Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea

Friends, and friends of Flim, we are so excited to announce the release of Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea by Afton Wilky, a total textual experience, 110 nonstop beautiful pages (w/ a tri-fold poster insert).

Joshua Marie Wilkinson writes, "Afton Wilky’s texts outdo their surfaces and conjure a physicality; and this book binds its curiosities and detours to the puzzling work of what the world of letters and white space and the technology of the book itself might learn to become."

Take a curious detour thru this world of letters, or listen to some audio, at clarityspeaksofacrystalsea.com. As always, we appreciate and rely on your support as we look forward to new and future projects!

Heart of hearts,
mk

Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea
by Afton Wilky
ISBN 978-0-9790888-7-2
7x9, 110 pages
w/ tri-fold poster insert

When we’re ready to see (and sea) the deep weave of our world-making as well as its surface, when our clarity includes the fact of the medium itself, when we can speak of our own speaking and acknowledge that material as some large part of what matters to us—then we will be ready to comprehend reality in all its complexity. Afton Wilky’s work is to poetry what string theory is for physics: a necessary next step, a way into a world of mutability and possibility, an invitation to participate in meaning-making in the “textureecho,” strand by strand, opening after opening, in the churn of a restless semantic evolution, “at the place where sounds intersect.” Paronomasia and neologisms find a new fluency where English itself becomes, as Wilky writes, “a pleasure put out to sea,” as, awash with a powerful music, this work compels exploration and experiment. It’s never been so exquisite to make our way(s) through “the mirror image of letters” as it is in this extraordinary, original, ground-breaking book.

     —Laura Mullen

~

Here the pleasures of the text are returned to the materiality of making, finding, and recasting the said and the scrawled back into the ghostly machine of saying. Afton Wilky’s texts outdo their surfaces and conjure a physicality; and this book binds its curiosities and detours to the puzzling work of what the world of letters and white space and the technology of the book itself might learn to become. I’m thinking of Gordon Matta-Clark’s sketches and photographs of the buildings he’d dismantled: part blueprint, part attempt, part scribbled investigation, and part relic of the gone. Whether frayed, scissored, collaged, printed, erased, or scrawled, Wilky’s condensary of texts is the result of exploring the materials themselves—catalyzing each crazed, folded, obfuscated, or exclamatory word. What’s alive in the margin, breathing in the betweens, is a moving set of texts arrested by its particulars, by its having-been-made, and held however temporarily for us to wonder ourselves into as poesis-in-action—frozen, but seething.

     —Joshua Marie Wilkinson

~

In Afton Wilky’s Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea, entire rooms of installation are captivated by book form. The pages hold out paper sculptures, words in compound trains and scatters, and juxtapositions of wrought and abandoned explanation, while the character Haada acts in story fragments that bring us closer in to this book’s “blinkers and the stammering whispers.” An incredible balance between openness – text in movement – and refinement – text brought to a pitch of expressive preparation – is part of what makes you feel you are in the room where it’s happening. Hand-writing entries, cutting-room floor word piles, the thirsty water glasses, the photographed concertinas and text-braids: all these elements are paced to make the book a whole experience, air shifting through the brain and black ink at the heart. This is “piling” at its excruciatingly breathing hinge, and it’s beautiful.

     —Lisa Samuels

Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea } is.

for the time being, see Afton Wilky.

buy soon at SPD.

& prepare a space on your wall.

The Problem of Boredom in Paradise: Selected Poems by Paul Hannigan

A quick, self-congratulatory note: Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a short, end-of-the-year best poetry list, and The Problem of Boredom in Paradise tops the list. From the piece:

Boston-area poets of a certain age (I am one) will remember Paul Hannigan, possibly with a shudder. Some of us huddled in informal workshops he attended that were held in an annex to Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room: There he could wither a career with a word, a gesture, a look. Irascible, implacable, intimidating, but ingenious and indubitably smarter than anybody when it came to poetry, it’s no exaggeration to acknowledge him now as a local legend.

Born in Cambridge in 1936, he was connected with virtually every literary institution in town for decades. His trade press debut was “Laughing,’’ published by Boston’s own Houghton Mifflin, but he also produced many fascinating chapbooks — usually illustrated with his own arresting drawings — that are priceless, yet can still be had for a song. Time has been unkind to this poet; he died in 2000, almost forgotten. But his work was rediscovered by young poets who have lovingly prepared a new selection….

