Introduction for Elaine Equi (by erica kaufman)

Elaine Equi's books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award, The Cloud of Knowable Things, and most recently Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems -- all from Coffee House Press. She teaches in the MFA Programs at The New School and City College of New York, and at New York University. She also edited The Holiday Album: Greeting Card Poems for All Occasions in Jacket Magazine.

Like Roy Orbison is often referred to as having “defied the rules of musical composition,” Elaine Equi is a poet who time and time again defies how one normally thinks of poetry or poetics. An Elaine Equi poem can easily be seen as a film still, a pop song, a drum solo, a new snazzy striped shirt. In an Equi poem nothing remains stagnant. This is a poetics of transformativity, wit, speculation, and curiosity. As she writes in “Epic Mountain Hoax,” “Whatever I told you yesterday wasn’t me.” Or, to quote from “1+1=3,” “Mirrors/transform us/into ourselves.”

In “The Heroism of Vision,” Susan Sontag refers to photography as “commonly regarded as an instrument for knowing things.” Equi employs the same intensity of focus as a photograph might take, only her medium, words, pleasantly seesaws between knowledge and inquiry. As Equi writes in “Surface Tension,” “replace the narrative/with another/form of narrative.” Roland Barthes explains in Camera Lucida, “a photograph can be the object of three practices: to do, to undergo, to look.” As a teacher, Equi taught me how to look-- at my surroundings--unpredictable as exploring the surface of Venus. To quote from “The Pill’s Oval Portrait,” “I have been highly productive/maintaining a certain uncertainty.”

Equi is highly productive, generous, and astute. As she writes in “Brand X,” “I make decisions/or my body/makes them for me/and certain nights/everything is perfect.” Here, the separation between physical self and internal self is not only fantastical, but also acknowledges how much one is capable of without being entirely aware of it. To quote “Second Thoughts,” “Even a landscape can make a gesture towards us.”

The New York Times called Equi’s poems “a bracing, resonant art.” The San Francisco Chronicle says, “Equi writes with a full, post-punk, Dorothy Parkerish kit of weapons: arched-eyebrow barbs, nervy, catchy hooks of pop-conscious metaphor.” SPIN Magazine writes, “Equi’s work does what poetry should do, yet very rarely does—makes you feel the sensations inherent in words and their combinations, while simultaneously throwing down a savvy personal challenge.”

Or, to quote a T. Rex song, “Don’t you know you’re a cool motivator.”

Please welcome Elaine Equi, a terrific poet, mentor, and friend.

The Segue Reading Series presents

RAE ARMANTROUT & ELAINE EQUI
Saturday, May 26, 2007
** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books are Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007) Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004), The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001), and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1993), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, UP, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, and 2004. Armantrout is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

“The Ether”

The room is ether-bright
rigid,

adrift in words

or I am

an afterthought,
refusing to dissolve.

Nothing

to be taken away;
to be added.

*

What can words say?

Chaplain-service at the checkout;

a desire
to be credible
across the straight.

A man and a woman
finish sentences
and laugh.

Each sentence is both
an acquiescence
and a dismissal.


***

Elaine Equi's books include Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award, The Cloud of Knowable Things, and most recently Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems -- all from Coffee House Press. She teaches in the MFA Programs at The New School and City College of New York, and at New York University. She also edited The Holiday Album: Greeting Card Poems for All Occasions in Jacket Magazine.

“Epic Mountain Hoax”

Always a question of scale
fanning the flames of music.

Temple of crumbs.
Stalwart microcosms.

Swerps of brazen heroes
coup de grease.

Singularly panoptic delirium.

Tales of the mogul
lost in space.

What are you not doing down there—
the sky seems to say.

I am climbing
a flat surface (hence the difficulty)

with a sack of juicy fears—
I mean pears!

Whatever I told you yesterday wasn’t me.
I was mixed up.

Today I can separate,
subtract myself better from the landscape.

Introduction for Eileen Myles (by erica kaufman)

Eileen Myles is like the Flash of the poetry world—able to move, think, and react at superhuman speeds. Bust magazine calls her “the rock star of modern poetry.” Publishers Weekly declares she's "the native informant of living life punkily on the streets," but also "having the best of both worlds, as working-class Bostonian and New York aesthete." Myles leaves no territory untouched—she’s written thousands of poems, published numerous books of poetry, a novel (Cool for You), short stories, and as an editor she brought the seminal anthology The New Fuck You/Adventures in Lesbian Reading to life. Myles was also the Artistic Director of The Poetry Project, toured with Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Road Show, and in 1992 she conducted an openly female write-in campaign for President of the United States (I wish she would run again!). Myles lives in New York and Southern California and teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

Eileen Myles's newest book of poems Sorry, Tree was recently published by Wave Books. It explores themes of nature, translocation, politics, love and corporate squalor. Myles takes her signature short line to new heights in these bi-coastal lyrics. (To quote from “Home,” “I thought if/I inventoried home it would be broad.”) Here landscape changes and how one identifies a geographic residence. Similar to the lightening bolt that gives Flash his superhuman speed, Myles’s short lines and the ground they cover revolutionize what can be accomplished in a single poem. (Quote, “No Rewriting,” “which pants am I in/do I remember them?”) Again, like Flash, Myles uses her super powers to fight evil—but in this case evil translates to mean political disaster, capitalism, sexism, homophobia, and many many more “isms” and injustices that plague our society. To quote from “To Hell,” “The city is emptying. The elephants have been planning their party for years.”

