Equanimity

 
             

   
 
 

Thursday, January 19, 2006

 
I like the style, the gestalt of 1913: a journal of forms. First MFA-ish journal I've come across to begin to approximate the investigative, try-anything, just-keep-talking quality of work in such 80s-90s indie mags as Big Allis, Torque, Kenning. (Roughly the same hit/miss ratio too, but the hits are quite nice, e.g. Jon Thirkield's poem, or the penciled-stenciled piece I don't have in front of me to name.)

UPDATE: Or maybe it'd just been too long since I'd read the work of Stacy Doris and Chet Wiener.

LATER: Scott Inguito's "Soweto Lash Dismay" is the stencil piece I was thinking of. Cole Swensen's translation of Suzanne Doppelt is fantastic, too, but the standout, the real well-look-at-that piece is John Yau's ventriloquism of Robert Desnos, a poet who as far as I can tell has done American poets a lot more good than he ever did the French language. Yau's had jaded symbolist parody down so long it's sounding new all over again:
Shortly after the last clock in town tolls midnight, black carriages begin lining up outside The New Archive Luncheonette. A swarm of iridescent gnats hovers above the main shed of the obsolete gondola repair depot. In an adjacent frame, two policement discuss ways to improve their uniforms, how their epaulets might be emphasized to greater effect. On a quaint suburban street near the fireworks factory, a team of champion wrestlers practice hauling the corpse of a pink walrus into an illegally parked armored car.

Jordan - #

 

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I'm Jordan Davis.
I write a lot.
I mention it here.

Say hi: jordan [at] jordandavis [dot] com.

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