Books™ - Boog City

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Books™ - Boog City
BOOG CITY
A COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER FROM A GROUP OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS BASED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY’S EAST VILLAGE
ISSUE 66 FREE
ARGOS BOOKS
AUTONOMEDIA
FRACTIOUS PRESS
KAYA PRESS
LOUDMOUTH PRESS
NEW YORK QUARTERLY
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Celebrate Six of the City’s Best Small Presses
Inside in Their Own Words and Live
Books
™
d.a. levy lives
each month celebrating a renegade press
T ues. Dec. 14 , 6 : 0 0 p . m . , f r e e
N ew Yo r k C i t y
Sm a l l P r e s s e s Night
Argos Books
Marina Blitshteyn
Hildred Crill
Bianca Stone
Autonomedia
Jordan Zinovich
Fractious Press
Steven J. Hann
Nikkiesha N. McLeod
Buzz Poole
K. Abigail Walthausen
Thera Webb
Readings from Argos Books, Autonomedia, Fractious
Press, Kaya Press, LoudMouth Press, and New York
Quarterly authors (see below), and music from Matteah
Baim with Golden Slumbers. Plus cheese and crackers,
and wine and other beverages. Curated by Cristiana Baik
and Svetlana Kitto
ACA Galleries 529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr.
(10th/11th aves)
For information call 212-842-BOOG (2664) • [email protected]
www.welcometoboogcity.com
Kaya Press
Samantha Chanse
Lisa Chen
Ed Lin
Thaddeus Rutkowski
LoudMouth Press
Geoff Cunningham
Carla Repice
New York Quarterly
Tony Gloeggler
Douglas Treem
It’s Like
I cannot love like a ninepin. Not
like the lane. Not like the blue shoe.
I can love like a farmhouse, or a griefchimney that funnels from the ovens
of my earlier unpopular period. This
is a small pond where thousands
of black tadpoles loiter at the rocks.
This is a wooden raft being tipped
by an assembly of teenagers.
And there are no clouds in the sky.
No airplanes. There isn’t even
a sky. There isn’t even a sky.
– Bianca Stone
From the chapbook Someone Else’s Wedding
Vows. Available at the Argos Books website.
This Landscape of Girlish Iniquity (forest)
Where I lived for many years. Boardinghouse of flocked
nightgowns, sunless girls wrapping locks of hair around
rags. Took my first tipple there, a ritual that came to
replace vesperal ablutions, replace the bedside lowering,
soften the mind to near love. Learned the difference
between clown and mime was not silence, but skill. Ran
my hands along a wall of my invention, was often climbing
imagined stairs, spent hours picking invisible orchids.
Sometimes I was a man coming on to me. Shy in repose, I
rebuffed the evening shadow as a boreal conifer feathering
out, cast my fingers across the door draft to pluck a most
dolorous credo. No one listened, even those who looked.
Once, in recalcitrant vignette, I posed for years as a girl
who didn’t know a goddamn thing, my homeland was a
single shaft of light across floorboards, the dust shone as
snow in a Pasternak diorama. This is what I remember
every night as I emigrate to your border. You are sitting at
the computer, maybe paying bills. Your dark limbs laden
with my favorite birds. Their happy song I am always
making my way toward.
– Paige Ackerson-Kiely
Й
elision/possession
Renovation Somewhere in the Building
I wear the flexible fingers
of a hardware guardian
alert to repercussions
of the upstairs hammer,
the intransigent anvil,
the interior drill.
Where I am
is part of where you are
wherever that is.
There’s no ridding myself
of the feel of screws, bolts,
electric switches.
I lick the sparks on my palm
and the entire world is spoken.
say a sound
is diminished
maybe a beat quickens
towards the rest
an elision slips
easily at the end
wearing a sleeveless
mini as the heart
– Hildred Crill
From the chapbook The Upstairs Hammer. Available at the
Argos Books website.
From the first installment in the Side By Side Series: collaborations between poets and artists, This Landscape is a collaboration between poet
Paige Ackerson-Kiely and artist Adie Russell. Available at the Argos Books
web site.
Unexpected
Sometimes it is wonderful when a friend shows up unexpectedly at
daybreak. I drank a first coffee and opened the kitchen window, and the
cold air breezed in and held its soft hat and scarf out to me.
Out in the world, across the street, the black dog of sadness sniffs along
the red garden wall and snuffles up the snowy hillside, seeking its master.
– S.C. Hahn
From the collection of prose poems A Sky That Is Never the Same. Available at the Argos
Books website.
maybe he’s
equally as eclipsed by distance
as I’m even
eagerly possessed
is already undressed.
maybe we seem
too pleasing or
too blessed
to pass anymore tests
so we freely
marry our ribs
in our chests & we’re
really too ready
but possession comes last
in Russian, a vowel
stays longer in the west
– Marina Blitshteyn
From the chapbook Russian For Lovers.
Available February 2011.
