David Wolach's Blog

Learning to write lefty.

And to peck
at the keys like
a poet.

The political consequences of the shift. Minutely felt as they are...

Many thanks to The Rumpus editors, as well as poet and reviewer David Peak, for publishing a kind, insightful review of Occultations. I was alerted to the review by friends, and reading it offered me new insight into what the hell I was or was not doing. The close reading is gracious and welcomed. Thank you!

Such wonderful poets have new books out. I will now have to wait till teaching in New York is over to see these new works (each of which I've read parts of, and have deeply been affected by):

--Susana Gardner's Herso - Black Radish Books // finally Gardner puts down her amazing book arts talents, others' manuscripts, and releases this difficult, spectral, book of poems.

--Sarah Mangold's An Antennae Called the Body - Little Red Leaves Textile Editions // I love LRL, the work they publish and the time they put in curating works. I also love Mangold's work, have for several years ever since reading Household Mechanics. Can't wait to read this book.

--C.J Martin's Two Books - Compline // Speaking of LRL editors, Martin's work has had an enormous impact on my thinking and writing. One of the most well kept secrets in contemporary poetry (well, not for much longer). And to wit, Michael Cross's new press (hot damn!) has published the book. That's celebratory.

--Carlos Soto-Roman's Philadelphia's Notebooks - Otoliths // I'm super excited about this. Speaking of well-kept secrets. At least here in the US. Whereas in Chile and elsewhere, Carlos Soto-Roman's work has been widely circulating. This work is bound to be....


Philadelphia's Notebooks (book)Print: $14.95Carlos Soto-Román writes from the center of Empire with a sense of play (game pieces included) and clinical examination. His book is the work of an artist/world citizen who critiques the daily interrogations that come with being a new immigrant. The fun fact that Ellis Island was greatly expanded with landfill in the late 19th -early 20th century provides a basis for Soto-Román's signage marking poetry's place in a disposable culture. There are workbook exercises that encourage creative ways to answer the calls for loyalty oaths with a demand for radical possibility the host country includes in its PR material. This work also includes what the USA brand doesn't advertise—isolation and moments of utter despair. It is a truly American poem in that it's internationally inflected, from George Perec to German cinema to self-immolators from all over the world. "Philadelphia's Notebooks" could not be a more artful and timely reminder that "Every heart is a revolutionary cell."—Frank Sherlock

--Oh, and here's a photo of my grandparents Alimelech and Tzivia (Kazakhstani). According to my aunt, they were active leftist revolutionaries, until one or both were swept up in one of the region's pogrom's.

Recommended, two in-depth interviews with two fabulous poets/editors:

--the intrepid rob mclennan asks 12 or 20 questions of Marthe Reed's work. Her Black Radish title Gaze was the press's first. The book continues to stun me whenever I read it or part of it, disrupting my sententially mediated life.

--Jennifer Bartlett, a poet and editor I've long admired, is interviewed by Michael Northern for the current issue of Word Gathering. Among her other work, Bartlett and Northern discuss Beauty Is A Verb, a wonderful, diverse anthology of disability culture/post-abelist-related poetry they plus Sheila Black have edited, and which is forthcoming from Cinco Puntos in September.

From SPD, so you can if you desire go back to the site and order, below is info on the release of Carrie Hunter's long-awaited The Incompossible. Another incompossible title from Black Radish Books, turning out beautiful works at a remarkably steady pace. I had the pleasure of proofreading/editing an early draft of this book, and I agree with Conrad (below): the work is haunting, language made strange and close reading made procedural -- where procedural here is redacted by the reading's output: short prose poems linked by the theoretical magic of the senses, and by a dystopianism that one can revel in and "reverse."



The IncompossibleCarrie HunterPublisher: Black Radish BooksPubDate: 6/7/2011ISBN: 9780982573136Binding: PAPERBACKPrice: $15.00Quantity Available: 44Pages: 120 Add to CartPoetry. "Every once in a while there's a collection of poems that cancels my way of thinking for a better way. Carrie Hunter's THE INCOMPOSSIBLE divines 'The decapitated head of Lack.' Over and over she does this, 'To say we are reversed now.' She admits, 'I can see you and see through you' and those superpowers are invoked by the reader only through the reading, a gouged track in the soil of our minds for the trickling, soon rushing images renewing our senses. Thank you for the superpowers, thank you for the poems of the new mind"—CAConrad.

