mischievoice

2009-11-09T06:35:00.000-08:00

grass
hopping over
the wall

& off
to

canonize
pauli

& back
to over
turn the

fucking
thing

this image, taken by petra in berlin this august & the poem, being a shadow version of the swedish original, are from our exhibition die kinder aus berlin hanging at the pub which has served as mine & my friends' living room since i first moved to malmö in 1996. &, yes that's a cricket in the photo

today people celebrate the 20th anniversary of the berlin wall being torn down. that's all good. now let's put some irresistible pressure on israel to tear down their anti-semite wall at the very latest a year from today

2009-11-06T10:19:00.000-08:00

sometimes i write flash fiction. crime stories. i have written before on this blog about my love for the hardboiled tradition. some of my flashes were published in the lovely defunct online zine flashing in the gutters edited by tribe (couldn't find the link to his site)

now i have decided to self-publish a small simply designed broadside of the first story i wrote & published in the gutters. it's titled Under the Sun & will be available for free from now until december 4. if you want a copy just send me a snailmail address & i'll print & mail it to you

2009-11-03T03:59:00.000-08:00

does belgian poetry exist?

go ask poetry international

the attached image was taken in berlin by petra pacifico & will be on the cover of an e-chap of prose poems to be published by differentia press probably in december or january

2009-10-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

i just have to post this lovely review of Susan Maurer's Perfect Dark. these are the words of George Wallace

Peering Through Perfect Dark: New Poems by Susan Maurer

In PERFECT DARK (ungovernable press, 2009), a new collection of poems Susan Maurer, the urban dilemma that is New York is told in fine style, offering up poem after poem with the kind of duality that satisfies and tantalizes readers. There's fine understated humor in many of the poems, which softens the otherwise urbane voice -- one part wary and another part earnestly yearning. It is this combination of vulnerability of the heart and toughness of spirit that results in a compelling volume with fabulous range.

Some of Maurer’s poems are ineluctably of the moment, seeming to have been traced in a foggy train window and glimpsed in passing as we hurry by. Like BLUE CHALK LINE, at once suggestive of the emotive moment and dismissive of it:

"He wrote on the brick wall in blue chalk
'I know who wrote this.'
Well I know who wrote this and
you know who's reading this
and that takes care of that."

In the poem WITH THE UNBEARABLES, by contrast, we are rushed along pell-mell with the high intensity crowd -- stretching our legs and striding energetically, Frank O'Hara style, through the New York City streets.

"I notice I am running and the red dirt hits my Reeboks
Up or down, I'm baffled, go for up
I stumble to the crosswalk, see no clumps of people, ask
The first man sitting and the man who's sitting next to him
Tells me it's on further and yes, they do want readers"

There is a nuanced balance going on here between eagerness to experience the world and desire to maintain crowd control. We’re offered up a kind of innocence in the face of it all: "She made this cap/unafraid of the city's lingering threat,/was not troubled by thoughts of mutability,/of how this ephemeral thing would fare 5 years from now" writes Maurer in CORONA.

There is also a wry kind of cynicism, which only partly masks the underlying passion of the speaker, as in this couplet which concludes JARDIN CREPUSCLE: "The death penalty comes back on Monday/I guess I'll wear black". Or in the opening lines from TO PAUL CLAUDEL BEFORE I FOUND OUT HE WAS AN ANTI-SEMITE AND TURNED IN THE PLANE TICKET.

"Claudel, Claudel, Paul, Paul,
cent phrases pour l'eventails.
You have cured me of the sea
but fanned from a cinder to a torrid blaze
my love for you.
I'm saying
this book is S
O beau ti
ful, I'm afraid it
might fly away.
And you, Paul, I love you for your poetry.
But I hope your teeth aren't bad."

True to their urbane nature, Maurer's characters are equally unafraid to cut off a potential moment of intimacy in a New York minute.

