The New Chicago School

[I'm reposting this here now that digital emunction is going out of business. I had linked to it when it first appeared but soon the link will dry up, I'm guessing.]


My pro­posal: That the clos­est thing we presently have to a “School” of younger, rig­or­ously inno­v­a­tive poets in the U.S. (one that stands clos­est chance of being ret­ro­spec­tively seen as akin in sig­nif­i­cance to the NY School in its first-​generation, proto-​formation years–and when I say “School” I mean in that sense of for­tu­itous con­stel­la­tion, some­thing very dif­fer­ent from a self-​identified ten­dency or “movement”) is what I’ll call the New Chicago School. It’s a list of accom­plished, exper­i­men­tal writ­ers, more poet­i­cally focused as a col­lec­tive, per­haps, than the con­tents list of the City Vis­i­ble anthol­ogy of a couple years back, and more geo­graph­i­cally focused, too, inas­much as all the poets have roots in the city, even though a few of them have recently moved else­where (though in most cases still nearby), and one now lives abroad:

William Fuller, Ed Rober­son (these first two the elder fig­ures of the group), Anthony Madrid, John Tipton, Devin John­ston, Peter O’Leary, Robyn Schiff, Bill Alle­grezza, Dan Beachy-​Quick, Michael Rob­bins, John Beer, Arielle Green­berg, Lisa Fish­man, Jesse Seldess, Nick Twem­low, Suzanne Buffam, Srikanth Reddy, Jen­nifer Scap­pet­tone, Francesco Levato, Eric Elsh­tain, Jen­nifer Karmin, Leila Wilson, Nathalie Stephens, Joshua Marie Wilkin­son, Garin Cycholl, Joel Felix, Chris Glom­ski, Erica Bern­heim, Larry Sawyer, Patrick Durgin, Joshua Corey out in the sub­urbs, Tony Trig­ilio, Daniel Borzutzky (though some­thing of a sep­a­rate case, the work of these last two, perhaps)… and a gaggle of bril­liant scholar-​editors asso­ci­ated, past or present, with the Chicago Review, along with Robert Archam­beau, on the out­skirts of town at Lake Forest.

To these names one could add an active (and often activist) group of even younger poets and pub­lish­ers: Michael Slosek, Kerri Son­nen­berg, Steve Halle, Eric Unger, Luke Daly, Brooks John­son, and Bar­rett Gordon, for exam­ple (the latter four have close con­nec­tions, and their work engages the visual arts and music scenes, as well).

For sure, there are others I’m just blank­ing on, or don’t know, and apolo­gies for that (please add). And obvi­ously (!) there are all kinds of superb poets in Chicago doing impor­tant work who don’t quite fit the avant-​aesthetic para­me­ters of the group­ing–Don Share being one promi­nent case, or David Trinidad, another.

From a poetic stand­point, what would jus­tify the set? It is a diverse group (as was the orig­i­nal NY School) and a large one, but it’s held together by a vibrant, active scene and cer­tain broad affini­ties of poetic pre­dis­po­si­tion and–quite often, and with the nec­es­sary excep­tions–affect. The tilt is towards a “scholarly,” brainy, less “pop-cultural” and more self-​consciously “critical” mode than tends to be the case around St. Mark’s, for exam­ple. And, I’d argue, the work by and large tends to be more the­mat­i­cally ambi­tious, more novel and chal­leng­ing in its reg­is­ters and forms, more earnestly in tune with the inter­na­tional than the work of the younger NY scene, still largely caught, the latter, within tonal frames of the hip, the pop, the ver­nac­u­lar, the anec­do­tal, the flarf.

I know that some of the poets above–John­ston, O’Leary, Tipton, and Fuller–have already been “aesthetically” grouped together by Stephen Burt (Bobby Baird has pointed out here that this group rep­re­sents a rhetor­i­cal and formal drift locally known for some time already as “Flood Poetry”), in his recent essay “The New Thing,” where he also iden­ti­fies recent theory coming out of the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago as key source for what he sees as a devel­op­ing cur­rent of poetic epis­te­mol­ogy. Burt is refer­ring to “Thing Theory,” as pro­mul­gated by, among others, Dou­glas Mao and Bill Brown, the latter living in Hyde Park, appar­ently. In short, these younger poets are turn­ing away from the still-​fashionable modes of lin­guis­tic and con­cep­tual abstrac­tion and towards a redis­cov­ery of “ref­er­ence” and “con­crete, real things,” tend­ing to render their expe­ri­ence with terse­ness and con­ci­sion. Though some of the poets he names, it should be noted, are not exactly laconic…

