dusie kollektiv #8 : curated by rob mclennan : now online

The 8th “dusie kollektiv,” as curated by myself, is now online! Pdfs of chapbooks produced and mailed last year as part of this 8^th curated kollektiv. See the link here to read all sorts of dusie goodness from across North America (and occasionally beyond!). The list of titles online include:

Gary Barwin, A History of Awkward Silences

Hugh Behm-Steinberg, The Sound of Music

Joe Blades, november poems

Rob Budde, TESTES

Amanda Chiado, prime cuts

Jason Christie, night

Michelle Detorie, the primitive undreamed

Amanda Earl, a book of miracles

kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Laughing Text

Jon Henson, Brittle Bit

Hailey Higdon, yes & what happens

Larkin Higgins, comb- ing mine- ings

Jen Hofer and franciszka voeltz, i copy your copy

Ken Hunt, CONFIDENTIAL

Paul Klinger, mouth piece

Megan Kaminski and Anne Yoder, SIGIL & SIGH

Bob Marcacci, skyn otsk ying

James Maughn, Dialogue of Crane and Snake

Nicole Mauro, SUPERZER0IC (Wonder Woman and Superman, an Anti-Romance)

Marcus McCann, SHUT UP SLOW DOWN LET GO BREATHE

rob mclennan, Texture: Louisiana,

Marci Nelligan, NASCENT

Marthe Reed, a transparent reality

Elizabeth Robinson, ON SILENCE

Michael Ruby, Coastal Elements

Sarah Sarai, The Risen Barbie

Michael Sikkema, light seed

Jessica Smith, TRAUMA MOUTH

Chris Turnbull, Candid

Stalina Villarreal, Pinko App & So-Called Ring

annie won, did the wind blow it

Elisabeth Workman, In the Event of Not Having an Answer

Introduction:

In spring 2015, Dusie Emperor Susana Gardner allowed me to curate the eighth “dusie kollektiv,” the results of which we are finally able to present to you here.

Organized and fueled by Gardner, a poet and American expat (she has since returned to the continental United States), the “dusie kollektiv” is a series of curated lists of poets who each self-produce a small publication in a large enough quantity to send copies to everyone else in their specific “kollektiv.” With eight “kollektivs” completed so far, it was originally produced as an extension of her work through the online pdf poetry journal dusie, founded after Gardner moved to Switzerland as a way to keep in contact with her American poet-friends, but it might just have developed a life of its own.

What I’ve admired about the gift-economy structure of the “kollektiv” is in its simple ambition: allowing a group of engaged writers to interact with each other across vast distances. When I participated in the fifth kollektiv a few years back, it involved sending chapbooks out to a list of ninety other participants; chapbooks appeared in my mailbox for weeks, many by poets I wasn’t previously aware of. For my part, I mailed six to Europe and the remainder to the United States, which cost a small fortune, given I was the only Canadian resident, and but one of two Canadian participants (the other being Frances Kruk in London, England).

For my “kollektiv,” I offered an open invitation to previous participants (most of whom are poets scattered across the United States), as well as solicitations to a whole swath of Canadian poets engaged with small and micro-press, attempting to connect a series of communities and individuals that otherwise might never have met. The results have been intriguing, knowing that there were multiple poets being introduced to each other for the first time. Some cross-pollination has already occurred, with familiar names appearing at Amanda Earl’s NationalPoetryMonth.ca, for example. One hopes that such cross-overs continue, are many, and wide-ranging.

And now you, too, can see what all the fuss was about. Read on:

Tuesday poem #191 : Kiki Petrosino : OUGHT

We’ll have to hurry if we want to get started.

It’s high time to consider beginning at all.

Time, at least, to think about starting

to start. After all, we’ve only just gotten up   

& running, but now? We’re almost too late.

We’ll have to hurry. If we want to get started

we’ll have to start now. We’ll have to work

round the clock, the gold moon, right on—

We ought to think about starting, at least. But

it’s tougher than ever. We can’t even begin

to explain what it’s like. To start with, we know

we should want to hurry. At least, we’re starting

to time it. That’s almost too tough to say

at the start. Still, we’re sure we’ll begin any moment.

It’s time to get started, we think. Let’s consider

getting up & running. By then, it’ll just sort of start

& we’ll have begun. Zut alors! It’s a plan & a party!

It’s just—we should hurry. If we want to get started

we better begin. But it’s tough. Just look at the time.        

