Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 6

The Year in Sports 2010

A thanks to the poets whose work I got to hear in Portland in 2010 (a click also brings up 2007 , 2008 and 2009 .)

Abel, DavidAlexander, Charles
Berrigan, Anselm Bettridge, Joel Boone, Bruce Boykoff, JulesBradshaw, JosephBuffy, JakeBull, Ethan Saul Buuck, David
Cain, AminaCalkins, Jennifer Card, Macgregor Cobb, Allison Coffelt, Bryan Cohen, Alicia
Daniels, Chris Degentesh, Katie Downing, Brandon Dunbar, Donald
Frey, Emily Kendal
Gendron, JamesGlazer, MicheleGraham, K. Lorraine
Hailey, JamaliehHarris, JayeHawkey, ChristianHill, LindsayHirsch, Kate
Inada, Lawson
Johanson, Reg
Kemp, Arnold J.
Larkin, Maryrose Lee, Marshall WalkerLevine, JakeLichtenstein, JesseLohmann, Sam
Mains, JosephMaziar, PaulMittenthal, RobertMorse, Jesse
Nealon, Chris Newton, RyanNufer, Doug
Ore, Pam
Radon, LisaRaphael, DanRoberts, Michael
Sampsell, KevinSand, KaiaSchaefer, StandardSchlesinger, KyleSchomburg, ZacharyShaw, B.T.Svalina, MathiasSwenhaugen, DrewSzybist, Mary
Timmons, MathewTran, StaceyTreiber, Jackie
Wallace, Mark Warsh, Lewis Weiser, KarenWheeler, VandorenWilkinson, Joshua MarieWolach, David
Zolf, Rachel

Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)

With just 12 shopping days left until Christmas, and Kwanzaa fruits about to pass beneath the nation's kinaras, it's high time to announce that the brave elves at OMG! Press have put together a one-stop-shop gift set for the small press poetry lover in your life. 14 bucks gets you a commemorative pen, a bonus CD, and four chapbooks featuring the literary stylings of Joseph Mosconi , David Brazil , Anna Vitale and me, in musical collaboration with America's best-loved Warrens, Diane and Alli .

If you didn't yet know this is Diane Warren's world and the rest of us are just living in it, Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren) , along with the companion The Hits (of Diane Warren) , will show you why Devo's rolled over for Il Divo, and how the Brill Building ended up inside a broody suburban kid from Van Nuys. What better way to say " (You Make Me) Rock Hard " to that special someone in your life? 

from OMG!:
FOUR NEW BOOKS!

WORD SEARCH by JOSEPH MOSCONI for OMG!  Limited edition, 100 copies, commemorative pen (by my reckoning, the only pen with the word  "motherfucker" and  "Creeley" on it.)

MEET ME BENEATH THE WAR ANGELS by DAVID BRAZIL  Limited edition, 100 copies.

ANNA VITALE'S POP POEMS by ANNA VITALE  Hot pink covers, fresh new work by Anna Vitale!

NAMES OF THE HITS (OF DIANE WARREN) by RODNEY KOENEKE / THE HITS (OF DIANE WARREN) by ALLI WARREN  Limited edition, 100 copies of chapbook with text by Koeneke, and compact disc compilation edited by Alli Warren. Let freedom ring.

I'm selling these books! 1 for $5, 2 for $9, 3 for $12, 4 for $14 what a deal! Just tell me which ones you want in the paypal field.

Monday for the Oracle at Delphi

Chicks Dig Kim Jong-Il

News (to me) of this really sort of amazing site compliments of Drew Gardner .

Hang In There.

"... because poetry, like America, is always in danger of being overwhelmed by cat posters."

—Jordan Davis

Turbidity of Rainbows (Writing Gathering Field)

LRSN up and blogging from Cairo.

