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[The page actually hasn't officially launched yet, so you can consider this a sneak preview. We expect to make the formal announcement in late January, when the college kids are returning to school.]
Pause Button
Kevin Davies
Davies writing takes the social critique of the Language Poets and the crushing ear of the best Projective versifiers and sets it all in cyclotronic motion with his rapier's wit and caffeinated melancholy, making him the Zorro of poets associated with Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing and the anthemist of choice for a disowned intelligentsia. Davies, who now lives in New York, published his second book, Comp., in 2000 to much acclaim, but the quasi-legendary Pause Button, first published in 1992 by Vancouver's Tsunami Editions, has long been unavailable to those not in the vicinity of Canada's choice used bookstores.
The Relative Minor
Deanna Ferguson
Ferguson's first book of poems is at once frenetically impatient with anything that could be called a lyrical subjectivity yet speaks, through the sliced rubrics of its many "postmodern" poses, from a perspective singularly angry, disaffected, vulnerable, eloquent, political and brash. The Relative Minor takes the project of the Language poets to the next level of public address, the scale tipping from the lexicons of theory and falling toward the pure, dystopic clamor of punk aspiration. Ferguson, who lives and works in Vancouver, has not published a full-length book since this 1993 volume, one of the major contributions by the poets associated with the Kootenay School of Writing.
Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty
Richard Foreman
For years, Foreman has been staging his plays at St. Mark's Ontological Theater with the regularity of the great Avant-Pop-in-the-Sky's postmodernist pacemaker, tooling his "reverberation machines" into a pristine state of subversive whimsy. Though the reader of this text will miss the virtuoso performances of Tony Torn and Jay Smith as bathetic superheroes dueling over the fallen Iron Curtain in the play's New York run, the paranoiac frenzy and epistemological funboxes of Foreman's high style are alive and flinching in Now That Communism is Dead.
What the President Will Say and Do!!
Madeline Gins
Madeline Gins has mostly been known for her collaborative works with the architect/philosopher Arakawa, releasing Mechanism of Meaning, an illustrated series of playful epistemological vignettes, in 1979, and devoting most of the last two decades exploring Reversible Destiny, a radical philosophy of architecture in which one "refuses to die." What the President is Gins in a more light-hearted, accessible vein, her creative assaults on mundane thinking arousing both laughter and caustic impatience with the status quo. Rarely has a book appeared as prescient and poignant twenty years after its initial publication.
Vexed
Jessica Grim
Grim's style masterly evokes the simplicities of poetry in the "New American" vein, with its fragments of candid observation just shimmering on the surface of the poem, but she allies it with a "post-Language" sensibility that balks before the prospect of a too-fluid Romanticism, thus spicing sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim's poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical integrity.
Adjunct: An Undigest
Peter Manson
Adjunctforms a teetering, overloaded bridge between practitioners of subjectively-deodorized "conceptual literature" such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin and writers working in a "new sentence" vein such as Language poets Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian, all with a nod to novelist David Markson's Reader's Block. But Adjunct is far from an organized literary venture; rather, it is a sprawling, subconsciously assembled stockpile of casual phrases, trivial ideas, worthless statistics, obituary notices, self-reflexive misgivings, and numberless, numbing et ceteras that make it an electric anthem to cultural (and personal) entropy.
Vérité
Michael Scharf
Scharf's poems are at once vulnerable to, and defiant of, the impositions of civic society, as the strands of global and historical implication wafting through the air that strike most of us as attenuated notes of "otherness" are transformed, for this poet, into the throbbing heart of community. The roving eye of Vérité takes in quantities of data that would sink writers with a less fluid and agile lyric touch, and the mixture of journalism, sonnets, "lieder" and manifesto-like prose poetry make this a compelling, multi-faceted collection, the second by this New York author.
2197
Ron Silliman
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as Tjanting and Ketjak, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem The Alphabet for over twenty years. The Age of Huts, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "2197" is the second half of the book, and anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows, rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in the age of the internet.
Sunset Debris
Ron Silliman
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as Tjanting and Ketjak, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he coined the phrase) poem The Alphabet for over twenty years. The Age of Huts, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation, despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal experimentation and mastery. "Sunset Debris" is, structurally, a collection of questions, but the cumulative affect of the queries is both giddily intoxicating and, subterraneously, melancholic, as the voice of personal entreaty become subsumed under the ceaseless rhythms of its literary method and, by extension, time and memory.
Response
Juliana Spahr
Spahr's deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when selfhood -- one's sense of uniqueness and of the permanence of one's personality -- has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr's poetry, revived to take center stage, floodlit by possiblity. Response, Spahr's first book (Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of participation in the social world.
Little Books / Indians
Hannah Weiner
Weiner, who died in 1997, culled from what she considered a psychic ability -- she literally saw words on the foreheads of her many New York friends and transcribed them like extrasensory conversations -- to create her typographically distinctive books of poetry. But there is nothing naïve about what Weiner was doing: she was a self-conscious, sophisticated artist, a close friend of the great innovator Carolee Schneemann, and has long been considered a central figure in Language poetry. Weiner's oeuvre reflects a complex, totalizing investment in the properties of words as they permeate and conflict with the self and the imagined "other," and Little Books/Indians, long out of print, is both a visual treat and an engaging read.
The Lesser Magoo
Mac Wellman
The final of the four plays of Wellman's Crowtet, Magoo follows the adventures of Curran and Candle -- an expert on "Crowe's Dark Space" -- and their motley assemblage of peers, some of them categorically "unusualist," in the parallel, decidedly unsettled, universe that is distinctly Wellman's. Magoo is chockfull of alternative histories, comprehensive pseudo-sciences, eerily relevant, off-the-map absurdist politics and soft-spoken contacts between humans all vying for attention in the seemingly self-propelled linguistics of Wellman's versification, which at turns recalls Beckett, at others the polymath Pynchon or the more childlike landscapes of Ashbery (in Girls on the Run). The music for The Lesser Magoo, scored for voices, toy piano, ukulele, and violin, was composed by Michael Roth, for both the Los Angeles and the New York productions.
The Tapeworm Foundry
Darren Wershler-Henry
Toronto-based Wershler-Henry's last book of poems, Nicholodeon, was a seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles. The Tapeworm Foundry is, in some ways, the opposite: a single unpunctuated sentence of pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, "andor."
Posted by Brian Stefans at December 18, 2002 12:32 PM