atlanta poets group

APG @ Eyedrum Periodically

2015-09-22T21:45:00.003-04:00

Been a while. We've surfaced just to note a couple APG collabs at the latest Eyedrum Periodically:
https://eyedrumperiodically.org/. The current issue's theme: Grub.

Erika reading her poem Frudetrusks at April 30 meeting

2014-05-21T20:18:00.001-04:00

fudetrusks

remoticons 1

2014-05-15T12:21:00.003-04:00

[from: the Loss Lieder]

the worst are full of passion ate them in tents, itty

bitty nonsense yawn stabilize worthless values?

valse use value, exchange in yr free marked-up

systemization branding flocculent & leaving

in ranch barred all howdy dust poured

into intro P: reality show as 101, digital con version, meaning

cross-platform bland-creation, oops, stepped between

the 3^rd rail at who? everyelse, allows for social

media utilization, loud scream gifts you

that soldier’s triangulated narrative Dis coursing thru the

vanes the whether, the don’t need a man to fish

in a bicycle rust ammo dump truck sleazing

that’s how everyone knows in the city

emracing the new domesticated violence,

monuments exist marking grand geometric lines

leading from twitters to contempt for twang

lug over to where ya spill yer guts

patrol on a dim wall, mentionless to menschen or

measureless to mammoths at least, oh and while yer at it

art in public spaces reeks of Samonite locked elitism

or is that a satellite licked E Lite schism? well,

i’m sure where you’re listening, the walls ring

almost as much

the snail’s dodering across the lay of the land

the whine of the country cricrossed by loopy & oblate

babble-lines Oh let’s just gavel that session forgotten

shifting gears into cog nightive daylighting—

EPI-IMPROPER: Remixing Bruce Andrews Via Twitter

2014-04-28T10:33:00.001-04:00

On April 1, the APG participated in the Bruce Andrews 25-Hour Twitter Project, an interactive performance piece that stretched across an entire day and included as many participants and media formats as America's favorite social media platform could support. Described by its curator, Maria Chavez, as a "sculptural documentation" and a "real-time archive of Bruce Andrews' current poetic writing and the responses it elicits in real time", the enterprise was irresistible to us for many reasons. Many of us have been either fans or even full-fledged students of Andrews' work for many years, and of course we found ourselves more than simpatico with the intermedial thrust of the piece, its radical openness, and its emphasis on collaboration and group composition. Also, April 1 seemed like a fittingly foolish day for the APG to release its first Twitter pigeon, so there ya go.

The project's Twitter account quickly became a site of reflection, refashioning, remixing and re-imagining of Bruce's 300-part poem "Improper" as its staccato bursts of 140-characters-or-less passed through various hands. Tweets were usually accompanied with links to the project's SoundCloud page where you could hear Andrews read the material. Once we were underway, I mainly just contented myself with riffing on Bruce's tweets as I reposted them, responding to, say, Andrews' "one beast cross-tool in full queer. Reading it made us all less incompetent" with "Reading it made us all less incompetent. Midwife as voyeur to beast? Apes in parallel, or stereo-perp a hot mess", etc. Or else I dropped slaphappy one-liners that echoed bits of Bruce like "my swastika nacho drips with porn" as I got drenched in the wave of socio-politically pointed mutations-of-utterance that "Improper" seemed design to release. Lots of other folks did similarly snarky, off-the-cuff things, and many were cogent and artful, but it was especially cool when a few participants got a little more ambitious with the pictures they posted and the recordings they uploaded. Along those lines, there was a widespread and enthusiastic reaction to the manner in which my fellow apgista James Sanders chose to respond.

Iteration #9 of the "Epiimproper" series

The "Epiimproper" poems are definitely striking as images or word-sculptures in their own right, but it's worth unpacking what else is in play with them. The prefix "epi" of "epiimproper" carries the multiple senses (from the Greek) of on, upon, after, towards, against, etc., but also, as my cheap student lexicon tells me, that of accumulation, extension, even of monetary interest. Anyone who's had even a passing acquaintance with James' poetry will know that he often works with the lattice--basically, these "word-webs" that defy traditional poetic lineation and can generate an infinite number of free-flowing,open-ended readings as you follow their lines--but the epi aspect is fairly new to his work. I first became familiar with it at a reading the APG did in Atlanta a few years ago. Calling the text as an "epiphyte" (literally, a plant that grows upon another plant), James handed me a page like this and told me to listen, as he read from another text, for the words in the gray areas and to treat them like "cue words" that would launch my own reading around the lattice, effectively letting my reading/performance grow upon, from, against (etc.) his own. This was fun to do, incidentally, while sitting in the audience at a fairly polite poetry reading sited in an art gallery. The attendees who didn't know we collaborated (or weren't hip to John Cage) just figured I was some asshole out to interrupt James' reading.

