The Continental Review: Now Open To Submissions

Please feel free to disseminate this little announcement on blogs and listservs :

As of now, The Continental Review is accepting unsolicited submissions of poems in text only format. Please do not send video immediately! Simply address a short email, with around 4-7 poems in an attached Word Document, to the following address: Nicholas(dot)Manning[at]ens(dot)fr. If your poems are accepted, you will then be asked to record a reading. In your cover letter, let us know a little about yourself. Both poetry and short prose/fiction will be considered. We will attempt to respond within 4-6 weeks. New(er) writers welcome.

Thanks!

Waage

For some reason my blogger profile is now in German here, which makes my astrological sign Waage.

An Interview: Men Of The Web

Didi Menendez very kindly conducted a little interview with me as part of her very cool Men Of The Web series. Read about The Continental Review, now replete with retro 'eighties specs! Oh yeah . . .

Count Your Path

Allyssa Wolf alerts me to the brand new edition of Counterpath Online, guest-edited this time by Jasper Bernes. And my my, isn't it a doozy.

Fantastic work by Joshua Clover doubling world currencies' poetic half-life. Gabriel Gudding and Jennifer Moxley are as vibrant as ever, and the less familiar afficianados for me (David Weiss) turn out wonderfully well.

Bernes' thematic arrangement (Abeyance, Cooking, Democracy, (Dis)embodiment, etc.) is refreshing and dynamic, though the inclusion of a traditional author list is comforting as well.

Wolf herself has an extract "from Introduction to Death" in this issue. What I love about Allyssa's poetry - if it wasn't already sufficiently obvious - is that it manages to be so defiantly glittery while also remaining very free, not at all up-tight, nor blinded - egotistically transfixed - by its own spark.

Like Andrew Joron, only that bit more goth . . .

P.S Oh and by the way, my first reading was fascinating. And how beautiful Novaless looks... A thousand thankyous to the amazing Mr. Perez. Now I'm madly preparing a course. I begin teaching next Tuesday. Will post the vid of the reading here soon!!!

Why There Are Stars In My Poems

Dear -----,

I still owe you a full explanation regarding the little subject we only just touched upon last night, due to lack of time and my inarticulateness. You expressed your bafflement with regard to these little marks, my “stars”, which populate my poems, and suggested you saw no reason for them being there. As for clarification, I made a poor fist of it last night, so I thought I’d write to you now that you’ve arrived back in ------ to try to give you a better account.

In a way, you are entirely right: the stars, like all things in the world perhaps, have at the same time a “reason” for being there, and also no reason at all. They are at once arbitrary and contingent, and in this way they are an attempted reflection on the nature of the arbitrary in our lives, and in poetry as well: of the things we cannot control.

To explain: have you ever dreamt of inserting something into a poem which would not, indeed could never, mean? Have you ever felt oppressed by the hegemony of meaning which words can exert, the fact that you can never say a single word, a single phoneme even, without it inciting in other people certain associations, certain reactions and ideas? Words are, in this way, almost too potent.

Some four years ago, during a moment of poetic and I suppose personal crisis for me, I felt the constant weight of this “meaning”, or at least this constant potency to mean, which is everywhere and in everything, very strongly. (Novalis talks of this: the terror of the mere presence of walls, doors, or other objects: their silence!) I felt the need to be rid of it, to put something into poems besides words, something which was less like a “sign” – with all their often terribly heavy connotations and implications – and much more like an object.

"For you I have emptied the meaning/ Leaving the song" says Zukofsky. He also says, later in the same sequence ("Anew"), "What are these songs/ straining at sense?"

The stars in the night sky have no “meaning”, but they are there. When we look up at this sky, we can’t but be shocked by the mere “presence”of these stars, by their pure ontology. They are “arbitrary”, in a sense, as it seems that, contrary to what other generations have believed, there is no justification for their specific placement in the form of their specific constellations. The stars in my poems, I like to think, are the same as this, or they at least, very impotently, mimic this.

My stars are arbitrary, in that they do not mean. They are also contingent, in that (I like to believe) they maybe look beautiful, and they change the way the poem appears on the page. They often break up words. They can influence syntax and semantics, but crucially, they don’t have to. They can exist with a reason or without one.

Like us.

In the same way, have you ever wondered about those aspects of your own personality which, though they have no rational justification, nevertheless profoundly make up a large part of what you are? You look the way you do, but there is no teleological “reason” for this: it is just the result of the way you live, combined with surprisingly simple combinations of alleles given you by your parents, and if you had had different parents you would look different.

You seem also to have suggested, however, that these sort of justifications on my part constitute an “over-intellectualization” of the poem, and perhaps of these poems in particular. This idea surprises me. Firstly, I’m not at all sure that these justifications, or these stars, are in any way “intellectual”. Secondly, even if they were, why should we want intellect to be banished from contemporary poetics, or from the “explanation” or “justification” of same? There is currently no intellect in our politics: shouldn’t we at least want some intellect in our poems?

