polly pocket book tour

In late june/july I will be running around southeast/eastern-ish USA with Kristen Stone and water buffalo to promote/celebrate her amazing new book and also a bit of mine. OUR FLOW IS HARD is also trying to start a small reading series in Minneapolis, and some of the readings are going to be themed similarly, like gross lady poems. The queer and the deceptively formal. These will be all tiny events. Details about this and other readings soon!

Book Review: Butcher's Tree by Feng Sun Chen

Reblogged from This Is the Title of My Blog:

If, as Iris Murdoch may have said, "philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious," perhaps poetry is often a matter of creating opportunities to mention our common, everyday experiences. As in Feng Sun Chen's "Concerning Nothing," whose seven sections each begin with an abstraction, which is then torn through until the emotion giving blood to the thought is exposed:

Read more… 1,538 more words

Book Review: Butcher's Tree by Feng Sun Chen. Hey! Someone was kind enough to write a review of my first book book. It's smart and full of philosophy and math. Justin also has lots of other great review to read on his blog. Thank you, Justin, for swimming in the broth of my butchery.

LOOK AT ME I”M ON A BUS

I am indeed, dique, on my way to Chicago now. My feet are damp and sweaty, and I have slept while sitting upright with open mouth and microbes festering in my mouth.

Among the things I will do: think about tinglyness and thinglyness.

Goth Club Reading: 10 PM / NEO @ 2350 N. CLARK, CHICAGO / NEW WAVE + 80′S DANCE PARTY UNTIL 4 AM Thursday

THE LEGION (with Black Ocean) 1354 W. Wabansia Chicago, IL 60642 Friday (9PM)

 

RED ROVER: 7-11:30pm
TABLE X/Y CACOPHONY:

Writers from 32 small presses
read simultaneously in one space!
Full details at 
https://www.facebook.com/events/221605691264245/

and attending lots of other readings by awesome people! If I don’t get lost.

Books I will be reading / giving away / selling:

butcher’s tree w/ Black Ocean: new excerpt here: 
http://www.everyday-genius.com/2012/03/feng-sun-chen.html

• I will sitting at the BO booth on Saturday for an author signing I think

blud (um, where are my copies? spork press, I’m coming after you) 
http://sporkpress.com/sporkblog/?p=2805

I forgot my Ugly Fishies so I guess I won’t be reading from that :( But it’s available as a free download now! Just click on the picture of the larynx on the right sidebar.

pockmarks of the internet

Blogs are like popped zits that reform. Since facebook became a direct drip applied to our veins, the face of the internet has more pockmarks and fewer fresh zits. That’s ok. It can be attractive. Like Skrillex’s face. Skrillex reminds me of an ex. He was the first one that was kind of good to me.

Squeezing out pus from my face in front of a mirror is calming. I used to do this more frequently, when I was younger and had much more anxiety. Now I do it every few days. More often, I casually pick at it before showering.

Getting the sebum out. Does this analogy work with the way blogs are also “platforms” for marketing? Facebook is the ultimate landscape of a billion huge whiteheads, flowing in sync… I guess it doesn’t work. Sebum says little about hypertext and digital synapses. On another note, I’m also annoyed and tired of how so many arguments about ANYTHING is gets integrated into the fiction/reality of the market. Everything I do can be called marketing, sure. Nothing escapes capitalist exchange, not even love, sure. It touches everything. Maybe. But I don’t think it is productive to wallow this way and certainly doesn’t help us understand desire any better and most of all it does nothing to undermine it.

Anyway. So did I already post a link to claudius app? http://theclaudiusapp.com/ There it is. The splash is really cool, really dynamic popping the stuff ia all over the screen.

Yet the internet is so… un-oily.

I recently ordered a book about Chinese mythology. I am waiting to read more deeply about Nuwa, the creation goddess, and how the world was created through snake-gods this way:

I’m still thinking about the N Djurberg video of the masked/masking snakes, which were creation gods by pageantry and not by heterosexual reproduction. I very briefly wrote about it here http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2542

The snakes come out of holes and wear masks over their wounds, inflicted by an orgy of biting and wounding. The masks then serve as their faces/eyes.

