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trailer >>> barrish, curation #3: Belladonna* from the A.O. Movement Collective on Vimeo.
Cathy Wagner recommends The Wide Road
"An enviably intellectually-fecund friendship set itself the important work of trying to think and write sex, collaboratively, as women. I wish I’d had this book years ago. “We eroticize our earthly situations and conditions and likewise they eroticize us…Our vagina accommodates the proverbial railway station it has sometimes been compared to. To be enormous is a wish that comes over us in our hot desperation. Then, miraculously, everything on earth swells to our proportions.” Yup that’s how it works. Crazy smart and crazy sexy."
MAKE MAGAZINE'S LEN GUTKIN reviews The Wide Road. (September 2011): The second quarter of The Wide Road, Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s strange, charming, picaresque “novel,” consists of epistolary correspondence between the book’s authors. These letters comment on the work we are reading, even as they evoke an enviably intelligent creative partnership. “We seem,” writes Hejinian to Harryman, “to be particularly given to unlikely linkages, to exciting mismatches, to the creative (playful, powerful, funny, mournful) co-existence of live incommensurabilities.” Read more...
Looking Up Harryette Mullen is named a Small Press Distribution Non-Fiction Bestseller.
(April - June 2011)
I am very honored to introduce our next reader, Eileen Myles. I first met Eileen when she came to talk in my poetry class in college. In college you get all these guest speakers (usually men) who come in and talk to you about their poetry (or whatever they’re doing) and the projects they are working on, followed usually by a lot of advice. Eileen was different. She came into my class and talked about being a poet, and what that meant. This idea of being a poet was new to me, this identity outside of writing the poem itself. It was like a coat you could put on. Then she read some poems and I felt like all the grossness around poetry, all that sticky sludge I had all over me from going to bad readings was washed off with ice water. Even her voice was subversive, the way her poems tumbled out casually like natural speech but were so much more than that.
Aren’t we all excited about Inferno? This poet’s novel about life and art? After we were told about the cheapness of “I” and of self and didn’t really ever buy it it, this book comes to inflate our sense of I, to give it some fresh air. Myles Writes:
Before I could write before I even knew how to spell I went out with my best friend Billy LeBlanc and we created a bunch of letters out of symbols we knew: sun, wave, stick— we made letters. We had so much to say to everyone and we pronounced our ideas carefully with crayons on paper and we folded them up and placed them in one mailbox on a house on our street. We were so excited because the silence of our childhood was over…that sun, the first tiny symbol still sits there in my head.
This gorgeous impetus, sending the self into the world with words is what drives this work. The audacious verbalization of self, as Poet, as Lesbian, as Queer, as Female is portrayed as both simple and complex, ordinary and deeply important.
The only additional thing I want to say about Inferno is that it made me thirsty. I had to keep tearing myself away to down huge jars of water. I think that says a lot.
Please welcome Eileen Myles.
By Krystal Languell:
Cara Benson warns against gatherings of groups like this one tonight in her new book, (made). She writes:
Everybody walked in the room I mean everybody in the same room then walking around that room to sniff the walls as a type of appraisal of that room. The room. All the people in the room looked at the other people in the room to be looking at the people in the room and then the walls. Bowties. Nobody had on a bowtie.
We behave strangely in groups, and Benson points this out:
"It was as if every person in that room knew there was this apple and yet none of them would mention it."
She calls us out of our common, unspoken thoughts, our herd mentality and our reluctance to be uncomfortable, and she does so through uniquely designed prose poems. The titles, if they are titles, often appear at the bottom of the page or are otherwise set apart from the text.
(made) is Benson's first full-length poetry collection, and is available for purchase tonight. It's a collection that knows all about your:
"False testimony hand over one eye but peeking at the horrorshow."
Cara Benson is a Dusier, Black Radish, Belladonna* and BookThug. She edits the online magazine Sous Rature and teaches poetry in a NY State Correctional Facility. Please welcome her.
July 26, 2011: HOT TEXTS @ The Way Station
By Emily Skillings
Paul Foster Johnson's first collection of poetry, Refrains/Unworkings, was published by Apostrophe Books, and his second, Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, was recently published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared in The Awl, Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, Fence and Octopus. From 2003 to 2006 he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He is an editor at Litmus Press and lives in New York.
In Johnson's Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, memories and words become boxes, structures, carrels, rooms in which we are kept and released--almost poured. In this superhuman, Arendtian "study," we are hurled through a tour of places (institutional, private, political, places of desire). We throw ourselves against the walls only to realize a secret door was there all along. Johnson writes in "Study in Pavilions": I would rather make my own ether/than have to explain again/that I don't work with images." This comically taut artist's statement is validated by Johnson's attention to trajectory, space, phenomenology and movement--there is nothing static in this book.
Please help me to welcome him.
The following introduction was given by Martine Bellen at the Poets House discussion between Harryette Mullen and Barbara Henning on April 29, 2011.