Author Hometown: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA



About the author: Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the now defunct Poetics program at New College of California and edits the small chapbook press ypolita press. She is the author of several chapbooks, including Vorticells (Cy Gist Press), Kine(sta)sis (Dusie), The Unicorns(Dusie), A Musics (Arrow as Aarow), and Diary (Dusie). She lives in San Francisco. 

Reviews:
ypolita press

Been quiet here, here I mean.

Reason: lost function of my hands, or "these hands" -- so, more walking, less writing.

But much has happened in here (let alone simpliciter) since my last post. It's gotten to the point at which I need peck at the keys:

--Woke up a couple days ago to find that Tarpaulin Sky Press selected Hospitalogy and Claire Donato's Burial (I'm keen on this title combo) as their Fall 2012 titles. I'm thrilled to work with Christian Peet and all at TSKY, and am honored to have had this title selected, especially as situated among such beautiful books & authors as company (see the shortlist). Thank you, TSKY eds!

--Great to see CA Conrad when he came out here for a short reading tour. Spent the day eating chocolate  and various organic chips. The reading at SPLAB (Seattle) was spectacular. Conrad's new poems, book forthcoming, are gorgeous. And would like to point folks to the Jupiter 88 Special edition, commemorating Allen Ginsberg for his birthday, with several poets discussing their first interactions with Ginsberg or his work.

--Also many thanks to Conrad for doing a Jupiter 88 issue of me reading from Hopsitalogy. I love that Planet!

--Just got the complimentary issue of the new Aufgabe (10) in the mail. As usual: big, beautiful, awesome poetry, art, and review--with a special section of French poetry in translation, edited by Cole Swenson. Awesome. Huge thanks to E. Tracey Grinnell, Julian Brolaski, & Paul Foster Johnson for putting together a must-read.

---Wonderful time on the road, teaming up with Eleni Stecopoulos at Evergreen (where she read with the amazing David Abel - awesome night, packed room), then to Philly, reading and doing a performative "interview" for the new c/c reading series curated by Nicholas DeBoer & Jamie Townsend. It was very much like (as it always is) coming home. Great to see CA Conrad, Debrah Morkun, Carlos Soto-Roman, and many other wonderful human creatures... Eleni read from some beautiful new work--spare and jagged--and from Armies of Compassion (Palm Press), one of my favorite books of all time...

--Read a week later with Sam Truitt and Maryrose Larkin at the KSW. Many thanks to kind, fantastic Jordan Scott, Kim Duff, and Cris Costa. And to those who participated in the evening. Too short a stay, as usual, but left feeling sure about returning soon. Sam read in Seattle for an Evergreen/Seattle Poetry team-up, via poet/curator Will Owen, and we had a lovely evening.

--Discovered Rob Halpern's forth. Music for Porn now has a page at Dartmouth's Press. Exciting. Soon. Nearly imminent!

Wax Buffet:  Double Book Launch
Robert Mittenthal   *   Wax World  *  Chax Press
Donato Mancini    *   Buffet World   *  New Star Books

with film from  Brandon Downing
Tuesday 3 May 8pm
Gallery 1412
1412 18th Ave (just north of Union)

First, many thanks to Rob Halpern, Thom Donovan, and Eleni Stecopoulos--whose poetries and critical writings, social engagement and radical pedagogies a la participation in Nonsite Collective--I am deeply indebted to. Indebted in the sense of communis--the reciprocal gift, i.e., receiving and giving care--that perhaps needs occur for an ethical sociality, a common body to emerge from, and as alternative to, the rubble of neoliberalism. Rob and Eleni respond to Thom Donovan's questions as part of Donovan's ongoing series at Harriet regarding a poetry of/from "somatics." Rob and Eleni give several of us--among countless others they note can be named--mention with respect to the question of what somatics might mean as set of practices, as set of common and yet importantly overlapping investigations and collaborations. Thom's work here, like the engagements I've been part of, perhaps, is shaped by critical interaction and participation in other media, as well as broader social concern. For me, from labor organizing alongside participating in auditory and acoustic live performance, gestural and live art--and from years of living with "disability" as defined by an ableist culture. For Thom, I suspect, and related--thru his engagement with dance and the visual arts, contemporary conceptual and land artists. And I think Thom and I probably both felt that Rob's opening remarks (followed by other gorgeous ruminations by he and Eleni) registered deeply. From Rob:

To be honest, Thom, I don't know what "somatics" means. And if "somatics" means something to me and my work, this can only be because it has some collective resonance, if only as a provisional frame of loose reference for investigating together the relationships between body, language, and social space. Somatics seems to be about working collaboratively in a range of areas to link very different practices by way of some shared concerns around embodiment: from poetics to choreography, psycho-geography to medicine, body work to translation, community history to political militancy.

Prior to publication of the interview with Rob, I emailed Thom about, I believe, his first post at Harriet regarding somatics, what I too take to be a constellation of becoming social relations and direct and indirect collaborations, not a term or field--an emergent set of rather diverse responses to what amounts to a crisis of the living: aesthetic practices that nonetheless all house within them the poison seeds of disembodiment, erasure, obsolescence, and violence upon this construction called the body. I emailed Thom thanking Thom for what I felt he was crucially getting to as part of these Harriet posts, and importantly thru interview, problems of discourse somatics begins to confront, or come into tension with, discourse in the sense of sedimentation, fixity, taxonomy, expertise, locality, and potential devaluation, via, rather than "return" to the body in CAConrad's sense (which is a finding of infinite excess and a social relation), a referent for something like a universal singular--something, as Stecopoulos notes, could resonate as replacement for or analog of "voice," hence, enclosure.

Related, lurking here is always (for me) a blurring of the important distinction between "a body" and "the body." I've wondered also about those of us who seek to articulate that heteronormative blurring, deconstruct it, and then reconstruct it on other terms--a project of gender negation. At what point does "somatics"--as term denoting a multitude of practices, as it stands--potentialize that blurring but also potentialize  occluding or precluding it, making of "a body" a sort of tradable good, an articulated (even designated) membrane beginning to harden contra lived relations and their unavoidable contradictions (and high stakes)? Thom, Rob, and Eleni, I felt, help address for me the complications and contradictions of bodies in searching contact in this regard. And of course so have so many others--those souls Rob and Eleni write about (David Buuck, Brenda Iijima, CAConrad, Brandon Brown, Amber DiPietra, Robert Kocik, Daria Fain). Something Rob writes I think warrants a great deal of lingering on:

So much has been made of "the body," and yet it feels as though it's always about to become a bland fetish, a hygienic fixture, an allegorical trope, rather than a set of messy stakes and real consequences. Brian Whitener and I were talking about this on Sunday afternoon at the "Movement, Somatics, and Writing" Symposium. What is not being talked about when we talk about "the body"? Whose body? Can it ever be definite? Can it ever be singular? Brian was referring to false intimacy, and the porousness of skin, and I was thinking about our vulnerability to penetration—be it by flesh, prosthetic, or bullet—and an unsettling line at the limit of Music for Porn: "My cock hardens in a soldier's wound."

Rob importantly locates some of these practices that have been called "somatics" within a concretized (as well as future-anterior) social frame of "messy stakes and real consequences," later quoting both MLK from his "Letter" and Bruce Boone from his Century of Clouds.  The immediate complicating of meaning and practice here with concrete stakes is, it seems to me, to "confess" to the vulnerability we have with one another and to discourse, to "confess" perhaps to the discomfort of unwitting, inevitable, or potential complicity in the mechanisms of identity reduction (to commodity and to the obsolete) that "somatics" emerges from, where to make visible always has tactical downsides (I think here of Dean Spade's "Trans Law On a Neoliberal Landscape" as a treatment of the militancy of relative invisibility, its power as organized and cloaked counter-intelligence--"under cover of darkness.").

