Author: silentbroadcast

The sky is bigger than the ocean.
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Release Reading in Philadelphia

Reception and Poetry Reading
Celebrating a Book Release and New Exhibit Opening

Friday March 5th, 2010
5:30-7:30 gallery opening and reception
7:30 PM-8:30 poetry reading
Asian Arts Initiative
1219 Vine Street, Philadelphia

There’s so much to celebrate!

I am incredibly excited about the release of Underground National (Factory School), which I’ve been working on for about three years. One of my favorite poets, Linh Dinh (also a Factory School poet), has kindly agreed to celebrate with me and share from his poetry and fiction.

The Asian Arts Initiative, which has been a generous friend and ally, will be hosting the event. The reception also celebrates their newest exhibit, CARRYING ACROSS. Curated by local artist Yvonne Lung, CARRYING ACROSS is a multi-media group exhibition that explores the nature, processes, and products of interpretation and translation. The findings range from morbidly beautiful to elegantly understated, hysterical to heartfelt.

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Linh Dinh is the author of a novel, two collections of stories, and five books of poems. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, 2004, 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among many other places. He is also the editor and translator of Vietnamese poetry. His collection of stories Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004.

CARRYING ACROSS features artwork by Sama Alshaibi, Midori Harima, Tomiko Jones, Jong Kyu Kim, Sarah Koljonen, Larry Lee, Yvonne Lung, Shanjana Mahmud, Rana Sindhikara and I Gusti Putu Hardana Putra, and James Sham.

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Underground National is available!

Factory School is pleased to announce the publication of Heretical Texts, Volume 5:

1. TOWN, by Kate Schapira (70 pages): How we live differently in the same world, who we mean when we say we, what we mean when we say here.

2. Green-Wood, by Allison Cobb (166 pages): Wanders Brooklyn’s famous nineteenth century Green-Wood Cemetery and discovers that its 500 acres–hills and ponds, trees and graves–mirror the American landscape: a place marked by greed, war, and death, but still pulsing with life.

3. Underground National, by Sueyeun Juliette Lee (108 pages): Go underground and enter into a subterranean consideration of how History collides with human memory to generate new, unseen currents for being.

4. House Envy of All the World, by Simone White (78 pages): Family, death, power, Poetry and blackness—each is implicated in a general failure of perfection and subjected to furious lyric re-thinking.

5. The City Real & Imagined, by CAConrad & Frank Sherlock (100 pages): Visit landmarks that remain standing, revisit citizens that live on in memory, and participate in the future mappings of your city yet to be realized–the city real & imagined.

For complete details, visit: www.factoryschool.org/ht

All books $15 paperback, $30 hardcover — available now through Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org).

VOLUME DISCOUNT: Get a complete paperback set of HT Vol. 5 for $50 (33.3% discount). Order direct from Factory School using PayPal: www.factoryschool.com/pubs/order.html

To order by check, please write to bmarsh at factoryschool.org.

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I read a poem in a blue room on Rabbit Light

Joshua Marie Wilkinson released volume 10 of his Rabbit Light Movies series, and I’m in it!

My short poem is from a series I’ve been working intermittently on for about 5 years. Many of the poets took it upon themselves to create short films rather than just reading into the camera. I really love Fred Moten’s piece and the video footage he incorporated. Overall, I’m astounded to be collected with the writers in this volume. Wow!

I opted to just read into my desktop’s video recorder. Once I get my hands on a good recorder, though, I think I’ll try making some little films.

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not in perfect circles, but a series of s-shaped curves

How best to reproduce daylight within a semi-porous, organic system.

A question of sustenance emerges out of air: to strive, break towards. A concupiscence characterized by watery overflows, another version of rapture set against a bent willow frond, reading nook, cloud-cover of eyelashes you cannot make out through a high-def screen.

The sun’s strophe = a stronger self-portrait set sail in a translation quickened from fingertip to breath.

Sun blinded-ness. To tremble in the semaphore that is this effort of communicating. Of angles without hips. A jointed venture.

The impossible how you go again and relapses.

I made this without thinking of you.

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The day they catch up to you, they’ll be sorry.

Progress. What is the shape of this idea, its space and outline. Where does it sit in the endless body we share? Cunningly, an edge. A forgotten stream, that howling dog. The sun behind a cloud, there. And that cloud again, the very same one. I told you about its minutes, every moment that pulled it into day. He said that this is an ineffable gesture, this art. I make invisible sand castles, I make invisible sand.