Sympathy for the Garfunkel

Somehow I missed the magic week at the SFMOMA blog that opened with Dana Ward on Corey Arcangel's editing down of Simon and Garfunkel's 1984 Central Park concert to only the footage where Art's got his hands in his pockets, and closed with Brandon Brown's answering piece on the satanics of Kanye West. Brown pulls a thread through two centuries of "poetry which portends towards devotion to the Satanic," his own days "entrenched in wizardry" in the 1980s, and the "audacious impiety" of Kanye's Twitter pronouncements about his upcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy , while Ward reads angelic Art's "increasingly enigmatic gesture"—boredom? regret? interpresonal friction?—as "a prosody to that which one never knew one desired to know." Art's remarkable "junction of poise and unease" through the concert, as Ward sees it, "speaks to the fragile happiness engendered by every false armistice." I liked this, too:

"[Arcangel's work] reminds me that reverie is the scholarship of unproductive time, and that inquiry undertaken there is hard won and precious and just what the world of work seeks to undo." 

See what can happen when you let poets out of their usual malbolge?

Parking Lot of Terror

The 1977 Gay Sunshine interview included in John Wieners's Selected is an Alp of spontaneous bop prosody, but this weekend at the Brandon Downing reading Sam Lohmann reminded me that Wieners's interlocutor, Charley Shively , gets his licks in too. If you find a better 'poetry of place' question than "How important is geography or the turning of locations into a parking lot of terror?" shout out and let me know.

Brandon Downing in Portland Tomorrow, 8 PM

 Poet, filmmaker, and lacustrine antiquarian Brandon Downing lands in Portland tomorrow to read for Bad Blood.  His videos are here ; an eloquent review by Lucy Ives, with lots of illustrations from Lake Antiquity , is here ; and a great interview with Ben Mirov in BOMB is here . Pop quiz at 7 PM; reading, with a few warm-up poems from me, at 8. Worksound , 820 SE Alder

Lewis Warsh's The Origin of the World

A seasonal time/energy deficit choked off the posts I meant to write on the strong run of readings in Portland lately: David Wolach with a laptop, Rachel Zolf with a Boykoff, Joshua Marie Wilkinson with a banjo, Katie Degentesh with unexpected sunshine, Mathias Svalina with surprise high school buds, K. Lorraine Graham with spangles, Anselm Berrigan with Sebaldliche syntax, Karen Weiser with Swedenborg, Alicia Cohen with autumn leaves, Kevin Sampsell with an SPD tee, Paul Maziar with a Catholic childhood, Standard Schaefer with false purgatories, Mark Wallace with lines for each audience member, Joseph Mains with skillfully held-back feedback, Les Fig with a pet caravan, etc. 

Those reports won't ever get written, at least not by me. But I did manage to write something about the Lewis Warsh books I got in advance of his reading , which I liked a lot. Soft rock and cowbell's bound to sound like a diss out of context; I hope you can hear that it's not. 

Lately, I hear '70s "soft" rock on the radio and wonder at the craftsmanship. It takes a lot of chops to sound that easy-like-Sunday-morning smooth, and measured against the digital wizardry that's come since, the production seems warm and honest, not MOR-slick. Once in a while a sharp bass lick or drum figure bubbles up through the flow, and I picture the studio musicians who gave everything they had to hits that got plenty of airplay, but little critical respect.

Warsh's poems from the '90s work sort of like that lick. You move along absently tapping your toes across the registers—"She drove up to Boston & bought a handbag on sale at Filene's"; "Don't be afraid of hurting my feelings by telling me/you hate me"—then suddenly, a sentence that pulls you up with its subtle vernacular majesty:

"Mansions where executives once lived with their families will
be split into apartments for the families of the workers"

or

"I plant the symbol of order, Neptune's trident, on the opposite
side of the achipelago & set forth under warm skies to a
new terrain, spellbound by the possibilities of the future
& the shadows of the strange birds hanging motionless
on the horizon, but I don't know the name of the boat
I'm aboard—it's like a shadow of some other boat
that went down in the storm of the Isle of Good Hope,
where promises of love were made only to be broken
the next day, where marriage vows were spoken
in the shadows of an empty cathedral, where friends
& relatives gathered to wish you well—could
anyone of them, or you, predict
this spell of cold weather
we've been having recently?"

That last one's from someone who owns a few Ashbery albums, but within the context of the assured, direct, observational comedy-like zingers that surround it, it leaps out with an intensity that's all Warsh's. If second generation New York School is Zappa, and Language poetry's the Sex Pistols, and theory is techno, the poems here remind me that sometimes a reader just needs more cowbell.