Monday, March 20, 2006
Hey Will, the new "tiny" is fantastic. Kind of beyond the size it promises, which is what makes it so strange, a gentle growing giant in school kid cap and skirt (or pants? no, skirt, it's my image dammit, it's a skirt! purple skirt!).
One of the things I like about "the tiny" is reading so many new poets (new for me). And getting to read such poets as Bethany Spiers, whose music has nailed me in place when hearing her sing with her guitar.
Something else I like though, in fact what I think I REALLY LIKE THE BEST is that the magazine has a wide range of aesthetics. I was reading Ron Silliman's blog today, and he said good things about BURNING DECK Press. He then mentions the poet Erica Carpenter, saying how he finds her more of a 1940s poet, delicate, the saber over the grenade, that sort of thing. But then he says that she might be too odd for what's going on in American poetry today, and wind up a NEGLECTORINO in the future. Oh man, what!?
My whole purpose of building support around the NEGLECTORINO is a way of saying, HEY, it's all over now. Nothing is out of reach, nothing has to be quiet, collecting dust. There is SUCH BOUNTY here and it's growing, and fantastic, and we can bring to the table EVERYTHING we love that few or many have heard of, and it's suddenly, easily accessible!
In a way, I firmly believe the Internet is the best possible spiritual tool.
This idea of one poet or another not making it into some sort of VEIN that will become obscure and funneled away forever into darkness is a fancy notion at best, at this point. It's all breaking open, or maybe it's more accurate to say it's BLASTING OPEN! The days of a voice or two making the way for movements, etc., seems kaput. A gorgeous corpse. SO MUCH, SO MANY, and the range is always sending the margins out beyond our puny individual human vision and THAT is truly something to be in awe of. Collaborative, and collective efforts and mixed energies seem important right now.
Less and less I encounter young poets who view someone's gain as their loss. That destructive element of jealousy can take a back seat as the MASSIVE wave of poets reading, writing, publishing gets to make its own magazines, create its own reading groups, sharing books, etc.
It's a remarkably hopeful time and that may seem ridiculous to say. But I MEAN it! In the face of so much darkness, the creative muscles are flexing wildly, everywhere! It's EXACTLY what we need, and that need is coming OUT at an unstoppable gallop!
When I was listening AND WATCHING poet kari edwards read yesterday at Robin's Bookstore here in Philadelphia, it was like watching a layer at a time of what the world is, peel away, a little blood here and there, spots of blood, and the next layer. And I'm not saying to be looking for one layer more beautiful or whatever, I'm just saying, layers! Voices! Channels of it! Her new book OBEDIENCE is super charged and full of the world of poetry behind us, and ahead! She had this way of standing on the outside rims of her shoes, her legs spread JUST beyond the width of her shoulders, and she falls to the flat of the shoe, then rises again on the outside rims, pushing something through her legs and knees and groin and up and up and up and she reads with this fucking TIGER'S speed and need, and the anger and hope all at once FLASH! Yeah, there's something about that powerful reading of kari's I'll always remember FEELING HOW IT embodies my sense of how everything is ready for the biggest possible bite marks to appear on us, and not only survive, but take a fucking cosmic bath in the blood and realize how much bigger we've gotten while so distracted for so long. As awful and as ugly as things seem, we're growing up, we're going to get shit beautiful in this world, together.
CAConrad
