Jack Christian talks to Ben Kopel about Victory, an energetic, noisy book of poetry which turns it up to 11.

Ben Kopel’s Victory comes to readers as a collection of poems rooted deep in the artistic life-force. Their energy is their singularity. It is what causes their swerve. Likely many poets who have grown up with rock-n-roll can relate to the desire to make a poem that works like a guitar-anthem, or really that works not like the words the singers sings, but the noises he howls. That Kopel sets out to do this might not be particularly remarkable—he’s not the first to want to—but the way that he succeeds, over and over again, in various measures and phrasings, through seven sections of poems in this debut album, is what I’ve come to see as the victory implicit in Victory.

When I listen to a rock-god sing his or her guts out, then, later when I see the lyrics printed somewhere, I’m susceptible to a disappointment where the power of the voice seems not to be matched by the words sung. Kopel has written the words that I always wished were in the songs. These poems do a magical thing; they don’t fool around with aspiring.

Jack Christian How did the poems in Victory come together? What did you tell yourself were the parameters of the project? What did you think about as you tried to organize them?

Ben Kopel Victory was written over a five-year period, but it wasn’t until about two years into it that I even realized it was becoming something resembling a book. Some people have very specific ideas and instincts in place when they sit down to write. There is a whole to be achieved, and they sit and they write their way towards it. Others just write sixty to eighty pages of material, and ZAP! it’s a book. I’m personally situating myself somewhere in the middle.

Read full article =>

Ashley McNelis on Héctor Abad’s memoir, Oblivion.

Renowned Colombian journalist Héctor Abad’s Oblivion, a memoir on his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, is an honest and thorough reflection on a man’s life from his son’s perspective that also considers the private sphere of the family and the political turbulence in Colombia in the 1980s. His father, a public figure who, in addition to being a progressive university professor and a human rights and union organizer, opened the Colombian Department of Preventative Medicine and the National School of Public Health and served as an ambassador to Mexico.

Although the unresolved tragedy to come is hinted at, the memoir is more a celebration of his father’s life and progressive work than the reactionary political turbulence that brought it to an end; in 1987, Gómez was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries in broad daylight. For decades beforehand, tensions between the conservative and liberal parties flared violently despite many governmental actions such as the creation of the National Front where power between the two parties was passed back and forth. In the 1970s and ’80s, right-wing paramilitary groups’ cartels—including the cartel that reigned over the city of Medellín, the city in which the Abad family lived—reigned and terrorized the nation.

The clarity with which Abad writes is one that can only come with time and perspective after such a tragedy and years of journalistic and novel-writing experience. Abad, the only boy in the family, had an especially close relationship with his father. His mother and several sisters were more religious and traditional, while Gómez based his thought on the rationality and knowledge taken from books. In a way, they were best friends; Abad even relates that he found separating himself from his father difficult and painful in the early years of his adult independence.

Read full article =>

Legacy Russell interviews performance artist Ann Hirsch about being scandalous, scandylicious, and the radical politics of the packaged female form in the sex-saturated era of reality television and social media.

Read full article =>

What to do when all seems lost.

MONDAY

Apparently this week is Internet week. Click here for the full schedule of events. Learn how to achieve your every dream without ever leaving the glow of your computer. Really though, click that link and LOOK AT THOSE ARMS! That is the future, people. That is the light.

TUESDAY

For the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, horrendously ignorant young people: Ernie Kovacs is (was, but eternally) awesome. There’s a retrospective of funny things he did on TV at The Museum of the Moving Image. There’s also somebody named Edie Adams featured so she’s probably great too, but BOMB’s events secretary cannot vouch for her.

WEDNESDAY

The Three Points Make a Triangle exhibit at the Queens Museum ends may 20th! It is therefore urgent that you go there and see the gnarly art on display.

Read full article =>

Julia Guez on the motion and modulation in Carl Phillips’s book of poetry, Double Shadow.

“Nothing to say about the texte de jouissance,” according to Roland Barthes. “You can’t talk about it, you can only talk ‘within’ it, on its own terms.” This, I think, is a useful way to approach Carl Phillips’s newest collection, Double Shadow.

Phillips’s verse is difficult to excerpt, though. (It is almost impossible to excerpt sparingly). There are plenty of gems, of course, plenty of individual lines whose phrasing seems absolutely non-fungible.

That said, the real force of the poetry is not most apparent on the level of the line (no matter how beguiling the line may be). The real traction is in the movement within and between stanzas that create enough room to enact the “back-and-forthing” of the mind.

Unlike a more static texte de plaisir, Katherine Kurk succinctly defines the texte de jouissance as “a dynamic construction which emphasizes a verbal action and which delights in the bliss of the textual reader/writer exchange.”

Read full article =>

Elizabeth Clark Wessel chats with Forrest Gander and Kyoko Yoshida, the translators of Kiawo Nomura’s book of poetry Spectacle & Pigsty.

This spring Omnidawn is publishing Spectacle & Pigsty, a full-length collection of poetry by Kiwao Nomura, one Japan’s most prominent contemporary poets. The wild, associative poems of Kiwao Nomura upend any narrow expectations we might have of Japanese poetry. They wallow in the grotesque mysteries of the self (what Nomura calls the “pigsty I”), and are deeply informed by both continental philosophy and Japanese literary history (“circling the vacancy called vacancy,/or as if/vacancy while staying vacancy transcends vacancy”). They also have a driving, performative energy that has helped them to transcend language barriers when Nomura performs abroad.

Nomura has been lucky in his translators. Forrest Gander and Kyoko Yoshida have brought his poems into English with intense musicality and deft shifts in tone and register. Recently, I corresponded with the two of them to find out more about this fascinating collection by a poet who obviously deserves to be better known.

