Written in collaboration with Matthew Klane, HIST is a lightbright apocalyptic 19th century text-image blockbuster populated with behind-the-screen metaphysical rescues, chases, shipwrecks, love affairs, murders, hauntings, monsters, demonic possessions, and ritual offerings. Thank you Calamari Press!
So much excellent conversation on the varied poetics of performance. One of the strongest points to this panel was the variety of approaches to the notion of performance. From the identity politics of C.V. crafting, through film and dance, to the politics of publishing metadata, the panel addressed the often overlooked aspects of what it means to perform a poetics. The panel consisted of Kara Pernicano, Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, Indygo Afi Ngozi, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, and myself. If you didn’t make it this time, hopefully I’ll see you next year!
photo courtesy of Dr. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
I’ll be chairing, “‘Tempi All Exempt Except Tempest’: Ronald Johnson’s Restless Ecologies,” at the American Literature Association Conference May 27th-30th 2021. We have a great lineup of scholars and papers. Hope to see you at the panel!
Ronald Johnson (1935-1998) was an exceptionally wide-ranging and restlessly experimental writer across a variety of genres, forms, and media. In part, what steered his restlessness and experimentation was a career-long attempt to manifest a visionary-scientific cosmic vision of humanity at the dawn of the Anthropocene. Although his epic ARK (1996), which critic Stephanie Burt has called “the most spiritual, the most celebratory, and maybe the most fun” of American modernist long poems, explicitly situates human creativity as one of many ambiguous processes ordered by natural forces, Johnson’s late poetry, in addition to his diverse career choices, reconceptualizes his ecological concerns, articulating human creativity through processes not only naturally ordered, but intertwined in social and personal reconfigurations. The influence of these overlapping ecologies on his work is nowhere more apparent than in his late projects, such as his concrete elegy for victims of the AIDS epidemic, Blocks to be Arranged in a Pyramid (In Memoriam AIDS) (1996), and the shadows these losses cast over his posthumous collection The Shrubberies (2001). Likewise, his experiences as a child of the Midwest transplanted to the Bay Area, where energetic cityscapes, and newfound social and sexual formations and freedoms, reveal Johnson to be conflicted by a need to respond to current events critically, by adapting genres, forms, media, and career choices previously rendered moot by their reliance on discourses of natural creation and ahistorical spiritualism. The papers in this panel aim to spotlight how Johnson’s works consistently recreate the boundaries of the personal, political, and material to challenge readers to consider the potential in forming and living more restless relationships between ecologies: social, subjective, and environmental.
On February 27, William Lessard will host with the featured readers Shira Dentz, Adam Tedesco, and James Belflower.
I’m looking forward to reading with excellent poets Shira and Adam! I’ll be premiering a new sound poetry piece titled Idiopathic for voice and electronics. Hope to see you there.
On February 13 @ 8 pm, William Lessard will host the open-mic with featured readers Ruth Danon and James Belflower.
I’m excited to read with Ruth. I’ll be performing some excerpts from With Walden for text and improvised video. Hope to see you there!
Starting with William Wordsworth we will write and walk to discover how the imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the natural spaces it passes through on two feet. Come join us!
I’ll be presenting a paper titled “Recipes for Wildness: Taste in Ronald Johnson’s A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees and The American Table” at the 30th Annual American Literature Association Conference this year. The panel includes Mark Scroggins, Devin King, and Sally Connolly. The abstract is included below. Hope to see you there!