Moreover, given the discoveries of recent cognitive scientists and post-Chomskian linguists, it seems that it is no longer possible to entirely distinguish what in the brain is the result of an “emotional”process, and what is the result of a “logical” or “intellectual” one. The great shock in fact was in finding out that people who feel differently also reason differently. If I give a logical justification for something in a poem, then it is also an emotional justification. And vice versa.

I can only hope that this clears up a little of your surprise regarding my “stars”: they are not mysticism, nor mystification, nor a purposeful attempt at bafflement. They are simply an image, a representation of the things we cannot control in our lives, of the things we cannot control in poems either: the things which are simplythere, which escape perhaps both our authority and our understanding.

Far from being “signs” then – which like words, have a definite semantic resonance – they are more like little objects. They are just like little objects (a cup, or a saucer, or a flower, or a spoon) in that they sit there, quietly, in their own laconic way, not saying anything, but simply asserting their little bit of presence. Like these little objects, they can be touched by us, or looked at, but we can never decide if they have a reason for being there or not. Most likely, like all things in the world, – and this is the crucial paradox: it comes direct from Mallarmé, though it was lost in French poetics by Valéry – they are apparently arbitrary and contingent at the very same time.

So, this attempted “explanation” of mine probably sounds portentous and overlong, but it’s unfortunately the only one I can give. It was really good to meet you and ----, and I hope you’ll respond and tell me what you think about some of these ideas. Perhaps we have rather different views about what poetry is and what it does, but I hope at least to have cleared up some warranted bafflement.

My very best ---,

Nicholas

The Dialectic Of The Glance

The building I live in has a long, narrow central courtyard. The apartments, divided into two wings which run the length of this stone yard, are thus directly parallel to one other.

This uncommon, direct-facing design enables unprecedented visibility of one’s neighbours. To offset this– and in a display of minor urban genius –the architect made the floors of each of the two wings at slightly different levels, and the windows of each of the apartments at different points in the wall.

This apparent attempt to increase privacy, however, has strangely backfired: the diagonal crosses and cuts of this arrangement only enhance one’s perspective, thanks to this unusual, diagonal visibility. The result of this complex, Ucellian perspective, is that almost all of the windows are covered by a thin gauze of cloth or lace. Often makeshift, a variety of the immigrant families have hung spare fabrics or whitish tablecloths before the daily domestic scenes.

Down below, in the narrow courtyard, there are sometimes light skirmishes: bereft lovers, debt collectors, but most usually marital disputes which spill from the apartments into the wooden stairwells, and finally into this stony visibility. Once or twice, the police have come, usually in absurd numbers to comfort a crying woman. When such scenes occur, half of the windows become gradually filled with bodies, who lean out and watch the development of what is happening below.

There are men smoking early-morning cigarettes, and children in night-clothes. Often we– the neighbours –make comments on the passing scene. As the drama develops, and begins to seem, especially from this height, more and more comic, we often begin to laugh. Below, two young men push each other in shows of feigned bravado. One puffs his chest and cries “Batard!” and then “Couillon!” at the other young man (who, having slept with the first man’s sweetheart, resembles him). Once, the sweetheart was even watching from one of the higher windows, and cried out melodramatically, with obvious pleasure, “Stop! Stop!”

A fight does not look like this in the movies: the silly flailing of limbs, the heads thrown back, the inarticulate, half-landed insults. And as it progresses, we the neighbours laugh more and more. We are at the theatre! We are at a film together. We look to one another, we shake our heads. This is, we think, the most perfect mise en scène ever made by man. For all is visible: Brecht would be so proud, for not only are the actors visible, but each member of the audience is visible the ones to the others, and they look from one to the other, studying the respective faces, the expressions, the pity or the laughing grimaces, as much as they watch the developing scene.

Moreover, the action below is “real”: the actors believe profoundly in this action, at least until the emotion fades from them, at least until the action is forgotten and replaced by the regular quotidian chores.

If one wanted to imagine that the theatre did not penetrate our lives, if one wanted to believe that poetry, too, was the search for “the authentic”, then here is proof against this, here is what shows how happily the artificial scuttles and makes its pretty webs even in the crevices we think the most secret of ourselves. To try to weed out such scuttling beasties and their glistening apparati is futile and harmful, for they are hidden, infinitely extending, and vast. But if we study their intersections and interactions, of course, we come away with many more fascinating mandelbrots.

If we only recognize that what we feel is, like its poem, both secret and exposed, then we may be liberated from some hegemonies of the emotions, and as to the truth, believe more in this dialectic of the glance. If we only looked at one another as well as what “is happening”, we may see more important reactions in these faces which are watching, too.