This year has been an exciting one for Belladonna*. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Belladonna*, Belladonna* has provided a forum for feminist and avant-garde poetry since 1999 when it was founded by Rachel Levitsky. It began as a reading and salon series that published small chaplets to commemorate each event. Belladonna* has featured over 1750 writers of wildly diverse age, gender orientation, and origin. In 2011, Belladonna* began re-forming as a collective, now comprised of 11 women, including Akilah Oliver. And this year called—A Year in the Commons—Belladonna* published the collaborative book-length poem THE WIDE ROAD by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian and now Belladonna* is here to celebrate the publication of LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN: INTERVIEWS ON SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY AND OTHER WORKS by Barbara Henning, with an introduction by Juliana Spahr.
In Spahr’s introduction, she says that “LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN is one of those books that can only happen in the arena of community-supported critical writing by poets about poetry.” LOOKING UP HARRY MULLEN is unquestionably a community-supported, a community-conceived, book. It’s made up of two sets of interviews, the first conducted in 1996. It began with Barbara Henning writing postcards and Harryette Mullen writing postcards back, and before long postcards overlapped because of USPS time delay, and postcards grew into letters, and the initial interview conceit took on a lively form of its own. The second set of interviews, which focuses specifically on the individual poems that comprise SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY, began in 2009 when Henning came up with the idea that directing a light on Mullen’s practice would offer her grad students at LIU a pivotal perspective into the poetry-writing process; in Henning’s words from the book: “The interview would be in the spirit of the Oulipo artists who reveal their experiments and constraints and catalogue them in the library of Paris. No mysteriously inspired writer’s ‘self,’ but instead a writer who is seriously inventive and willing to share her methods and approaches.”
So back to my point (or rather, Juliana’s) about LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN being a community-supported project—Who makes up the community to which I’m referring? The USPS (who helped create aleatory delays), Henning’s students; Henning herself and Mullen, of course; Rachel Levitsky had the idea of making a book with images so in the book there are photos taken by Henning, Mullen’s sister Kirsten’s friend Lauren B. Parker, Cecil Beaton, among others. An Etheridge Knight poem and a William Shakespeare poem are included in the book, so they are part of the composition of the community. HR Hegnauer worked on the complicated interior design of the book and its cover. For me, working on this book with Barbara has been an extraordinarily collaborative experience. And Stephen Motika and Poets House who very generously are hosting this talk and celebration. The community also extends to the Belladonna* Collective and now, you, dear audience, are part of the community. Of course I’m just naming a small part of the community; once a book becomes a book its breadth is incalculable.
Before I turn the discussion over to Henning and Mullen, I’ll provide you with short introductions of their work: Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven books of poetry, and a series of photo-poem pamphlets, including most recently, CITIES & MEMORY (Chax Press), THIRTY MILES FROM ROSEBUD (BlazeVOX), and MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY (United Artists). In the nineties Barbara was the editor of LONG NEWS IN THE SHORT CENTURY.
Henning’s work is grounded in the world around her, the day, and the moment she’s in. Like a magnet that attracts not only metal, but also light, sound, and gesture, the patterns of her written moment slowly reveal a larger world that we inhabit together, one which includes politics, family, and desire. Henning’s poetry and prose, her vision, are so fluid that to identify her as a poet or novelist or storywriter would be off course with her creative endeavors. And in LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN, some of us are fortunate to be introduced for the first time to Henning the teacher, interviewer, and photographer.
Harryette Mullen currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches courses in American poetry, African-American literature, and creative writing at UCLA, so we in NYC are especially lucky to get her for this weekend. Her poetry collections include SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY, a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and RECYCLOPEDIA, winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award. In the introduction to RECYLOPEDIA, Mullen says, “If the encyclopedia collects general knowledge, the recyclopedia salvages and finds imaginative uses for knowledge. That’s what poetry does when it remakes and renews words, images, and ideas, transforming surplus cultural information into something unexpected.” Mullen’s poetry, often prose poetry, culls from vast storehouses of knowledge, personal and communal, and objects, and other writers’ writings—Sappho and Stein among them—and synthesizes collaged sound and texture into poem which obliterates any sense of interiority and exteriority, a tornado of salvaged knowledge, some allusions missed and some deeply perceived, which finds respiring meaning that recharges the quotidian.
As in:
A humble monumental
Music made of syllables
Or a heartbroken crystal
Cathedral with gleaming walls
Of Orangina bottles
--“Outside Art”
And now, over to Mullen and Henning…
Bomb Magazine's Patricia Spears Jones reviews Looking Up Harryette Mullen.
(Issue 116, Summer 2011)
Wednesday, June 15, 2011; 8:00 pm
Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading.
Please join us as we create a space for people to read and perform Akilah Oliver’s work and work inspired by her. The reading will be in the Parish Hall, a room where she read her work, carefully listened to the work of other poets and taught workshops. The event is an opportunity for us to express our deep gratitude and pay homage to her gifts and her greatness. With Rachel Levitsky, Eileen Myles, Patricia Spears Jones, Julie Patton, Tonya Foster, E. Tracy Grinnell, Tracie Morris, Charles Bernstein, Steven Taylor, Tyler Burba, Julian T. Brolaski, Rachel Zolf, Joyce LeeAnn Joseph, Laura Meyers, Stacy Szymaszek, Marcia Oliver and a special tribute from a group of some of her former students: Stephen Motika, Lydia Cortes, Jamila Wimberly & Mia Bruner. Presented with the Poetry Project.