Iteration #10 of "Epiimproper"

So, as the Andrews Twitter project gained momentum through the day, James devised a series--eighteen, by the project's end--of these iterative epi-lattices that spun out from the sporadic Tweets of Bruce's "Improper." Andrews' words hover in the gray or black clouds; James' proceed from these to congeal as lattices over the white space. If you run their images in sequence as a photo-slideshow, as I've done, you get a sense of the series' evolution over the 25-hour period that can often seem like a time-lapse view of the action in some kind of dynamically verbal petri dish. Words and phrases assemble themselves together like the proto-organs of a microbe. They cohere or spin out, hold complementary or oppositely charged phonemic valences. New parts emerge and protrude productively while others drop off and die, become erased. Not to get too carried away here waxing on about the properties and potential of the lattice...we've already done so elsewhere.

In any case, what's motivated this post--just as much as our post-game enthusiasm and gratitude about getting to play productively with Bruce and his fellow travelers--has been the opportunity to make public some of the recordings the group has done in bringing the "Epiimproper" series from the mute page into vocal performance. I've provided several recordings below, paired with the pages of James' work they bring into sonic action. The ones I did are fairly straight-ahead, hewing pretty closely to the formal line of the epiphyte since I generally wait for Andrews' voice (lifted from SoundCloud) to "activate" my reading and send me spinning around the lattice. But they're conservative next to Austin-area performance artist/poet and APG alumnus Jeff Dahlgren's takes on the material, which incorporate a lot of digital effects and get especially awesome when other Austin-based performers sit in with him. I don't know who these other guys are, but, hey, that's what blog comments are for, I guess. Anyway, it's been absolutely fun remixing Bruce with this crew. Hope you enjoy listening!

Epiimproper #1

jselv's reading: "premale stars hide"
jeff's reading: "kleptoseeplatform"

Epiimproper #2

jselv's reading:"mundo el mundo retailing"

Epiimproper #3

jeff's reading: "uglier website"

Epiimproper #5

jeff's reading: "worrycute"
jeff &co.'s reading: "is alive"
jeff &co.'s reading: "andyjeffbruce"

Epiimproper # 8

jselv's reading: "privately pink post-talk" (sans Bruce)

Epiimproper #11

jeff's reading: "to the stroke"

Epiimproper #12

jselv's reading: "guy-namics kool aid"

Epiimproper #13

jeff's reading: "aftercloning"
jeff & co.'s reading: "emily"

Epiimproper #17

jeff's reading (untitled)

jeff & co.'s recording (untitled)

Epiimproper #18

jselv's reading: "ku klux klan sleeper miscast again"

D'Agostino's BLUBBERLAND to open in Denver

2014-04-18T15:55:00.000-04:00

Just received word that frequent Atlanta Poets Group collaborator David D'Agostino's exhibition BLUBBERLAND: Colorless Colorado will open next Friday, April 25 at the Edge Gallery in Denver. A collaboration with Mickie Boyd, David's exhibition features the contribution of many other artistic players as well, including the APG this time around. Ever since David moved to Colorado, we've enjoyed throwing in bits of text from time to time in support of his inter-medial, often site-specific extravanganzas.

From the event invite: BLUBBERLAND is...

an "intermedia carnival composed of wood constructions, burnt panels , tar, oil, animal tails, claws, lard, bones, sewn forms, crystals, rubber, rocks, sand, salt, homemade candies, fermented fruits, and poetry shards.

"Blubberland displays the iridescent and opaque character of the Colorado landscape—an historic territory mythologized as the ‘Colorful’ state, yet imminently devolving as an epicenter of climatic disaster pivoted by endemic pine beetle kill, massive forest fires, mountain traffic coagulation, and REI fashion schemed athleticism."

What?? Poetry shards...like maybe somebody took a hammer to Keats' urn? Who would do such a thing? My stars. Otherwise, since I know next to nothing about D'Ag's latest beyond what I just cut & pasted here, I'll shut up. Not much I can say beyond, "hells yeah, David!" But I plan on following up, so if recordings or pics from this event surface, I'll make sure to repost them here.

