SHARKFORUM: OPINION WITH TEETH

An Open Letter to MCA Director Madeleine Grynsztejn: How To Subvert the Art Institute, Create a Chicago Canon/ a Remedial, Visionary New Wing for this Stairway to Architectural Ignominy, and Have Chicago Lead the Way to a Brave New Art World

2009-12-04T07:06:13Z

You laugh! But you shouldn't! or, wouldn't, if, that dorsal fin was attached to, say me for instance, and you were climbing the stairway to the business end of carcharodon carcharias (the ultimate in evolutionary epicurean elegance ) rather than this embodiment of all that is ultimately dysfunctional when it comes to the Chicago art world.

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Dear Ms Director, you have two essential problems -or three.....a. the MCA building sucks -how did this thing get built? Why in this city of modern architectural triumph would we get stuck with this piece of blazing mediocrity? Probably, someone should do a study of how this building came be, the makeup and mindset of the board of directors that ushered this thing into being -choosing the mediocre German architect of modest accomplishment Paul Kleihues -over people like Frank Gehry, (who went on after losing out here -to build Bilbao-) Tadao Ando, and several others, Koolhaus perhaps? (the running joke is we chose the wrong haus-).....and, the relationship between this failed building, and among several things, the lack of original vision that defines the circle of wealthy collectors/socialites who are primarily responsible for this atrocity, comparing this, with (b.) the mostly tepid, condescending support (if any) for the art scene here - in the acquisition arena both public and private -and also as an example, in the problematic way the MCA does engage the community it exists in: namely with an emphasis on 'emerging artists -12X12-', an occasional one person exhibition -and no, canon creating/defining shows of real vision and depth that seek to create an international context for what is going on here in Chicago but rather, in lieu of this, an ongoing obeisance to New York, LA, and other supposed points of destination greater than here, - making the MCA an importer of others cities' art communities / canon - rather than having, 'originality'- its no accident that the critic Peter Schjeldahl recently described Chicago as a "receptor city" -Just as its no accident how the major collectors here will on occasion slum it and drop a few dollars on an emerging artist or some local showing at a friends gallery -but hold the Chicago scene in contempt and essentially do all of their serious collecting, elsewhere. Perhaps had they been more serious about Chicago, we would have gotten a better, more considered, building, accompanied by a different, more engaged level of support from the top collectors here.

Its not lost on me, Madeleine - that when I see that Larry Poons facsimile created by one of the local court painters - festooning the walls of the MCA -how it really got there: not, due to any kind of excellence, but rather, due to complacency -Lou Manilow or others of his ilk, buying a painting off of his old friend Rhona Hoffman/with Ms Kirshner hovering nearby exerting 'influence' as always -keeping it in storage for several years (certainly not good enough for his own collection) then dumping it on the MCA -where the ever gullible art crowd here is then of course -impressed... mediocrity is legitimized.

Its about complacency Madeleine, what Soren Kierkegaard described as the cause of all that is evil, of a lack of whole-heartedness. Going through the motions, abstracted and, distracted by things other, than what is concrete, real. That is what confronts us as artists here in Chicago. Or, as Allen Turner reputedly remarked when asked why Kleihues was chosen, 'he served us a better lunch-'......

This then is what it is, the problems that confront you Madeleine: a. the building sucks: b. the perception, whether its the MCA's stated mission or not, that the MCA suffers from a lack of real, and imaginary!, canon creating involvement with the community here, and c. the new kid in town -the Art Institutes new contemporary wing.

And now here, Dear Director is the solution:

Hold an ongoing architectural competition to create a new wing for the MCA -that both, houses an interdisciplinary program for all things cultural in Chicago, and, that addresses the issue of the building's lacuna, its ultimately hideous nature. ONLY DON"T BUILD IT! Let the architectural competition remain just that, a competition, a think-tank of ongoing architectural exploration, exploiting the buildings inherent ugliness as possibility! Have it be that when people look upon it they say but, but, BUT! it is always being re-thought, re-imagined! Transformed, its hideous nature as its greatest asset! And then, in this new, imaginary/theoretical wing, CREATE THE WORLDS FIRST SERIOUS CYBER WING OF A MUSEUM! A new species of construct: one that, rather than gathering things into it, reaches out into the city, with limitless space and scope -the only limit being what is good enough to focus upon....a relationship between the viral nature of cyberspace -and that of analog- concrete reality on the ground. A construct that dispenses with the limitations of the museum's traditional structure, while at the same time, providing INFRASTRUCTURE! at an international level, in a daring, bold! ..... GREEN!.... way. Tear out that silly community center on the north side of the building and put in a cyber center/control room! As Kierkegaard also noted, evil is only good in need of transformation -

Think! As we watch the demise of print, of, Modern Painters, of Art In America -the fragile state of ALL of our local newspapers, as we see our economy change and the silliness of the festival driven, decadent bling for the hedge fund crew's art world collapse, now, is the time for a new construct, for a different, more serious approach -one that addresses the very real issues of the nature of art, of the art world here and everywhere else for that matter...... Madeleine, USE THE MARVELOUS SPACES THAT ALREADY EXIST HERE for your new wing. USE CHICAGO. Think! The MCA is at Metro this week because Bob Dylan - or Eleventh Dream Day is playing - its at Big Cat Press, or Wesley Kimler's or Dawoud Bey's studio to view a new body of work - offering internet samples of actual events on the ground! Its at Symphony Center - a poetry reading - a play at Steppenwolf, up at The Green Mill to hear the great Kurt Elling re-define what modern jazz singing is, all, simultaneously!........it is the new magazine, museum, construct, interdisciplinary, flexible, viral, light on its feet, fierce! limited only by our collective imagination. If you do this, it will be the new, non-existent wing of the MCA -not the Art Institutes recent addition, that will be the focal point/topic for discussion and interest around the globe.

Of course, it goes without saying, your curatorial staff would have to do that which only Lynne Warren has done over the years here - and that is, be conversant in what is really happening here, and when I say really, I'm not meaning the fake, self interested, history foisted upon us by Kirshner - with curator/boy on the go (complete with ubiquitous shoulder satchel) Rondeau in tow, or, Hamza Walker/Suzanne Ghez at 'The Ren' a confluence of painting illiteracy- all of the above, card carrying members of the conceptual crowd with the occasional (and never very good) pet painter thrown in the mix...I'm talking about the artists in all disciplines here, who are actually good- not the little academic mafia -this would require a new mindset -remember, that curatorial farce of a failed painter, cum Flash Art gopher, cum, international jet set exercise in celebrity speciousness -Francesco Bonami -openly and publicly bragged about how he did not 'do' studio visits -of course he could be found over at his pal Judith's Gallery 400 looking at the newest, institutional offering of student work........ what professionalism, what breadth of vision and curiosity, what, a dilettante! A veritable aesthetic Magellan setting sail in our midst! Bearings taken, headings set, destination, the shallow end of the pond. Completely ignorant about the art scene here, and proud of it! - enough so to announce it publicly....what breathtaking, unearned self importance, what a demonstration of contempt prior to investigation, what prejudice; or, as Robert Storr noted when describing Bonami as his "stalker" and, as, "a clown who has lost his timing."

Hard words for tough times Ms Director - but its never personal with me, - its about recognition. About the practice of social psychiatry. We cannot just ignore what is and has happened and think it will just go away. I'm The Shark! Its really not as glamorous as Hollywood has made it out to be...oh sure, I on occasion do get to munch on a swimmer or two, but my main job, is custodial; is to keep the ocean clean, to take out the trash!

Its our time here in Chicago, the world is focused upon us. We can make the things I suggest here happen - real solutions for real problems, for very little money - fraught with possibility, fecund! What is required, what it is that we need, Ms Director, is leadership! This is Chicago's time and its your time Madeleine, so lead Ms Director, and if you do so with courage, imagination and boldness, vision, I for one, will follow.

