlos Soto Román, and Lara Durback at Woolsey Heights 1/18/14

A A-K

The age old other.
Caged bees must remember how to fly.
I've never seen bay area rain on the windows
She did not want to jump.
I thought you should bleed more.
The feeling that comes from smashing something.
The feeling that comes from surviving together.
The exit wound is always larger
when you forget the beginning
of the imminent open end

CSR

House as puzzle.
A house without a body is a puzzle.
Absence is such a transparent house.
The stream that occurs between the silence
isolated signs of the inevitable.

??

Happiness is needed right here -- Aaron Begg
There's something bad about sitting in the back.

"Go deep or go home." #Asta

Surface yoga practices. Sometimes you've got to be surface though before you can get to the deep places, you have to practice on the surface. Had so many morning pains in my body this morning, I could barely lean over, hips hurt, lower back hurt, until around the middle of the practice I finally started getting a flow and could actually go a little deeper. But also a nice metaphor for living a surface material life, and how that *may* attract certain types of people to yoga, but that is not what it is about, but maybe for some it could be a bridge toward deeper living. Do the surface stuff first if you have to, but don't stay there. (And don't go home.) (Or maybe go home and meditate.)

Also, tangentially related, I came home instead of eating out, and made a sandwich and sat meditation for a bit. The whole time while I was meditating I could hear this guy out on the sidewalk yelling; he had this contraption he had made that was falling apart and he couldn't figure out what to do, its base was a wheelchair and he had all this stuff piled on top of it, which kept falling off. As I was meditating I could hear him yelling out occasionally, and thought about all the silly stuff I get frustrated about in life, and how (maybe) if you are meditating more you will be happier and more peaceful, even though it doesn't really seem like just sitting will make you peaceful, it does happen. Also thinking about this common thought I've had for years, that might be much more complicated than I'm making it, like hello mental illness, but that with all the time they have, homeless people could use it to meditate, what would happen if they meditated 12 hours a day, and all the shit going on around them would become less foreground, and move to the background... And that if I'm thinking that about homeless people, what about my life is so easy if I just do it? Less Facebook more meditation, more writing. Use time better. Or go home.

Stanley, McCreary, Robinson SPT

Stanley, McCreary, Robinson

Small Press Traffic

December 1, 2013

Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia Street, SF
5:30pm

Geomantic particularities.

I'm pretty sure I'm a sorcerer.

You leaves get covetous.

Lamps of pure capture.

October is full of Libras.

Some people have old names but don't live very long.

Obstinate shimmering recondite.

Talking is basically the definition of skin.

Some poems are only instructions.

We'll all have tender feet in the new world.

They promised to make me smarter.

I move often toward a dream.

Any type of shirt with one button buttoned.

***

No one wants the embarrassment of absolution.

The worrying power of effigies.

I've got your Stockholm Syndrome right here.

Because I know how the roundabout works.

I don't think of a white bear so hard.

An entire summer spent speaking in code.

An eye swapped with the language of water.

Someone should tell the bees.

Like wet puppy & dirty pennies.

There is no really intimacy without remorse, but also there is gratitude.

I incite the etymology of mayhem.

Open your hand to show you held no weapon.

That's not an ice cream truck that's church bells.

Comfort isn't always comfortable.

We changed the story we solved the problem.

And now my feet are maps.

Waiting for anything is its own kind of fever.

The way moths fly, like they're broken.

***

Didn't monster imply narrative.

To be suspicious is to be suspicion.

To face into it [the unverifiable]

Breaking through its skin with our skin.

As if to evade all our futures with his present tense.

The evidence wasn't able to modify itself with a pronoun.

Rage is always past tense.

Variably audible to memory.

Theft has it own taxonomical condition.

Dirty teleology.

Bay Area Public School: Studying Crisis, August 29, 2013: JASPER BERNES, MAYA GONZALEZ, LAURA HUDSON

Strategies don't work.
Walmart as a new form of communism.
The factory line.
People can work less.
The progressive dimension to production.
But instead the factory line enables capital to exploit people.
De-linking as orphaning.
The Jetson's communism.

***

"Class belonging appears as an external restraint."
Austerity is on the lips of every bleeding politician.

***

Land as museum piece.
Or a bank, or reserve.
Turning pollution into a market.
Solutions inside of capitalism, problematic
because nature has no value in the capitalistic system.
Solutions that are not profitable will not be implemented.

Colleen Lookingbill, Jaime Robles, Maxine Chernoff, at Canessa Park Reading Series, 7-24-13

C.L.

