Brandarablandarar I-III

Check out the new digital version of Blandarabrandarar, Brandarablandarar here, an electronic free-book by me and Jón Örn Loðmfjörð. The poems that have been posted so far are

Naglasúpa,

Besta orðið mitt

and

Kardinálinn var svo áhugasamur um Norrænar bókmenntir.

More poems coming soon!!!

My horizontal Iceland

In a few days I’ll be flying to Iceland, leaving Helsinki summerlong for the green, green grassy knolls of home, Ísafjörður, Iceland (puzzled face). I’m excited. Then there’s Lithuania in June, for a few days, and a week and a half in Toronto in July. I’ll be finishing a book of visual poems, that’ll be accompanied by a CD with sound poetry, before mid-august, to hopefully be published in the late fall.

I should point out that Brandarablandarar, the digital version of Blandarabrandarar, is slowly but surely being posted on the Icelandic part of this page. The work is a collaboration between myself and Icelandic poet and programmer Jón Örn Loðmfjörð. Click here for Brandarablandarar, and the titles of the poems for a text about the work, and then the purple “hér” link for the poem itself.

Ode to an anabolic steroid

I’m sweating pure anabolic steroids,
& my balls smell like shit.

There’s shit on my path
and it smells like
the dehydrated apples of Kong
on my monkey balls.

You look for me in the bathtub
but I’m already there, dripping.

There’s sun in my face
– & youth is 4ever.

The sun dresses like a greek
philosopher peeing himself.

In the company of fish

I can smell your haddock from here
whereas in Rome my centurians
lie baking clad in black sunglasses
stripping to the seducting sounds of
Eurotrash Made (in) the U.S.A
if and when you tic-tac-toe,
and we feel as though you should
be reminding him of someone close by.

Maximum security poetry

Bernstein

“And surely it is a scandal, I tell my students, how Americans are afflicted with attention-deficit disorder, just like they say in Time magazine, which after all should know, being one of the major sites of infection for the disease it laments, with it’s “you can never simplify too much” approach to prose and its relentless promotion of predigested cultural product. […] What is striking today is the refusal to recognize that it is a degraded cultural agenda of the major print and electronic media, and not the state of culture, that has given rise to mediocrity. […] They prefer to support projects that translate art and ideas into administrative and presentation packages most similar to what is already available, generally reducing art to personal narrative and ideas to feelings about these personal narratives. Such “dumbed down” programming is counter-productive because it reinforces the common conception that unpopular art just offers bad versions of what you get in popular art and entertainment […] Typically, intellectual and cultural work is not readily familiar. At its best it resists endless repetitions of the already known. But this does not mean it is inaccessible. While diet and exercise have become a national obsession, the idea of exercising the mind is treated with increasing contempt. The problem isn’t that Sally and Dick can’t read anything more difficult than the Op Ed pages, the problem is that the Op Ed pages reinforce this ignorance. […] The idea that complex or unfamiliar ideas, indeed that compound-complex sentences are “elitist” must be countered as demogogic populism and quasi-totalitarianism. It is not that writers and artists and intellectuals, any more than listeners or readers, are ignorant; but the constraints enforced in public space produce, protect and defend ignorance.”

From the essay Revenge of the poet-critic by Charles Bernstein.

Chains!

Derek Beaulieu’s Chains is out! A beautiful book of concrete poetry! Hip hip hurrah! More information here.

Buy it here.

Some work from Chains is on Tregawött here.

And check out Derek’s EPC site here.

Asked to comment to the New Illiterati about his new book, Beaulieu said: “CHAINS, to me, occupies the space between poetry and graphic design, architecture and dance.”

I haven’t seen the book yet, but from what I have seen of it, it gets all my clumsy thumbs up and a rollicking yee-ha!

New videos and updates

I’ve updated the visual section of this site, with new videos from New York and Brussels, as well as making changes to the concrete section - mostly navigational, but also added a few pieces. You can see the visual section here - readings here, and concrete here. Next on the program is adding to the Sound poetry player (to your right)!

Brussels