Cordially,
The Shark

Poetry of the Week: "Delection Even" and "Concerning Lasts Made (In Illinois)" by Jennifer Scappettone

2009-06-30T16:54:59Z

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009), and of several chapbooks: Ode oggettuale, a bilingual poemetto translated into Italian with Marco Giovenale (La Camera Verde, 2008); Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007); and Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (dusi/e kollectiv, 2008). She is at work on a manuscript called Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups, for Atelos. She was guest editor of Aufgabe 7, devoted to contemporary Italian poetry of research. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Delection Even

I dredge alledgedly

to repair and upgrade the Port of Umm Qasr

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transrational contract drag

well I pledge alien

lesions will be doled

expensively (not on the cheap)

and not to um miss explosives

who shell

Bechtel by the—that is Shell it by the

shore Bechtel sells

unflaggingly to the drag of the dividend

rates of America I pluck allegiance from

an estimated 1.8 billion

and to the executive committee—

Chicago—the world's fair—and to Columbus

Day in the park—I think it was the fourth of the

reprivate which it hands

to the drooling class—I mean the measuring

cache watch this base—I am a semifree colonist in gall—

and to the elect by which it assesses,

and to the electric by which it stands, and erects, th—

rederegulated privates, bow, get down: how

much would be chucked if this versus

then forest of Arden

should burn in the name of the national hamlet—

if it be true that good wine needs not bush,

we'd choose once we got behind the curtain, we guessed,

if it's there anymore except

in Geist. . . . while one gust mail addles in accidental

against its—when walking Tokyo—wonderful

you caming to OOIO show and I

Ill put you on the just list—

this against—flurry of

finger-pointing—forget it

and your phony numbers like in why two okeydoke

take it, one ration under planes—

Apaches, syllabled to us versus shame—

one galaxy under goods, world's-without-end fair

under the indivisible party, beneath security, below

God's belts to humanity, with

puberty and enduring as-is and no trial for troglodytes and dogs and

tax treats for by for

allegiance. The friction has its machine—as you choose it?

Concerning Lasts Made (In Illinois)

Darksome, this schizic

sand where frame

from guilt of

skyframe be-slowly-locks a

civic canton's gush

permuting off the

private staff

                 which

tunes Casanova's motorized

oohs metronoming the

bang that would

protract Enlightenment in

staffs

           of servers

babbling mud colloquys

between us toddler-seizures

of experience-fulsome tweet

seconds of iron

archaic composed within

hymns to resist

wood-under-arsenic fire before

corpse-steel raises

heath and harebells'

fallout through hammering

hands—the kind

that cites itself

as already dust

straddling the saw

who croons fallacy

warping against itself

I am a

memory lapse. Drone,

how to make

a

           last. Double

it.

[already][ double][sawn]

Poetry of the Week: "Waiting" and "La Bouderie" by Allison Benis White

2009-06-22T16:39:36Z

Allison Benis White is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. She is currently at work on a second manuscript, Small Porcelain Head, which received the 2008 James D. Phelan Award for a work-in-progress from The San Francisco Foundation. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

Waiting

I think of broken snow, but this is permanent. Two separate women on a bench—crossed at the wrists, ]]> her hands could make a smaller version of the dancer unlacing her shoes. Or maybe she's just clutching her ankle in order to communicate a small, but consistent pain. The kind that makes you look at pictures because words are not sufficient to describe it.

God said just float on a black lake like a child floats on her back to stare at stars. Let go. Watch cool paper boats. But I'm afraid of black water and the way women ignore each other at restaurant counters (one sips her coffee while the other draws circles on a paper napkin). When a child throws a stone into a lake, God is pleased, and opens in rings, then fades to prompt the child to throw again.

When I hear her set her coffee back on the counter, I look at my napkin to pretend I'm occupied with my love of circles. This could be an aerial sketch of twirling ballerinas, I think—each dancer ignoring the small white pain in her ankle. Like a moon incessantly reflected in a lake. When a child floats on a paper boat, she wonders, Where do stones go after they've pleased God?

This is a hinge at the end of a lake boat, but I still don't know how to draw the fear of separation. We were alone for a long time. After many years, God said to the child, There are hundreds of wet stones in your mouth—and inside stone, the possibility of black unopened umbrellas.

La Bouderie

Never my wife, only your mother, and even this only once. Rarely the phrase only child, shameful in most cultures, when he described me, but often my youngest or daughter. He carried me at a party once when I was tired and soon I said we need to leave. A boy whose father leaves is called the man of the house. Yet what happens to a girl is not the woman but we. She and her father, someone could say, live in a gray house on a quiet street. Without her is the oldest meaning of us: my father holds my hand when we walk to the store. When observed from an adult window, anchorless, she and he becomes an almost lovely phrase in its lack of history. Seven years, to summarize, my father and me. Seven years before the phone rang. He answered at his desk. Standing in the hallway I asked who, without turning to me, drained of color, not your mother, but rather the name Wendy.

Poem of the Week: from "Storm, lustral: unevensong" by Andrew Zawacki

2009-06-15T17:44:50Z

Andrew Zawacki is the author of three books of poetry—Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House, 2009), Anabranch (Wesleyan, 2004), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia, 2001). A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers' Association, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine) and edited and cotranslated Aleš Debeljak's new and selected poems, due next fall from Persea. His translation from the French of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is forthcoming from Burning Deck. He teaches at the University of Georgia and is Coeditor of Verse and of The Verse Book of Interviews.

from "Storm, lustral: unevensong"

A tractor rasping its talon

along the dune

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blanched floss silk

off the sound

                              the pupil

recite its conjugations of gold :

rape seed          paper lantern

mimosa          spider web

a steeplechase of cumulus

lithographs the bay at

                                        eventide

by this house composed

in aquarelle pine          plate glass

& ardoise          with pajama blue

shutters & samurai

ironwork

                    a winter

garden to keep the winter out

but not out of sight :

recycling what murmurs

volt after volt

goodbye

                     it's okay

goodbye

white flame in a white

fog in a windflower coming

to meet us

Read more at Conjunctions

Poetry of the Week: "The Stationer's Transport" and "The Geometry Transport" by Jessica Bozek

2009-06-08T16:33:40Z

Jessica Bozek received an MFA from the University of Georgia and an MA from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. She is the author of cor·re·spond·ence (dusi/e-chap kollektiv), a collaboration with Eli Queen. She has lived in Russia, England, Spain, and Costa Rica but currently walks the dog in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Bodyfeel Lexicon was published by Switchback Books, 2009.

The Stationer's Transport

through panes and across sheets, perception yields

here, in the margins, my body-ghosts happen

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on the savanna no new-season snow

I repeat your name and follow horizontals

distracted hands make sludge of a self

as rough rounds corkscrew the sky

the grounds of my love—sweat-peel, tragus-ring smatter, cuticalia—

air-lit by the replica moons of a three-hole punch

The Geometry Transport

Training for a transport
of turns and time-skew

should include pre-notes,
practiced angles. Traveling

songs to bloom correspond-
dence: I sine you, you

circumscribe me. Let
the tools of our Hyphen War

be: quadruped-smell,
hand-breath. Long on

the ground, late at
the gorge. Tooth-lit.

Leanings aren't weight-
loss biscuits, nor tendencies;

they are vulnerabilities.
I left leaning

against your half-
walls--something

to remember me down.
Geometry stutters, un-

leads its mechanical pencils,
stubs to eraser-casing.

Who slopes along
inscribes a slant for sniff.

Poem of the Week: "Wí'-gi-e" by Elise Paschen

2009-06-01T09:01:31Z

Elise Paschen is the author of Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009), as well as Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have been published in The New Republic, TriQuarterly and The Hudson Review, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies. The editor of Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion, Paschen teaches in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Wí'-gi-e

Anna Kyle Brown. Osage.
1896-1921. Fairfax, Oklahoma.

