Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 11

Dept. of Monday (Summer Guest Edition)

Uncles from Kansas don't like yellow glasses.

Gustaf Sobin's Luminous Debris

Still on this. (The rest live under "books.")

Sobin's Collected Poems just came out with Talisman House. His career gets an old-skool-thoughtful treatment by its editors, Andrews Joron and Zawacki, in the latest Jacket. Luminous Debris is a smart, moving throwback to the era of amateur archaeologists and Victorian belle-lettrists, with their "delectable valleys" and "fanciful curves" and Romantic attachments to their data sets. For all his hostility to our placeless postmodern global...

The New Newer Metaphysicals

Good to see Nicholas Manning up and blogging again, only this time from London.

Star Studies

Giant thanks to Tom Fisher and Sam Lohmann for being last night's first, brave iteration of the Habsburg Lipps. Good hearing work by Erik Flores and remarkable solo guitar from Dave Bow, whose songs carried some of the charge of Oregon's own Tim Hardin. Enjoyed meeting Cheyenne Glasgow, too. Got home past 11 to spot the fire-twirling troupe who practices for Burning Man in the park near my house. This spring they were marching through a thin steady rain, hoops and wands unlit. Last night they...

"Pretty Sweet Line Up, Kidnap Lovers"

I'll be reading some poems this Tuesday, July 27 with local fictioneer Erik Flores for July's installment of If Not For Kidnap Poetry. On top of sonic surprises by musician/Portland Mercury contributor Dave Bow and photographs by Cheyenne Glasgow, you can catch the debut of my new poetics percussion ensemble, The Habsburg Lipps. Here's the announcement from Jamalieh and Donald:

July brings you a pretty sweet line up, Kidnap lovers. Poet Rodney Koeneke and fictioneer Erik Flores. You will also...

Out of Office Reply (Informal)

Peaches and Bats Noon Saturday

I'm reading poems with Joseph Mains and dan raphael this Saturday, July 10 at 12 noon at St. Johns Booksellers, next to St. Johns Farmer's Market in North Portland. It's the launch for Peaches and Bats #6, the Portland-based poetry zine edited by Sam Lohmann, who'll read some work by contributors who can't be there.

Peaches and Bats is one of those hand-sewn, handheld lit delivery devices that was supposed wither with the rise of the Internet, but keeps putting out blooms (Try!, Mrs. Maybe, ...

Fourth of July

"But his creative contributions to the insurance business could hardly have been made so successfully later if he had not had this early familiarity with the basis of insurance theory. He was at home with it from the first because his devotion to Emersonian doctrine led him to see, in the truths revealed by statistical averages, the expression of the Universal Mind, operating in the experience of many individuals."

—Henry Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music

"Come Into My Amazing Yard"

BOMB does Brandon Downing.

Line Misread from a Sara Larsen Poem in Mrs. Maybe

"IN A RICH MAN'S HOUSE THE ONLY PLACE TO SIT
is in his face"

—Sara Larsen, from "2 Poems from The Hallucinations," Mrs. Maybe 3 (except with SPIT for SIT)