Becoming reptile:

At least half of what I experience in this world is virtual. I’m half light soup.

Looking forward to AWP!

Secretions

I haven’t posted anything in months. No reason. But I thought I’d put something up today to show that I’m not dead. I’ve managed to squeeze myself into a screenwriting class 2 weeks late, and have been working on “Loglines” for the first assignment. Not surprisingly, my loglines seem to be the kind that will never get sold. But how awesome would it be if I could turn these into actual movies?

LOGLINES

1. MARS VIOLET

Two painters and ex-lovers trapped in a studio for several days during a blizzard begin hallucinating together, to potentially violent, passionate ends.

2. MINOS

Introverted schoolgirl who can see into the underworld befriends a jaded but brilliant teenager in trouble with drug lords and gets dragged into the fray.

3. MASTER APHRODITE

A modern per-version of the venomous love triangle of Aphrodite, Eros, and Psyche  leading to the suicide of two children, set in a summer camp.

4. MEAT FAIRY

A lonely fast-food worker grows pathologically attached to the food products he makes, believing them to be sentient; meanwhile, a meat packer dies in a meat packing factory.

In other news, I have an interview at Radioactive Moat (Ugly Fish is now a free download!), and my book, Butcher’s Tree, is now available for preorder. It ships right after AWP. Speaking of which, I will be doing a book signing on Saturday at the Black Ocean zone. I will, however, be reading at 2 readings, Thursday and Friday nights. Thursday night will be a strange affair inside bathroom stalls with Lara Glenum, Lucas de Lima, Johannes Gorranson, Kate Durbin, and other strange people at a location TBD (because I don’t know where, and I’m hoping it’s off site so I can actually do it) and Friday (I think!) will be a Black Ocean reading with my awesome Black Oceanographers. Details to come.  Why is this year’s AWP sold out? Has there suddenly been a population explosion of avid poets and writers? Tough times call for feeble literary types?

I’ve also been reading this http://www.scribd.com/doc/42995065/PONGE-Nature-Things book by a french poet, Ponge, who loves snails and talking about pebbles. The one line that sticks out to me regards the secretion of humans, and this secretion is not like/unlike the creation of shells by mollusks, but rather than calcium, we secrete language.

Finally, I never thought I would like a show like Downton Abbey. But I am getting old, and historical dramapics are becoming more and more interesting to my wrinkling mind.

Also, looking forward to the birth of my book. Look at this amazing cover design! Thanks to Janaka Stucky and Josh Wallis and all the hot people at Black Ocean for this:

Cover Image

Spread, spread, spread that death butter

Read a nice interview at HTMLg with Johannes Gorranson. I’m looking forward to reading his unsustainable new book. Made me think about some things. I share his discomfort with the label “experimental”, which has very strange connotations, (dismissive, I would say), as if this kind of writing has a hypothesis. I guess I kind of like that idea, but people don’t usually realize that many experiments are done for the sake of experiment, not for the sake of its hypothesis or result. Mostly, it’s uncomfortable because it is, as he says, a huge word that says very little. Other than that, the experimental/avant-garde is also no longer possible. The linear idea of progress and new-ness is, on this day and age, backwards. Arriere-garde, however, is relevant. Or derriere-garde, I like to think. Lucas sees the lyric poet as the power bottom.

And the plague of literature (“too much shit is being published”) I think is a very unique plague in that it is extremely proliferative but not quite massively contagious, maybe because capitalism has built-in containment cells and plumbing, which we even build ourselves out of guilt and reflexivity (art is useless) to flush the shit out of sight. You almost have to want to be sick to get sick, because some work is required to actually expose yourself to the gaping wound of “experimental” writing. Poetry especially is already seen by many to be an archaic art, yet I believe it has never been richer, like a huge, dark compost pit. I doubt that there has ever been a time when so many different aesthetics are given their own chance at incubation. There are hundreds of small presses and micro presses. Most people do not know or care about their existence. Being both dead and alive at once is anachronistic (oh yes, I read McSweeney’s The Necropastoral in the bath the other day). You are at once within time and without, historical in more than one sense.

Genre has also become a dirty word because it acts as a container.

