critical replays

An interview with Kenneth Goldsmith in Rain Taxi (transcribed from Ceptuetics, 03/08)

A review of K. Silem Mohammad's Breathalyzer (in Josef Kaplan's excellent Sustainable Aircraft)

Be sure to pick up the print edition of Rain Taxi for a review of Goldsmith's American Trilogy by Steve Zultanski (mp3-steve). Also, check out the other reviews in Sustainable Aircraft's second issue, including Diana Hamilton (mp3-diana) on Meg Hamill's Death Notices and Eddie Hopely (mp3-eddie) on Nico Vassilakis' Text Loses Time.

more from this blog-w/o-a-radiobody soon?

Craig Dworkin

For Ceptuetics' last show, Craig Dworkin provided insight into some of the social and technological issues surrounding conceptual poetics  and addressed his editorial choices for the UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing and a forthcoming book co-edited with Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Expression. He read from his most recent book, Parse (Atelos), and discussed the place of subjectivity in this text and other "uncreative" works.

Craig will be interviewing Vito Acconci at the Bronx Museum on Saturday at 3pm (North Wing, 2nd Floor). Scroll down from here for more info.

Five Shows on PennSound

Recent shows with David Buuck, Eddie Hopely, Matmos, Brian Kim Stefans, and Caroline Bergvall are all available on PennSound, thanks to Dear colleagueS Danny Snelson & Michael S. Hennessey.

WNYU's packing up for greener pastures (a few blocks down), so expect new room tones to fill the non-breaking spaces & stitches of Jen Bervin's poetry and book art next week.

Look to the right for more guests, soon.

Caroline Bergvall

Caroline Bergvall reads a Chaucer tale and some figs. We discuss intertextuality, multilingualism and governmental strictures on speech, and the intersections of 'differential' practice, performance writing, and conceptualism. Caroline also gives a short recap of the recent Conceptual Poetry and Its Others conference at University of Arizona, which you can read more about from Kenneth Goldsmith and Charles Alexander.

Tomorrow (Tuesday), Caroline will be performing My Chaucer at the Hispanic Society of America along with Mario Diaz de Leon. 7:30 pm: Audubon Terrace, Broadway between 155th and 156th streets...By subway take number 1 train to 157th and Broadway

Chris Funkhouser

talks digital poetry and reads from a forthcoming work, Technopoetry Rising. More of his work recently archived at PennSound.

note: Caroline Bergvall will not be on the show May 21st, but June 4th.

Anne Tardos + Laura Elrick

late on this, but happy to group these two shows together, they make a very poly-duo btwn Tardos' I Am You (Salt, 2008) and Elrick's multivocal audio pieces, accumulated using language from her book Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School, 2005)

Anne Tardos on Ceputetics, 04/16/08

Laura Elrick on Ceptuetics, 04/23/08


the reason for the delay, i'm glad to say, will (persistent cold willing) result this week in a finished thesis on conceptual writing & a reading/discussion on post-conceptual poetics with Ara Shirinyan for next week's show.

Updated Archives

All readings/interviews to date are now permanently archived on this blog (that is, there should be no more expired links, if you've tried unsuccessfully to listen to shows from the fall). Enjoy:

10-03-07 Rob Fitterman
10-24-07 Lawrence Giffin
11-07-07 Steven Zultanski
11-28-07 Sara Wintz
12-12-07 Rodrigo Toscano
01-23-08 Rachel Levitsky
02-06-08 Marie Buck
02-13-08 Barbara Cole
03-05-08 Rod Smith
03-12-08 Bruce Andrews
03-19-08 Kim Rosenfield
03-26-08 Kenneth Goldsmith
04-02-08 Anselm Berrigan

Tomorrow, Judith Goldman

Bruce Andrews, Kim Rosenfield

"we're all idiom now": Bruce Andrews reads from Give 'Em Enough Rope, Lip Service, and War and Peace (journal edited by Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino), discussing his modular writing process, his collaborations with musicians, dancers & other poets, and Lip Service's interrogation of gender socialization. At the end Bruce gives a shout-out to Obama.

re:evolution: Kim Rosenfield reads, sings, and talks about her latest, ambiguously named project (forthcoming on Les Figues next spring) - we talk inherited modes of logic & how to disrupt them w/ subjectivity in the poetic text, Kim strutting her stuff, feminism, and psychotherapy. Interrupting re-evolution's "Denouement," Kim gives a shout-out to Obama.