Mermaid
Caribbean thyme is ten times stronger than the English variety
— just ask Miss Queenie and her royal navy, who couldn’t
yank a Jamaican weed from her rose-garden that didn’t grow
back thick, tenfold, and blackened with the furor of a violated
man. The tepid American I sank with my old shoes over the
jaws of the Atlantic could never understand the hard clamor
of my laugh, why I furrowed rough at the brow, why I knew
the hollow points of every bone. But dig where the soil is wet
and plant the proud seed of your shame-tree; don’t let them
say it never grew. Roll the saltfish barrel down the hill, sending
that battered thunder clanging at the seaside moon, jangled
by her long earrings at our sea, ten times bluer than the bluest
eye. That mint tea whistling in the Dutch pot is stronger than
liquor, and takes six spoons of sugar, please—what can I say,
my great-grandfather’s blood was clotted thick with sugar
cane and overproof rum; when he bled it trickled heavy like
molasses, clotted black like phlegm in the throat. Every red
ant from Negril to Frenchman’s Cove came to burrow and
suckle at his vein, where his leg was honeyed with a diabetic
rot, and when he caught my grandmother in his wide fishing
net, he served her up cold to his wild-eyed son: “Mermaid on
the deck.” Now I too am rooted deep in his mutinous garden,
buried in the dirt with the rioting mimosas, which open and
close with the blue pulse of my breath, spiring tenfold through
this dreaming skeleton.
– Safiya Sinclair
From the forthcoming collection of poetry and essays Catacombs. Available
June 2011.
Argos Books is an independent literary press, founded in 2010 by three poet-translators. Our aim is to support
poetry, hybrid genres, translation, and collaboration, with a special interest in work that crosses cultural and
national borders. We have two curated series intended to engage with diverse work in unexpected ways: the
Little Anthology series, small anthologies that capture a community, subject or point of view, and Side by Side,
collaborations between artists and writers. While publishing innovative work is our primary focus, we are also
invested in facilitating critical dialogues among communities, genders, and languages.
For more information and to buy upcoming and available titles please visit our website: www.argosbooks.org
2 BOOG CITY
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BOOG CITY 3
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BOOG CITY 5
MEMO from the Office Of Blame:
Often people are skeptical at first. It’s understandable. We aren’t
your everyday office, and people carrying blame will always be a
little less trusting. So they want to know ‘where do you get your
funding? Is this a private organization? Who’s paying you? Are you
CIA?’... But we see through all that. This is what we train for. We
provide a service. By accounting for blame we are offering people
the opportunity to get on with their day... perhaps even their lives.
We’re not heroes. We’re just doing our job.”
- Blame Accountants
www.loudmouthpress.org
Homeless people in America face the obstacles of social invisibility – despite the fact that their condition puts them on constant
display in our streets. “Why Are You Surprised I’m Still Here?”
takes a look at the people who exist on the very fringe of our
society, by focusing on the signs that they create.
Sometimes the sign is ironic, using humor to make a point; most
often the sign is a cry for help and for basic recognition. Gathered over almost a decade from around the country by farmer
and artist, Billy Kaufman, then salvaged from a dilapidated barn
in rural Tennessee, the collection, seen together illustrates the diversity of America’s homeless and the myriad of hardships they
face living on the streets.
The sales of this
book will benefit
The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), an
organization combining the skills of
advocates, lobbyists
and people who
were once, themselves homeless.
Through public education, outreach and
government action,
the NCH mission
is simple - to end
homelessness in our
country.
6 BOOG CITY
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by Amanda J. Bradley
978-1-935520-07-8
Hints and Allegations
by Adam Hughes
978-1-935520-35-1
Tourist
by Sanford Fraser
978-1-935520-11-5
by Joe Weil
978-1-935520-10-8
Petrichor
by Joanna Crispi
978-1-935520--00-9
by Grace Zabriskie
978-1-935520-05-4
The Plumber’s
Apprentice
by Ira Joe Fisher
978-1-935520-02-3
Songs from an
Earlier Century
Soldier in the Grass
by Kevin Pilkington
978-1-935520-09-2
In the Eyes of a Dog
by Jim Reese
978-1-935520-17-7
ghost on 3rd
by Jackie Sheeler
978-1-935520-34-4
Earthquake Came
to Harlem
by F. D. Reeve
978-1-935520-20-7
The Puzzle Master
and Other Poems
by rd coleman
978-1-935520-27-6
beach tracks
by Jayne Lyn Stahl
978-1-935520-26-9
by Richard Kostelanetz
978-1-935520-18-4
poetry at
the edge™
www.nyqbooks.org
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York Quarterly Foundation, Inc. Its mission is to augment the
New York Quarterly poetry magazine by providing an additional
venue for poets who are already published in the magazine. A
lifelong dream of NYQ's founding editor, William Packard, NYQ
Books™ has been made possible by both growing foundation
support and new technology that was not available during
William Packard's lifetime. We are proud to present these books
and keep them in print so that all may enjoy.