Our thanks to Mr. Share. Here’s hoping lots will read Paul Hannigan in the new year. Perhaps this bodes well for our next title, Clarity Speaks of a Crystal Sea by Afton Wilky (look for it in February).

Available for Purchase!

     ISBN 978-0-9790888-6-5

     flim forum press

     166 pages, 7x9

     $20 + $4 for shipping & handling

            

Poems by Paul Hannigan (1936-2000), a Boston-area poet most active during the late 60s, early 70s, with ties to poets and writers from that time and place, including: Fanny Howe, Bill Knott, William Corbett, DeWitt Henry, Tom Lux, and James Tate. The Problem of Boredom in Paradise contains poems from a young Hannigan’s A Theory of Learning (1966), the chapbook Holland and the Netherlands (Jim Randall’s Pym-Randall Press, 1970), selections from the books Laughing (Houghton Mifflin, 1970) and The Carnation (Tom Lux’s Barn Dream Press, 1972), and the entirety of Bringing Back Slavery (Dolphin Editions, 1976). Also: a large portion of an unpublished manuscript The Higher Slum (1975), an assortment of other unpublished works from the 80s and 90s, and a few original drawings.

Paul Hannigan, society reporter on safari, sketches serpentine philosophers and corporate baboons, chronicles “these degrading surprises we call our days.” Like a good comedian, he paints these fools on his own face, in othered self-portraits, alternately toothy and toothless, sad saccharine, smothered in “moral sherbet.” Hannigan mumble mumbles a messy subjectivity, all the insecurities of our race, gender, sexuality. He can be rhapsodically self-felicitous in fantasies of self-pity. He can be witty, crude, and brutally cruel. Paul Hannigan, fall-guy, castaway, shackles Milton with suburban shopping malls and maps over happiness with The Bush, that colonial/genital beachhead. Hannigan’s poems are busy napping, bong coughing, constantly undressing, disabling, donning a series of hospital gowns. Perverted lyrics parade from his hopelessly open mouth.

     You have already

     had enough fun

     now you must

     what watch watch

     and listen and

     remember. Sort

     according to subject.

     And cross-reference.

     At your dwindling

     so-called leisure.

The Next Big Thing

[The following conforms to the chain-letter ominously known as The Next Big Thing.] 

1. What is the title of your new book?

The Problem of Boredom in Paradise (Selected Poems by Paul Hannigan).

2. Who is the publisher of your book?

Flim Forum Press. Originally, Pressed Wafer offered me the chance to do a selected. It was to be no more that 100 pages, which at the time seemed reasonable, since I’d yet to uncover Hannigan’s unpublished ms. The Higher Slum, or the hundreds of unpublished poems, or the unfinished novels, etc. Pressed Wafer lost interest in my participation because I was slow to produce a ms. I suggested the project to Matthew, even though Hannigan is not an obvious Flim Forum poet, and expected to be turned down. Matthew asked me if I thought Hannigan’s poetry was good and the project worth doing. I said yes. So he said yes. An act of faith I appreciate.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry. Sub-genre, the rescue-volume. That is, from obscurity. Hannigan has been out of print since the late 1970s.

4. What is one sentence from your book?

"When, as occasionally happened, a tribesman burst into tears at his own joke, his peers would roar in rebuke: That is not sad; this is not funny." [from “The Bush”]

5. Where did the idea for the book come from?

From Paul Hannigan. (I write about the origin of the selected in my introduction, but, without repeating myself, I can offer a less flip answer than “Paul Hannigan.” When I started the Hannigan project, I did not imagine I would edit a selected; I just wanted to know a little more about who he was. The idea of doing a book gradually grew from that research.)

6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Not exactly applicable, however—I began typing up poems  (with the help of my wife Amy and the choreographer Nina Joly) that might end up in a book in 2007, shortly after I published an article about Hannigan in Open Letters Monthly; his widow, Caroline Banks, read the article and gave me the go-ahead (and helped fund a research trip to Georgia, where his papers reside).

7. What are your influences for this book?

When writing my introduction, I specifically thought of  Michel de Montaigne. John Cotter offered suggestions that helped me to think about the book. Otherwise, and obviously, what of Hannigan’s spirit I could pick up from his corpus, so-to-speak.

