Rod Smith's beautiful Deed has arrived--one advance copy at any rate. And with a most excellent cover photo by Tim Davis. Should be available in early September.
This is The Good House & Other Poems. You want this book.
“The great thing about Rod Smith’s work is that it is all risk all the time. In Deed, he has built a substantial architecture whose ‘perilous upkeep’ is dazzling. This is a truly wondrous book.”—Peter Gizzi
“A master poet among us? I’d vote for Rod Smith. With the sweeping vision of Whitman, the noun-play of Gertrude Stein, and the slant political commentary of the New York School, Smith chisels out a place of his own with a tremendous integrity of vision. Deed contains the best of what American poetry has to offer: a place to pause and reflect upon the beauty of language and love flowering up through the mayhem of the world.” —Lisa Jarnot, author, Black Dog Songs
A deed is a governmental conveyance, a power asserted by the written, for, as William Carlos Williams wrote to Robert Creeley: “the government can never be more than the government of the words.” The question of ownership, of the words with which we define ourselves and each other, and of whose and what claims are legitimate is much at issue in Rod Smith’s Deed, a lyric, ambitious, rebellious work thoroughly grounded in the New American tradition of poets such as John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson.
At the entrance to this collection stands an abode in the form of a long poem, “The Good House,” a comfortable, at times soothingly humorous place that is also a site of conflict. In “The Spider Poems,” the mythic spider, the maker of the alphabet, is a figure of fun and revelation. The third section of the book presents a series of shorter poems chosen for their stylistic variety. Deed ends with a nod to two masters, as Smith turns Jack Spicer’s “Homage to Creeley” into a double homage with “Homage to Homage to Creeley.” The gesture of choosing what one brings into one’s house, what one decides to love, closes the book.
Deed is about making as bequeathing, as celebration, and as impatience for the true democracy that is always yet to arrive. There is still joy inside and out, and by giving us Deed Rod Smith has captured that joy. In so doing he tells us where we as a people, a politik, and a poetic are going.
rock heals recently posted poems from the daily projects of jamie, adam, ryan, and me (week 117).
ryan walker wrote a really nice review of my new chapbook for rock heals earlier this summer.
RUTHLESS GRIP POETRY SERIES
@ Pyramid Atlantic Art Center
Saturday, April 14, 2007, 8:00PM
C.S. GISCOMBE, SUSAN TICHY, and KEN RUMBLE
7:30-8:00PM Champagne Reception! Please come!
Please join the Ruthless Grip Poetry Series for a reading by C.S. Giscombe, Susan Tichy, and Ken Rumble on Saturday, April 14, at 8:00PM.
C.S. Giscombe's recent poetry books are Giscome Road and Inland. He currently teaches at Penn State and will be teaching at U. C. Berkeley starting in fall 2007. His EPC author page is located at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/ giscombe/.
Susan Tichy's books are Bone Pagoda (Ahsahta Press, 2007), A Smell of Burning Starts the Day (Wesleyan University Press, 1988), and The Hands in Exile (Random House, 1983), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series. Her poems, collaborations, and mixed-genre works have been published in the U.S. and Britain, most recently in such journals as 42opus, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, Court Green, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Fascicle, Free Verse, and Indiana Review. She lives in Colorado and in Virginia, where she teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at George Mason University. She also serves as poetry editor for Practice: New Writing + Art, and has just launched The Mag/pie, a blog about poetic collaboration and collage.
Ken Rumble is the author of Key Bridge (Carolina Wren Press, 2007) and a contributing editor for Fascicle. His poems have been published in Talisman, Parakeet, Cranky, Cutbank, Typo, Octopus, and others. He lives in Greensboro, NC, and works for the Green Hill Center for NC Art. [Ron Silliman just gave Ken's new book a big review on his blog.]
We hope you can join us for the reading and the festivities afterwards.
Pyramid Atlantic Art Center is located at 8230 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, MD, three blocks from the Metro red line. For directions: http://www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org/about/contact.htm
Rod Smith tagged me with this meme...
More Mike commands at Tong Bliss and Unreliable Zygote.
“Hey Mike! Grab a cowboy and get the cattle burger on your banana boat! Giddy up!”
“Hey Mike, I need you to rub this all over a character from the cantina scene in Star Wars.
"Hey Mike, I need you to break out your Bach & Rock and stick it in a dry dock."
“Hey Mike, I need you step into the walk-in and beat off to these K-Mart panties.”
"Hey Mike, I need you to take this twine and truss up the bobcat that just landed in my mise en place."
“Hey Mike, I need you to write a persuasive essay about how much my dad and I love your show. Also do you want to go to a party with me on Sunday?”
I tag Maureen, Cathy, Stan, Brian + all of [blank] device, Katie, and Gary.
Inappropriate, odd, disturbing and hilarious, Flarf Poetry is an avant garde poetry movement of the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. The program will feature several prominent Flarf practitioners, including Nada Gordon, Mike Magee, Mel Nichols, Rod Smith, Sharon Mesmer, Gary Sullivan, and a film by Brandon Downing.
RUTHLESS GRIP POETRY SERIES
If a pet upsets a romance, move photos of the animal out of the boudoir. Keep two fresh flowers in the far right corner.
Got tagged by Rodney Koeneke to state five little-known facts:
"...the pychosis of influence..."
Brian Howe with Audrey after the reading @ Angles in Adams Morgan.
my letterpress experiment at the book arts fair at pyramid atlantic art center (november 17, 18, 19). there are wonderful people affiliated with pyramid atlantic who salvage old wooden and metal type (like you see in the first photo above) before it is destroyed or melted down.
