Introduction for Elizabeth Willis (by erica kaufman)

Elizabeth Willis' most recent book is Meteoric Flowers. Other works include Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law. Formerly poet-in-residence at Mills College, she now teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in central Massachusetts.

“Fluent in salamander,” Elizabeth Willis’s seemingly organic ekphrasis stuns meteoric after turneresque after abstract. These poems are shapely tornadoes that collide with things past, they take “genre trouble” and out of it create “prose in revolt.” “The world [might] be clanking noun noun noun” (it usually is), but in Willis’s work the poet always has critical control—meaning Willis’s poems radiate the kind of strength that makes one rethink his/her own confidence. (To quote “Errata,” “for the, read her”). Or, as Stefania Heim writes of Meteoric Flowers, “deep fissures between things hold the emotional core, the sharp intelligence, and the relentless energy of the collection at the same time as they remain the sites of what is left unsaid.” To quote Willis, “I do this work to word you.”

In fact, Willis’s newest collection Meteoric Flowers even begins with the Wallace Stevens quote—“A poem is a meteor.” And these poems are indeed meteors—with their atmospheric entry, their impact on the surface (of the page, on the listener’s ear, on Darwin’s own texts), and their finely sculpted shapes. As Willis writes in her “Notes on [Meteoric Flowers] the Text,” “Darwin made poems that perform as well as contain their intellectual discoveries.” Or, as she writes in “All the Paintings of Giorgione,” “this is the moment when painting becomes painting.”

Please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Willis.

The Segue Reading Series Presents:

Thomas Fink and Elizabeth Willis

Saturday, April 26, 2008 ** 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

Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, including Clarity and Other Poems. He is the author of two books of criticism, most recently A Different Sense of Power, and he is the co-editor of Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics. His paintings hang in various collections. Fink is Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia.

from "Deconstricted Sestina 5"

Dialogue will swerve repeatedly before it survives
patriarchy. Thanks for not smoking inside. I
trust you to profit from any experiment
that respects the survival of those not

yet as fit. Reach into my pocket
and husband what's left. My husband assumes
immortality, but one attentive scribe is becoming
my sole access to recommencing dialogue, into

which labors or equalization should
be poured. My thanks are
colored by suspicion of vested

recollection. Lately, many fund Plato's
experiment; mine could take several

millennia to breed a profit.

Elizabeth Willis' most recent book is Meteoric Flowers. Other works include Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law. Formerly poet-in-residence at Mills College, she now teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in central Massachusetts.

"Her Mossy Couch"

I stain lengthwise all I touch. The world is so touching, seen this
way, in fleshtones, aggrieved, gleaming as the lights go out, look-
ing into the crease of relativity. We've seen this before, why? Tri-
umph arches over us like bad emotion. We were supposed to feel
more connected to it, we were supposed to feel humanly moved
by imaginary strings. All the words in the world are moving pic-
tures to the dizzy ear, fleas, inadequate deceptions of nocturnal
hair, pushing buttons, pushing papers, pushing pedals up the
long hill. Who could get over the blatant radiance of a name like
Doris Day, throwing your finest features into political relief, a
warehouse in the shadow of apples and streams?

SEGUE 4/19: RUTH LEPSON, WALTER CRUMP, AND DAN MACHLIN

The Segue Reading Series Presents

Ruth Lepson, Walter Crump, and Dan Machlin
Saturday, April19, 2008 ** 4PM SHARP**
at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, just north of Houston)
$6 admission goes to support the readers

hosted by Tim Peterson

Poet Ruth Lepson and photographer Walter Crump are the authors of the collaborative book Morphology (Blazevox Books). Ruth Lepson is also the editor of Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology and the author of Dreaming in Color. Walter Crump's photography is included in numerous private and public collections including: Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Museum of America Art (Smithsonian), and the National Museum of Fine Art, Hanoi. His website is www.waltercrump.com.

Regarding Morphology, Tina Darragh says:
"'Awake' is now 'Aquake,' and we are more sensible souls for the 'light tablets' this collaboration tones us."

and Charles Alexander says:
"This book is magic. I want to read it a thousand times."

From "Morphology"

*

"Can anyone think of a
Realist writer? I ask. A guy
In the back of the room
Raises his hand. "Simmonds
Hoote," he says.

*

*

Robert Creeley's new poems are
black                  and white
maps                  of America
clear                  as New
Mexico.                  The clouds
are verti-                  cal curliques
chalked                  through Nebraska
and Kan-                  sas. The
Midwest                  map
strikes                  me--
its neck,                  the
North-                  east,
has been                  severed.
Later I                  notice the absence
of words,                  the
silence.

Dan Machlin's first full-length collection of poems Dear Body: was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Fall 2007. He is also the author of several previous chapbooks: 6x7, This Side Facing You, In Re; and an audio-CD collaboration with Singer/Cellist Serena Jost, Above Islands. He is the founding editor of Futurepoem books.

From "Dear Body"

Meanwhile you were hiding underneath the table. At one time, they too could
assemble you out of grass – an abandoned rug and decaying vegetables.