Now, I fully agree with Baird, in his post here some months back, report­ing on afore­said essay, that Burt is a ter­rific critic. I sup­pose Burt and Adam Kirsch are more or less neck and neck right now to be the next Helen Vendler, Burt the horse on the left, Kirsch the one on the right, strid­ing to the pole, pulling their crit­i­cal sulkies behind. (Though who, one won­ders, will be the next Mar­jorie Perloff?) So there’s no ques­tion he’s very good. But I find his neo-​Objectivist “Thing” group­ing to be some­thing of a stretch: John­ston, Mark Nowak, Juliana Spahr, Joseph Massey, and Jen­nifer Moxley, for exam­ple, placed in the same stable accord­ing to the poets’ (very dif­fer­ent) ren­der­ings of their atten­tions to objects and their (usu­ally wildly dif­fer­ent) the­matic appli­ca­tion of these phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal encoun­ters? Well, OK, I guess, though really, I wonder what U.S. poetry since Williams’s isn’t haunted at least a little by some manner of Husser­lian susurra­tion inside it. Come to think of it, forget Williams; even spooky Dick­in­son is chock-​full of stuff and Things. So is Whit­man, and in over­drive, though he’s not quite “con­cise,” so maybe he wouldn’t qual­ify as a “thing” poet. In any case, what’s all that “new” about the New Thing, if such a thing actu­ally exists, is not all that clear.

As you can see, I feel Burt’s argu­ment is a bit forced and con­strain­ing, a bit too much of a bit and halter, as it were. (Inci­den­tally, inter­est­ing to me, and as I wrote Burt after I first saw his essay, I’m pretty sure the first-​ever seri­ous appli­ca­tion of Thing Theory to post-​avant poetry, includ­ing quo­ta­tions from Mao and Brown, et. al, was in Eric Hayot’s 2005 PMLA essay, “Araki Yasu­sada: Author, Object.”) In any case, both Baird and John Latta have pretty neatly taken Burt apart on all this.

And maybe my grumpi­ness with Burt’s bridling clas­si­fi­ca­tion isn’t all that nec­es­sary, anyway. Supe­rior poets will almost never try to con­form to this or that critic’s tax­o­nomic cri­te­ria, and I’m sure some­one like Burt would be the last to want them to. The point I’m trying to make, though per­haps I don’t even have to, is that you don’t need–as again, the New York poets proved, or the Black Moun­tain poets proved, or the Beats proved, or even the Objec­tivists proved–any kind of solid critical-​philosophical frame to con­sti­tute a vig­or­ous “school,” or even ten­dency, of poetry. You don’t even need a quasi one. All you need is a locale(s), smart ambi­tious people, and a cer­tain affec­tive habi­tus (often found in tav­erns) that is friendly, con­tentious, gos­sipy, mutu­ally sup­port­ive, and pro­fes­sion­ally inces­tu­ous to some degree. The modal, orga­niz­ing affini­ties, which rarely funnel down to strong affini­ties of “pro­gram,” grow out of these. If some­thing is right, and who knows what that is or how it works, things flower.

So I’m making the case that there is some­thing that has devel­oped in Chicago over the past few years, an accre­tion of poetic felic­i­ties whose parts and sum are unri­valed by any other avant locale in the coun­try: St. Mark’s has a wealth of talent and enough in-​house sound for a School, but the tex­tual ambi­tion seems com­par­a­tively slight; Austin has Slow Poetry, and this is full of promise, but it’s more an embry­onic move­ment, not a School; the Bay Area has a great scene, but the crazy var­ie­ga­tion of it all (see Bay Area Poet­ics) makes any notion of School unten­able; Philadel­phia is loaded with smarts, but true Schools of poetry cannot abide ven­er­a­ble Head­mas­ters (well, OK, except­ing the Sons of Ben, during the reign of Charles I); Iowa City has the most expert prac­ti­tion­ers of the period tachisme, but that is not any kind of School, it is a career; Prov­i­dence has riches, but it takes more than stu­dents; Buf­falo is home to some fine out­lier poets, but SUNY is cov­ered in snow; Boston, appar­ently, has fallen into the sea.

In con­clu­sion, what I’m propos­ing (it would appear I am begin­ning to repeat myself) is some­thing that’s begin­ning to have a sense of the self-​evident to it already, I think, and no doubt others have noticed it, too: that Chicago, right now, is home to the most inter­est­ing and vital avant “poetic cluster” in the country.

And I feel con­fi­dent enough of the claim to name it again, even though I know the name is not all that flashy, but that’s appro­pri­ate to the city’s spirit, too: The New Chicago School.

–Kent John­son

[One hun­dred miles from Wrigley Field, in Freeport, Illinois]

Vanitas 5: Film :::: available now

Purchase Vanitas, Vol. 5 , because it's available now with: Louis Armand, Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Mary Joe Bang, Michael Basinski, Michael Brownstein, Tom Clark, Steve Dalachinsky, Ray DiPalma, Elaine Equi, Clayton Eshleman, Jim Feast, Richard Hell, Robert Hershon, Anselm Hollo, Jack Kimball, Gerard Malanga, Eileen Myles, Jerome Sala, Tom Savage, Larry Sawyer, Ilka Scobie, Peter Jay Shippy, David Shapiro, Tony Towle, Anne Waldman, and John Yau among others .. (that's the editor Vincent Katz,in Vienna, as photographed by Vivien Bittencourt)

Unable to Fully California (Otoliths Press, 2010)

Unable to Fully California with cover by Krista Franklin is officially available on Lulu and Amazon .






