Orlando Watt's Recital of "Words" Excerpt

Many years, shortly after I first discovered YouTube, which probably would have been not long before I began blogging here, I had the idea to begin posting short clips of myself reading poems by other poets that I loved. Then clarity struck and I realized that this would mean that I'd have to film myself reading the poems, and my naturally shyness, technical ignorance and concern for violating unknown copyright strictures got the better of me, and that idea remained just that. Of course countless other people decided to do something similar, as well as recording their own poems specifically for a YouTube viewership, so I would have hardly been alone in this project. Not long after Seismosis, my collaboration with poet and artist Christopher Stackhouse, appeared, someone named Kinomode created a lovely short video, inspired by the book, that I deeply enjoyed. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, inspiration drawn from a pre-existing work is one of the finest tributes. When the Black Poets Speak Out movement, organized by Ebony Stewart and Amanda Johnson, began, I originally planned to contribute a video, but shyness overtook me, and so my support was with them, but in the realms of concept and affect.

Fast forward to recently, when I received a request for a list of YouTube URLs to videos of me reading or discussing my work. There aren't many, but I dutifully compiled what existed, and sent them along. (There is or was one on Vimeo, I think, pairing Chris and me as we read from Seismosis; I still had dreadlocks then, and over the years I periodically have encountered younger poets who found the recitation in unison thrilling. That was directly inspired by one of my dazzlingly smart former Northwestern undergraduate students, Tai Little, who wrote a senior thesis novella that included a double-columned passage that she invited classmates to perform live; it was thrilling to hear, and in fact embodied the disorientation she was aiming to convey in her narrative.) At any rate, in my YouTube search I came across something I had never seen before, which was someone reciting one of my poems, and I have to say, I love it.

I do not know the performer, a young man named Orlando Watt. But he takes my poem "Words," which appeared earlier this year on the Academy of American Poets Poetry Daily website, and brings it to life in his own distinctive way. I have read the poem a number of times, very differently from, but it was a delight to see and hear his take, using a brief excerpt of the poem as a monologue, perhaps for an audition. His accent and the way he paces the words and shifts the emphases got me to think about what I had written and how the music in my head transferred to and was transformable on the page. Now that I am posting the link to the video here, I also will post a note of thank you below the video itself. And maybe, if I can find the time and now that cellphones are much easier to handle than the older digital video cameras, post a few videos of myself reading poems--by others!

40x40@40: C. S. Giscombe on Seismosis

Many thanks to Tisa for forwarding to me and others a very fine mention of Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), the collaborative project I worked on with artist Chris Stackhouse. Small  Press Traffic is currently running its "40x40@40" series, about which SPT says:

As part of looking back and mapping what the amazing feats of the SPT community have been since 1974 [the year of its founding], we asked 40 writers to contribute one short text each celebrating—describing, anatomizing, remembering an encounter with, meditating on, shouting out to—a single book published by a small press between 1974 and 2014.

We’re interested in having writers reflect on a book that palpably shifted their perspective, startled their aesthetics, changed their life; a book they always recommend to others; a book that they would place in a time capsule. The one small-press publication that has obsessed them: cult classic—difficult pleasure—creased-cover favorite—out-of-print masterpiece…

The 40×40@40 list will, hopefully, sketch a 40-part haphazard history of independent publishing and ardent reading across these four decades.

How wonderful then to learn that out of many libraries' worth of compelling experimental texts published over the last 40 years award-winning author C. S. Giscombe, author of Giscombe Road (1998), Prairie Style (2008), and other important works of poetry and criticism, and professor of English at University of California-Berkeley, selected Seismosis as his pick.

Here's a snippet of what he writes:

Seismosis, John Keene’s collaboration with Christopher Stackhouse, moves and moves in more than direction.  From the title—which suggests the motion of earth and the motion of liquid—onward the book celebrates mix.  As the back of the book tells us, the text samples work from a variety of writers and performers (Guy Davenport, Leonardo da Vinci, DJ Spooky, Charles Olson, Marjorie Perloff, and Cecil Taylor, among others) and here, in that act, is the mix of languages that makes poetry—here Keene and Stackhouse have taken their collaboration outward and, in so doing, have brought the world into it.  The very end of the book, the one-line poem called “Process,” is signal and also, playfully, serves a summary function—“In the mark we choose and lose signature.”  

