effing blog

HANDS by Tom Raworth

help Tom Clark

from Dale Smith:

Tom Clark needs your help. He is stranded with no salary and no medical insurance to cover costs due to a recent stroke. He also needs funds for medications to aid in the recovery of his wife, Angelica Clark, from surgery on her hip.

After 25 years on the faculty of the New College of California’s Poetics Program, payment on his salary and his insurance was abruptly stopped when the school came under scrutiny of federal and state auditors last fall.

Tom Clark has been an important voice in postwar American poetry since the 1960s. For a decade he was the poetry editor for The Paris Review. His many books appeared with Black Sparrow for nearly thirty years, and his biographies of Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, and Edward Dorn have provided essential perspectives on the lives of these New American authors. He is a passionate and devoted teacher who deserves far greater recognition for his services to American poetry communities.

He needs your help now.

There will be a Tom Clark benefit reading in Austin, Texas, on Saturday, April 26, at 7 pm. A painting by Austin painter Philip Trussell will be auctioned, and broadsides and chapbooks by Clark will be available for purchase. Sliding scale donations are required at the door. Beer and wine will be available. All proceeds will be directed to Clark.

I am collecting donations as well from those of you outside of Austin who are willing to contribute. Please send what you can immediately to:

Tom Clark
c/o Dale Smith
2925 Higgins Street
Austin, Texas 78722

or

______________________________________

Background to the Situation

When the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) put the New College of California on probation in July 2007, I wondered what would happen to that 37-year-old institution. By November, the federal Department of Education refused to release $3 million in financial aid. That month, the school stopped paying faculty salaries. Since then, the school has lost its accreditation and it has closed doors indefinitely, stranding many former instructors with no income and a loss of health benefits. A February 28 article in the San Francisco Chronicle provides more details.

With Hoa Nguyen, Renee Gladman, Leslie Davis, Jeff Conant, Michael Price, and others, I attended the college in the mid 1990s, studying in the Poetics Program with David Meltzer, Lyn Hejinian, Gloria Frym, Adam Cornford, and Tom Clark. It’s a drag to think of that program’s disintegration, particularly since luminaries such as Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, and Diane di Prima had taught there over the years too.

I remember hearing Clark Coolidge, Lorenzo Thomas, Alice Notley, Barbara Guest, and others read there over the years, and I recall the cultural, material, and historic grounding of study in poetics at that time.

The attraction to the program centered on the fact that faculty in the Poetics Program were all poets, and yet instead of teaching in the traditional workshop format, instructors taught courses in poetics and in the material production of poetry.

My first semester included classes in Shelley, Backgrounds to Romantic Culture, and Lyn Hejinian’s class in poetic theory called, “The Language of Paradise.” Other semesters focused on Early Modern, Modernist, and American Renaissance periods, providing students with a thorough grounding in the theoretical, historical, and material backgrounds to the periods studied.

One semester I took Hejinian’s class on Stein, Clark’s on Olson, and Meltzer’s class on backgrounds to modernism, in which we read about John Reed, the IWW, and other revolutionary social movements that joined art and politics to influence change. I also was fortunate enough to study the art of letterpress printing with Jeff Conant.

Students were engaged with the creative possibility provided through poetry, and we worked to discover ways to increase our awareness of the art through study, conversation, and learning the skills necessary to publish magazines and chapbooks on our own. We learned how to extend conversations in poetry to existing audiences. And we learned how to listen to the ongoing dialogues that compose much of the contemporary verse we discovered in California and beyond at that time.

My years at New College grounded me in a serious education from which I could move forward on my own once the formal course work had been completed. I wrote a thesis on Philip Whalen, took my degree, and moved to Austin, where, with Hoa Nguyen, we began to produce magazines, books, essays, poetry, and host readings. New College’s emphasis on the material production of the poem as a social tool of engagement stuck with me. And as testament to the concreteness of this plan of study provided by New College, I was later accepted to a PhD program at the University of Texas based on this prior period of study and the resulting years of production.

By academic standards, the school was funky. But in terms of what was provided intellectually and creatively, it was essential and instructive.

Help those who have seen their livelihood damaged by the mismanagement of New College administration.

Send what you can today.

Please help Tom Clark.

BRAND SPANKING NEW: BE SOMEBODY by LESTER

BE SOMEBODY by Lester7.5x9, saddle-stitched with forced spine64 pages, offset and letterpress printed covers$10 order here________________________

[T]he approach of ventriloquism goes one giant step further in the form of Lester, sock puppet extraordinaire & alleged author of the booklength manuscript, Be Somebody. Lester, obviously, is in the tradition of other wisecracking dummies from Charlie McCarthy to Triumph the Insult Dog, but also Armand Schwerner, Art Language & just possibly the aforementioned Mr. Bernstein & David Antin, &, dare I say, Spicer too falls on this side of the line, certainly in Language & Book of Magazine Verse. [...] Be Somebody [...] pokes a very hard finger into the chest of Western literary assumptions. [...] Like somebody who understands that what makes Moby Dick great is all that stuff about whales, Be Somebody is difficult in the way the very best books are . it challenges our desire for the familiar (and nothing is more familiar than my pronoun, not even my name) & holds on like a pit bull with lockjaw for the entire trip, in this instance 58 pages. [...] Someday, someone is going to publish this book & then we will all have to deal with Lester's intimate striptease of the self. Until then, it will remain, like the full-length version of Mark Peters' Men, one of the great rumors of contemporary poetry [...] you have to read the book.