My Sick Teacher
POEMS
Riding with Destiny
Recircuits
by Pui Ying Wong
978-1-935520-29-0
by Norman Stock
978-1-935520-30-6
Yellow Plum Season
Just Beautiful
by Tim Suermondt
978-1-935520-28-3
Bones & Jokes
by Ted Jonathan
978-1-935520-01-6
by Fred Yannantuono
978-1-935520-06-1
A Boilermaker for
the Lady
by Oren Wagner
978-1-935520-19-1
Voluptuous Gloom
by Iris Lee
978-1-935520-16-0
Urban Bird Life
by Ira Joe Fisher
978-1-935520-03-0
Some Holy Weight
in the Village Air
by Barbara Blatner
978-1-935520-23-8
The Still Position
from
Pickled Dreams
Naked
Books™
NYQ Books™ was established in 2009 as an imprint of The New
He stands at dawn
burning on the inside,
coughing stuff up.
He walks from the bed halfway to the bathroom
like crossing a river on stones.
He must inspect what he has coughed up
to check it for its color and consistency.
If it’s dark and thick
if it’s still dark and thick
then he will still be very sick.
He can’t seem to find enough stones.
Avoid the cliche, he taught me.
Everything So
Dodge it, duck it, kill it at all costs.
Seriously
Okay: so he is pale as night.
by
Douglas
Treem
Custer, he says.
978-1-935520-14-6
Custer, he did not crack.
He holds a finger straight up.
He jerks once and half of each cell in his body flinches.
But Keats,
he says.
Keats, he says again.
The finger draws an arc in the air,
points straight down a moment,
then loses its strength and curls.
He says Keats cracked.
Standing there pale as the night,
trembling like anything other than a leaf can tremble,
he composes: Keats cracked, but Custer laughed.
For posterity, he looks at me.
He speaks with finality.
Keats cracked.
Custer laughed.
I note the revision with one nod of my head.
Suddenly he finds the stones to the bathroom
where he holds his hand to his face
to see what he coughed up.
by Douglas Treem
Forthcoming NYQ Books include books by: Anna Adams, Yu Yan
Chen, Franz Douskey, Steven Henn, Luke Johnson, Gordon Massman, Michael Montlack, Mather Schneider, Shelley Stenhouse,
Barry Wallenstein, and many more.
ONE YEAR LATER
My brother was on his way
to a dental appointment
when the second plane hit
four stories below the office
where he worked. He’s never
said anything about the guy
who took football bets, how
he liked to watch his secretary
walk, the friends he ate lunch with,
all the funerals. Maybe, shamed
by his luck, he keeps quiet,
afraid someone might guess
how good he feels, breathing.
The Last Lie
by Tony Gloeggler
978-1-935520-15-3
by Tony Gloeggler
BOOG CITY 7
URBAN FOLK
A Magna Opera
Laughter & Lust Meets Frampton Comes Alive!
Meets Ride This (or Trio) Meets Taking Liberties
BY JONATHAN
BERGER
Fustercluck!!!
Elastic No-No Band
ustin Remer does not hide his
influences well, or, really, even
try to. He seems proud to give
credit where it’s due. The title of
his 2008 EP, Every Elvis Has His
Impersonators, makes an indirect
reference to Elvis Costello’s 2002
track “Episode of Blonde.” That’s a
J
which were thematically consistent
works. While sometimes the themes
are pretty vague (Costello’s Punch
the Clock can be identified as “the
pop album”), each of the albums
these English New Wave singersongwriters released during their
most prolific periods has a distinct
identity all its own. Like his revered
predecessors, Remer likes to make
thematic albums. His last full-length
as Elastic No-No Band was My
3 Addictions, which described, in
studio, like Remer and Nan Turner’s
take on Joe Jackson’s “Different for
Girls,” which successfully captures
all the chaotic energy of a drunken
night out for karaoke. Much better
is the reinterpretation of the Everly
Brothers’ “Poor Jenny,” wonderfully
assisted by Toby Goodshank (who
also collaborated on the cover
with Elastic No-No Band-member
Preston Spurlock).
There are live tracks throughout the
album—including the hilarious story-
logical choice, since the EP is a minialbum of Costello covers. Even the
name of Remer’s group, Elastic NoNo Band, alludes to John Lennon’s
first post-Beatles undertaking.
Remer is certainly a big fan of the
singer-songwriters, clearly bowing
before masters like Costello and Joe
Jackson, who, in fact, is covered on
Remer’s latest. From 1980 through
1987, Jackson made albums that use
lyrical themes and musical styles as
the cartilage linking disparate songs.
Elvis Costello, meanwhile, produced
a 10-year run of high-concept
albums, from This Year’s Model
through Blood and Chocolate,
separate sections, his vices of girls,
movies, and food.
Now, with Elastic No-No Band’s
dual-disc, 45-track magna opera,
Fustercluck!!!, Remer has upped the
ante. He has made not just one concept
album but a series of them, joined in
one appropriately named whole.
Included in the 140-minute
extravaganza are a live album, a
collaborations album, a covers album,
and a B-sides album. Sometimes
these albums overlap.
