c/c reading 012:

(Monday, February 13th)

Camille Roy

CAConrad

Patrick Lucy

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We are very pleased to invite you to the twelfth c/c reading with three wonderful writers!

Higher Grounds

631 North 3rd Street

Philadelphia, PA 19123 (7:00-9:00 pm)

($5 suggested donation)

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A. DeBoer

Camille Roy is a writer and performer.  Her most recent book is Sherwood Forest, from Futurepoem. Earlier books include Cheap Speech, a play, from Leroy, and Craquer, a fictional autobiography from 2nd Story Books, as well as Swarm (two novellas, Black Star Series), among others. She co-edited Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative (CoachHouse 2005, re-issued 2010). Roy has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University, California State University SummerArts, and Naropa.

CAConrad is the author of A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). He is a 2011 Pew Fellow, and a 2012 Ucross Fellow. He is the editor of the online video poetry journals JUPITER 88 and Paranormal Poetics. You can visit him online at caconrad.blogspot.com

Patrick Lucy lives in Philadelphia where he’s a partner in a small advertising agency. His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, elimae, SKEIN, Revista Laboratorio (translations by Carlos Soto-Román), NOÖ Weekly, Bright Pink Mosquito, Apiary, La Fovea and more. He is a founding member of the New Philadelphia Poets and keeps a blog & ephemeral press at _Catch/Confetti

Well.  The Next Objectivists came and knocked back the birds here in Philadelphia.  In that way, my distinct pleasure comes in tossing out the keepsake of their introductions.

Group Introduction:

‘Can you send me the link information for the Thursday Objectivist workshop?’ That’s all it was. I had spent a year and a half in Chicago, unable to find that primeval connection. I had gotten used to that form of hermitage that exists after trauma. It takes its home in you, like a parasitic grief, that knows that with the right tweaks, you will tumble down and deep into your depression.

This didn’t happen. In the early weeks of October 2009, I found myself 24-hrs without sleep sitting across from people who knew poetry, that took it as space in their lungs. But what was more, they wanted to investigate, they wanted to break down and get intimate with the perusal. It isn’t anything new, this has been going on for hundreds, thousands of years. People get together and talk the talk of the arts. But, I could argue. I could get gruff and stumble into my own thoughts without a lot of clever face dancing and glad-handing deliveries.

Yet, what was really happening was a home was in the pipeline. I mean, that’s the great thing about the human race, we make homes on the fly. We get all dumb with excitement and the next thing you know, you too could already be a Next Objectivist. Founded in January of 2009, the mission is, “to live poetry differently…to resist the increasingly intense pressures to privatize poetic practice that result from & help to perpetuate neoliberal hegemony by doing poetry in ways that were captured by the economy in cultural capital as its being regulated today.” Twice a month the Next Objectivists Poetry Workshop meets, a workshop that has and will ‘insist upon being autonomous, free & open-to-the-public,’ where they investigate the processes of poetry.

And through this they are engage n “an ongoing endeavor to produce a new kind of autonomous poetry.” They have, “poetypists (to) transcribe material given to them by ordinary people at public & semi-public events. Workshop members & the public at large work together to revise the transcribed material into poems which have no individual authorship.”

That’s the import. As Roland Barthes points out, “everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.”

But, hey, that’s how it works. All of a sudden it’s 830 in the morning and you are putting up posters, and setting out typewriters on a conference table, helping create the living oral dialogue into a poetry of and by the people that move in and out of the rooms you’re in. What is so magnificent about the Next Objectivists is the engagement. These are the moving bodies, the poetry of the multitude.

Denise Dooley: I like immediacy. A hit to the body, a register that doesn’t level off right away. Dooley writes, “All night there are wolves at/the door and I wake there are/wolves at the door.” It’s a fever rush, that streak of sweat that aligns itself on your brow and waits to pour salt into the eye. There is this availability, where once you start feeling the line, it starts to deepen its motivations, it starts to aim in like a spy satellite. She writes in Drumtops, “rising black/ant hulls in spill shape/parameter of lost or melted/soda,/still the birds/rioting around it open.” Once I’m in, I can see it, this army of black ants, like a ship hull spilling down and over all the lost places of the concrete sidewalks and they rally around the corn syrup of the soda and above them the birds riot, riot open, preparing. I like immediacy, I like it now. Would you please welcome Denise Dooley.