Because she died where the ravine falls into water.

Because they dragged her down to the creek.

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Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.

Because I turned the log with my foot.

Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.

Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.

Because she lived without our mother.

Because she had inherited headrights for oil beneath the land.

She was carrying his offspring.

The sheriff disguised her death as whiskey poisoning.

Because, when he carved her body up, he saw the bullet hole in her skull.

Because, when she was murdered, the leg clutchers bloomed.

But then froze under the weight of frost.

During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tse-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon.

I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver.

I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.

Published in Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009)

"A Freak Show Of Conspicuous Consumption" No More

2009-05-29T01:30:12Z

The Slave Market..... Jean-Leon Gerome

What!? You think bloody body parts floating in pools of blood, bobbing about, detritus, stirred by my five foot dorsal fin is a spooky sight? .........wooooOOOooooOOOOOOO!!......... Hah!..... You ain't seen nuthin' yet...!......just wait until this weekend at The Merchandise Mart. You want a horror show! -just keep telling yourself as you stroll from one b gallery nightmare to another, to remember what your therapist told you: 'this isn't really happening to me,' 'stay calm!,'' I'm going to my happy place now...'

I hate it when I'm wrong! Barreling up from the deep, ready to chomp the head off some innocent little baby seal -only to find out I've just latched on to the leg of some mangy surfer dude (quit crying for mommy! I didn't mean to take your leg off!...oops I just chipped a tooth!) or worse yet some pelagic researcher's towed rubber seal dummy (-who wants to have tire mouth?!) and to what end? so I can end up on some low-rent, 'man is the real predator, now that we said it don't we feel good?' piece of pulp on Shark Week?......So, imagine the extent of my mortification when Tony Fitz (the whale shark) patrick proves me wrong about...anything! (an exceedingly rare occurrence) But, in this one isolated incident, he has. Three years ago, after a meeting with the Mart/Art Fair people that included Tony, Paul Klein and myself, Tony walked away saying 'I'm done'.....and he was, and he was right. 'These people weren't going to really treat or think of artists in any way other than commodities, indentured servants, serfs' - and they, haven't. Tony went on to say, this isn't about art or an art fair, this is about political ambition and low and behold......read the political pages of The Chicago Sun-Times in the last few days? Read the list of people on the host committee, or the middlemen/ panelists for ancillary events for this years fair? Lots of players, very few artists. Lots of art world bureaucracy, played out and washed up, manning a decaying, and decadent, outmoded system and a failed scene -and by this I mean the infrastructural end of the Chicago Art World.....

With all the money under one roof, whats is there to complain about you ask? Well for one thing, if we are discussing Chicago money -lets face it, its never been supportive of the Chicago art world. Institutions have been built here true, and mostly to house imported fare -whether we are discussing a French Impressionist Painting or a trendy piece of garbage 'painted' by Karen Kilimnick, the conceit persists and insists that what comes from elsewhere is by the very nature of its geographical origins, superior.

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To dig themselves out of this mess, the Mart has obviously decided to retrench -bringing in all of the 'players' that helped create the cultural ghetto that now passes for an art world here in Chicago: (-note I say players....to the exclusion of almost all artists here-) apparently choosing to ignore, or, in their ignorance, thinking its a good thing, that these are the very provincials who given the opportunity, race down to River West to scoop up those crappy Josh Smith paintings (Saatchi owns this work! He is from New York City!), who have sat on the board at the MCA no doubt supporting show after show of NYC/LA locals -Kilimnick, Currin, Pettibone, Kelly -while essentially refusing to support and take seriously the art world here, to have even a semblance of originality.

How many people reading this are even aware of the existence of 'The Society For Contemporary Art' James Rondeau's own little fawning coterie of societal sycophants? Presided over by one Ms Deborah Lovely, bubble head bleached blondes in tow......ever heard the one about Carroll Dunham coming to town and the woman throwing the Societies party for him racing out to buy a couple of his works (at how many 100ks a pop?) for the evenings window dressing? Does anyone really believe this same person or these people, ever gives any thoughtful, serious support to anything? Let alone anything created here in lowly Chicago?

....Every year these people purchase new contemporary art for the Art Institute: anyone here in Chicago (conceptual clones/pet artists excluded-) ever had them by for a look? Of course not! They are busy flitting of to NYC to lunch with GoGo (Larry Gagosian) and pick up some expensive piece of pedigreed NYC pablum...Look at the host committee for this years Art Chicago: its a veritable who's who of these very people -the ones that got us to where we are. The ones that helped cause an art world here so diminished, so marginalized and degraded, that the Chicago Tribune thought nothing of terminating Alan Artner, the one remaining art critic working for a major publication here in Chicago. The socialites, the middlemen, of a failed situation, the Deborah Lovely's, Hamza Walkers, Suzanne Ghezs, these are the people the Mart has turned to, the apparatchiks -rather than the artists, or art. This is why Tony walked away, and why I am now doing so as well. With the huge changes happening in the art world, the bursting bubble of the international art market, the growing ascendancy of the internet, of artists taking charge of their own situations, who wants to hang with these losers? Why would anyone want to go to a panel on how to survive in this new economy -when those on the panel are the problem, are exactly what needs to get lost?

In 2006 Jed Perl wrote an article Laissez-Faire Aesthetics: What money is doing to art, or how the art world lost its mind.

"In this supremely sordid season, I visited Art Basel Miami Beach, the fair that now anchors nearly a week of events in early December that extend well beyond the Convention Center on Miami Beach. And what struck me most forcibly as I wandered the aisles was the noisiness and vehemence with which prices were announced.Dealers wanted to tell anybody and everybody, whether they were potential clients or just art world rubberneckers, not only what everything in their booth cost, but how much the discount would be. It was an orgy of money talk. When you take a look at the art market,what you are really seeing is the stock market. The whole art world is like Nobu during bonus week, a freak show of conspicuous consumption. The point is not what the booze or raw fish tastes like; the point is how fiendishly expensive it is.

-No More- or, well, well, how things have changed: " When you take a look at the art market, what you are really seeing is the stock market." .........indeed.

Tony, Paul and I tried to get the Mart people to get it: that the bubble was going to burst -that to be on the other side of this curve, ahead of the game, would be a good idea. I argued for a year around website about Chicago culture -culminating with the fair, for non-traditional ad campaigns -a twenty billboard project -featuring say twelve Chicago artists and eight from elsewhere.....new ideas -with a new focus not only on art, but how art exists in society, to move decisively away from the glutted bloat of Art Basel Miami Bling, Festivalism if you will, and embrace a less vulgarian, more interesting/sophisticated culture. Tony argued for all artists to be included in the artists project, in effect, HE ARGUED FOR THE ARTISTS! Paul spoke to, or for, Chicago, in terms of community -all to little avail. So now, what we have is a fair consisting for the most part of Chicago's increasingly mediocre gallery scene complimented with galleries from the hinterlands you have never heard of before, peopled with the ineffectual societal trendoids/lightweights that hang like an albatross around our collective necks as artists here, not to forget the medallions being given out for excellence in 'realism'. What, an appalling embarrassment. This is the third largest city in America, not Bumfuck in the sticks, people.

The MCA's involvement: I would say to Madeleine Grynsztejn, the road to hell is paved with good intentions: rather than yoking your museum up to the 'trendsetters', socialites, art world apparatchiks involving themselves with this particular business event/very mediocre art fair, how about some serious, real involvement with the art community here? Lets do some killer shows at the MCA -cannon creating - and not just another tedious re-run of the rancid academemia induced conceptual 101ism of the Kirchner/Hoffman/Manilow cabal that has had your institution in a veritable stranglehold for decades now.

Sharkstock will be held this year in October, It will be about art, not, the art market. Stay tuned.

