It was such a privilege to host Rachel Levitsky and Valerie Mejer for c/c003 on Saturday May 7 to discuss issues of translation around Rachel’s essential book NEIGHBOR. Below is a transcription of the intro I gave toward the event’s focus:

On the 2nd of April, 2011, we had the distinct pleasure of introducing Julia Bloch, CJ Martin and Rob Halpern for c/c002.  Below is the text of those introductions.  Audio from event forthcoming.

OPENING REMARK: “the sound described as ‘dangerous’ was in fact merely unknown.  It had all the easily divisible patterns but also different ones, whose function it was their hope and glory, a tight-lipped vigilant ranging across a terra of hard dark shadows, to eliminate.” [George Albon, "Cosmophagy" Empire Life, 67) [JT]

JULIA BLOCH: There is a way, an obsession in my own work, where I want to capture natural light.  It’s the fleeting impulse of color that stretches at dusk, what photographers call the ‘golden’ or ‘magic hour’.  This is the dialog, or at least where I’d like to come in, for in Julia’s work, there is identification, a curious linger.  She writes, “Shopping lights string the street/under a grayly, darkening sky” … or … “Diffracting you gently/as you spill some ash/on my skirt”.  The work is adjusted, unfiltered, filtered, a set of apertures flit with soft and hardening grays, a proximity to your self that knows.  When I read Julia’s work, I slow down, finding myself in line with her senses, sketching out the hairs of my arms standing up.  In The Selfist, she writes, “The narrow fortune, this/hand in absentia.  Descent/or any kind, plus ascent.  I feigned a story but it’s/all mine, all my mouth.”  I wonder then, if the perception I have is narrow enough to be a fortune, if the hand on the pillow is really there.  Is the suffering of my natural life, just a descent matching its ascent.  Within each line and flex, I hope to find out, if I too can see that space, as she does.  Please, let us welcome, Julia Bloch. [ND]

CJ MARTIN: CJ Martin is here (huzzah!) — here in Philly, here in the CITY (spelled large, as Olson would say), which is really any city, the space his beautiful Vigilance Society chap explores as a conglomeration.  In the first issue of ON: Contemporary Practice, Andrew Rippeon aptly describes CJ’s work as a ‘poetics of the pile’.  After reading and thinking through CJ’s arresting, thorny lyrics I have personally amended that description to a ‘poetics of the compost heap’; I know that it doesn’t immediately sound like it but I mean this is the most most flattering way possible (especially as someone who tries to plant, till, and grow in the CITY).  Over the phone and through online chat CJ has talked with me (bearing my standard ADD style) effortlessly and eloquently on everything from Kurt Schwitters and Alvin Lucier to parenting practices, cross-species linguistics, and the political import of noise.  Reading CJ’s work and speaking with him over these last 6 months has radically shifted and refocused my conception of poetic assemblage methods; of deep reading and annotation as a discipline, a way to approach the poem through a measure of actual experience and honest living.  I think it’s vital for us all, especially those of us who endeavor to write, to recognize that ‘composed’ is just a short step away from ‘compost’ and, really, one of the most honest and self-effacing (or actualizing) ways to approach the “composition” of a poem is to let the materials of it, and their natural correspondences (being adjacent to or on top of/beneath, etc) create their own, life-giving, nutrient-rich loam.  Language as active notation of living in the heap of reality, without the ragged edges stamped down. And when something roots itself in or shoots through, when a form of growth begins, it is not through a measure of our will, but, perhaps instead, a sign of our care. Please welcome CJ Martin. (JT)

