This Sunday @ Myopic Books

Myopic Books in Chicago — Sundays at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue,
2nd Floor

Sunday November 11 – Yuriy Tarnawsky

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On Yuriy Tarnawsky's work:

Yuriy Tarnawsky is a bilingual Ukrainian-American writer, and the author of 19 collections of poetry, seven plays, nine books of fiction, a biography, and numerous articles and translations. Yuriy Tarnawsky's LIKE BLOOD IN WATER is a fascinating account of the creative and destructive arts. Taking inspiration from music and the visual arts, Tarnawsky crafts a dense work of allusive prose and simple storytelling. The author interweaves reality with dreams and fragmentary thoughts, diffusing the elements of lives that are anything but mundane.


What reviewers have said about LIKE BLOOD IN WATER:

"LIKE BLOOD IN WATER is an incredibly complex, beautiful, and frustrating work. It is less about story than craft, a fact that I found alternately exciting and confounding. Like each of the mini novels, 'Screaming' is broken into a series of interrelated sections, sometimes using poetry or even scripted dialogue. Piecing the sections together, choosing what to show and what to keep hidden, is what Tarnawsky does so well; by writing only the minimum, we as readers are forced to help him create the story, weaving it together and filling in the blanks. One need only read a small section of 'Screaming,' though, to recognize Tarnawsky's enormous talent as a writer, and to understand that no basic plot synopsis could do his writing justice."

—Andrea Chmielewski, Bookslut, June 2007

HISTOIRE DU CINÉMA

I remember seeing Star Wars for the first time,
but it wasn't like seeing Breathless for the first time.
I was breathless when I watched Raging Bull for the first time,
but I was a raging bull when I watched Clueless for the first time.
I was clueless when I watched 8 1/2 for the first time.
I was 8 1/2 when I watched Snow White for the first time.
I was snow white when I saw Halloween for the first time.
It was Halloween when I watched High Noon for the first time.
I remember seeing King Kong for the first time.
It was in The Apartment that I saw The Searchers for the first time.
In Modern Times, a Taxi Driver should consider The Graduate and
go Singin' In the Rain On the Waterfront with The African Queen,
instead of this route I took classes with a Psycho from Chinatown on The Grapes of Wrath. Someday I'll be An American in Paris but for now
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Rocky and The Wild Bunch
rode in on The Streetcar Named Desire to fill their Jaws
with The Best Years of Our Lives.

Clearly, It's Not So Clear

Ashbery is the most well-known poet in recent memory. How he achieved this is somewhat of a mystery, however. His poetry is indecipherable.

In 1977 Ashbery had recently won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for his collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Like his cohort in the New York school, Ashbery is given to painterly abstraction and to appropriations of the language of everyday life. His poetry is famously difficult; as he then wrote, “It isn’t absolutely clear.” Here's my review of the Vermont Notebook.

This Sunday @ Myopic Books

Myopic Books in Chicago -- Sundays at 7:00 / 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue,
2nd Floor

Sunday, October 28 - Arpine Konyalian GRENIER & Gene TANTA

Born in Timisoara, Romania in 1974, Gene TANTA immigrated to Chicago in 1984 with family. He earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2000. He translates contemporary Romanian poetry and makes visual art with found materials. Mr. Tanta's Publications include: Epoch, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (two poems with Reginald Shepherd). Currently, he is a PhD student in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where he is also the Art Editor for Cream City Review.

Arpine Konyalian GRENIER holds graduate degrees from the American University of Beirut and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York. Her work has appeared in How2, Columbia Poetry Review, Sulfur, The Iowa Review, Phoebe, Fence, Big Bridge, Milk and elsewhere, including several anthologies. She has repeatedly been chosen finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Greg Grummer Award, has two published volumes of poetry, and a chapbook is forthcoming from NeOpp Pepper Press.

Myopic Books is one of Chicago's largest used bookstores and a cat lives there and they don't allow cell phones.

Kultur

As a Chicago transplant, I’m still acclimating. Especially during these brief autumn moments, which usually seem much more like winter than they should—or as I remember Ohio autumns, which had some longevity. Fall (in Chicago) is no longer the time for reflection that it used to seem to be. There’s simply too much going on. Tonight for example there are more poetry readings going on around town than I’ve ever seen in my six or so years of living here. The Chicago staple--Around the Coyote Arts Fest--is winding down tonight with readings and exhibitions. Jesse Seldess is appearing in the Red Rover reading series, Chuck Stebelton is reading tonight, and Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson are reading at
Myopic Books tonight at 7:00.

If that isn't enough, next weekend there will be a mammoth reading as the publication of the new anthology, THE CITY VISIBLE: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, will be celebrated on October 20th at 7:00 p.m. at 3617 W Belle Plaine Ave, Chicago, IL. (Gethsemane Evangelical Church—yes, in the church).