Poet X : a treatise re: verse(d)

2014-03-26T09:56:00.004-04:00

essay 368

western odd is sling fest untuned maybe

is there someone there i can speak to about

the complete lack of positive direction in this universe?

not even uni, more a partisan gang in filtration

particulate removed blinkerdom look away

the urban south ain’t got stars

red carpet drenched fulla fueled re-get lacking its R

& backed up @ rush (our)

long to the slip grits maybe time happens

a loudshouter irrit-hacker quick-marching thru marshes

a thrower gets flamed

right in the middle of alt fingering,

or scoop slips on table-ratted slope grouting

.... if cling, then sing, or Macedon,

outa which Alex whined about worlds—

bawl yer multiverse out:

just one verse being worth an anapest twist-tie

for taking out the prosed rash ..

sadness ain’t worth it, it’s

over in the content we vend

(words needing kithara strum replacement therapy ..)

then if ya get too upper case,

the lowing classes with cud syllabic

just might nick verbs

from out of this 2-year sentence, &

give ya a slight

re-naming procedure ....

like snoring with yer windows open & seeing grey

mushy things go slanking around

the rough tree leans

Mark reading, i thought thought was overreacting

2014-03-19T22:08:00.001-04:00

This Mark reading his poem "i thought thought was overreacting," at the January 15 meeting...

i thought thought was overreacting

APG at Sci-Fest

2014-03-18T21:11:00.003-04:00

Hey Atlanta people. The Atlanta Science Festival starts March 22. During that week there are some cool art-science events around town. One of those takes place at the Fusion Gallery on Monday, March 24 from 6-9. It's the kickoff for an exhibition by Craig Dongoski called "The Sound of Art". The APG (well Zac and James anyway) will be performing with Craig as part of that event. Zac will be playing violin and James will be playing language. There will be also be brain waves playing. So stop by and watch us do our thing.

Here is a little more info: http://www.atlantasciencefestival.org/events/event/525.

sordid sonnet 23

2014-03-10T11:28:00.001-04:00

Gets angry whips around, assembles

not quite dispensables anchored w flip oxy—

cold fish call for slap-yappy newsprint:

agency breaks in to Sir Veil our you;

all across flip lash scurries dim hint..

cereal killer chokes her wheat e’s with moxie !

being camera’d, yr nod grumbles:

just a season since a minute grew

Then the ents get formidable by burning

a nonbreaking space as the cone re-enters

our altered atmosphere;

weapons will always be with you—churning

of course, & renting the centers...

A shrugging life-history, flat/clear

sonnetinho: smolder

2014-01-27T10:42:00.001-05:00

disarticulation involves the writing of new smiting-systems

a dark just as there are no more stars scrutinizes

light pollution (which is a heavy pollution)

which is lost if it’s pulled apart but this is primarily

the result of and the novas are tamed

embark on a culture moving thru the undergrowth

except that’s an image, an approach to dissection

or to desiccation something you can attach

even though these things are all said in Caesar’s dialect

interesting dark, too, not that there is any longer, and this

and the archeologists who study it they study morning

good for a lark

2014-01-27T10:40:00.000-05:00

[from: the Loss Lieder]

they laugh, but then the choir fell thru the floor. it became, or appeared, a moment with odd rocks arrayed for the public. a nearness twiddles its thumbs far away....and slow beginnings, introductions with feather-time, heap up here all over the understudied.....if you overstep the bounds, then the hare will lie down with the film makers. almost the eternity that they shoot for, slithers into the one regard i’d seize. if electronics replace the scoreboard, then fire on those who wait, buried way inside personal life. the state of crying slings right past, and then you put your foot on the accelerator, or a mammoth pike of sensation you barrel down. when i have all the echoes, i’ve heard some right at the beginning, right at the start. a toy by definition’s broken, and quietly led forms to glue there. laughter distant while calling up the, almost the rapid fall, they’ll come toward you with those papers. an explanation is halted, flim-flam amuck with time in this jar. i’m going to drop it (right now). all frozen the one letter, and if it went astray i found new gestures, a something else (like something opened). quite right, then i changed font. the big one, with appalling dark lines, it was like a painting in a dream. or commercial in a dream. forest scents while being stalked by animals with ownership, credence flowing out the everyday.... stunned managers, you’ll find your hats where the cards are. punch this one, this word, it won’t ring only pay out with clocks under my adjusted “no”