I love the clear style, unforced music. It is not so much a strange poetry as the poetry of a stranger, the way Bishop was a Brazilian in Boston and a Bostonian in Brazil. I fell in love with your “blue fruit” and “inescapable tomorrow,” also what seems like renunciation not of sentimentality but of cliché …I like even the quasi-Romantic dislocations here: “There is a beauty to ice/only a statue understands.” I’m not a statue, so I only partially understand, but that should be more than enough for Sawyer’s uncanny picnic on no grass … seemed as real as the Bronx, and I couldn’t stop thinking: I am so lucky that this poetry is so good.

—David Shapiro


The split infinitive title that is Unable to Fully California prompts the question: What in 2010 is most real? Larry Sawyer leads us in response to “the exotic trigonometry” that invokes twirled concepts, blended wines, plus deliciously intentional mistakes. In this spree of sight and sound, nouns take up residence while collocating in new roles as verbs alive in trans-plantation. The tenor and vehicle of similes yield a vivid array of bleached blond poems that skid across the page. Their x axis is transmuted from horizon line to stars as yet unnamed from which we readers readily infer we’re not in Kansas anymore.

—Sheila E. Murphy



The poetry of Larry Sawyer arrives free of any investment in a “poetics” or worldview and therefore ties its shoes on the run: “The city is a Smith and Wesson covered in noon.” The sublime lies in “covered in noon,” the waking world in the Smith and Wesson. So there’s a spontaneity of composition (anything can happen and does) that reminds us of what René Char was supposed to have been. On first impression, the poems can seem scattershot, like the art works of Niki de Saint Phalle composed by shotgun. Some of the pellets form patterns, some impressions they make are deeper than others, and some even pierce the metal canvas. Because Sawyer’s style is so open, the casual and intense find comfort in each other and the remarkable detail emerges: “What horizon / spreads in the distance / muscles ripening?” Much of this work is therefore fresh and unexpectable, like the final line of his elegy at Char’s gravesite: “Quiet snow, gossip over the hero’s grave.”

—Paul Hoover

New Myopic Poetry Dates, 1564 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, 7pm

Sunday, July 25

Devin King & Peter O'Leary



Saturday, August 7

Amy De'Ath, John Wilkinson, Kristina Jipson & Joel Duncan



Tuesday, August 17

Nico Vassilakis, mIEKAL aND, Crag Hill, and James Yeary



Friday, September 10

Catherine Wagner & Dana Ward



Saturday, September 18th

Adam Golaski & Jennifer Karmin



Saturday, October 2

Chicago Calling with Dan Godston (guests to be announced)



Saturday, October 16

Mark Wallace




Saturday, October 30

Carol Novack






Past readers at Myopic Books include:

Duriel Harris, Joel Craig, Jessica Savitz, Mark Tardi, Thax Douglas, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Jennifer Karmin, Lisa Janssen, Brandi Homan, Daniel Borzutzky, Katy Lederer, Gabriel Gudding, Patrick Durgin, Kristin Dykstra, Krista Franklin, Tim Yu, Marvin Tate, Liz Marino, Dan Godston, Bruce Covey, Daniel Nester, Ed Roberson, Francesco Levato, Gina Myers, Simon Pettet, Joel Felix, Jason Bredle, Diane Wakoski, Jenny Boully, Todd Heldt, Eileen Myles, Tyehimba Jess, Michael Robins, Nate Slawson, Philip Jenks, Garin Cycholl, Kristy Odelius, Ela Kotkowska, Melissa Serverin, Bob Archambeau, Garrett Brown, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Carrie Olivia Adams, Jesse Seldess, Arpine Grenier, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Patrick Culliton, John Beer, Kostas Anagnopoulos, Lea Graham, Jeremy Davies, John Tipton, Charlie Newman, Edmund Berrigan, Gene Tanta, AD Jameson, Joshua Adams, Carrie Etter, Dave Awl, Chris Green, Bill Allegrezza, Peter O'Leary, Nathalie Stephens, Megan Volpert, Luis Valadez, Simone Muench, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Carolyn Guinzio, Chris Glomski, Farrah Field, Zach Harris, Lauren Levato, Steve Halle, David Meltzer, Paul Hoover, Kerri Sonnenberg, Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, K. Silem Mohammad, James Bellflower, Aaron Fagin, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Orange, Fred Sasaki, Wayne Miller, Karyna McGlynn, Tony Trigillio, David Trinidad, Kent Johnson, Linh Dinh, Judith Goldman, Reb Livingston, Jen Tynes, Elizabeth Harper, Mirela Tanta, Erin Teegarden, Chuck Stebelton, Stella Radulescu, Roberto Harrison, Charles Ries, Kristy Bowen, Bill Berkson, Oni Buchanan, Donna Stonecipher, Abraham Smith, Ray Hsu and many others...

