Dear friends,

What else is a blog but a sort of rarefied gossip column? Plenty, but not today. It’s 7:15, and I’m going to get into what’s been exciting in my corner of the ark poetica of late. Its going to entail some sinfully laudatory descriptive language.

Friday nite saw Brandon Brown and Brent Cunningham read @ SPT. SPT is the outgrowth of a 30 plus year old literary-advocacy project, and pretty much the most reliable and wide-ranging series of contemporary readings round here. Have I already said much the same? It’s a reliable place to run into poetry pals and peers, nestled in the Timkin Lecture Hall at the back of CCA’s hanger-esque artspace.

Brandon read from/performed sections of his The Persians by Aeschylus, the latest of his active re-imaginings of Classical texts. Constantly shifting, formally conscious and inventive, dense with word-play (downright Zukofsyian at times), and tensely resonant with an echo-chamber of postcolonial concerns with representation of the Other (the Greeks “fend off” the Persians, the US “pre-empts” Iraq), and wise enough to allow the chorus to get down to business to “Rock the Casbah”, Brandon’s work was invigorating - a real stunner. The type of piece where, after its over, I found it difficult to speak, and certainly difficult to speak about. Which is a measure of its impact and strength, work that can literally fuck you up. I don’t know how well Brandon’s rep extends outside the Bay Area – his bio is disturbingly full of unpublished works (someone will have to do something about that) – but he was warmly received and “welcomed” Friday night by his hometown crowd.

It’s a warmth they returned. Brandon and Brent opened the evening with a performance of a comic dialogue which underlined both performer’s real interest in – and critical consciousness of the limits of – creating a warm, intimate space of “welcome” with their work, of having the audience listen as comfortably as they would in their own home. Timkin - and SPT - both are and aren't that space they were invoking. Their appeals to the heart - worded, performed - both did and didn't evoke such intimacy and warmth: and the constant return to this basic welcoming became increasingly absurd - the record's (or neurotic's) stuck groove. The slide here between pathos and bathos was wonderful, and had at least two of us independently thinking of Beckett’s tramps. Language is such a tricky medium, never stationary, never flat, always beyond our control, even in moments when it seems most transparent and responsive to our intent. Both Brandon and Brent, in their own ways, proceed from a position in which irony and honesty, personal vulnerability and the impermeable mask of the orator, are inseparably coiled. Good f-ing luck picking them apart.

Brent read a smattering from his Bird and Forest (Ugly Duckling), for which this reading served as a belated release party. Brent read a sampling of the title poem, a series which, as he explains it, inverts the traditional mode in which multiple images point towards the same “unnamed” center, which the images serve to enliven. So the single image of the bird, and its forest, iterate outwards off each page, in each instance in a different direction, gesturing towards dozens of possible focii. This approach has a rich conceptual resonance, and is realized in sumptuous, contemplative language full of subtle turns. It’s a fucked thing that work that seems to emanate from a place of quiet, dedicated study – from in short, a study, that sense of the workman’s table, a comfortable armchair, next to it a table on which rest a few well-chosen books, seems such a rare find these days. Brent's work seems at home with itself where much other work seems itchy, bothered, uncomfortable, agitated. There’s a sense of unhurried mastery here I associate more with the past dead than the present living. Rarer still that the work is lively, attentive, that it has heart and grit to it, and a humble/sharp sense of humor. This alertness, not sprung from any sense of danger, but somehow innate to the posture of the work itself, makes for compelling reading, makes the generative intimacy of the study seem a resonant chamber for me.

Brent continued on to read from a new manuscript which got me thinking to such a degree I can’t really say anything on it. Sometimes you leave a reading just wanting to see the damn work on the page. What impressed me most was Brent’s declaration that the process of this new work included a vow to strike out any line which struck him as conventionally poetic. Given Brent’s skill with this “conventionally poetic” that strikes me as a particularly brave thing.

As soon as the applause died down, Sara and I ducked out to pick up Sarah and hit The Goblet of Fire, which temporarily erased the reading with the first blast of Dolby sound. In the second row of the multiplex, feet up on the seat before me, Whizzy Fizz popping on my tongue, I switched from viewing the work of a sole author to a movie made by more than a thousand.

Saturday saw Sara and I sit down for the first of two el pobre submission selection meetings (at Beanbag, a café two sunny blocks from our usual choice). November is the tail-end of the warm season here, and this weekend delivered, with a trio of glorious days. I keep thinking “it’s November” as if that means something on its own – but months only take on specificity in a given place – and no, this isn’t anything like November in New England or Colorado. The selections are making more sense this time round: the third el pobre advances and refines our aesthetic, challenges several of our early limits, and is moving into a more varied, rougher, uneven – and invigorating – read. Its exciting work, and a pleasure to be publishing. The flow is a little wilder, less predictable, the range of work is greater, and the aesthetic preoccupations and concerns come forth more sharply here. The 1998 Robert Creeley interview Brent's brought us is a particularly rare and wicked find.

Today – Sunday – Scott Inguito and I finished the layout and proofing for Lection, Subday’s latest. Lection will initiate Subday’s “mini book” series of small book-art conscious chaps. Each time we meet the design comes a full step or two forward, and each time it’s a surprise. This time, once more, the book came forward in unexpected directions, and carries a liveliness and fully-realized polysemous quality that was only a dream a month back.



On top of being productive, the meeting was delightful – Scott and I have been ideal collaborators, and working on Lection has fulfilled the social criteria of publishing – that the editor and the writer come together in the process, that it generates an intimacy and exchange of ideas, perspectives, poetics. I also see the mini book series as a collaborative venture, a chance for me to step forward with layouts, designs and editing strategies which push the process of book-making to the fore, that catalyze the writers manuscript into a new shape, new form. Bookmaking is always a process of translation, and with the mini books, I hope to showcase the possibilities and test the limits of this trans-ing of the word.doc text into papered three-dimensionality. Lection will be available by December $10th, for $5, and Scott will be releasing it at SPD’s Holiday Open House reading and book sale. These are two facing pages, unfortunately scrambled here. They line up so that "use aries" can be read across the pages.

Now I’m sitting at home, finishing an Oatmeal cookie milkshake, and Sarah’s at my side watching Bono on 60 Minutes. I’ve put my headphones back on to finish track 6 of Sigur Ros’s latest CD. Their must is emotive in a way that turned me off a few years back, but, now, the alternating surges and slides and languid rolls of their music makes sense to me, how to say it – there’s a tidal quality here, and a vulnerability that rises up in crescendos of noise, vivid waves of it that then crash – or evaporate, leaving a droning wake of amplifier hum and piano keys. The same way, 20 seconds after a big six foot breaker, a 1/8” thin sheet of water pours back into the surf with its fine cross-braidings of sand.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wanted to end the weekend at the New Yipes, a half-hour away in Oakland, where Norma Cole is reading tonight, but I was too late. So I’ve decided to share and celebrate that too-late-ness, this buoyant comma at the bottom of the heavy week. Next line starts with Monday’s alarm brrrrrng and my first shave in five days.

Now Sarah’s watching about animals left behind by Katrina, and I’m gonna join her.