Just back from my first trip to the Danny’s reading series, which came about through a fortunate pair of events: first, an email a few weeks back from Joel Sloman telling me he was coming to town to read, and then an offer of a ride from a U of C professor who happens to be an old college classmate…
Mark Strand and Joel Sloman are reading at Danny’s tonight.
Lure for Alli Warren This one’s just too good to pass up, like a sweatshirt without the name of a college. It’s a childish fixation, incubating with a foursquare tug, an empty gesture erasing each line of a scratched-in proof. Maybe it’s something to do while waiting for the walls of the room to pull away, revealing the cheering crowd.…
You can follow the Robert Creeley world tour to Philadelphia over at Ron Silliman’s blog; Ron’s report (it was crowded there, too) includes the full text of the poem, “John’s Song,” that I referenced at the end of my own report on Creeley’s Chicago reading, as well as the information that the John in question is John Taggart.
The new Chicago Postmodern Poetry site (a spinoff of Ray Bianchi’s former Chicago Postmodern Poetry Calendar) is now up, with listings for Chicago-area readings, as well as reading reports, reviews, and poet profiles. There are reports on the recent Robert Creeley reading by me and Ela Kotkowska, as well as my review of Alli Warren’s SCHEMA, now preserved for something…
Blanching for Alli Warren After a while the ants start getting bigger. The ones that move faster have some kind of whiteness around their bodies, like wings or the skin of an egg. Occasionally I have an itch somewhere and I look expecting to see something crawling along it. We always go spelunking on the same side of the street.…
Cassie has landed. We’ll be huddling around the graduate students and professors for warmth.
A Genealogy of Spoons for Alli Warren Some spoons only work in pairs. Some spoons spread roots upward. Some spoons swerve aside at the last moment. Some spoons had tails. Some spoons stick to tongues in all weather. The spoon of Chicago consists of 9 bundled tubes, each 75 ft. wide with no columns between the core and the perimeter.…
Okay. I’ll bite. 1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. from Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (see? I am working on my dissertation) We can express the difference by defining the romantic, nineteenth-century periodical…
Regretfully, I didn’t make it to the Kent Johnson reading last week, but here’s a fine report by Jeremy Bushnell.