Early on disc one is a triptych
of cover songs, all featuring duets
with prominent AntiFolk artists. Some
of them were recorded live in the
about-songs “The Worst Thing on
My Resume,” which details Remer’s
repeated attempt to get included in
the soundtrack of a Troma film. That,
and with the band tracks “Imaginary
Girlfriend,” “Red” (one of the versions
included on the album), and “Turn
Out Right Rock,” which has made an
appearance on the last two Elastic
No-No Band full-lengths, compose
part of the live album. Numerous
tracks give the impression of loose,
ramshackle, live recordings, and the
comprehensive notes at the interactive
website support this assessment. In
fact, Remer’s own commentary on his
humongous album helps put much of
Boog City’s Classic Albums Live presents
a performers’ choice album
the work in perspective.
have extra-band collaborators, the
Often there are associations traditional numbers usually include
between tracks, certain suites of songs AntiFolk expatriate Debe Dalton. The
that link together
quite well, that
With Elastic No-No Band’s
are followed by
dual-disc, 45-track magna opera,
the innards of
another, entirely
Fustercluck!!!, Remer has upped
different concept
the ante. He has made not just one
album. “Color
Machine” and
concept album but a series of them.
“Mouth” are
experimental
tracks (so part of the B-sides album), most Dalton-related track is the duet
the first with Brook Pridemore and of “There’s A Hole in The Bucket,”
the second with the sampled help of which includes her in the role of Dear
the artist formerly known as Declan Liza. She sings her lines with perfect,
MacManus. Then the album left- thinly veiled contempt for her partner,
fields into “Hangover Dial,” a slightly Dear Henry, who acts innocent while
sweet song about postponing the leading her irrevocably into the
call to the night after the bender.
intellectual impasse that closes the
Sometimes the links between song. It’s truly a thing of beauty.
songs are clear but still
Other incredible voices can be
cacophonous. Right after a solo heard throughout the album. Sure, duets
incarnation of Elastic No-No Band make up the collaboration album, but
rips through an excellent version of there are also a number of outstanding
“Goodbye Southern Death Swing,” call-and-response sequences featuring
originally by Major Matt Mason anonymous voices. “Hot As I Are”
USA (with Remer, co-producer of includes excellent uncredited shouting.
the album), there is a strange epic. While bassist Spurlock and drummer
“The End of Disc 1 As We Know It” Doug Johnson are credited as backing
prominently features a Major Matt vocalists, there seems to be a fair
voiceover and an infectious Muzak amount of Remer helping himself out with
track that seems eerily familiar. Also backup vocals. Many of the tracks are
part of the B-Sides Album are five demonstrably improved by executing
remakes on the album(s)—seven if the magic of multitracked Remer.
you count “Red,” which exists as
Probably the best thing about
a live track on disc two and a Fustercluck!!! is the sheer chutzpah of its
collaboration with Chris Andersen magnificent sprawl. It’s a massive thing
(of The Christian Pirate Puppets) on to consume all at once, but there are
disc one.
so many ways to take it in. Certainly, it’s
The cover album hidden more than worth the attempt.
in Fustercluck!!! can be further
Jonathan Berger is Boog City’s
subdivided. While most of the covers Urban Folk editor.
performed live by
Sidewalk Café
Aaron Araki featuring Two Kazoos
Todd Carlstrom
Bob Kerr
Ben Krieger
Chris Maher
So L’il
Brian Speaker
The Trouble Dolls
Yoko Kikuchi & Kate Wheeler
Genan Zilkha and Ray Ferrer
NYC
Directions: F/V to 2nd Ave., L to 1st Ave.
Venue is at E. 6th St.
The Beatles
The White Album
LIVE
Fri., Dec. 17, 8:00 p.m.
$5 suggested with a two-drink minimum
94 Ave. A
For further information:
212-842-BOOG (2664) • [email protected]
8 BOOG
BOOGCITY
CITY
OCTOBER 2003
WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM
PRINTED MATTER
Ives Crosses This Out
Seeing Stanley’s Forest for the Trees
BY C HRIS MARTIN
Anamnesis
Lucy Ives
Slope Editions
rite, “at first glance Anamnesis
might seem like a failed paean
to the Platonic Ideal.” Cross that
out. Write, “Anamnesis has been used by
W
Lucy Ives
audiographers to describe ‘The Madeleine
Effect’ of certain timbres to trigger memory.”
Cross that out. Write, “that Anamnesis is about
memory makes it inextricable from the dangers
of nostalgia.” Strike through “nostalgia,” write
“prose.” Cross all that out. Write, “the triumph
of Anamnesis is not found in the process of
erasure, but in the perseverance of starting
over.” Now add “the first book by Lucy Ives
and winner of the 2008 Slope Editions Book
Prize” before “is.”
This is the experience of reading Anamnesis,
which is exasperating and exhilarating in turns.
