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Batch 2 : last updated 14 April 2009
Jared Hayes ♦ Paul Klinger ♦ Arielle Greenberg ♦ Derek Beaulieu ♦ James Cummins ♦ Kaia Sand ♦ Susana Gardner ♦ Emma Phillipps ♦ Juliet Cook ♦ Bonnie Jean Michalski ♦ Kathrin Schaeppi ♦
fromfiftyfarms by Jared Hayes
Designed & Published by Caribou Press (Annie Finch)
Gift economy. Barnyard poems "fromfiftyfarms" for louis zukofsky, for gertrude stein, for gertrude stein, for lisa jarnot, for gertrude stein, for gregory corso, for jack spicer, for william carlos williams, for gertrude stein, for jack spicer, for annie finch, for jack spicer, for gertrude stein, for harry smith...and for you.
Hear de-centered voices in polyglott: “honk.gobble.moo.and a pig sound.” Jared Hayes at Livestock Press tends to his stock of animals by destalling/de(in)stalling them(?). Here livestock roam through poems with great mobility, creativity and amplification.
"are cows sheep the pig / of cock nothing but owl / wolf there rat is yet / what is goat is horse / and chicken is the new"
Alongside this barnyard kollektiv there are also two finches -- Annie Finch, who designed and made this chap and Annie Finch-Brand. Both Finches have illustrated the chap with hand-stamps (all those animal stamps I would love to have).
To feed the animals visit the Barnyard. Gluck Gluck Gluckoogle livestock editions.
The Speaking Parts by Paul Klinger
Designed & Published by Braided Anchors Press
Paul Klinger’s “The Speaking Parts” are poems written in “ropes.” Each poem title refers to a writer: Harryette Mullen, A.R. Ammons, Edgar Lee Masters, Gertrude Stein, Alice Notley, Robert Burns, Samuel Johnson, Charles Bernstein, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bernadette Mayer, William Blake, Margaret Cavendish, Susan Howe, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Bishop.
As Klinger's “ropes” slink down the oblong pages they con/verse with the respective writer.
“brief
comic
timing
clips
of short
mess...
...briefs
who
needs
them
any
how” (p. 6 Gertrude Stein)
“...am I the
needle
am I
aflame
with
the things
I write
or it’s
whatever...” (p. 7 Alice Notley)
“...descriptors
touch but do
not linger...” (p. 4 A.R. Ammons)
The chap in its blue sleeve stamped with blue leaves leaves traces in the front and back matter and on the mind.
Shake Her by Arielle Greenberg
Designed & Published by Jen Hofer & The Panorama Press
One cannot escape being touched by the poetic stories nested within this New England red-barn colored cover.
One is of Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784) leader of the Shakers who founded the faith, seemingly out of a dis for her difficult pregnancies and the traumatic loss of 8 children and a dis for sexual relationships.
One is of a child’s death during the time this story was being written.
One is of a difficult relationship with a mother.
One is of the caring choice of paper, of embossing, of handstitching by Jen Hofer and Madeleine Zygaewicz.
One is of how fingertips rub against the grain, ridges meeting ridges.
One is in the footnotes and how they move from margin to center: “Bonnets of deep indigo and scarlet. Oval boxes of orange, red, yellow. Bright blue linen. Chairs woven with wool. Cloaks in red, cloaks in blue and black, cloaks in plum. Wide wooden floors painted the color of goldenrod, the color of sun.”
One is of how poetry shakes one awake and into altered states.
√¯¯ by Derek Beaulieu
Designed & Published by Default Publishing (James Cummins)
Open a small flat envelope. Find one tiny flat square. Unpack it. Unfold it. Build a cube. Fold layered letters around edges and create a bird. Throw it. It falls. Turn it upside down to become a crab. Raise winged flaps i.e. legs to build a house. Squint to decode writing. Read “For more info go to...” Agree that the writing comes far off the page. Put on desk and shoot paper clips into square root.
Speaking off centre by James Cummins
Designed & Published by livestock editions (Jared Hayes)
“placed / between /context / contest”
James Cummins displaces.
“words meander
upstream
away from any sense of
center”
He shifts awareness. He off-centers. He does it subtly by changing a font size, using a symbol to replace a word, filling a page with white-space (silence) or cramming it with noise. He uses
“always
allll waaaays"
Uptick by Kaia Sand
Designed & Published by Stephanie Young
Kaia Sand merges today’s messages with yesterday’s images.