Interview with Robyn Schiff

2009-05-26T11:41:04Z

This interview with Robyn Schiff about her book Revolver was conducted during the week of May 18th, 2009 by eight poets: Christine Pacyk, Aaron Delee, Nicole Gallicchio, Andrew Galligan, Sarah Jenkins, Joshua Lobb, Lana Rakhman and Rose Woodson.

Q: When reading Revolver, I noticed that nearly every poem had something to do with an invention, including the envelope machine, the Singer Sewing machine, McCormick's Reaper, and even the revolver itself. Which poem was written first? Did you originally intend on writing a series? If so, how did this series evolve? How do you come choose the images of the antiques that you describe in your poetry?

Robyn Schiff: The first poem I worked on was "Colt Rapid Fire Revolver." I wrote it as the United States was gearing up toward the invasion of Iraq, and it set the tone and helped determine the content for the other poems in the collection. I was interested in invention and destruction, but also displays of power because this was the immediate post-9/11period, and there was all this chest-beating patriotism going on and solidarity expressed on bumper stickers. ]]> Worth, on the night of March 20, 2003. The book was fairly new at the time, and I hadn't written any other poems yet except for "Colt..., so I finished my reading with it. Mark Levine was reading that night, too, and as he took the stage after me, he looked at his watch, did a quick calculation, and then ominously remarked that we were going to war in about two hours. It was very moving to read poems that night, and I could feel new, darker, wartime poems--the poems that would eventually became Revolver—stirring in me. It was an important evening for me as an artist. On a totally different note, I also happen to really like mechanical things, and I tried to use syntax and syllabics to explore mechanical operations. Every syllable is like a working gear. I found it very fertile formal ground to work out questions about industrialization and ideas of progress and prowess.

Q: The images you construct are very powerful and engaging; however, it seems as though all of your poems are free-associative as you leap from one image to the next. I view this as a strength of your writing because it adds depth to the poems, but I wonder how you are able to draw such connections and still manage to give your poems a sense of completeness.

Robyn Schiff: I try not to free associate so much as perform the opposite of that exercise—what can I call that? Bound association? I'm interested in turns that occur through metaphor, or through other kinds of association, but I like the associations to be substantiated, inevitable, and I work to chart the connections as carefully as I can, even if I elide some of those steps. It's like conspiracy theory—there has to be a relationship, sometimes a probable one, and sometimes the connection is merely possible—and then the fun (or the terror) comes in proving it. I'm so happy that you feel a sense of completeness. Thank you. I work to put the whole puzzle together, even if the poem only represents some of the pieces.

Q: Which poets do you believe have inspired your own writing? Which do you continue to return to with the feeling that you still discover something new?

Robyn Schiff: Dickinson, Moore, Bishop and Plath are perpetual favorites. And lately Schuyler and Koch, too. And lots of novelists: Woolf, Trollope, Proust, anything by or about the Mitford sisters. For contemporaries, I have to name my own husband, Nick Twemlow. And a call out to Canarium authors Tod Marshall and Ish Klein.

Q: How do you see form functioning in your poetry, since you use the white space on the page in various ways, and sometimes in multiple ways in a single poem? And, which is your favorite poem in the book Revolver, and why?

Robyn Schiff: I think you're asking about space and shape-- aspects of a poem's form we don't talk about very often. I think of white space in a poem as the silence that's contending with the articulation the poem is trying to achieve. In a poem there's always a push and pull between what can be said and what can not. That combination is the heart of expression. White space is the silence encroaching upon the chatter. It's particularly threatening in the middle of a sentence in a highly enjambed, violent break in saying. I very rarely use interlineal white space, but the white space that moves me most is the margin itself. I don't often use the weed-wacker approach—you know, a straight, evenly spaced stanza edge—because it tends to neutralize the margin. I like it to look a little wild. I grew up in the N.J. suburbs and to distrust evenly cropped edges of all kinds. Unless I'm in France, and then it's really quite lovely.

I've never been asked to name my own favorite poem! That's a really tough question! Probably "Project Paperclip"—not because I think it's my strongest work, but because it was the most challenging and offered the most rewards. It was draining and took months, years, but it pushed me to try things I never could have premeditated. It was truly a process. An ordeal.

Q: Tell us about "Heroic Couplet." It is unlike any other poem in Revolver. Why did you include it and why is it preceding the last poem?

Robyn Schiff: It strikes me as strange, too. I don't think I can say too much about it, except that it's a love poem, and it was inspired by an article in the Science Times about how out-of-body sensations can be simulated in lab settings by stimulating the brain. The self can become detached from the body! There are certain moments in science—like when those amazing pictures of Mars were published—that make me think, my god, poetry has to completely change its course to express this! And then it both does and doesn't. I placed the poem where I did in the book because I wanted to express a feeling of coupling and its dark opposite, uncoupling, at just that juncture.

Q: Are you always a formalist or was that the evolution of Revolver?

Robyn Schiff: I guess I'm always a formalist to some extent.

Q: Many of the poems in Revolver must have required background research. When in the writing process do you research—e.g., before the poem begins, after you realize what the poem is about, etc? Or to use another phrasing, how did you write Revolver: which came first, the research or the poetry?

Robyn Schiff: I believe the inception of a poem happens long before the first words are down, and that inception inspires a lot of reading and a lot of writing, which are closely related creative acts.

Q: How do you keep track of the themes and movements of your longer poems? During the writing or in the revision process? And how do you know when a longer poem—or any poem—has ended?

Robyn Schiff: I don't distinguish between writing and editing—I'm a really slow writer, so slow that revision happens at a faster rate than writing. I have a physical sensation when a poem feels complete. I can't really describe it. I can't even really remember it from poem to poem...

Q: Do you ever lose track of your poem while composing it? What I mean is that there are often so many subjects/objects and transitions that the reader must depend upon your stitching to keep them arranged, so I wonder how the reverse process works for you, the unstitching?

Robyn Schiff: I think the tracking comes down to grammar for me. "Subject" and "object" are grammatical terms, and I rely on syntax to keep me on track. I definitely lose the thread of my ideas along the way, and there's usually an accompanying symptom—a grammatical mistake—or a more mysterious rhythmic problem. I can usually clarify my thinking by revising my syntax.

Q: The poems in Revolver do not read formulaically, but I'm curious if you have any kind of ad-hoc rules, timing mechanisms, etc. that you may go back to when revolving through and reintroducing images/subject matter, metaphor, etc. throughout a piece in order to engender/preserve balance and/or aid the reader in staying in step. In composition, do you have a sense of when it's time to take the poem down the next path, or does it happen more or less organically depending on the poem?

Robyn Schiff: That's a really interesting question—I guess the answer has to do with a sense of order that I can't describe—it has something to do with the music of the syntax. But I'm as interested in losing my way as I am in finding it in a poem. The poem feels like it's getting somewhere if it's askew and disproportionate and digressive. I try to enact the sensation of falling out of step, and also the pleasure of getting a little bit ahead, too.

Q: I admire in your poems the way you jump from idea to idea—in "Iron Door Knocker the Shape of a Man's Face," for example, there is a connection between death and the negative space in an unstrung tennis racket. How completely unexpected and incredibly original! My question is—how have you trained yourself to see these connections in the world?

Robyn Schiff: Hmm. I don't think we have to train ourselves to see connections; we're born set theorists! — but we do have to train ourselves to resist the obvious or most apparent relationships. Maybe this has something to do with pace and patience. For me, an image takes a really, really long time to compose ("Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.").

Q: Your poems often become labyrinthine in structure—how concerned are you with your reader understanding what you've wanted to get across? In other words, how do you balance your poems being sophisticated with them also being accessible? And how do you decide the structure of your poems? (Ex: the chaos of "Singer Sewing Machine" versus the relative order of "Project Huia")

Robyn Schiff: I don't think there is something I'm trying to get across—the labyrinth is all there is. I think poetry is very well suited for exploration, but not particularly good at communicating information. The question about accessibility is related to this, I suppose, and I see the connection you're making. I don't think there's a poem in the world that is inaccessible; we certainly have different temperaments as readers, and we are not all interested in the same kinds of arrangements. Some of us like to walk in the city, some of us ramble in the country, and some of us prefer to walk in one straight line along a coast; that doesn't mean the other routes are inaccessible. They're just not preferable. Preference is highly temperamental and entirely personal.