In this same poem Myles writes, ‘I want to show you complicated dyke love, construct a poem about women and men.” The shift from Republican invasion to dyke pride is remarkable, vivid, and affective. Myles’s voice is like Flash’s, as in when she speaks or writes her voice is a sonic boom. To quote from “The Lesbian Poet” (a piece from School of Fish), “I think we all write our poems with our metabolism, our sexuality, for me a poem has always been an imagined body of a sort.” These poems are bodybuilders, in perfect shape, about to win the Olympics.

In an essay about “Postmodernism” Kathy Acker writes, “Language always occurs in the present because it makes the present, because it’s active.” In “Tulip,” (a poem from on my way), Myles writes, “The incandescence/of poetry/is a result/of the/moment of /being alive.” Myles’s work is more than alive, it is vital, animated, thought-provoking, genius. Quote, “The woman turning, that’s the revolution. The room is gigantic, the woman is here.”

Please join me in welcoming Eileen Myles.

The Segue Reading Series presents

Jack Kimball & Eileen Myles

Saturday, May 19, 2007
** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Jack Kimball's 350-page Post~Twyla collects imploded haiku, essay fragments, and made-up journal entries. Co-editor of "Queering Language" for the online zine EOAGH, he blogs at pantaloons.blogspot.com and publishes Faux Press.

from Post-Twyla

Momentum.
Does the hair actually grow? Off shore
The sound of it forces us to make a
water landing.

(Lap-dogging, I wish I were a poet.)

Eileen Myles's newest book of poems Sorry, Tree was published by Wave Books in April. It explores themes of nature, translocation, politics, love and corporate squalor. She lives in Southern CA & New York and teaches at UCSD.

"Jacaranda"

What's
the feminine
of feet
I didn't
know I
could
have
a lavender
tree

Language Poetry & The Body: A Panel

panelists: Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Leslie Scalapino, Maria Damon

Introduction to Language Poetry and the Body: A Panel (by erica kaufman and Tim Peterson)

Introduction to Language Poetry and the Body: A Panel

Language poetry and poetics are known for their critique of commodified concepts such as "the self," "experience," and "identity," replacing these concepts with an emphasis on language as material. Language viewed in this way brings to the foreground meaning as a social construct while simultaneously advocating a more democratized notion of reader participation. In the words of Bruce Andrews, "The writing helps stage, rather than conceal, the particulars of its format. It helps the text foreground its "social" constructedness, as a body of social sense, not just leaving us stuck with a fetishizing of artistic "process" or the preenings ofauthor control."

This panel will address the precise nature of this materiality in language. Can words be said to have a physical body or a sonic body? How does this concept relate to the phenomenological, the physical, or other concepts that are outside of the text, such as the body of the reader? In the words of Lyn Hejinian, "A person alone, or in groups of persons, has accompanied art throughout its history; it is assumed that a work of art is, at the very least, a manifestation of his or her presence. But whose?"

What is the role of the body, both the social body and the body of the individual, in Language and Post-Language poetics? What does language want?

The Segue Reading Series presents

LANGUAGE POETRY & THE BODY: A PANEL
Panelists include: Bruce Andrews, Steve Benson, Maria Damon, and Leslie Scalapino
Moderated by:Tim Peterson and erica kaufman

Saturday, May 12, 2007
3:45PM (sharp!)
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson

Bruce Andrews is the author of such now classic texts of the American avant-garde as GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE and I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER, SO SHUT UP (OR, SOCIAL ROMANTICISM) . Along with Charles Bernstein, Andrews edited the crucial poetry magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He teaches political science at Fordham University.

Steve Benson has often incorporated oral and physical improvisation, as well as presentational and instrumental uses of projections, audiotape, and printed texts, into works presented as poetry readings. This is his first New York appearance since March 2005.

Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry , and co-author (with mIEKAL aND) of Literature Nation, pleasureTEXTpossession, and Eros/ion.

Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, inter-genre fiction-poetry-criticism and plays, including recently Zither & Autobiography, The Tango, Orchid Jetsam , and Dahlia's Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction. Scalapino's Selected Poems, 1974-2006/It's go in horizontal is forthcoming from University of California Press.

Susan Bee & Johanna Drucker

The Segue Reading Series presents


Susan Bee & Johanna Drucker
will give a multimedia presentation and talk about collaboration


Saturday, May 5, 2007
**3:45PM**
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers
hosted by Erica Kaufman & Tim Peterson


Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist living in NYC. Bee has had
four solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC.  Granary Books has published six
of her artist's books, including A Girl's Life with Johanna Drucker. She has
collaborated with Charles Bernstein on five books. Her website is:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee. For more information on Susan Bee,
please also visit:

M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online
http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/

A Girl's Life
http://www.granarybooks.com/books/a_girls_life/a_girls_life1.html
http://www.analogous.net/beedruckercollab.html

Johanna Drucker is currently the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the
University of Virginia  and Professor in the Department of English.  Her
most recent  critical work is Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art  and 
Complicity. Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and
experimental, visual poet whose work has been exhibited and collected in
special collections in libraries and museums nationwide. For more
information on Johanna Drucker, please visit:

Johanna Drucker's EPC page:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/drucker/

Drucker's page at the Media Studies Program at UVA:
http://people.virginia.edu/~jrd8e/

Essay on Susan Bee and Miriam Laufer:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/Laufer/drucker.html

Tongues: A Parent Language (from EOAGH #2)
http://chax.org/eoagh/issuetwo/drucker.htm


*  *  *
For the entire Spring 2007 Segue Reading Series, visit
http://www.seguefoundation.com/calendar.htm