As the OED gloss found on the book’s last page
notes, anamnesis is “the recalling of things past;
recollection, reminiscence.” There seems to be
a connection to Plato as well, whose doctrine
of anamnesis involved the imperfect mortal
remembering of those ideas once known by the
soul in its ideal constitution. It is, indeed, a book
about memory, but only insofar as memory is
an active recreation of the remembered. And it
is about the ideal, but only insofar as it wages
a refutation against it. What is important here
is how the moment makes its unpredictable
swerve, clamoring just ahead of time, which is
busy sweeping up what just happened, even
if it happened a long time ago. This constant
scurry destabilizes Anamnesis, but Ives dutifully
clothes the moment’s vulnerability with lines that
bring out whatever “sure” she can find in the
close of “measure.” In this way, she mirrors the
inexorable choosing we all do as the de facto
authorities of our lives:
Write, “It became bright morning in the
middle of the night”
Write, “On television I saw a beach”
Write, “I stepped outdoors”
Write, “Someone was smoking”
Cross all this out
Write, “I needed a lot of things”
Cross this out
Write, “When one has come to have only
a memory
of feeling”
WWW . WELCOMETOBOOGCITY . COM
Cross this out
Write, “But I stay like this, I change and I
don’t, embarrassed
of my own presence”
“Only a memory of feeling” seems
like an operative line in this book. Recent
neurological studies have revealed just how
much memory is invented and perpetually
distorted through its reinvention. As Ives’ lines
reinvent themselves, they posit these feelings
anew, retaining only the flashbulb’s overlap as
it drains from image to image. But since this is
a book and not a brain, the lines themselves
must remain as they are, even in the midst
of being crossed out or amended. So, “I
change and I don’t,” and this “I” finds itself
locked into the perseveration at the core of
presence that makes it feel so “embarrassed.”
What recuperates this perseverating self of
Anamnesis is the aforementioned perseverance
Ives demonstrates, her perpetual redo that
moves from erasure to compulsion to witness.
It is, finally, the witnessing that seems most
important here. Once one falls into the rhythmic
emendations of the text, the gentle thrill of lived
life emerges in all its fractured glory. Though
anamnesis is a term forever tied to Plato, the
force of Ives’ writing appears directed against
the ideal. It’s not that she’s searching for the
perfect line or some egress to the transcendent or
access to the soul’s own memory; she is bearing
witness to the present moment, whether lived
or remembered, and how its disappearing act
keeps purity at bay. Anamnesis succeeds most
when it feels least ideal, shoring its succession of
now against our desire to memorialize it:
Anamnesis is, indeed, a
book about memory, but
only insofar as memory is
an active recreation of the
remembered. And it is about
the ideal, but only insofar as
it wages a refutation against
it. What is important here
is how the moment makes
its unpredictable swerve,
clamoring just ahead of time,
who is busy sweeping up
what just happened, even if it
happened a long time ago.
Write, “Girls react to others on the street”
Cross out “Girls”
Write, “I”
And draw the pigeon with one leg white as
milk and the
orange basketball
Sliding across the rim
Write, “A man shows me one of his
thumbs”
Write, “I am passing him”
Cross this out
Write, “All this is only writing”
Cross this out
Chris Martin is the author of American
Music (Copper Canyon). The web journal
he edited, puppyflowers (www.puppyflowers.
com), just finished its 11-issue run.
BY KARL SAFFRAN
Book Made of Forest
Jared Stanley
Salt Publishing
ared Stanley’s reading here in Milwaukee
in the fall of last year was, in the most
pleasant way possible, something like a
sucker-poetry-punch to the gut. It was one
of the rare cases of seeing a reading by
someone whose work you’re not familiar
with and being sincerely wowed—by the
poems and the performance. I’d hesitate to
call Stanley’s delivery a style, as his writhing
movement appears to be the poems escaping
from his body in a purely natural way. His
physical reading, at the time, seemed entirely
of the poetry—only later was I aware of it in a
larger sense.
His book, published last year by Salt, gives
a similar effect, starting, even, with the title.
Book Made of Forest, for me at least, almost
wants to be read as Book Made of Trees when
in fact it’s much less ordinary, much bigger.
The forest, of course, is vastly more complex
than a group of trees. Stanley takes aim at this
complexity in his first poem, “What is Outside.”
After utilizing lines from Robinson Jeffers’ poem
“The Birds,” Stanley finds that
J
Daws, hungrier than I am
screech for interiority.
Anechoic choice
to die of exposure
or expostulation.
The first section of the book is filled with
moments like these: man is brought to nature
and likewise, nature to man.
A mockingbird perched
on a plastic owl’s head
over the top of the screen
through the window
and “A rake is imitating a typewriter/ scratching
the word yes/ in the dirt between the trees.” The
poems have a relationship with nature that is
refreshingly human. Instead of living with nature
in the stereotypical sense of peace and harmony,
Stanley here treats nature like an affable but
messy roommate, leading to an affectionate yet
strained domesticity. There are moments such
as “An eye is a whisper of a shadow; I think of
trees;/ embarrassing trees that care.” and
Moon,
you can’t win.
You’re wallpaper,
a head on the ramparts, or a compass of
hinges
in a city’s sky.
The effect is strange, wonderful, and
somehow more real then the awed deference
often contained in poetry concerned with
nature. These moments of human interaction
(as opposed to human interactions) once
again recall Robinson Jeffers and, here, his
notion of Inhumanism—to which the strongest
call is found in his poem “Carmel Point”: “We
must uncenter our minds from ourselves;/
We must unhumanize our views a little, and
become confident/ As the rock and ocean
that we were made from.” In many ways,
and certainly on the surface, my reading of
Stanley’s writing as a humanizing of nature
runs in direct opposition to Jeffers’ efforts
to “unhumanize” ourselves. If there’s an
intersection, however, it’s in Book Made of
Forest’s “State Park.”
