New—like a baby howling “kill the fucker”
from its iron crib—new
like episodes of your daily blood coursing
transmitted to every computer
day and night—
new—like a toothbrush,
bristles standing straight—
what is it that makes all of these things the same?
They have something to do with “new.”

In one sitting, she could master the controls,
and with that, caromed
off into the simulated NYC skyline on her screen
(HUD off, she was flying with no HUD)
and she was excited.
—It was better than glass blowing!
which she had just failed out of in night school
(partly due to scheduling problems,
but it’s also known that she didn’t get along with the teacher).

So we get this straight, also—
nothing gets “old” in the virtual.
Every word—you turn it over like a cube
in a syntax mesh—like a polygon in Lara Croft’s buttocks—
never failing, and it never fails
to ignite. Thus, your negotiations
revive, cyclical—like T.S. Eliot meant with the term “juvescence”
—not so hotly as to feel religious, only
sacrilegious, as it sabotages our inevitable meat.

This voice—in all the anthologies
takes as its subject the old anthologies;
we are admiring time, here
on a still lake, waiting for the boy
to drop his tonsils into the glassy waters:
ritual. But he puts it all together
so nicely, with a clownish, manic turn
at the end; he moves forward
with us, into the unclearness
that is black and always novel.

A crowd might want circumstances
more immediate, some play
of forces like beasts, phallic, unthinking
faces in the bright confusion—
animals can lead us to the sock
that gives some shape to the tick-tock
travesty of story time. But that’s easy.
What’s difficult is the waiting
for the boy to assay one more twist
in his effort at soft control.

But I have a complaint: it’s just show,
even highbrow, clearly inept,
this waiting for modest immersions,
like a gnat clamoring for “sleep”
despite a span of minutes-for-life,
and its lack of a lifetime for dreaming it. I
mean: the air might have its poetry
but one hrumpf! sound a week? This boy
is funny, so I just don’t mind,
but trust the impatience of instinct.

My latest little project has been creating an all around arts site for Richard Stockton College where I’m teaching. The site is called Richard Stockton Overdrive (a name inspired by Bachmann Turner Overdrive, of course). It’s for “official and unofficial” creativity, meaning that I want students to give me stuff from their classes but also their own private ventures, much of which seems much more interesting to me than class work.

It’s not “launched” yet — the content on the site is either bogus, stuff I ripped from the web, etc. I plugged it all in just for design’s sake. The image in the upper right will change with each issue — perhaps the entire color scheme will change — and the categories that I have are just the first group I could think of. They will also alternate depending on content.

But one rule will remain constant, which is that I just want one of each thing for each issue. This keeps the size down, so people know they can more or less get through an issue in less than an hour. Too many webzines overload their contents, and so what happens (in my mind) is that I peruse a few things and maybe bookmark it, but don’t visit it again until I get the announcement for the next issue.

There’s some trash aesthetic going on here — I wanted it to have some underground feel to it — but has some elegant touches, to make it professional-looking.

Please join Les Figues Press and editors Christine Wertheim & Matias Viegener, to celebrate The noulipian Analects, an alphabetical survey of constrained writing by some of today’s most innovative writers.

Hosted by: Robert Fitterman

With readings by contributors: Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, Brian Kim Stefans, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener, and Christine Wertheim

Thursday, January 31, 2008
7:00 p.m.
The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017

For more info see:
http://www.lesfigues.com
http://www.mercantilelibrary.org/events/readings.php

About the book, in the words of Charles Bernstein
[The noulipian Analects is] An Alpha Bestiary of Exogenously Exotic Essays and Dazzlingly Delectable Design, Complexly Charismatic Constraints and Occasional Oulipian Outrages, Thoughtful Theoretical Threads and Ludicrously Ludic Limits, Gutsy Gender Gaiety and Dantesque destinies Detourned, Quixotic Queneau Quests and Cocky Combinatorial Collisions, Real Rubber Roses & Radiantly Removed R’s…What We Wanton Woeful Whimsical Wanderers Willingly Want.

About the People Performing

Robert Fitterman is the author of 9 books of poetry; 3 of which constitute his ongoing poem Metropolis. Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon New American Poetry Award (1997), and Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Books, 2002) received the Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award in 2003. A new collection of various writings, rob the plagiarist, is forthcoming in Fall 2008 (Roof Books). Fitterman is on the writing faculty at NYU and at Bard College. He lives in New York City with his wife, poet Kim Rosenfield and their daughter Coco.

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and a co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence, a 50,000-word, one-sentence novel, and a chapbook, Figure from The Gates of Paradise. Her nonfiction book The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality is forthcoming from Other Press; her novel La Medusa will be published in Fall 2008 from Fiction Collective 2.

Brian Kim Stefans is the author of Free Space Comix (Roof Books, 1998), Gulf (Object Editions, 1998, downloadable at ubu.com), Angry Penguins (Harry Tankoos Books, 2000) and What Does It Matter? (Barque Press, 2003). Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos Press), a collection of essays, poetry and interviews, appeared in 2003. His newest books are What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), collecting over six years of poetry, and Before Starting Over (Reconstruction S.) (Salt Publishing, 2006). He is the editor of the /ubu (”slash ubu”) series of e-books at www.ubu.com/ubu and the creator of arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics.

Rodrigo Toscano latest book is Collapsible Poetics Theater, which was a National Poetry Series 2007 selection. Toscano’s experimental poetics plays, body movement poems, polyvocalic pieces have recently been performed at the Disney Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, Ontological-Hysteric Poet’s Theater Festival, Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival (Alexandria, Virginia). Toscano is originally from the Borderlands of California. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Matias Viegener is a professor at the California Institute for the Arts, and a member of the art collective Fallen Fruit. His criticism appears in the collections Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media (Routledge), and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style (U Mass). He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles’ The Trial of Gilles de Rais. He has published in Bomb, Artforum, Artweek, Afterimage, Cargo, Critical Quarterly, Framework, Oversight, American Book Review, Fiction International, Paragraph, Semiotext(e), Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Abject and Discontents and X-tra.

