Issue V Release Party Pics/Vid

     Some photos from the Issue V release party:

the seeing fields and the hearing forest

the four hoarse men harassing 

Paul Nelson playing 'I Spy Pim'

Bill Carty impersonating Bill Carty

George Ciardi casting an analog spell

Alex Bleecker reading five poems at once

Sarah Galvin in Sarah Galvin wig

Jeremy Springsteed cropping his fingers off

Sierra Nelson has published more books than she has hands

The Editor drank so much wine his hands, even, were blurry 

     And if pictures aren't enough, video has been posted here: Wow. Enjoy!

I'm a Monkey!

Self Portrait of Myself Writing This Blog

     "What can be said, can be said clearly. What cannot be said clearly, is not in the world and one must be silent about it."
          - Wittgenstein.
     I have this quote written in one of my notebooks. I just realized today that I've been misreading it (because my handwriting is so horrible) as saying "What cannot be said clearly, is not in the world and one cannot be silent about it." As in, one is compelled to art by those things outside of the world that we cannot say. The very fact that they cannot be said necessitates the attempt to say them. I've long thought that poetry was an attempt to say what is impossible to say. To speak the unspeakable. And anything sayable isn't worth saying at all.
     Wittgenstein though is talking about God. He has said that he likes the idea of a silent religion, and I agree with him there. He was not referring to the arts, so I am not only misreading, but taking the quote out of context and applying it to a different subject altogether. This, I guess, is also what poets do. That ruthless and unethical race of baboons.

Hate Gass

City of Hate

     "Getting even is one great reason for writing. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. My hatred is much of me, if not the best part."
                 -William Gass.

PageBoy Reading 12/1 Seattle!

Happy Holidays! 

     PageBoy Magazine is pleased to announce the release of its fifth issue! We are celebrating on Saturday, December 1st at 7 p.m. The party/reading/show will be at Kaleidoscope Vision (1419 10th Ave) on Capitol Hill (Seattle). 

     Readers will include current contributors Sierra Nelson, William Carty, Jeremy Springsteed, Sarah Galvin, Alex Bleecker, and Paul Nelson. Photographer George Ciardi will be showing prints. The We Don't Know Yets will be playing music. Also: I don't know what else, it could be anything!

     Magazines will be for sale! Wine will be for free! 

     Please join us in this pre-emptive pagan event so that together we might end this endless yuletide squabbling, and begin again the beginningless pagan offering. Okay?

Invisible Trolls

Dylan Thomas with several invisible trolls searching his chins for an apple.

     "I far prefer reading other chaps' work to my own: I find it clearer. An hour of me aloud is hell, and produces large burning spots in front of the mind . . . At the mere thought of reading only myself, I begin to feel hunted, invisible trolls shake hands with my Adam's apple."
     - Dylan Thomas in a letter to J.M. Brinnin. This published in Dylan Thomas in America, which three out of three PageBoy Magazine editors agree is a very lovely and very trashy little book.

Vote YES on BS!

High Turnout, Long Lines for PageBoy Vote!

     Don't forget to vote YES on Proposition BS #1: The Legalization and Subsequent Public Funding of PageBoy Magazine!

A New(d) Poetics

DT: Damn Tfool

A Damned Fool

     "These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damned fool if they weren't."
          -Dylan Thomas.
     Hmm...

George Carlin Is Never Satisfied

Right (T)here

Rubik's Cube Marilyn

     "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known."
              -Wittgenstein

     The answers are here. Right here. Over there.

"Cold cliff, dead tree,
this knobby-headed me
who thinks there's nothing better than a poem.
I mock myself, writing in dust, and
damn the man who penned the first word
and steered so many astray."      
                       -Ching An (1851-1912)

Ping Pong

Mr. Wang (with broom) representing Ping, and Mr. Shan (sans broom) as Pong.

     8th century Chinese poet Han Shan had this to say about his predecessor, a certain Mr. Wang:

"Mr. Wang's degree says Flourishing Talent.
He loves to find fault with my poems.

He says I don't follow the regulations,
and don't use the right techniques.

He says I don't use the four tones correctly,
and just stick in words any which way.

I laugh at what he calls poetry: a blind man's
rhymes in lukewarm praise of the sun."

     to which Mr. Wang replied:

"Mr. Shan's degree says Master of Subversion.
He loves to find fault with my poems.

He says I don't follow his regulations,
and don't use the right techniques.

He says I don't use the four tones correctly,
and choose my words too carefully.

