ceptuetics 02-20-08

That's Eddie Hopely's head. We all drew it two weekends ago at Freddy's in Brooklyn, for an "Acrosticoncretics" performance where the first letters of each word in Eddie's poem spelled out directions for mapping his head on a grid. I didn't end up with anyone's head, but I loved the different ways of listening the piece opened up - at first, catching letters to form words to make an image, then when I gave up on a particular section, catching words to make a poem, and finally, when I realized that most of the words being spelled could be predicted ("l-i-n-e" or "m-i-d-d-l-e" for example), looking to thread together and even anticipating words. Eddie's poetry renders reading an unpredictable activity of visual mapping, achieving something like a Situationist drift through language, which emphasizes process, disorientation, and networks of meaning that need not be connected.

Wednesday's show brought together a few recent performances, including Saturday's Segue reading with sound/noise artist Austin Publicover and poet Christina Strong, which you can hear (unfortunately cut off!) at the beginning of the file. Check out Austin's noise accompaniments to current Segue curator Alan Davies' poems in Mad Hatter's Review Issue 9 here. Alan Licht has some recent Conceptual Soundworks available on Ubu (I play an excerpt of "Rashomon"), and last in the playlist, Carla Harryman, with whom Austin Publicover has also collaborated, performed part of her Belladonna* book Open Box in Providence in 2005, available at PennSound.

Listen to the show here, it's time for me to go out in the snow.

1. Austin Publicover - Poem to the Last Fourteen of My Ex-Girlfriends, but Not the Thirteenth (excerpt)
2. Eddie Hopely - Acrosticoncretics: My Head
3. Alan Licht - Rashomon (excerpt)
4. Carla Harryman - Open Box (excerpt)

Next week, Anselm Berrigan, who is the author of three books of poetry published by Edge Books, most recently Some Notes on My Programming (2006). He co-edited the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U.Cal, 2005), was Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church from 2003-2007, and has just joined the staff of The Brooklyn Rail. He's also just completed a 46-page poem made of 97 short poems all called "Have A Good One."