Bright Lighghts, Big City

Is the cultural mix lonelier, emptier, thinner and far less interesting now than it was in the 1960s? I would guess not lonelier or emptier, given that more are writing poetry now than at virtually any other time in American history. As to whether it's less interesting, that's a purely subjective question, but again not from my perspective, although all of these players are some of my heroes/heroines of poetry. Of course, Saroyan's poem "lighght" is still the pop-cultural, conceptual tour-de-force it always was.

New Myopic Poetry Series Dates

Come spend some time in a cozy bookstore rubbing elbows with poets and ... books. The Myopic Books Poetry Series is free, which is best of all. This, however, is an interior shot of Filter, the venerable Wicker Park landmark, while it was still kicking.

Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave Chicago, IL 60622
Contact: 773.862.4882
larrysawyerpoet@yahoo.com


Saturday, January 23 : Roger Bonaire-Agard & Kevin Coval


Sunday, January 24 : Nick Demske & Michael Bernstein

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IN CONJUNCTION WITH
The Chicago Review
Saturday, January 30 : Christian Hawkey, Uljana Wolf, & Monika Rinck

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Sunday, January 31 : Robert Fernandez & Anthony Madrid


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Sunday, February 7 : Philip Jenks & Allyssa Wolf


Saturday, February 20 : Michael Robbins & Daniel Borzutzky


Sunday, February 21 : Aldo Alvarez & Dave Awl


Sunday, February 28 : Jon Thompson & Lisa Fishman


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Sunday, March 7 : Michelle Taransky & Jordon Stempleman


Saturday, March 14 : Jamie Kazay & Lina ramona Vitkauskas


Sunday, March 15 : William Allegrezza & Chris Glomski


Saturday, March 20 : Seth Landman & Lewis Freedman


Sunday, March 28 : Carrie Olivia Adams & Josh Corey

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Saturday, April 3 : Laura Carter & Erika Mikkalo

Sunday, April 4 - Steve Halle & John Keene

Wednesday, April 21 - Jerome Rothenberg

Saturday, April 24 - Ben Doller & Sandra Doller

Sunday, April 25 : Barry Schwabsky & Matvei Yankelevich

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Sunday, May 2 : Connor Stratman & Philip Jenks

Sunday, May 9 : Robert Archambeau & Don Share

Saturday, May 15 : Brandon Downing & Macgregor Card

Sunday, May 16 : Aaron Fagan & Daniela Olszewska

Sunday, May 23 : Andy Fitch, John Cotner, & David Trinidad

Sunday, June 13 : Debrah Morkun & Kim Gek Lin Short

Thursday, June 24 : Greg Purcell & Joel Craig

Saturday, July 10 : Chicago/Milwaukee Poetry Fest!
Roberto Harrison, Nick Demske, Mike Hauser, Brenda Cardenas, Caryl Pagel, Larry Sawyer & more!

Saturday, October 16 : Mark Wallace

Saturday, October 30 : Carol Novack
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Metrophobia: Poetry as Last House on the Left

Are you afraid of poetry?

I’m afraid of it only to the extent that it has given me some sense of the awesome power of language to expand awareness. So, to some extent poetry is a conduit that has increased my awareness and an expanded awareness can seem to shift our perspective and unfamiliar ground can be frightening, but can’t that particular definition of frightening also be more aptly described as “exhilarating”? My two cents.

There's an interesting post at Robert Archambeau's great blog, Samizdat, re: “poetry is being read by an ever-smaller slice of the American reading public” which begs the question “is it being taught ‘wrong’”?

When poetry is defined as 'self-expression,' which is how I believe that it might be taught at the high school level, then students of poetry walk away with a stunted awareness of the possibilities of language. In fact, most would probably opt to get their self-expression ya-yas out in any other way that might be construed as more "fun." Making a movie for YouTube or starting a rock band for example. Poetry is a distinct art form with distinct tricks of the trade. If no awareness of craft is imbued in students then there won't be any appreciation of the multi-levels of meaning and the depth of observation apparent in poetry that was written by the most skilled practitioners of the art.

(And further “news” today at HuffPo about the issue.)

Of course, the fact that fewer people seem to be reading poetry can also have much to do with the fact that we’re witnessing a huge shift in how information itself is being transmitted. From newspapers and books to the Internet, for example. You’re reading this now via computer screen rather than a printed page, but I’m glad you tuned in. Here are a few poems that can help you to expand your own parameters. (This is a pic of Drew Barrymore after her first reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.)


Here are a few poems that are well worth the fright.