Q: What words do you avoid/are cautious about using?

Robyn Schiff: It seems to me that strategically attempting to avoid a word is a good reason to force yourself to use it.

Q: Many of your poems necessitate a careful reader; in your poem "H5N1" there are some dense lines that may require re-reading, because either the line is complicated or is an intentional run-on. Do you construct your sentences with the intent to slow a poem (or reader) down or is it a product of your natural diction and pacing? Do you regularly fall into using lengthy run-on lines? Why do you use them?

Robyn Schiff: I'm very interested in the line between convolution and clarity. I use a lot of long sentences to foreground the exasperation of striving toward full articulation. Description and exposition are daunting, but that attempt at full articulation has something to with wanting to live forever—wanting to delay that ultimate end-stop. I'm interested in how enjambment (is that what you mean by run-on lines?) and other enforced silences (like the introduction of parenthetic statements and asides) interrupt lucidity, but I'm not particularly moved by run-on sentences. I don't think there are any intentional run-on sentences in Revolver. Though grammar does get the best of me sometimes, I believe that all of the sentences technically behave.

Q: A number of your poems allude to or are grounded in popular culture or current events (Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, avian flu). Did you intend for these poems to serve as societal markers or do they simply serve as grounds for conveying culturally relevant meaning? What benefits/challenges do you think exist when someone references cultural icons or events?

Robyn Schiff: All poetry is embedded in its moment. Dickinson's volcanoes; Hopkin's ship wreck; Uranus swimming into Keats' ken. Our poems date us—and not just through our references of course, but different modes of composition go in and out of style. We can be writing in a period style and not even know it. I think we more often don't know it in fact, and literary style is just taken for granted, like other trends—hairstyles and hem lengths. I'm interested in poems (like Dickinson's, like Plath's) that name their time, rather than being named by it.

Robyn Schiff is the author of Revolver (Iowa, 2008) and Worth (Iowa, 2002). She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she is the director of the undergraduate creative writing program. She also co-edits Canarium Books.

from Revolver

Iron Door Knocker the Shape of a Man's Face, by Feetham

Has no fly laid a sac of eggs
in the wet hole in the house finch
dead on the back porch
a week, ten days, not even
the eyes missing, sometimes
I sit by it and read, it's March,
there is fatness to the air, walking
to the bus, back from the bus, I
miss the confidence
swift burial of the dead
gives us. I used to believe the wild
takes care of itself. I used to believe
maggots arise
like a spring of death
that need only be tapped,
but the flow of incarnation
is much too slow and nothing
comes to debride the flesh
so that my finch
can matriculate into the hall
of its next house
the door of which
is guarded.
You've seen door knockers
with the faces of men. In the novel,
the face warms to your approach,
but it's so few of us who can even
get our body all the way through
the cold negative space
of an unstrung tennis racket
we're holding. Pilloried in a past life,
who joins us here in this awful heat
clinging to the screen
door? A swarm of mayflies clutching
the wire mesh on their only night on earth.
They defile it until they
die, though it's not exactly
true they live their whole
lives in one humid day.
They were larvae first, that takes years,
then they emerge starving with no
mouth. Someone hates us very
much. If you walk back from
the lake late in the afternoon, as my
mother did when a girl, you'll find thousands
on the kitchen door when you return. A thousand
bodies who want in. I don't
want there to be a thousand faces
on the other side but
my grandmother must have seen them
when she pushed open the door for you.

Little Visceral Carnival by Philip Jenks & Simone Muench

2009-05-22T01:12:50Z

Art by Kim Ambriz

Little Visceral Carnival by Philip Jenks & Simone Muench

| saddle stitched chapbook | 5" x 5" | 23 poems + 2 linocut collaged lithographs | $8

To purchase, visit Cinematheque Press

Dear Godzilla—

The parade didn't become you. You are so over the top
but this is why I love you, my atomic lover, my glottal stop,
]]> this way! I'm splayed out by your popular culture,
your nuclear tail. Derail me with your maple-leafed
dorsal plates and heavyweight collective unconsciousness
that flattens the world beneath your postwar charm,
your angered architecture. Each step an earthquake,
Godzilla, you are so totally bombastic. I read you into
Revelations, you pretranshistoric tower crumbling as you
run towards your own disappearing future. Thunderbolted
to a phone booth, but unable to phone home.

               Dear anonymous caller—

               Beware of the smallness of men on missions,
               remember not erased, but dissolving. To leave
               a residue is to leave residence of oneself.
               I shatter, but when I do the world shimmers
               then all is gone to tone, to poem, to arboretum.

First published by Vincent Dermody in Information Booth #1 Duet for Caller & Oracle

Art History-less-ness, an Ailment

2009-05-21T07:51:36Z

In James Elkins's great book Stories of Art, he discusses various personalized "visions" of art history. I would like to cite and highlight one important paragraph here.

Discussing widespread ahistoricism in internationalist, or what I would term "academicist," Postmodernism, Elkins writes:

"(The list of periods might look like this):

Art History
(No subdivisions)
The Present

Psychologically, such a radically collapsed sense of history is a great relief for people burdened by a nagging sense of the importance of history. Suddenly, all art is possible, and nothing needs to be studied. ... Some art historians who work exclusively on contemporary art feel the same exhilaration: they can apply any theories they want, interpret in any fashion they choose, and cite or ignore precedents at will. But as Milan Kundera might say, sooner or later the apparent lightness of art history reveals itself as an "unbearable lightness," and finally as an unbearable burden."
]]> Stories of Art, James Elkins, NY: Routledge, 2002, p. 26.
link.

Harry Bouras on the "Original" Giant Paul Bunyon

2009-05-20T06:32:57Z

]]> .

The Spanish Tomato Fight Video

2009-05-19T09:41:15Z

Who needs art tomato fights when you can have the real thing in Spain?

In August each year, the small Spanish village of Bunol hosts the world's largest tomato fight, the Tomatina.
]]> .

Interview with Kristy Bowen

2009-05-16T16:38:59Z

This interview with Kristy Bowen about her book in the bird museum was conducted during the week of May 11th, 2009 by eight poets: Christine Pacyk, Aaron Delee, Nicole Gallicchio, Andrew Galligan, Sarah Jenkins, Joshua Lobb, Lana Rakhman and Rose Woodson.

Q: In your collection of poems in the bird museum, you experiment considerably with form. During the initial draft of a poem, does the form present itself to you as a means to experiment, or is form secondary to either the language choices you make or the thematic significance you're going for? Did you have a specific goal in mind while putting the book together or was the layout the result of a natural tendency for you to experiment with language and forms?

Kristy Bowen: In most cases, those poems that play with formal constructs (glossaries, footnotes, mathematical equations) always seem easier to write, largely because one is basically limited somewhat by the circumstances of the form and those limitations are oddly comforting. The entire first section of the book, most of which was originally a chapbook called errata, was written as an exploration of "feminine" vs. "masculine" texts, or modes of writing, so I had a list of things that I wanted to try out--poem as etiquette manual, poem as textbook, poem as concordance.