Your consciousness is not contained in your body, but your body is contained in your consciousness.

Prayer unlooped.

Augmented accelerations.

The space absence will offer.

Welcome fugue of morning friction.

J.R.

Old English word for river -- exe.

Like Persephone, I have left my mother.

I'd forgotten the strength of silence, its mutability.

Interstices of pomegranates.

Wheels, spoons, flickering, clay.

Into time's contours.

M.C.

I read like someone's chasing me.

Small but wide.

A look that means less.

Your face was vaguer & therefore more intimate.

With boxes and owls (Joseph Cornell)

The possible is not enough.

Around three years ago on a Colorado trip with my mom I wrote this.

And today in the Rocky Mountain National Park:

Fishing Poem #2
       for zack

"the rough deific sketches"   — Walt Whitman

In the lack of the animate, the inanimate animates.

No one knows the combination and so the locked, sits.
Solitary.

The Civic Engineers and the no public access
and my mother pissed at America for this
is all thats left of America.

The bob bobs
and my eye waters,
the itinerant eyelash.

The road is closed past this point.

Becoming more and more aware
of my energetic states and how
I can manipulate them.

She caught a tree.

She wants me to sit on the rock.

I will sit on the rock.

Once the spider moves.

Read Walt Whitman
out loud & a deer
came by. From afar.
For a minute.

Getting caught in the thrush.

Afraid to sit next to anything leafy for fear
of poison.

She got a bite. We're eating dinner!
But he got away.  With the salmon egg.

Got it off the hook without
getting himself hooked.

She felt the bite.
It wasn't the water.

The bird swoops down toward
the water, grazing. Like
skipping stones.

Ideas are in the past.
Only living is in the present.
Ideas stop the present.

The present is the present.

If I was into Conceptual Photography:
every tree in the Rocky Mountain
National Forest photographed
individually.

"The mountains look like they're moving away"  — kid

(_______) dookie

I hate summer.

Tour van named Arrow.

Good directions that are just good luck.

Poetry Readings Numbers Game

Me and a friend (to establish the informality of this study) were talking about how it seems like there are more poetry readings that feature women readers than men in the Bay Area, and are we feminist now?


So I counted.

Maybe not the most scientific study, but I counted literary readings (including fiction, but not nonfiction) that I was invited to on Facebook for the month of April.

Certainly there are more readings that don't advertise on Facebook, and some readings on Facebook that didn't invite me (possibly). I tried to make sure to cut out obvious musical acts. However, out of some of the readings that I did not attend, some seem to involve writers/poets and music, and I am not sure if they were singing or what, but I'm still counting them if web searches proved them to be involved in the literary world in any manner. So.

The final count: 99 people gave readings in the Bay Area in April 2013. 56 Men, 42 Female, and 1 Gender Variant. Not feminist at all!

Why is this? Is this one of those our tastes dictate our consumption, and our consumption does not tend to steer us towards the more male centric readings? I don't know!

(I am available for readings, Bay Area.)


My list:


APRIL Poetry Readings 2013

APRIL 4 Rock Paper Scissors presents a reading of small press prose with:

Daniel Coshnear (Kelly's Cove Press)
Karen Lillis (Spuyten Duyvil Press)
Ocean Capewell (High On Burning Photographs zine)

APRIL 4
Wanda Coleman and Brenda Coultas
Poetry Center Book Award reading

APRIL 6
Anselm Hollo, a Memorial Tribute

Alan Bernheimer
Mary Burger
Maxine Chernoff
Brenda Coultas
Steve Dickison
Stephen Emerson
Derek Fencer
Gloria Frym
Tinker Greene
Donald Guravich
Paul Hoover
Alastair Johnston
Joanne Kyger
George Mattingly
Lucy Farber Mattingly
Sarah Menefee
Jim Nisbet
Eric Olson
Michelle Puckett
Kit Robinson
John Sakkis
Andrew Schelling
G.P. Skratz

APRIL 6
Amerarcana reading at Bird & Beckett

Ava Khoobor,
Patrick James Dunagan,
Christina Fisher,
Rod Roland,
Carrie Hunter,
William Rockwell
Jack Hirschman,

APRIL 7 SPT
Carla Harryman and Jon Raskin

APRIL 12 BAM RE@DS

Zoe Tuck & Wendy Trevino!

APRIL 13

PAWA and Arkipelago Books Presents an evening of conversation with author R. Zamora Linmark.