Song by Frank O’Hara

from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

No Liquor in the House by Kenward Elmslie

Two Poems by Nicanor Parra

Five Poems by Aimé Césaire (trans. by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman)

To Brooklyn Bridge by Hart Crane

In the forest of symbols

Are poets synesthesiacs? I do know that “To taste the wine of speech” (as one poet put it) helps to describe our world in a way that illustrates the gray areas of experience—a memory is often collage. It’s a rinse cycle in the mind of every available sensory detail regarding a person, event, or period in time.






Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you
to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,
my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.
We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.

—John Ashbery, “Mottled Tuesday”


The Sufi poet Attar to describe Rumi said …"There goes a river dragging an ocean behind it." So, poets are used to using figurative language to describe and bring new life and interest to the mundane. And poets have been writing of memory throughout the ages. As Ana Akhmatova wrote in her poem “Lot’s Wife.”


There are three periods of memory.
The first of them is like a yesterday,
The soul basks in the blessings of their vault,
The body takes its glory in their shade.
Laughter has not yet passed away, tears gush,
The blot is not yet bleached out of the desk,
The kiss, like a heart's seal, is terminal,
Is singular and unforgettable...
But this does not last long before the vault
Has vanished overhead. And in some backwoods
Neighborhood, in a solitary house
Where summers leave the winters' chill warmed over,
Where spiders weave, where all things are in dust,
Where lovestruck letters lead a crumbling half-life,
Sly portraits change into their different selves.


And Emily Dickinson wrote “Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine.” I guess it’s always been this reorganization of the senses that interests me most about poetry.

Anne Salz, a Dutch musician and visual artist, perceives sound as swatches of color that she incorporates into her paintings. "The painting represents the opening of the concerto for four violins. I listen to the music while I paint. First, the music gives me an optimistic, happy feeling and I perceive red, yellow, and orange colors in a great variety with little contrast. It looks like a field of these colors. I perceive the color field as a musical chord. You can compare it with the colors of a blanket or cover made of autumn leaves." Her painting "Vivaldi" was a result of what she "saw" while listening to Vivaldi's music.

Neurologist Richard Cytowic identified synesthesia as meeting some of the following criteria:

1. Synesthesia is involuntary and automatic.
2. Synesthetic perceptions are spatially extended, meaning they often have a sense of "location." For example, synesthetes speak of "looking at" or "going to" a particular place to attend to the experience.
3. Synesthetic percepts are consistent and generic (i.e., simple rather than pictorial).
4. Synesthesia is highly memorable.
5. Synesthesia is laden with affect.

Some artists who also happened to be synesthetes include Duke Ellington, David Hockney, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Liszt, Wassily Kandinsky and the guitarist John Mayer. This claim might be a little more obvious as it relates to Kandinsky’s painting versus, say, John Mayer’s guitar playing, but the topic is intrinsically interesting. It may have been Charles Baudelaire, (first as he was in many things), to have first written in a modern way about the effects of synesthesia in his poem “Correspondences.”

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let escape sometimes confused words;
Man traverses it through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar glances.

Like long echoes that intermingle from afar
In a dark and profound unity,
Vast like the night and like the light,
The perfumes, the colors and the sounds respond.

There are perfumes fresh like the skin of infants
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies,
—And others corrupted, rich and triumphant

That have the expanse of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, balsam and incense,
Which sing the ecstasies of the mind and senses.

Arizona Fuzz

The poem
does not lie to us. We lie under
its law, alive in the glamour of this hour

—John Wieners



Do roses skipping in the
Glass make great gifts, I mic
Their contours, wipe innocence
From the window, these milk
Mansions. Arizona fuzz catches
Green fish coming up
From

Being hunted, her
Devouring dawns, within
Gnawing hiatus shed. This
Glamorous tongue noticed,
Will arrest all secrets.
We stash strange

Butterflies are
Puzzles of our former lives.
But he is elephant. That
Exception and the
Surrounding meadow
Its tender symmetry.


On repeat, the choral
Stillness, yet the siren’s panache
Makes stew of our excuses
Launches enemy submarines
Who looks with astonishment upon
Its maize


My happiness.

Series A, mini-conference, "Poetry and Place"

I had an opportunity to discuss new Chicago poetry at a recent conference with Garin Cycholl and Ray Bianchi as part of Bill Allegrezza's Series A poetry reading series at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Click here to access the sound file. Frank O'Hara's work loomed large in my mind as I considered how to respond to the idea of Poetry and Place.

Myopic Books Poetry Schedule

We've updated the Myopic Books Poetry Series calendar ... please note that the Kent Johnson/Linh Dinh reading occurs on a Saturday~! Myopic Books has the widest selection of used books in the city.