Recipes for Wildness: Taste in Ronald Johnson’s A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees and The American Table
Although Ronald Johnson’s early poetry is filled with Early American discoveries of wild apples, Indian Corn and Floridian oranges, and his later work includes prize winning cookbooks, his gastrophilosophy remains largely unexplored. This dearth is in part due to the nature/culture dualism that haunts the Transcendentalist lens typically used to theorize Johnson’s poetry. However, I argue that Johnson developed a theory of taste from encounters with matter’s dynamism that intervenes in this historical division of nature and culture. Beginning with his 1964 collection of poetry A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees, and culminating in his popular cookbook from the 1980s, The American Table, Johnson’s performative notion of taste suggests that “wild” metamorphoses in the unique phenomena emerging at the inseparability of word and world are analogous to gustatory experiences. Like poetic practice, taste is the embodied participation in the specific material (re)configuration of nature/culture relations through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are enacted. Taste, for Johnson, acknowledges matter’s role in food’s becoming, and therefore provides an understanding of how discursive practices make meaning. In addition, Johnson’s performative practice has a critical facet; it savors “wildness,” the disruption of boundary making practices that assume the separation of discursive and physical matter. This paper proposes that only by juxtaposing the recipes of representation, which linger in Johnson’s early collection, with the culinary practices of his later cookbooks, can we fully understand how his performative taste productively mixes a volatile American culinary past into a wild future.
While you’re waiting on the panel, check out Sam Amadon’s great essay on Ronald Johnson’s Cookbooks.
I'll be performing 6.27.18 with musician Nate Pape in the A.E. Randolph presents series. Come check out Nate's powerful improvised guitar sojourns, and our newest text/visual/music collaboration.
My set will consist of text, improvised visuals, and Nate's experimental guitar work. I'll be using TouchViz, an awesome video mixing app from the great developers at Hexler.net. Here's what the TouchViz portion of the set looks like so far.
Hope to see you there!
The final Yes! Poetry & Performance event of the season. Join us at Albany Center Gallery for readings/performances by Toby Altman, Emily Barton Altman, and Alifair Skebe.
$5 suggested donation
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Toby Altman is the author of Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) and five chapbooks, including recently Security Theater (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016). His poems can or will be found in Crazyhorse, Jubilat, Lana Turner, and other journals and anthologies.
Emily Barton Altman is a poet and editor living in Chicago. Recent publications include a chapbook, "Bathymetry" (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016), and poems in TL;DR, Parallax, wicked alice, and others. She is a recipient of a Poets & Writers Amy Award and received her MFA from New York University. She co-hosts and produces the poetry podcast Make (No) Bones with her partner, Toby Altman.
Alifair Skebe is a visual artist and author of the poetry collections Thin Matter; The Voyage of the Beagle, an Excerpt (forthcoming); “El Agua Es La Sangre de la Tierra” (written in English); and Postcards: Les Lettres d’Amour, a book of poems and collaged, text-art postcards. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including (em), *eratio, Interim, The Cape Rock, and So to Speak. She is an English/Writing Lecturer in the Educational Opportunity Program at the University at Albany.
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Albany Center Gallery is a non-profit art space dedicated to exhibiting skillful contemporary art of the Mohawk Hudson region. A community-based and community supported organization, the mission of Albany Center Gallery is to promote and exhibit contemporary visual art produced by emerging and established artists living primarily in the region and to inspire interest and provide enjoyment to an increasingly diverse audience.
A few blocks from our old space, the gallery is located in the Arcade Building behind a new Stacks Espresso bar. Entry into the space is up the alleyway to the right of the building (if you're facing from Broadway).
Hope to see you April 22nd for my reading at St. Rocco's Reading's for the dispossessed in Albany NY. I'll be reading some new work using electronics and found sounds!
Featured with these awesome readers:
Laurin DeChae is a PhD candidate in Composition & Rhetoric at SUNY Albany, acting as the poetry editor for Barzakh Magazine. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Animal Literary, Pretty Owl Poetry and elsewhere.
Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. He conducts interviews and analyzes dreams for Drunk In A Midnight Choir. His recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Funhouse, Fanzine, Fence, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart, Plinth and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently HEART SUTRA (REALITY BEACH), and ABLAZA (Lithic Press)
Our third Yes! of the "spring" season will feature Barzakh, the University at Albany literary journal, and will be guest curated by current editor Victorio Reyes. We look forward to readings by Michael Leong, Jill Hanifan, Laurin Jefferson, Ben Nadler, and more!
