Tisa Bryant and Silas Howard read, but you're not supposed to know that.

Many thanks to all who braved the bitter cold, the roping wind, the stacks of sawdust, the "There is no show tonight" sign on the door last week (I'd tell you which night it was, but then I'd have to shoot you). Our first night in the new Dixon Place paradoxically furnished a return to the old Lower East Side arts scene: underground, unpermissioned, embracing danger, shattering rules. Art on the edge! Risky words!

Tisa Bryant's warm readings from her wonderful work on films and Silas Howard's idealistic odes to Mr. Hollywood and the jilted love found there heated things right up. Here are the intros from the event.

But first, please don't forget to come to the FINAL QT READING OF 2008:

Tuesday, December 9
doors at 7 PM / reading at 7:30
TRIPLE BOOK PARTY!
Douglas A. Martin (Your Body Figured)
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (So Many Ways to Sleep Badly)
Magdalena Zurawski (The Bruise)

I scarce can breathe, I am so excited. See you then!

The intro of Silas:

The first time I saw Silas Howard was in 1995, and I totaled a car on the way there. It was a big Buick Century, a station wagon my mother had driven to work for roughly a decade before consigning it to me for my senior year of high school. I was taking a poetry class at the Bethesda Writers Center that met on Monday nights, but when word came down that dyke punk troupe Tribe 8 was on tour and had a Monday night gig at the 9:30 Club, it seemed that the universe was asking me to choose between being a poet and being a punk. I chose punk, and ditched the class. So at 7:30 that Monday, while my suburbanite classmates chawed at their sestinas, my cinnamon-scented Buick wagon lost its brakes, skidded 180 degrees around on a slicked Seven Locks Road, and finally came to a halt an inch or two shy of a low stone wall that separated the road’s grassy shoulder from a steep, wooded ravine.

My whole body trembling with adrenaline and averted demise, I turned the car around, drove on to my friend’s house, and went with him to the show, where Silas, whom I’d never met, was playing guitar.

Given this history, was I a little nervous about having Silas read tonight? Yes. I told him: “No guitars.”

But really, I want to embrace these places Silas’s work leads us—pointing a different direction than the one we meant to go, hanging between road and ravine, contemplating walls and precipices, hearing our hearts march irregularly in our temples. In his video and film work as well as his prose, creatures shapeshift, kids fall into a hole and become kid-monster hybrids, phantom genitalia consort with the periodically expelled organs of the sea cucumber. These malleable bodies suggest malleable selves and an unsteady relation between self and embodiment, making for an art easily as liberatory, if perhaps not quite as cathartic, as the ritual castration that took place onstage at the 9:30 Club, the night in 1995 that I totaled my car.

and of Tisa:

At Dia:Beacon, I recently spent a long time hanging out with a set of Fred Sandback works. Each of these works consists of lengths of colored yarn stretched taut, defining shapes and thus marking out the planes of space within them, making that empty space seem tangible and charged. The most moving of these works, to me, is a set of yarns that extend vertically, floor to ceiling, while appearing actually to thread through floor and ceiling into the world beyond, engaging a space more expansive than the gallery, perhaps infinitely so.

I thought of this work while I was reading Tisa Bryant’s elegant and far-reaching book Unexplained Presence, which takes up European cinema, literature, and visual art in a series of linked prose pieces that defy easy categorization or facile reading. Zooming in on the African presences in these works, Bryant fills the screen with the perhaps blown-out result of that zooming. We wander through these narratives as if half-lost, traversing the inverse tale that blooms when a silenced or marginal element becomes the centering or constitutive one.

As often as not, forces and processes outside the enclosed space of a given work of art set it in motion: an active and resistant pair of viewers, a filmmaker Bryant shows us in the process of shaping light and sound, Zola writing to Manet about Olympia. As these forces penetrate the work itself, conversely the reach of the art, and the sphere of its relevance, extends out of frame as well, perhaps infinitely, drawing all of history into its spectral embrace.

