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.