Forgive me my indiscretions. As a child, a something then and what was it, she. As such a child, I mentioned myself to you and moved gropingly across the floor. I pulled myself into a knot. The same one here, and here.

Strangers say you are beautiful. Strangers walk towards me on the street. I don’t have any money to give them, and they stay put. Somewhere in New Orleans I got lost and stayed. Indolent, of no matter. That city made me ultimately go forward they seem to think. A variety of upward velocities converging ==> a pulse. And what does that progress towards? Dear flat emergence. This is not an address. Not a call. Dear flat emergence. Dear renegade activism. Dear suffering shoe.

Whose endeavors call you there? My own. And the shape of your voice? A rock that was thrown. Where is it consequential? At the place where the sea divides. What time is it? You’ve already commanded it. It took place? Eventually. Without effort. Like a cry.

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Saving daylight?

I was wondering when daylight savings was this year, and saw that it’s not for another few weeks.

The concept of saving daylight amuses me. Isn’t it an always-expenditure?The end of the world is purportedly in three years. The sun might send out a giant flare that eats our entire planet. After the poles switch polarity.

What is true about daylight.

What is true about day.

The advantages of measurement–may I one day have the tally.

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To the limit.

The very most thing that you aren’t capable of extending. Where? A bumpy carapace under which you slowly erase what you had come to believe about yourself…

To. Approach it. A forelonging. I forelong this understanding. Capture it. I forelong the blank space of erasure. Meaningfully.

The urge, the motivation for it. There is little I desire in that there is little I lack. And under the stars, what sky. The force of it astounds me but I have become mountainous, swallowed by my meager “human profanity.”

Don’t tell me I encourage you. I swallow you. The world conspires to slurp you up, a stumpy pulp. My words were a token of their designs. Don’t buy them. They flower in the cavernous silence of your total failure.

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Whiteness + Behemoth = Mortal Exhaustion = Cataclysm

I saw Tristin Lowe’s “Big Mocha Dick” at the Fabric Workshop a few weeks ago. You can see one photo of it here.

I don’t want to really describe it, since I don’t think I’d do it justice, but the effect it had on me was stunning. Maybe because I wasn’t expecting to see it, I’m not sure…but I was filled with a real sadness. I felt like I was personally witnessing an extinction. I have a theory about this–I think it had to do with its immense size, and its whiteness. It wasn’t a gleaming industrial white, but that soft natural white of hemp. The fact that you could see various filaments of fibers in the felt impressed on me its made-ness, how it was crafted out of something else that had a life in the world previously.

The days of true prophets might have ended, but the terrifying mortal exhaustion that loomed over them and motivated their calls still hovers in our atmosphere. Does it wear the outline of a beached whale?

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The greatest things ever known to man have been lost

I’ve been so happy. My housemates came down with me to spend a long weekend at my mom and stepdad’s place, I saw my sister’s brilliant show at the DC fringe, and just wrapped up a party celebrating her successes.

And yet, one thing I’ve struggled with lately is memory loss. I know there are things I’ve forgotten, and there are many things that I experience regularly that I know will disappear to me in a short period. I remember things said to me, but not by whom. I remember some events, but not who was there. Maybe on some fundamental level I recognize that, as humans, we are transients. If I have ever forgotten you, forgive me. And know I love you as dearly as my own self.

I know that I won’t remember most of the details from this trip. But I’ll remember something of my state of my mind, such as my peace and happiness. For those of you who filled it, thank you.

Writing this, I know I”ll lose it. I’ll have only this minor record.

Is this how one feels–at the very end?

And what else has been lost to us all– to mankind, in our totality?

Aren’t those the fragments we wash up against daily? Some thoughts feel like my own, and others feel thought for me.

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Friendship = Yay = Cupcake = Mango

I’m with my friend Tim this morning on a study hall date. We get together once a week and do dissertation-y type work. He’s up against a tight deadline, and I’m up against my poor work habits. I’m also full of poundcake, which doesn’t help the brain. Boo.

Lovely Stan put up a post with some of the poems that were shared at my book release. I LOVE the poems. And not just because they were written for me. Check it out here.

There was an article in the New York Times online today about how widows tend to be better at maintaining relationships and therefore don’t feel the need to remarry. It’s kind of a sad statement on masculinity that men are far more likely to kill themselves. But, talking with my significant other and other guy friends I have, this is not a phenomenon limited to old age. Many of my male friends seem fairly emotionally isolated, though they have friends.

If I didn’t have friends, I think I’d be a very strange person. I’d probably talk to myself a lot.