On last night's marvelous reading of Corrine Fitzpatrick and Andrea Lawlor

Thanks so much to the many people who came out last night, filling the room (and, afterward, the bar) with keen intelligence and conviviality. Intros below. But first, we interrupt this recap to bring you this breaking news story.

JUST ANNOUNCED! The remainder of the QT season--which will take place in Dixon Place's brand new swanky space on Chrystie Street--is as follows:

Wednesday, November 19:
SILAS HOWARD [By Hook or by Crook (and other films)]
+
TISA BRYANT [Unexplained Presence (Leon Works)]

Tuesday, December 9:
Triple book party!!! with
DOUGLAS A. MARTIN
[Your Body, Figured (Nightboat)]
+
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE
[So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights)]
+
MAGDALENA "NO MIDDLE NAME OR INITIAL" ZURAWSKI
[The Bruise, winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize (FC2)]

Now, the intros:

ON ANDREA LAWLOR

Claude Lévi-Strauss writes, “What gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future.” Andrea Lawlor’s smart and engrossing Pocket Myths series, which invites artists across disciplines to provide new takes on major themes and characters from Greek myth, has for the past several years been putting that assertion to the test, yielding work that has been beautiful, meaningful, engaging, humorous, and provocative.

Lawlor’s own stories set myths in societies more familiar (to me, at least) than ancient Greece: long-closed dyke bars in Park Slope, grad-student parties in small towns. Often her characters behave disconnectedly, as if compelled, driven along by the force of ancient plotlines, structures, fantasies, and drives, but dressed here in language that glistens with energy and intelligence and heart.

Lévi-Strauss also writes of myths as language that exists above the linguistic level, inoculated by its enduringness against the effects of any particular translation. But Lawlor’s language is highly relevant here: If her writing uses the myth as a kind of eternal engine, the myth in turn luxuriates in the enchanting chassis of her wicked humor, the sharp social commentary she laces through the myths’ retellings—in short, her impeccable craft. Lawlor’s stories propel me through them in a way that few works of fiction do: with an inexorable thrust.

ON CORRINE FITZPATRICK

There’s a rigorous aesthetics of subtraction at work in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s stripped-down poetics. This is most overtly visible in Zamboangueña, a chapbook that came out this year and consists of taut, sly stanzas culled verbatim from her grandmother’s storytelling, built as much from what Corrine leaves out as what she includes.

This principle also animates her recent poems, one of which begins with a sentence that, read quickly on the page, seems at first to say “in this world there are problems,” and then you realize, a bit late, that you’d read it wrong; it says not world but word. And herein lies one of the chief problematics—or, as it appears in the line, post-subtraction, “problems”—in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s poetry: that to travel from experience to poetry, from world to word, can seem a function of diminution, of winnowing. Her work explores the aesthetic, intellectual, and moral challenges this leaves us with.

The vehicle, the medium of this movement, is perception, a process whose conditional and unstable character plays a key role in these poems (“throw specifics into doubt”). A siren, which could be a sound or a woman or both, dopplers itself out of form; a changing angle of light alters a landscape, as does a simple bodily movement: “turn conducts my view.” What can be counted on?

These poems’ caution, and their considered and erudite skepticism, exists to challenge the same tendencies in ourselves, their readers. Too, the poems seek ways to challenge this outlook. “I speak to you,” one poem begins, courageously setting aside momentarily all the ways that assertion could be undone. Another poem’s title, “emptiness has something to shout,” evinces a similar determination to escape paralysis or muteness without relinquishing theoretical and critical rigor.

The urge to subtract, as gracefully rendered in Corrine Fitzpatrick’s thoughtful, critical poems, leads us to explore by what terms we might attempt, through all our changing perceptual and intellectual frames, to build.

Tuesday, Sept. 23: Corrine Fitzpatrick + Andrea Lawlor

QT: Queer Readings at Dixon Place presents:
(the first reading of the new season!)