Enriching Rob's important acknowledgment of the contradictions and stakes of real bodies, Eleni's remarks register, for me, a malleable framework for thinking about bodies and bodies thinking us anew (as our senses become theorists and conversely) that I take to be crucial for we who seem, at this moment, to be collaborating:


 Recently the poet Patrick Durgin asked, "Is 'somatics' the new voice?" I thought this was a very interesting question because it raises the implication that poet-critics who invoke the term may be turning to the body for the same reasons that voice gets valorized—for uniqueness, authenticity, immediacy—the metaphysics of presence. But for me, the answer is "no." Because my sense of somatics ultimately leads me away from the individual body and toward the interdependence we learn from disability culture, the microcosm and macrocosm we learn from Chinese medicine, where the individual body is always porous to the whole, toward environmental medicine where the highly sensitive prefigure the condition of the oikos—as I once heard Mei-mei Berssenbrugge say, "we're not the aberration but the vanguard."
I don't look to the somatic for authenticity, but rather native estrangement. In a Poetics of Healing colloquium I curated with physicians and poets on the subject of listening, the medical historian and emergency medicine physician John Tercier said something that has stayed with me: "Poetry is language made strange, language that draws attention to itself. In illness the body is made strange. One of the things that privileges poetry [as therapeutic] is that there's a certain relationship between the body made strange and language made strange." But also I would say that in illness the body recognizes itself as strange. And in healing as well. One's body becomes other, in the sense of care—you have to care for yourself as an other, or allow yourself to be cared for, which is also a kind of care. It's the way that "therapy" derives from therapeutes, the attendant, the one who waits on you, serves you, treats you in the drudgery and abjection that sickness brings—treats you without any certitude, without knowing whether you will be cured. Lately I think it's precisely in this labor—this experiment in the dark, this art of composition in real time—that the poetics of healing lies.

Here's to these labors, and to three writers, and their/our countless friends, for whom the stakes are too high to allow for common sense to be anything more or less literal than it is: to sense commonly, which can only come thru "this experiment in the dark," a lived relation vulnerable to estrangement, a "strange" thing, paradoxically emerging from dissensus, ultimately from ruptures in Common Sense. Messy and real.

This is truly exciting. Many of us have loved and been fascinated by Stephen Vincent's "haptics," drawn energy grids of event cum hand & body, and in May Stephen's work will open in New York. The details are below, stolen from Stephen's blog. A congrats. And a thanks again for his two haptics he sent me, from readings/discussions in the Bay the past couple times I was out there. Check out the blog, too. Especially if you are not in/around NYC in May.


I am pleased to announce a new May show of my drawings and unique accordion fold books at the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York. If you are in the City during May, I will be delighted if you can check out the works! I will be there for the opening weekend and Reception. 
Gallery Details:Friday, May 06 – Saturday, May 28 2011
Reception, Sunday, May 08,
6 – 8 pm
(Gallery will be open both Saturday & Sunday, 11 – 5; it is Gallery Week in Tribeca!)Jack Hanley Gallery, 136 Watts, New York, NY 10013 (Tribeca)
http://www.jackhanley.com/show.php?sh...(For directions to the Gallery, etc.)

Please check out the new addition to Thom Donovan's Others Letters. DiPietra and Leto's collaboration is fascinating, gorgeous. I love the intersection of collage, epistolary poem (lyrical and terse), private and public here, body and repetition, body and struggle, body and machine. From Thom's announcement of the installment:

"When you have a chance, please check out this excerpt from Amber DiPietra's and Denise Leto's wonderful "epistolary poem,"Waveform, now up at Others Letters:

http://www.wildhorsesoffire.org/index.php?/archive/amber-dipietra--denise-leto/

Others Letters publishes the correspondences of contemporaries--especially those articulating problems in contemporary practice--on an ongoing basis. 
If you have letters or email you'd like to share, by all means do so! I would love to hear from you....

Hope all are well,--Thom"

Richard Lopez contributes a generous review-close reading of James Maughn's startling The Arakaki Permutations, now out from Black Radish Books. Check out the book and review HERE.

Richard Lopez contributes a generous review-close reading of James Maughn's startling The Arakaki Permutations, now out from Black Radish Books. Check out the book and review HERE.

*

Also, check out Thom Donovan and Rob Halpern's commons questionnaire, prompts about commoning both used for an ongoing collaborative manuscript and that Thom releases over at Harriet with the hope of hearing your responses. Really interesting/fascinating work that Rob, Thom, and others have been working on since at least as early as 2007 and that formed into a suite of events/curriculum over at Nonsite Collective last summer, events which included talks/discussions by myself, Thom, and Elliot Anderson.