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Books. Five dollars. This weekend. Juana I, The Compleat Purge, Ambient Parking Lot, Propagation, Left Having, Some Math, and Hannah Weiner’s Open House. Just because it’s summer.

Small Press Distribution celebrates Earth Month with an April-long sale on books that are all about such matters, including Francis Ponge’s Partisan of Things. Visit their Whales Bash Back sale here.

Andrew Durbin’s debut novel MacArthur Park is being touted over at Pitchfork, replete with an excellent interview with Andrew by Kevin Lozano. This debut actually debuted as a chapbook in the Ordinance series, and you can read it in PDF form here. “Ordinance” as in coordination, ordinal points, and incendiary potential. Each chapbook in the series was handmade, perfect bound, and portable. And though Andrew’s Ordinance book is out of print, other titles are still available (while supplies last!) by Daniel Borzutzky, Julietta Cheung, Cassandra Troyan, Daniel Spangler, Margit Sade, Steven Zultanski, Janelle Rebel, Carla Harryman and Brandon Brown. Do you want to read MacArthur Park in its entirety? Of course you do! Nightboat Books is your host.

As the final entry in his series of Jacket2 commentaries about “how poems change,” Piotr Gwiazda discusses how Carla Harryman’s Artifact of Hope “turns philosophy into poetry.” Here is the insightful article and here is your chance to complete your collection of Ordinance series chapbooks with one of the last remaining copies.

Artifact of Hope is the final installment of the Ordinance series of non-fiction writing in the areas of contemporary poetics, philosophy, politics, and technology. “Ordinance” as in coordination, ordinal points, and incendiary potential. Each chapbook in the series is handmade, perfect bound, and portable. Other titles are by Daniel Borzutzky, Julietta Cheung, Cassandra Troyan, Daniel Spangler, Margit Sade, Steven Zultanski, Janelle Rebel, Andrew Durbin and Brandon Brown.

Announcing the last iteration of the third annual Festival of Poets Theater, a radio play by Alain Jugnon:

Artaud in Amerika, a radio play by Alain Jugnon, translated by Nathanaël, directed by Patrick Durgin, produced by Mark Booth, and voiced by Booth, Durgin, Caroline McCraw, Joel Craig, Devin King, Jeremy Biles and Fulla Abdul-Jabbar. Commissioned by and produced for the third annual Festival of Poets Theater.

this is

a quick caption for Artaud in Amerika

because Artaud lives in it

I know that Trump did not know that my poet Artaud had hosted your Welles in France in 1948 out of love for Rita

but Artaud lives in it

the piece is called Artaud in Amerika

where you are not

there are Artaud and Welles who redraw the world in red

life in beauty

dreams in american

without Trumperie

with poetry

the cinema

and writing

Artaud in Amerika is Artaud who tweets to Trump:

leave the stage, we are the theater

Kenning Editions is pleased to announce the publication of the debut full-length publication by the celebrated Argentinian poet Ana Arzoumanian, fully bilingual, translated by Gabriel Amor and edited by Daniel Borzutzky: Juana I.

This book opens with a blank page containing a line that is repeated like a mantra throughout the text: “What I need is a mouth.” As if the mouth, absent from the body, had lost its capacity to speak. Yet the text emits many voices, imagining the circumstances that surrounded the figure of Juana the Mad, the legitimate Queen of Spain in the first half of the XVI century, who was declared insane then silenced and confined to a convent.

Ana Arzoumanian subsumes us in a dense and powerful atmosphere in which the liberated mouth unveils with an abject heroism that could be called feminine, the tensions that historical circumstances impose over bodies.

Gabriel Amor’s translation, developed over the course of a decade, registers the rhythms and tones of this beautifully carved tragedy with unmatched skill.

Lila Zemborain

Juana was born in Toledo in 1479. She was the titular Queen of Castile from 1504 (when her mother, Isabella the Catholic, died) until her own death in 1555. Judged insane by history, and placed under house arrest in Tordesillas for over forty years, Juana was the object of political machinations designed to deprive her of power. Her mental health became the focus of a struggle between her father, Ferdinand the Catholic, and her husband, Philip the Fair, over the right to rule her kingdom. With the sudden death of her young husband, a new crisis unfolded in Juana’s life . . . one that was marked by an eight-month funereal procession through Castile (during which she refused to bury his corpse). This is the jumping off point for Ana Arzoumanian’s piece, a poetic lens through which we witness a marked development in Juana’s language. The first-person narration becomes lost amid whispers; it is an “I” that, even as it is deprived of its content, continues to insist on its need to speak. Although judged and condemned by her peers, the question of Juana in Arzoumanian’s poem consists of a series of moments where history and the world interweave, and a new language is born along the way. The ideological leaders of Juana’s time were reacting to the monarchy’s expansionistic politics: the discovery of America, the first circumnavigation of the world, the decrees expelling the Jews in 1492 and the Moors in 1501. Juana I is a love poem that deals with a beloved’s body as an object on the margins of the legal body; it is a tapestry-poem that exposes the reader to the bare emotions of a story about domination and cruelty. The poem works at the deepest levels of language, articulating the speech of Castile and its legal echoes as taken from The Seven-Part Code of Laws, a juridical code that unified the Kingdom with South America via the Castilian language.

