BECOME AN HONORARY KANSAN

If you haven't heard, I’m offering secret poetry gifts to anyone who comes to a reading and insults me memorably. Points awarded for style, delivery and originality. Oh, and volume--can't forget volume. All participants will receive a gift, none will be refused!

So link up with the latest leg in the Pusateri/Pierce traveling poetry circus by coming out to one of these spine-tingling events, and insult someone who can truly appreciate your abrasiveness.

Friday, August 24th at 7:30pm
Eleni Sikelianos, Chris Pusateri, Michelle Naka Pierce & others
$8/general; $5 members of BMOCA or Lighthouse Writers Workshop
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 13th St
Boulder, CO 80302
More info @: http://www.bmoca.org/2012/06/the-art-of-ekphrasis/

Sunday, August 26th at 5pm
Chris Pusateri & Michelle Naka Pierce
Taproom Poetry Series
Eighth Street Taproom
801 New Hampshire Lawrence, KS 66044
More info @: http://taproompoetry.blogspot.com/

TELL ME OFF AND GET A GIFT

Hello poets and readers,

As some of you know, Michelle Naka Pierce and I are traversing the country this year, bringing avant-goodness to any group of people who will sit still long enough to listen. I'm also making a solemn promise to anyone good enough to attend one of our readings: if you approach me and say, in your most menacing voice "Give me my fucking gift, poet!," I will give you a secret poetry gift. Because we're all in the Olympic spirit, points will be awarded for maximizing the element of surprise and for the originality of your delivery; hence, the more points awarded, the greater the gift. And face it: it's been months since your last birthday, the heat is making you cranky, and there's nothing you'd like more than to tell someone off and be awarded a prize for it. So if you're in the Portland, OR area this Sunday, come on down and get your grouch on.

Chris Pusateri, Michelle Naka Pierce and Stephen Vincent read from new work
Sunday, August 12th @ 7:30pm
The Waypost
3120 N. William Ave
Portland, OR
Complete details and bios @ http://www.flim.com/spareroom/

Now, despite what Heisenberg says, you can't always be everywhere at once. So for those of you whose hearts are in Portland but whose corporeal forms are in Denver or Boulder, let me strongly recommend that you drop by Innisfree Poetry Bookstore, to check out the inimitable Debrah Morkun, author of The Ida Pingala and Projection Machine, both by BlazeVox. She's appearing with j/j hastain.

Debrah Morkun & j/j hastain
Saturday, August 11, 2012 @ 4pm
Innisfree Poetry Bookstore
1203 13th St, Ste A
Boulder, CO 80302
More info @ http://www.innisfreepoetry.com/

Because You Have Excellent Taste

Michelle Naka Pierce and I will read for Nick Demske's Bonk Performance Series this Saturday, July 28th at 6pm. For those of you in the Racine-Kenosha-Northern IL area, or for anyone passing through, here are the details.

Here's a promise: If you come to the reading and utter the words, "Give me my fucking gift, poet!" I will give you a secret poetry gift.

Michelle Naka Pierce, Chris Pusateri, Debra Hsueh & Nick Ramsey
Saturday July 28th @ 6pm (doors open at 5:30)
Racine Arts Council
316 6th St
Racine, Wisconsin
6pm (doors open at 5:30)
More info @: http://bonkperformanceseries.wordpress.com/

Chris Pusateri & Michelle Naka Pierce Read in Philadelphia, Sun 7/8 @ 7pm

Hello all,

Michelle Naka Pierce and I will read in Philadelphia this Sunday with Kari Larsen and Jaime Fountaine. Details are below, and we'd love to see you if you're free.

Sunday, July 8th @ 7pm
Jubilant Thicket Literary Series
Robin's Book & Moonstone Arts Center
110A South 13th Street
Philadelphia, PA
more info at: jubilantthicket.blogspot.com/

JAIME FOUNTAINE lives and writes in Philadelphia, where she is often found politely discussing her age and valid state-issued identification with the clerks at the liquor store.