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."

ceptuetics 01-30-08

Wednesday's show (follow this link, and click on "01 ceptuetics 01-30-08.mp3" on the right hand side of the page)

Lawrence Weiner "Having Been Done At / Having Been Done To, Essendo Stato Fatto A" Tellus 21: Audio by Visual Artists {1973}

Redell Olsen "Untitled" The Book of Fur (Rem Press) {2000}
Kristin Prevallet "Lyric Infiltration" Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation, and Image-Text Projects (Skanky Possum Books) {2002}
Kevin Davies "Part Two" The Golden Age of Paraphernalia {2004 reading; book forthcoming}

P. Inman "Smaller" Criss Cross (Roof Books) {1994}

Marjorie Welish "One A"

Patti Smith "Parade" Sugar, Alcohol, & Meat (Giorno Poetry Systems)


On Wednesday, tune in to hear Marie Buck, who writes poems, co-edits the mostly-poetry journal Model Homes with Brad Flis, and studies poetry and poetics in the English Ph.D. program at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her chapbook "Life & Style" appears online at Beard of Bees, and a prose piece is forthcoming in the "bpNichol + 20" issue of Open Letter.

hi again, here are two shows

Back from a trip to Berlin, and very excited to begin classes with Avital Ronell & Kamau Brathwaite this semester. Also some great upcoming guests to be announced soon! For now, archives of the two shows that aired while I was away, and tune in tomorrow night to hear Rachel Levitsky read recent work & talk with me about her poetry and Belladonna* books.

Ceptuetics 01-09-08 (dedicated to Henri Chopin)

1. bpNichol - "Clover"
2. Henri Chopin - "Sol Air"
3. Nikolaus Einhorn - "Don't you may be, the essential interview" (w/ John Cage and Hans G. Helms)
4. Robert Ashley - "She Was a Visitor"

Ceptuetics 01-16-08

1. Rachel Blau DuPlessis - "Draft 72"
2. Erica Hunt - "Invisible Hands"
3. Tom Raworth - "Catacoustics"
4. Ben Friedlander - "The Mind is a Bubble Sheet"
5. Hans Arp - "Dada-Spruche"
6. Camille Bryen - "Tete de Coq"
7. Nam June Paik - "Simple"
8. Language Removal Services - "Marilyn Monroe"
9. Bruce Andrews - "You Made This World, We Didn't" (which I mistakenly present as the Index to I Don't Have Any Paper, So Shut Up)


Tomorrow:

Rachel Levitsky’s first full length volume, Under the Sun was published by Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly (a+bend, 1999), Dearly 356, Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The Adventures of Yaya and Grace (PotesPoets, 1999) and 2(1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998). Most of her poetic works tend toward what is known as ‘the long poem’ and she is currently writing a prose novella. Levitsky writes poetry plays, three of which (one with Camille Roy) have been performed in New York and San Francisco. Her work has been published in magazines such as The Reculse, Sentence, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Global City, The Hat, Skanky Possum, Lungfull! and in the anthologies, Boog City (vol. I & II), Bowery Women, and 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology. Recently her work was translated into Icelandic for the anthology 131.839 Slög Med Bilum by Eiríkur Örn Nordahl. Online poetry and critical essays can be found on such sites as Narrativity, Duration Press, How2, and Web Conjunctions. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna*, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics.