Twice referencing “public private
disappearance,” Stanley mocks the act
of visiting protected land reserved for the
masses.
Oh my people
you fennel, rocks and vandalism,
you fees, you gates, you group of kids,
you candles in the Sibley maze.
Instead of living with nature
in the stereotypical sense of
peace and harmony, Stanley
here treats nature like an
affable but messy roommate,
leading to an affectionate yet
strained domesticity.
Far removed from Jeffers’ hope for
“uncenter[ed]” appreciators of nature, Stanley’s
parkgoers are preoccupied with “[t]he money
situation/ no children to love/ all the people
who could know.” The poem closes with some
of my favorite lines from the book:
You stack of wood, soon to be pencils
you pencils at the end of nature
you number of unsolved indentations
you. on the ground.
Book Made of Forest closes with “Admirations:
Covers, Portraits, and Articulations,” a section
composed mostly of prose poems dedicated
to various poets, musicians, artists, and others.
The sentiment here, for the most part, remains
the same. From “For Michael O’Brien”: “the
mulberry … it would be a city mulberry, a
beautiful shape made more beautiful by carrying
its requisite number of flying plastic bags. English
needs fewer words.” The standout poem from
this section, though, is “For Brenda Coultas,”
which just might have the greatest Civil War
battlefield/celebrated actor metaphor ever
written.
Chantilly’s a beautiful name for a nonexistent
place under an innocent parking lot that
never killed nobody. I go there inhabited by
you, and though you may or may not exist,
this mark is there for all to see for now, the
colonial style colonizing the fairly national
site of bloody death and bullet-pocked trees.
What kind of land deserves a death-mask as
much as John C. Reilly, in life a friendly ghost
but with pangs of history written in a dark
script around the eyes, jowls, brows?
It is moments like these that demonstrate
Jared Stanley’s descriptive powers and his
ability to tease out elaborate beauty from
even the bleakest of landscapes and, likewise,
undeniably human complexity from otherwise
standard scenery.
Karl Saffran lives in Milwaukee, where he
co-curates the Salacious Banter reading series.
For more information visit www.salaciousbanter.
blogspot.com.
BOOG
CITY
OCTOBER 2003
BOOG
CITY 9
PRINTED MATTER
There Is a Message on the Monument
Selected Edward Sanders
Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century:
Selected Poems 1961-1985. New and
Revised Edition.
Let’s Not Keep Fighting The Trojan War:
New and Selected Poems 1986-2009
Edward Sanders
Coffee House Press
dward Sanders is famous. The poems
in this book thirst, pacify, rage, and
historicize. There is a hieroglyphic
emblem on the very first page that should be
well attended to. Is it a magical talisman to
ward off evil spirits? Is it the name of the book
reproduced in ancient Egyptian? Careful study
of this text may allow its decipherment.
American poets should read this book.
Americans who can’t stand even the smell
of a poem should read this book. Rock ’n’
rollers, if any still exist, should read this book.
It is a book for careful study, yes, but also
a book for joyously singing aloud. Edward
Sanders is a crowd, a multitude harnessing
a weirdly wavering articulate revelation that
echoes through the stone canyons of the city
and frightens woodland creatures into reluctant
evolutionary dances. Everything is permissible,
personified, and perforated; that is, until it is
realized that there are only two constants in
Sandersian n-space: time and the voice.
Thirsting for Peace achieves the wonderful
incompletion that is thirst: the desire to be
quenched and that dull ebullition cooking the
taters behind all static forms. “Form” here means
poetics, artifice, and prosody. Sanders has done
and written a million things. Almost by making it
look like an accident—that special achievement
of American art—he has created his own brand of
historiography, poetry, and the public persona. His
lines are like little word globules, little molecules,
little hallucinatory street machines. Yet they are
often so prosaically conversational that it is easy
to forget they are poetry. The beauty of Sanders’
poetry is also its greatest liability: all Americans
born in the raging 20th century may recognize
the topics discussed in these poems but will not
all feel the same about them in the end. There is
the dimension of the universe you live and have
lived in, and there is the dimension of the universe
in which these poems are the most accurate
description of what exists, what has happened.
With Sanders, new information comes to light.
This book enters into the charged and
necessary negotiations that warring parties
must conduct in order to establish peace
accords. Sanders includes more and more,
can accommodate more and more, heroizes
and vilifies the irreconcilable until the poem
is so tactically impactful it’s ready to blow up
E
BOOG CITY
Marilyn’s tiki-wiki skirt. He makes up words
and spins asymmetrical webs. He can even
abbreviate atrocity until you feel your briefs
creep up your crack into a squishy bunch.
Sometimes the poem feels like the hairball in
your hotdog, and sometimes the poem cools
its heels in the nymph-pools of En Gedi. In
Sanders’ verse, all metaphors are welcomed.
