Posted July 22nd, 2016 at 4:21 pm
22Jul
The summer issue of Poets & Writers features a great "Literary MagNet" column with Alice Notley, reflecting on some of the places she published in the lead up to her new collection, Certain Magical Acts. In the feature, Notley praises Animal Shelter #4—where six passages from her serial poem "Voices" appear—as "a remarkably beautiful object." Read the whole column, by Dana Isokawa, here.
Posted June 20th, 2016 at 10:17 am
20Jun
Announcing two new titles from Scary Topiary press!
CRYSTAL MARYS by Feliz Lucia Molina
Written from the impassive surface of the Internet and the high desert of Southern California, CRYSTAL MARYS is a field study of social-media fatigue, suburban youth, Filipino immigrancy, a denim day job in LA's garment district, and other sites of crystallized dis/enchantment. Molina traces life's "beautiful unreliable narrative logic" by the devotional images of our times—the Virgin Mary, emoji, family photos, profile pics, etc.
Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Emily Pauline Fanny Dart-McLean Harris, Shola Wynne Lawson, and Feliz Lucia Molina. Edition of 129.
ABSOLUTE LOVE by Chris Kraus
A parable of activist youth, mellow courtship, and lost time told with Proustian pathos by our best chronicler of modern relationships and romance.
Saddle-stitched binding and silk-screened covers. Art by Matt Fishbeck. Edition of 212.
Posted June 18th, 2016 at 1:33 pm
18Jun
I'm delighted to be joining Robert Glück, Colm Tóibín, and Feliz Lucia Molina tonight for a reading/release-party to celebrate the publication of Glück's Communal Nude and Molina's Crystal Marys. Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, 7:30 p.m.
Posted May 6th, 2016 at 10:52 am
06May
Hi! I'm updating this site again (and renewing my vows to post here every once in a while) after a few months of digital neglect.
I've now added a separate page for Supplication, which gathers a wealth of smart reviews -- in Bookforum, American Poets, Jacket2, and elsewhere -- plus archives some audio/video content from recent Wieners readings at City Lights Books, the SFSU Poetry Center, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, Poets House, and the St. Mark's Poetry Project.
Last month, I participated in a discussion on New Narrative at the University at Buffalo (see Scholarship). The paper I presented there (on the links, or lack thereof, between John Wieners and New Narrative) will be published in a special volume on New Narrative, forthcoming in 2017 from ON Contemporary Practice.
Last fall, I interviewed Alice Notley for Bomb magazine. As always, Notley spoke beautifully:
It’s a huge job to be a poet. It’s the most essential thing there is. In terms of essence, it’s very essential. Poetry is the species. I would probably emphasize the “is.” All of our perceptual equipment is geared toward seeing us as forms, as compact forms operating on many levels—that’s like a poem. That’s who we are, that’s how we see. That’s what there is, really: there’s poetry. Prose is very, very flat. But we’re not flat. We’re dense and layered.
Finally, exciting new things are coming from Scary Topiary and Free and Natural Poetry. More soon.
Posted November 14th, 2015 at 2:58 pm
14Nov
I'm terrifically excited for the first ever Free & Natural Poetry Faire in Los Angeles next weekend! Co-organized by Dorothea Lasky, Elizabeth Metzger, Max Ritvo, and myself . . .
The Free & Natural Poetry Faire is a gala of poetry, art, and arcana. It is our belief that poetry itself is by its nature transdisciplinary, and, to that end, the Faire will create a collaborative and unrestrained space where poetry will coexist for two days with many other art and knowledge forms. True to its name, the Free & Natural Poetry Faire is free and open to the public. This will be the first of a series of Free & Natural Poetry events.
The Free & Natural Poetry Faire is being graciously hosted by the gallery Commonwealth & Council, and will occur on Friday and Saturday, November 20th and 21st. For these two days, the Faire will provide a festive exchange for many brilliant people and happenings. Semiotext(e), Penny-Ante Editions, and other LA small presses will be present during the day. Asher Hartman and Stuart Krimko will offer readings psychic and astrological. At nightfall, poetry will ascend, with over twenty-five poets and performers reading over two nights—Cedar Sigo, Micah Ballard, Feliz Lucia Molina, Fred Moten, Kate Durbin, Amber Rose Tamblyn, and many others. Somewhere in the middle, there will be a new one-act play premier by "Tall Paul" Gellman & Friends. Visit the official Free & Natural Poetry Faire site for more details and the full schedule of events!
Posted November 14th, 2015 at 2:27 pm
14Nov
Another belated book review notice! In its recent November 2nd issue, Dan Chiasson of the New Yorker had this to say about Supplication:
His many poems about sex, his celebrations of heroin, peyote, and cocaine, and his reverence—in poems that make gritty and real the heart’s imperatives—for an idealized poetry so different from the facts on the ground make Wieners (born a Catholic, and, like many lapsed Catholics, prone to beliefs that fill in the blank) a devotional poet . . . His afterlife exists in the form of these poems, a mental Boston, eerily lit by neon and street lights, through which the rest of us wander.
Read the whole piece here.