etude with shifts

2014-01-21T10:12:00.003-05:00

the ugly american word, nope

intro to magnify a favor flows

into a fever a nitwit fools a nitpicker

all told

flip these rankings

a personal call is all the time

when the stupid have imploded into

inner spaces

rack that foliated nonsense

reach the major minority

rake the new files into a timed or durational shrug vortex

maybe crosscut

at the bully post

sonic transport, social aspects

2014-01-13T09:40:00.000-05:00

[from: the Loss Lieder]

blown for a kind of sting, on more idiot lacking halves or a stack of

old records, just blow out the reference, to text as next

it keeps glowing works w old haunt from carriage return

all creepy whistle as a smile now i’ve gathered in blasted software—

you got a counter reads the smile ache

or just wiggle faced w a dream gambols pun higher than chairman

of the bored a quick flood alters when then

it slithers thru veggie snow time all alert is lichen

stolen from a werefallriver law ax or sue

looking once at time in rain capped by our floating hovel

i can build anything out of words

not a quick solution

always it faces a crowd like the stiff breeze in sun

try to square hamming it up with a nexus meaning registered trademark

that’s open way to leaver yr

don’t know what i mean in the stranded canyon, hold

order, an evocation of twilight begin echoed flight gliding over

purple valley mounts in a deposed majesty

green gives to deep glow indigo, lots of cows on a hill

high lawn

words only have written existence otherwise process

it’s ten or alto or one in ten

rather than representing quality in the Belgian biscuit trade

what i’d trade, vigilante groups conjuring up sound on a wax tube

every local order social violence viol: ents

a few ways of saying, go on down the

hill to where the old model A disintegrates a bit

more each winter .. technology has a way of creating meaning whose

stupidity you can really see on a day to day basis

stealing some silence from the edge of the beach

when you got spiders crawling all over you

they run into words that’s standard practice

study 278 : droop nose-dive sequential

2014-01-09T11:40:00.000-05:00

scream and climb and scream and climb

as now the proximate of being

flattened

by non above

when you go into reality you thrill up

the splitting that as the country in a shell

cracks open

the passive voice and a stage hand

on a vanished stage

presentational emptiness allows

war as you know it civ-smashin

definitely slowing down becoming speeding up—

definitive thrust cry

booming voice

pouring down pointless drains

w. rain

for fame

on cardboard

2014-01-09T11:38:00.000-05:00

cardboard has interstices

right? like situations do

if you look thru from

the side if you get the

angle right, you can see

laterally thru the object to

the other side but the tubes

that convey light also

constitute a strengthening

internal structure that allows

the material to be both

light & strong also

not incidentally it requires

les material so it increases

the level of profit by

its very nature card

board is transitional &

belongs to the 20^th century

since it’s a form of paper

& thus pre-digital

tho the way you handle

it & the way it’s made

are such that it certainly

involves the fingers & so it’s

only pre-digital in a post-

digital sense, if you know

what i mean if you knew what

i mean you’d probably already

be home by now since

card & board & cardboard are

key bldg. materials for homes

for the homeless & also in

favellas every bit of cardboard

produced is dull green paper

you can cut yr. own throat

exactly w. an exacto knife

by wanting to press too hard

on the faces of those underneath

you it’s a science for the

CIA only on Sept. 11 did i find

out that the media call them

“box cutters”

thrower floor resistance

2014-01-09T11:35:00.004-05:00

this then is the way the phrase manages all work flow to slid against the brain-dead who are in the middle of the phased land (Eliotic technique idiocy week

all that foam’s flick to the engage button so you manage raid wise power-saw to chicken-out regard: random memory lack of access

then ante hoping at the little kindle flame to rate sanction mechanism slaughter .. it wigs you out and a revolver simpers crawl across magnify symptom culture

look a little main

frame time system haunt

it goes into the

Germanic century or

2 of the lyric mobilization

it goes

cause the waterfall buys

all the desiccated maybe and the

old town’s sounded down

as a fumble weird inflammation

slow stats

quick glints to light a flame or

slinky rattles down stairs

fuller dream w

all these beats on this here)

glass drum

it’s a bit nippy out there lyric umber

2014-01-09T11:33:00.002-05:00

blinkered, & running the race

all the way thru the odd the raked over the mind, sluice, mere sum

then un-adding back; as amber unlit

evasionless, mind’s eye,

ill wind that blows over linkage even if

you can type all that,

lacking a daisy-call

not that you punch the clock / it punches you back, slack

is a glass jaw slowly living none organic

limiting adjacent grits this violation

within the state,

run to trip to fall to the stars

a makeover at the graph push

a second frozen as a rest warren

quick

sketch a pummeled data set

that goes, here’s yr solution, dissolution, or

all grated the pay checks out...