KARI LARSEN is the author of Say you're a fiction (Dancing Girl), the Black Telephone (Unthinkable Creatures), and Come as Your Madness (Birds of Lace). More information on these and other projects can be found at www.cold-rubies.com.

MICHELLE NAKA PIERCE was born in Japan. She is the author of seven titles, including She, A Blueprint (BlazeVOX, 2011) with art by Sue Hammond West and Symptom of Color (Dusie, 2011). Awarded the Poets Out Loud Editor's Prize, Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (Fordham UP, forthcoming 2012) documents the migratory patterns of the hybrid as she travels the floating borders in Rothko's Seagram murals. Pierce is associate professor and director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, CO.

CHRIS PUSATERI is the author of several books of poetry, including Common Time (Steerage Press, 2012), Molecularity (Dusie, 2011), Anon (BlazeVox, 2008) and North of There (Dusie, 2007). His poetry and critical prose has appeared in many periodicals, including American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Jacket, Verse and many others. A librarian by trade, he works in Denver, where he reviews new poetry and fiction titles for Library Journal and curates the Belmar Film Series, a free public program that showcases independent and foreign-language cinema.

Upcoming Readings in France

Next week, I'll be headed to France for the Lex-ICON Conference at Upper Alsace University in Mulhouse, stopping in Paris along the way. For those of you who are local or making the trip, Michelle Naka Pierce & I will be reading at the following events.

Tuesday, June 5th @7pm
Berkeley Books of Paris
8 Rue Casimir Delavigne (Métro Odéon), Paris
Chris Pusateri, Michelle Naka Pierce and Alexander Dickow read from new work


Thursday, June 7th @ 8:30
La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, 16 rue de la Fonderie, Mulhouse, FR
8 Rue Casimir Delavigne (Métro Odéon), Paris
Chris Pusateri performs with Gisela Hochuli (Suisse), Démosthène Agrafiotis (Grèce), Valentine Verhaeghe (France), Alessandro De Francesco et Caroline Zekri (Italie) and Michelle Naka Pierce (États-Unis)

There will be another reading on the evening of June 10th in Mulhouse, in conjunction with Lex-ICON. Details shortly.

Book Launch This Thursday

For those of you in the Denver/Boulder area, come celebrate the publication of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red by Michelle Naka Pierce and Common Time by Chris Pusateri.

Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 7:00 pm

Innisfree Bookstore and Cafe

1203 13th Street Suite A, Boulder, CO 80302

Book signing following the readings.

Born in Japan, Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of seven titles, including She, A Blueprint (2011), Beloved Integer (2007), and TRI/VIA (2003). Awarded the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize, Continuous Frieze Bordering Red (Fordham, 2012) documents the migratory patterns of the hybrid as she travels the floating borders in Rothko’s Seagram murals. She is associate professor and director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, CO.

Chris Pusateri is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Common Time (Steerage Press, 2012), and Molecularity (Dusie, 2011). His poetry and critical prose appear in many periodicals, including American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Jacket, Verse and others. A librarian by trade, he works in Denver, where he reviews new poetry and fiction titles for Library Journal and curates the Belmar Film Series, a free public program showcasing independent cinema.

THE TREES ARE SCREAMING

Common Time
by Chris Pusateri
Normal, IL: Steerage Press
Release date: February 22, 2012
106pps
ISBN: 0983632626 ISBN-13: 9780983632627
Price: $9.99 (paper)

Hot off the press, with a beautiful cover by HR Hegnauer, and a steal at only $9.99. The superlatives below will tell you all about it, and you can order from these guys until SPD has copies available, which should be soon. For those of you who don’t delight in the sound of trees screaming, a Kindle edition will also be released shortly (and for only 99 cents!).

Originally conceived as three discrete books, Common Time takes pianist Glenn Gould’s notion of the two-take as its procedural centerpiece, soldering together sections from each of the three finished versions and combining them to make one final work. But unlike Gould’s idea of an authoritative masterwork built from multiple versions of an original piece, Chris Pusateri turns the telescope backwards, making of this brokenness a meditation on what it means to compose, to couple, to comprehend.

