"THE OUTSIDER'S DILEMMA"

Thanks to curator Ian Whistle for including my asemic series, "The Outsider's Dilemma," in h&, a journal of visual/concrete poetry.  Go HERE to see how my white hairs are mischievous; here's an example:

SHELVED IN SWEDEN!

What I look like in Sweden

in a bookstore managed in Malmö by lars palm!

MY ROMANCE: A BRICK!

Aileen Ibardaloza, a charming poet with a charming book, moved into a house in San Mateo, CA.  And she recently decorated her porch with books painted to feature some of her favorite books!  Am delighted to see that she included (apparently her first book by Moi) MY ROMANCE, a collection of art essays/reviews with poems.  Here's an image from her porch of those brick books!

I love the company in which MY ROMANCE finds itself!  Thank you, Aileen!  MY ROMANCE is a fairly unique book, and I hope Aileen's treatment encourages you to check it out!

AS REGARDS THE POET-PUBLISHER...

Spent part of my recent vacation reading (and annotating for a possible review) the 1955-1997 correspondence between Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg: I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER, effectively edited by Bill Morgan. There are many gems innit, but perhaps because I include "poet-publisher" among my own roles, I'm focusing (at least this afternoon) on Ginsberg's opinions of Ferlinghetti's poems -- a section that made me wince.

I didn't wince because Ginsberg thought poorly of Ferlinghetti's poems (though he shared his constructive criticism) but because, as a topic, it was obviously not at the top of Ginsberg's list of concerns (this topic wasn't raised until page 153 of the book) and Ginsberg is a poet who pays attention to other poets. And Ferlinghetti was, at least, conscious of Ginsberg's lack of attention ... a few pages past p 153, Ginsberg offered some more notes on Ferlinghetti's poems but I got the sense (I could be misreading but I don't think I am) that Ginsberg was nicely (if belatedly) realizing that he should be more attuned to the fact that his publisher also writes poems.  Well, really, you should read this book to sense the nuances for yourself (and see if I'm being over-imaginative)...

since this is a topic that resonates to me as a poet-publisher.  As a publisher, I don't expect reciprocal attention to my work from poets I publish.  The focus in this publishing arrangement is the publishee.  But what does it mean when the publishee is indifferent to how his publisher is also a peer, also a poet?

So often, I've received surprise and/or a distinct, as if rare, pleasure as the reactions to a question I pose to my publishers or editors, "How's your work coming along?" and/or "I appreciated your work ___" followed by some question about it. This surprise is also why I don't expect my publishees ever to pay attention to my own work (though the majority, to my distinct pleasure, do).

Not sure, really, where I'm going with this.  Nowhere, I guess.

One poet-publisher once shared that it can be a tad aggravating when a publishee talks to the publisher as if the publishee was the master and the publisher a mere listener when the publisher is also a poet.  (Got that?)

I guess I'll stop talking now about this topic which is just grimace-generating, sadly because it partly bespeaks the limited attention given to any poet's works.

BUYING POETRY

It's been interesting to read two of my recent poetry book purchases together: URSULA OR UNIVERSITY by Stephanie Young and BAN EN BANLIEU by Bhanu Kapil.  The tones and narrative references are very different, but the two have more in common with each other than not.  Anyway, here’s an update on moi Recently Bought Poetry List of books by poets or about poets/poetry. 

MANDARIN PRIMER by Rosmarie Waldrop

SEVEN FOR BOETTICHER & OTHER POEMS by Rodney Koeneke

TWO POEMS by Hugo Garcia Manriquez

URSULA OR UNIVERSITY by Stephanie Young

INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS by Bhanu Kapil

SCHIZOPHRENE by Bhanu Kapil

BAN EN BANLIEU by Bhanu Kapil

COLLECTED POEMS 1957-1982 by Wendell Berry

COOL DON’T LIVE HERE NO MORE: A LETTER TO SAN FRANCISCO by Tony Robles

LOVE AFTER THE RIOTS by Juan Felipe Herrera

SINGING AT THE GATES: SELECTED POEMS by Jimmy Santiago Baca

BOMBYONDER by Reb Livingston

AMERICAN SUBLIME by Elizabeth Alexander

SPAR by Karen Volkman

THE LAST INCANTATIONS by David Mura

ON THE CUSP OF A DANGEROUS YEAR by Lee Ann Roripaugh

POET IN ANDALUCIA by Nathalie Handal

THE CLOUD CORPORATION by Timothy Donnelly

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION by Cathy Park Hong

ABOUT THAT BOOK REVIEWER NAMED "EILEEN TABIOS"

Maxwell Clark "reviews" me as a "reviewer" over at NOEMA.  This is so ... intriguing I'm going to to replicate the whole thing below. I suspect, if one cared to pay attention to something like this, certain of these implications and thoughts are/can be ... controversial. If one cared to pay attention...

About Eileen Tabios 

By Maxwell Clark 

Vaguely aware of Kierkegaard’s teachings on the obnoxious superfluity of book-reviewing, of how in the reading masses book-reviews lazily crowd out the more intensive and individual reading of their else merely attendant books, I offer a few remarks on Eileen Tabios. She is to me more of a vortex of transnational poetic societal relations, however fuzzily and ambiguously defined in their ever-shifting dimensions, than a poet unto herself. She curates the works of others exceedingly well. She reviews others books with such an easy command that it even sometimes astounds her reader. But for all of her glowing book-reviews, very many of which are deposited haphazardly into her own books, do her own books stand out with a like aura of serendipity when the reader is alone with them? Were I to ever answer this question, I would be stooping to the traditional forms of critical evaluation in the book-review canon. Instead, I leave the question hanging; the better to nag the otherwise ignorant of her corpus to answer for themselves. 

Eileen Tabios is of a genius that is hard to pin down in any one textual space, otherwise put. Her genius is more of that incessantly collective barrage of her own rapid-fire of texts, their wondrously delicate shepherding of her ambient poetic world, in so many micrologically specific ways. I don't mean to go against Kierkegaard's grain re: book-reviewing much, but perhaps in the unique case of Tabios's most luscious critical preenings, that most brusque but highly attentive sensitivity they achieve as contexts to otherwise unread texts, therein something of goodness and justice accrues. Perhaps, just maybe, her reviews are better than the books upon which they anchor as references to? Doubtless, I again cannot answer my own questionings. But hanging questions, as superlative luxuries in a way, I indulge myself with them herein. Perhaps the art of reviewing books needn't deteriorate the value of what they review, perhaps book-reviews may indeed even ennoble their otherwise mediocre reference materials? If such were ever to be the case, then assuredly Eileen Tabios would be exemplary of it.

Nota Bene: I don't assign myself poetry books to review.  I just try to read as widely as I can and then review whatever compels me to review them....

By the way, the article is illustrated by a flag.  Interesting, since I consider my flagpole to be empty ...

BOOK? CHECK!

My son wrote his first check this weekend.  For the purchase of a book:  The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.  Yes, soon enough his checks will be for, I don't know, gum underwear CDs et al.  But may he never forget his right start to his checkbook: a book is worth paying for.