Kiki Petrosino is the author of two books of poetry: Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) and Fort Red Border (2009), both from Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, Tin House and elsewhere. She is founder and co-editor of Transom, an independent on-line poetry journal. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #190 : Anne Cecelia Holmes : A Very Harsh Hoax

I don't know how else to posture
myself against these notions
of adulthood except to say
I am nothing but posturing.
All the books in my house
lean toward one another
like they are waiting to be
excised from a more monstrous
thing. I've learned you can
drag your body around but
unless you take instruction
from your bones it's a pretty
disappointing ride. How about
I mimic the oncoming weather
or better yet make a small
noise for all the days I
have stayed inside. If I am
straying too far I do apologize
for confusing the herd.
I'm afraid I have lost my
ethical compass and in exchange
I see myself as I really am.
I feel like punching my way
through a reservoir.
Everyone I know takes
more pictures with books
than with people and I'm
starting to believe we make
the world we fell into.
I know I think too much
about cruelty. Again
and again the advice I
receive is to stick my face
in a fountain to understand
how real that feeling is.

Anne Cecelia Holmes is the author of The Jitters (horse less press 2015) and the chapbooks Dead Year (Sixth Finch Books 2016), Junk Parade (dancing girl press 2012), and I Am A Natural Wonder (with Lily Ladewig; Blue Hour Press 2011). She co-edits Jellyfish Magazine and lives in Western Massachusetts.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #189 : Shannon Bramer : ODE TO ER

She’s so much gentler kinder taller thinner warmer smarter
She’s so much better harder louder fatter sadder wilder uglier
She’s just so much angrier poorer quieter lonelier emptier

She’s water
She’s older
She’s just another mother

She’s tender
She’s feather

Let her

Shannon Bramer [photo credit: Sadie Derry] is a poet and playwright. Her fourth collection of poetry, PRECIOUS ENERGY, is forthcoming from BookThug in the autumn of 2017.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #188 : Donato Mancini : BY THE LIGHT OF THE

Donato Mancini makes visual and procedural poetry, bookworks and visual art. His books and chapbooks include: Snowline (2015), Buffet World (2011) Fact 'N' Value (2011), Hell Passport no.22 (2008), Æthel (2007), 58 Free Coffees (2006) and Ligatures (2005). Notable exhibitions ofMancini’s visual artworks have included exhibitions through Artspeak, Western Front, Gallery Atsui, Malaspina Printmaker's Society, and CSA. He performed with Gabriel Saloman in their noisepoetry/noisecomedy/noisemusic ensemble in the 2013 LIVE! Biennale of performance art, and as part of Concrete Scores at Open Space. Mancini's published critical writing includes work on the archive, time and memory in Anamnesia: Unforgetting (2011), and a discourse analysis of poetry reviews in You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2012). His most recent full length book, Loitersack (2014), is a labyrinthine commonplace book where critical, theoretical and paraliterary tendencies intersect in the forms of poetry, poetics, theory, theory theatre, laugh particles and many many questions. A new book of accumulation texts, SAME DIFF, is forthcoming from Talonbooks in 2017.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #187 : Natalie Lyalin : A Mollusk

Blue-like, a blue like a mollusk melting in air

A thin air, an air in which whips

my mouth and nose and ears, that assaults them

in a funny way, a gentle way

                                    I think the air is saying why

Did you come to the Himalayas? Why are you here?

And the others all trudging up my side? But I did not

care. I did not take a care card with me on the trip.

                                                When I was planning

the trip I was on beach reading a book. A book about

Himalayas because before I thought it was just a word

like salt. And I was on the beach and I saw a blue

Mollusk and I thought of the pink salt and felt

sane. And safe!

            But it was not safe. There was a chance of

my carcass freezing to the mountain. Clinging to the

mountain like a tongue to a poll. Like the shock of

how painful it is and the instant regret like nothing else.

Like the air. The thinness of the air. The veil of it. Like

I was marrying the horror of dying alone on a hostile

mountain that did not want me. That did not care.

                                    I left my confidence on the

beach. Who was I to deal with nature like that. I only

studied danger in passing. Like the bubbling waves

before a tsunami and standing in the doorway during

an earthquake and hiding in the cellar during a tornado.

But

                                                Did I really care to learn. No.

I did not really care to learn. I did not really care

for much at all.