CORRINE FITZPATRICK + ANDREA LAWLOR

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

Corrine Fitzpatrick is the author of a transcription project, Zamboangueña (sona books, 2007) and a chapbook of poems, On Melody Dispatch (Goodbye Better, 2007). Poems are about to be out in The Denver Quarterly and Tight Journal. She is in the MFA program for writing at Bard College, and is the Program Coordinator for The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. Born and raised in California, she now resides in Brooklyn.

Andrea Lawlor, a fiction writer and the editor of Pocket Myths (www.pocketmyths.com), has had stories published in Persiflage, the Brooklyn Rail, and Encyclopedia. Lawlor is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at UMass Amherst.

EXCERPTS:

[from Andrea Lawlor:]

He stroked his throat til the bump smoothed down and then he checked his look in the mirror on the back of his closet door. How could he look so pretty? He was a slutty superstar. His black motorcycle boots and close-fitting Levi’s jacket, big fur-lined Lenny Kravitz coat, every detail he approved. Who was he? He was the girl he wanted to fuck.

[from Corrine Fitzpatrick:]

sunlight is incident

sunlit incendent

   my mathematical

moment

E. Tracy Grinnell and Martha Oatis read, and it was lovely.

It was wonderful: a gently rigorous and rigorously gentle season finale, followed by an unprecedented profusion of mussels. Thanks to all who came.

Here are the intros.

On E. Tracy Grinnell:

Because this is a queer reading series, I want to start off talking about inversion. Arnold Schoenberg’s late-romantic, pre-serialist Verklärte Nacht (1899) was controversial for including a chord he called an inverted ninth, because the note in that chord known as the ninth was on the bottom, in the bass, where everybody knew it didn’t belong: a chord that had previously been forbidden and thus, Schoenberg joked bitterly, did not exist.

In E. Tracy Grinnell’s long poem “Humoresque” we get a couple of lines in which the idea of inversion mobilizes every word or group of words, without ever being said directly:

. . . succumb to deviants’ dreams underway
Night that transfigures.

“Night that transfigures” is itself an inversion of the Schoenberg work’s title in English, “Transfigured night.” This is typical of the tremendously exciting and mobile way Grinnell’s poetry operates—the way concepts and words are circled, unmistakable even in their sometime absence. I go through her poems in every direction. I stack and layer, I imagine her pages as transparencies I shuffle and lay over and under one another, I think of the students who, piercing several pages of Talmud with a pin, could recite the word pierced on each page, that manic polydirectionality: the pan-historical sweep, the perpetual-motion prolepses.

I read in “Humoresque” a condensed, elliptical late-empire Homerian epic, in which “[o]ne loves best a warrior’s coma”—so the idea of the war hero is itself lying suspended, moribund—while muses and sirens work to dash warlords on seaside rocks.

There’s so much more I want to say. I could very happily spend the next few years of my life giving lectures on E. Tracy Grinnell’s poems [Unknown audience member: “You should!”], following each thread in her rich allusive web to its source and laterally through its complex macramé. But for now I should just welcome her here, to the music stand. Perhaps a string player, premiering Schoenberg’s forbidden inversion a century ago, used a similar stand.

and on Martha Oatis:

I’m really pleased to be introducing Martha Oatis, who is a very dear friend. Most of the time when we talk on the phone she’s driving between Boston and Providence, so motion suffuses and carries our relationship more than it does perhaps any other relationship in my life. So it’s fitting that in her work, attention to motion—and to position and to relationality—are so crucial.

In her long poem “Forest Trace,” consciousness moves through via prepositions; in “Metaphysics Continued,” her newer work, that relationality becomes, almost literally, concrete:

“From here, I look down upon the sidewalk. Which later I will find at my feet. I will need it to step on. . . . That the ground provides perpetual connection between places.”

The play on ground is deliberate, I believe: She addresses not just the dialectical figure/ground relation but what the actual point of contact consists of—the pause within the preposition: how that can be shadowy, insubstantial—

“An object in the hand. Where hand and surface meet, there also hovers the shadow between two things making contact.”