]]> The Body, an entire narrative told in footnotes) or a classroom assignment. I was pursuing my MFA over the time I was working on the book, so there are some pieces that stem from that environment. ("how to read this poem" came from an attempt at writing a litany.) I've also found that going into something structurally already built , makes me much more creative in terms of getting away with things within that structure. Otherwise, when given free reign, don't really think all that much about the actual shape or line breaks of a piece during the initial drafting. Once I have something like a first draft (where language, image, and theme are probably my main considerations) only then do I begin to consider those elements, how certain decisions work form-wise for or against what I'm after. Sometimes, what I initially thought might be a prose poem, badly wants to be broken into lines, or vice-versa. Or, I will decide the lines are too long for the speed of the poem and make them shorter. The decisions are not always conscious, though, and sometimes, years later I will still be changing things, punctuation, breaking a line elsewhere, experimenting with the shape. In the last 5 or so years, though, I've moved from being the sort of poet who wrote everything out by hand and then typed it to someone who composes on a computer keyboard. I think the ease of moving things around on screen has made it easier to get it right the first time and try things out before they are too set in my head about what I feel they SHOULD look like.

Q: Going back to forms, do you find that you are able to express meaning or theme better in one form versus another? If so, which form do you feel most at home with and why?

Kristy Bowen: Lately, there has been a ridiculous number of prose poems, to the point where I've been trying to force myself to write something else. The manuscript I am just finishing up is prose poem heavy, almost self-consciously so, and my newest project is actually a sort of novel-like thing in short prose pieces. Perhaps, having started out as a fiction writer, I've just come full-circle . All of the poems in my first book, the fever almanac, however, are broken into rather traditional lines and stanzas, and at the time, pre-2005, that was definitely what I was most comfortable with. I'm also convinced a lot of it has to do with what I find myself reading. Up until then, my knowledge of poetry was pretty limited to more traditionally, stanza laden poets like Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, and Louise Gluck. As I began to find myself drawn to more formally experimental work, my own work took a turn in that direction.

Q: In what ways has your work as an artist influenced your writing; conversely, how has your writing influenced your art?

Kristy Bowen: I think my delvings into collage art have had tremendous impact on how I construct a poem, as well as my gravitation toward the "series", several smaller pieces which form a whole. I was recently telling someone that very rarely do I find myself writing poems which stand alone. Even though they are hopefully enough to stand on their own when encountered by editors and lit mag readers, they are still very much dependant on the other pieces in the series to form a whole unified body. In some ways, the pressure to write a single poem that encompasses everything I need to say is way more pressure than I want to put on myself as a writer. Instead I like to approach it from different vantages, skirt around it, poke it a stick, with a shovel. As for process, up until maybe 2004, I always sat down with a clear idea of where a poem needed to go, maybe some vague images, some sort of idea of what I wanted to accomplish. Since then, however, I rarely sit down with anything concrete. I keep a journal filled with all sorts of bits and pieces--words, phrases images--the detritus of things I've read, seen, thought. I sit down and start melding a number of things together and see what emerges. It's somehow much more fun and less angsty for me as a writer to wind up with something I wasn't expecting to get and work from there, rather than something I am trying to do. Sort of like the difference between putting together a collage and trying to paint a portrait.

Q: Some of your poems take a very "modern" approach to an idea (i.e. "footnotes to a history of desire"). How do you define "modern" poetry and where do you see your poetry fitting into the larger context of "modern" poetry? Have you received any criticism for your more experimental pieces? For example, "footnotes to a history of desire" shatters most conventions of poetry; in fact, some may question whether or not it is actually a poem.

Kristy Bowen: I've never been very good at gauging where the line falls between more traditionally oriented poetry and more experimental or avant-garde work. I tend to view it as more of a continuum with poets like Billy Collins and Gwendolyn Brooks on one end and, say, Charles Bernstein or Christian Bok on the other. And even then there are variations in exactly how a poet is traditional or experimental--form, language, syntax, which is given more weight. In certain MFA workshops, no one got my work because it was too experimental. In others, I was told I was too traditional. I've been rejected from a journal because my work was "not experimental enough," yet always feel like there are certain journals that will think my work is way too far out there to the left so I don't even bother submitting. I tend to feel I fit best in more experimental-leaning publications, so that's where I send work these days. The footnote piece initially appeared in an online journal (alice blue) which tends to publish similar work. Even in terms of getting my books published, Dusie's tends to be very far to left on the spectrum, while Ghost Road, who published the fever almanac, definitely is more to the right. My third book, girl show, which will be out from them next year, is sort of a middle ground. There's not as much formal innovation as in bird museum, but the poems are much more based in surrealism that what I've written before, yet to the eye, look more like traditional verse.

I've also never been good with definitions of what is a "poem." I would venture a concentration, a distillation of language, text, image, idea, no matter what it looks like on the page (or even if it is on the page at all). Though I suppose this would mean all sorts of things could be a poem (a film, a performance, an installation.)

Q: It seems like some of your poems draw from local history (i.e. the "archer avenue" series)--what is your process of molding history into poetry?

Kristy Bowen: I am a research freak, so it always begins there. I tend to immerse myself in certain things for awhile. Sometimes, they become part of my work. I've always had a supreme love of ghost stories and legends, and Resurrection Mary has been on my radar since I'd read about her in a ghost book I checked out when I was 11. At some point I decided to do the project and totally read everything I could find, visited the area, took weird ghost tours. Again, it's a sort of collage process integrating the history into the work. The cool thing about urban legends is that there are so many versions of the possible truth that I could play around a little with this in the poems, even down to the narrative voice.

Q: Throughout the book, I read a relation between the many images of concealment and confinement with those of propriety, domesticism, or etiquette. They all seem to imply order, and one that's forced and not willful. How would you describe your use and treatment of these images?

Kristy Bowen: The thing that keeps surfacing in the book is that relationship between knowledge and danger, how confinement, be it societal, physical is meant to keep things safe and protected yet at the same time takes away their volition, their voice. This is especially true in the first section of Victorian poems, where everything seems to be seeking to contain, to partition the realm of female experience from something else, something darker that's sort of hinted at, but never revealed. The second section, the Cornell inspired poems, is all about women in boxes, in roles, forced into objects. But the problem with containment is that it's messy and never whole. There is always a movement towards transgression. There's always this tension between safety and confinement. Even in everyday modern life. A few years go, there was a week where every single story on the news was something awful happening to a woman or a girl. Found bodies, torture, abuse. (so disturbing I finally stopped watching the news for awhile.) In the third section, there's a turn in the book, where the containment starts to loosen, but the danger factor increases. The women move between being empowered and endangered and back again.

Q: The voice in this book seems to lurk behind the scenes. The voice can seem hidden as many of the poems are written double-textually, appearing as dictionaries, instruction lists, and other existing forms re-worked into poems. What is the appeal to you as a writer of poems that function this way? Is a clear voice secondary to drawing out and against a reader's inherent understanding of the way to read and/or use such texts?

Kristy Bowen: think, with all my work, in each book, there is probably not really one voice at all, but several. Even the poems that do fall into the category of seemingly objective modes--outlines, instructions, catalogs, still have their own sense of voice, and it's not always the same throughout. I think in some ways, such modes give the illusion of authority, which you get in other, more lyric pieces, but at the same time, they work to undermine that authority. I'm all about shifting identity, shifting senses of "truth" these days, especially in the new stuff that I've been working on.

Q: In many of your poems, there is a feminine presence, vis-à-vis, characters, description, even articles of clothing? Is this a recurring voice in your work? How did you come up with the reoccurring "dress" theme in your book of poetry? You seem to use that term to symbolize many different aspects of femininity, so how did you want your audience to interpret that word in the poems?

Kristy Bowen: I don't think I initially had any intention to use that as a symbol, or a recurring thing, but it just sort of wound up that, that dresses kept surfacing and resurfacing. They show up a lot in my first book as well, but perhaps less as a trope. I think there is a tension between that which is feminine, girly and something with a little harder of edge. There is also the idea of "costume" in the book, the things we put on willingly and the things which are foisted upon us. It doesn't help that I am a freak for fashion, vintage dresses in particular. My favorite things have an annoying tendency to keep reappearing in poems...

Q: Was there a real bird museum? How much time did you spend there?