8. What else might pique the reader’s interest?

The March issue of OpenLetters Monthly, our Paul Hannigan blog, and the article I wrote for OLM back in 2007.

Coming Soon!

     March 2013
     ISBN 978-0-9790888-6-5

     flim forum press
     166 pages, 7x9, $20

Poems by Paul Hannigan (1936-2000), a Boston-area poet most active during the late 60s, early 70s, with ties to poets and writers from that time and place, including: Fanny Howe, Bill Knott, William Corbett, DeWitt Henry, and James Tate. The Problem of Boredom in Paradise contains poems from a young Hannigan’s A Theory of Learning (1966), the chapbook Holland and the Netherlands (Jim Randall’s Pym-Randall Press, 1970), selections from his books Laughing (Houghton Mifflin, 1970) and The Carnation (Tom Lux’s Barn Dream Press, 1972), and the entirety of Bringing Back Slavery (Dolphin Editions, 1976). Also: a large portion of an unpublished manuscript The Higher Slum (1975), an assortment of other unpublished works from the 80s and 90s, and a few original drawings.



Paul Hannigan, society reporter on safari, sketches serpentine philosophers and corporate baboons, chronicles “these degrading surprises we call our days.” Like a good comedian, he paints these fools on his own face, in othered self-portraits, alternately toothy and toothless, sad saccharine, smothered in “moral sherbet.” Hannigan mumble mumbles a messy subjectivity, all the insecurities of our race, gender, sexuality. He can be rhapsodically self-felicitous in fantasies of self-pity. He can be witty, crude, and brutally cruel. Paul Hannigan, fall-guy, castaway, shackles Milton with suburban shopping malls and maps over happiness with The Bush, that colonial/genital beachhead. Hannigan’s poems are busy napping, bong coughing, constantly undressing, disabling, donning a series of hospital gowns. Perverted lyrics parade from his hopelessly open mouth.

     You have already
     had enough fun
     now you must
     what watch watch
     and listen and
     remember. Sort
     according to subject.
     And cross-reference.
     At your dwindling
     so-called leisure.

2 New Books!

Flim Forum Press is thrilled to announce the release of 2 new books: Lori Anderson Moseman's All Steel and Justin Katko's The Death of Pringle. You can purchase the books, or read more about the authors and the projects, by clicking the links in the sidebar.

Both books will be available @ AWP in Chicago, where you'll find Flim in the middle of Table X/Y.

ALL STEEL

ALL STEEL
by Lori Anderson Moseman
ISBN 978-0-9790888-4-1
96 pages, 7x9
$18 (+$3 shipping & handling)

or:

Send a check for $21 to:

Flim Forum Press
PO Box 549
Slingerlands, NY 12159

Query: klane at flimforum dot com
flim forum press




Our age of human thing plant animal atmosphere entanglement calls for a poet who knows her way around a toolbox. Moseman is such a rare breed: a writer whose way with words is as sharp as her drawknife, whose poems take on the caesurae of a life working the front lines, the "sledge, haul, spill, cut" of contested ground. Everything is connected, but at every step we pull apart as much as we pull together; All Steel's deeply implicated poems riddle that hard fact. Core samples from a century of trauma, her pleasurable, challenging language shapes deliver, from a divided past, the data of our common future.

— Jonathan Skinner, author of Birds of Tifft


Read more about All Steel...

THE DEATH OF PRINGLE

THE DEATH OF PRINGLE
by Justin Katko
ISBN 978-0-9790888-5-8
98 pages, 7x9
black & white insides
w/ CD
42 min. original electro-acoustic music, text sung by author
$20 (+$3 shipping & handling,
international orders please query before purchase)

or:

Send a check for $23 to:

Flim Forum Press
PO Box 549
Slingerlands, NY 12159
USA

Query: klane at flimforum dot com
flim forum press





Written from 2007 to 2008, Justin Katko's libretto "The Death of Pringle" tells the story of a group of evil scientists (The Mother Fuckers), whose plan to digitally convert Southern California's Salton Sea into Washington DC's Sonny Bono Memorial Park are foiled by a triad of song-hero Poets, led by an epistemonical Pringle. With an original musical composition that is programmed, played, and sung by the author, "The Death of Pringle" is supplemented by visual and textual marginalia, as well as extended "Notes and Fragments" which sketch out the greater narrative universe of which the libretto is just one part ("The Death of Pringle" being the first book of a prematurely cancelled six-book epic entitled "The Dope on the Arch of the Dust"). The cast includes such players as the oblivious People (featuring Larry and Popular Lou-Ellen), Sony Bono, Bonito Sonic, The Big Mermaid, Exviiideao, The Imperial Lab Daughter, Petrol Pedra, Viola Ted and of course, Newt Gingrich. "FUCKING HELL! WE'RE GONNA LOSE!"


Read more about The Death of Pringle...

Iowa Reviews aaaaaaaaaaaalice

Erika Jo Brown reviews aaaaaaaaaalice @ The Iowa Review:

"Let us, for a moment, judge a book by its cover. The title of Jennifer Karmin’s debut poetry collection, aaaaaaaaaaalice, stretches across the span of the book in hollow, clean, orange typeface. Several blue keywords wrap around laterally. The front cover, mostly white space, is modestly embellished with three inky bunnies in the bottommost corner. The astute typography and layout design reflect the accomplishments of the book, which experiments with space and presence in an unpretentious and, frankly, perky way. It is at once socially generous (the keyword “hello” is bolded in salutation), intellectually inquisitive, and aesthetically tickling. aaaaaaaaaaalice is a generous book that innovates its own space in which to breathe and invites the reader to do the same." Read the rest here

Erika Jo Brown is author of What a Lark! from Further Adventures Press and the editor of Stretching Panties Magazine.

The Alps in the embrace of } The Girl Without Arms

Notorious HTML Giant posted "a conversation between Brandon Shimoda and Matthew Henriksen." Not a conversation two poets trying to out-weird each other. I was thinking about thinking about Brandon Shimoda and this made me think about Brandon Shimoda: his The Alps, Flim Forum's The Alps. I contacted Black Ocean and suggested since they were publishing Brandon Shimoda's second book Flim Forum and Black Ocean ought to put the two books together and we did, with a beautiful paper band made by maids in Black Ocean Tartarus. More than the paper band, tho, you get The Alps and The Girl Without Arms together, each for $10, so for $20. The Alps usually priced at $14 and The Girl Without Arms at $14.95. Even if you have one or the other why spend $14 or 14.95 when you could kick in another $6 or $5.05, get both, and give the one you already own away, to, like, your mother? Think about it. In this economy.

[Both Flim Forum and Black Ocean are making the offer--email us or them. However, Black Ocean has no link to this offer because it's a secret that they have a huge crush on us.]

A land between sleep & } Flim Forum

Woke up to Barzakh 03. Read three Flim poets. John Cotter with three poems. Anne Gorrick dedicates "When the Noon Wears Ermine" to Lori Anderson Moseman. Pages from Adam Golaski's OUTLAND (dedicated to Jessica Smith).

Flim @ the Fridge, DC

Thursday, February 3
7:30-9:30
@ The Fridge
REAR ALLEY, 516 8th Street, SE
Washington, DC
FREE

featuring:

Charles Alexander (Chax Press)
Amy Allara (Highway 101 Press)
Andrea Bates (Toadlily Press)
James Belflower (Instance Press)
Joe Elliot (Lunar Chandelier)
Jennifer Karmin (Flim Forum)
Laura Moriarty (Nightboat Books)
Hoa Nguyen (Fact.Simile Editions)
Sarah Suzor (EtherDome Chapbooks)


w/ books and snacks!

aaaaaaaaaaalice

by Jennifer Karmin



ISBN 978-0-9790888-3-4
112 pages, 7x9
$16 (+$4 shipping & handling)

or:

Send a check for $20 to:

Flim Forum Press
611 N. Johnson Street, #3
Iowa City, IA 52245

Query: klane at flimforum dot com
flim forum press




___


"This book, a score, is full of information both literal and (im)possible. Do dip in; see what you come out with."

—Bernadette Mayer


"Jennifer Karmin brings an openness and generosity to these poems of public address and private insistence. Aaaaaaaaaaalice's buoyant charm calls out for new listeners."