The readers will include:
Nick Twemlow – Robyn Schiff – Johanny Vázquez Paz – Joel Felix – Peter O’Leary – Garin Cycholl – Chris Glomski – Simone Muench – Cynthia Bond – Kristy Odelius – Lina Vitkauskas – Larry Sawyer – William Allegrezza – Jorge Sanchez – Tony Trigilio – Jennifer Karmin – Ray Bianchi – Kerri Sonnenberg – Eric Elshtain

Here's an interesting article about Dylan's poetics of voice.

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This article seeks to examine the literary pleasures derived from Bob Dylan’s songs, paying special attention to how Dylan’s poetical texts are performed and rhythmically rewritten by his voice, as well as the ways in which Dylan uses the songs to “write himself” through the creation of numerous and competing personae. Close reading of the lyrics, this article argues, must therefore be supplemented by a “poetics of the voice” and a detailed analysis of the theatricality of his “games of masks.” While a stylistic approach to the lyrics reveals a thrust towards writerly openness and new poetical idioms that fuse oral traditions with high poetry, the aesthetic and semantic uses Dylan makes of his voice are equally sophisticated. A study of Dylan’s “masks” will show that the artist uses archetypal poetic identities (prophet, trickster, man of sorrow, and so on) as fictional figurations of himself offered to the audience.

"Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat."

I've never dug Robert Lowell's poetry but I found myself thinking of his line from "For the Union Dead" while in Washington DC last week. Lowell's patrician imagery and metaphor has always rubbed me the wrong way, but there are a few lines from his poetry that really work and resonate with me. I also caught myself thinking of Langston Hughes and the famous meeting between Hughes and Vachel Lindsay at the Wardman Park Hotel in DC where Hughes was employed at the time (which makes me think of when Jean Michel Basquiat entered the restaurant where Warhol was eating to try to sell him his "ignorant art" postcards).

Plus thinking of Hughes (being from Lincoln, Illinois) seemed logical because the ghost of Lincoln looms large in our nation's capital. I've always thought Hughes to be truer than Whitman to the cadence of America.

Here's a pic from the "Haunted Washington" walking tour I took, which was kewl. The ghost of Dolly Madison is scheduled to appear again on the porch pictured in the photo above sometime soon.

Pay attention

Is an explanation more useful than the object itself? Certainly not when it comes to poetry, otherwise we get.

"The eight-line poem frustrates expectations about poetry. It stands like a small aside, a voice suggesting in rather emphatic terms, 'so much depends upon,' that the seemingly simple, often overlooked elements of life are what really matters. In fact, the short aside is akin to the wheelbarrow and 'white chickens' in the poem--essential, but easily ignored. Pay attention, the speaker advises, to the ordinary, to the quotidian."

But how many have had to turn to an exegesis to decipher what is probably Williams' most straightforward work?

Do poets have some mental faculty that makes them more able to derive some kind of satisfaction from a series of words without a literal meaning? Maybe poets are predisposed to appreciate the conceptual aspect of writing and the spatial aspects of poetry because of their biology? I prefer Stevens to Williams whatever that means. There's nothing like a good cigar. No one needs to explicate that. I think Frank O'Hara had it right "But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what?"

Poetry @ Myopic Books, Chicago

Sunday, October 14 - Joshua Marie Wilkinson & Noah Eli Gordon

Sunday, October 21 - Chris Green, Tony Trigilio, & David Trinidad

Sunday, October 28 - Arpine Konyalian Grenier

Sunday, December 16 - Michael Cross, Anne Boyer, and K. Silem Mohammad

::::Myopic Books, 1564 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60622, ph 773.862.4882::::

flaming as Russia

spidery Autumn



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sunflower erupting like applause





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the fool who streetlights







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tsunami pronounced tastes like
anxiety

I'm Not There

Now they're saying Shelley's politics "verged on the totalitarian." You can't fit a genius into the cookie cutter, but they'll keep trying, I guess. Mozart was a sillypants, but he wrote some mediocre tunes that people still waste their time on and Shakespeare was a sophomoric dreamer. Thus spake the New Yorker: A Magazine for All and None.

Burning man was burned too early by this weisenheimer.

Another stray City Visible review by Rob McClennan, interesting Canadian poet and publisher extraordinaire.

When I finally retire, I'm going to kick it in Yambol, Bulgaria. Don't ask why.

Daniel Borzutzky and Lina ramona Vitkauskas are my favorite poets in Chicago. Notice I didn't say "Chicago poets."

What would Dylan do? I know what he won't do. He probably won't go see that movie, although you know how I feel about Cate.

Readings @ Myopic Books

Chicago is known for Sox and Cubs, gridlock, Vienna Beef, furniture dealer Al Capone, Old Style, and guess what? ...poetry. Check the Myopic Book's blog for the latest news on what's happening next in the Myopic Books Reading Series.

