Proofs from Little Red Leaves

... for the Ephemera issue & a chapbook designed Dawn Pendergast— holy cow, they are beautiful. I'm feeling very lucky to be working with such a talented artist.

Ephemera issue into the world next month, chapbook the following, as I understand it—ending 2011 and beginning 2012. Exciting stuff.

LRL site is here.

Three Sentences from September @ Poetic Labor Project

"When I try to make a narrative out of it, my job history reflects a string of disillusioned attempts at how I can make money doing something that will help me be a better artist." - Ariel Goldberg

"But we're swamped with craploads of our own non-art work." - Kristen Gallagher

"fetishes using a grant to be anti-productive and a drag on the economy, i.e. not make commodity art, but converse in a leisurely way or wander or day dream or “research” or cruise" - Monica Peck

The whole report is rad. Needless to say I'm honored to be included. The whole is here.

The Calm Before the Stork

I am going to try my hand at something like improvisational cultural criticism right now. No editing. I think.

I want to put a few things into play:

1) This morning after walking Sonia to drop her off at preschool, I was listening to the RZA-produced Kanye West song "Dark Fantasy," the kinda-title track off his much-lauded album that came out late last year. As I walked and listening, I was thinking about the refrain can we get much higher? in relation to two more things I want to put into play—

2) The Lil Wayne song "I Feel Like Dying" from The Drought is Over 2 (Tha Carter 3 Sessions), one of his 2007 mixtapes.

3) The continuingly spectacular decline of global capitalism.

4) The last piece I want to put into play is where the really bad pun of a title for this post comes from. This afternoon we are scheduled to induce birth for our second daughter, now twelve days overdue. The wait for her these past couple weeks has been a strange anticipatory quiet (and in the way of things in our family, included the death of a parent, Kate's stepfather). A calm, a waiting. I don't know if it's what makes me want to write. Maybe I just don't take time often enough lately to write about music. In any case, in a few hours my second daughter's birth will begin, if not before. So here we go.

1.

I'm watching the video for that Kayne West song now, for the first time. (Does anyone actually watch music videos on TV anymore? I'm guessing they don't.) It opens with a shot of what turns out to be a meteor, but on YouTube I first saw it as a shuttle launch or an oil well fire. Both symbols of a recent past that marks the present—an imagined future of the 1960s that involved various flying things and space travel; and the age of oil, that spectacular commodity.

But no, it's not oil burning, it's a meteor, which is in keeping with the weird latterday fairy-tale overtones of the video—slow-mo deer, forests, and Kanye in a fancy car. "I fantasized about this back in Chicago." The deer, you think? Or maybe Milton Friedman had this dream—millionaire on the open road. Anyway. Next shot of the meteor looks a little mushroom cloud. Another iteration of 20th century dreams of American self.

After about two minutes its clear that this video only has three elements—meteor, forest/car/Kayne, and deer. It's really leaning on the strings that the song really leans on to create its atmosphere. Meteor hits car. Trees hurt. Car/Kanye/deer are ok. Turns out the meteor was a female angel—I briefly hoped it was Nicky Minaj, but it wasn't—probably a lucifer reference there, since the devil shows up in the song in a chrysler lebaron—sucks to be the devil, I guess. Then Kanye shows up what he really fantasized about in Chicago—his moment of action movie slow-mo-walking-away-from-explosion-holding-passed-out-girl.

So it turns out the video is kind of boring—but what about that refrain? Can't get higher. And these lines: "Teacher how do you respond to students / refresh the page, restart the memory." There's something there. A death wish, a wish for renewal, for a clean slate. Wishing he could've been consumed by the meteor/shuttle/oil/20th century, back when there was a future and things were awesome. But instead he is forced to relive cliche moments from that century with these f**king deer that won't die.

2.

"Only once the drugs are done, I feel like dying." There's no video for this song, but that YouTube has a great picture of Lil Wayne looking like the drugs aren't done. Because he is more talented than Kanye, Lil Wayne actually formally messes with the death wish that is late capitalism. Check out what he rhymes with the refrain's 'dying' in the song: lying, flying, frying, buying. Or this couplet: "And violets are blue, roses are red / Daisies are yellow, the flowers are dead." The list of drugs to sustain the high lilting chorus, like the xanax might push the dead of Wayne's monotone into the bright rafters where the sample echoes. (And oh the magic of sampling: hard to believe that came from this.)

What I want to say is that both of these songs are about the moment just before the crash, the long intoxicated pause in the early hours before it is properly tomorrow, when things begin to spin and look beautiful-ugly, shiny with the sweat of it all falling apart. In that moment, in these songs, we hear the late 20th c., still the obsession of the early 21st: but wishing the high would last is knowing already that it's over. Only once the drugs, the $, the oil, the enlightenment, "America," the spectacle—only once it's all done, is the dying feeling of the morning of the new century.

3.

But that's a weird place to end something I'm writing on the day my daughter will begin her birth. And that's why I needed to include this fourth thing. Because, people, today we are still human. Today of all days we are truly human, we are alive and soon more of us, more of my family at least, will be. And tomorrow will be written by us people—it will have to be. So I am ending in this hopeful calm place—that we are alive, that we are human, that we can make something new. Gentle now. I insist. We love you, everyone, get up.