Eshleman

There will, and should be, many links to it, but this is another. Perhaps the most important, and clearly the most lucid, evaluation of our contemporary poetic state (in all senses of the term): Clayton Eshleman's Wind from all Compass Points in the new Typo:

"While it is thrilling to know where one is ultimately based as an artist, it is equally horrifying to realize that one may also be witnessing the ecological destruction of the fundament that made art possible in the first place. As these massive vectors shift into place and cross, a disturbance in my mind challenges the convictions that I held as a young man: that the most meaningful way I knew of to deal with myself and with the world was to explore poetry and to write it. This is not a back-handed way of suggesting that poetry or art at large is dead, but a recognition that I may be of the first generation to be witness to one of the recuperations of the roots of culture and to the devastations that may make culture as we know it today a thing of the past. Rather than resonating with the magnificent aurochses of Lascaux, the abyss that opens before us today declares itself through the potential extinction of frogs and honey bees, and the accompanying sensations of the empty and lifeless space that humankind has always suspected fueled depth and its analogues of loss."

Dangerous Poetry

The Continental Review's Double Update!!!

Well, to celebrate the rebirth, after a long and quite empty continental summer, of another fresh and dazzlingly new Parisian poetic year, The Continental Review offers a veritable video extravaganza.

French-American poet Chris Tysh delivers a stunning hymn of praise to, of all cities, the marvellously reborn Detroit; and the Review is delighted to be featuring, as our first reading in French, work by the prominent and thrilling French poet Jean-Michel Espitallier.

Some bios? :

Chris Tysh was born in Paris, France and holds an M.A. in American Literature from the University of Paris (Sorbonne). She has published many books of poetry, including Continuity Girl (United Artists Books, 2000) and Cleavage (Roof Books, 2004).

Born in 1957, Jean-Michel Espitallier is the author of many books of poetry, and the editor of an anthology of contemporary French poetry, Pièces détachées (2000). In 1989, he co-founded the award-winning magazine Java. A translation of his Fantasy bouchère (Butcher Fantasy) is out from Duration Press, and his Théorème d'Espitallier (Espitallier's Theorem) has been translated and published by Seismicity Editions in Spring 2005.

Enjoy.

What Not To Do

Okay, so next Tuesday is my first reading. I've even now just realised I've never read poems before even the most intimate audience. This week, then, will require some reflection as to how I want to do this. So, my question to you all is: is there any advice you'd give, unusual or otherwise, for the presentation of poems in what is, for them, an already unfamiliar medium? Are there any "atrocious reading" stories out there? Or the contrary? (Names may be withheld, but also remember that it is very fun to rub our hands together in wicked poetic glee). Then I'll post a video here once it's done, and we'll see where I disobeyed, perhaps to my peril, the most golden advice . . .

NEW! Iain Britton In The Continental Review

The next video installment at The Continental Review features well-known New Zealand poet Iain Britton. Read more of Iain's poems over at Jacket and The Argotist. It's a video rooted in place and persona, and place as an Olsonian definition of persona: a profound orientation which The Continental Review is all the more happy to explore.

P.S. TCR favourite Linh Dinh now has a blog. Go there, now!

Ah, This New Year . . .

Well, to celebrate the return to most beautiful Paris sunshine and loved people and beloved things, I thought we'd use some music to begin this year, one, let's hope, of poetries and philosophies and friends and loves.

First, some Serge. Ahhhh, Serge. A lot of people were very offended by this clip. Gainsbourg's apparent desire, in the last years of his life, to look as much like a pedophile as humanly possible without actually being one, is evident. I love Serge, and this is, I think, one of the reasons: I find it impossible to be offended by this kind of excruciatingly silly Serge as Provacateur: by such "fantasy", hardly meriting the title, made precisely to offend in a very particular way. I mean, the black glove? It's hilarious. Far from the terrifying quotidian resonances of Nabokov - which I just read this August, and was struck that no-one had ever told me it was perhaps the saddest book one could ever read - carrying your daughter out of the surf with a four-day growth, whisky breath and a black glove is a silly, magnificent tribute to ironic French decadence at the end of this siècle. Wait for the cheesy west-coast sax at the end . . .




In other news, I'm giving my first ever reading here in Paris on the 25th of September as part of IVY Writers series, run by the indefatigable Jennifer K. Dick and Michelle Noteboom. Read about it here! Everyone in Paris, please do come, and let's meet if we never have, and talk if we've never talked, and as for those separated by oceans, email me so we can cleave them with chanted song. Also, my girlfriend, the visual artist Olga Kobenko, who illustrated my chapbook and who's studying at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, will be exhibiting a number of paintings/drawings/photos. So anyone who, as well as being a poet, is also a banker, come with your chequebook!

As for interesting developments in the ever-expanding poetosphere. I like Nada Gordon's initial anti-rules of blogging. How do you "obey" an anti-rule? Love each other, I suppose. The posts to my blog range from serious reflection to self-analysis to reading lists to European wanderings to French pop. May it ever be so . . . Also, two of my favourite poetosphere people in an extraordinary conversation, namely: Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino interviews Nick Piombino.

Soon there'll be more additions to The Continental Review's expanding library, including an imminent update with work by Ian Britton.

Oh, and here's an even more disgusting one just to finish up. I'm aware it's so offensive it doesn't deserve comment. Vive l'année à venir!

Coming . . .