He concludes his short post by noting that

Here I feel the book coming again not to “a still but not deep center” (Roethke) but to a statement (via re-statement) of its collaborative project.  I’m struck, throughout the book, by the play of collaboration. The book seems to me to be an examination of what collaboration might look like if it crossed borders.  And here, in Seismosis, with its implicit ruptures of earth’s crust and violations of membranes, borders are being crossed.

Many thanks to Cecil and to SPT, and do visit their site to check out some of the other works they've selected, including works by Dennis Cooper, Elaine Equi, Bernadette Mayer, Karen Brodine, and Heather Fuller. There are a little over 30 more or so works to come!

Vanishing New York, or Doma (No) More

Doma, back in April 2007

I'm a regular reader of Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, a blog devoted to cataloguing the rapidly disappearing vestiges of pre-Bloomberg Manhattan (and to a lesser extent, Brooklyn and the other boroughs), be they restaurants, barbers' schools, bodegas, gay leather bars, you name it, be they 10 or 100 years old. One can rightly argue that Manhattan is always changing and has been for over three and a half centuries, but what Jeremiah Moss captures, much as I've observed in my much less attentive way, in his sometimes overly nostalgic and sentimental but always informative posts is that the pace of transformation from the post-9/11 moment to today, driven mainly by hypergentrification, the accelerating colonization of neighborhoods by chain stores, and the vicious cycle and unaffordable rents, except by the superrich and mega-corporations, outstrips the pace of change of the previous ten years.

Even the behemoth NYU, which has rescrambled its neighborhood more than once, couldn't clear out and knock down and throw up buildings as quickly during the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, as it has done over the past decade. (It also has managed to come back from ICU status to now somehow hosting campuses not just in Manhattan and Brooklyn--where it snapped up not just its former engineering and architecture departments, which Polytechnic University of Brooklyn had taken over, during its troubled period thirty-something years ago, but that entire institution!--but in Abu Dhabi and, if I read correctly, in Shanghai, China very soon.) No matter how sharply pitched the outrage by neighborhood residents, the faculty, and politicians, NYU, like New York's bossy imperial mayor and its still growing cadre of billionaires and multimillionaires, is getting its way.

But my point with this post was not to launch into a tirade against my (one of them) alma mater. If you Google "NYU village plan outrage" or a similar combination you will find more than enough material to decide on the appropriate emotion. (Or just let Fran Lebowitz [cf. below] do it for you.) I also suggest visiting Jeremiah's site, which often points to places you might want to drop by in order to catch them before another high-end condo building crams itself into the spot they once occupied, or learn about a planned action to save a struggling bookstore, or chase down links to peruse if the mention of the words "hipster" and "artisanal" and "luxury" and "Ivy League" in the same sentence sparks in any emotion in you. Or if you just want to witness other people's exasperation at entitlement and privilege and no care for the swift, capitalist erasure of the past and present.

Doma, on March 22, 2012

I began this post to memorialize a spot that Jeremiah did not cover, a café-wine bar that was close to my heart, Doma, because, as he wrote to me in a polite email reply, others had covered it. What was Doma and why was it special to me? It was a tiny café that sat at the corner of 7th Avenue, Waverly Place and Perry Streets, in Greenwich Village. It was quite affordable as New York spots go, had decent coffee, slightly better pastries, very good aguas frescas, economical wine (though I rarely drank there), and, at least for a while, a very relaxed atmosphere that encouraged creativity. (The Czech name, Doma, means "home" or "at home," and it certainly had a Bohemian air.) It was a neighborhood-centric joint, with a revolving monthly gallery, that also drew people from all over the metro area, and among the regulars (including an elderly artist who drew extraordinarily elaborate pencil and ink abstractions, or local graduate students, or people working on hieroglyphic math problems--professors? post-docs?), there would be the occasional glamorous or semi-glamorous person (Calvin Klein, Elizabeth Wurtzel, John Cameron Mitchell--I saw all of them, so not just making this bit up) sliding in and out without much to-do.  One cool element of the place was that they had a bookshelf of all the books written or revised within Doma over the years, and it was quite a little library. The café-restaurant, which opened in 2002, stayed fairly relaxed up through about 2007, I think, and then, as the pace of gentrification ticked faster, it glitzed up a bit, becoming a bit more bistro-esque after 6. But during the day it still retained, to the extent possible, what it had been. I also think musicians played there, but I never caught a performance, since those usually happened after my clearing-out time.