“am I viewing the past or the future?”
I wonder and Sand says it: “recognition bends.”
Each poem is accompanied by a still frame stamped with “Oregon Historical Society.” Stills from a home-movie shot by a machine shop operator & inventor in the 30s & 40s. What with “a centrigrade uptick—“ ? Too much sun and too little, too little water and too much. Temps (in centigrade and workers) rising.
Sand takes us local close up:
“this is the jeweled among us, water breathers, small smelt
from nearby streams
nearness is knowledge
touching the fish touches back...”
Parallels multiply by powers.
Herso by Susana Gardner
Published by University of Theory and Memorabilia (Nicole Mauro)
Tied with a wine ribbon, stamped with a wax seal, in a black folder lies Herso unbound, unnumbered, on water-marked vanillin sheets. Herso: an heirship in waves.
Here the visual, oratory and conceptual experiences balance. Poems are exquisitely presented on the page, the mouth is awash with rhythmic chorals and the mind enchanted with images.
" 'eh eh eh' — tiny bird — provok-
ing — rara avis — established the need
to memorize this moment — her face..."
***
"by the sea on...
nested sea on...
nets her sea on...
nests the sea on...
by sea on..."
***
“descending as the
sea must seemingly descend
as in its coastal carriage —
each wave wearily catching and
crashing into the next —
a hatching — a harmony or honing
(if you will) of this we this coast
this I — long abandoned – a nest
or home ever as even as it is just —“
Layered, erased, just beyond as in waves tugging at memory, at longing of and for and letting go, and coming and leaving, of sound and silence. Each phrase reaching just after that which has just—
Built, project by Emma Phillipps
Published by necessary press (Cara Benson)
Clad in a textured blue cover, sheathed in a blueprint, bound with nuts and bolts, printed on firm paper this is the material of buildings. A measured angle, dimensions of space, Phillipps’ words are precise and open. Her phrases align along the margins and are sharp as nails.
“Replacing surfaces, covering more though and not
completely flattened. Measured we — there are two.”
“The inside of this (as an action) placing one and then
placing the other over that one, so we can see both but
only one —"
Materials used to build may not always be apparent to the eye.
“Erasure is fundamentally architectural, not merely visual
continuity — like dissolve — function.”
Mondo Crampo by Juliet Cook
Published by Dana Teen Lomax
Red slick cover, remember lightning cramps, blood soaking into white sheets, feel butterflies, fallopian tubes and other things in your belly as you are lead through varied fates of womb, ovary, follicle as they take on a life of their own and rule yours.
"in the street. Drivers thought they were bits of road kill
until they skittered away. 'It did not skitter,' claimed one woman
on the local news. 'It moved like a hairless caterpillar, contracting
at warp speed and I felt a flutter like butterflies in my stomach."
My Glass Terrace the Hinterland by Bonnie Jean Michalski
Published by anUncagededition
Fourteen of Michalski’s poems are framed by lines from Yeats’ Three Things: “Sang a bone upon the shore” and “A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.” Each poem becomes a word-window showing something on the glass, on the ledge, against the pane, near the frame, behind the glass.
"A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.
blends polymer with glass and finds
a durability how the window can angle
out to create a barrier that feels metrical
had the first know tension between
design and outlying use value yet
bad form begot bad form and a token
to place oneself inside of success channels"
The repetitious Yeats’ lines creates a space to engage with each of Michalski's word-windows. These poems, we are told, belong to a larger work—worth waiting for.
Cancer Mon Amour by Kathrin Schaeppi
Published by Winterling Press (Emma Phillipps)
Written between August and December 2008 this narrative runs on and over as it suffocates in fear, frenzy, anguished love for a friend diagnosed with ovarian cancer. In a staccatto-flood collage-narrative connected by dots (pearls, ovaries) and divided by the pause of now (now gone) the mixed-states of a carer surface.
“ ... · tea after chemo · after three days the effects of cortisone wane · then sensing what lies below · then driving to the country to buy hats · making faces at mirrors · several · i bought a brown one · mochabittersweet · tear-soaked crystal sharp joy · ...”