poem at PEN American Center

Got a newish poem up here at the PEN poetry series. Best read in a chair like this:

A wild step

 

One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power

Wrote a review of Nina Power’s book and it’s here at The Mainlander

Rolling Camera Inside Sound

Another anti-capitalist poem.

So You Think You Can Death

‘For if the Idea of Beauty appears only in dispersed form among many works, each one nevertheless aims uncompromisingly to express the whole of beauty, claims it in its singularity and can never admit its dispersal without annulling itself. Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works, in the unity of the arts and of art, but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing.’   – Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

‘One cares for the story more than life, more than for oneself. The story is the supreme good. We are the proprietors of hell. The story is the only thing that can be taken away from us. The risk is that our own act of property will be taken away from us. The real hell would be to lose the book of hell, [ . . . ] the work of art, the only thing not disfigured, that is all of humankind. Save my book, take my life.’   — Hélène Cixous, Volleys of Humanities (Cornell University, September 21st 2011)

‘I’ve never found (except in the depressing “literary scene” sense) poetry to be a competition. Don’t you, if you find someone’s work interesting, recommend it to your friends? Organic (or perhaps now viral) growth. There’s no tape you break after which you can relax. When we were doing Goliard Press we sold (not immediately) between 400 and 700 copies of each book. At that time the “real” publishers printed at most 250 copies. But we were the “small press”. I always remember something Val said around that time: “It seems to me fame is just a load of arseholes thinking you’re all right.” ’  — Tom Raworth, Misosensitive

view from bedroom window

view from bedroom window

bit of Main Street, Vancouver

better-than-most-billboards

New poem, ‘Cuteness is a Landscape’, at Intercapillary Space.

Buy Caribou = support Occupy Oakland

No need for fairtrade Galaxy chocolate in a candlelit bath. Now you, the poetry reader, can indulge yourself while simultaneously bathing in the warm waters of the knowledge that your wanton luxury is aiding a good cause. For the next month Bad Press will be donating all US dollar proceeds made from sales of Caribou to Occupy Oakland, to support them in building a new social centre, convergence centre and headquarters for the Occupy Oakland movement (here is their site). They’re more reliable than ‘fairtrade’ cocoa plantations. GO HERE to buy the love poems.

Bad Press: subjectivity liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity!

CARIBOU

Bad Press (so liberated from the imperatives of purposive activity it’s unreal)

IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE
* *  n e w ! * *

CARIBOU, by Amy De’Ath

A cerebrally serpentine collection of love poems re-working the lyric into a silken girder that will dizzy you with echoes of itself ALL AFTERNOON: in short, YES.

Caribou whizzes its readers from the ‘Fast Eddy’ of East London to the ‘Vertigo Valley’ of West Canada. “Now I am conducive to everything” writes Amy De’Ath and she means it, through her wonderfully sassy lyric ‘I’ that negotiates the rapids and gulps at the cliff edge with never a flicker of introspective self-importance. These poems are fleet-footed and fancy-free. They love to dance but they know the depths they skip across, the brow that beetles, the heart that almost disintegrates. So they are an example to us.

– John Wilkinson

Accelerates from fast break scatter into pocketa pocketa: a love careen. “This thing-ting, thinking! … this out-of-sync wonkybeat,” this poetry knows its game too well not to bash the balls off the table. Go on, De’Ath, “boom brighter than the moon.”

– Cathy Wagner

£5 / $9 at http://badpress.infinology.net/ : please hit the first DONATE button and send us £5 if you are in the UK or EU / hit the 2nd one and send us $9 if you are in the US or Canada