Online poetry resources

I'm compiling some lists for Anna & Emma, two students about to enter the 9th grade, who are doing an independent study with me this summer on contemporary poetry. We've been reading Juliana Spahr's Well Then There Now, Joseph Lease's Testify, and Jennifer Moxley's The Line. They are some hardcore young people.

This first list is of online resources; it will be revised and updated. Coming soon: a list of great paper journals.

http://jacket2.org/
The single best place for all things relating to boundary-pushing poetry


http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/
Eclipse—lots of scans of older small-run books (language poets esp.); super useful


http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/
The Electronic Poetry Center—lots of useful information on poets

http://ubuweb.com/
Amazing archive of sound/visual/avant-garde poetry

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
Penn Sound—archive of recordings of poets

http://www.critiphoria.org/
Super strong collection of poets

http://littleredleaves.com/
Annual journal—really smart—also includes PDFs of chapbook-length projects

http://htmlgiant.com/
Lots of writing about writing—interesting articles—as well as creative work

http://www.alicebluereview.org/main.html
Fiction & poetry

http://www.durationpress.com/
International poetry

http://www.wombpoetry.com/
Poetry by women

http://www.deepoakland.org/
Site-based investigations, poetry & prose

http://disinhibitor.blogspot.com/
Poet Michael Cross’s blog—lots of great reviews of great books

www.actionyes.org
Politics & poetry

http://ecopoetics.wordpress.com/
Environment & poetry

http://www.thirdfactory.net/
Compiles an annual list of various peoples’ favorite poetry books/journals/etc.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/
Art & culture

http://blog.sfmoma.org/
Suzanne Stein at SF MOMA brings together some really smart people for this project

http://www.trickhouse.org
Beautifully designed, lots of beautiful work (Phoebe Wayne in the current issue is amazing)

http://www.onedit.net/
Poetry journal

http://www.raintaxi.com/
Good reviews

http://galatearesurrects.blogspot.com/
Good reviews

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/
Many good guest bloggers

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/
At one time the clearinghouse for poetry news, though no longer; still useful

http://www.shampoopoetry.com/
Lots of good poetry


http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/
Steven Fama writes long and smart reviews of lots of different poetry books


http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Chronic/index.html
Great press and paper journal, also publishes excellent work online

http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/
Good reviews by a range of writers

http://www.h-ngm-n.com/
Poetry and chapbooks

http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/
David Wolach's smart, smart blog

http://whof.blogspot.com/
Thom Donovan's likewise excellent blog—lots of great stuff on art & music as well as poetry

http://jupiter88poetry.blogspot.com/
A video journal run by the inimitable CA Conrad—he brings in some amazing folks

http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/
Speaking of CA Conrad, these poetry exercises are unlike anything else.


http://www.labday2010.blogspot.com/
Poets writing about work/labor—the paying kind

http://www.eveningwillcome.com/
New-ish, but very promising

http://petroleusepress.com/download
Longer projects


http://andrewkenower.typep​ad.com/
Recordings of live readings in the Bay Area

http://www.drunkenboat.com/
Art & culture


https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter
San Francisco State Poetry Center's Digital Archive

http://ww2.rediscov.com/sacknerarchives/Welcome.aspx
Visual & concrete poetry archive

http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/

HOW2—innovative poetry by women

Memory

8th graders graduated yesterday at my work. A class I was very close to.

Speaking to a grandmother of a student about her husband's recent death; I had sent that student Whitman's Hymn for Death from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd as it'd meant much to me during my mother's passing; esta abuela me dijo: "tu entiendes algo de la perdida" (o quizas me dijo "algo de la muerte"?); I responded with the story of the month between Sonia's birth & my mother's death. Things you can't forget.

I'm going to miss that class.

I found this poem & I can't remembering writing it. Did I write that? Is this poem mine? It's about some of my obsessions, so maybe it is.

& then it was asked—by the air, let’s say—
what do we do, painting pictures, seeking
the abstraction of to be in the contradictions
of the day? Or better: stand & shout. Or
better: make it pretty. Or better: don’t add
to heartache. Or better: tell a story of the
time you spent staring at the time & were
left empty of money, built of money, money
talks so talk more bucks. Better. Insipid to
wish for a home which didn’t bomb homes
with the $ spent to build it. Admit it. Air
asks. Sirens respond. Air empties. Sirens.

Hugs—

Dan

Interview

Taiga's issue T has arrived, and is beautiful. New site for them too, here:

Taiga Journal

I did a short interview for them, as did erica lewis, my collaborator on the piece in the issue—and she has an interview up as well. Check potion!

Interview is here.

Physical iterations

Bound materials & bodies—

Jen Hofer's class at California Institute of the Arts is talking W+S, among other Tiny Press Practices.

Taiga, returned from hiatus, has a new issue that includes a collaborative poem I wrote with Erica Lewis.

TRY, trying out a piece of the Great American Beatjack Vol. I.