Poet, critic, and translator Joshua Clover has been distracted recently from his ongoing work on an English language edition of Jean-Marie Gleize’s Tarnac, un acte préparatoire, by this preposterous and sinister clamp down; Clover and eleven students face over a decade’s prison time and up to a million dollars in fines for peacefully exercising their constitutional rights to protest blatant injustices on the UC Davis campus. The Davis Dozen, as they’re being called, need your support. Begin by signing their online petition.

There is little subtlety in the ironic twist that the first full collection to be available to Anglo-American readers–by Gleize, one of the most important poet-critics of the latter 20th and early 21st centuries in France–is based on the story of the Tarnac 10.

Here is a conversation published earlier this year between Clover and Juliana Spahr, on poetry and politics. Mind the scare quotes.

And here is an article on Gleize’s work.

Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto, authors of Waveform, will present a workshop in collaboration with Petra Kuppers Saturday, May 5th, as part of the Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing conference. The workshop runs from 1:15-2:00 PM is one of many worth highlighting throughout the weekend.

Subterranean Technologies: The Ambient Poetics of Tan Lin, Pamela Lu, Sueyeun Juliette Lee,
Dorothy Wang, and Lucy Ives

Friday, April 27, 2012, 7PM

Join us for a night of ambient poetics with three experimental writers who probe the relationship between art- making and found technologies from parking garage reverberations to the neon glow of TV broadcasts. Treat your ears to Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt, Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Underground National.  Williams College professor Dorothy Wang will moderate and Triple-Canopy Editor, Lucy Ives, will live-tweet the event.

The recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol Foundation Writing Grant, Lin is the author of Seven Controlled Vocabularies, lauded by Warren Liu as “an utterly, compellingly boring film–I’ve already forgotten it in the best way unimaginable.” In Tan Lin’s latest work, Insomnia and the Aunt, a young man’s memories of visiting his Chinese aunt at her motel, recalled almost as if written by their TV set. The aunt’s memory ghosts her nephew’s television screen, their shared past-time.  The aunt “resembles the biography of a dead person where the dead person has somehow forgotten to die. She speaks casually, like the speech of a language without a speaker.”  Lin’s experimental novella is indexed by photographs, postcards, and the indicia to an imaginary novel, mimicking the seamless repetition and reproducibility of images on the television. In Lin’s beautiful and wonderfully odd elegy, technology acts as an emotive transmitter engaging the two relatives in erotic simulacra.

Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot profiles a noise music band’s search for the ultimate ambient sound and is the follow-up to Pamela: A Novel, an experimental poetry classic and one of SPD’s bestselling books of the 90’s.  They sample revving engines, the parking habits of the rich and famous, and commercial parking spaces. Reading Ambient Parking Lot is comparable to “watching an indie webisode spin-off of ‘Behind the Music,’ as Lu tracks the Ambient Parkers’ absolute mediocrity in awkwardly-awesome crescendos and geeky-fantastic loops,” says Jai Arun Ravine of Lantern Review Blog.

The author of That Gorgeous Feeling and Underground National, Sueyeun Juliette Lee could be the only poet to write about U.S. intervention in Korea and the dating patterns of K-pop stars. Sueyeun is a transnational collagist who perverts found documents and replaces fixed histories of square footage, geographic boundaries, and global affairs editorials with erasure. In her second book of poetry, Underground National, Lee remixes celebrity suicides, tourism trends, and web splices to put forth a subterranean account of Korean culture.

This event is co-sponsored by St. Marks Poetry Project

@ Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 West 27th Street, Suite 600
Between 6th and 7th Avenues
Buzzer 600
$5 suggested donation

Kenning Editions happily welcomes Pamela Lu for a rare visit to the Midwest, reading from her novel Ambient Parking Lot (2011).

Saturday, April 21st, 7:00 PM at Woodland Pattern Book Center with Carl Bogner, 720 E. Locust Street, Milwaukee. $8.00, $7.00, and $6.00 admission. See www.woodlandpattern.org for details.