2007 Favorites

Favorite albums of 2007
1. These Are Powers - "Terrific Seasons" (Hoss)
2. Black Dice - "Load Blown" (Paw Tracks)
3. The Fiery Furnaces - "Widow City" (Thrill Jockey)
4. Panda Bear - "Person Pitch" (Paw Tracks)
5. KK Null - "Fertile" (Touch)
6. M.I.A. - "Kala" (XL/Interscope)
7. Liars - "Liars" (Mute)
8. Aa - "gAame" (Gigantic)
9. Sightings - "Through the Panama" (Load)
10. Magik Markers - "Boss" (Ecstatic Peace)

and reissues...
Negativland - A Big 10-8 Place (Seeland)
Glenn Branca - Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses (Atavistic)
Lily Greenham - Lingual Music (Paradigm)
Culture - Two Sevens Clash (Shanachie)
Ruins - Refusal Fossil (Skin Graft)
Laurie Anderson - Big Science (Nonesuch)

poems, videos, bonus tracks...
Linh Dinh - Jam Alerts (Chax)
Cheryl Donegan - Refuses (on Ubu)
Kenneth Goldsmith - Traffic (Make Now)
Aram Saroyan - Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling)
David Schafer - In the Year 2525 remix (scroll down his Ubu page)
Juliana Spahr - Intricate Systems (The Press Gang)
Edwin Torres - The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos)
Hannah Weiner's Open House, ed. Patrick Durgin (Kenning Editions)

(Add your own top 10 list here.)
I'll be on WNYU tomorrow from 4-8pm, doing a Wednesday edition of the New Afternoon Show and then Ceptuetics. Tune in at 7:30 to hear Marcel Broodthaers interviewing a cat.

Tomorrow Kenny Goldsmith will be singing theory with accompaniment from Alan Licht. Also performing: C. Spencer Yeh. At the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, 8pm.

Upcoming Guests

Tune in next Wednesday to hear Rodrigo Toscano on ceptuetics. For those unfamiliar with his work:

Rodrigo Toscano is the author of To Leveling Swerve, Platform, The Disparities, and Partisans. His new collection Collapsible Poetics Theater, which was a National Poetry Series 2007 selection, is due out in 2008. Toscano is the artistic coordinator for the Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT). His experimental poetics plays, body movement poems, and polyvocalic pieces have been performed at the Disney Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, Ontological-Hysteric Poet’s Theater Festival, Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival (Alexandria, Virginia), and in Teubingen, Germany. His poetics radio pieces have been aired on WPIX FM, New York, PS. 1 Radio, KAOS Public Radio, Olympia. Toscano is originally from the Borderlands of California. He works at the Labor Institute in Manhattan, and lives in Brooklyn.

In addition, tomorrow the Fiery Furnaces will be coming into my other radio show (The New Afternoon Show, a new rock/electronic/ experimental/noise show that has been running on WNYU for 25+ years). The Fiery Furnaces are one of my favorite indie rock bands to emerge since 2000, and I'm very excited to have them on for a live performance + interview. Tune in tomorrow around 5:30-6:45 pm (full show runs from 4-7:30), as always at 89.1FM, wnyu.org, or directly on iTunes, under "eclectic" in the radio section.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

To those who tuned in this past Wednesday to hear Sara Wintz, I'm very sorry the interview didn't air. I was out of town for the holidays and an earlier interview (with Steve Zultanski) was aired by mistake.

So, Sara Wintz will now be reading & talking about her poetry this coming Wednesday the 28th from 7:30-8:00pm. If you miss it, catch it afterwards at wnyu.org or right here.

Thanks for the interest!

Rob Fitterman performance tonight

Rob Fitterman will be appearing on ceptuetics tonight to read from his new manuscript "Rob the Plagiarist" and talk to me about his poetry. Rob teaches at NYU and has been a great influence and friend since I took a course with him last year, so I'm very happy to have him as my first guest. Tune in tonight at 7:30-8:00 EST, as always.

A bio:
Robert Fitterman is the author of nine books of poetry, including three installments of his ongoing poem Metropolis: Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Books, 2002), and Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edge Books, 2004). Earlier titles include Leases (Periphery Press), among the cynics (Singing Horse Press) and Ameresque (Buck Downs Books). His most recent title, War, the musical, is a collaboration with artist Dirk Rowntree. He teaches at New York University in both the General Studies Program and the Department of English, and also the writing faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College.