How is it Friday already? The Poetry Festival kicks off today. We've been having meetings since October, kicking around poet invites, funding options, and other, more abstract issues for so long that it's hard to believe the day is finally here. Tonight, Right to Write kicks off the evening with a reading, and then Sonia Sanchez and Sage Francis do their thing, after which there will be a sham-pain reception... how bourgy are we? If it were my poetry festival, I'd probably make buckets upon buckets of Danger Punch (cranberry, pineapple, a fifth of bottom shelf vodka, and FRUIT SLICES) for my guests, but alas, I've been working with some classy folks on this. And hey, there will be fruit -- don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure strawberries will also be eaten.

Until tonight, though, I have to spend some excruciatingly slow-creeping hours at work... normally I work 11A-10P on Fridays, though, so this is a welcome change. I get to leave early and go rock out to some mothertruckin' poetry.

Sad part is that the one Friday I leave early, there's actually a pretty killer event going on at my work. It's the book launch for this tome, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Hendel, and Ravi Shankar. I bought this book about a week and a half ago and it has turned out so far to be a really satisfying read (though I am far from finished; it's like 570 pages).

Wow, what a bunch of f'ing great feedback we've gotten for the first issue of At-Large. I daresay I overheard something about Laure-Anne Bosselaar's approval... and we've got several new subs for the next issue (thanks BC for talking up the mag -- at least one of them is because of you!). So now it's collecting time again.

Yesterday was such a gorgeous day here in New York. I woke up at 945 with the intention (as we'd planned) of meeting Rohin in Williamsburg for the Regina Spektor show, but when I texted him he was still lounging in his abode, so Garrett and I checked it out ourselves. Naturally the line was unmanageable (and, as Garrett pointed out, everyone in it was embarrassingly young), so we did the next best thing: grabbed an iced coffee and headed out to a Chelsea gallery.

The gallery in question was Arario New York, and the show was Hyungkoo Lee's Animatus, which consisted of these meticulously made resin skeletons of cartoon characters (see left), all hanging from the ceiling with wires like exhibits from the Museum of Natural History. The Road Runner and Coyote skeletons were posed in a chase scene. The whole gallery was super dark, with black walls, and the only lights were on the installations themselves, which created a very dramatic air (not unlike the Bodies exhibition, maybe on purpose). It was very, very cool and super worth it.

Then! Then we went to see Alex Lemon read at the Ear Inn. He seems like a super fun person, and I'm very excited to have him read at the SLC Poetry Festival this year. He was totally comfortable in a crowd, friendly, and nice. 'Course I dorked out and had him sign my copy of At Last Unfolding Congo. The other two readers were good as well -- I particularly liked Jerry Williams. Read some of his poems here at Spork Press.

Arms? Bear?

We are keeping such long hours working on At-Large. I love and hate it. I love it because it seems like everyone on the staff is really committed to it, committed enough to not fuss too much about the long hours and the long(ish) "meetings" (at the coffee shop, or on our living room floor with wine and possibly cheap beer and some exotic snack du jour) that we keep having. The layout looks beautiful, and Rohin works extremely hard on tweaking it and takes all my suggestions to heart. And I hate it because my sleep schedule sucks. But the first point trumps the second one, for sure, haha.

Ars Fennica

Garrett and I went to see the Ars Fennica exhibition at Scandinavia House on Saturday. It was the final day of the show, and the final hour of it (we went at 5PM), and so it was kind of pleasantly empty. I mention this because the last time I was at SH, it was for a film (A Man's Job, during Nordic Oscar Contenders Week), and the place was packed with irritated, grumbling masses.

Now, I know barely anything about contemporary Finnish art, though I do know that in other genres the Finns are surprisingly avant-garde (consider the freak-folk scene that emerged from there a couple years back). So I didn't really know what to expect. But the show was beautiful; highlights for me were Elina Merenmies' forestscapes -- the picture to the left is an example so you get an idea, but it is not from the show; the ones I'm talking about were painted. Look her work up on your good time. It's unsettling in a whispery foresty The Knife-y kind of way. I also liked several of Anna Tuori's landscapes. Fuck, I liked the whole show. And I got a bar of Fazerin Sininen in the gift shop afterward. Well played, Scandinavia House. Well played.

varovasti

"Our love is
like dodo:
beaten down and abused
for being strange."


Why is the D key on my Compaq not working. GOODNIGHT.

blurt

Listening to The Knife's Silent Shout. This album is so, so good. It's something like hushed electronica, like forest electronica, like if tiny nocturnal animals with light-sensitive eyes stopped and made electronic music and became more and more brave throughout the process. I'm aware that the album came out in like 2006, but I want you to know I have been listening to it since then.

I think I'm in a strange mood because I'm writing. Victoria Redel gave a workshop-wide assignment to write a much longer draft than we might normally write. Meanwhile, I've been working all night and have ended up with 20 lines. I have to give the assignment its credit, though: I might have stopped after ten lines or so, and then the poem would never have gained some of its singsong -- a quality I actually rather like, and that actually kind of goes with the subject matter of this particular poem. But, despite this newfound "love" (ahem) for "long poems" (AHEM), I'm finding myself ill at ease.

I would like to prevent the devolution of this blog into half-assed music reviews and overarching, arrogant statements about poetry that I shall surely regret tomorrow -- so here's a question. Do you suppose the word "aigrette" -- headdress whose most noticeable characteristic is a plume, like that of an egret -- has squat to do with other words that end in "-aigrette"?

Anne Carson

Here's a link to a clip of the Anne Carson performance, from 92nd St Y that I talked about a couple posts back:
http://blog.92y.org/index.php/weblog/item/92y_video_anne_carson_dramatic_reading/
It's really worth watching -- the audio is great. You have to keep in mind that the room was HUGE and the video does not really do justice to the spatial aspect of the performance, though.

Holy Moly

Here's a fun thing -- the new SUB-LIT is up. I'm in pretty good company.

The first issue of At-Large is coming together in the middle of April. It seems like a lightning-fast period of time to produce an issue, but I think the magazine is a little bit more fast-paced than the traditional quarterlies and whatnot. I think content-wise at least first it'll be small, but it'll come out something like bimonthly. It's a lot of work, but it'll also be exciting and worth it to keep the issues somewhat small, since content will actually change which will keep people's interest. Hopefully. So look out for that soon. It's been pretty great learning how to put something together, too. Rohin's vision is really extensive and so he's really accommodating, which helps.

And that's what's consuming most of my time. I should be working on some mad thesis stuff, but while I feel alternately satisfied and disturbed by my progress or lack thereof, today is one of the satisfied days so I'm just going to work on my outside projects and be merry.