I laugh at what he calls poetry: a blind man's
rhymes in lukewarm praise of the sun."

Title This Blogpost Please

Please Fill In, Dear Reader

"Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him."
     -Wittgenstein

     It was after reading this Wittgenstein quote that I wrote the following epic poem (published here in its entirety):

Why Don't Hejinian Nunchucks Exist?

Your search - hejinian nunchucks - did not match any image results.
                                (use your imagination)

     "To some extent, each sentence has to be the whole story."
          -Hejinian.
   
     That is, each sentence has to be a hole (read 'rabbit hole') within the, um, story. Not simply le mot juste, but lemon juiced in just the precise Hejinianian way. These such Hejinianianisms are the nonesuch and nunchucks of obsessively paratactic poetry nerds such as haunt the hallowed halls of PageBoy Magazine's corporate hindquarters. It was cold outside.

Get Out of the Way!

How poets should compose.

     "Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."
          -Wittgenstein.
     Language also takes care of itself. As does poetry. The challenge for poets is not to manipulate language, but to get out of its way.

Irish Football Coach Korg Delusional!

Korg during his time as Poetic Consultant to Ireland's football team (2010). The Irish failed to qualify for the World Cup, though Korg stated famously "won, we've won, before the games've begun." He was sacked shortly thereafter under suspicions that he was "delusional." When asked to respond, he stated simply: "I'm unaware of any accusations against me."

     "Reading poetry does not help us to do anything; it simply helps us to gain a greater awareness of our experiences than we can achieve ourselves."

     "A poem does not offer a copy of, or a comment upon actuality, but a sensation of insight peculiar to itself. Its value does not depend upon its 'truth' to reality, but on its ability to provide, within itself, a clear and coherent experience."

     -both quotes from Jacob Korg in An Introduction to Poetry, sometimes it's nice to be reintroduced.

Monkey Mouth

"In the beginning was the word..."
     Gospel of John.
"In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words, words came out of the womb of matter."
     Lao Tzu.

     I wish these two would end their endless squabbling over words. The word is that in the beginning was the beginning of the word, but even so there were no words that came out of the womb of matter. Can we all just agree, finally, that words came from monkeys. And note the trends in new poetic writing: the return to monkey mouth!

   

Reading Lolita in London

Olympia Press's evocative cover. (oh the understatement!)

     "The filthiest book I have ever read. Sheer unrestrained pornography."
          - John Gordon (ed. of the London Sunday Express) in a review of Nabokov's Lolita.
     Obviously Mr. Gordon needs to get better porn, and filthier books! Were the '50s that bleak?
     This quote reminds me of Umberto Eco's comment on the Marquis de Sade (who Gordon obviously never read). It's something to the effect of "The most disturbing thing about Sade's work is that just when you start to get turned on he goes off on some philosophical rant that lasts upwards of 50 pages. How is one to enjoy onesself, there's way too much philosophy!"

Muppets, uh... Critics.

Critics par excellence!

    "I read the poems I could find by the critics, and I pronounced them not very good. I wondered then just what it is about critics that enables them to know so much about poetry when they obviously don't have the faintest idea how it comes about."
          - A.R. Ammons.

Ludwig Lovelace

    "Even to express a false thought boldly and clearly is to have gained a great deal."
           -Ludwig Wittgenstein.

     "I never realized how many lies you have to tell to sell a book."
           -Linda Lovelace.

     It is estimated that Linda Lovelace has sold up to 10 times as many books as Wittgenstein. Interestingly, Lovelace's book Ordeal begins with the wonderfully philosophical line "My name is not Linda Lovelace." If Wittgenstein had enjoyed anything (he evidently didn't), I think he would have enjoyed Lovelace's double entendre. It's a kind of pornographic version of Rimbaud's je est une autre.

Probably Prose

Armstrong at last month's Cascadia Poetry Festival

     In the seemingly endless argument over what is a poem and what is prose, what fiction, essay, lyric essay, memoir, autobiography, etc. Louis Armstrong offers this morsel of wisdom concerning his own art:
     "If it sounds good, don't worry what it is, just enjoy it."
     He later went on to say, "but if it doesn't sound good, it's probably prose."

PageBoy Hedreen Recording!

Greg Bem is front left, dressed as Khaela M. of The Blow.

     If you want to relive the Hedreen reading, you can, thanks to Greg Bem and his ubiquitous, spy issue fountain pen tape recorder (series 5.01). And if you missed it, you can now laugh, cry, and sigh along as if you were really there then when we did that thing we did.
     Here's the top secret link: awp award.