These poems enact a gentle rage. The
bare-handed rock-climber of time’s crumbling
pile of fragments climbs onto the stage and
sings boogie woogie. These poems say: Have
courage! See for yourself! “This is the age of
investigation”! Is poetry like this readily available
to us anymore? Are there poets like this here or
anywhere? For now he is here. Anymore is now.
But Sanders is not a self-important man; he has
Miriam Sanders photo
BY DOUGL AS
MANSON
indeed taken the humble oath of the truth-teller
for the benefit of his people.
These poems exist as historical proof. There
is a witness who will take the stand. Nobody
else is telling this story in this way, so at least
listen, even if you can’t imitate. The poems in
this book embody the desire to investigate and
research. They should inspire readers to seek out
more information about the people and events
described. Learn your history, teach your children
well, and serve your fellow creatures with good
deeds. There is a message on the memorial.
•
A companion volume to Thirsting for Peace,
a new book of selected poems, Let’s Not Keep
Fighting The Trojan War, bears witness to the
Peace Eye bard’s continuing investment in the
writing of history. He stretches a shining cord
of memory across time—a cord embodied in
the driving, incessant beats of pop songs; the
density of his famous “data clusters”; and in
matter-of-fact, plain-spoken meters.
Opening with a “new” poem by the greatest
lyric poet of Greek antiquity, Sappho, Sanders
proves how ancient and far-reaching his poetics
is. While his mammoth, multi-volume America:
A History in Verse divulges oceanic tides of
information, the pieces here are much more
discrete, fleeting, personal, and anecdotal. They
include memories of Robert Creeley, Charles
Olson, and Allen Ginsberg; 9/11, poets’
Issue 66 free
poetry editor
Joanna Fuhrman
[email protected]
editor/publisher
David A. Kirschenbaum
[email protected]
printed matter editor
Arlo Quint
[email protected]
copy chief
Lauren Russell
[email protected]
small press editor
Douglas Manson
[email protected]
art editor
Cora Lambert
[email protected]
urban folk editor
Jonathan Berger
[email protected]
10 BOOG
BOOGCITY
CITY
OCTOBER 2003
wages and fame, travel to tombstones, and
collecting verses from famous poets for a new
“Amazing Grace.” Of course, there is always
discussion of the prominent causes about which
consciousness needs to be raised—the peace
movement, campaigns for social justice—and
of simple human kindness to those in need.
Reading the book from cover to cover takes the
breath away in its range of distinct topics and
personages. As a whole Let’s Not Keep Fighting
The Trojan War resembles the “lists” Sanders
praises and bemoans near the volume’s end:
Not even a billion parallel universes
…
would be enough
to list what needs to be done.
Even as much of the work is dedicated to
the intertwined strands of history and poetry,
with Sanders’ memory and investigations in the
foreground—disclosed in clear and strident tones—
the book is also a tribute to the great poets and
personal friends who meant the most to him. There
are odes, nostalgic laments, diary poems, and
elegies as well. In their need to rouse, affirm, or
repudiate, the poems have no qualms if they are
sometimes homiletic. Sanders can be populist in
the way that Carl Sandberg was populist and
sometimes as Archibald MacLeish was. He writes
in homage to his peers as heroes and to his
political heroes, the Kennedys, as tragic actors.
He writes hymns, fight songs, and cheers.
One poetic innovation that Sanders often
uses is the compound word—called a kenning
in Anglo-Saxon poetry—such as “vom-vom,”
“poor-kill,” “fang-packs,” and “time tracks.”
While his kennings, use of shorthand, and
abbreviations are often funny, they can now
and then feel forced.
Sanders can so terrify me with his descriptions
of horrors that I stop reading. He has seen
much, traveled far, and known deep sorrow.
He understands the results of his efforts and
why he must continue them. He reminds readers
why the best journalists and journalist-poets
should be revered as heroes. I am cheered by
his encouragements and appreciate his advice
about poverty. In a poem about Herman
Melville’s father, he writes:
Advice to the middle aged
with penury’s prize
…
Be prepared to be sneered at
like a hungry rat
This is so true! I recently accompanied
a friend to a local food stamp center,
where she was digitally fingerprinted and
photographed. Her newly snatched bio-info
was then run through the government’s big
counsel
Ian S. Wilder
•
First printing, December 2010, 2,250
copies. Send a $3 ppd. check or money
order payable to David A. Kirschenbaum
to the address below for additional copies.
Paper is copyright Boog City. All rights revert
to contributors upon publication.
“crime-brain scanner,” all in order for her to
sit in a waiting room for four hours, where
she was finally acknowledged by a tired,
overworked employee who yelled at her for
not having all the papers she needed. Treated
like a suspect just because she wanted to get
Sanders stretches a shining
cord of memory across time—a
cord embodied in the driving,
incessant beats of pop songs;
the density of his famous “data
clusters”; and in matter-of-fact,
plain-spoken meters.
something to eat, my friend found herself inside
“the same cruel system” that Sanders claims
trickled out from beneath a glacier 15,000
years ago. Is this also “we the people”?