Natalie Lyalin is the author of two books of poetry, Blood Makes Me Faint, But I Go For It (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014), and Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books 2009), as well as a chapbook, Try A Little Time Travel (Ugly Duckling Presse 2010). She lives in Philadelphia.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #186 : Sean Braune : untitled

lapsed gradient
A turgid pli projects [the]
[its] cenozoic lies, convex
[as] curious plastic equality
            tarry tableaux  :
            try holism, tired
            misery
            numbness ,
               the inferno
[night]

i’m
          voltage

Sean Braune’s theoretical work has been published in Postmodern Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, Canadian Literature, symplokē, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in ditch, The Puritan, Rampike, and Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere. For the past three years he has been invited to speak at the graduate level at Yale University on the topic of avant-garde visual poetry. His dissertation focuses on retheorizing the semiotic sign in response to new materialist philosophies. His chapbook the vitamins of an alphabet appeared earlier this year with above/ground press.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #185 : George Stanley : To a Young Voter

I can't take politics seriously, at 82
I'm too preoccupied with my own

mortality.  But I can go 'meta' -
I can take your taking politics seriously

seriously.  I know, intellectually,
if your party wins the next election,
the new government will raise

taxes on the rich, lower
taxes on the poor, set a price for carbon,
save the children, save the aquifers -

even the rich will feel they are happier.

So I take very seriously
your taking politics seriously,

notwithstanding my mortality.

 

George Stanley [photo credit: Cath Morris] is a third-generation American modernist poet taken refuge among second-generation Canadian modernists.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #184 : Marie Buck : I Cough Into Your Face and You Cough into Mine

I was practicing suspending a coin in midair,
a coin the size of a standard desk globe
and the weight of a very heavy thing.

And now I remember something already ghoulish,
my majestic pink belly glowing in the dark.

The belly button ought to be sexy but isn’t;
it’s sexy to the one who licks it but feels
like nothing to the one who’s licked,
so that both parties will eventually decide
to end the awkwardness of trading pleasure
and sit back and instead read the script
on the decorative
napkins they’ve been given.

The script that says “the world is not terrible,
it’s pretty awesome,”

which no one believes,
which kills all desire.

Marie Buck is the author of Life & Style (Patrick Lovelace Editions) and Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya). She lives in Brooklyn.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #183 : Jason Christie : a portrait

gallery walls acrumble
and i'm inside eating

i'm inside eating my
lunch before work

sunlight and dust, so
much that a new

statue has formed
around me, impossible

to resist the accumulating
import, sunlight howls

my thought to shift
from tight couplets

to a disregard for the dust
that i follow and my body follows

and at some point i remember
the layers of shit on the walls

that seemed so important
while i was eating lunch

in a broken gallery surrounded
by colleagues and acquaintances

before i had to start work
dismantling the portrait exhibit

Jason Christie lives in Ottawa with his wife and toddler. He is the author of Canada Post (Snare), i ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and a co-editor of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury). He has three chapbooks from above/ground press, two of which were nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award: GOVERNMENT (2013), and Cursed Objects (2014). The third chapbook is called The Charm. He is currently writing poetry about objects.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #182 : Chris Martin : THE MASKS ARE FOR OUR OWN SAFETY

Duct-taping the mouth of the oracle shut

Finance & hypnosis

Resting & Resisting

Where an evening cloud stains the nasturtiums

And bed bugs leisurely fleece

A handwritten note reading free

As Hurricane Patricia scalps the coast

I say tomorrow, you say opportunity

(everything’s a mouth)

I say opportunity, you say property

As we (endless

Dolly shot) glide across the sidewalks

And I want to fondle each tree

Marked with a green x

Because, I dunno, they’re possessed?

Our red carpet of papier-mâché leaves

Turning full banana peel in the freezing rain

This week we’re fucking and making a baby

Giving the cat away so I can breathe again

There’s a twitch in the hood of my left eyelid

Tapping out Morse code to the half-buried scarecrow

It’s almost Halloween

Scarlet sociopath gardens

Blooming scattered limbs

In manicured yards

I thought these people were middle class liberals

Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren

Atty is waging a nap-strike

Singing bobbikin horn, his pants are all torn

And then mi cabeza over and over

He’s two-and-a-half and he’s going to be

A sexy, sparkly witch

And there’s nothing we can or want

To do about it

He’s the future

The future prolongs his opulent sleeplessness

And I secretly want him to become an engineer

But he’ll probably just become a famous actor

Or worse, a poet

The future is making declarations and practicing her cackle

I need the future to sleep so I can relax

But the future really doesn’t get tranquility

I should just let the future finish this poem

He says Daddy feels the beautiful rain

He says It’s nighttime in other people’s houses

He says I breathe my dark air

He says I become a merry, scary shepherdess

He says Yellow fire, yellow fire

He says I’m going to shrink to the size of an acorn

He says The white astronaut on the white moon opens the white door

He says Petal shovel

He says My astronaut got some moon on him

He says Mama is a witch because she walks in the alley

He says Daddy is a man because he walks into a house and is not a thing

He says Orca in a carriage full of people

He says I’m bellying away from you

He says You don’t want to call it anything

Chris Martin is the author of The Falling Down Dance (Coffee House, 2015), Becoming Weather (Coffee House, 2011), and American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007). In 2015 he co-founded Unrestricted Interest, a consultancy and writing program dedicated to transforming the lives of people with autism. He also teaches at The Loft Literary Center and is a visiting assistant professor at Carleton College.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #181 : Christine Stewart and Ted Byrne : Stone Rimes 1

from Dante

Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra

1.

