Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 23

Works and Days

Managed to see read in a single week Eric Baus, Graham Foust, Crag Hill, Lauren Levin, Eileen Myles, Douglas Rothschild, and Jared Stanley. Dug and Crag addressed a BBQ from the Cobb/Coleman victory balcony, tossing down late Creeley and Theogony like the revolution's confetti. Lauren and Jared stunned a happy hour bar crowd into submission using only great shoes and a mike. Graham and Eric brought out the youth like I rarely see them for poetry here, which sparked the distressing reflection t

Cocaine

Jeremy Prynne's reading of "Cocaine" makes Wieners's poem sound like the tradition it's so anxious to get into. In Wieners's reading, it's anxiety that drives the situation—the anxiety to be a poem overlaps with the desire to hold an unloving lover. The poet might get the one—a "real" poem—but never the other: poetry as compensatory cocaine.

Prynne reads like the dealer whispering yes you can have your coke and eat it, too. It's like listening to that animating tension of American lit—to out-Engl

Sortes Virgilianae (Puppets of Sentiment)

Opening library books at random as a means of work avoidance pulls up little opals like this:

"If we should laugh at and insult the memory of the Puppet, we should be laughing at the fall that we have brought about in ourselves, laughing at the Beliefs and Images we have broken."

—E. Gordon Craig, 1912

Jessica Grace Wing

Thinking this weekend of Jessica Wing, who wore spidery shawls against the hot campus sun, covered "Groove Is in the Heart" outside the grooveless grad dorms, and died of colon cancer five days before her 32nd birthday, in 2003. The cancer part I learned about only after the Internet, where now there's a Wikipedia page, an official site, and a New York Times review of "Lost," the Hansel and Gretel musical she completed a month before she died. This post is a breadcrumb trail.

avin a larf

Lesley and I are on a lethal late-summer cocktail of U.K. comedies—Saxondale, Yes, Minister, The IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, even a little (forgive me) Father Ted—which is maybe why I stood to attention at this (best if read in interior voice of Alan Partridge):

"Humor is therefore not a rhetorical leavening of one's message. It is the best evidence of the door to the source being left wide open."

On the same tack, good to see student of Britain Johnny Clay and his band, The Dimes, trai

Sustained Decay

Got to see Andy Vogt's installation in the back of Adobe Books earlier this month; I like how Eric Heiman connects it to San Francisco's recent history today on the SFMOMA blog:

"Since the economic boom of the late 1990s, the architectural landscape of San Francisco has changed dramatically. Never have so many high-priced residential buildings sprouted up to fill the foggy sky, and this current recession has only temporarily slowed the gutting renovations of many existing homes. Just the existenc

Weekend Readings

Attractive run of readings in Portland this weekend, Thursday through Sunday, to round out an exceptionally active August. I'll be at three of the four, but haven't yet figured out the fourth. People keep mentioning how much poetry activity has picked up here over the last few years. It'd be interesting to put together a list of the poets who've moved or returned here, new series launched, and the increase in writers passing through town to read since, say, 2003 or '04. Of course other poets mo

Weekend readings

Weekend readings

Thank You, Lauren Levin

"To draw an arrant fop from top to toe,
Whose very looks at first clash shew him so;
Give him a mean, proud garb, a dapper grace,
A pert dull grin, a black patch cross his face."

Pepys's Patches

Not Poetry, Poetics, or Portland, but help me out people with a little Pepys. In his diary entry for 14 May 1660, he notes Dutch ladies of fashion wearing "black patches." By August, he's pleased to see his wife with them; in November he writes:

"The Princess Henrietta is very pretty, but much below my expectation; and her dressing of herself with her hair frizzed short up to her ears, did make her seem so much the less to me. But my wife standing near her with two or three black patches on, and