Pamela Lu is the author of the books Ambient Parking Lot (Kenning Editions, 2011) and Pamela: A Novel (Atelos, 1999), as well as the chapbook The Private Listener (Corollary Press, 2006). Her writing also appears in the anthologies Bay Poetics and Biting the Error, and has been published in periodicals such as 1913, Antennae, Call, Chain, Chicago Review, Fascicle, Harper’s, Mirage, Poetics Journal, and Tinfish. She grew up in Southern California, and now lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Carl Bogner worked for nearly a decade as a bookseller and, truth be told, prefers reading to everything. He has worked as a film curator for some time, crafting schedules for, among others, Milwaukee’s only LGBT Film/Video Festival, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Film Department Screenings, UW-M’s Union Theatre, Asian Media Access in Minneapolis, and Woodland Pattern Book Center’s Experimental Film/Video series.

Sunday, April 22nd, 4:00 PM at the Logan Square Comfort Station, 2579 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago. The event is free and the venue is ADA accessible.

Ambient Parking Lot is a 187-page book about one band’s quest to capture the world’s most perfect ambient noise in a parking lot. Wait, don’t go away! It’s great … I swear. It’s dizzying, really, and hilarious.
—Cooper Berkmoyer, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Lu’s book looks at the cerebral struggle of artmaking and of ambient music: as struggle between the problems of the language of the individual and the language of the collective.
—Devin King, Make Magazine

The Ambient Parkers’ yen for recognition seems to be a residual effect of their desire to create something that matters, but what their message or the content of that matter might be is always skirted over or slides into something new. In this way, Lu captures—and mocks as well, perhaps, but lovingly—the existential pretenses of artistic endeavors. In the end, Lu suggests that despite the absurdities and shifting metamorphoses inherent in human effort, the greatest grace and sense of humanity comes from attending, from recognizing that the deathly silence we fear is in fact fully populated and alive once we quiet ourselves. By the novel’s end, ambience takes on new meaning, and doesn’t require our torturously theorized amplifications but graces us when we quietly acknowledge it.
—Sueyeun Juliette Lee, The Constant Critic

What I love about Lu’s work is her sharp wit, subtle delivery and deadpan hilarity, which you have to slow down and listen for in order to fully appreciate. Thus, parked, I listened.
—Jai Arun Ravine, Lantern Reviews

Part fiction, part earnest mockumentary, Ambient Parking Lot follows a band of musicians as they wander the parking structures of urban downtown and greater suburbia in quest of the ultimate ambient noise, one that promises to embody their historical moment and deliver them up to the heights of their self-important artistry. Along the way, they make sporadic forays into lyric while contending with doubts, delusions, miscalculations, mutinies, and minor triumphs. This saga peers into the wreckage of a post 9/11 landscape and embraces the comedy and poignancy of failed utopia.

Ambient Parking Lot is the much anticipated second book by Pamela Lu. Portions of this book were previously published in Chicago Review and Harper’s. She is also the author of Pamela: A Novel and The Private Listener, a chapbook from Corollary Press. Pamela: A Novel is on the decade’s bestsellers list from Small Press Distribution, and has been taught in a number of literature and creative writing classes. Her writing also appears in the anthologies Bay Poetics and Biting the Error, and has been published in periodicals such as 1913, Antennae, Call, Chain, and Fascicle. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

On Pamela Lu’s previous novel—“Pamela: A Novel is one of the finest books to emerge from the ardent, experimental writing scene in the Bay Area . . . Lu builds a social space and founds a society.”—The Stranger / “Reading the word ‘I’ in this novel becomes a mystical experience—an invitation to connect to the ‘I’ in all of us . . . This is a work of ‘precision,’ as Robert Musil would say, ‘in matters of the soul.’ It extends the novel’s capacity to think.”—Rain Taxi Review of Books / “Lu, in her debut, . . . [creates] a precise and humorous elegy to the self, and to its self-subversions . . . This is a book of extraordinary philosophical subtlety and clarity, one that manages to tell a beautiful story in spite of itself.”—Publishers Weekly