Sanders is adept at revealing such absurdities.
I especially enjoyed his capsule biographies, the
results of a practice that may have begun with
his book The Family, about the Manson murder
cult (no relation), continuing through his Hymn
to the Rebel Cafe and into his big volumes of
20th century history. I laughed at how Friedrich
Hölderlin had to go out “looking for tutoring jobs
in poetless towns,” as I was reminded of all the
poets I have known who were forced to travel
across the continent and beyond, looking for
work in the name of poetic art.
Sanders’ tone ranges from encouraging and
informative to admonishing and disquieting, but
overall it is comforting. Sadly, in this second half
of a two-volume selection of a 50-year career,
we are often given too-quick glimpses into the
broad and diverse spectrum of his tens of works
and thousands of pages. Luckily, the fuller swathe
of these details can be found elsewhere—either in
his books, musical recordings with The Fugs and
others, or in the various outside accounts of the
many events in which he took part. His very varied
life in verse traces a very varied course across
time and space, so that reading these two books
has an epic feel. The best poem for me was
his description of a psilocybin trip with Charles
Olson, recalled in all its Day-Glo, goofy pomp.
While much of this book scatters details about like
a runaway nomadic foray into the wilderness, it
still enables me to have vivid visions and a feeling
of green. It ever points and tacks its craft to a
magnificent and unnamable source.
Douglas Manson is a poet and educator,
publishes little scratch pad editions, Celery
Flute: The Kenneth Patchen Newsletter, and
maintains a blog currently listed as “Island
of the Nondisenchanted.” He writes poems,
published Roofing and Siding in 2007, and
now lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Boog always reads work for Boog
City or other consideration. (Send SASE
with up to five poems or pages of any
type of art or writing. For email subs,
put Boog City sub in subject line and
then email to [email protected] or
applicable editor.)
BOOG CITY
330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H
N.Y., N.Y. 10001-4754
www.welcometoboogcity.com
T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664)
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POETRY
Peter Waldor
Short Hills, N.J.
Notes to a Painter for a Series of
Paintings on the Millipede’s Legs
14.
Fold the paper
into a square
and place it
in your pocket.
Walk and find
a solitary flat space
and unfold the paper,
weight the corners
and wait two days,
no matter the weather.
Then, in ink,
the legs as tall grass
bent by wind.
Let it stay two
more days
no matter the weather,
refold,
same pocket.
Walk home.
Andy Gricevich
Madison, Wis.
From For the Record
Through the Window (tinted winter)
The stock of unfortunate size is sinking
in the bleat of tax-sensitive born-agains
milling and polling to stuff the season
with electrostatic perms achieved at last
and risk, a breast pervades the attention
and might as well, since the room is bright
and its center colossus-free. Get up to the
waft of backup in the basement, repeat
melt-freeze as phrase screen made
out with it the corner of snow would fall
through tilted fields of broken home
runoff
to walk thought down a crease
unplayed
leaving its
remainder
unwritten
you think
historically of
self-neglect in time
as unshelter in the vast
shortages
15.
High up,
a rusted ore car,
too high for
a petite bourgeoisie
to strap on his mule
and haul down
for his lawn,
which, therefore,
has no ornaments.
In the loam
a millipede labors,
legs arched-a roller coaster.
Indwelling jargon parades
against clockwork, re news
a softer emergence
etched
vs. mist
Music
makes the world
louder by contrast
Cars distinguish
one another
Unmetaphorical
germination
takes precedence
23.
Bleached ribs
of a whale
on an uncharted isle.
Paint faithfully,
though you will
never leave the island.
About the Poets
Andy Gricevich edits Cannot Exist magazine and, with Lewis Freedman, facilitates
the ______________-Shaped Reading Series. He spent much of the last decade
performing satirical cabaret songs with the Prince Myshkins and strange political theater
and chamber music with the Nonsense Company. He fears we may be confusing
irony with habitual insincerity and is uncomfortably writing this in the third person. Peter
Waldor is the author of Door to a Noisy Room (Alice James Books), which was a finalist
for the 2009 National Jewish Book Award. The poems appearing here are part of a
manuscript called “Leg Paint,” which is a set of instructions to a painter on how to paint
a series of pictures depicting the millipede’s legs.
Submission Guidelines
Email subs to [email protected],
with no more than five poems, all in one attached file with “My Name Submission” in the
subject line and as the name of the file, ie: Walt Whitman Submission. Or mail with an
SASE to Poetry editor, Boog City, 330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H, N.Y., N.Y. 10001-4754.
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BOOG
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New from
L I TM U S PR E S S
HOW PHENOMENA APPEAR TO UNFOLD
BY LESLIE SCALAPINO
New & Expanded Edition
In “Eco-logic in Writing” one of many brilliant essaytalks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, “Seeing at the
moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference
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 JOAN RETALLACK
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In Beauport, Kate Colby tells the tale of the decorator
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‘anti-ekphrastic’ poems after Currier & Ives lithographs
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‘animate dioramas,’ where the sound of seagulls dropping
quahogs on the roof echoes all day. Not since Charles
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