APRIL 13
THE BREW presents: A spoken word-music showcase with:

Jam Hands - Garth Bunse - Raul Gilbert - MG Roberts - Avrille Godchaux - Scot Young - Garrett Murphy

APRIL 14

Enjoy the poetry of Joseph Lease and Peter Burghardt at University Press Books

APRIL 14

The Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno St, San Francisco

The following readers will perform their work:

Art Beck
Judith Ayn Bernhard
Neeli Cherkovski
Agneta Falk
Jack & Adelle Foley
Maketa Smith-Groves
Jack Hirschman
Clara Hsu
Ava Koohbor
A.D. Winans

APRIL 14

Manifest #14 features poetry from Kate Menzies, and Lindsey Boldt

APRIL 15
Quiet Lightning

Moneta Goldsmith » Rachel Ann Brickner » Matthew Rodgers » Mario de la Vega » Katie Wheeler-Dubin | Allison Landa » Jan Richman » Baruch Porras-Hernandez » Matt Pine » Charlie Getter » Katie Carter

APRIL 18 MFA MIXER 2.0 USF

*Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed my Body and Messed with My Head (nonfiction)
*Chris Carosi, Bright Veil (poetry)
*Lindsay Tam Holland, The Counterfeit Family Tree of Vee Crawford-Wong (fiction)

APRIL 18 Woolsey - Brent Cunningham and Thom Donovan

APRIL 18 Hearts Desire Reading Series - Cedar Sigo, Jason Morris Sara Larsen

APRIL 19  Underpass Reading Series at Bica
ALLI WARREN / ANGELA HUME

APRIL 20 The Other Fabulous Reading Series

Brandon Brown
Donald Dunbar
Robert Gluck

APRIL 21
MAGED ZAHER & STEVE FARMER at SPT!

APRIL 25

Clark Coolidge and Steve Dickison

APRIL 25

1111 issue 14 party

SB Stokes
MG Roberts
Olga Zilberbourg
Ben Mirov
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier

and just added

Explore the compelling work of Cannon Dill (CCA alum).

APRIL 26

Under the Influence

Lizzy Acker
MK Chavez
Mariama Lockington
Genine Lentine

APRIL 27

Oakland's Backyard Open Mic
Featuring Youssef Alaoui

APRIL 28

Triple Publication Party!

Actual Café
Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s “The
Opposite of Work” (JackLeg Press), Steve Gilmartin’s "Comes Up to Face
the Skies" (Little Red Leaves Textile Series), and Maw Shein Win’s
“Ruins of a glittering palace” (SPA/Commonwealth Projects).

Next Big Thing

Was tagged my j/j hastain AND Laura Woltag!, so here goes. Thanks j/j and Laura!!

***

What is the title of the book?

Inversion Twilight 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It is actually part of a larger manuscript called Anti-Oedipus, and so I got the idea obviously from Anti-Oedipus. My previous book, The Incompossible, was a sort of translation (of abstract language into more concrete imagery, not French to English) from Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, and I enjoyed working with philosophy/theory so much I wanted to keep doing it. This time around, instead of translating philosophy into concrete imagery, I used the language from the Deleuze & Guattari text itself, collaged them together, and then in an effort to keep it from being too, too dense, I also wove in writings I did while listening to ambient music. Towards the end I deleted out a lot of the Deleuze & Guattari language as it really was too dense, so there is a sort of palimpsest of their writing with my own written over it.

What genre does your book fall under?

Epithalamium.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Although I envision Anti-Oedipus as female, I could imagine her being played by Jonathan Caouette in drag. I'm in (supposedly, I haven't seen it yet) about 5 minutes of his newest film Walk Away Renee. So. 

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Disjunctions and desire-machines, voicing what cannot be voiced that in the end can be, and the terrible, joyful process of becoming-schizo.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Have been writing and rewriting since 2008. For the most part I have been happy with the text, but have had quite a difficult time finding its form as a whole. I was unsatisfied with The Incompossible's unitary prose-poems (although it seemed to be necessary at the time) and so wanted everything in this book to be constantly different and evolving, in flux. (However this will not be apparent in the chapbook coming out.)

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Deleuze and Guattari obviously, but also on a personal level, the ending (an evolving process) of wanting what I cannot have, and the anti-oedipal, anti-capitalist path of finding a way towards having what I do have, or how having itself becomes unnecessary. Or how not having is a type of having, or finding a way towards having and not having simultaneously. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Mythology's invisible footprint, fighting the suicidal impulse, identity, writing as meta-life.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Birds of Lace is putting out Inversion Twilight this coming April.

Tagging: Amy Berkowitz, Sara Larsen, Suzanne Stein, Lara Durback, Erica Lewis