Kristy Bowen: I had in mind, when I came up with that title for the poem, the sort of taxidermied displays that on sees in Natural History museums. That sort of canned song that they sometimes have playing in the background that sounds like birds but isn't. Everything so still and encased in glass. The poem the book title was taken from was written as part of the Andromeda poems that are inspired by Cornell's boxes, and there is a similar contained feeling to his work. Apparently, a couple of museums in the country are actually devoted solely to birds, however.

Q: How did you come up with the format of the book? Specifically, how did you choose the order in which the poems are placed, and why did you place the poem "footnotes to a history of desire" in the last section? And how did the "phobia" section, or section five, come about and why did you chose those phobias in particular?

Kristy Bowen: The overall book is actually a collection of several short series of poems, some of which initially appeared as chapbooks. I think within each section, each series and project had its own priorities in terms of form and experiment. The original manuscript layout, when I put it together, and when it was accepted for publication, had everything mixed together, with no defined sections. It was also considerably shorter and did not include the Resurrection Mary poems, nor all of the Cornell-inspired poems. When I started looking at it again, however, I realized that each poem had more resonance when placed next to the poems they were initially written with, rather than scattered throughout. And sections made it a little easier on the reader, as well. Once I was dividing it up, I decided to add in all of the andromeda poems, the Archer Avenue poems, both series that were written outside of the big project, and weren't initially part of what I was thinking of as my next full-length book, but that still nevertheless fit in thematically. Although I didn't name each section, I still sort of in my head consider the first poem in each section as a sort of title for the section. "footnotes.." which was originally in the feign chapbook and could have gone in the middle of the book just as easily, somehow seemed to be a good makeshift section title for the last handful of poems that were more about relationships and desire, so I thought that might be a good opener. The phobia poems were the last section I wrote, and I suppose I was looking, as I wrote them, for fears that tied in with rest of the text, as well as things which I have tiny fears of myself--madness, time, numbers, drowning. (I am not actually afraid of the color red, erythrophobia, but it's a color that makes me uneasy (part of my weird synesthesia thing). I didn't even know there was a word for the fear of it though it until I read one of Simone's poems, and found it.) The entire series really started with the red poem and snowballed into an entire batch of them.

Q: How does a poem begin for you? When and how do you decide what form you'll use for a poem? How do you title your poems?

Kristy Bowen: Usually, I will sit down with my notebook of snippets, words, ideas, and images, and just start making connections, trying to find some thread, some rhythm, that pulls the poems along and builds it from nothing. Sometimes it's easy and I have it right away, other times I have to dig for it. The form usually, as I mentioned earlier, usually comes rather organically from the feel of the poem, unless I set out with a specific idea to write specifically in a given form. I have this list in my notebook of titles (for poems, for projects, for books) that come to me, so sometimes I'll choose a title and try to write something that works with it.

Q:What words do you not like/have an aversion to/is cautious about using? Do you have any writing rituals? Is there anything you need to do to sit down and start writing?

Kristy Bowen: I was once told in a workshop to never use the word "dark" so I proceeded to try to work it into every poem I wrote for about six months. I don't like abstract concepts very much, words like "truth", "faith," "love" since they don't really have any resonance besides what you fill them with, which ideally would be the concrete stuff of the poem. I tend to get a lot of writing done either during downtime at my day job or late at night right before I go to sleep. (I'm a night-owl and barely functional in the morning, so writing then is so not an option.)

Q: Why do you go into cataloguing/listing with poetry? What are the pros & cons you see with it?

Kristy Bowen: I think cataloguing/listing, is one of the things that I do to get a poem moving sometimes. I like to leave the reader to draw their own conclusions from the lists farther than inserting any type of authorial voice into it (though it's there if you look, it's hard to get away from it even when I try.) I think the imaginative capabilities for the audience, who is then charged with doing some of the work in the poem, is very fulfilling, at least in my opinion as a read, in terms of making connections, drawing narrative, etc. However, it's also seems sometimes like the text then becomes too much in the readers control and that the poet is less in control of the interpretation. I sort of like that tension, however, so I like to use that technique a lot.

Q: Who do you read and what are some of your influences? What do you do to overcome writer's block?

Kristy Bowen: Lately I've been reading a lot of contemporary poets. I just finished Brenda Shaughnessy's Human Dark with Sugar and Robyn Schiff's Revolver. I bought a whole stack of stuff while at AWP and haven't had nearly enough time to get through all. Influence-wise, I have to admit I owe a whole lot to Plath's work and quite a bit to Sexton. Oddly, when I first began writing anything of quality (not the 4 or year so before that when I wasn't) it was actually The Wasteland that really broke things open for me. I suddenly want to be able to do the sort of things that Eliot did so well. These days, I read a lot of younger, contemporary women poets.

Kristy Bowen's work has appeared in Diagram, Caffeine Destiny, Cranky, Another Chicago Magazine, and others. She lives in Chicago where she dabbles in collage/text/book art, edits the online zine, wicked alice, and runs dancing girl press. Her chapbook, feign, was released by New Michigan Press and another chapbook, errata, is available from her website. One of her full-length collections, the fever almanac, is out from Ghost Road Press, which will also be releasing her third book, girl show. The book featured here, in the bird museum, is available from Dusie Press.

From in the bird museum

another cautionary tale

This one begins with girls,
candied and small boned as mice.
Begins in kitchens or hallways.

On the phone or in cars beneath picnic
blankets. When the killer comes
from the bushes. From the closet.

From the backseat of a blue Cadillac.
The girls line up like a seam. Fight back.
Fashion a rope from their hair, a compass

from a compact. When their date goes
for gas, they stab the psycho with a nail file,
hide the evidence beneath pink twin sets,

harbor something black and lush as licorice
beneath their tongues. Swallow the man
with the hook, the stranger inside the house.

When left alone, poison the boyfriend
and bury him beneath the cellar. Slaughter
the narrative, read it backwards like the gospel.

The dirty, dirty word in their mouth.

Title: Richard Lloyd/NTO @ The Abbey Pub, May 9th @ 7PM

2009-05-05T15:23:49Z

A small story about why you should be there and why I have to be there!

Hello again Shark Forum. Haven't had a chance to write on here for a while as it basically slipped and slipped even further away from my mind. Also, I think for the most part, SF is about the visual art world and not so much the sonic one. Sharkboy has always insisted that ain't true and says it's because Rizzo and I are too lazy to write anything. There's a bit of truth there as well. It's also a lot more fun to piss off Sharkboy than to please him. That's another good reason not to write. I think the best reason to write, though, is when there's an event or show worth something to me and that I think would be a shame to miss. I was lucky enough to find out that guitarist and songwriter Richard Lloyd was going to play the Abbey Pub on May 9th by Sean Duffy, who books the club and asked if I'd open the show. It didn't take my band and me long to say yes. ]]>
Lloyd, historically speaking, was a part of that small club of guitarists from NYC that emerged in the punk scene. He and Tom Verlaine lead the group Television. The other two I'd like to include in this club but am not going to write about at this time are from the band Richard Hell and the Voidoids. They are my pal, Ivan Julian, who'll have a record out in Spain in a month or so, and the late great and very funny to hang with Bob Quine, who chose to join his wife Alice in heaven, rather than to wait for a tedium of years to pass before he could reunite with his soul mate. Hope it worked, Bob. As an opening act, NTO only plays on shows that they would want to attend and in clubs in this town that I can stand being in. This date fits the bill BIGTIME! The other reasons are out of friendship or to fulfill some personal moment and loop the present with the past. In this case it's the latter. BINGO, AGAIN!

I've only seen Richard Lloyd play once before. It was I believe in 1976 in a rock club in Wheeling, Illinois called Haymakers. For this moment in time to make any sense at all I think I'll need to paint a picture of the music scene in Chi-town in those days. First off, I was 16 years old, with fake ID's, a black suit and red shirt. These were my stage clothes.