Juana’s narrative blurs fact and imagination, as she conflates past with present, brother with father and husband, and marriage bed with childhood bathtub and royal coffin. This leaves us to wonder, was Juana truly la loca, or was her mental state the consequence of incredible personal loss, abuse and trauma? Or, were the accusations of madness merely a ploy to suppress her voice? In her own time, the courts judged against Juana and sentenced her to confinement for over forty years. Five centuries later, Arzoumanian’s powerful verse and provocative imagery is another sort of justice, one that gives a mouth to the silenced.

Ana Arzoumanian is a prolific and celebrated poet, but is or has also been known as: a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; a professor at the International Postgraduate Program in Creative Writing, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences; a Lacanian psychoanalyst; and a professor of Philosophy of Law at the Universidad del Salvador, Faculty of Legal Sciences of Buenos Aires. And as an active member of the first course of arbitration in Argentina, dictated by the National Direction of Training and Communication of the Ministry of Justice of the Nation in 1992, she was selected advisor in the Ministry of Justice of the Nation. Arzoumainian remains an active literary and theatre critic, and has traveled extensively to read her own poetry, as well as to collaborate on the documentary A Dialogue Without Borders on the Armenian genocide and the disappeared under the Argentine military dictatorship. Inspired by the tale of Juana the Mad, Queen of Spain, Juana I was adapted for the stage by Román Caracciolo, as La que necesita una boca. This book is the first full-length English language translation of her work to be published in North America.

Born in Galicia, Spain, Gabriel Amor has lived in New York since the age of five.  He has published translations of poetry and prose by numerous Latin American writers, and received a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant for his work on Juana I.  Gabriel has collaborated with other artists on multimedia performances and was a producer on the Emmy-nominated documentary The Woman Who Wasn’t There.  He is currently Program Director of Postbaccalaureate Studies at Columbia University.

Distributed by Small Press Distribution and also available via subscription.
Poetry  /  Bilingual  /  ISBN: 9780999719800  /  $14.95  /

Subscribe to Kenning Editions and receive all books in our 2018-2019 season, including Ana Arzoumanian’s Juana I, Soleida Ríos’ The Dirty Text, Selected poems by Miyó Vestrini, and Kevin Killian’s Stage Fright: Selected Plays.

Here is the link. It’s easy and it eases the way for important new and archival publications like these. Onward to a radically different, new year!

The third annual Festival of Poets Theater’s online offerings are live at https://festivalofpoetstheater.com/2017/12/10/poets-theater-online/ for one week. Stay tuned for the debut of Alain Jugnon’s ARTAUD IN AMERIKA this xmas eve, also at festivalofpoetstheater.com Artist bios are here.

• Unscripted, unrehearsed, and unedited, NOW is a three-part improvisational work created for the Third Annual Festival of Poets Theater by Suzanne Stein and Steve Benson. Bridging, exploding, and reinforcing the dialectical tension and chaos underlying the dichotomy of practice and performance, NOW attempts to examine, understand, and simultaneously realize its own nature during the course of this half-hour-long documentation-as-product.

• Douglas Kearney presents Sucktion. An abject housewife undergoes a cyber-erotic transformation through the subversive use of a vacuum cleaner. That’s Sucktion, a hyperopera composed by Anne LeBaron with a libretto by Douglas Kearney (published in Someone Took They Tongues. [Subito, 2016]). This performance, directed by Nataki Garrett, features the trio, SoNu (Nina Eidsheim, vocalist; Phil Curtis, laptop/sound design; Gustavo Aguilar, percussion), and was recorded at REDCAT in Los Angeles (2008).

• Annie Dorsen presents Youtube 1-4, a set of music videos made from pop songs and youtube comments.

• Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947), a radio play embodying the “theater of cruelty.”

