Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 16

David Brazil's Spy Wednesday

Spy Wednesday is the hump day of Holy Week, smack in the middle of Christ's Passion, but it also evokes the surveillance and identity protocols that condition dissent in our age of "intense decathexes." The title's a great example of Brazil's allusive dexterity as he plays embedded reporter to himself over the course of a single week involving protest, arrest, breakups and meetups, all set to the rhythm of a witty "call & response across the segment" with Beckett, Melville, St. Paul...

Leslie Scalapino's Zither & Autobiography

Just hit 200 "reviews" of poetry books on Goodreads and don't exactly know why. Partly it's cheerleading, partly compulsiveness, partly the online fun of watching numbers climb. If I arrange them right, I wonder if they'd show a coherent poetics, or a map of friendships and affinities that amounts to the same thing. I'll post some here, for the few who still read blogs between Facebook updates, and who dropped away from Goodreads long ago.

Leslie Scalapino's been on my mind a lot lately...

Su'al (Question)

"And many more poets … still went on halting over the abodes of their abandonment to direct to them their outpour of questions, which, indeed, was like one large, cumulative question, time after time, poem after poem."

—Jaroslav Stetkevych, "Toward an Arabic Elegaic Lexicon: The Seven Words of the Nasib"

Intro for Brandon Downing, Powell's Books, 3/14/10

Here's the intro I gave for Brandon Downing at his Powell's reading in Portland on Sunday.

Brandon Downing is the author of The Shirt Weapon ("You are a blue rat caught/In a black dog's jaws") and Dark Brandon ("Through a discount centre entryway. I come/Into piano spotlight"). He's also the bricoleur veejay genius splicer behind "Dark Brandon/Eternal Classics," a DVD which paradoxically convinced cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling "to pay attention to a poetry movement" again.

I don't think...

Intro for Macgregor Card, Powell's Books, 3/14/10

About 45 pairs of ear turned out to hear Brandon Downing and Macgregor Card at Powell's on Hawthorne Sunday, including those of local poets Gale Czerski, Jules Boykoff, Allison Cobb, Jen Coleman, Donald Dunbar, Emily Kendal Frey, Lindsay Hill, Drew Scott Swenhaugen, Kevin Sampsell, Zachary Schomburg, and Wayne Craig Pernu of Portland lit rock act The Telling. Here's the intro I gave for Macgregor. It missed the secret Dante/Futura font messaging Gary caught, but he did open with some Spasmodi...

"Brandon Downing Is Some Kind of Genius..."

…says The Stranger, and he's hauling the braincase to Portland for two prismatic displays. First, in celluloid form this Saturday, 3/13 with Vancouver BC-ite Reg Johanson & locally grown Jake Buffy for Tangent, then again at Powell's on Hawthorne Sunday at 4 PM, where he reads from his new Fence book with his traveling partner in crime, Macgregor Card. It's a one-stop shot to get your Lake Antiquity and Duties of an English Foreign Secretary from the hands of the genii who wrote them.

Dept. of Permanent Monday

Genghis Blues

"In the eyes of a Mongol they look at themselves like conquerors of the known world, and people around them or under their rule despise them."

Reader's Block

An occasional co-sufferer, I appreciate Chris Vitiello's description of his recent reader's block. Random sample:

is it all butt-sniffing? like, i am showing you my level of craft, and my level of being able to recognize your craft, so that i am legitimized in this context that we are now wrapping around ourselves

Catching up with the whole Delay experience, which it turns out I'd failed to update in my blog roll when it moved, has been a pleasure. New Year's Resolution: keep up with The...

A Lot of D.S.

Graft Sam Lohmann's sharp interview to the beefy feature in Jacket, and you've got a whole lot of David Shapiro in easy-to-read-at-the-workplace online format.