It was also the place where I wrote, discussed and revised a good deal of Seismosis during the summers of 2003 to 2006 with my fellow collaborator, Chris Stackhouse. Since it was convenient for both of us to get to, I'd often go there, sketch a bit, work on revisions I'd drafted initially at home, and then show and discuss them with him. He often had to get back to Brooklyn or head somewhere else, so after our discussions I would just chill, write a little more, grit my teeth and not complain because the place did not have Wifi (though if you sat close to the front windows, you could pick up a free connection from time to time), and Doma was also not far from the Village Copier, on Hudson Street, where I copied and bound not only the many drafts of that book, but other many short stories, novel chapters, poems, and so on, over the years. (It too is gone, and its storefront remains empty, occasionally filling with sets for photoshoots.)  Even though Doma was changing--though the other café where I worked on Seismosis, Il Panino Giusto, just down Perry and up Hudson, is thankfully still open--and I'd found a new favorite spot at the New York Public Library's Research Branch, I tried to drop by there from time to time when I was back in New York.

And then, this past March, during spring break, I went by Doma to get a cup of coffee and catch up on reading I'd had to put off because of the academic quarter, and it was closed. Emptied out. A shell. March 18, I believe, was its terminal day. I knew its hour of reckoning was coming, given that it sat on one of the primest spots in lower Manhattan, but I also though that the clientele, some of whom did belong to the 1%, could keep it afloat. But then again, since Doma did not own the building, if those 1%ers weren't directly negotiating with the landlord to keep the rent reasonable--a threat to many a business across New York--or if one of them wasn't the landlord and thus could decide to go against the grain and not gouge, the café-restaurant was going to have to clear out. It did. Sic transit...you know how that goes.

Doma na Rohu, on Morton St.

But the story doesn't end there. Because Doma miraculously did find a new spot, a bit out of the way and further south in the Village, at 27 1/2 Morton, at Seventh Avenue South. In addition to the new location, it found a new name: Doma na rohu. (Uh huh, and yes they use the lowercase letters, and I'm not making that up.) And from what I can tell it has morphed into a more beer-centric spot, with an Austro-Hungarian/Mitteleuropa focus (double huh?), perhaps because, at least a year or two ago, beer bars and beer gardens had become quite popular in New York. And Germany, which I have been noting various people in comment sections keep threatening to move to, or urging others to do so. (WTF? Also, I love beer, but grew up in a city where German beer gardens and rathskellers and street festivals featuring beer and beer itself were so plentiful it might as well have been Munich, or Prague. Ich möchte nicht in Deutschland leben jetzt oder später. That's from my high school German, and I think that's close to right, yes?) Perhaps the beer gardens still are popular, and perhaps the rich people will go live in Germany if Barack Obama wins reelection in the fall (though he does everything he can to keep them happy except tuck them into bed every night and promise them endless tax cuts, even though he's ensured they got to keep the ones that have made them obscenely rich and thrown the entire US economy out of whack).

Anyways I have not yet hied myself over to Doma Na Rohu yet, though I keep saying I will. I haven't even been back in New Jersey for an entire month yet, so that's my excuse. I will get over there, though. I'm closer than the Brooklynites and their beer gardens, but it still isn't as convenient to get to as the old spot was, and I really am not looking to drink beer in the middle of the day, pleasant as that sounds (though if it gets hot again and I'm not already in Newark, I just might reconsider), and as I said I'm not so gung-ho on the whole heavy-duty Middle European thematics--and let's not talk about the scary mess that contemporary Hungary has become, at least not in this post--but I will check it out. Uh...soon.