cereal, ism, shattered grass;

look, i just think you shd

go over those notes again

Kid O—

Charles Bernstein reads Louis Zukofsky

2013-12-31T07:00:00.000-05:00

Charles Bernstein

reads

Louis Zukofsky's

poem

A Foin Lass Bodders Me

which is

his

translation of

Cavalcanti's

"Donna Me Prega"

available in

Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems
(American Poets Project)
Library of America
ed. Charles Bernstein

reading William Carlos Williams from _Kora in Hell_

2013-12-28T15:57:00.001-05:00

Improvisation II: 1, 2, and 3

read by jselv

etude w laserJet con (trail)

2013-12-20T10:45:00.000-05:00

long to the slop goes, maybe in field

or fie to the giant foe to

fumble, again, if you look into the

stentorian drab clot, a needle poles

as a minor systemic star-bruise, happenglance

to maybify all cornets played by

getting a whole lot slipperier ...

see, the difference is mild to natural shock

loaded into ab or sub duct ambling

in the direction of incredulity

in a shadow zone grump denying

if you glimpse the data

on that invoice that just came in,

split the tiny unreadable difference

w a fairly frank accent ;

always this closed shiver

is “one” starting

to open things up—

unquiet etude in a piano fort

2013-12-17T10:17:00.001-05:00

this then’s the yoke a quick battered form

then it waves into phantasm next week nosebleed slum arguments

then the find system morphs: agree against,

tone slight maybe reach to a a here this i’m

getting a grasp of .. now a nevertheless, flukes the gathering

light against lite as newer gambol just gesture

so geste laugh at that

in the addressed or pushed envelope,

history of the leaves of war signifies a scream in a cushion

quick see then how

formed in fire & impervious to

being sucked thru a wireless signal,

a witness sample or, witless strangle time;

secret to self-hate aids & abets karmicity nada slip under radar dive

in the cloud, shrug off mist (which is missed)

grinning at anomie:

slap-happy gettin

relaunched and squashed flat

quad rains

2013-12-13T09:02:00.001-05:00

out on loan as a spector prisoner

outside desire like a lone crystal pawn

slow cline rat maze pensioner

crunch on a low flatted prawn

knock toward while slip flood chart

actual as lap message clear

into a return lifted slat mart

that flips where as a list round here

sound well duh how else

the cinging state sleet fair

only back or cash sort of if it sells—

consolidation, be a gagged flair

sordid sonnet 22

2013-12-11T11:24:00.000-05:00

sloshing dumbness rings

a kind of dumbbell ask not for whom

this toll is paid it ain’t paid (it doesn’t loom)

for you; a poet sings

but actually he’s (ring) tone deaf & clings

to the zoom

like a conceit in a locked room-

type mystery;

he’s just a loon

more adversarial than sublimated;

here have some romanticoid gloom,

3^rd grade sifts assassinated:

all references are autopostdated—

(word jumbles now break things . . .)

please delete “corporate moon”

etude in an old factory

2013-12-10T10:06:00.003-05:00

this is a jam session quality import at ramp

of one waking without buzzing snakes

or slithery hornets, blast past

happenstance, a vaper intones: bully for you,

break his nose, or

i brake for noses

or i smell

an unrated rat

with a noise for trouble....

study 277

2013-12-10T10:05:00.002-05:00

lack’s mealy-mouth being without credits toward title

a fling rips haven lexiconical to the trashed slink

or a stop-word list bares all and bares down on sluice at tiny bytes

regimented regime change filter

gross as the card file manager—

bit of intense focus wimp walking on side street

hauling Ludwig’s patented arabesques

where a philosophe loved filing

miles grow hangabout

lag as slowish gabbing to the line fit

sloparosh trime flitting, or gyp land goes to lang

flop severance

Manichean mannequin

babbles in a blague space,

croons w. a twinkle & a crease;

Gershwin or take all