ROB HALPERN: There have been a lot of things said about Rob Halpern’s writing recently and for good reason (it’s made it daunting for me, as an admitted huge fan to express its effects in a way that seems unique and genuine). I think over the past couple years we’ve really seen the impact and influence Rob’s beginning to have on a whole generation of writers in regards to redrawing those lines around what is “sayable”, in fact what is “necessary”, in verse today. As a writer of cross-genre work, and I use this term in the sense of finding connective tissues, semi-permeable membranes stretching between seemingly entrenched and self-contained schools of thought (here I’m thinking specifically of Rob’s excellent essay “Restoring ‘China’” (Jacket) where he carefully examines the complex intersections of language poetry and new narrative in regards to community concerns), Rob has facilitated the kind of vital exchange between different (and often estranged) modes of writing, necessary toward building and sustaining artistic solidarity. Plus there’s the sheer beauty, depth, and range of his work; shifting from a variety of rich narrative verse & constrained intertextual explorations of the body as a socio-political product in “Rumored Place” & “Imaginary Politics”, to the tightly wound, yet endlessly unfolding paratactical verse of Snow Sensitive Skin” w/ Taylor Brady, to “Disaster Suites”, where to sing out into a starless night becomes both a method of self-location and erasure. In short Rob always brings us the body’s mind — the mind, in all its furious and sublime mobility as a body part; integrated, inclusive, unseparated. At the recent “Somatics, Movement and Writing Conference” in Michigan Rob presented a somatic exercise where he asked participants to “Imagine an architectural structure” then “Within that imagined space as it appears in yr sensorium, imagine an organ from within yr own body” — when I think about Rob, as the vital participant in poetry’s movement forward (into whatever comes next) that he is, I imagine both a brain and a heart in this room, seamlessly pirouetting together. Please welcome Rob Halpern. (JT)

We here at con/crescent are very excited to post some poems by our friend Geoffrey Olsen.  Recently, we were both quite pleased and lucky to find ourselves critiquing and really investing some time in his work.  So much so, that we’d like to offer you .pdf’s of Mr. Olsen’s work, and our two responses to it.

Here is a brief excerpt from Olsen’s Not of Distends*Address Panicked, followed by a .pdf for download:

.         blue wrapping our
.           blue wrapping around

.      avoiding seeing
.          them folding it seeks
.                   return
.             to right altering

.                    multiple chains

.                                they’ve
.                 splintered though I was wanting
.                 desiring to be there as a part

.                             access to sun
.                 response dictates
.                 they were riding next to each other
.        something regional and a way from here. patterning

Not of Distends*Address Panicked download

Here is Jamie’s response, followed by a download for the full:

“Your text is struck through with the present participle tense — the ongoing-ness of experiential space. As I open to the first page, beginning with a blue that wraps both “our”, the shared closeness of an inner dialogue that positions separate bodies, and “around” that field between, the potential space of experience, I am thinking primarily of the infusion of blue in our world — that it is the color of both sky and water because of the way light is absorbed and refracted. We begin with sight, with light as a subject that contains its own conditions, shapes experience, literally “colors” the field on which forms play. That the act of splintering, that sight is an acknowledgement of the break that we live in, allows this text to address the phenomenological complexities inherent in the act of writing. It challenges us to perceive sight, which shifts to the camera image of the eye several lines down, as an act of navigating complex relationships between the “see-er” and the “seen” as an “effort to form one’s mind”. A startling and absolutely necessary concern with which to open this aggregate of shifting space…”

Jamie Townsend’s Response to Geoffrey Olsen download

And finally, here is DeBoer’s response to the text, followed by the full in .pdf

“Initially, I get a sense, more than a color with ‘blue’ and its an easy suggestion to be that of ‘depression,’ but if we allow ‘blue’ to stand, as a color we move into this space of a ‘blindfold’ of the avoidance of sight. Yet, the avoidance also acts as a ‘right’ (as in the right to be something) altering the ‘blindfold’ as a chain worn over the eyes, or the body. I like ‘they’ve/splintered though I was wanting/desiring to be there as a part,’ quite a bit, as in the way it breaks apart, streaming like colored ribbon in a parade, or that tightness that shrieks to the point of lack, to the desire that registers as a need. There is this wonderful, pivot that happens in the space between ‘stanzas’ or whatever it is we are to call it these days. This goes toward the ‘access’ the sun has to response, to dictate the way in which ‘they’ ‘people’ ride next to one another.”

Nicholas DeBoer’s Response to Geoffrey Olsen download