Reading and Roading in California

Once again I'm in the air, in mild disbelief that the driving-reading tour of southern California with Seismosis collaborator Christopher Stackhouse has concluded. As I noted in a prior blogpost, we read on Wednesday at the University of California-San Diego, in their Black Box Theater; on Thursday at California State University, San Marcos, in their Commons Theater; and on Friday at the Poetic Research Bureau's/Public School's reading space in Los Angeles's Chinatown.  I have thanked all of our hosts, meal companions and attendees directly, but let me again say many, many thanks, for the invitations, the meals, the conversations about all manner of things (Afrofuturism,  the crisis and effects of public university funding and the larger societal dismissal of the humanities, translating forgotten poets and trippy Argentinian novels, Hilda Hilst, the diminishing enrollment of free classes on Baruch Spinoza, St. Louis Cardinals baseball fans in Los Angeles, Cheikh Anta Diop, mental colonization and oppressive consciousness, UCLA vs. USC, life without an automobile in Los Angeles, fishing in Key West, the constrained appeal of loquats, the need for higher marginal federal tax rates, Ben Shahn, the genius of Geoffrey Chaucer, etc.), the books, the laughter, and especially the directions!

Chris and a friend of his had previously taken a cross-country road trip a few years ago, and some of my students have sung the praises of long and shorter trips over the years, but the furthest roadtrips I've trips since arriving at the university have been 1) to Milwaukee to read (which isn't very far at all); 2) Saint Louis to visit family members (again, not that all that far); and 3) with C back to New Jersey a few years ago, a trip I always remember fondly because almost immediately upon our arriving on the raceways of the Garden State, a furious rainstorm began, and it was only through C's steadiness behind the wheel and presence of mind that we got home in one piece. I think I still prefer traveling by train or plane more than cars, but this trip has subtly shifted my opinion.

For J's Theater readers from San Diego, San Marcos (are there any?) or Los Angeles, these images may induce leaden lids, but if not, do enjoy.

San Diego from the airplane

The Pacific Ocean

Surf school, Mission Bay Pacific beach, San Diego

Mission Bay, San Diego

On the campus of the University of California, San Diego

Kroc Center for Peace Studies reflecting pool, on the University of San Diego campus (poet and friend Jericho Brown gave us a brief and enjoyable tour of the campus)

Main plaza, California State University, San Marcos

Rural southern Orange County, heading north to Los Angeles

101 freeway in Los Angeles, with zeppelin

Union Station in the background, homeless Angelenos in the foreground

Los Angeles railway (funicular)

Nancy Rubens sculpture, LaMOCA

Links Hall: Memory as Innovation

I've been a little off the blogging grid of late, primarily because of work-related duties, but also because I've been preparing for a performance (as opposed to the usual reading) that I participated in, with Chris Stackhouse, at Links Hall this weekend. We were one of a number of people that Links Hall Associates Amina Cain and Jen Karmin invited as part of the second week of a four-week festival devoted to the idea of memory.

The first week included readings and performances by Judith Goldman with (my new colleague) John Beer; Nicole LeGette, Jenny Roberts, Timothy Yu; video by Abigail Child; and Lee Ann Brown, with Jeff Harms/A D Jameson/Toni Asante Lightfoot/Sarah Merchlewitz/Anni Rossi/Auroar Tabar/Rachel Tredon, and Roberto Harrison.

The lineup for this weekend was:

Friday, January 16
Patrick Durgin with Jen Hofer, the Seismosis Duo, Laurie Jo Reynolds with Amy Partridge, and video by Temporary Services

Saturday, January 17
Tradeshow, Jen Hofer with Dolores Dorantes, Seismosis Duo otra vez, and Jennifer Karmin with Mars Caulton/Joel Craig/Lisa Fishman/Krista Franklin/Chris Glomski/Daniel Godston/Lily Robert-Foley

Sunday, January 18
Tradeshow, Jen Hofer with Dolores Dorantes, Jennifer Karmin with Kathleen Duffy/Brandi Homan/A D Jameson/Lisa Janssen/Erika Mikkalo/Ira S. Murfin/Timothy Rey, and video by Laurie Jo Reynolds.