It is this tentative place she defines -- between the fully realized human being living just below the surface of the urban defensive shell -- which makes Susan Maurer's poems so poignant and winning. Time and time again we are offered characters torn between the desire for human connection and puzzlement over how to remain safe while achieving it -- perfectly enunciated in the anecdotal CALLING BILL KUSHNER, one of her strongest poems from the collection,

"And so we collaborated.
He did one line and I did another.
I wanted to look down his throat
to see where some of them came from.
I mean how'd he come up with them?
And he was mad at me sometimes
'cause he didn't think of some lines I did.
I was honored.
It was so intimate I wasn't sure we should be doing this."

One almost wants to cry out with the same perplexity: 'yes, you SHOULD be doing this, Sue – no, no, you should NOT be!'

The ability to enunciate the dilemma of possessing a human heart in the treacherous urban environment is one of the hallmarks of New York poetry -- and in PERFECT DARK, Sue Maurer's got it in spades. There are vignettes and anecdotes of experiences from Mozambique to Tallahassee, as befits a globe-trotting Manhattanite. But whether it's at home or abroad, we are confronted with experiences and environs that both entice us and warn us away. PERFECT DARK is a world where a back yard is a 'concentration camp for drunks,' people with Walkmen in their ears 'deaf to their own drama,' and some kind of 'Guantanamo on the Hudson.' Even the butterflies become 'colors/fraught with wings.'

The whole question of selfhood in the tumult of stimuli can lead to a violent clipped and yet captivating directness, as in DREAM ADDICT

"I've been having to look at a
number of faces that will
no longer look at me.
Ocatillo living fence, what the blue turtles like.
I can smell snow,
the brilliance of what is
left unsaid.
You hope the clown distracts the bull.
Where's the who. There's no who.
Horse of a different color. Same
fucking ride.
Glass beast. Mud garden. Ecstatic devouring.
My body is a foreign country."

If in the end it is about survival, Maurer poses for her readers a profound question -- what it is that is worth surviving for. Throughout PERFECT DARK, we are reminded that there is beauty yet to be found within people and things, if we can just safely find our way through-- something inside that continues to offer enthrallment, and remains worth fighting for. "They are not the correct colors/it's o.k. to admire like/taupe and beige. These are Day-Gloes,/gawked at, cheap, carnival,/ what one doesn't like" she writes, in ZINC: FRANKLIN AND OGDENBERG NJ.

Yet rocks, she reminds us, "have secret/lives, fluoresce, have/double selves, turn from ordinary stone/to Day-Glo slash, or hot coal orange" and in the end, we want like the author to succumb to their beauty:

"I gawk. I love them,
in the same category of miracle as
eggs which stand on end at equinox."

2009-10-14T05:37:00.000-07:00

this man was found a month ago outside one of the police stations in malmö. he had suffered a stroke & a heart attack. it also turned out he has full-blown amnesia. he doesn't have a clue who he is or what he is/was doing here. the hospital staff & cops have no clue either. all anyone knows is that he speaks fluent english

2009-09-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

both i & ungovernable press have been absent from this blog. now we return. to announce

{uniquely constructed self] by Nate Pritts

&

to finally announce my own

cantar de mio corman

available for the price of a SASE from Amanda Laughtland's Teeny Tiny Chapbooks

that's all for now

2009-08-18T06:44:00.000-07:00

now who would have thunk ungovernable press would live to see its 25th book published? anyway, here it is

Altered Aesthetics by Felino A. Soriano

i thank all ye who made me go on doing this

in other news i returned from four days in berlin yesterday. a lovely & probably mad city

2009-08-08T05:29:00.000-07:00

2009-08-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

this has taken way too long for several reasons, the most important one being personal & hence not fit for this blog. but now your waiting's over, dear constant ungovernable press reader, for i unleash

Perfect Dark by Susan Maurer

this book is unique in our catalogue in a couple of ways. it is a collection of poems written over a long period of time, something like 15 years, & it's the first (& last) manuscript i've received in hard copy with all the extra work that brings when you don't own a scanner. at times i feel i know this book by heart, which, as this is the book it is, is a good feeling

i may also add that ungovernable press might become we, as someone who may be introduced later, if she's still game, has volunteered to do future cover designs

