I'm Unsure

if it's Lowe or Low; I've read it both ways--but am guessing it's Low?  Purposefully unfixed?
I don't want to disrespect her through incorrect spelling.

T Low

 I like her Hunting Season performance that I just watched at Jacket2.  I don't think I would
want to read it, but it's delicious to watch.  The only bit that fell flat for me is the end--which
makes perfect sense: it's in many ways very much a continuous present mode, so any ending
is bound to ring dully.  It's very artifice-laden, but it does what performance modes almost
never achieve--to register as actual event/eructation, sans script; I didn't know the start was
the start: I thought it was her introductory remarks!  Too often, when I see people read writing,
they seem to act like they're following how they think performance should come off and what one
gets, for me, seems like an imitation of performance rather than performance; hmm, or am I
just detailing how shitty acting ends up?  Anyways, Low's performance doesn't follow this
dynamic.  And Yah, I seem to be privileging reading performance which actually seems like
someone speaking in a way that could even remotely plausibly occur outside that particular
stage scenario.

What I Have Read This Past Hour or So

Frequently, I find author/artist's statements/explanations of their creations tedious/grandiose/self-serving, obfuscating/misleading and, most devastatingly---boring! This is not the case with Monica Youn's essay which regards her poem "Blackacre" which I read a few months ago while at the Barnes and Noble on US 1 in Fort Lauderdale, FL (I love going there for coffee so I can read magazines while I wake up).  I immediately felt/thought the poem terrific: I love thinking of Milton as a poet who makes other major poets look comically minor (in other words, I love thinking of him in rather cartoonish figurations) and "Blackacre" writes not through nor over  but rather with Milton's sonnet "On His Blindness," a poem I'm not even an idolater of.  And now having just read Youn's exegesis, I know what Blackacre means, and that the poem stems/circles around the fact that she was infertile.  This makes amazing sense once she's written to me, but I totally never imagined that subject when I was happily going through/with it at B and N.

I also read #Actual Asian Poets, a collocation of homages up at Literary Hub.  I find this to be exciting in terms of the general cultural contours it creates, but not (with a few exceptions) cognitively engaging in any specific way: mostly it reads to me like an anthology of blurbs.  Perhaps quite contradictorily, I ADORE blurbs, so don't mean to cast undue aspersion.

Finally, I read Mia You's essay-at the Poetry Foundation blog--regarding her pregnancy and specifically her attempt to establish what constitutes being in labor--what timeline most accurately contours the experience.  I love this piece.  Most notable, for me, is that it is--though ultimately the work documents markedly difficult realities--quite funny in places, and I sense that I as reader have been led to carry this response due to You's fully intended effort.

Quoting a Plum--or Perhaps Chestnut--by Joshua Corey

Here's a funny allusion to F O'Hara by Joshua Corey in his poem "The Barons":

"I think I’ll buy a malted for the writers in Ghana these days"

--New World Writing indeed, lol.

Cynthia Cruz

Below is a response I just posted regarding a poignant sentence in Cynthia Cruz's essay "On 'Amy' and 'Ex Machina' up at Hyperallergic:

adam strauss • 8 minutes ago

This registers to me as terribly accurate: "At this point in our culture, in order to simply enter the conversation, a woman must pass certain basic aesthetic standards." For me, the crucial term here is "basic"; it's great to read someone who recognizes that aesthetic enfranchisement more overwhelmingly exists at this basic requirement level rather than the rarefied hyper conventionally attractive strata. My question is--can this reality be other than dead-end? If there are basic aesthetic requirements to enter public discourse (hello to the fact that so many public feminists are totes normatively attractive), then women have to be complicit--and so this theoretically means that resistance--refusing to do the unmarked and assumed labor of intensely grooming ones' self and in the process reproducing the notion that a natural woman is hairless in all the "right" places, etc--is rendered ineffective. My unrealistic answer is this: the more humans embrace the human part of the identity human--and not the infinitely more powerful male/female pinch-hits--then the more likely it is that world-views produce more parity in terms of minimal aesthetic requirements. If there is no freakishly sedimented notion of men to embody contrast to via the hellaciously sedimented notion of women, then hopefully the humans formerly bonded by being women (I am working via the warrant that women and men are linguistic realities that should not be seen as identical to human organisms and their chromosomal characteristics) could relax the physical self-disciplining. Or of course everyone could just end-up having to meet new crazy high aesthetic standards for what it takes to be a public human.

From "Grief Abstracts," Julie Carr (Boston Review, 2009). I love how, despite being a prose-poem, and somewhat fragmented, Hopkins' timbre rings clear:

Grief of fire in its final flash and
                                smolder. The weight of her speaks spark’s brief ire become ash,
                                                                                                                                    become
ruinous food full of dolor. To recall her laughter is to grow older. Fear’s rife in
this filial order. If molded, I’m fodder for air, and I’m colder. Since I lost her I
stored her like ore in my form as if later I’d find her, restore her.

Here, too, are some lines from Joyelle McSweeney's Contagious Knives (excerpt from the Poetry Society of America):

Devil (to Swan, amiably)

Have you heard the buzz?
Each screen is hot with it, each watch and pocket.
How the kid enlistee cowers in the dumps
He looks like this one, narcissistine,
Stripped naked, as he's a threat to himself
on a very high level!
His name is Bradley Manning.
He's a puppet and a larva, a pupa, and a ghost
A ghost orchid, moth, I mean a goat.
If we were tragedians
we'd play his slit throat,
We'd play the ghost pipe, the bag & faggot,
the bundle of bees. On my bundle of knees.
But alas we're only tatties, falsies
we live in glass bottles
we report and you decide, deicide. 

I particularly like "play his slit throat"--"play" makes for such a wonderfully sinister verb-choice!  And the "goat"/throat" rhyme totally echoes this amazing moment in Elizabeth Bishop's "Crusoe in England," a poem I LOVE:

"But then I’d dream of things  

like slitting a baby’s throat, mistaking it   

for a baby goat."

 

Bishop's lines are actually quite a bit more sinister: with McSweeney's poem one is clearly in the realm of play (and this work is from a drama!)--albeit that which is deadly serious. 

 

Finally, I dig JM's "we'd play the ghost pipe, the bag and faggot."  In this line, fire--bonfire of the vanities?!--burns, sends its smokes, its signals, and limns--ghosts--bag-pipe and the smoking body of a Gay man under immolation.  Smoke as like ghost--that makes sense to me.  And, too, the spectral bag-pipe makes sense: surely sucking--"blowing"--cock could be deemed akin to playing that gutsy instrument.

 

 

  

After a bit more leafing through other Hyperallergic pieces, I am fortunate enough to meet this bit of absolutely awesome--an interview with a photographer and documentary maker named Zanele Muholi:

Depicting an Existence So Far Violently and Blaringly Erased

• by Claire Breukel on January 17, 2012