Originally Chris and I were going to present a new project, RAM (Revolutionary Access Memory), which we've been talking about and working on for several months, but because he's in NYC and I'm in Chicago, and I didn't have much free time this past fall, we decided to try out a new performative version of Seismosis. While we have co-read and delivered talks (to artists only) on the project, we'd never created a multimedia performance of it, though we'd spoken about this all the way back to the time we began collaborating, so we figured out how we would feature the images and texts, and then created two sets, which we performed on Friday and Saturday.

I'm usually wracked by anxiety over such things, but I have to say that a few years of teaching has done wonders for my shyness, and we were able to sync our readings, the images and projected texts, and stage entrances and exits properly after only a few rehearsals such that things went off without a hitch. (And we stayed pretty much within the requisite 20 minute framework!) The images, which we took from the pdf galleys as opposed to new scans, appeared immense and crisp on the rear white wall, while the texts pixillated a bit, and were probably harder for audience members to read.

We led off the first night, whose highlight I thought was the direct testimony in Lauri Jo's playlet, involving members of the TAMMS YEAR TEN project, by three men who'd served extended solitary confinement--TORTURE--in the horrific TAMMS CMAX "supermax" prison, in southern Illinois. Writer Terri Kapsalis led a talkback after the performance, and by common assent, the three ex-prisoners took the floor and spoke about how their experiences, and those of more than 200 others at TAMMS and countless others across the country, continued to pass under our society's radar. Mustafa Afrika, one of the men testifying as part of the playlet and talkback, eloquently related the experience to Abu Ghraib, and noted that while that international horror shocked the world, similar forms of torture, of US prisoners (one of the men spoke about having been in prison for 29 years, only to be released when the prosecutor and courts realized that they had no case against him), merits almost no commentary, protest or outrage. It was an emotional evening, to put it mildly, but I was glad that we were able to present in conjunction with the other artists and to have a little dialogue with them afterwards.

On the second night, we followed Jen Hofer and Dolores Dorantes, and Jen Karmin's polyphonic performance followed us, with the dancing duo of Tradeshow coming last, so the balance was different, but equally provocative, and got me thinking even more deeply about ideas around and the practice of collaboration, as well as future work to pursue.

As I was preparing for the event, I realized that you can easily movies with the newest version of PowerPoint (who knew?), so below is a short movie featuring images from Friday and Saturday. (There are none of us because I wasn't able to film us, but poet and composer Daniel Godston told me that he has both audio files and still photos, so when I get those I'll post or link to them.)



One of the coolest aspects of the event was the opportunity to experience collaboration in the moment, as we improvised at certain points with some of the texts--like "Geodesy"--while following a stricter set of directions with others ("Analysis I"). I told Chris that all my years of observing other poets freestyle on their own work had taught me some pointers about writing improvisatory possibilities into a work, and it's something I'm aiming to do in at least one new project.

Many thanks to Amina and Jen for inviting us, and thanks to all the wonderful artists we performed with!

Poem: Joseph Legaspi + Seismosis News

Today, I'm featuring a poem I found online, in Shampoo (31), by a poet I've known and admired now for a little over a decade, Joseph Legaspi (at right, from mipoesias.com). Joseph and I were in graduate school together, though in different genre tracks, but Joseph is one of those down-to-earth people whose unaffected friendliness and kindness means that you look forward to running into them, and I often would, he, and fellow poets and classmates Jan Gill (now O'Neil) and the late Phebus Etienne, a lively and amiable trio, and I can say without hesitation that I never left them without a good though, good feeling, and a good sense that these were three writers to watch out for. Joseph published his first collection of poems, Imago, with CavanKerry Press earlier this year, so check it out, and enjoy this little philosophical "postcard" of a poem. Yes, it literally was a postcard (see below, from Shampoo), from an issue devoted to them!

The universe has no edge or center.
Yet we who traverse in it do so
along perimeters, always, man-made,
conceptual and defined.  Try and pin-
point the center, and we go there.  Or is
it where we are at a given moment?
We are bound by boundaries: arms length
or under the hot sun of a horizon.
Trace edges, visible and invisible; place me in a box as I walk around in
circles.  Or is it equilibrium we seek: like the mallard bobbing on the Hudson
River, afloat, content, afloat.

Poem and image, Copyright © Joseph Legaspi, 2007, 2008, All rights reserved.

