Xerolage 46 – STARINGS by Nico Vassilakis

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Xerolage 46 – STARINGS by Nico Vassilakis

http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage46/by/nico_vassilakis

This is what an alphabet does when the books are closed and the
letters are off duty. The characters cavort, mate, replicate,
coagulate, instigate, insinuate, explode… Free of responsibility,
the alphabet dances.

– Rosaire Appel

Nico Vassilakis’ STARINGS occupies us by combining radically
different registers of meaning — violence and play, destruction and
creation, character and scatter. And we are occupied when we enter
each image, as in taken over or filled up, concentrate on or in, we
have control or have lost control of meaning here. Not that there need
be an either/or in these pages. There is only is. So dwell a while.

– Jenny Sampirisi

from the introduction:

Dear Alphabet’s Demur,
You take lines and shapes and given possibilities and make alphabet.
You use it to make sounds and you map out trajectories of thought. You
make names and call your children by them. This is done everywhere.
And it’s been done for thousands of years until you became bored with
this method — until you surrounded and suffocated yourself with these
products of your creation.

More here: http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage46/by/nico_vassilakis

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Poets for Living Waters

Great story about poets feeling an urgency to do something in response to the BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.

A telling paragraph in the article is this one:

King and Staples modeled their group after Poets Against War, a popular Web site established in January 2003 that solicits and anthologizes poems protesting war, though Staples and King wanted Poets for Living Waters to be “for” something, rather than “against.” Yet “people are sending in a lot of work reflecting anger and grief about what’s happened,” Staples says. Even so, the two poets believe such emotion is simply part of the process of mobilizing the community.

The whole article from the Poets & Writer’s website is here: http://www.pw.org/content/poets_act_on_oil_spill

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George Bowering Interview

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/in-other-words/george-bowering-bullshit-artist-a-poetics-of-attention/article1675695/

A great primer to innovative Canadian poetry with Big Daddy George Bowering. It includes great testimonials from some of George’s friends and this list:

What makes a poet a poet?

1. Insatiable curiosity about the facts.
2. An ear that likes what words do other than designate.
3. A desire to continue the work.
4. A lot of skepticism.
5. A love for oneself as a stranger to oneself.
6. A highly competitive ego-loss.
7. Compassion on the part of one of the nine muses.
8. The inability to leave the house without a book in hand.
9. A record of failing one class in high school.

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Living Room Resumes October 26th!

Living Room, our writer’s critique circle resumes in October for SPLAB’s 2010-2011 season. It will happen at the new SPLAB in the Cultural Corner of the former Columbia School, 3528 S. Ferdinand. (Enter from Edmunds in the back.) This school is two blocks from the Columbia City Link Light Rail Station. Get ready to share your new writing October 26th! See the schedule of facilitators here. Suggested donation $5.

1. Columbia School

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