Adam Weg: A frequency, a pulse, persistence, that wobble and flow over riverbed rocks. The things it touches shoots solid bolts up. Weg writes, “Quote something that hasn’t been said before/between us, so it’s just the two of us, and these/elements of another/volunteered in ten different directions. It’s all being lifted into/eating acid and chips fall, but cover our tracks.” It is the stream gone succinct, moments that feel as though they are my own memories. An attachment, quartering off inside a dusty room of a dying grandparent. Weg writes, “the problem, the/erupting off us/the minute/you attribute it/to memory/although though/it’s my neck that’s/is insane/a memory/the etiquette/we attribute to memory/Now put up his eyes’. I read with a breach of my hull and as the water starts riding into the shell of my body, the memory fractures, fucks up, my lungs fill up with fluid and I’m almost there. Would you please welcome Adam Weg.

Matthias Regan:

It’s all too much. Sometimes. Sometimes you have a lot sitting on your vocal chords. And I do. And I could stand up here and commit to synthesizing, but it would be reactionary without the wares. So, what can I say? Well, if I’m going to belly up, this is an engineer, a maker of countless worlds, the action, not a self-actualizing scribbler, not a hip-fat capitalist, but embodiment of a landscape that he is but one voice, anonymous, a multitude or the heteroglossia. He sees because he has sat long and still enough to know, to be of a poetry from the outside. In Code Book Code, Regan writes, “1 shadow/moved darkest/against the river wall – /some sand blown up/the scene was set:/it’s a neighborhood threat.” A little Iggy Pop strewn over the shadows rolling up against the green rust, sand lost to the design of its storyboard.

In some ways, perhaps, what I’m really aiming at, what I can only scratch the surface of, is that this is the good fight. A place to plant a flag. In Gapers’ Delay: A Harmolodic Essay on Unwanted Acceleration, we find ourselves in a meta-universe collapsing. “Our ashcan life whispers its remorse/in the bitter hours of an afternoon//stalled between the last of the lunch rush/& the earliest the shift manager/will ever let us leave -.” And I guess that’s where I come in, a little gift for Saturday afternoon. Would you please welcome Matthias Regan.

Well, if excitement isn’t the name of the game, then we don’t know what is.  Coming soon:

c/c reading 005:

(Saturday, 4 Jun 2011)

Ariana Reines

Dorothea Lasky

Marion Bell

And with that, we’d like invite you to the fifth installment of the c/c reading series.

Fergie’s Pub

1214 Sansom St

730pm to 930pm

(Free – $5 suggested donation)

Thanks and look forward to seeing you there!

- Jamie Townsend & Nicholas A DeBoer

Ariana Reines is the author of the cow (alberta prize, fence: 2006), coeur de lion (mal-o-mar: 2007, fence: 2011), and mercury (fence: 2011).  TELEPHONE, her first play, was commissioned by the foundry theatre, inspired by the work of avital ronell, and performed at the cherry lane theatre in new york, 2009, with two obies; related performances and talks were featured at the guggenheim museum later that year.  translations include my heart laid bare by charles baudelaire (mal-o-mar: 2009), the little black book of grisélidis réal by jean-luc hennig (semiotext(e): 2009), and preliminary notes toward a theory of the younggirl by TIQQUN (semiotext(e) interventions series: 2012).  save the world, an lp starring lili taylor, is due out this summer.  ariana is new to philadelphia.  sometimes she blogs at YES.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, published by Wave Books, AWE and Black Life. She is also the author of five chapbooks, most recently an educational text, Poetry is Not a Project. Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Laurel Review, American Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Boston Review, and A Public Space, among others. She was educated at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Harvard University, and Washington University. Currently, she researches creativity and education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Marion Bell is a person who lives + reads + writes poems in Kensington, Philadelphia.  She is excited to be reading with two great heroes of the female avant garde.  She is into that.  She is shy but wants to talk to you.

Just a quick drop in the bucket.  Edric Mesmer at Yellow Field recently gave us a nice blurb for con/crescent2. 
Yellow Field, “is a semiannual journal of poetry and commentary collating together the established, emergent & undersung.”  The second issue was just released which included work from Catriona Strang, Karen Pava Randall, Vincent Katz, Nava Fader & Mark Dickinson.

Not to mention, an interview between James Maynard & Edric Mesmer, A letter to the Collator from William Sylvester, Martin Bowen on Spicer’s Editions, Edric Mesmer reporting on Olsonia in Buffalo and Kenneth Warren’s The Deep Pivot of a Curriculum.

I read this on my recent trip to Indiana.  I’m one of those flyers where I think I’m going to die the whole flight, so it was nice to have this on my lap to calm me down.  You can contact the journal through yellowedenwaldfield (at) yahoo (dot) com

Here’s a cover of the most recent issue, which you can click to take you to the Facebook page:

we are proud to announce the release of Denise Dooley’s chapbook: Drumtops.

Denise Dooley hails from Chicago, IL, or where she likes to chill and hang out and be active in things.  She’s a member of the Next Objectivists when she isn’t crafting these bad ass poems, and is currently much more obsessed with prose.  So says the rumors.