Saturday, September 05, 2009

MINOR AMERICAN NUMERO UNO 2009
VANESSA PLACE -- TED POPE -- DES ARK
SEPTEMBER 19, 2009, 8pm
715 Washington Street Durham NC
FREE -- OPEN TO THE PUBLIC -- BYOB

Vanessa Place: Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of /Dies: A Sentence/ (Les Figues Press, 2006), /La Medusa/ (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and /Notes on Conceptualisms/, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009); her nonfiction book, /The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law/ is forthcoming from Other Press. Place is co-founder of Les Figues Press, described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”


Ted Pope:
“I am the warm and fuzzy wall between the Church and The State. Trapped out here in the orbit-of-Mars like a Hound-Dog or an Owl. the little inner buddha is building a wondrous canoe that will travel from my heart... to you.”


Des Ark:
Des Ark is the secret soundtrack of midnight Carolina. It’s the hard and sweet noise of everything that keeps you up at night, a bulldozer come to break its heart with you. Walking alone at night, you can hear Des Ark through the broken window of the used bookstore. Inside, everyone is there and everything is real.







Friday, September 04, 2009

From Coolidge's "The Crystal Text"

A prosewriter's mind's mass is thought plots
but a poet's is fielded of words.

What do you see when you look out with your language?
A pile of hooted buckets.
A loose laugh spoon.
Miles of adroited pain paper.
Lungs full of glass beads.
A list of nodules knowing of nameless.

These are never only things, just, but the words
retracked. Circling as a flying object almost home
with your pen above whatever oval tensions
or the wheat in your litmus class, the glow on the fear.
The witness motions are there. Or add another
e to that th.