$5 suggest donation
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Barzakh is a multi-genre journal with an internationalist stance. Emerging out of the English department at the University at Albany, SUNY, our focus is on innovative poetics, in keeping with a tradition of forward-looking department-based journals that spans from Don Byrd’s co-editorship of Jed Rasula’s Wch Way in the 1970s to The Little Magazine in the 1990s (our first issue features an interview with Rasula, and issues of both journals will be made available in our archive). We envisage the archive as a way to bring together our various departmental projects and initiatives, past and present, and to connect them to analogous or anomalous ventures elsewhere in the rhizomatic spirit of crossings that is Barzakh. Ours is not an “ism” but as an “isthmus” (see below) that links disparate articulations (between tongues, between histories) in the interplay of text, sound, and image.
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Albany Center Gallery is a non-profit art space dedicated to exhibiting skillful contemporary art of the Mohawk Hudson region. A community-based and community supported organization, the mission of Albany Center Gallery is to promote and exhibit contemporary visual art produced by emerging and established artists living primarily in the region and to inspire interest and provide enjoyment to an increasingly diverse audience.
A few blocks from our old space, the gallery is located in the Arcade Building behind a new Stacks Espresso bar. Entry into the space is up the alleyway to the right of the building (if you're facing from Broadway).
Although Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter sustain a constant and seemingly stable feed of our psychological maneuvers in a variety of media, what happens when the words, photos, or sounds you just posted are subject to commentary, reframing, and sometimes deletion? This is precisely what occurs in online creative writing collaboration. This panel investigates the unpredictability inherent to online collaboration, ultimately asserting that the improvisation, adaptation, and necessity to reconfigure one’s creative framework in the interface of digital variability is a process that invents the collaborator as the much as the collaborator invents it.
Melody Davis, a poet and art historian, is the author of four books including Holding the Curve (Broadstone Books), and Women’s Views: The Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America (University Press of New Hampshire). Davis has held writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and she was a finalist in the National Poetry Series. She is an associate professor of art history at the Sage College of Albany and publishes poetry and art criticism internationally.
Albany poets Matthew Klane and James Belflower, co-curators of Yes! Poetry & Performance Series, a project that “brings poetry into conversation with other art forms,” perform work from Canyons (Film Forum Press), a collection of images and texts reimagining “Manifest Destiny” and its virulent consequences. Their performance is a combination of layered voices, projected collages, and soundscapes created with theremin and distorted vocal effects.
I'll be presenting at the SLSA conference in a panel on Appetite and Creativity with Stacey Balkan and Iemanja Brown. The panel reconsiders various forms of consumption as creative acts. My paper examines Ronald Johnson's late cookbooks and early poetry. It's titled "Wild Enchantment: Taste in Ronald Johnson's The American Table and A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees."
ABSTRACT
At mid-century American gastronomy was defined by exploration. Chefs and cookbook authors, such as James Beard, were encouraging home cooks to discover and experiment with the globalized influx of international foodstuffs. During this rich period, New American poet Ronald Johnson wrote award winning cookbooks. However, existing scholarship rarely addresses the ways in which they nuance the many relationships to food that he investigates in his poetry. My paper intervenes in this oversight by examining key alimentary motifs in his gastrophilosophy, namely how he translates the wildness of natural ingredients into performative rhetoric, how his notion of appetite creatively recombines regional and nationalist ideologies of the past, and how he practices taste as a process of embodied discovery. By reassessing the alimentary metaphors in his first book of poetry, A Line of Poetry a Row of Trees (1964), through his late cookbook, The American Table (1984), I argue that Johnson critiques the destructive tastes of early American colonization and replaces them with an appetite for the differential material relations common to enchantment. Food in Johnson’s poetry is a vehicle for sharing the vital substance of material relations across temporal and cultural limits. Food in Johnson’s cookbooks performs the ethical relationship to materiality Johnson’s poetry evokes by imbricating the cook in the shared unpredictability of culinary practice. In sum, reading Johnson’s work as a gastrophilosophy shows how taste can revitalize an essential and ethical dimension of enchantment in the American ethos of expansion.