Comfort Station is a turn-of-the-century structure turned multidisciplinary arts space in the heart of Chicago’s Logan Square. Originally a resting place for tired travelers, it now plays host to artists from all walks of life, and to anyone with an interesting idea. As the only structure of its kind still standing along the entire boulevard system, Comfort Station represents the preservation of a neighborhood rich in history, while playing host to exhibitions and events that promote its present culture.

In Chicago, shoppers can find Ambient Parking Lot at Saki and Quimby’s.

…more meditation than conventional novel, or something somewhere between a novel and everything that’s not a novel, every story that can’t be finished or remembered or even told at all. 

At HTML Giant.

The Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference comes to Chicago this year and brings with it Kevin Killian.

Killian, co-editor with David Brazil of THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985, will be signing copies of the anthology as well as his numerous other books, at the Small Press Distribution booth. Just come down to the AWP book fair in the basement of the Hilton. It is enough to remind you of the late Etta James’ hit “Down in the Basement.” But then again, the seedy parlor affair vibe only extends so far when it comes to creative writing as a professional organization, no? Kevin’s signing is scheduled for 3:00 PM on Friday, March 2nd.

Killian is presenting that morning at 10:30 AM as part of the panel entitled “Recovery/Discovery: The Art of Bringing Queer Literary Heroes Back into Print”–also on the panel are Christopher Hennessy, Mark Doty, Stephen Motika, and David Trinidad.

At 7:00 PM the previous evening, Kevin will read recently published essays and poetry in dialogue with “Anagram City,” the current exhibition at the Golden Gallery.

Among the poets featured in THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER are Charles Olson, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Russell Atkins, Gregory Corso, Helen Adam, Michael McClure, James Broughton, Kenneth Koch, Jackson Mac Low, Lorenzo Thomas, Anne Waldman, ruth weiss, Ron Padgett, Hannah Weiner, Lew Welch, Sonia Sanchez, Joe Brainard, Bruce Andrews, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Bob Holman and Bob Rosenthal, Steve Benson, Ted Greenwald, Carla Harryman, Ntozake Shange, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Robert Grenier, Alan Bernheimer, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Rodefer, Fiona Templeton, Kenward Elmslie, and Leslie Scalapino. Also included are previously unpublished plays by Jack Spicer, V.R. “Bunny” Lang, James Schuyler, Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason, Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, James Keilty, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Johanna Drucker, and Nada Gordon. The editors provide informative and provocative prefatory matter, including extensive notes on each play, as well as several that fall within the purview of the book but, for one reason or another, were omitted, as with Pedro Pietri’s The Masses Are Asses or Jessica Hagedorn’s Tenement Lover. Rounding out the book are contemporary classics: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and Kathy Acker’s The Birth of the Poet. See this informative review by Mac Wellman for more on the anthology.

On March 1st, Oakland’s Diesel Books presents a reading with Carol Snow, Denise Leto, and Marjorie Stein. Leto is coauthor of Waveform and will be offering a workshop with the book’s other half, Amber DiPietra, at UC Santa Cruz’s Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing conference May 4-5.

Tan Lin, author of Insomnia and the Aunt, as well as the newly issued BIB., REV. ED. and Heath Course Pak,  has been awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant for poetry in 2012. Congratulations on this richly deserved recognition!

I chuckled and tick-marked at record speed, drunk with the spot-on parody and ridiculous brilliance of her lines. What I love about Lu’s work is her sharp wit, subtle delivery and deadpan hilarity, which you have to slow down and listen for in order to fully appreciate. Thus, parked, I listened.

Read the review at Lantern Review Blog.

The venerable Stephen Beachy names Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot as one of his 2011 favorites, here at LAMBDALITERARY.ORG.