As of '75, I'd joined a band whose leader idolized the band Cheap Trick and was made to shit-can all my old glitter stuff I'd bought in dollar stores in the girls section. It cost a lot of dough to go from a three dollar whore to a continental type. My Broadway and Lawrence shopping days were over. I had just enough for one black suit that was turning grey at a rapid rate.

Chicago at that time was a 2nd city in the true sense of the word. Most of the bands that played rock were cover bands, mostly because you could get a lot more work. There was a lot of feathered hair and platform shoes a la Creem Magazine. The drinking age was 19 and driver's licenses didn't have pictures on them so it was a breeze to get one from your girlfriend's older brother and begin hitting the clubs and drinking your brains out 'til your tongue turned black. All girls were on the pill. Fucking was like shaking hands. Bigger and louder was better. We all wanted Marshall stacks and multitudes of watts. At my age however, we settled for what we could afford and usually made our own speaker cabinets that were way too big and filled with 8 to 10 Radio Shack speakers. These were heavy as hell and some of the worst sounding and loudest things you can imagine. Not in some cool Blue Cheer way. More like a thousand am radios with broken speakers playing all at once. This may sound cool in some performance art kind of way to some of you. Put that out of your mind. It was bad!

Some time around '75 or so, a very thin magazine called Rock Scene started publishing pictures of bands out of New York that looked really different from the sort of rock star/tranny look we were all used to seeing in those kind of rags. These were pictures of bands we'd never heard of and who didn't have any records out. They dressed in do-it-yourself kind of clothes, their haircuts looked crooked and they were playing in clubs and not theatres and arenas. The pictures were in black and white as the only thing I can remember being in color in this magazine was the cover. The captions in this magazine were more like what someone would write in a photo album. They told you very little. Stuff like, "Dee Dee counts off the song." Occasionally there'd be a quote from one of the performers, usually from the stage saying how they hated some famous band which didn't bug me because most of the bands they hated, I hated too. But I'll bet it bugged some of the guys I knew.

In Illinois in those days, the best rock clubs were scattered across the suburbs. Chicago was mostly blues clubs and lounges. One thing that was alike in both city and country here in IL was that no one who had a record out in rock played in clubs. If you came through town, had a record out but weren't popular yet, you were opening for a more successful band at the Aragon or the Auditorium. Bands with records did not play clubs, period! No one here could figure out why these bands were getting press out of New York from playing in a fucking club! All the clubs we played in were for the most part run by mob guys at the time and were a bridge to more club gigs, only. Certainly not record contracts or magazines. This made most of the musicians in town hate these new bands before they'd ever heard them. A true 2nd city moment.

I don't think it was a New York thing in the end really after all. I once asked David Johansen to paint a sort of picture of what the scene was like in NYC when the Dolls started out. He told me there was no scene and no clubs to play in. The village was a bunch of closed up venues and dying folk clubs. No rock and roll. They used to go into bars and tell the owners how popular they were and how they were going to make a bunch of money for them: in other words lie there asses off and then paste flyers around trying to get somebody to show up. Think it probably was like that for those early bands in the mid-70's as well. Find a couple of joints that could stand them and just keep going back.

So it was doubly surprising when I heard that Television was coming to play Chicago and even more surprising that they were going to play a club, let alone a club in Wheeling, Illinois! I remember it as being on a week night as well. I was intrigued. Most of the older bar musicians I spoke to about going to the show were either blowing it off, "Fuck those New York fags!" or were going to go just to jeer at them, "Fuck you! New York fags!"

You have to understand the way that punk was written about in '75. They made it sound like guys were picking up instruments one week and forming bands the next. Kind of like the way they wrote about the beat writers. Both were lies of course. That's why Capote put down Kerouac I think. I'm sure he never read his stuff. Just the way the press wrote about stream of consciousness writing and all that bullshit. "That's not writing...that's typing." I'll bet he was just offended by the idea of it. Punk turned out to be more of a return to the rawness of earlier American bands that had sort of disappeared as the technology of the recording studio began to become more complex a process. Back was the style of capturing the moment as opposed to manufacturing one that had become the norm of the mid-70's. That, and distaste for corporate intervention. What musician couldn't hang with that?

Sadly the legacy of great art is usually the folklore that gets turned to fact. That's why musicians get into drugs, writers drink like Hemingway. "Dylan and Reed didn't have great voices so you don't need one." (The reality is Dylan has never sung a sour note in his life and Reed can phrase a line as badass as Sinatra.) Maybe that's why the 2nd wave of any supposed style or scene seems to be a second-rate version of the first. It's the hype and not the truth that gets past on. It takes a while longer for the truth to out itself, if ever.

Anyway, walked into the club in Wheeling. It was half full, mostly with curious rockers looking to find some gimmick that might stick. Some new flashy deal they could cop. Something cheap they could laugh about. An emperor with no clothes. First off, no big amps! No semi outside full of equipment. No double stacks. No giant drum set with a gong in the back. No swastikas. No groupies. No Hollywood. The band came out unceremoniously and began to play. The guitars began to twist around themselves like they were daring each other into someplace uncharted. Notes colliding into each other until you couldn't tell Verlaine from Lloyd, Strat from Jazzmaster, bass from drums, light from shadow... They were looking for the moment. What moment? Where you disappear. Where sound happens before you can think it. Where thought gives up and commits suicide to make room for the stream of the moment. They were trying to catch that thing you can't chase. That thing that once you've stumbled upon it, your life as a musician never is the same. It's hard to explain.

Maybe the best way is an example:

As a kid I idolized a lot of different musicians, but I worshipped only one. Jimi Hendrix. I can honestly tell you that I have never learned to try and play a Hendrix lick in my life. I knew it would never come out right. There was something more happening there. I couldn't understand it, but I knew it was there and it was his and his only. I didn't want to play like him. I wanted to feel like him. There's a moment on the Monterey Pop Festival record at the beginning of "Like A Rolling Stone" where he says, "I'd like to bore you for about 6 or 7 minutes" and then this thing happens in his hands that well, just happens. It came through him without warning and he laughs, like a spectator to it. I recently found my original album of that performance. It's beat up all over but you can see the line in the grooves as plain as day were I played that 3 second moment over and over again. That's what I wanted. To float. To be reborn in music. What makes a person want that? Is it knowing it's there? It might even be part self-loathing. To create a new world. Hendrix dressed like an Indian warrior from Mars and wrote about spaceships. Spent his whole life leaving his past behind rather than looking for it. Was it being a black man in America that put him on the search for new worlds? Is that why so many geniuses in music of the last century happen to be black? Is it my own self loathing of the awkward Greek boy that makes me...? Now I remember why I hate writing for Shark Forum! Back to Television at Haymakers circa 70-something: All of a sudden that transcendent moment began to happen on stage, and all the musician jaded or not, could not deny it. We all knew it. We all applauded. Some excitedly...others reluctantly. But you couldn't deny it. It happened and was happening and the words rock or punk or punk rock went out the window with the window where they belonged.

Since then, Lloyd has become famous for his work as guest artist, most widely known on Mathew Sweet's "Girlfriend" record as well as some really great solo albums over the years with his bands Rockets From The Tombs and the trio he'll be coming to town with, The Sufi Monkeys. He ain't lost his edge either folks! If anything it's just gotten sharper so be prepared for one badass night! He's also become a guitar teacher over the years and after looking at a lesson on intervals that Guitar World put up on youtube I think I might have to grab a lesson as well! We'll be opening the show and like our headliner, have been on the road for a while too so both bands are well oiled for action! Fair price as well. Hope you can make it. That's all I really wanted to say when I started this. SHEESH!

S. Cohen: Want to Buy Sotheby's?

2009-05-05T09:52:54Z

Now would be cheap.
Sotheby's stocks have fallen almost 90 percent! Their profit fell to "only" $28.3 million, the worst result since 2003. You could get them for a song!
]]> More here in German.

Perhaps days like this, of $1.6 million sales of Marlene Dumas are over?