2009-07-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

the mighty wheelhouse collective has published three new free e-chapbooks

my own over this here rainbow

tongue like a stinger by juliet cook

xenomorphia by matina stamatakis & john moore williams

i read the cook & the stamatakis/williams an hour or so ago & am wildly happy to be in such company

2009-07-16T06:08:00.000-07:00

ah, ungovernable press got

another shadow? by tom beckett

who is otherwise known for his unprotected texts from meritage press. & a little book of zombie poems available from poet's corner

other announcements & things will follow

2009-06-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

the weekend & many a day ahead are saved. you now have ample opportunity to read the works of this man. ungovernable press just published

hexapoems II

&

song of chin (part I,II)

by ed baker. who has been publishing quite extensively in recent times. he has the first 3 (of 6) books of neighbor at new mystics, points/counterpoints from fact-simile & g oo dnight from moria. another chap, asherah, is forthcoming from wheelhouse later in the summer

2009-06-09T06:55:00.000-07:00

what? again? sure, news from ungovernable press

Bash Slasho by Alana Madison

& she does things to a well known dead japanese poet that make me blush when i think of them

go, have ye some fun

2009-06-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

new from ungovernable press

terracotta worriers by Mark Young

where he with a broad mind & a (deceptively, i'm sure) light hand takes on the chapter headings of Sun Tzu's The Art of War. ever productive this is his second book since the generous new & selected pelican dreaming from Meritage Press. earlier this year he had more from series magritte out from moria

2009-06-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

mackerelling by james harvey. published by intercapillary editions, the press extension of intercapillary/space

2009-06-01T05:17:00.000-07:00

should you so want you might head on over to ungovernable press & check out our latest thing

the white album by adam fieled

in which he does wild things to the song titles of that famous beatles album

2009-05-23T06:45:00.000-07:00

a small prose poem for your reading pleasure

(british colonialism & swedish public service radio)

an hour extolling the virtues of the old-school colonial white landowners in zimbabwe (& this is 2009?)

2009-05-22T03:19:00.000-07:00

elizabeth williamson has a brief review of david wolach's book alter (ed) on goodreads. i reproduce it here because it's interesting

The two sections of book alter(ed) reproduced here by ungovernable press are startlingly different; the differences reward attention. In the first section, the fire speaks, but this is not T.S. Eliot's epic voice. Anchored both in the material horror of the Tokyo firebombings (depicted on the cover) and in the philosophical problem of the historical events that seem to return to us over and over again, this section plays with the terror of "as if." The work seems to be backing into history, ripping holes in the fabric as it moves in and out of what we think of as our factual experience.

The second section, which draws on excerpts from online pornography, deals far more directly with bodies and their vulnerability (and of course with the book as body). Here Wolach is doing a different kind of inversion, taking language that is firmly anchored in the present (Home Depot, foreclosures, etc.), but shifted slightly out of our normal range of perception, as in lines like this: "His hands ran up the left side of my life." Together the two sections are deeply intimate, but also--and importantly--unsettling.

2009-05-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

will
you walk
with me in

to this thunder
storm? clearing
the

air
of silence
adjusting the nothing

so it may
run with
interesting

interruptions
the axe
came down, blood

all around. that
woke me
up

shall
we go
then or have

you something better
to execute?
like

maybe
a movement
swinging an axe?

& this is where the axe came from

2009-05-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

2009-05-19T16:29:00.001-07:00

2009-05-19T11:51:00.001-07:00

2009-05-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

three poems each by jason bredle & jean vengua & two by adam fieled at pfs post

david wolach blogs

i occasionally play with poems on twitter

a grand new issue of blazevox i'm still swimming around in

Mothers, Daughters & Nightbirds by Martine Bellen new from beard of bees

the haiku foundation

2009-05-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

2009-05-19T07:59:00.001-07:00