        - Ron Silliman


A few years ago, the unschooled shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro flew into our millenium with a rocket pack on his back, calling himself Lester. He spoke in the most simple and transparent syllogisms, though only a few (their hands cupped to ears) were present to hear. He landed, he spoke, he fired his rockets, shot up, landed over there, spoke, fired his rockets, etc. Then he went away... Thankfully, and somewhat miraculously, his parables have been transcribed by the faithful handful and are gathered here in one place for the first time.

May I suggest that all the hip Flarf poets get down on their knees and urgently pray.

        - Kent Johnson


Lester is a smart-mouth puppet who wants to ruin the sacred truths to fable and old song. Actually, he wants to ruin the fable and old song, too. Are we an important poet? Lester seems to want us to think we have no opinions on the matter, even the ones he has laid out for us. It's no good hating Lester; this is what we get for asking goat questions and giving sheep answers. Be Somebody raises a serendipitous lake cup atop the strata of radiant steam whose luminous degeneracy we have ascertained, and then lets it fall away like a silken robe. This isn't fair. If you see this book on the road, kill it. Unless it's already too late, and you're reading this, which means it has somehow found you first, and you have not read this after all, though you are rightfully convinced you have. Lester is not Patrick Herron. This is not a blurb.

        - K. Silem Mohammad

Effing website is up

clickbuytell others

rogue blargue

Been working the hands around new effing projects, like Patrick Herron's Lester book Be Somebody. Lester is a sock puppet. The edition is printed and stacked and now we're binding the hell out of it. Release is immanent. Also we're proofing out the new effing magazine with editor Chris Vitiello and carving up blocks to use on its cover printing. It's a very

North Carolina

effing month.

Be Somebody copies under the cinder blocks.

We're taking some letterpress jobs too and have been banging out sweet two color prints for the U of Texas Writing Center and also for individuals to be wedded and for babies that have been borned. And coasters. Here's some scans of some of the UT Writing Center flyers printed - though the scans don't do the printing much justice:

prints are 7x10 on Crane's Lettra pearl stock, printed on the C&P 8x12. Designed by Suloni Roberts.

We've acquired a small AB Dick offset press and are tearing it down for cleaning and repair and hope to have it operational in the coming weeks. We'll use it for flooding paper stock with color and for underprinting on effing book covers and title pages and endpapers and who knows what else. We just need a little platemaker and we're good to go with the who knows what else.

We'll be in the studio all weekend making the paper fly.  If you are in

Austin

this Sunday this looks pretty interesting:

And if you're in San Francisco TONIGHT there is this with Austin's Hoa Nguyen and others:

Friday, April 4
Three Vietnamese Poets: Nguyen Do, Hoa Nguyen, and Truong Tran
In celebration of the recently published anthology Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions), three Vietnamese-American contributors will read their poetry. Nguyen Do who edited and translated Black Dog, Black Night with Paul Hoover, Hoa Nguyen, and Trong Tran. This groundbreaking anthology presents the true picture of a poetry that had been suppressed in

Vietnam

due to Soviet-influenced censorship. A discussion period will follow the reading.

and also this weekend in San Francisco, check out my bud's work at this wacky show:

Interactive, crank, prank, word house cosy house treehouse with a white picket fence… Sustained Simulacrum Quip is a collaborative installation piece that invites the audience to play with the monsters in their own backyard. Enter an environment where perhaps you are in control, perhaps not. Where you are not necessarily cogniscent of how your actions may play out and can only experiment…

Kent Johnson reads from Spanish translations: the poetry of Jaime Saenz

Tuesday, March 18, 8 pm

UT Campus

Joynes Reading Room

(Behind Corothers Residence Hall)

2501 Whitus Avenue



Kent Johnson grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay and worked in 1980 and 1983 as a literacy teacher in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution, an experience that led to his translation of many poems from the working class Talleres de Poesia there, later collected in the volume A Nation of Poets. He is author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books and chapbooks, including three collections recently published in translation abroad. His most recent books of translation (in collaboration with Forrest Gander) are of the Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz: Immanent Visitor (California) and The Night (Princeton), both of which received awards from PEN. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a large gathering of Johnson's new and selected poems, will be released this year by Shearsman Books in the UK. He lives in Freeport, Illinois.



The Joynes Reading Room can be found off the courtyard behind Corothers/University Honor's Center Building on Whitus Avenue.

http://www.utexas.edu/ugs/uhc/

busting ass and wearing a squid hat.

we're not looking for new work but we never say no to mail. we like the snail.

keeping our hands in the metal. bundling type to sell and so cases can be cleaned and refilled with more type. talk to me if you are in need of Engravers Old English fonts - bigguns: 24pt, 30pt, 36pt

three potata four.

it's almost time to Be Somebody. Put on your helmets. Put on your shocks and awes.

then never say shock and awe in combination again.

Did you go to the Punch Press showcase at the D.A. Levy Lives Series in NYC last night?  If you were there please tell us how great it was. 

Effing will do the DA Levy Lives showcase in late May. We're now taking applications from those wishing to impersonate and read from the work of effing artists. If you are of la familia you may apply to impersonate yourself or another. Whatever you are bested suited for.

you've fallen asleep in the middle of the park while reading a book and wearing sunglasses and now you have raccoon mask kind of sunburn. this is your life. this is you living your life.

you sordid lot

you disorderly people

i love you

i want to pummel you

softly

with paper craft