Elizabeth Clark Wessel How did you first discover Kiwao Nomura’s work? What drew the two of you to this project? Did you know from the beginning that your collaboration would result in a full-length book?

Forrest Gander While Kyoko was a visiting scholar at Brown University, we had many conversations about contemporary literature. I told her of my interest in the poetry/post-poetry of Gozo Yoshimasu, whom I had been able to bring to Brown University to perform two years earlier. Kyoko thought that if I was a fan of Gozo’s work, I would probably like Kiwao Nomura, a poet whose work I had never encountered. So it was Kyoko’s knowledge and generous resourcefulness that turned me onto Kiwao’s work, which of course she had to begin to translate in order to show me. A year into our co-translating, she passed along to me some translations of Kiwao Nomura that Michael Palmer had made, with an unacknowledged co-translator I presume, in a small chapbook.

Read full article =>

Eat your vegetables, people!

FRIDAY

The work of Anne Collier is at the Anton Kern Gallery, but only through Saturday, so hurry on over there.

Same goes with the Nigel Cooke exhibit at the Andrea Rosen Gallery. Go see art! Make great haste!

SATURDAY

Rashaun Mitchell’s work is at Danspace. See that.

The Budos Band play those horns so hard and so funkily. They’re playing at The Bell House this Saturday. It will be, by every indication, a joy.

SUNDAY

Go see Patience (After Sebald) at the Film Forum. Everyone that this Events Secretary knows has read his stuff; this Events Secretary even slept next to The Rings of Saturn for three months (without reading it, however) (#osmotic learning). You probably gotta know about W.G. Sebald so at least see the movie.

Read full article =>

Rachael Rakes on Jacqueline Goss’s video art and new film The Observers.

Wind is the worst kind of weather, a quotidian reminder of the environment’s dominance: when the sun is hot, we beg for wind; in winter, we struggle against columns of air. Turning over sandcastles and upending the picnic, it’s a barrier to our attempts at some sense of connection with nature.

For the past dozen years, Jacqueline Goss has made video inquiries into social problems and the measures taken to alleviate them. Her short works often focus on the personal repercussions of broadly applied social fixes. Goss’s new, near-feature length film, The Observers, ruminates on rough weather and the treacherous isolation of tracking it. The film is a document of a weather station at the summit of Mount Washington, NH, (whose website boasts that it has the World’s Worst Weather). It’s a place of record-breaking winds (hundreds of miles per hour) and sub-zero temperatures, where staff take hourly readings of the temperature, wind speed, and barometric pressure. The scientists, the air, and the landscape are the subjects of the fictionalized study.

Read full article =>

I first encountered poems from Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire in an issue of the electronic journal Triple Canopy, where the poems stood alongside the video art of Adam Shecter as “Forecasts.” The videos were spun and crackled under heavy filters. The poems fast-forwarded me into a future which might have been similarly disorienting, but was so deftly rendered that the confusions felt familiar, the technologies not a distraction from but a sounding board for the familiar, resonant noise of human relationships. Exploring the rest of the book led me into two other landscapes, both just as well-drawn and as mysterious. Over the western frontier of the United States, an industrial city in China, and an imagined future state of California, Cathy makes narratives flash and craze like heat lightning. This spring, she was kind enough to answer a few questions.

Elsbeth Pancrazi Engine Empire has a few different settings—the American West, present-day industrial China, the future in California—all of them frontiers. How did you begin to think in terms of frontiers? I’m curious about whether you deliberately set out in this direction, or realized at some point that it was a preoccupation.

Cathy Park Hong I’ve always been preoccupied with the frontier. It’s such an American trope first of all. And I like to think of the frontier as being on the borders of language, body, and land. Lyn Hejinian wrote, “the border is not an edge but rather their very middle—their between; it names the condition of doubt and encounter—a condition which is simultaneously an impasse and a passage, limbo and transit zone.” My poetic consciousness rests in that transit zone.

Read full article =>

Nature Loves You, Or Does It?

BOMB Bits is BOMB’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

Hawaiian Tropic (The Honeymooners), Nigel Cooke. 2011 Oil on linen, backed with sailcloth 90.55×125.98 inches. Image Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

In Nigel Cooke’s fourth solo exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery, a vanishing distinction between foreground and background involves a tempestuous and heartbreaking swirl of subconscious material. Cooke’s brushstrokes (of oil on linen backed by sailcloth) dominate the canvases with wide and darkened sweeps, as though a wind-shield wiper is eliminating a thick substance, making the pathway to clarity only more murky and dangerous. The sentiment of the imagery portrays some sweet aspects, such as flowers and semi-innocent silhouettes, but the dominant feeling is fury. This floating, non-situated activity produces smoke, storm winds and lush green foliage that is both seductive and choking. Cooke’s motifs include mysteriously closed books titled UR, CRAP and UUURRGGH in the paintings Wordless, Hawaiian Tropic (The Honeymooners) and Nature Loves You—summoning thoughts of a nightmarish vacation. Throughout the works, we see an odd repetition of clown noses (variously attached and detached), dramatic skulls or teeth of skulls, men and women in swimsuits, petaled faces, and eyeballs that seem to momentarily hover within gusts of sinister winds. Threadlike tendrils with long invasive reaches could be vines, lightening, or fissures of cracked glass (perhaps all at once). The powerful obscurity within Nigel’s body of work may serve as a metaphor for thought and memory becoming aggressively swept into a smoldering mist of absence, leaving only shards of exotic matter shrouded by mystery.

—Kari Adelaide

The Andrea Rosen Gallery is exhibiting Nigel Cooke’s work through May 12th.

Read full article =>