THE BURNING CHAIR

There is no shaming in hearing

Matthea Harvey, Aaron Kunin & Peter Jay Shippy

Sunday, May 28th, 4PM
The Cloister Café
238 East 9th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
East Village, NYC

The Burning Chair Blog: www:typomag.com/burningchair
Contact: Matthew Henriksen at matt at typomag dot com


Author Bios

Matthea Harvey’s books include Sad Little Breathing Machine (Greywolf Press) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books). She serves as poetry editor of American Letters and Commentary.

Aaron Kunin is the author of Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books), a collection of small poems about shame; a novel, The Mandarin, is forthcoming in 2007. His work has appeared in The Germ, No: A Journal of the Arts, The Poker, and elsewhere. He recently moved to California, where he is an assistant professor of negative anthropology at Pomona College.

Peter Jay Shippy's first book, Thieves' Latin (University of Iowa Press) won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. BlazeVOX Books will publish Alphaville, an abecedarian suite, as an e-book in 2006. About Thieves' Latin, Bin Ramke, editor of the Denver Quarterly wrote, "Shippy's strange little machines of words are all kinetic, disturbing, and weirdly graceful, unlike anything else available in American poetry. A dazzling book." Claudia Keelan called it, "... a surrealist elegy for the earth... a fierce accomplishment." His work has been published in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Fence, FIELD, The Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and Ploughshares, among others. Shippy has been awarded writing fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005 he received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry. He teaches at Emerson College and lives with his wife in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

There is no shaming in hearing

Matthea Harvey, Aaron Kunin & Peter Jay Shippy

Sunday, May 28th, 4PM
The Cloister Café
238 East 9th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
East Village, NYC

The Burning Chair Blog: www:typomag.com/burningchair
Contact: Matthew Henriksen at matt@typomag.com


Author Bios

Matthea Harvey's books include Sad Little Breathing Machine (Greywolf Press)
and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books).
She serves as poetry editor of American Letters and Commentary.

Aaron Kunin is the author of Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books), a collection of
small poems about shame; a novel, The Mandarin, is forthcoming in 2007. His
work has appeared in The Germ, No: A Journal of the Arts, The Poker, and
elsewhere. He recently moved to California, where he is an assistant professor
of negative anthropology at Pomona College.

Peter Jay Shippy's first book, Thieves' Latin (University of Iowa Press) won the
2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. BlazeVOX Books will publish Alphaville, an abecedarian
suite, as an e-book in 2006. About Thieves' Latin, Bin Ramke, editor of the
Denver Quarterly wrote, "Shippy's strange little machines of words are all
kinetic, disturbing, and weirdly graceful, unlike anything else available in
American poetry. A dazzling book." Claudia Keelan called it, "... a surrealist
elegy for the earth... a fierce accomplishment." His work has been published
in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Fence, FIELD, The
Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and Ploughshares, among others.
Shippy has been awarded writing fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural
Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005 he received a Gertrude
Stein Award for innovative poetry. He teaches at Emerson College and lives with
his wife in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Come and get your heart broken
by

Edmund Berrigan & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Sunday, May 21st, 4PM
The Cloister Café
238 East 9th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
East Village, NYC

Anna Moschovakis is a genius.

Hear the ears of

Anna Moschovakis & Sheila Squillante


Friday, May 12th, 7:30 PM
The Fall Cafe
307 Smith Street
btwn. Union & President
F/G to Carrool Street

FREE FUN GOOD PLACE SWEET PEOPLE

Sheila in Typo 5: http://typomag.com/issue05/squillante.html
Anna in Octopus 7: http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue07/html/main.html


Contact: matt at typomag dot com or 917.478.5682

Found In Nature by Jen Tynes
horse less press 2004

In her debut book of poems, Jen Tynes summons a new structure of space and time with autonomous means: a phenomenology of tongues born from the “bare bones and thin-skinned” horse less press she co-founded herself. To enter these new and charged spaces demands surrender, a willingness to be spoken into by multiplicities; a desire to be aimed at, fired upon, breached. These poems deal a healthy crushing blow to poetry that is safe; poetry that assumes everything in this world simply corresponds. Tynes explores with scrutinizing acuity the ontological consequences for abandoning the thick skins of meaning associated with [language].

The book itself is simply constructed with hand cut pages and securely bound with red string. One should be careful not to lump the appearance of its form with the demands of immediacy. Wise things are simple; some are even bound in red string. Comprised of one poem per page in the form of paragraphs, one is elegantly vaulted into a quotidian landscape where hope is a leaky bucket, memories break the same way twigs do, and (un) certainties are always fluid. First assault:

that the photo represents our face

The complexity of the image traditionally takes precedence in all referential frames (even math needs objects to manifest itself. Nature?) However, where our beehives of meaning yield consolation, Tynes puts a dress on meaning and demands it to dance. The photograph could in fact be the image of a face, but a face is never a face. Very wise indeed.

Memory in these poems is pliable and may change momentum or direction at any moment. Perhaps this is one axiom one may lean on for a moment. Consider the randomization of experience when reading a poet that offers not only appetizers and dinner, but also a chance for you to eat you own heart for dessert. The subsequent motions of language uttering contradictions, tautologies, even truth!-are enough to send one spinning in syntactical ecstasy. Until you read that

Sometimes there is no choice, the rest of your life vibrating out of some hole.

Perhaps you shouldn’t lean on that axiom after all.

That which is, which is somehow lost in the stringent technical codes of our language is revealed in Tynes’ poems; these traversings, motions, splicings; these meanings. There are subtle gestures of reconciliation entwined in the strata crumbling before you face. Healing finds a voice in the violent sentence. Much is still hidden in the resonances here. (Yes, I am writing from there.) Like a forest, it is safe to call this multiplicity of her pen a Nature in of itself. This is a safe, predictable, and justifiable enterprise. An enterprise built on the de-centered experience. But this not the case. She does not allow us a calculus for feeling. If I tell you how these poems make me feel, that would be cheating. Or, how do you remember a dangerous flower? Remember: the finality of each poem is a continuation. In the poem there are many mansions. Consider how:

There are methods of strangulation.
Or its nearest subtitle: strange me, strange me now.

It is my suspicion that big things move underground (small presses in the shapes of horses included). Epistemology functions this way. Movements are slow, but every now an then we are reminded of its presence. Suddenly, the earth opens up and swallows a few people. These poems were forged there. De profundis. Do not expect short-term rewards for reading these poems. If you listen, they will haunt you. They will kick you, bite you, perhaps love you. They have already begun to strike at al you hold dear. If you are lucky, the earth may swallow you.




                                                    --Review by John Mulligan.