• [Online December 24th, 2017] Patrick Durgin directs Alain Jugnon’s radio play Artaud in Amerika, translated from the French by Nathanaël and derived on commission of the festival from the book. Recorded, edited and scored by Mark Booth, voices are by Booth, Durgin, Jeremy Biles, Caroline McCraw, Joel Craig, Devin King, and Fulla Abdul-Jabbar.

this is

a quick caption for Artaud in Amerika

because Artaud lives in it

I know that Trump did not know that my poet Artaud had hosted your Welles in France in 1948 out of love for Rita

but Artaud lives in it

the piece is called Artaud in Amerika

where you are not

there are Artaud and Welles who redraw the world in red

life in beauty

dreams in american

without Trumperie

with poetry

the cinema

and writing

Artaud in Amerika is Artaud who tweets to Trump:

leave the stage, we are the theater

Sector 2337

In Association with Green Lantern Press and Kenning Editions Present:

The Third Annual Festival of Poets Theater

Curated by Devin King and Patrick Durgin

December 8th – December 10th, 2017

This year the festival is separated into two main sections: 1) artists in response to the visionary work of the Ivory Coast writer Werewere Liking and 2) artists using online media formats. This event is free and open to the public.

“How does Poets Theater integrate the usually solitary research practice of the poet into the ecstatically open site of the theater? How does performance ‘do’ poetry, and how does it replicate poetry’s gestural openness? And what are the outer reaches of these theatrical gestures; how does Poets Theater fold into dance, painting, sculpture, music, and even back into poetry?”

Friday, December 8th, Sector 2337, 7-10pm

Performances by

Sherae Rimpsey and Josh Hoglund + Corina Copp

Exhibit by

Matthew Sage and Jen Hill

Saturday, December 9th, 7-10pm

Performances by

Max Guy and Dao Nguyen

Exhibit by

Matthew Sage and Jen Hill

Sunday, December 10th, All Day, beginning at Noon

Streaming Media and Performances by

Steve Benson + Suzanne Stein, Douglas Kearney, Annie Dorsen, Antonin Artaud and

radio play directed by Patrick Durgin and produced by Mark Booth by Alain Jugnon

(translated by Nathanaël)

About the curators

Patrick Durgin is the author of PQRS (Kenning Editions, 2013) and The Route (with Jen Hofer, Atelos, 2008). His artist book Zenith was published by Green Lantern Press in the spring of 2016.The Volta published “Prelude to PQRS,” a reflection on his work in poets theater originally presented at the New [New] Corpse event series. His performance piece Interference was featured in the 2015 Festival of Poets Theater. He is currently writing two books: a critical biography of Jackson Mac Low and Hannah Weiner and a collection of poetry. He edits the non-fiction series Ordinance for Kenning Editions, an independent press he founded in 1998. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Devin King is the co-director of Sector 2337 and the poetry editor for the Green Lantern Press. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About Sector 2337

Sector 2337 is a storefront gallery and bookstore at 2337 N Milwaukee Avenue. Functioning as Head Quarters for The Green Lantern Press, Sector 2337 hosts three exhibitions a year, maintains a vibrant schedule of public programs, as well as a niche on-line bookstore and an in-store bookshelf specializing in contemporary art, poetry, theory, and independent press titles. By marrying these threads — contemporary exhibitions, readings, performances, poetry, and printed matter — Sector 2337 continues the spirit of The Green Lantern Press, making community, culture, and discourse easily accessible to Chicago.

Further details at the festival website. Meanwhile, see The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater.

Kenning Editions is proud to announce the release of Carla Harryman’s Artifact of Hope, the last in the Ordinance series.

Ordinance was a series of perfectbound and freely available PDF chapbooks in the areas of contemporary poetics, philosophy, politics, and technology. Extending from mid 2015 through the end of 2017, the series is complete now with ten books in all. Previous installments are by Daniel Borzutzky, Julietta Cheung, Daniel Spangler, Andrew Durbin, Cassandra Troyan, Margit Sade, Steven Zultanski, Janelle Rebel, and Brandon Brown. Allow us to recommend picking up where Ordinance left off, with Green Lantern Press’ On Civil Disobedience series, featuring titles by Ravi Agarwal, Robin Blaser, Romi Crawford, Ilona Gaynor, Stephen Lapthisophon, Nathaniel Mackey, Moshe Marvit, Abhishek Narula, Nina Power, Jennifer Tamayo, and others.

“…if dude-cum is a mirror of dudeliness and the excretive form of patriarchy, then universalized cum, human cum, would offer a different materialism, redefining the paranoia that underwrites masculinist skepticism as paranoia proper, thereby leaving supremacist arguments from physical difference moot. Patriarchy’s metaphysics of presence would lack a master signifier, and who can imagine what kind of world we’d have instead?”

Allison Cardon at Full-Stop. Cassandra Troyan’s A Theory in Tears is available here.

Genève Chao’s review of Dolores Dorantes’ Style is up at Medium.

The patterns of song in her cuáls and cons and ques provides certain pleasure, and Hofer’s English finds its own chant of which and with, exposing the weft of this network of girls, this army of girls calling out their erstwhile leaders, emerging from under the muddy boots of presidents to force men to meet their gaze.