Hope to see you there!
Enjoy a Poetry as Walking Workshop at Middleburgh Library at 11 on 10.29.16 with poet James Belflower
I'll be leading a workshop titled "Poetry as Walking" at 11 on Saturday Oct. 22nd at Middleburgh library. Please come on down and write poems about using the foot as a sensory organ!
"From Wordsworth to contemporary poet Lisa Robertson, we’ll tie the rhythm of the foot to the measure of our lines and come to understand that writing is an ongoing discovery of what is around and within us. Novice and experienced writers are welcome."
Registration is required. For more information about the complete series, please click here.
This program series is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.Sponsored by the Mohawk Valley Library System and participating member libraries.Also funded in part by The Friends of the Schenectady County Public Library.Participating libraries are accessible for people with disabilities.
August 19th @ PUBLICATION STUDIO, Troy - 7:30pm
Book Launch!
September 10th @ Berl's Poetry Bookshop, Brooklyn - 8:00pm
w/ Jeff T. Johnson and Jaclyn Lovell
October 6th - Just Buffalo
October 7th @ Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee - 7:00pm
October 8th @ Asymptote & Zygote, Chicago
October 9th @ Public Space ONE, Iowa City - 6:00pm
October 22nd @ Publicly Complex, Providence
November 18th @ Charmed Instruments, Philadelphia - 7:30pm
November 19th in Baltimore - TBA
November 20th @ In Your Ear, Washington DC
December 3rd @ Yes! Poetry and Performance Series, Albany - 7:00pm
w/ Joe Hall, Cheryl Quimba, and Carl Skoggard
Hope to see you there!
From Canyons by Matthew Klane and James Belflower
My new multimedia collaboration, Canyons, with poet Matthew Klane is finished. We will be performing the work at 8pm, breathing alternate life into its images and sound at Publication Studio in Troy NY. Please stop by and enjoy the show!
Canyons Matthew Klane and James Belflower
In conjunction with the Albany Symphony's New Music Festival, Living Poets Musical Theater showcases the work of living poets Shira Dentz, Diana Alvarez, and James Belflower, and explores the intimate connection between poetry and music. Curated by Rebecca Wolff, Editor of FENCE Literary Journal, and featuring contemporary poets from the Capital Region and beyond.
No Ticket Required!
EMPAC Performance Hall
Shira Dentz is the author of three books: black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman), door of thin skins (CavanKerry), and how do i net thee (forthcoming) and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Shearsman), and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press, downloadable for free). Her writing has appeared widely in journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, and Western Humanities Review, and featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Her awards include an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah. She was Drunken Boat‘s Reviews Editor from 2011-2016, and curates both DB’s blog feature, “What I’m Reading Now,” and reviews for Tarpaulin Sky. She teaches creative writing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. More about her writing can be found at shiradentz.com.
Diana Alvarez is a vocalist, poet, composer, video and sound artist whose poetry chapbook, Consultations with Bruja Juana, was published by Toadlily Press in 2009. As a PhD candidate in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Diana is composing a Mexican ritual opera that descends from and contributes to a lineage of innovative women of color artists. Diana has performed as a vocalist and poet and taught in a range of venues in Texas, New Mexico, New York, and Massachusetts. For more information: diana-alvarez.com.
2015 AWP panel with David James Miller, E. Tracy Grinnell, and Maryam Parhizkar titled "Echo locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics."
Come join us at the UPSTATE ARTISTS GUILD on Thursday Feb. 26th for a superb night of experimentalism. This special event is being co-sponsored by the ALBANY SONIC ARTS COLLECTIVE and the YES! POETRY SERIES.
2014 Naropa [Dis]embodied Poetics Conference: Writing/Thinking/Being
If you're in the area please come. I'll be grappling with how Charles Reznikoff's conversion of testimony to poetry creates the potential for a readership united by shared feeling in my paper "The Disgusted Community: An Affective Collective in Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust."
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