Location: Poetry Project: 131 East 10th Street; New York, NY 10003
Admision: FREE
The Invititation:
On the weekend of what would have been Cha's 60th birthday (a full life cycle event in the Chinese/Korean lunar calendar), Belladonna* and Kundiman gather poets to perform a staged reading from Dictee. Cha's best known written work, Dictee focuses on the lives of several women framed through the art of the Greek muses, yet in the cosmos of Shamanism and Daoism. Their struggle to speak and overcome suffering is enacted through a mixture of media which destabilizes the notion of a progressive and seamless history.
The Players:
Opening - Soomi Kim/Jen Shyu
Clio - Allison Roh Park
Calliope - Zhang Er
Urania - Genevieve White
Melpomene - Cathy Park Hong
Erato - Sarah Gambito/Kelly Tsai
Elitere - Anne Waldman
Thalia - Cara Benson
Trepsichore - Tamiko Beyer
Polymnia - Myung Mi Kim
The introduction:
Somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it. —JUDITH BUTLER, “After Loss, What Then?”
In Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War author Grace Cho uses the trope and actual possibility of the ghost as a lens through which to view the repeatedly untold legacy of the Korean War:
If, in the most basic terms, studying ghosts allows us to rethink a society’s relationship to its dead, particularly to those who were subject to some kind of injustice, the ghost and its haunting effects act as a mode of memory and an avenue for ethical engagement with the present. (29)
Referencing sociologist Avery Gordon’s work on haunting and the sociological imagination, Cho speaks of an ethical and political urgency to dealing with the presence of loss by “mourning modernity’s ‘wound in civilization’ and eliminating the destructive forces that open it up over and over again.” If no memory can retrieve what was lost nor one story be told about it in order to mourn it, we must look to more than the singular - to the multiple, fractal, and even ghostly - to enact the attempt to suture trauma. Butler continues: “a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full ‘recovery’ is impossible.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s films, mixed media, performances, and the book to be performed from today, Dictee, can be said, as in her words, to be “in the perpetual motion of search.” They are works of repetition, fragment, dislocation, intertwining personal, female and social historiography, looking forward and toward the past and from it, perpetually.“There is no destination other than towards yet another refuge from yet another war.” The destination is in motion. Towards and yet and yet repeated. The wound perpetually reopened. To recover the body, the work, is not fully possible. What we have and will have will be partial, excerpted, a dream reconstituted as a haunting avenue to engage with the present and presence of all of us here today, who we draw with us to this space, and those whom we will carry with us as we proceed.
--Cara Benson
This event was curated by Belladonna* Collaborative, Kundiman, and Zhang Er at Bowery Poetry Club on March 5, 2011.
• THE POETRY PROJECT'S CORINA COPP interviews Carla Harryman & Lynn Hejinian about The Wide Road.
(April / May 2011)
SINA QUEYRAS interviews RACHEL LEVITSKY about Belladonna* for The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog.
KARLA KELSEY for THE CONSTANT CRITIC: 
Looking Up Harryette Mullen is now available to order!Six years after Harryette Mullen and Barbara Henning first met at the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, Henning proposed she do a postcard-format interview of Mullen that would allow for a “very small postcard space in which to respond …The idea of cards flying through the mail & overlapping.” Thus began what is now the first segment of Looking Up Harryette Mullen, unique collaborative conversations that offer a candid look at the influences, politics, and poetics that inform Mullen’s poetry, specifically her books Trimmings and Muse & Drudge.
In these small postcard spaces, which soon expanded into lengthy letters, race and gender, Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Houses, Salt-N-Pepa, black English and Spanglish, to name just a few of topics, are discussed as the two poets travel around the country, letters and postcards overlapping, as layered and thrilling as the poems that they unpack.
The conversation expands even further in the second set of spoken interviews that include concerns as far-ranging as the Heaven’s Gate cult, Oulipian constraints such as S+7 and lipograms, syllabic rhymes, and Aimé Césaire. In stunning detail, Mullen and Henning discuss the origins of each poem in Mullen’s award-winning collection Sleeping with the Dictionary. For poets and readers of poetry interested in witnessing how a brilliant, singular writer embarks on the journey of generating work to scholars researching the inception of Mullen’s poems, this book informs by way of techniques and vitality as Mullen guides the reader through her poetry from A-Z. Twenty-five photos interspersed throughout the conversations act as visual annotations. Included are images of the Babydoll House of the Heidelberg Project; the original handmade “Ask Aden” poem that Mullen drew for her nephew; and her “Dim Lady” poem side-by-side with Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” Sonnet 130. Besides being a significant pedagogical tool to teach Mullen’s poetry, Looking Up Harryette Mullen generously offers a rare glimpse into process and practice and the poetry community.