“Common Time is a ‘collection’ in the best sense, a self-consciously accretive book; here, meanings precipitate out of the nonsense detritus of the working day and observations tighten into aphorism. Pusateri’s method exposes the paths that obstruct meaning and those that allow it to accrue: ‘There is a grid within/what we utter,/within phonemes, associations form/and dissolve like flies on bison.’ A humane, wise, and wicked smart book.”
– CATHERINE WAGNER

Dusie Kollektiv 2011

This year's Dusie Kollektiv chapbooks are now online at www.dusie.org. This year's kollektiv features contributions by:

Bill Allegrezza * Hugh Behm-Steinberg * Lynn Behrendt * Cara Benson * Jaime Birch * Tilla Brading * Jessica Brehney * Ross Brighton * Lee Ann Brown * Naomi Buck Palagi * Juliet Cook * Sarah Anne Cox * Meredith Clark * Caroline Crumpacker * Maria Damon * Michelle Detorie * Jennifer K Dick * Lara Durback * Betsy Fagin * Jennifer Fortin * Susana Gardner * Carmen Gimenez Smith * Kiala Givehand * Harry Godwin * Giles Goodland * Michelle S Gould * K Lorraine Graham * Arielle Guy * Jared Hayes * j/j hastain * Larkin Higgins * Ming Holden * Jen Hofer * Carrie Hunter * Megan Kaminski * Kirsten Kaschock * Christine Kennedy * Friedrich Kerksieck * Andrew Koszewski * Becca Klaver * Rebecca M Knotts * Frances Kruk * Mark Lamoureux * Dana Teen Lomax * BJ Love * Anna Moschovakis * Catherine Meng * James Maughn * Nicole Mauro * rob mclennan * Jenn McCreary * Peter Manson * Nicholas Naughton * Dawn Pendergast * Michelle Naka Pierce * John Pluecker * Deborah Poe * Chris Pusateri * Marthe Reed * Sarah Rosenthal * Michael Ruby * Kaia Sand * Kathrin Schaeppi * Susan M Schultz * Anne Lesley Selcer * Sandra Simonds * Ash Smith * Jill Stengel * Bronwen Tate * Scott Thurston * Mark Wallace * Carol Watts * Elisabeth Workman * Vincent Zompa

from Gloss by Giles Goodland (Dusie, 2011)

At first glance, the cover art of Giles Goodland’s from Gloss suggests a fixed position. The front cover is a detail from a map, and on the back is a list of coordinates for a number of international cities. For reasons I cannot articulate, this cover art brings to mind something Derrida once said about how the self is situated in language, and how there can be no self, indeed no idea of self, without the language by which the self is expressed.

This vision of self is best observed in a young child who is still navigating the difficulties of speech. He treats language not as something separate from the world, but as something of the world: not as a system over which one achieves mastery, but as a practice that one undertakes without knowing what its consequences will be. As we age, literacy teaches us that language has rules; those rules impose distance and estrange us from the very world that language seeks to illuminate.

Goodland sets out to bridge the distance imposed by these normative rules. Flipping to the first page of from Gloss, we see a list of phrases, each beginning with a specific letter of the alphabet. On closer inspection, we see that Goodland’s idiom is sprinkled with neologisms formed by the combination of several root words:

                    Timesweeper, minesleeping erasearcher.

This line can be parsed in many ways, depending on where one places emphasis or breaks the syllables. For instance, timesweeper (time sweeper, time’s weeper), minesleeping (mine sweeping, mind sleeping, mind leaping) erasearcher (era searcher, erase archer, eras ear sure). The longer one stares at these lines, the more unstable the words become: they break apart, drift and coalesce, like tectonic plates. In a militant move against stereoscopy, the reader of Goodland’s text must misread and disread, often pushing the poems headlong towards nonsense, returning language to its most playful and primordial form.

