My first featurette is up, introducing Jane Wong’s gorgeous poetry. Please go check it out.

Is one capable of turning off solar storms, stopping magnetism’s charge?

A phenomenon opens and with it all else, too.

This is about a grown man’s scar.

This is about being hungry.

Are you making the most of all you have and hold?

What gets in the way of the bright rain?

May 4-5: Emergent Communities Conference at UC Santa Cruz

May 6: Emergent Communities Plenary in San Francisco for Small Press Traffic

May 7: Reading with Crystal Curry at the Hedreen Gallery in Seattle

May 9: Reading with Ray Hsu in Vancouver

The conference in Santa Cruz and the plenary discussion in San Francisco should be incredible. Tisa Bryant, Vanessa Place, Ronaldo Wilson, Anna Moschovakis, and Juliana Spahr are among the many participants!

Friday, April 27, 2012, 7PM

Join us for a night of ambient poetics with three experimental writers who probe the relationship between art- making and found technologies from parking garage reverberations to the neon glow of TV broadcasts. Treat your ears to Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt, Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Underground National.  Williams College professor Dorothy Wang will moderate and Triple-Canopy Editor, Lucy Ives, will live-tweet the event.

The recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol Foundation Writing Grant, Lin is the author of Seven Controlled Vocabularies, lauded by Warren Liu as “an utterly, compellingly boring film–I’ve already forgotten it in the best way unimaginable.” In Tan Lin’s latest work, Insomnia and the Aunt, a young man’s memories of visiting his Chinese aunt at her motel, recalled almost as if written by their TV set. The aunt’s memory ghosts her nephew’s television screen, their shared past-time.  The aunt “resembles the biography of a dead person where the dead person has somehow forgotten to die. She speaks casually, like the speech of a language without a speaker.”  Lin’s experimental novella is indexed by photographs, postcards, and the indicia to an imaginary novel, mimicking the seamless repetition and reproducibility of images on the television. In Lin’s beautiful and wonderfully odd elegy, technology acts as an emotive transmitter engaging the two relatives in erotic simulacra.

Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot profiles a noise music band’s search for the ultimate ambient sound and is the follow-up toPamela: A Novel, an experimental poetry classic and one of SPD’s bestselling books of the 90’s.  They sample revving engines, the parking habits of the rich and famous, and commercial parking spaces. Reading Ambient Parking Lot is comparable to “watching an indie webisode spin-off of ‘Behind the Music,’ as Lu tracks the Ambient Parkers’ absolute mediocrity in awkwardly-awesome crescendos and geeky-fantastic loops,” says Jai Arun Ravine ofLantern Review Blog.

The author of That Gorgeous Feeling and Underground National,Sueyeun Juliette Lee could be the only poet to write about U.S. intervention in Korea and the dating patterns of K-pop stars. Sueyeun is a transnational collagist who perverts found documents and replaces fixed histories of square footage, geographic boundaries, and global affairs editorials with erasure. In her second book of poetry, Underground National, Lee remixes celebrity suicides, tourism trends, and web splices to put forth a subterranean account of Korean culture.

This event is co-sponsored by St. Marks Poetry Project

@ Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

POETRY

Browning, Sommer. Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds LLC, 2011)

Dabrowski, Tadeusz. black square (Zephyr Press, 2011) *

Dennigan, Darcie. Madame X (Canarium, 2012)

Greenstreet, Kate. “but even now i am perhaps not speaking.” (imprint press)

Hocquard, Emmanuel. The Invention of Glass (Canarium, 2012) *

Ignatowa, Elena. The Diving Bell (Zephyr Press, 2006) *

Madrid, Anthony. I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say. (Canarium, 2012)

Pettit, Emily. Goat in the Snow (Birds LLC, 2012)

Wallace, Mark. The End of America, Book One (Dusie Kollektiv V)

Yu, Jian. Flash Cards (Zephyr Press, 2010) *

Yu, Tim. 15 Chinese Silences (Tinfish, 2012)

Zhai, YongMing. The Changing Room (Zephyr Press, 2011) *

PROSE

Cardinale, Joseph. May I Not Seem to Have Lived (New Herring Press, 2011)

Lee, Janice. Kerotakis (Dog Horn Publishing UK, 2010)

Lind, Jakov. Ergo (Open Letter, 2010) *

Place, Vanessa. Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues, 2005)

Unferth, Deb Olin. List (New Herring Press, 2011)

Tillman, Lynne. Doing Laps without a Pool (New Herring Press, 2011)

Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen. Girona (New Herring Press, 2011)

Xue, Can. Vertical Motion (Open Letter, 2011) *

Yeh, James. Some Things You Just Have To (unattributed chapbook)

I spoke (rather poorly, I have to say) on a panel about book reviews as part of the Constant Critic team, and attended panels on New Media, the Chapbook, and Asian American poetry.

Of the poetry events I attended, the Lambda Literary organization’s Ancestors reading of multi-ethnic trans/queer writing had the greatest sense of community and urgency in the work. The space was incredibly welcoming, generous, attentive, and everything I look for in a community. I have to credit Ahimsa for his immense human warmth and laser beam focus for bringing that event together as perfectly as he did.

I had the most fun at the Red Rover series off-site event, and was also brought to tears several times. The tears were in response to the video of Akilah Oliver reading her work: I’m still so close to the loss of my own dear one…and the incredible fragility of language, of light being projected against a wall, of the patterns of Akilah’s voice against the room–it moved me into a nameless space. Part grief, part beauty, part immense silence before the all of being. Quiet devastation at having to continue, simply.

We’ve titled the series POETRY ((PRO) (FANA)) and our first event is tomorrow, Sunday the 12th, over in Lawrenceville. Brenda Iijima from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs will be sharing her work along with Sha LaBare, a post-doctoral fellow over at Carnegie Mellon’s Humanities Center. The conversation will twirl around ecologies, environments, language, and sentience. I’m SO THRILLED. If you want to learn more about it, run over to the new blog for the series:

poetryprofana.wordpress.com