Some Pics from PageBoy Release Party (Arabica)




Sarah Erickson provides rather unconvincing evidence that the cover image is actually a portrait of her.

Paul Nelson has eyes not only on his head, on the head in front of him and on the heads behind him, but also beneath his hat. It's true!

Whoa! These poems'll knock yr teeth out yo!

The Myriad Minions, having emptied myriad bottles, now search the air for onions... and find them!

The editor being scolded for his loose interpretation of copyright laws and bow ties.

Sarah Galvin: laughing casually after threatening to tie the audience to a radiator.

Thanks to Duvel for sponsoring the event.

 

PageBoy Now at Powell's Burnside*

*see blog entry title for information concerning the nature and purpose of this entry.

H.D. C.U.T.U.P.

Vision is of two kinds:
     Venison of the womb
And
     Venison of the brain

Most of the so-called
     Artists today
Have lost the use of
     Their brain

Over-mind artists
     Usually come in a group
This is called a circle jerk
     And there is no

Great art period
     Without great lovers
Of course:
     There is no great art,

Period.
     Great lovers however
Hover forever
     In a kind of

Jelly-fish mind
     Lingering alongly

To sting you.

PageBoy Magazine Reviewed:

http://www.hugohouse.org/content/tight-cozying-pageboy-magazine

PageBoy at Spine and Crown and

     PageBoy is now at Spine and Crown Bookstore (315 E. Pine St., Seattle) in addition to the other Seattle stores listed on this blog. Go get it.

PageBoy Reading Recording (Regarding Greg Bem)

Philthy

     The honorable Greg Bem has posted a recording of the PageBoy reading at Arabica. Find it here:
http://gregbem.com/wordpress/?p=3943

Over-mind not Over Mined

H.D.

    Here are some quotes from H.D.'s amazing little sketch of a book Notes on Thought and Vision.

     "If you cannot be seduced by beauty, you cannot learn the wisdom of ugliness."

     "There is no trouble about art. There is already enough beauty in the world of art, enough in the fragments and in the almost perfectly preserved charioteer at Delphi alone to remake the world.
     There is no trouble about the art, it is the appreciators we want."
 
     "My sign-posts are not yours, but I have my own trail, it may help to give you confidence and urge you to get out of the murky, dead, old, thousand-times explored old world, the dead world of overworked emotions and thoughts.
     But the world of great creative artists is never dead. The new schools of destructive art theorists are on the wrong track. Because Leonardo and his kind are never old, never dead. Their world is never explored, hardly even entered. Because it needs an over-mind or a slight glimmering of over-mind intelligence to understand over-mind intelligence."

Reading Tonight!

     We have magazines yippie! And will have them at the reading tonight, so come get one.
     PageBoy Reading June 4th 8pm at Arabica, 1550 E Olive Way, Seattle. Readers Sarah Galvin, Sarah Erickson, Paul Nelson, Erika Wilder. Artist Shannon Perry (portraits). Music: Myriad Minions oh my god!
     PageBoy: Better than a can.

Shklovskyshklovskyshklovsky

"Go to the reading, pussy cat."


     "Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony - art removes objects from the automation of perception."
                  -Victor Shklovsky

     PageBoy has proofs, and the proof is in the, uh, printer. Issue III 11 will be out and all over everywhere soon - like pudding I guess. If you want to see the magazine FIRST, join us at Arabica (Capitol Hill, Seattle) on Sat. June 4th at 8pm. We will be celebrating with readers Erika Wilder, Sarah Erickson, Paul Nelson, and Sarah Galvin. Shannon Perry will be showing her (amazing) watercolor portraits (featured in the magazine), and Myriad Minions will be performing LIVE NUDE MUSIC!

Caveat

Caveat (for reading a poem at a spoken word event)

Warning:
     I am going to read a poem. It may be metered at times.

Warning:
     It is not in first person. You is.

Warning:
     It may be too masculine for some of you.

Warning:
     It is not pc, why would it be?

Warning:
     It may be too feminine for some of you.

Warning:
     It may be offensive at times
     Remember
     These are just x's and lines.

Warning:
     There is nothing poetic about pc, Pussy Cat.

Warning:
     I am offended too.

Warning:
     I am not mad at anyone. Thanks for letting me read anyway.

Warning:
     Is it spoken word, or 'broken word?'

Warning:
     There is no chip on my shoulder, Chip.

Warning:
     There is, however, a chip in my head.
     Say 'hello' Chip.
     "Hello."

Warning:
     Is it spoken word, or 'broken girl?'

Warning:
     Poetry as therapy
     Is mental midgetry.

Warning:
     Was that an off rhyme, or an offending rhyme?

Warning:
     Everything rhymes with everything.

Warning:
     Boys get broken too. (boo hoo hoo).

Warning:
     Rimbaud's line was: "I is an other,"
     Not "I against other."

Warning:
     Poetry is not therapy.
     Therapy is therapy.

Warning:
     Who speaks more clearly:
     Gertrude or Franken Stein?

Warning:
     White guilt, Black power.
     Can't we all just take a shower?

Warning:
     Perhaps I'm a midget
     and I just don't know it.

Readings!

     PageBoy is hosting a reading in celebration of its third issue, which is due out any day now! 
     When? you might ask... at Arabica on Capitol Hill in Seattle at 8pm sharp on Saturday June 4th (and other prepositions). Readers will be announced soonly. Mark it on your calendar Mark, Gene and Jori. 
     PageBoy Magazine: Better than indie pop.©

     P.otato S.oup: We will also be celebrating in Portland on June 25th at The Waypost. And maybe in Olympia too (thirdly). We will let you know the details when we know de tails. (You still can mark it on your calendars though, just very bigly.)

what american lit needs

Malcom Cowley

     "What American Literature needs is not more poets (we could dispense with most of those already writing), but mature poets who are willing to devote their whole time to the most difficult of arts."

               -Malcom Cowley

     Critics have argued for over fifty years as to what M. Cowley meant by "the most difficult of arts." It seems clear to me, however, that he was either referring to teaching undergraduate creative writing classes, or flash animation.

Boom.

     explode < Lat. explodere meaning "to drive out by clapping."
     What an odd form of exile!

     (Medieval court, rural Europe. JUDGE, cloaked in black robes stands to deliver his verdict; a rather meek and filthy BEGGAR hunches before him obediently,)
     JUDGE: Do you have anything to say for yourself, sir?
     BEGGAR: Please Your...
     JUDGE: Silence! (pause) Well then, due to the heinousness of your crime, the Court hereby and forthwith sentences you to... explodere!
     BEGGAR: No Your Honor, Please not that!
     JUDGE: (forcefully) Exlodere! Bring in the Band of Clappers!
     (Enter several men and women, all expressionless, clapping, who walk up to the BEGGAR, forcing him from the courtroom and out into the street.)
    

Horrible

     "a horror picture really should have moments where you kind of rest up and laugh, even it's a nervous laugh, and then go on to another horror."
                    -Samuel Z. Arkoff (B-movie monster mogul)

     A poem really should have moments where you kind of rest up and laugh, even if it's a nervous laugh, and then go on to another horror. This probably could be said of any work of art. It is the thing that keeps the work from "flat-lining."
     In the same way that all horror all the time at some point ceases to be horrible, if it's all beautiful, then none of it's beautiful. Or: if it's all this, then it isn't this at all

Elevator Music XX

No.


low hills, how binding
a mesmerizing klezmer band

apple blossoms off the porch
listen: the shadows pool

across the sunset painting
gin is crude, I know

but really, how can you bear
the inanity of music

without lens, cairns
are too pretentious, zinnias

painting dumb, song
it's true you have to have a

kind of faith in stupidity
to be happy here, and love

News Flash: Poetry Is Everywhere!

     Ann Sexton while at work on Love Poems (1969)


     Poetry is everywhere, and because it's everywhere it's ridiculous to transcribe it. Why capture something that is all around us. Like water, when we try to hold it in our hands it only slips through our fingers. There one moment, gone the next. At its very best it leaves us wet.
     Then again, that may be reward enough for the depraved. PageBoy, at least, seems to enjoy it.

Dueling Haiku

     Poetics Haiku

     a cutup's not an essay
     it's an easy knot
     so cut it out, cuteypie!

     This from PageBoy (2008-). The following rebuttal is from Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), who, incidentally, in addition to writing haiku was a literary critic.

     on how to sing
     the frog school and the skylark school
     are arguing
          

Pu-tai Says Laugh

     "... to talk too long, to examine too meticulously, to pile qualification upon qualification and add theory to theory, is to be in danger of upsetting the delicate balance of that life which one wishes to understand, or of destroying the fragile tissue into which one wishes to breathe new life. Here too, 'the letter kills, while only the spirit gives life.'"
     - Conrad Hyers (Zen and the Comic Spirit)

     Hyers could easily be talking about poetry here. Sontag's Against Interpretation comes to mind, as well as the famous Zen Master Pablo Picasso, who put forth the following koan:
     "Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?"

Ludwig the Skeptic

     "It appeared to have little connection with reality and was more concerned with the study of language. 'Distrust of grammar is the first requisite for philosophizing.'"
                -Strathern referring to Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy, and then quoting him. He could be discussing poetry, and in essence, is.

A Series of Follies

     "For Levi-Strauss, the great ruptures that had thrilled him (namely surrealism, DADA, cubism) in his youth had led nowhere. The path to abstraction had become a story of failure as modern art degenerated into a series of follies and empty aesthetic gestures."
          -Patrick Wilcken (C L-S)

     The following is chosen at random from American Hybrid; A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (Norton 2009 ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John).
     Empty aesthetic gesture? Or great rupture?
     The excerpt is by Etel Adnan and is listed as from IN/SOMNIA. Here is "XIX"

1. Night falling. again. Not again.
    long / line no help help / less
    terror stop the terr...
    terribly all over / over
    what?

2. blows bellowing blowing
    paper and doors and what
    else? Is is it? is it coming?
    Yes. time. Last time

3. lasting timing ever-ever
    snoring orderal or deal
    dealer of cards     of smoke
    tick / no no end

4. shhh - weee - buzzz
    buzzing pele-mele
    keep     held hold-it! keep
    insane in / sane the right
    to wait wait! waited for
    for wait a minute for / the /
    dark / light of morning

5. collapsibles

     Note also that often today poems are "from" something else, something much grander we are to assume. We are also to assume that if we were reading the entire something else, we would surely think "Wow, that was something else!" Unfortunately, we rarely get access to this mysterious place all of these fragments are "from," but are nevertheless asked to say "Wow!"
     This alone could be a very important distinction between the American avant-garde of 1913 Armory Show New York, which somehow didn't seem to need to qualify its fragments, non sequiturs and general 'avantfulness' by claiming they were "from" some place else, and the avant-garde of the present day, which almost always does.
     Levi-Strauss had noted the avant-garde as a "story of failure" in 1959! Fortunately for him he didn't live to read the above-mentioned anthology.

Poetry as Alchemy

    ...if 'everything happens so often that speaking of it makes no sense,' the poet must find ways of representing those happenings so that their actual feel, their texture is re-experienced."
     PageBoy quoting Perloff quoting Hejinian quoting.

    

PB in PN

Can I Get Piano Lessons?

     Our interview with Natalie Phillips has been reprinted in.Poetry Northwest. Check it out.

Is it Still?

     While doing anthropological "field work" in a remote section of the Brazilian outback, Claude Levi-Strauss handed out sheets of paper and pencils to a tribe of native Brazilians known as the Nambikwara. They had never seen or used paper or pencils before, had never written or drawn "aside from rudimentary decorations - the dots and jagged lines with which they adorned their gourds. After initially ignoring the paper, the Nambikwara began scribbling a series of wavy lines, from left to right across the page. Unprompted, they had begun 'writing.' The leader of the Nambikwara went one step further, requesting a notepad from Levi-Strauss. Quizzed on ethnographic points, he 'wrote' answers in the pad, handing his doodles to Levi-Strauss. When later, during bartering between two different factions of Nambikwara, the leader made a great show of 'reading' the list of exchanges and beneficiaries from a sheet of scribbles.
     "Somewhere in those scrawled lines lay meaning, not of the literal kind, but in a metaphorical sense. The Nambikwara had intuitively grasped the power of paper, notebooks, pens and markings in Western culture... The leader's approach had been a pragmatic one, slotting into an alien culture with a certain ritual fluency, trading symbols alongside beads, arrowheads and lengths of cloth. Writing, Levi-Strauss concluded, was first about power, and only afterward used for the purpose of aesthetic or intellectual enlightenment. Far from being mankind's crowning cultural achievement, it had initially been used to create hierarchies between the scribes and the illiterate masses. 'The primary function of written communication,' Levi-Strauss concluded, 'is to facilitate slavery.'"

Post No Post (Dizzy) / Elevator Music XIX

     "I see some guys try to transcribe my music on paper, but if you play it like that it will sound corny. That's because they hear notes that I didn't even play. It's there without being there. It's implied. And although people can't really hear it, they feel it. It's an auditory illusion."
          - Dizzy Gillespie

     How to create an "auditory illusion" in poetry? Double entendre is one way, but that is more concerned with meaning than music. So how to make one word, or a phrase, sound as if it contains other words. Words that aren't there. The equivalent of bending a note in music, or simultaneously playing different notes. To make words sound that aren't even there.
     Here is some elevator music to listen to while you figure it out:


All That Is Normal or Possible

if glassful is
the quantity a glass can hold
then how awful
an awl can be
it baffles the crows caw

indeed, what is
the quantity a crow can hold?
what lawful reasoning
determines the count of caws
their fullness?

     the blacker the better the richer the darker
     when it comes to a crows caw or coffee

somehow the sunken panels
in a ceiling or soffit
are in fact higher than
the ceiling or soffit itself

sunken, sunglass
sunglassful:
the quantity the glasses hold
     of reflection, of light, of eyes
     of faces, cheekbones and rooms
of sunflowerful August afternoons

and what then simply of full?
the quantity an of can hold
a quantity that can be held
     full of full of full of of
the quantity of music
                that can be held

One of These Frogs Is Doin Its Own Thing

(can you find his frog?)

Frog - a wedge-shaped horny prominence in the sole of a horse's hoof.

Frog - A loop fastened to a belt to hold a tool or weapon.

Frog - An ornamental looped braid or cord with a button or knot for fastening the front of a garment.

Frog - A device on intersecting railroad tracks that permits wheels to cross the junction.

Frog - A spiked or perforated device used to support stems in a flower arrangement.

To Imagine Evil

     "Poetry's function is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it. What if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostoevsky opposed Raskolnikov - the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskolnikov, so that we begin to see betrayal and murder and theft in a new light."
     -Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov

McCaffery Verse

     "...an experience in language rather than a representation by it."
     - Steve McCaffery on an (un)certain kind of post-free verse poetry. Indeterminate as opposed to strictly referential. If that isn't clear enough, then refer to this by Marjorie Perloff:
     "I have no name for this new form of sounding and perhaps its namelessness goes with the territory: the new exploratory poetry (which is, after all, frequently prose) does not want to be labeled or categorized. What can be said, however, is that the 'free verse' aesthetic, which dominated the 20th century, is no longer operative."

Elevator Music XVIII

Ocean View Semi-tarry


stone used with zest, devoid of
vital pipe clay and pulverized

I want to write about you but
you are chairly and organ
     molten metal flows
     broken zinnia flowers
     strewn across the lawn

a cross says less than the lack of one
     it is nice to see a church
     but nicer not to

the grave is up, heartfelt
uncivilized
considered as a group
the cemetery lacks concupiscence
though is a kind of concubinage
     we come together
bring into one main body
     less dilute
and rise, we rise
take wing and coiffure
a frazzle of starlings
one's thoughts or attention
out over the Straight
     and into books

Douglas Miller New Works

I Thought of You When I Wrote This

    Are you kidding me? Check out this and other new works by Douglas Miller.

PageBoy Now at Left Bank Books

     That's right, you heard it here wrist! First but not least, PageBoy Magazine is now single-handedly keeping another independent bookstore/magazine seller afloat. How do we do it?.. Well, by your generous support of course. So next time you're reaching for Nit House, Sween Mickies, or DUNCE, just think to yourself: "PageBoy Magazine makes me happy, it really does."

Who Said That?

     "You don't listen to a symphony and ask, 'what did they mean by that?' You ask, 'did I have a meaningful experience, was I moved?' A poem is the same."

     I found this quote on one of my notebooks, I Magritte to say that it had no source written beneath it. It must be regret, though. It's consistent with the quote by him listed in this blog under the heading Rene Magritte Pipe Song. I can't be sure, though. When I google searched "you don't listen to a symphony and ask, 'what did they mean by that?'" I came up with How Do I Get My Wife to Listen to My Needs? (poor bloke) Perhaps he's going about it the wrong way. Perhaps instead of asking her to listen to his needs he should ask, "Honey, are you moved?" or maybe "Honey, do you need to move out?" Either way the quote above is neither his nor his wife's, pretty sure of that.

Robert Peter's Critoris

R.P. in his Marlon Brando phase.

     "For some readers criticism is a sexual act - the critic either rubs up against poets (virgin and seasoned ones) or ravishes them. Other readers regard such writing as among the least sexual of all cultivated postures - the arbiter of literary taste sponsors careers and moves into power with the abandon of a disinterested savage seated on a pile of freshly cut scalps."  