The sonic elegance of this text amplifies these strategies of syncopation. Many poems use cadence as a carrier wave to propel the reader through the text, but the rhythms of from Gloss are more tidal than linear. Goodland’s permutations push the reader forward, only to yank her rudely back, like the undertow of the receding surf. No sooner is one line complete, than its words reconfigure themselves, necessitating a re-reading. Meaning, as Goodland’s poem indicates, can only find its expression through a continuous process of starting forward and doubling back.

A friend from San Francisco once pointed out that people in large metropolitan areas tend to measure distance by using units of time. In other words, even though San Francisco is only ever ten miles from Oakland, its actual distance varies, based on factors like traffic congestion. Therefore, Oakland is much closer to San Francisco at night, when traffic is sparse, and becomes farther away in the morning, when millions are en route.

Goodland’s chapbook achieves a similar effect: it transposes space and time, and in doing so, makes from Gloss a potentially infinite text. How complex or simple, how long or short the experience, depends entirely on the reader.

Collection by Megan Kaminski (Dusie, 2011)

Surfing Goodreads the other morning, I ran across the following description of Megan Kaminski’s Collection: “Suburban terror poems that explore what happens when narrated identity becomes unbearable.” Like many poets, I love a good existential dilemma, so this initial description—whether considered or haphazard, accurate or misleading—served as more than mere description. It was the first line of the book.

Having now read the chapbook in its entirety, I must play devil’s advocate and ask: do I really believe that Collection is a work rife with anxiety over its unbearable narrated identity? The short answer is no. If I’m being honest, I must admit to something quite different: that I read Collection as an inquiry into the urban pastoral, one that rejects the idle tourism of the flaneur in favor of a mode that retools the idea of the urban particular.

Many of the poems in Kaminski’s Collection consist of two stanzas: to one side are a series of one- and two-word lines which form a small column, and on the other side are larger text blocks comprised of longer lines. Although the small pillar of text may be read as a continuous line that descends down the page, I saw it as a discrete, free-standing list of short phrases and objects. Consider the following passage, with its juxtaposition of the vertical and the horizontal orientations.

carryall                  Yellow jackets announce our surrender to the
slick zero               city’s daydream afternoons almond-cookies
abilify tree            ducks in the park banks rove the river pockets
ducks squawk      empty palms flowering purple-blue we planted
spend late             watched shoots spring imagined
hours sun              deeper roots stirring subterranean insects
bent corner           we do not discriminate between the living and
store spent            the dead hold my handbag it’s almost time

When presented with a page that has two bodies of text—one larger and one smaller—there’s a tendency to devote one’s attention to the larger stanza at the expense of the more diminutive one. Read as a list, the tiny lines of the left-hand stanza might be viewed as little more than gloss, a caption to the action taking place in the larger, more phrase-based text body. But the longer I read Collection, the more convinced I became that these tiny lines, so deceptive in size, actually played a central role in the book.

If indeed there are “no ideas but in things,” then Kaminski challenges this received wisdom by selecting objects that are resolute in their thing-ness—not simple desktop shortcuts to big ideas or movie screens upon which human judgments are projected, but metaphors for how one is dreamt by the city when the telescope is turned backwards. In short, the urban particulars of Kaminski’s city are not porous props, awaiting authorial intervention, but autonomous objects that populate the visual field.

These objects also serve to anchor the action of the longer sequences, slowing the pace of the book. All too often, urban poetry becomes caught in the city’s slipstream and seeks to mimic its frenetic pace. The effect is one of extreme transience, where the montage moves at such a clip that the particulars disappear altogether. The poems of Collection, on the other hand, exhibit presence, are less hurried, are more deliberate, are perhaps more real for being grounded in this way. This forced slowdown allows Collection the audacity to declare that “this afternoon is for wasting,” if by wasting we mean paying attention to those things we’re taught to ignore, the innate syntax of the city.