Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 22

Dept. of Forgotten Neologisms

"Cafetorium." Forgot it sometime last century—thought it had ceded to "multi-purpose room"—but here it is back in my life. Welcome back, cafetorium.

Thought It Was Gold ...

So I guess it's goodbye now it's over
Nothing much changed we're just older
But if I see you again back in detox
Put my remains in my snuff box.

The New Talkies this Friday, 9/11: San Francisco, de Young Museum

I'll be in San Francisco this Friday, 9/11 to perform my neo-benshi piece for Paul Wegener's German silent, "Der Golem." Jen Hofer, Douglas Kearney & Nicole McJamerson, and Andrew Choate will be up from L.A. to debut new pieces, along with local hero Jaime Cortez, who killed with his election-era Obama-ization of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" last year. If the Bay's in your radius, hope you'll come out. You can find some background on the movie, a troublesome gem, here, here, and here.

The...

The Age of Incompetence 3

One of the things I like best about Kasey's treatment of competence is his proposal of wit as a quality that vaults the poem over the walls of the ordinary while still acknowledging the virtues of the generic. Here's Kasey's initial formulation:

"If it were possible to state the relationship between competence and wit in terms of an equation, it might be something like wit = competence + awareness of the inadequacy of competence. This automatically suggests that irony plays a part in wit. I...

The Age of Incompetence 2

Last time, I wondered if poetic competence is a useless concept right now; if "a baseline level of craft viability," as Kasey puts it in his original post, is no longer necessary or desirable to aim for in poetry. Competence might even be inimical to contemporary ideas of poetic excellence—having one, it would seem, means you can't have the other. The "step beyond competence," as Kasey points out, isn't competence plus a little extra fairy dust. Instead, it jumps off the graduated scale of "...

The Age of Incompetence

Nathan Austin unearthed an antique post of Kasey Mohammad's on poetic competence recently, proving that yes, Virginia, people do read blog archives. And apparently think about them sometimes, too. Nathan's article connects Kasey's suggestion of wit as a contemporary measure of poetic excellence to Arthur Danto's ideas on the state of art after the Brillo Box, Komar and Melamid's post-Soviet paint-by-poll numbers kitsch, and Sianne Ngai's poetics of disgust, which he reads as "the preface to an a

The Lovejoy Columns

The Peaches and Bats 4 launch party in Portland on Thursday flexed poetry's ancient muscle as an aide to Mnemosyne. Jesse Morse used sonnet-length anagrams built from the letters in "Eric Chavez" to restore his favorite Oakland 'A' from the limbo of the injured list to the Elysium of obsessive fan recall, with the caveat I guess that sports heroes are always just magnified analogues for us. Sam Lohmann evoked broken New Year's resolutions and landscapes that incessantly negotiate their own disap

Birth of the Uncool

Thinking lately of the life-preserving traits of Joe Pachinko, mail room chief at the last place I worked in San Francisco. Publisher of Lenore Kandel, author of books with names like The Urinals of Hell and The Incredibly Stoopit Adventures of Granpa Stuped, dispenser of drinks at office events where drinks get dispensed, daily shop floor reminder that soylent green is people. Here's Joe on video in Oakland last year, & reviewed in the East Bay Express. If they ever invent that Trumball Stickne

Elevator Redux

Great post on the SFMOMA blog about the 15-year-old subject in Robert Frank's 1955 Elevator—Miami Beach photograph. Kerouac closed his intro to Frank's book, The Americans, with a remark on this picture:

"And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?"

It's Sharon C., Pac Heights, SF, but no one knew till she saw the picture in the paper this year and rang the museum. You can see a reconstruction of the shot in 2

Synchronicity (BB Edition)

Brandon Brown, who teamed up with Alli Warren to give one of the best readings I've seen this year in Portland, has some great new poems in The Brooklyn Rail. It's one of those cases of knowing and very much liking what someone's been up to for a long time, then watching the roof bounce up a couple feet. Alex Burford's spot-on post about all things Brandon steered me there; I found it just after getting home from Powell's on Hawthorne, where Eileen Myles is talking to the woman in front of me in