Hey Ahadadians—another reading we’re pleased to announce! Catherine Daly will be reading in Milwaukee and Madison this coming Saturday and Sunday, April 1 & 2:
Saturday, April 1, 8 pm Woodland Pattern
with Garin Cycholl
720 East Locust St., Milwaukee
Sunday, April 2, 3 pm A Room of One’s Own
with Kate Sontag, David Graham, Marilyn Talyor
307 W. Johnson Street, Madison
In anticipation of the impending launch of Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006) I had the opportunity to conduct a quick interview via email for the Small Press Exchange. Fiorentino discusses the practices of a conspicuous loser, PlayStation and Margaret Christakos—among other things.
In 1899, Thorstein Veblen recalibrated North America’s class system with The Theory of the Leisure Class. Introducing terms like ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘nouveau riche,’ he identified a new demographic: the leisure class, a caste of the elite who could afford to spend all their time in pursuit of fun.
Fast-forward a century, and the leisure class has given way to the loser class: geek gangs and rec-room rabble, a landscape of videos, drugs and late-night talk shows. Find your own inner nerd as Fiorentino maps the psychic territory of abjection across the shopworn spaces of suburbia, where losers lurk against a backdrop of aging strip malls, burned-out houses and living rooms littered with video game consoles.
By turns compassionate, funny and filled with self-loathing, The Theory of the Loser Class is poetry for the socially inept and culturally vexed.
Theory of the Loser Class will launch April 6, 2006. For more details, click here.
Blends & Bridges: A Survey of International Contemporary Visual Poetry & Related Art
Gallery 324 at the Galleria at Erieview is hosting a show of contemporary international visual poetry. The show is curated by Cleveland visual poet/publisher John Byrum, local artist Wendy Collin Sorin, and Florida visual poet/publisher Bob Grumman.
Gallery 324
1301 East Ninth Street
Cleveland, OH
216.780.1522
marcus@designerglass.com
Poetry readings/performances begin at 6:30PM. Refreshments provided. Free parking will be available for the opening in an underground parking garage. The entrance to the garage is off Lakeside, between East 9th and East 12th streets. Exhibition continues through April 30, 2006.
Gallery Hours: Monday—Friday 10—6, Saturday 10—2, and by appointment
For more information on the show, including directions to the gallery, click here. Click here for a map to the gallery.
Join The Asian American Writers’ Workshop for an evening of poetry, music and visual art with Mong-Lan and Paolo Javier on Thursday, March 30, 7pm.
@ the Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
btwn 5th Ave & Broadway
New York City
$5 at the door. Free for Workshop members.
(click here for map)
Mong-Lan is the author of Song of the Cicadas (Juniper Prize, UMASS Press, 2001), which won the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award and was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber Award. Her second book is Why is the Edge Always Windy? (Tupelo Press, 2005). Honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University for two years, a Fulbright grant to Vietnam, and inclusion in Best American Poetry Anthology. Her paintings and photographs have been exhibited in galleries in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Capitol House in Washington D.C., in Tokyo, Japan, and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Paolo Javier is the author of 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada), which received a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award. He lives in New York.
For more information, check here or call (212) 494-0061. (click here for map).
Yesterday, I took a pleasant trip with my family to see the Paula Modersohn-Becker exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Hayama, Kanagawa Prefecture. Titled “A Short, Intensive Festival” after a description Modersohn-Becker penned in her diary about what would prove to be her own short life (1876–1907), this excellent exhibit featured some of the artist’s best studies of the human body. On every hand, I saw flashes of Gauguin, Van Gogh of the dark period (or Goho as the Japanese call him), and Munch, but handled in a more delicate, inward-turning fashion. Her portraits of the poor farm workers and their children–particularly of the young girls–were incredibly moving. The quiet suffering that radiated from one in particular–”Worpswede Peasant Child Seated on a Chair” from 1905–will stay with me for a long time. There were other favorites: “Self-Portrait before a Window with a View of Paris Houses,” a study in back-lighting, “Sleeping Child (1904)” with its dramatic design which reminded me of Oskar Kokoschka’s portrait of two lovers in a boat adrift at sea, and her “Woman in a Red Blouse” from 1898. We see Modersohn-Becker’s movement towards a kind of gorgeous abstraction in this exhibit, and we wonder, had she lived, what she would have ultimately accomplished. The biggest surprise of the exhibit was a great portrait of Rilke–apparently a friend of the artist, and a frequent visitor to the Worpswede arts community where she spent a good part of her creative life.
Afterwards, we visited relatives, and we all had delicious cream-puffs! A great way to end the day.
I invite, for general inspection, Kent Johnson’s foray into his own brand of wit, which he posted in the comments section. Kent shows us his tin ear, his forced rhymes, his misuse of the word redolent, and his inability to make grammatical sense in the three last lines, and then tells us that bad writing is somehow charming. Moreover, Kent gives us a peek at his own pathology in those final, fragmented lines. Of course, I think Kent should get a refund from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Bowling Green for those many creative writing classes he took, but more than that, I sincerely believe that Kent should seek out the services of a psychologist. I’m not being flip when I say this, folks,–and I say this as a long-term friend–Kent Johnson is sick and needs help. This is not at all a personal attack, this is just an observation, but as a result of my dealings with Kent over the past several days, I really believe this.
Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets
by Kent Johnson BlazeVox Books
These epigrams of yours can barely work—
an ounce of lard in which a thought might lurk;
or an attempt to hurt dressed in a bramble
of brittle thorns that break off as you ramble.
Precise and gleaming, wit’s lightning blade
Requires rhyme to buttress what is said:
One cannot stab with daggers made of dough,
Or vivisect with blades of melting snow.
It’s rhyme that sets the epigram apart
And gives the snicker snack to this fierce art.
(Or at least in English—other poets may
Autopsy dullness in a classic way
With stressed and non, their feet may sharply kick
But their translated spurs can barely stick.)
Slapdash free verse with line breaks here and there
Cannot be honed to an instrument of fear,
But brings down brick-bats on the careless head
And resonates with dullness when it’s read.
So the effect is quite the opposite intended,—
The offender becomes the jest of those offended:
An easy target for their japes and jeers,
A roaring fool; the sheep to his own shears.
Whitman was not a wit, Rochester was:
The rhymester wins hands down in witty wars.
So, Kent, instead of “epigrams” of wood,
Recast your lines, and then seek to draw blood.
The Daily Yomiuri reviews “loquacious” Jesse Glass’ The Passion of Phineas Gage & Selected Poems, a co-production of Ahadada & West House Books:
The Daily Yomiuri recently met up with Glass during his lunchtime in Shin Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture, near the campus of Meikai University, where he teaches literature and history. Asked about his early poetic endeavors, Glass, an avuncular, loquacious fellow with a ready chuckle, produced a battered scrapbook from his crammed shoulder bag. He opened the scrapbook and showed me a yellowed article cut from the Nov. 8, 1973, issue of the Carroll County Times, the local paper of Westminster, Md., where he grew up on a horse farm. The article profiles the 19-year-old Glass, who had just self-published a collection of poems and drawings titled Nigredo. The accompanying photo shows a handsome young chap–imagine a goateed Tobey Maguire–with a thousand-yard stare.
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