Christine Wertheim is a former painter with a PhD in literature and semiotics from Middlesex University, (UK). She teaches at the California Institute for the Arts and co-organizes an annual conference: Séance (2004), Noulipo (2005), Impunities (2006), Feminaissance (2007), ArtText (2008). Her writings on aesthetics include essays in Art History vs Aesthetics, Xtra and Open Letter. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, including La Petite Zine and Five Fingers Review, and her book of poetics +|’me’S-pace is published by Les Figues Press, 2007.

I.

There was the dying, that
                                                  was suspicious—
       strange words passed, none of them
                                                                            colorful
on an Indian Winter day in West
                                                             Philadelphia
              when the extremity of poetry
                                                                      equals the utility
of the timetables on which
                                                   we run—
       that one seems overtly-educated, if not
                                                                                 dressed so
impeccably, he’ll not need a job
                                                             or residence
              and subsist on merely being right-looking
                                                                                               —she
keeps something cinematic, shiny, in her left hip
                                                                                           pocket—
                     so terribly deft, so accessory, so honestly
                                                                                                     in place of life.

II.

Strange words fail, fall—the meekest
                                                                       rise up,
       apotheosized, they need not even be
                                                                            made customary
so deep the sentences slouch in beds
                                                                       of über-deliberated
              sheets—this counter-cultural sales pitch is
                                                                                                faux-1973, yet fresh,
we’re hardly missing the insecurity—as lines
                                                                                      jut,
       reeling about the Caucasian, when, in fact,
                                                                                      miscegenation
has returned to find victory in World War II, and peace
                                                                                                          at last—
              then, turning cocky, Nietzschean, it
                                                                                   tries
to clear the span of Snake River Canyon in a balsa-wood
                                                                                                              rocket—no helmet—
                     like the Birth of Evil, haha—another “difficult” poem
                                                                                                                           that failed to ignite.

Here’s a little poem I wrote after flipping around through Elizabeth Bishop’s collection of drafts and notes called Edgar Allen Poe and the Jukebox. I was reading the 15 pages of drafts for her poem “One Art,” which I don’t actually think is that great a poem but that’s neither here nor there.

But it did inspire me to try to write something in her style. There’s a touch of Philip Larkin (of all people!) in there as well. I guess I was feeling pretty down — it’s a real “house” poem, in that it does reflect some of the gloominess of living in a house by yourself in a rather depressed area of Philadelphia, far away from the action.

The title is in quotes because it is taken from the title of a Morrissey song, as if to drive the point home! It’s supposed to be funny.

“On Maudlin Street”

We can have our books brought down,
talking like living giblets,
in trite tones, or tri-tones
one could almost write a book on, explaining
how those digressions weren’t failures
and how those failures were fairly met.
We can have our coffee blackened or whitened
to taste, and our tastes in trivial things
affirmed by television queens
in the afternoon, while late night kings
rehearse celebrity with celebrities
and bring us names from movies we won’t see.
We can have those things, or have
some things we might not like to have, like
love that peters out in a month
of gin and tonics and rivetting accolades
for dancers and poets who just seemed made
for us, and our talk, and our gin and tonics
before, of course, the check came
and the poetry seemed hurried and mawkish.
This was before they put us here.
But not that, yet. We can have,
for a moment, air that seems homemade,
“just like mother used to breathe,” and floors
that rise to greet your feet (not face)
and Southern comforts and Northern comforts
and niceties from Indiana
delivered to our front door, and friends
who talk a lot when they’re entertaining
and go the fuck home when they’ve become bores.
Not a bad life in these padded walls.
The bills slip in and out like dogs
who only need walking once a month, and otherwise
keep the house house-like, warm and haunting,
always wanting more, but saying nothing.

Benazir Bhutto died on the wrong day.
It’s irrational to think
that the technology of the sun roof
is so advanced
as to be able to kill an ex-Prime Minister.
And yet, the country will get behind that,
and let her be buried.

Brian goes mainstream.
Who cares about the fella
stuck in a field
with a Mason jar
ventriloquizing in the rain?
Yes, the field grows to meet him.
A helipad, also.
It’s wilder than the swoon
that annexed Xerox to Brigadoon,
leaving him asking for anything.

Here’s a crazy little video I made with Sianne Ngai back in the salad days of the mid-90s. Special guest appearance (actually, she’s probably the star) by Chelsea Pennebaker.

I won’t tell you the story because it’s so complex that it would take up several pages of this blog, not to mention the technical details — camera, lighting, special effects — since it’s really chock full of them, and I don’t want to waste your time. Screenplay took about 6 months. Quite simply, it’s the best thing since Jean Vigo’s “L’ Atalante.”

Thursday, December 6th 7pm FREE
Teachers & Writers Collaborative
520 8th Ave, Suite 2020
A,C,E, to Penn Station

wine, cheese reception to follow

Brian Kim Stefans’ recent books of poetry are Kluge: A Meditation (Roof Books) and What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School). A book of interviews and criticism, Before Starting Over, was published by Salt Book in 2006. He teaches new media studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and lives in Philadelphia, PA.

Eric Baus is the author of The To Sound (Wave Books), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, forthcoming), and several chapbooks. He is a contributing editor for PENNsound and publishes Minus House chapbooks. He lives in Denver.

Mobile Libris will be selling books.

“Hope I die before I get there!” — Pete Townshend.