All posts by 'robert':
A new poem appears in Noon on the Moon, Sternberg Press Poetic Series #4, co-edited by the lovely Fiona Bryson. Other contributors to this issue include Luna Miguel, Dafna Maimon, Pablo Larios, Bernadette Van-Huy, Mark von Schlegell, Gerry Bibby, Natalie Häusler, Josef Strau, Judith Goldman, Andrew Kerton, Dena Yago, Kenneth Goldsmith, Karl Holmqvist, Alejandro Cesarco, Sophie Collins, Sarah Wang, Barry Schwabsky, Dorothea Lasky, Andreas Schlaegel, Veronica Gonzalez Peña, Óscar Garcia Sierra, Matthew Dickman, Keith J Varadi, Jacob Wren, Madeline Gins, Charles Bernstein, and Nora Schultz.
The fourth issue in the “Poetic Series” is a seasonally themed special issue, a festive anthology composed of contributions from more than twenty writers and artists. Each interpreting the theme in an unconventional and abstract sense, it is an alternative omnibus of everyone's favorite and most controversial holiday. Artwork is provided in the form of a colorful collection of romance covers illustrated by Vicki Khuzami. The “Poetic Series” brings together works of poetry and literature in combination with visual art, introducing young as well as established writers concerned with challenging the boundaries of traditional forms of narrative. Initiated by Keren Cytter and coedited with Fiona Bryson. Copublished with A.P.E (Art Projects Era).
€12.00. To order, e-mail order@sternberg-press.com.
I was saddened to learn the other night that Dave Haselwood, visionary publisher of the Auerhahn Press, passed away on December 30 at his home in Cotati, California. I met Dave once, in January 2013, when I interviewed him in Cotati about his publishing of The Hotel Wentley Poems. Dave received me very warmly and impressed upon me his still vivid memories of arriving in San Francisco fresh from the "Wichita vortex" in 1958—"just out of the Army and cornfed from Kansas," as he put it—and immersing himself in the burgeoning arts scene in Polk Gulch. He and John Wieners met early that summer (at either a Philip Lamantia reading or a Larry Jordan film screening) in the neighborhood, and he began Auerhahn with Wieners's Hotel Wentley later that year.
After our meeting, Dave was always quick to reply, always with insight and encouragement, to my follow-up queries regarding Auerhahn/Wieners minutiae. I had hoped to visit with him again on my next trip to the Bay Area, but, sadly, won't—though I feel grateful and honored for the chance I had to meet him when I did. Of the inception of the Auerhahn Press and his friendship with Wieners, Dave told me that day last January:
We really made a real empathetic connection, because that’s how I’ve worked as a publisher and printer, and that first book set the tone of how I operated, which was you’d read these poems going around, and you’d go "yes, yes," and then you’d get to know the poet and you’d get into a collaborative mode, and then you’d bring in an artist—in this case it was Bob LaVigne, who also lived in the Hotel Wentley, and so that drawing of Wieners [in Hotel Wentley] was done in my room in the Hotel Wentley—so that’s how Auerhahn Press always operated, it was a collaborative effort. And, you know, there were a lot of other poems out there that I could never make that kind of connection with, so I never got involved with those people . . . Well, what sums it up for me was when the book came out, and he and I were gloating over it, I said, "I don’t want the press to be a fly-by-night operation, I want it to really continue." And he said, "Oh, no. It should be fly-by-night." That’s John. Somehow or another that encapsulates John’s mystique and his magic. "No, no—it should be something that secretly happens and then disappears and appears somewhere else." . . . He was a very unique person. I've never known anyone else vaguely like him.
The Auerhahn Press Records are held at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. A Bibliography of the Auerhahn Press, & Its Successor, Dave Haselwood Books, by Alastair Johnston, was published by Poltroon Press in 1976. A small collection of early poems, The Moon Eye and Other Poems, is online at Wichita Beats. Cedar Cigo wrote a great piece about Haselwood & Auerhahn for the Harriet Blog back in 2010. In later years, Dave was a devout practitioner of Zen, and was an ordained Zen priest; the Zen website Cuke.com has a nice page on Dave, with links to his Zen lectures and interviews, here. Rest in peace.
photo credit: Dave Haselwood, Bodega Bay, April 1997
I believe we all work with a fundamental rupture within ourselves. What is important is to dare to know, to accept and address it through artistic means . . . What I write, what I've been able to do and to experience, is a question of being. Much more than the body, being is what torments me, if I can use the word torment for this. I mean quite simply the fact that we exist.
Source: Bomb
The poem wants to sing out, to communicate, to wake you up. The maker of the song who has this urge, this gift, sees how others are faring on the planet . . . I am not talking about an easy, therapeutic confessional poetry that just talks about how you, the personal “I,” feels. Or suffers. It’s of a higher order and command. So there’s a way—through Shakespeare, Blake, Emily Dickinson, through poetries and cosmologies of cultures all over the world—that great poetry can inspire you to care for the planet, and for all its creatures and greenery.
Source: Tricycle
Raymond Foye has guest-edited a brilliant arts feature for the December-January issue of the Brooklyn Rail. The selection includes an essay on "Reading Cookie Mueller Today" by Jarrett Earnest; interviews with Shiv Mirabito (of Shivistan Publishing) and Henry Threadgill and Jason Moran; and, best of all, Foye's own wonderful encomium for Rene Ricard, whose apartment in the Chelsea Hotel is pictured above.
As soon we look at Mayer’s images, we immediately find ourselves in a different territory—one that appears explicitly personal and autobiographical, fraught with memory and subjectivity. The color is lush, and the look and feel hews closer to the diary films of Jonas Mekas . . . than to models of conceptual photography. Yet unlike the overt markers of subjectivity and personal style in Mekas’s work . . . the quasi-systematic aspect of Mayer’s project—36 photos a day, every day—has the effect of abstracting the images and foregrounding their generic quality: they are from her life, but they could be almost anyone’s . . . the very intensity of surface detail in Mayer’s Memory paradoxically atomizes personal experience into an endless flow of pictures and recited recollections; its authorship is distributed among various functions that don’t necessarily cohere into a single self . . . Needless to say, in their look and feel, Mayer’s photographs could not be further from the resolutely “banal” black and white snapshots that we usually associate with conceptual art. Their frequent nighttime lighting and dim interiors at times bring them closer to Nan Goldin’s early work, though without the cloying stagey feel. Images resonant with narrative and personal history are followed by fire hydrants and parking lots—not the carefully chosen “architectural banal” of Ed Ruscha, just the parking lots that surround everyday life in almost any city or town . . . It is all too easy to imagine a present-day artist selecting out the “poetic” moments from such scenes, making tableaux of artfully arranged trash to strategically reference Arte Povera or site-based art. Mayer’s hippy profusion of randomness breathes in a way that the claustrophobic pictures of more recent so-called “post-conceptual” practice cannot.
Source: Concreta