The Worm in the Apple.

This is a red apple.

     PageBoy Magazine can now be found and fondled at Green Apple Books at 506 Clement St. in SFCA, so go get it, what are you waiting for?

     PageBoy Magazine: Better Than Dolores Park.

Help! Literature Is Not Self Help.

     Maggie Nelson, in discussing Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book, claims that the book "disallows the delusion that writing necessarily connects us to humanity, that it will help us quit noxious substances, that it will restore us to love lost, or at least serve as a consolation. Literature," she concludes, "is not, after all, self-help."
          - from The Art of Cruelty.

Lyn Hejinian in the Bath

A Thick Egg.

     "If words matched their things we'd be imprisoned with walls of symmetry. As for we who 'love to be astonished,' thicken the eggs in a bath Marie."
          -Lyn Hejinian.

Don't Eat the Baby!

     The message of the flower is the flower. A rose is a rose is a rose. Je est un autre. Etc. etc. etc:

Look at Me Don't Look at Me!

Cioran picking the nits from his eyebrows.

     "Next to the contemporary 'maker' with his sufferings and his sterility, the creators of the past seem embarrassingly healthy. They were not made anemic by philosophy. These days no one escapes this exacerbation of the intellect and its corresponding diminution of instinct. The monumental, the spontaneously grandiose is no longer. The best thing an artist produces now are his ideas on what he might have done. No age has been so self-conscious."
          -E.M. Cioran (1956)

     Ouch. Fortunately for him, I think (though maybe I shouldn't think), he didn't live to see what we've become (I think). I hope that's clear, maybe I should change it. You should've read what I was going to write. Namely mostly that Cioran was a self-professed "Hitlerist" and an overall dickhead. Really. Still, he's right. We are infested with our own we ares. It's become a kind of In Fest, Ed.

Swallow the Yellowbrkrd

Frye just before eating his glasses.

     "The writer is neither a watcher nor a dreamer. Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either; it swallows it."
           -Northrop Frye.

     I just found this quote on an old receipt from 1/2 Priced Books. Neither of the books listed on the front of the receipt belong to me, at least I can't find them. The receipt was in a coat pocket. It was half-eaten.
   

Susan Sontag Has Worms

The apple and the worm are more than the apple itself.

     "We have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice."
          -Susan Sontag

     I love this quote very much, and even the fact that Sontag goes on to say that "music, film, dance, architecture, painting, and sculpture" are all worth more critical attention than literary forms. This was true in the 1960s when Sontag wrote it, and possibly even more so today. So it is, so.
     The question then, I guess, is whether poetry is being overthrown or throwing over. Is it a rowing thing, over now, a woven ring or owing then? Is it a throwing up or a winged river?
     Personally, I'm grateful it's fallen away from popular culture, and relegated to a kind of parasitical state, freed from obligations to entertain and even to be 'understood.' The parasite has the host and it has itself.
     Poets have a long, rich tradition of slithering around in the dark. Darkness, after all, is full of possibilities, lightness of limitations.

   

Bunga Bunga!

Virginia Woolf is far left

     On Feb. 7 1910, Virginia Woolf, along with her brother and Horace de Vere Cole dressed as "Abyssinians" to fool the British Navy into showing them their flagship, the HMS Dreadnought. The disguises worked, and the supposed Abyssinian emissaries were allowed on board. 
     The group inspected the fleet. To show their appreciation, they communicated in a kind of porridge of words derived from Latin and Greek, as well as the oft repeated phrase "bunga bunga." They asked to pray on the ship's deck and bestowed fake military honors on the officers.
     The disguise's only limitation was that the "royals" could not eat anything or their make-up would be ruined. At a luncheon served for the Abyssinian delegates, the group's interpreter (Cole) had to explain that Abyssinians never eat "on board a ship or off in this way." When asked what he meant, Cole offered, "things such as this are quite nuanced," at which the matter was dropped.
     When the real Emperor of Ethiopia visited sometime later, British children called out "bunga bunga" as he passed on parade.

Best New Magazine!

Crossing our fingers.