All readings begin at 7 pm. Thanks,

Larry



UPCOMING


Saturday, October 24 - Kent Johnson
& Linh Dinh




Sunday, November 1 - Roberto Harrison, Tom Hibbard
& Chuck Stebelton

Sunday, November 8 - Matthew Klane & Jennifer Scappettone

Sunday, November 15 - Eileen Myles
& Guest


**************************



THE MYOPIC POETRY SERIES — a weekly series of readings and occasional poets' talks

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


773.862.4882

Contact curator Larry Sawyer for booking information and requests.
E-mail: larrysawyerpoet@yahoo.com




Myopic Books — 17 years of innovative poetry in Chicago


::::THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING THE MYOPIC POETRY SERIES::::

On the New Chicago Poetry

The quote by Reginald Shepherd included by Robert Archambeau on Adam Fieled’s blog in an old blog post gave my morning a jumpstart, along with my morning cup of sacred bean squeezings

“T. S. Eliot said that the poet must be as intelligent as possible; Wallace Stevens said that the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. It is in the play between the intelligence of language and the resistance to intelligence of language as an object that poetry occurs. What matters is not what a poem can say, a preoccupation Harold Bloom shares with the multiculturalists he so despises, but what a poem can do. I look to poetry for what only poems can do, or what poems can do best–to alienate language from its alienation of use (the phrase is Adorno’s), to treat language as an end-in-itself rather than a mere means: to communication, expression, or even truth.”

Although Shepherd passed from this earth on Sep. 10, 2008 he was described by Lawrence White as “born and raised in Bronx projects, exiled to Macon, Georgia, then rising up to Bennington and Brown and beyond—was the stuff of an Oprah-list memoir. The motor of that progression, his adamantine integrity that would not swerve nor stoop, was heroic in the old-fashioned sense: it brought him to glories and it brought him to calamities. But he was no cliché. His friends, and those students and readers who were drawn to him, knew he was a rare spirit.”

In thinking about what’s "new" about the poetry being written right now in Chicago (dubbed by Kent Johnson recently as the New Chicago School and by Adam Fieled previously as the Chicago Eliotics, and even earlier by Tim Yu as New Prairie School), I came upon Shepherd's quote, which posits an idea that has a different drift than Auden’s famous “Poetry makes nothing happen.” And it’s worth reading Poetry magazine senior editor Don Share’s post against the holding up of W.H. Auden’s line as evidence of anything when taken out of context, being that the line was written to describe a poet whom, according to Auden, did/does make things happen—William Butler Yeats.

Although Share comments that Auden’s line isn’t necessarily a declaration of poetry’s inutility, in my experience, proving the utility of poetry, as absurd an idea as that may seem, comes up frequently when one applies for a grant or funding of any kind, either for the monetary means to travel in order to write poetry, or to take time off of work to write poetry, or to host a poetry event. Often questionnaires include a line or two asking “how will this serve the community.” In other words, why is poetry on a different side of the line than, say, fiction (or painting or film)? Does Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds serve the community of Los Angeles, or did William Faulkner somehow serve his community by writing The Sound and the Fury? In the case of Faulkner, the folk of Oxford, Mississippi grew to dislike the novelist in their midst, after they'd read his books, because they claimed that Faulkner had presented an unflattering portrait of what went on there. These two examples are perhaps polar opposites of a sort, but I still hold to the notion that an artist creates because he/she must. I’m pretty sure that authors of fiction who receive grants or endowments aren’t asked whether the new novel that is in the process of being will somehow serve the community.

This “newness” has come into being largely on a completely parallel course to the course that is being charted by the Poetry Foundation. Perhaps two or three of the younger poets that I know have been published in the pages of Poetry magazine, but none of the other 30-40 other amazing younger poets living in Chicago who are all writing what could be called experimental poetry (I would call it contemporary) have been published there and it could be that the editorial board of Poetry is simply not able to hit that vein, whether that’s intentional I have no idea.

Another recent foray into publishing Chicago poetry has been Granta’s (which is financed by a Swedish billionairess who purportedly doesn't like Americans) recent Chicago issue that includes virtually none of the many younger Chicago writers of this newer poetry who frequent venues, bars, and bookstores such as Danny’s, Myopic Books, Elastic Arts, Red Rover, and Series A in Hyde Park.

I was surprised to receive a near-immediate response from the American editor of Granta John Freeman, after I originally criticized Granta's odd editorializing of the Chicago scene and he stressed via e-mail that it wasn’t the intention of Granta editors to “exclude younger poets,” but that he couldn’t find one whose work “bowled him over.” He concluded by commenting that many poets don’t know that Granta publishes poetry and that keeping track of new poets is daunting. My guess is that Granta solicited all the work that was published in their Chicago issue and that the net they cast to find these “Chicago poets” must have been a pretty small one. Ok, enough appetizer.

The poets here aren’t necessarily anti-confessional (and I’m really speaking only for myself). In fact, I love Anne Sexton’s work (who lived in Boston and died in 1974), for example, but what I love about it isn’t its juicy confessional details or risqué (for the time) subject matter—reading Sexton is like watching fireworks. She wrings language into new meanings, which is what’s always excited me about poetry—old or new, whether it was written in Chicago, Boise or Khatmandu.