Poems-for-All

It's good to see that Poems-for-All got a little mention from Ron Silliman. The catalog is pretty impressive. These matchbox-sized books are really remarkable. I was glad Richard Hansen published my poem Crossing the Meridian. I got a big manila envelope filled with many little booklets. I first heard of his press because of Hansen's Poets & Writers interview. Despite the size, the production value of each is better than some full-sized books of poetry I've seen lately. Is bookmaking the lost art? In the past few years, Richard Hansen has published these folks. Whoa.

d.a. levy
Ted Joans
Robert Creeley
Roque Dalton
Peter Kropotkin
Charles Bukowski
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Jack Spicer
Bertolt Brecht
Anne Waldman
Arthur Winfield Knight
Kit Knight
Douglas Blazek
William Blake
Jack Hirschman
Delmira Agustini
Peter Orlovsky
Patti Smith
Allen Ginsberg
Dr. Seuss
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robert Burns
Tom Waits
Ruben Dario
Pete Seeger
Tuli Kupferberg
Jack Micheline
Ko Un
W. H. Auden
Larry Sawyer
Harold Norse
George Harrison
Steve Dalachinsky
Michael Basinski
William Wantling
Jean Arp
A.D. Winans
Lyn Lifshin
Richard Brautigan
Diane di Prima
Gerald Nicosia
Kenneth Patchen

People are scooping up old LPs at record rates these days. There's no need to fear the latest phase of the retro craze. Sometimes new technology isn't necessarily bettter, it's just more convenient. iPods seem like old news now, but throwing an original pressing of Led Zeppelin IV or any James Brown
on the turntable causes some real excitement because vinyl's fuller sound really does make for better listening. Physical Graffitti is still my favorite Zep. But nothing compares to Quadrophenia for thrills, spills, and chills. The first Bob Marley and Miles Davis I ever heard was on vinyl and I think that added to the experience because I would sit listening to it and just stare at the album cover after reading the liner notes. Who does that with a CD? Anyway, from Chicago to Tennessee, vinyl is selling again. I'm glad I listen to jazz, because hardly anyone buys it and there's more left over for me.

Decembering



(This just in)
From the dark side
of an illustrated moon

a volcano destroys
all sentences
without religion.




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Another Love Poem



We wear nothing but the air between us.






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Late Night Movies



A train emerges from your
Mouth. Across the platform of our lives
Your lips are melting igloos. Could our
Conversation be any colder? Spring sparrows
Noticed it, your skirt of complications.
Your stilettos stab the pavement like my heart.
I crossed great waves to find you and dove
Into an ocean of metaphysics to discover
Your home there at the bottom. You lounge inside an
Echo. Your fragrance is eternal: I can’t escape it.
Did I try to escape? That’s exactly what I can’t
Remember. I’m shackled by the freezing
Rain on my window, deliriously silent.
Who am I, who are you? These are questions
We ask the hours. Each of them.




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Dear Lorca



I love to Friday

through the thunder in the wall.

Ghosts spill

out across the carpet.

In the rain God nails

secret meetings.

Foreign Junes

skin lush jungles.

Humility is a vole.

Notice the chocolate horizon.






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Poets


Wear the blue sweater of memory.
The days ahead won’t be easy.

Make a world noise:
the future is already here.

Advertising turned us into mosquitoes.

Galaxies in the distance still sculpt
the gism of the void.

It's good to see a review of The City Visible (which includes yours truly) up at Book Slut.

Hallelujah Fruit Bowl

Thank you for your reliability.
I could always count on you to
maintain your even temper, as you
held the few remaining oranges
and a banana or two. You no
doubt heard my random muttering
in the kitchen on bad days, perhaps
a “goddammit” slipped out
once or twice, as I nearly cut my finger
or a pot boiled over. But you sat
there steadfast, performing your
duty so calmly. I salute your
temerity in that somewhat
frenzied nook, neighbor to
the toaster, but ultimately
without peer.

The anxious, clammy, and paranoid film choices of Paul Giamatti? (You have to skip the Sprint ad.)

Chicago's finest in riot gear is needed to disperse poets at a Printers' Ball? They could've just announced that the liquor had run out.

Ward Churchill can be fired after all.

DNA tests might have proven him innocent, but it's too late for poet Darrell Grayson.

Fully awake at Black Mountain College.

John Yau speaks with Rosalyn Drexler about art, capital "a."

It's time for another Best of the Net.

How to write the McPoem.

Here's an interesting interview with Kenneth Goldsmith re: Ubu Web.

A road is the end of the nomad.

Stratagem

We seek indigo theories
to explain our gravity.

As humans we pain.
Captives of perspective.

Mystique, in league with
altitude, resists.