—Charles Bernstein


"I like tightly proposed structures in which anything can happen & does because the more tightly controlled the structures, the more explosively the language will implode, disseminate, fold in or out or whatever it is it needs to do to loosen up or reverse direction & meaning. And that’s the fun of Aaaaaaaaaaalice, lithe row of straight a’s followed by biting animal commentary."

—Pierre Joris


"Alice and anime, Asia and uncertainty, we do so want our sounds to make sense, our textual travels to have a guide, even if that guide is the white rabbit that will hide. Aaaaaaaaaaalice is the sound and sight of the disappearing rabbit, the one with a hat, the one who pops up with regular unpredictability whenever we go somewhere not here, and while words will swivel around us like our very own heads, making the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar, making no sense but nonsense and non-sense sense, like in this very text, what’s moreover curious, as Karmin rightly notes, is that 'yesterday a man was walking.' "

—Vanessa Place


___


Jennifer Karmin has published, performed, exhibited, taught, and experimented with language across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run spaces, community centers, and on city streets, including Betalevel (CA), Links Hall (IL), the French Broad Institute of Time and the River (NC), the Poetry Project (NY), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (MI), and Woodland Pattern Book Center (WI).

A proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv, she is the author of the Dusie chapbook Evacuated: Disembodying Katrina. Walking Poem, a collaborative street project, is featured online at How2. Her poems are widely published in anthologies and journals, like A Sing Economy (Flim Forum Press), Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press), Not A Muse (Haven Books), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books), Bird Dog, Cannot Exist, Delirious Hem, MoonLit, Otoliths, and Womb. She is the Community Aesthetician for Les Figues Press at Give A Fig.

In Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools. She earned her BA in the Poetics Program at the University of Buffalo and MFA in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Past grants and residencies were funded by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the Djerassi Program, the Joseph Kellman Family Foundation, the Poetry Center of Chicago, Poets & Writers, Rochester Community Savings Bank, Summer Literary Seminars, and the Synapses Foundation.


___


Read some early reviews of Aaaaaaaaaaalice selections here, and of Aaaaaaaaaaalice in performance here and here.

Flim Night @ the Poetry Project

Brandon Shimoda & Jennifer Karmin (with special guests)

Monday, November 8
8pm

@ The Poetry Project
131 E. 10th St. (and 2nd Ave)
New York, NY


see: The Alps and aaaaaaaaaaalice

Reading } Forget the terrible lies you've heard about us.

Jjjjjjjjjjjennifer Karmin and Adam Golaski will be reading together in Chicago on the 18th at Myopic Books. Jennifer will read from (or in close proximity to) Aaaaaaaaaaalice, oh, have we mentioned Aaaaaaaaaaalice?, and Adam will read from Color Plates, his new book from Rose Metal Press.

Adam will also read on the 19th at the Orange Alert series. This will be the official debut of Color Plates, suggesting--at least to this reporter--that the Myopic Books reading will have a delicious illicit feel to it, like eating a kiwi fruit while wearing someone else's underpants.

Out again } at Stain

jennifer karmin's self-propelled and multi-dimensional aaaaaaaaaaalice tour lands in brooklyn tonight, that's right, tonight the most evil-sounding poetry series presents an absurd number of poets--perfect for performing a multi-vocal text-sound-epic, if I do say so myself. I do. the stain of poetry begins at 7pm with jennifer, julie doxsee, curtis jensen, eric lindley, ben mirov, and peter spagnuolo. I suggest you wear a hat.

Yes! / Stain

Jennifer Karmin and aaaaaaaaaaalice will be in NY this week, Albany on the 26th, and Brooklyn on the 27th...

___


Thursday, August 26th
Yes! Reading Series
@ the Albany Social Justice Center
33 Central Avenue
7:30pm

w/
Sarah Giragosian
Maryrose Larkin
Jennifer Karmin


Friday, August 27th
Stain of Poetry
@ Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway, Brooklyn
7pm

w/
Julie Doxsee
Curtis Jensen
Jennifer Karmin
Eric Lindley
Ben Mirov
Peter Spagnulo

The Alps

The Alps has a new online home - the place thereof is thither

Roland blows the olifant. } + bleeds.

so. th'first fitt'v Green furnished by th'folks at fopen fletters fmonthly. the translator is briefly interviewed here, and expounds on a single line here.