PhillySound: new poetry

2 EVENTS ON
OCTOBER 13TH

LUNCH TALK

at Kelly Writers House at NOON

please RSVP @ wh@writing.upenn.edu

BOOK PARTY
at 8PM
AT THE ICA
118 S. 36th St.
copies of her new book INFERNO
will be for sale by staff from
PENN BOOK CENTER
(Philadelphia's finest indie bookstore)

BRAND NEW

EILEEN MYLES FEATURE

AT RATTAPALAX ONLINE
edited by Edwin Torres
includes poems by Myles
an interview by Stacy Szymasek
excerpt from the new novel INFERNO
and an essay by CAConrad titled

"Eileen Myles: CLOTHED IN NATURE WITH AN OPEN EAR"
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FEATURE

Celebrate the release of the first issue of Apiary Magazine. Tomorrow from 1-6pm at 4226 Spruce St.

- R Eckes

PennSound Daily has just posted the audio from The City Real & Imagined book launch at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. I forgot about the cellphone music in the very beginning, but somehow it works with the piece as an impromptu introduction.

For your listening pleasure... click here.

You can also read Rachel Blau DuPlessis' proper introduction for the event here.


- Frank Sherlock


* photo by Jack Krick

I'm VERY EXCITED about the new edition
coming out soon, very soon!

Details at THIS link!
CAConrad

A collaborative (Soma)tic Poetry Exercise by CAConrad & Erica Kaufman
Click HERE
posted by CAConrad

Today The Poetry Foundation published a taped conversation I had with Curtis Fox on the poem "Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall" by Anne Sexton.

The podcast is HERE.

This much edited talk does not include the excerpt I read from Sexton's 1967 interview with The Paris Review which explains much of what was going on with her life when writing this and other poems from her first book To Bedlam and Part Way Back. (By the way it is VERY IMPORTANT that I say that I am IN NO WAY upset with The Poetry Foundation or Curtis Fox for the editing, as I'm well aware, and was made aware prior to taping that it would be edited. I simply want to share a little more now, that's all.)

Here is that excerpt from The Paris Review interview:

Until I was twenty-eight I had a kind of buried self who didn't know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths. I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic break and tried to kill myself.

It was THIS moment in her life -- in my opinion -- where Sexton was suddenly THRUST -- for better or worse -- outside the world which was suffocating her. She was stigmatized from this moment forward. And I say forward because lucky for her she entered a world of poetry which embraced her wholeheartedly. Not quite so lucky as many other patients, or inmates of the mental wards, I prefer to call them inmates. But it was at this point where Sexton found a part of herself which had been dormant.

The other thing that I mentioned soon after reading this excerpt (also edited out) was that this psychotic break occurred when she turned 28. 28 is known by scholars of astrology as "Saturn Return," and it is the time when the planet Saturn appears where it was when we were born. There are 4 quarters to the cycle which roughly work out (give or take a day or two) to 7 years each. The human body sheds and refurbishes the cellular tissues with new cells, completed after 7 years. So at 28 we have had -- roughly speaking -- a total of 4 cellular replacements. Saturn is the old god planet, which rules Capricorn, and demands to see what we have learned by this point in our lives. 28 is known to be a very hard year for many people, it's sort of a sink-or-swim year, and if sinking is what occurs than ages 29 through 32 often become worse. Luckily though she lived for some years following this initial psychotic break, thanks to poetry I believe.

One other thing edited out (and once again I'm well aware that editing was in the picture from the start) was my mentioning that Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris chose Sexton to represent the Confessional Poets in the anthology Poems for the Millennium Volume Two. In other words NOT Lowell, Plath, Berryman. And those anthologies by Rothenberg and Joris were built around poets who shifted the paradigm of their time for poetry or for their school of poetry. For them SEXTON was the shaker of conventions. And they chose to reprint in the anthology "The Jesus Papers," which I must say was the first time I had read this particular Sexton poetry in years, and certainly for me the first time reading it on its own, outside her collections. It stands firm, clearly, go check it out.