(Even stranger: A recent addition to the Granta Web site under the “Chicago-issue” banner includes a piece by Milwaukeean Bruce Olds titled “Leaving Chi-Town” that wistfully illustrates the memories that he still has of the city, although presumably he moved away. He even mentions Al Capone—pow, pow, pow, but no Michael Jordan? Ok, to be fair he does include the words “at risk of cliché.”)

As Roland Barthes said, (to paraphrase in a meathanded way and bend the quote by Barthes from a separate discussion to suit my own) I believe that readers of this new Chicago poetry to some extent help “generate the texts they are reading.” So, the poetry here does something, even if it's only the impetus for the creation of new and multiple meanings in the mind of the reader. This open ended poetry that kicked out closure and didn’t even give it cab fare exists because there is a confluence of poets who have either relocated here from elsewhere or returned after stints at Brown, Iowa, or other major schools and what had been known previously as a fly-over city is now a cultural blender par excellence where, if one has an active interest in poetry, there is a genuine sense that something is happening. These poets all seem to have a sense of this kind of awareness. These poems do enact, rather than describe or list in the sense that New York School poems, especially evidenced by the timing in the moment-to-moment sensibility of Frank O’Hara as it comes through in his writing, list or map the consciousness of the author as it splattered against another day living in New York.

So, I’m here to say, too, that it matters not what a poem can say, but it’s what a poem does that makes one want to inhabit it by participating in its meaning. It’s not that some of these Chicago poets have some programmatic impulse to create poetry that narrowly adheres to these sort of strictures regularly—but the awareness of this as an aesthetic option (of many on the menu) and a certain brand of extroversion of personality gives the writing being produced here a genuinely wide-ranging quality that is unique. Despite the quibbling over who is or isn’t a “Chicago poet” as if one would have to live out an expiration date from a previous existence to be granted the nameplate and plastered with the title of “Chicago poet”, from where I’m sitting what’s happening here is galactic. Paul Hoover’s words on the topic of Chicago poetry from an old blog post sum it pretty well “perhaps the usual thing had happened, a revolution of the word.” If all this is so, there is definitely evidence here of the orbit of a number of “heavy planets” (Paul’s words), and I’m happy to drift among them.

Thanks, Daily Reviewer

Thanks Daily Reviewer for picking Me Tronome as one of the top 100 poetry blogs on the Internet.

Chicagoland

Adrian Brody in Hollywoodland is perfect as a PI in a noir thriller with his mussy hair and charming quirks (he's a private snoop who doesn't smoke, he chews gum), but here in Chicago we have our own mystery brewing.

Apparently Granta magazine, which is published in England, recently visited a Chicago of which I've never heard.

Their recent "Chicago Issue" features much mention of Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow (why Hemingway's name would be mentioned in an issue of Chicago writing is a head-scratcher, he wrote not-so-favorably of Oak Park) and even includes Roger Ebert (thumbs up) but the plot thickens as one scans the contributors' list. It seems that none of the huge number of younger poets who are now living and writing in Chicago are given any mention.

And, Granta, no one thinks that James Schuyler is representative of Chicago. The man was a roommate of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara in New York. Have you heard of them?

We can't wait for Granta's New York issue. I hope Hillary Clinton will get a centerspread. I mean she's so New York, I mean Arkansas, er Chicago.

RIP Jim Carroll

Thanks to Kent Johnson for mentioning this humble blogger at digital emunction .

Still up: Evidence of my past stint as Chicago Poetry Scene Examiner , with reports on Myopic Books, the Hopleaf, Bookslut, Adam Fieled, Bill Allegrezza and one of the most underrated poets of all time, Lorine Niedecker.

Word / for word, issue 15

Many thanks to Tom Hibbard for including some of my work in the new issue of Word for / word.


Poetry by Cindy Davett, Brooklyn Copeland, Mg Roberts, Marthe Reed, Joshua Butts, Marcia Arrieta, Nicole Zdeb, Julius Kalamarz, Trina Burke among others.

Visual poetry by John M. Bennet, Scott Helmes, Kristin Hayter, Sheila E. Murphy, K.S. Ernst, Nico Vassilakis, Ray Lam, Andrew Topel among others.

Political poetry feature (guest-edited by Tom Hibbard) with Jim Leftwich, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Mark Wallace, Roberto Harrison, Eileen Tabios, Mary Woodbury, Michael Basinski, Chuck Stebelton, Buck Downs, Larry Sawyer, David Meltzer, and Tom Hibbard et al.

Essays/Notes: Interview with C.S. Carrier and Elizabeth A. Hiscox, “Heritage Like Money Then” by Arpine Grenier, among others.

Save Michael Reese Hospital reading

When: July 25, 3-6 p.m. at St. Paul's Art Center
Where: 2215 W. North Ave.