  -Robert Peters (from the preface to The Great American Poetry Bake-off)

Elevator Music XVII

such as a plain, highway or voyage
of these we're taught to idealize

I'll take the plain, the grass and sky
above it, a breeze, sun and rustling
whittling, curdling dry thymus
the sound of sound of, of saying
of someone saying Whitman, widow
willows saying listen, this is
your place amidst the broom
leave your singing here with me
marry me, never leave
there is no place better
than this one beneath these branches
stay

Anuthur Buckett

     "I see her still, propped up in a kind of stupor against one of the walls in which this wretched edifice abounds, her long grey hair framing in its cowl of scrofulous mats a face where pallor, languor, hunger, acne, recent dirt, immemorial chagrin and surplus hair seemed to dispute the mastery."
                 -Watt

The Puked Puke

     "it is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it."
                    - Beckett (Watt)

Pics from the Reading

     The PageBoy reading took place on Oct. 15 in an apartment on Capitol Hill. Everyone was there, even Mine. Emily Beyer, Paul Nelson, Thomas Walton all read. Garrett Hobba played a few tunes. 
     Here are some photos from the event.  

Garrett Hobba de Las Colinas Suaves. 

Paul Nelson slaughtered us all.

Sara Palin was there, though everyone referred to her as 'parasailin,' because she seemed to be doing so for quite some time.

Tuuli Kahlo Walton performs a scene from "One Hand No Hand."

Un hombre con un bigote

Unfortunately, we had to turn people away.

what is good english?

          PageBoy was out at a silly little dive bar one day when the regulars asked the barmaid if she knew the name of the movie where Danny Glover and Mel Gibson play cops and etc. and the barmaid said immediately, almost without thinking "Lethal Weapon" and all the regulars erupted in cheers and ohs and that's its and everybody was laughing and we were too because it was very happy there all the sudden and then one of the regulars said thank-you i've been trying to think of that all day and the barmaid said, "yeah and i ain't even never seen it," which was the most beautiful music that happened that day even though it was a day that everyone seemed to find beautiful, being all sunny and cool autumnal like leaves and the market was and kites even.
     Then I remembered Corso's line "that I speak good English before I die" and smiled smiled smiled, knowing he was wrong, and right, and that the bloody mary's were so horrid they were undrinkable, though of course we drank them anyway.

The Glass Slipper

   "It is a sort of equation with insufficient conditions for determining the unknown."
          -John Ashbury on Jasper Johns' painting "According to What."
     This quote itself is a sort of equation, a description of poetry, of art and its ineptness for determining the unknown. Yet it works in a way. Its ineptness is its wisdom. Aware of its insufficiencies, it goes out dancing just the same. Old ugly Cinderella and her little lost shoe.

That Bury Small Animals

     burying beetle - (n.) any of various beetles of the genus Nicrophorus that bury small animals on which they feed and lay their eggs.

John Burroughs After Onions

     "Thoreau's quality is very penetrating and contagious; reading him is like eating onions - one must look out or the flavor will reach his own page. But my current is as strong in my channel as Thoreau's in his."

     PageBoy wonders which metaphor is worse: the onion or the current. What does the eating of onions metaphor mean actually? How can you "look out" for something that you've just put in your mouth? Does "the page" here refer to some sort of foul bowel situation? And does it have anything to do with his "current" being so strong in his "channel?"

from his treasure

  

...he drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

     a day of dappled seaborne clouds.

everyone suddenly burst out singing

     he is dead and gone, Lady.

they turned to him, who was listening, and smirked

     it is nice to listen to music, but nicer not to.

when the rains began then, that day
     though not really. it was long ago.

Veg

     "A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”


     Gertrude Stein said this and as she was saying it I was thinking oh nothing will come from this and then but it did, something. something else. from the music around the thing it came. which is where what most people don't hear but why? it's too much for me to look at a fire pit. to see it there, like some eggplant sitting.

Some Words

     Hoecake - n. cornbread that is baked on the blade of a... hoe. (whoa.)
  
     Ho hum - interj. used to express
     Boredom

     Hoedown - n. A dance that is square and never
     Round.

     Hod - n. a trough carried over the shoulder for transporting
     Cod, coal or Al.

     Hog Peanut - n. the peanut of a
     Hog. But Not and never of a sow.

     Hokum - n. something impressive but which's (whose?) veracity is
     Broken (Who's veracity is broken? The Witch's)

     Hole - n.(?) a cavity in a solid, a kind of
     Bowl of lackingnousness.

JJPS Elevator Music XVI

Jasper Johns 0 Through 9


     "Revolutionary art and visionary physics attempt to speak about matters that do not yet have words. That is why their languages are so poorly understood by people outside their fields."
          - Leonard Shlain (Art and Physics)

Elevator Music

warm, dry grass, dry field
dry swatch swallowing rocks
dry sea tide and sea stack
in the sun (it must be in the sun)
whispering the order of sound
the singing fields constant
the lighted thisness thistening
as you lay down to die
an old falcon to be eaten
by new falcons
but first, to lie in the grass
to be the thing you've wanted
all your life for a second