Many thanks to Curtis Fox and The Poetry Foundation, I enjoyed this talk tremendously,
CAConrad

The Fall Season of Chapterhouse kicks off this Saturday, September 11th at 8PM
with poetry by

BEN MIROV
LAURA SPAGNOLI
and
QUYEN NGHIEM

More details here.

- R. Eckes

So Jim Behrle has been interviewed on BOMB Magazine. First of all, HE'S SUCH A FUCKING LIAR (of course, big surprise) ABOUT ME HERE! I do not think that I have EVER met anyone who constantly makes shit up the way he does.

Having spoken with some of his victims it was uncanny, even creepy how accurate the path turned. It was as if I said that I had to take a drive into a dank, sulfurous canyon. They replied, "OH YEAH, I've been in that one, let me tell you. When you get in there you will see THIS, and THIS, and then THIS will happen." Sure enough, almost as soon as I engaged with him I watched it unfold just as was told, "First he will lie to you. It will be instantaneous. Then when he doesn't get his way he will just start sending you a barrage of e-mails to flood and further confuse you." Yeah, it all happened just as I was told.

He lied right away, saying that my friends were all lying. His lies are so odd because he doesn't even clean up his tracks, I mean he conflicts with every other thing he's said in print. Weird. It must have worked in the past I guess? EVERYONE is lying, except Mr. Behrle, of course. For instance, my new favorite lie is that Philly sucks, yeah, right! If Philly sucks then WHY is it that he wanted to have a poetry festival here? Is it possible that someone would WANT to have a poetry festival in a city of poets they hate? Yeah, right! Nice try with that one! Of course the real reason there was no festival here is because my friends told him what a jerk he is and that he should fuck himself.

Oh, and when I say "his victims" I'm not using the language lightly. While he has gone after men, when he goes after women there is a certain -- ugh -- a certain pleasure that he takes that makes you nauseous. That makes you nauseous, unless of course you're like he is. His attacks are always as public as they are brutal, except for the reports I've heard of him calling and harassing offline. His attacks on women are particularly manic, sadistic, an acute form of sado-manic-misogyny.

Whenever I have witnessed a man abusing a woman I have zero respect for him. Permanently.

It's impossible for me to ever have respect for Jim Behrle, having watched him go after women like a disturbed, horny little animal the way he does. What a creep. He is without a doubt THE BEST example of a clinically defined narcissist that I've ever encountered in that he abuses people (mostly women) then instantly turns his victims into villains. It's a coping mechanism narcissists develop in order to sleep at night, or to be able to live with themselves at all. And when I say instantly, I mean it. For instance in my own experience all I had to do was confront him on HIS behavior and I was instantly turned into this monster in his eyes and in his words. Suddenly he was portraying me as the evil villain out to get poor little Jimmy.

There are too many trusted friends who have had to deal with his manipulations and deceptions for me to ever believe him, or to ever respect him, or to ever want to have anything to do with him. His pleasure in the pain and misfortune of others reminds me of a word my Danish grandmother used: skadefryd. The German -- and more common -- equivalent of this is schadenfreude.

What's so peculiar is how the narcissism in Behrle has developed in such a way that he actually believes he is doing a service to poetry by tormenting innocent people. He has crowned himself the great overseer of poetry for the great migration of souls for the great moment in poetry history for his own greatness. Some such crap is going on in his brain about greatness, The Great Jim Behrle is invincible. When really all he is in poetry is a shit stain on the library wall. And it is already starting to dry, and flake away. He thinks he will be remembered. He is wrong. He will be forgotten. There are a lot of horrible men in prison who hate women, and acted on it. Fortunately he is too much of a coward to physically touch the women he hammers away at on his computer while masturbating with the other hand. It's impossible to know whether his orgasm cums when he receives their reply, or the reply he hopes for from them. In the end Jim Behrle is just another creep in a creepy world full of creeps.

CAConrad