ARCHIVE - Poetry New York - Poetry Reviews

ARCHIVE - Self Immolation of the Burning Chair reviewed by Will

Willy — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:06:13 -0700

I went to the Burning Chair on the first day in NY where I didn't set foot on Manhattan Island. It was after the end of a particularly late night working at Ugly Duckling presse. Matvei recommended strongly that I attend the reading. I didn't think I'd have time to get anywhere from Park Slope at 8 PM, but apparently little park slope was home to an interesting monthly reading series in a nice-looking cafe called 'the Fall.'

I remember showing half an hour early, shy and famished. Ordered a BLT and read 'Notes from the Air' while Brooklyn poets (a very distinct group, I rarely see the same people at readings on the island). Matvei stayed behind at the presse to continue working, which was my excuse for not being particularly social, hoping that the reading might prompt discussion.

ARCHIVE - The PoPedology of an Ambient Language

Brian Billy King — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:42:37 -0700

I sat down to read Edwin Torres’ book The PoPedology of an Ambient Language after seeing him read at a radio show recording. I enjoyed his reading style. His performance had strong melopoesis, but did not convey meaning or stylistic choices as well as the written word. Torres’ work is sometimes associated with both the Russian futurists and the Beat Poets. His use of space and short one or two word stanzas that fill a page is also an intriguing part of his technique.
Torres often creates words in his work. These words include “interupt,” “intellooneries,” and “PoPedology.” This is very similar to the word creation and resulting idea combination of Rodrigo Toscano and less similar to that of Kenneth Patchen. It has also been speculated that his creation of words has the same objective as that of the Russian Futurists although Torres did not confirm it.

ARCHIVE - Scout Niblett

Brian Billy King — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:17:13 -0700

I went to see Scout Niblett in concert at the Europa Night club. Two bands opened the show. The first band was The Art of Shooting. Their musical style was a shoegaze-esque sort of progressive rock. While seeing them perform, I was instantly reminded of My Bloody Valentine. They put on a great show despite the usual lack of movement associated with shoegaze bands. It was hard to understand their lyrics, but that is a common problem with loud music, but the sounds they made with their mouths meshed very well with the instruments.
The next band up was the Holy Sons. For half the set, the band consisted of on man on stage with his guitar. His sound was like a yipping country singer trying to be Jack Johnson. He made some style choices I did not find appealing and that detracted from the subdued and comfortable tone of his music. His lyrics were played out and cheap. Besides these flaws the music was only decent and definitely not worth calling home about. His drummer came on halfway through his set and supported the limping singer, improving the act significantly.

ARCHIVE - The Flight of the Red Balloon

Brian Billy King — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:54:21 -0700

“The Flight of the Red Balloon” (2007) shares very little physically in common with the original “The Red Balloon.” (1956) There is a red balloon, a city, and a little boy, but there is so much more on top of that in the new movie. While simplicity and lack of dialogue were a large part of the beauty of the original movie the new movie did rather well in staying true to the feeling of the original. The boy in the 2007 movie has much more depth. He is now the son of divorcees and lives with his mother. The mother is a puppeteer and, consequentially, very busy. She hires a babysitter to look after her son. The baby sitter is a film student and is very interested in the 1956 movie.

ARCHIVE - Verbobala

Brian Billy King — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:21:50 -0700

I went to the Bowery Poetry Club on a Tuesday to see Verbobala, a stage poetry and video fusion group from the Southwest. The black clad players came onto stage with ominous skull masks over the top halves of their faces. A desert was being projected onto the screen behind them. What looked like buildings were growing and shrinking over the desert while cacti occasionally manifested in the landscape. This was occasionally juxtaposed with a video of a busy city street. The fiery words of the first piece confronted the issue of racism in the southwest and called for the opening of the Mexican-American border. Halfway through the performance the players removed their masks.

ARCHIVE - We Meet by Kenneth Patchen

Brian Billy King — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:30:34 -0700

New Directions publishing is re-releasing the works of Kenneth Patchen in a new collection entitled We Meet at the end of July this year. It is a collection of Patchen books including Because It Is, Poemscapes, Hurrah for Anything, and A flame and Afun of Walking Faces.
One striking element of this book is its relevance to the current poetry scenes. Patchen’s combinations of phanopoetic ideas, like “chairabbit,” “beduck,” “lilacat” and “goosetoothdawn,” are similar to those used by contemporary poets like Rodrigo Toscano although Patchen keeps them significantly more nonsensical. Patchen’s integration of image into, or placing next to, the text is becoming more and more common in recent poet’s work. Patchen’s images offer little to no clarification in his work. This shows Patchen’s will to be cryptic in the same way Ashbery is in his work.

ARCHIVE - Satyagraha: A Literary Perspective

Kevin — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:51:39 -0700

“…yet by my creative energy I consort with Nature and come in time to be.”

-passage from the Bhagavad-Gita magnified on the set of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha

Where words often fail to commit meaning, image withers in reflection, and music trips over its conventional coattails, Phillip Glass and company have created art that imagines. His heralded opera, Satyagraha, first performed in 1980 and recently viewed at the Metropolitan Opera Lincoln Center stage, is a stunning display of eclectic ingenuity fused with inspired social conscience. After waiting seven hours in line for a $20 orchestra seat less than thirty feet away from the stage (normally priced at $100), I would like to extend a warm thank you to Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman who created and sponsor the rush ticket program at the Met and make this and similar experiences possible for impoverished college students like myself.

ARCHIVE - "Shock & Awe" Hits Close To Home

Kevin — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:49:32 -0700

On a cold wet night in April, an odd mixture of well-to-do seniors and scholarly youngsters gathered at the 92^nd Street Y to witness a live dramatic reading of Gilgamesh, civilization’s oldest epic poem. The text, as adapted for the stage, retains just as much relevance to the modern crusade of humanity as it once held for our ancestors. They too relied on a written record of their myths to forever preserve the glory of their acquired knowledge and cultural heritage in physical artifact. Accompanied by meditative interludes of Middle Eastern singing, violin, drums, and other audio effects, the nine stage actors employed their professional vocal skills and character personifications to further augment this classic tale of friendship, loss, and self-discovery.

ARCHIVE - Julie Patton

Brian Billy King — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:35:32 -0700

Julie Patton went to the stage at the Bowery Poetry Club and sat down on the stairs in front of the stage. She held her microphone and notebook very casually. She started her set with a transcribed interview with her mother. The words sounded more like a conversation than a formal interview. The section was about colors. Patton’s mother, a painter, talks about painting characters and the colors under-toning them. This relied heavily on Pound's phanopoeia because it used so many solid images. She focused mainly on the color blue and its many meanings relating often to honesty and sadness. It was hard to believe that this conversation happened outside of a movie because it was extremely quick and witty. This disbelief in combination with Patton’s disarming and mellow manner turned this experience into a nearly surreal one.

ARCHIVE - Working with Rodrigo

gorsop19 — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:54:45 -0700

Working with Rodrigo Toscano was an experience that has deeply impacted my views on performance poetry and introduced me to an art form I feel is revolutionarily beautiful and effective: Collapsible Poetics Theater. Essentially the people performing are not actors, but simply people or “players”. They can be played by any gender; race or origin and are encouraged to bring themselves into their “character”. CPT is a form of theatre where the poem is accentuated by movement while keeping its poetic nature and luring the audience’s attention.