Remember when poetry was ambient and sneaky ambiguous and jangled at the touch like mechanical tears on the blushing imago of the "novel form"?
Remember the faux finish, the "new elliptical", the liberation of the "open work", the clouds in the coffee of the post-language reverie gang?
Well, you'll get none of that here.
Not this weekend.
This weekend, proposition in poetry is back. Argument is alright. The didactic is generative. One frank sentence pops into place after another.
And why not? Anna Moschovakis is in town.
Screw the blurb gumbo about both of her parents being logicians and her first book containing sectionals like "The Blue Book", etc. The point is: when her mind pivots at the putative ground truths her notional stylus leads before it, your own mind pivots too, and cumulative pivots mean ice rink fantasia in your cognitive cluster.
You won't forget that action.
Joining her is Northeast LA's very own minister of clean design whose prosodic stumbling blocks stage explanations and illustrations of prototype theory on the robot clover of an inherited typeface ("of the world," she says, "of the world!"). She calls her new book "A Fixed, Formal Arrangement", but you'll be repositioned, I guarantee you. This poetry plays fidget rock.
Is it just me, or are all the boys flarfing in the backroom, fussing with collectible captchas and calling it "vis-po" or stealing pixels from the video fireplace like bantamweight prometheans busing data from one bottlenecked formal genre into another to make a claim for "sample culture" and the now sound?
Well, call me stumped. The gals are on it in this weather. The boys better get back to bureau.
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ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS & ALLISON CARTER
Saturday, July 19 2008 at 5:00pm
@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3702 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206FEEL THE FUNCTION: PRB |---> ULLA
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ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS works with the Ugly Duckling Presse collective as an editor, book and web designer, and letterpress printer. She also translates from French, and has published translations of Gautier, Michaux and Cendrars, among others. Her first full length collection, I Have Not Been Able To Get Through To Everyone, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2006. Anna is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at CUNY's Graduate Center, and currently teaches at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
ALLISON CARTER is an LA-based writer, teacher and designer. Her first book, A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, is forthcoming next month from Les Figues Press. Her chapbook, Shadows Are Weather, will soon be out from Horse Less Press. Her work has otherwise been published in P-Queue, 5_Trope, Fence, and other journals. She currently teaches a workshop in hybrid forms at California Institute of the Arts and co-edits P S Books with Joe Potts.
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Doors open at 4:30pm
Reading starts at 5:00pm$5 donation requested
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The PRB: Your frontline against poetry snacks.