Carinna Finn (who has a blog I love) says “…perhaps so many people insist on defining genre in singular, palatable terms because the contagion of multiplicity poses a threat to what James notes above as “the constraining humanist need for ‘voice.” “The Voice,” attached to a body which has a lifespan, can be easily made safe via an act of canonization, like J says — classics are dead. I wonder, then if one can take a sort of fossilized genre and bring it back into a state of becoming through decay, radioactivity.”

I was once told that capitalism is at once the most revolutionary (forward) and anti-revolutionary (backwards) system because it allows for the bacterial/exponential production of “revolutionary” ideas and simultaneously, because it enables so many revolutions/overthrowings, it entails that each has an extremely short lifespan. One always makes way for the next copy. Capitalist existence is a very insectal, vermin, microbial existence.

This year is supposed to be the biggest year for mosquitoes yet. In the spirit of the plague, I have “published” myself on lulu as an experiment in futility and fertility:

birth to my pigs

Paul Cunningham of Radioactive Moat has been in labor for many days (he made this gooey thing!), and my first chapbook should be arriving any minute now, with a full head of hair.

some thing$$$

Poems appear, my poems appear like zits all over the internet!

http://sporkpress.com/weeklies/poetry/archives/00000033.htm

Also I have a special surprise coming from Spork Press soon… WINK

http://www.metazen.ca/?p=6757
(from my ugly fish project and pork project)

I’ve been getting nice comments lately (see “love”). Thank you all for stranger love, one of the best kinds of love.

I’ve been working on a new project, which is about Paul Thek, biographies, autobiographies, and “bad”ness. Thinking about this quote: “I want to say something about bad writing. I’m proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. [ . . . ] Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which’s something you have to try to have.” Guess who said it. That’s right. Ma girl Ariana Reines. Also thinking about Ventrakl and the same old impossible endless desire of knowing someone dead which is similar to trying to know someone who is alive, but sometimes more honest because there isn’t the living person getting in the way of this unknowing. This project is a giant mass of a crap poem. Hahahaha!

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11284911/

I’ve come up with a rapper name for myself. 4tune Cookie.

$

Let’$ fight about font & write paper$ about typography
& publi$h them.
When I run I get out of breath like I am dying
like when I write paper$ that are important.
I’m glad I can buy product$ to help me in thi$ difficult proce$$…
It’$ time to break out my $uper co$tume.
Here I go woah
woah…
You can call me 4tune Cookie.
I’m na made of $ugar I am made of Wookie.
Everyone at the mall of america must li$ten to me. LI$TEN TO ME
Thi$ yellow cookie deliver.
I’m under a $pell I can’t tell lie$.
My hou$e is the liberty bell. I’m a fairy thi$ my hell.
Thi$ $alivation is 100 percent real for real.
I give birth to wildebee$ts for breakfa$t.
All your future drop$ outta me.
Don’t touch me mall rat mon$tar!
I’m a fucking cookie not a cookie mon$tar.
I EAT mon$tars. Thi$ Place is the $hit.
You all $hould run for your life, dumbrat$.
That $ale item is MINE. I’m a $tar a mallratrucking $tar, damn it.
Perceive my 4tune PER$ONALITY.
4tune Cookie, jerk wad fat rod. 4tune Cookie.
Fuck yeah. $$$$$$ GOLD

some poems out there

Why are all my poems the same. Earthworms!

I have made poems.

A poem about dear old Wukong from the days of yore but really it is about tongues and tubes in la petit zine. KISSES AND GUNS.

Some poems in Kill Author which is a nice community.

Also, Black Ocean is having a FREE BOOKS sale campaign thing that is ending today, and I have a book with them that will be born next year.

The other day, some poets and I buried some wishes in a garden and lit a candle. I hope that the wishes will be eaten by earthworms and distributed all over the truth of the soil.

I feel so old because I just found out who Ke$ha was yesterday or maybe someone mentioned her to me before was this the one who wanted to get drunk and party all the time and isn’t too ambitious like Lady Gaga? I have 20 tabs open and it’s her voice and I am horrified by my own response to her as she sings while I read/listen to the news…