Poetry readings by Larry Sawyer, Charlie Newman, & Al DeGenova
* * *
David Boykin -- solo percussion
* * *



Paul Hartsaw -- tenor saxophone
Dan Godston -- trumpet
Alex Wing -- drums
Jerome Bryerton -- drums



As part of its bid to the Olympics committee, the city of Chicago has decided to build an Olympic park on the south side in conjunction with their plan to make the city accessible for visitors and athletes should the city win its proposal to host the 2016 Olympics. The only problem is that the site of the future Olympics village is also home to Chicago architectural landmarks, including Michael Reese Hospital, which was designed by the legendary architect Walter Gropius with Reginald R. Isaacs. Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Germany that was a lightning rod for new ideas regarding architectural design worldwide from 1919 to 1933. The influence of Bauhaus ideas on art of all genres is inestimable and continues to this day.


The city of Chicago seems very eager to raze Michael Reese Hospital to the ground whether the Olympic bid is ultimately successful or not. If it is successful and Chicago is chosen as the host city, the Olympics will come and go, and an important piece of Chicago history will be lost forever as a result. This seems like a very large price to pay for a temporary event, even for an event as illustrious as the Olympics.

The Save Michael Reese Hospital group his been organized to address this threat to a Chicago landmark.

Chicago is known for its architecture if anything, and the work of Walter Gropius in the city is an important piece of a puzzle that includes many other skilled architects who made Chicago what it is today, including Louis Sullivan, George W. Maher, Mies van de Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The work of these architects and others who made Chicago an architectural landmark that is visited by tourists from all over the world should be respected and the idea that the work of Walter Gropius should be destroyed to pave the way for the Olympics, a temporary event, is profoundly disrespectful to the memory of Gropius as well as to the citizens of Chicago.

Visit the Save Michael Reese Hospital Web site for further information now.

Also see Lynn Becker's, Writings on Architecture for more information.

grüp

The Group resurfaces.

grupo, groupe, gruppe, gruppo, группа, groep, ομάδα, grupp, مجموعة

“Collaboration”: An Official Printers’ Ball Lead-up Event

“Collaboration”:
An Official Printers' Ball Lead-up Event

When: Sunday, July 12, 2:00 PM
Where: Woman Made Gallery
675 North Milwaukee Avenue




Free admission.

For this event, writers’ work and/or performance will involve interaction with other writers, performers, art forms, media, maybe even with the audience. Participants in the event include Simone Muench and Philip Jenks, presenting collaboratively written poetry; Mars Gamba-Adisa Caulton, working with her own music; performance poetry duo Marty McConnell and Andi Strickland just back from their Wandering Uterus tour; Jennifer Karmin, in a live improvised collaboration with Chicago writers; Carrie Olivia Adams, Daniel Godston, Laura Goldstein, Amira Hanafi, Coman Poon, and Larry Sawyer performing the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice; and curator Nina Corwin in collaboration with Janice Misurell-Mitchell, internationally known improvisational flautist.


More information at Woman Made.org

Reading at Michael Reese Hospital

What: Save Michael Reese Hospital reading
When: July 25, 6 -11 pm
Where: 2929 S. Ellis Ave.


[pictured: Bauhaus, Dessau]

As part of its bid to the Olympics committee, the city of Chicago has decided to build an Olympic park on the south side in conjunction with their plan to make the city accessible for visitors and athletes should the city win its proposal to host the 2016 Olympics. The only problem is that the site of the future Olympics village is also home to Chicago architectural landmarks, including Michael Reese Hospital, which was designed by the legendary architect Walter Gropius with Reginald R. Isaacs. Gropius founded the Bauhaus School in Germany that was a lightning rod for new ideas regarding architectural design worldwide from 1919 to 1933. The influence of Bauhaus ideas on art of all genres is inestimable and continues to this day.

The city of Chicago seems very eager to raze Michael Reese Hospital to the ground whether the Olympic bid is ultimately successful or not. If it is successful and Chicago is chosen as the host city, the Olympics will come and go, and an important piece of Chicago history will be lost forever as a result. This seems like a very large price to pay for a temporary event, even for an event as illustrious as the Olympics.

The Save Michael Reese Hospital group his been organized to address this threat to a Chicago landmark.

Chicago is known for its architecture if anything, and the work of Walter Gropius in the city is an important piece of a puzzle that includes many other skilled architects who made Chicago what it is today, including Louis Sullivan, George W. Maher, Mies van de Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The work of these architects and others who made Chicago an architectural landmark that is visited by tourists from all over the world should be respected and the idea that the work of Walter Gropius should be destroyed to pave the way for the Olympics, a temporary event, is profoundly disrespectful to the memory of Gropius as well as to the citizens of Chicago.

Visit the Save Michael Reese Hospital Web site for further information now.

Also see Lynn Becker's, Writings on Architecture for more information.