***

Some more good news about Seismosis: it received another very fine and perceptive review, by poet Frances Richard, in the most recent issue (March/April, I think) of the Poetry Project's Newsletter (the newest issue isn't up yet). I'll post the link to the new issue when they post it.

And...it received one of the 10 Fellowships for distinguished first poetry collection from the Pan African Literary Forum, which will hold its first conference this summer in Accra, Ghana, from July 3-July 18, 2008! I don't think either Mr. Stackhouse or I will be able to attend (sponsors, anyone? :-)), but this is a wonderful honor for the book, and we graciously thank the PALF's board of directors, who adjudged it worthy of this honor.

Reading at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn

Here're some photos from the reading this past Sunday at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn with Chris Stackhouse and Geoffrey Jacques. It's always fun to read with Chris (though no simultaneous poems this time), and it was an honor to read with Geoffrey. C was there, as was our good friend Victor, and other friends like Tisa, Erica, Tonya, and Alisoun. Chris, Geoffrey and I ended up with a packed room and sold all the store's copies of our books (Seismosis flew out of there, as did Chris's book and Geoffrey's, paid in full!). All the photos are by C (thank you!).

Unnameable Books introducing the reading, Chris and Geoffrey at right

Chris reading (and rolling us in stitches)

The audience (Tisa in the middle)

Yours truly, and Chris at right

Geoffrey Jacques - "What ever happened to the beautiful language?" ("Viewers Like")

Me, having a great time afterwards

Tisa, snapping a photo outside

Victor

Mary Reilly!

Geoffrey and Chris

More Photos from the Beacon Talk

Here are a few more photos of Chris Stackhouse and me at the talk in Beacon, New York, so here are some from artist Karlos Carcamo, one of the co-founders and proprietors of the talk's sponsor, the Go North Gallery. (Thanks, Karlos!)

Me speaking about Stephane Mallarmé's and Edouard Manet's L'après-midi d'un faune (1876-1877), one of the earliest and best known experimental art-text collaborations

Here I'm puzzling over the gestural economy and influence of Jackson Pollock's The Deep

Chris talking about a Richter drawing in paint

And more about Richter

Here he's speaking about another Richter painting that functions like a drawing

Here we're conferring before we read "Geodesy," one of the "simultaneous" poems, which one of the audience members suggested was like pleasant "feedback"

Photos: Beacon + Seismosis Talk

Here are a few photos from my visit to Beacon, New York and the talk at the Go North Gallery, which was actually moved to a larger venue just down the street, the historic Howland Memorial Library, which now houses the town's Historical Society. Let me thank Karlos Carcamo and Gregory Slick of Go North once again for inviting Chris and me to speak about and read from Seismosis, and thanks also to all the people who showed up (esp. Dante, Erica and Patricia!) on what might have been the most beautiful Saturday in New York and New Jersey this August.

The interior of the Howland Memorial Library, before the talk (artist and gallery owner Karlos Carcamo is entering the room)

Some of the audience, as we worked out the technical issues with the projector

The exterior of the Howland Memorial Library

The first slide (ready to go!)

After the talk (Chris Stackhouse, in the white shirt, has his back to the camera)

More post-talk chatting (poet Dante Micheaux, in the brown shirt at back, is stretching)

Chris and Karlos, in front of a slide of one of Gerhard Richter's drawings-in-paint

The "Out of Line" show at Go North Gallery (Photo, Go North Gallery)

Main Street, Beacon, New York

Dia: Beacon, which had closed by the time Chris and I headed over there

Near the Dia: Beacon main gates, a view of the Hudson and the Catskills to the west

As we were driving around, we came across this spot, the Max Protetch Gallery's Sculpture Park and Annex

Although redolent of Sol Lewitt's work, I believe this piece, unlabelled, is by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, whom the Max Protetch gallery represents; it may even be one of his "Iceberg" sculptures

I'm not sure who's the artist behind this gigantic piece, but it's visible from the road

Chris is wandering over near a patio that has sculptures by Scott Burton (and perhaps Lewitt)

A train shot, heading back to New Jersey, of the Hudson River and Catskills from the river's eastern side