—and how that can be substantial, and a ground for inscription, as in the line, later in the poem:

“I place my hand on the sheet of paper resting on a wooden surface.”

A sheet of paper: just enough substance to write on, and what is written on the paper records the surface, and embodies the relation.

This essayistic, open-hearted, evolving voice brings us in on the poetry’s important inquiries. We are the fortunate guests of a compassionately, attentively, ever-changing mind. Alan Davies, writing in Boog City, praised her “soft, quite simply beautiful” stanzas. I’m additionally grateful for her flexible, thoughtful working out of interrelatedness, whether it’s the pavement of I-95 or the sidewalk that provides the connection.

Tuesday, May 20: E. Tracy Grinnell + Martha Oatis

at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Some Clear Souvenir (O Books 2006) and Music or Forgetting (O Books 2001), as well as the limited edition chapbooks: Leukadia (Trafficker Press forthcoming 2008), Quadriga, a collaboration with Paul Foster Johnson (gong chapbooks 2006), Of the Frame (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs 2004), and Harmonics (Melodeon Poetry Systems 2000). She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches writing and edits Litmus Press and Aufgabe, an annual journal of poetry and translations.

Martha Oatis is the author of from Two Percept (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) and two unpublished manuscripts, Forest Trace and Metaphysics Continued. Other poems have appeared in Aufgabe and EOAGH. She recently began studying Traditional Chinese Medicine at The New England School of Acupuncture. She lives in Providence.

Dale Peck + Mark Edmund Doten: Tuesday, January 8

at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

Dale Peck is the author of the novels Martin and John, The Law of Enclosures, and Now It's Time to Say Goodbye; the memoir-cum-novel What We Lost; a book of literary criticism, Hatchet Jobs; and two children's books, Drift House and The Lost Cities. In 2008 and 2009 he will publish Body Surfing, a metaphysical thriller; Sprout, a young adult novel; The Garden of Lost and Found, a novel for adults; and, if he finishes it on time, Twelve Caesars, his first collection of short stories. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Observer, Out, the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, the London Review of Books, Bookforum, BOMB, Tin House, Granta, and the Threepenny Review. The winner of two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he currently teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of The New School.

Mark Edmund Doten is enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA writing program, and is a former associate editor of Huffington Post. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot; Mudlark; Web Del Sol site The Potomac, where he is a contributing editor; and novelist Dennis Cooper’s "Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground” (Akashic Books). His interviews with Edmund White and Rick Moody have appeared in Bookslut and Huffington Post, respectively. In June 2007 New York Magazine ran an excerpt from his fiction, naming him a "future star" of New York area writing programs.

Akilah Oliver + Stacy Szymaszek: Tuesday, December 18

at Dixon Place: 258 Bowery, 2nd floor, between Houston & Prince
doors (+ snacks + drinks + hangouts) at 7 / reading at 7:30

Akilah Oliver's chapbooks include a(A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), The Putterer's Notebook (Belladonna, 2006), and An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla Press, 2004). She is the author of the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999), a book of experimental prose poetry. Currently on faculty at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University's Summer Writing Program, she has also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and she is currently the Monday Readings Coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church. She lives in Brooklyn.

Some online Akilah Oliver: http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/oliver.html

Stacy Szymaszek was born in Milwaukee, WI, in 1969. She is currently the Artistic Director at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. Her chapbooks include Mutual Aid (gong, 2004), Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005) and There Were Hostilities (release, 2005). She is the author of Emptied of All Ships and the forthcoming Hyperglossia (both with Litmus Press). She is the editor of Gam, is a contributing editor for Fascicle, coeditor of Instance Press, and was one of the editors of the "Queering Language" issue of EOAGH. A new work, Stacy S: Autoportraits, featuring her self-portraits with accompanying texts by Trane Devore, Renee Gladman, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Anne Tardos, Tim Peterson, or Trace, Elizabeth Robinson, and David Gatten, will be out soon on OMG Press.

Some online Stacy Szymaszek: http://www.mipoesias.com/Poetry/szymaszek_stacey.html