     We are proud to announce that at AWP in Chicago this past weekend, PageBoy Magazine was voted "Best New Magazine! (unable to afford to attend AWP)"
     Of course "new" is a bit misleading, as we've been around for three years now. But we are not ones to quibble over facts, not when receiving awards.
     As part of the award, AWP has offered to fund the magazines' expenses to the 2014 event, which, ironically, takes place in Seattle. As our headquarters are on Capitol Hill in Seattle, this award amounts to five days of bus fare back and forth on the 49, that is, "if the weather requires it." If it rains, we may get up to $25, which though not an exorbitant amount still would put AWP in our "Wow You Really Love Us" category for donors.
     We are very grateful and excited about this award, and hopeful that the weather will be shit in 2014!

PageBoy IV 12 Release Party

Drew Christie's
"Union Grove..."
ink and watercolor on paper

     PageBoy Magazine is celebrating the release of its fourth issue! March 10 7-9:30 pm. at the Hedreen Gallery (905 12th Ave) Come hear Sierra Nelson, Jeff Encke, Stacey Levine, Alex Bleecker, Jeremy Springsteed, John Wesley Horton, and Nico Vassilakis read poetry and prose. Come watch short animated films by Drew Christie. Come hear Probable Musical Antics. Come buy a copy of the new issue, with work from the above as well as Ed Skoog, Amalio Madueño, and Mary Ellen McAuley Stewart. Just come, don’t worry, it’s fine. There will be wine and funyuns, those funny onions.

A Biological Sport

Horrified medical student observing biological sport (I can't beLIEVE she's wearing that blouse!).

     "Gertrude Stein’s importance is a myth. She is enormously interesting as a phenomenon of the power of personality and as a symptom of a frantic, fumbling, nightmare age – our present – and it is as such that she will live. Later ages will gather about the corpses of her work like a cluster of horrified medical students around a biological sport."
          -B.L. Reid.

     One of my favorite quotes regarding anyone and anything! Perhaps PageBoy will be thought of someday in such glowing terms.

True Sentences

I spy with my eyes morgue is bored.

     "I think that we cannot, indeed that we may not, use the old images because they would sound insincere coming from our mouths. We must find true sentences, which are worthy of our own zone of consciousness and of our changed world."
     - Ingeborg Bachmann

True Sentence 1: Even the hardest brick is soft in the mouth.

T.S. 2: The best smorgasbords never speak their name.

T.S. 3: While it may be true that a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush, it is also true that a hand in the bush is worth more than two on the bird.

T.S. 4: Hate what is evil, cling to what is good, unless what is evil is really really good.

T.S. 5: Know thyself: when in doubt, don't question just about everything.

choo.choo.

Do you like to color trains?

   
"Reality circulates making objects appear as if they belong where they are."
          -Lyn Hejinian

     "In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen."
          -El Wittgenstein

     In the poem everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. Each line appears as if it belongs with every other line of course it does how else. I like to beat people up, my dream a crumpled horn, my horn a Norfolk train, my my, how the flies do time.

In the Funny Culture

Steeped in cold beer.

     "I want to stay funny I want to keep moving ahead of the straight culture. I want to stay in the funny culture ahead of it."
          - Stephen Colbert in an interview at HardeeharHarvard College.

     If you don't stay one step ahead of your audience (in comedy or in poetry) then where are you but in your audience. And if you're in your audience then you aren't writing, you're being written: they are writing you. Hardeeharhar, you can't step in the same river once.

Ms. Used!

Beckett, Samuel

     "Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused."
          -Samuel Beckett

write/unwrite

Bachmann unwriting her fingernails.

     "If [as Wittgenstein says] the limits of my language are the limits of my world, the writer's task is to unwrite the phrasemaking of our ordinary, everyday discourse, the prefabricated sentences by means of which business-as-usual is conducted."
          Marjorie Perloff paraphrasing Ingeborg Bachmann in Wittgenstein's Ladder.

Oh Doctor!

Theodore Geissel in Dr. Seuss glasses.

     "To produce a 60 page book, I may easily write more than 1000 pages before I'm satisfied. The most important thing about me, I feel, is that I work like hell - write, rewrite, reject, re-reject, and polish incessantly."
          -Theodore (Dr.) Seuss Geissel.

     In a later PageBoy interview, Mr. Geissel went on to say that he preferred not to write in cafes or in the rain,
not on boats and not on trains
not in church or after dinner
or while reading Lyn Hejinian or
Gertrude Stein
he never liked Wittgenstein
or The Fat Boys
Pound Eliot or Joyce
even Berrigan's Sonnets
gave him the vomits
and after reading Plaith
he always needed a bath.
The only poet he admitted to liking
was Anvil Hammerstriking
but only all the pre-early muppets and couplets
certainly not the blank verse or German horseshits.