Poetry. Cultural Writing. The poem looks back on the decades previous to the first Gulf War and forwards--toward a duration of events, which, because the poem is in history, do not cease to occur. In a famous modern definition, an epic poem is a poem including history. In Barret Watten's BAD HISTORY, history includes the poem. The poem, too, becomes the event of its own recording. Watten is the co-editor of POETICS JOURNAL and author of TOTAL SYNTAX, essays on modern and contemporary poetics, as well as the long poems PROGRESS and UNDER ERASURE. He teaches modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Bad History

Literature & Fiction

Watten, Barrett

Poetry

Atelos

Poetry. The poems in TRUE are Rae Armantrout's contribution to the Atelos project, a series begun in 1995 and devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate it from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact. The text here appears in prose paragraphs and details much of the poet's own history. A founding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, her poems have appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and in books, including PRECEDENCE and MADE TO SEEM. She teaches writing at the University of California, San Diego.

True

Biographies & Memoirs

Armantrout, Rae

Arts & Literature

Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel rocks. Lu manages to explore, critique, and worry about identity, location, self-expression, communication, shopping malls, orange dresses, and the future with glorious intelligence and laugh-out-loud humor, in the context of exquisitely wrought and very long sentences. One suspects that, like the character YJ, Lu "was always living and writing against a blind wall of cacophony that existed somewhere between plain sense and the din of cultural expectation and popular music." The narrator P (as well as her twenty-something friends L, R, YJ, C, A, and so on) thus occupies "the contemporary position of always being foreign to herself, a private predicament which necessarily played itself out on the public level, in the politics of making a literature that struggled to catch sight of itself, as if that could provide some assurance of its existence. We were using a borrowed language to add more words to our names ..." Where do we draw the line between fiction and autobiography? Frankly, when reading Pamela, we could care less. The truth of this writing is in its extreme excellence: we need no more.

Pamela: A Novel (Atelos (Series), 4.)

Lu, Pamela

United States

Poetry. The water shored up the pilings and barnacles/ that shored up the pier, that shored up/ the memory machine. In Lytle Shaw's CABLE FACTORY 20, Robert Smithson's description of the landscape surrounding his Spiral Jetty in Utah's Great Salt Lake guides 20 site-specific poems. In the spirit of Smithson's site/ non-site dynamic, which proposes a continuous circuit between objects selected for framing as art and the contexts out of which they have been pulled, Shaw uses the the San Francisco Bay Area as his laboratory, exploring the extent to which a poetics of place, a linguistic site-specificity, is possible in the social/architectural landscape of the century America. Lytle Shaw edits SHARK with artist Emilie Clark. Their collaborations ROUGH VOICE and FLEXAGON, as well as SHARK, are available from SPD.

Cable Factory 20

Shaw, Lytle

Prose. Poetry. ALIEN TATTERS is a series of prose poem meditations in response to (someone's) sightings of UFOs and encounters with aliens. The writer has been/is being abducted. The writings are the situation's tatters, its tatterings. Inevitably funny (except perhaps to the true believer), the work is also sad and scary. Lights came. My god, blobs. A sneaky little rill. Bought them a box of shoes made of chocolate. Small silver wire, challenge kit. The Frenchman walks off into the noise with his girl. From the bottom of the craft, enough darkness to fill, replace all our missing nights?

Alien Tatters

Coolidge, Clark

History & Criticism

Cultural Writing. Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and video artist presently living in Lebanon. His video and installation works, which include Radical Closure Artist with Bandaged Sense Organ (1997), have been shown at the San Francisco Cinematheque; the Pacific Film Archive; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; and elsewhere. He edited the special Discourse issue Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in this World. FORTHCOMING is a fascinating blend of political theory, film theory, and cross-genre writing -- an essential book for those interested in contemporary thought and culture.

Forthcoming

Toufic, Jalal

Prose. Poetry. Part of Atelos' Hip's Road project, which is devoted to publishing writing that challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, Schultz' book does just that. Comprised of three sections of prose and poetry, with the last section entitled A Novel: Some Vague Wife, Schultz continually pushes the boundaries of language and form, while exploring, most often, the constructs of sex, gender, and class. Schultz is the co-editor of LIPSTICK ELEVEN, available at SPD, and her poetry, experiemental fiction, and critical essays have appeared in many journals, including TRIPWIRE, FOURTEEN HILLS, and KENNING.

Some Vague Wife

Schultz, Kathy Lou

Poetry. If Jelly Roll Morton should meet Emily Dickinson in 21st-century Las Vegas to compose occasional metaphysical stanzas, the result might resemble Kit Robinson's THE CRAVE: beautiful, strange, and ha-ha. Kit Robinson has been active as a poet, teacher, curator, and performer on the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene for 30 years. In addition to THE CRAVE, he is the author of 15 books, the most recent of which (also available from SPD) include CLOUD EIGHT(written with Alan Bernheimer), DEMOCRACY BOULEVARD and BALANCE SHEET. "If we look in the direction/ these words will have to do/ adding to the enormous burden of words/ The entire concept is entirely too conceptual/ all we need is a few good words"-- (from "Return on Word"). Robinson lives in Berkeley and works as a marketing executive in the information technology industry.

The Crave

Robinson, Kit

Poetry. "What do Hugh MacDiarmid, Donkey Kong and the algorithms of pornolize.com have to do with each other? Was Wordsworth all wrong, and is the democratization of language to be found in the work of a whiz kid's Commodore 64? Is it healthy to read the letters of a supermarket receipt for its lyrical soul? What is a `digital poetics' and where can I get one? Does it hurt? Can I still write `normal' poems afterwards?"--from FASHIONABLE NOISE. Brian Kim Stefans is also the author of FREE SPACE COMIX, GULF, and ANGRY PENGUINS, all carried by SPD.

Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics

Stefans, Brian Kim

Poetry. Rodrigo Toscano's PLATFORM is a political one; his writings are predicated on the political conditions of contemporary life. But his work is not (and will never be) predicted by those conditions; indeed, outwitting, unnerving, and outspeaking the forces and figures clinging to control is one of his signal artistic strategies. The work is bitingly inventive and yet delicately meticulous; outrageous, funny, anti-hypocritical, and "unfuckingrightgaggable," PLATFORM is a victory for the political intelligence whose exercise is now, more than ever, a human necessity. Toscano is a nationally influential writer, whose work along the intersections of social and aesthetic activism is adding new dimensions to contemporary poetics. His other two books are THE DISPARITIES and PARTISANS (both available from SPD).

Platform

Toscano, Rodrigo

Contemporary

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