In the brief day of masks

When the color leaves

And the grass is white

In the day that comes

To the white bleached hills

My desire is lost.

In the scalded hills lost

In the stone woman masked

In the white hills

Fixed in the dying leaves

Left but how hard is stone when the soft shade comes

To her that is masked, how white?

When the shade softens the white

And covers in green the desire lost

In the flowers coming

In the orchards unmasking

In the fields and leaves

Releasing the white hills

Turning green the new hills

Taking breached the will of bleached white

Finding the stone self in leaves

Shielding the stone not lost

For its beauty unmasked

Made clear in a verdant coming

As a person comes clear in leaving

As the stars of grass come

Calm to the plains not lost

Come finding green hills

Where the person is not white

And the unlight of I is unmasked

As leaves from the grass of hills  

Come green come unbleached   

As desire comes, found, and unmasked 

As I come between

2.

In the brief bereft of eyes

of what ambition imparts with time

In her eyes periodic departures and the cold

brought back from places she’s not known

the address that’s not a home

the country where desire persists

In hillocks mountains persist

In the bleached sand snow and ice

call the hunted home

Ecology announces the death of time

erases the burden of being Unknown

the fear of coming in from the cold

When May comes back from the cold

the rattling of the harrow persists

as shoulders bump against the known

A satyr he should fear Demeter’s eyes

to be unmanned before his time

in the place he once called home

Not Love but Love’s mother draws us home

all lifted to her lips but the cold

of stone white in this green time

Leafing then blooming the selves persist

in her eyes in her eyes in her eyes

light unlike the light we know

By persistence will she be known

with knowledge driven home

splendour condensed in her eyes

There is a winter’s distant cold

unremembered nights persist

against the odds of perfect time

But certain clocks take back time

or would if the truth were known

Certain ideas fail to persist

once they’re away from home

while others give heat to the cold

as surely as trousers attract eyes

The odour of time clouds our eyes

but vision persists in what we know

coming home to the fondling cold

3.

In underpants, the lost can see

what will gives from hours

In her vision – small and interrupted leavings and the cold—the fucking cold

returned from anonymity

those numbers aren’t on her gate

in this place where want lasts

In the small hills height remains

in the white sediment and snow, some ice.

It calls to the chased

the way systems shout ‘hey, time’s up’

and wipe out the weight of being one

and the fear of being welcomed

The way spring returns from a thaw

as noisy as hell, never ceasing

shoulders jostling against its certainty

That old goat should fear Spring

She’ll unman him soon enough

in that place he once called home

At first, it’s as if Love’s mother sketches the houses

and lifts the pencil (to her mouth)

And it is, everything lifted to her mouth, except winter,

not Love but Love’s mother that holds us

leafing, blooming, selfing

undone in her eyes, light’s mechanical misfortune

She will be known, by all the science of the schools

standing in the hollow of a spoon

dancing a concave of warming

There is a winter we forget

its night dissolved in this solution

as if time were not a problem

and the little smile in the corner of her mouth

her turning back, were of the essence

Ideas are well enough, but hell

they never wander far from home

because it’s cold in the marches

even as exile quickens the attention

Let’s not talk about time or the insubstantial

qualities of what it moves around in

Let’s just close the door behind us when we leave

Dante’s Rime Petrose are the underbelly of his beatified distortion of desire. Starting from Ted's literal translation of Dante's quartet of petrified rimes, we have tried to pull this desire slant, into repetition, into shifting patterns of diffusion and accumulation where dejection can flourish, where the gendered subject (masked) and the green hill can regather. This sestina is the first of the four canzoni.

Christine Stewart works in the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta. She studies poetics, and is a founding member of the Writing Revolution in Place Research Collective. Recent publications: “Propositions from Under Mill Creek Bridge,” in Sustaining the West. Wilfred Laurier, “On Treaty Six from Under Mill Creek Bridge” in Toward. Some. Air. Banff Centre Press, “This—from Treaty Six” in Dusie and The Odes, Nomados Press.

Ted Byrne was born in Hamilton Ontario and has lived in Vancouver since the late sixties. He was a member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective, and is presently a member of the Lacan Salon. He periodically teaches poetry and poetics in the HUM 101 program at UBC. Current projects include historical fictions about Hamilton, and a book constructed from sonnets by Louise Labé and Guido Cavalcanti. His books include Aporia, Beautiful Lies, and Sonnets : Louise Labé.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan