From: "Brian Stefans [arras.net]" <bstefans@earthlink.net>
Subject: /ubu Editions :: Launch + Winter 2003 Titles
__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com
UbuWeb is pleased to announce the launch of our new E-Book series, /ubu
Editions (pronounced "slash ubu"). The Winter 2003 series, featuring 13
titles, is edited by Brian Kim Stefans and features a mix of reprints and
new material presented in book-length PDF files. Each title is beautifully
designed and features images from the UbuWeb site.
/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu
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/ubu Editions :: Winter 2003 Titles
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Kevin Davies _ Pause Button _
Davies writing takes the social critique of the Language Poets and the
crushing ear of the best Projective versifiers and sets it all in
cyclotronic motion with his rapier's wit and caffeinated melancholy, making
him the Zorro of poets associated with Vancouver's Kootenay School of
Writing and the anthemist of choice for a disowned intelligentsia. Davies,
who now lives in New York, published his second book, _Comp._, in 2000 to
much acclaim, but the quasi-legendary _Pause Button_, first published in
1992 by Vancouver's Tsunami Editions, has long been unavailable to those not
in the vicinity of Canada's choice used bookstores.
Deanna Ferguson _The Relative Minor_
Ferguson's first book of poems is at once frenetically impatient with
anything that could be called a lyrical subjectivity yet speaks, through the
sliced rubrics of its many "postmodern" poses, from a perspective singularly
angry, disaffected, vulnerable, eloquent, political and brash. The Relative
Minor takes the project of the Language poets to the next level of public
address, the scale tipping from (though not forgetting) the lexicons of
theory and falling toward the pure, dystopic clamor of punk aspiration.
Ferguson, who lives and works in Vancouver, has not published a book since
this 1993 volume, one of the major contributions by the poets associated
with the Kootenay School of Writing.
Richard Foreman _Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!_
For years, Foreman has been staging his plays at St. Mark's Ontological
Theater with the regularity of the great Avant-Pop-in-the-Sky's
postmodernist pacemaker, tooling his "reverberation machines" into a
pristine state of subversive whimsy. Though the reader of this text will
miss the virtuoso performances of Tony Torn and Jay Smith as bathetic
superheroes dueling over the fallen Iron Curtain in the play's New York run,
the paranoiac frenzy and epistemological funboxes of Foreman's high style
are alive and flinching in _Now That Communism is Dead_.
Madeline Gins _What the President Will Say and Do!!_
Madeline Gins has mostly been known for her collaborative works with the
architect/philosopher Arakawa, releasing _Mechanism of Meaning_, an
illustrated series of playful epistemological vignettes, in 1979, and
devoting most of the last two decades exploring Reversible Destiny, a
radical philosophy of architecture in which one "refuses to die." _What the
President_ is Gins in a more light-hearted, accessible vein, her creative
assaults on mundane thinking arousing both laughter and caustic impatience
with the status quo. Rarely has a book appeared as prescient and poignant
twenty years after its initial publication.
Jessica Grim _Vexed_
Grim's style masterly evokes the simplicities of poetry in the "New
American" vein, with its fragments of candid observation just shimmering on
the surface of the poem, but she allies it with a "post-Language"
sensibility that balks before the prospect of a too-fluid Romanticism, thus
spicing sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim's
poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems
occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each
one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical
integrity.
Peter Manson _Adjunct: An Undigest_
Adjunct _forms a teetering, overloaded bridge between practitioners of
subjectively-deodorized "conceptual literature" such as Kenneth Goldsmith
and Craig Dworkin and writers working in a "new sentence" vein such as
Language poets Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian, all with a nod to novelist
David Markson's _Reader's Block_. But _Adjunct _is far from an organized
literary venture; rather, it is a sprawling, subconsciously assembled
stockpile of casual phrases, trivial ideas, worthless statistics, obituary
notices, self-reflexive misgivings, and numberless, numbing et ceteras that
make it an electric anthem to cultural (and personal) entropy.
Michael Scharf _Verite_
Scharf's poems are at once vulnerable to, and defiant of, the impositions of
civic society, as the strands of global and historical implication wafting
through the air that strike most of us as attenuated notes of "otherness"
are transformed, for this poet, into the throbbing heart of community. The
roving eye of _Verite_ takes in quantities of data that would sink writers
with a less fluid and agile lyric touch, and the mixture of journalism,
sonnets, "lieder" and manifesto-like prose poetry make this a compelling,
multi-faceted collection, the second by this New York author.
Ron Sillman _2197_
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as _Tjanting _and
_Ketjak_, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he
coined the phrase) poem _The Alphabet_ for over twenty years. _The Age of
Huts_, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation,
despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal
experimentation and mastery. "2197" is the second half of the book, and
anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different
acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows,
rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in
the age of the internet.
Ron Sillman _Sunset Debris_
Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as _Tjanting _and
_Ketjak_, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he
coined the phrase) poem _The Alphabet_ for over twenty years. _The Age of
Huts_, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation,
despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal
experimentation and mastery. "Sunset Debris" is, structurally, a collection
of questions, but the cumulative affect of the queries is both giddily
intoxicating and, subterraneously, melancholic, as the voice of personal
entreaty become subsumed under the ceaseless rhythms of its literary method
and, by extension, time and memory.
Juliana Spahr _Response_
Spahr's deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment
of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when
selfhood – one's sense of uniqueness and of the _permanence _of one's
personality – has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media
that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the
opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of
the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr's poetry, revived to take
center stage, floodlit by possiblity. _Response_, Spahr's first book (_Fuck
You-Aloha-I Love You_ appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National
Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of
participation in the social world.
Hannah Weiner _Little Books / Indians_
Weiner, who died in 1997, culled from what she considered a psychic
ability – she literally saw words on the foreheads of her many New York
friends and transcribed them like extrasensory conversations – to create
her typographically distinctive books of poetry. But there is nothing
naïve about what Weiner was doing: she was a self-conscious,
sophisticated artist, a close friend of the great innovator Carolee
Schneemann, and has long been considered a central figure in Language
poetry. Weiner's oeuvre reflects a complex, totalizing investment in the
properties of words as they permeate and conflict with the self and the
imagined "other," and _Little Books/Indians_, long out of print, is both a
visual treat and an engaging read.
Mac Wellman _The Lesser Magoo_
The final of the four plays of Wellman's Crowtet, Magoo follows the
adventures of Curran and Candle – an expert on "Crowe's Dark Space" – and
their motley assemblage of peers, some of them categorically "unusualist,"
in the parallel, decidedly unsettled, universe that is distinctly Wellman's.
Magoo is chockfull of alternative histories, comprehensive pseudo-sciences,
eerily relevant, off-the-map absurdist politics and soft-spoken contacts
between humans all vying for attention in the seemingly self-propelled
linguistics of Wellman's versification, which at turns recalls Beckett, at
others the polymath Pynchon or the more childlike landscapes of Ashbery (in
Girls on the Run). The music for The Lesser Magoo, scored for voices, toy
piano, ukulele, and violin, was composed by Michael Roth, for both the Los
Angeles and the New York productions.
Darren Wershler-Henry _ The Tapeworm Foundry _
Toronto-based Wershler-Henry's last book of poems, _Nicholodeon_, was a
seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and
process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with
icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles. _The Tapeworm
Foundry_ is, in some ways, the opposite: a single unpunctuated sentence of
pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning
data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the
seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, "andor."
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/ubu Editons :: Winter 2003 Titles
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/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu
__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com