We prayed to your effigy like to a beautiful library book you wanted to steal –
the perfect never-noticed crime.

Many years later indexing doubts about your presence you uncover lost plans
for some extreme city.

Or you as your own forbidden lover who meets yourself
Late at night in a forgotten deco motel.

A brief conversation about ephemera (each word drenched with sexual potential).

You know, I've never believed in your hope. So somehow the limbs attached to
a trunk of meat and toes a face lips that say a nose balding teeth barely –

O how this house whispers beneath the dinner table!

Introduction for Tonya Foster (by erica Kaufman)

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Books) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance.

In “A Mathematics of Chaos,” Tonya Foster writes, “The act of writing involves a similar process of construction and resistance.” This quote is one of several interstices where a gracefully semi-disjunctive narrative breaks for questioning. Like a moment when the work reflects on its own creation. (aside: I am reminded of something I read describing Cha’s Dictee as “autobiography that transcends the self.”)

Another moment of this sort—“Walking forward while looking back is a natural process through which cities and poems come into being.” Foster is architectural in her ability to construct cities via poetics—whether the place be Harlem, Jersey City, New Orleans, haiku, or a Woman Named Kong. This variant architectonic variance is partially because of Foster’s amazing ear for how words can and should bump up against each other, and partially because of her pioneering recognition of the marginalized (diction, region, politic).

As Foster writes in A Swarm of Bees in High Court “When Moses parted/the Red Sea as if it were/hair, was he tender?” Here I am reminded of Anne Waldman’s “Prelude: My Long and Only Afterlife” (from A Vow to Poetry) in which she writes, “Past is never over, will you learn that now?” then later, “Regarded with a fortress mentality the reclamation of nation, of people.” And so we ask the question, what can poetry do? (active verb)

Quote,
“In memory, the/eye is quicker”

and

“Bullets can/ blot a page, train an eye to/ follow thought and sound”

Please welcome Tonya Foster.

The Segue Reading Series presents
Tonya Foster & Anne Tardos

Saturday, April 12, 2008 ** 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

Tonya Foster is the author of poetry, fiction, and essays that have been published in a variety of journals from Callaloo to The Hat to Western Humanities Review. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna Books) and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art. She is currently completing a cross-genre piece on New Orleans, and Monkey Talk, an inter-genre piece about race, paranoia, and surveillance.

From "(In)Somniloquy"

History swarms in
the marrow of your thoughts (,/.) as
she lies there (,) sleepless

history swarms in.
To eat or not to? Then what?
She clears her throat.

"You can't be eatin'
from everybody," her aunt warned
after the first loss.

"You can't be eatin'
like you don't mind trading a
baby for red beans."

That yarn's redness bleeds Persephone, Eve, Jemima, Rine. More
squirrels.
That yarn's redness: eating from a strange pot/tree/hand/mind draws
blood or sleep.

Anne Tardos is a poet and visual artist. She has published several books of poetry and the multimedia performance work and radio play Among Men. She is the editor of Thing of Beauty by Jackson Mac Low, from the University of California Press this fall. Her new book I Am You is just out from Salt Publishing.

81

It's time to let go of the narrative section of this poem and let the ride begin

Haa-ooh-aah

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Won't you be my silicone doll
Won't you be my forever stamp
No I will not fix your computer

Music You

Possibly

--from "Letting Go"

Introduction for Wayne Koestenbaum (by erica kaufman)

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen's Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2007. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.

Part fashion icon, part heroic musicologist, part flaneur, part Lacanian “new species in signification.” Wayne Koestenbaum is Barthes’s dream come true—exactly the kind of agency he calls for in “Musica Practica,” a place where the idea of playing is revivified via concise swerves along the road once thought of as essay. Much like “fashion’s nature is bricolage” (Koestenbaum, “Thrifting”), Koestenbaum breaks genre binaries and instead embraces the influence of one form on another, writing a “diva” I can’t help but indefatigably admire.

Hotel Theory, Koestenbaum’s newest is a masterpiece in mirroring—simultaneously a “dime store novel” and an exploration into a “hotel state of being.” In presenting two seemingly separate prosaic texts side by side, Koestenbaum asks his readers to rethink how we read. The result: a queer poly-narrative that reforms the visibility of a text and the page. To quote from “Hotel Theory,” “We practice a hotel room, just as we practice space: residing and walking are ways of turning space to account, defining and molding it.” To quote from “Hotel Women,” “In Hotel Women, time bent over backwards to make guests happy.”

What does it mean to be happy? Perhaps ultimate “genre autonomy?” Or, an “opalescent red Jung theory of progress.” “in this oops! I call love.”

As Benjamin writes in “Excavation and Memory, “ “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium.” Koestenbaum has found this much talked about medium and cloaked it in sequins, pinstripes, and what The Washington Post refers to as “extravagant gestures and precise observations.” To quote the New Yorker, ‘Koestenbaum breaks the silence,” and it is my great pleasure to be introducing him. Please welcome Wayne Koestenbaum.