Reading Cohorts - Chris Slaughter

Here we are again ready to passeth all understanding! Keep your hearts and minds multiplied through the knowledge that Mental Marginalia is happening in UNO WEEKO as El Bloombito would say. That's right my perfect brethren of good comfort, we five marginals are offering you benediction next Wednesday's night at the West Cafe for the price of free, so adorn your sacred selves and come join us.

In the meaning whiles, preview Chris Slaughter and let the peace and glory be forever and ever

Reading Cohorts - Paige Taggart

We're on the Gravy Train. The Turkey Gravy Train, but that should not stop you from remembering, marking the calendar, creating an entire memory castle just for storing this one important fact - MENTAL MARGINALIA on 11/30/11, or if you are a Sodurinian, 11/333/IH8^3. You will have a good time. I will make you have a good time. A cheesy flip flips good time. Until then, here is impending cohort Paige Taggart

PRUDE FROG

We charted out these breath patterns on tape recorder.
We ran around kicking and screaming, blue tooth, blue tooth!
Then we swelled really low to the Earth, and impregnated it
with little bomb sockets.
Merely seconds before they were authenticated with a copyright seal.
I kept going around with stickers to preserve my idea, and you, well
you exploded with your own enthusiasm about what happens next.

You can read the rest at La Petite Zine

Reading Cohorts - Christine Kanownik

Heeeeeeeey'all,

Surmise quickly the 11/30/11 happening at West Cafe which shall put some hustle in your bustle and an apocalypse on your hips. Seriously, I expect dancing. Your call if you want it dirty. But we finally finished rigging up the new catalytic salt reactor on the roof this afternoon so the HYPE MACHINE is fully operational, and its already kicking out the buzz. First fist up: Christine Kanownik-

How the West was won.

by CHRISTINE KANOWNIK

Tyra Banks is a cowboy.
She is in the desert.
When she stands on rocks
They become mountains.
And when she descends
They become canyons.
She spits a little when she talks
And the spit becomes rivers.

You can read the rest of this piece at 42Opus

Comin At Ya!

Christine Kanownik
Paige Taggart
Chris Slaughter
Robin Richardson
myself

11/30/11
West Cafe
379 Union Ave
Brooklyn
Presented by Mental Marginalia

A Great Quote on the Future of Literature

"You know, we've had this amazing oral tradition of poetry for nearly as long as anyone can remember. The entirety of our knowledge has been adapted to this tradition. It contains everything we know and have experienced as a civilization. It is the basis for our law, our commerce, our history, and our art. Now you have these Cuneiformists who want to start recording everything. They want to translate the vast beauty of our language, poetry, and culture into symbols, into children's drawings in the sand and claim this will preserve our way of life. Hell, they claim it will make life easier? How? How could the passion of Iklad Munnur's arguments during the Tell Fara inquiry be translated in physical form? How does one capture the richness of Sonitep's voice? Mark this time. The cuneiformist way is the unraveling of our literature."

-Ensur Ugar, Mesopotamian Oral Translator and grump, 3386 B.C.
(what's amazing about this quote is that it was found via the painstaking research in 2011 by Orslo Bilgant into what he deemed Cyclical Bitching by Old Men About How Much Better the Past Was and How All of Literature Faces Imminent Finality Every 20 Odd Years. Orslo found the varied shards of Ugar's quote by reading between the lines of the frequent posts by old men about how terrible x (book, music, art) culture is today compared to the bygone Halcyon days they knew of from their youth)

fence books reading at The Kitchen twitter review

So Fence Books, evermore publishers of always the most amazing, most interesting work, held a reading last night showcasing their fall catalog authors: Nick Demske, Martin Corless-Smith, and Jena Osman. Martin I've seen read before, though I forget where. Jena was/is co-publisher of Chain/Chain Links. Nick's name I'd seen here and there, but I'd not run up on his work before.

Here is my condensed soup of a review of the reading via twitter:
The Fence Books reading at the Kitchen was quite spectacular. Jena Osman had an awesome, Flash (the superhero) infused presentation...to go along with her reading of the poem "Mercury Rising".

I really hope she finds a way to post that online someplace. Martin Corless-Smith remains one of the best reading poets I've seen.

And Nick Demske's reading seems a little much at first, but he wins you over with sincerity, humor, and energy.

Bought all three books. I never buy all three books.

If any of you are thinking, "hey, I just don't have enough BOOK on my holiday gift list": http://fencebooks.fenceportal.org/new_titles


Not my past glory of Year of the Hug reviews (The Year of the Hug was dedicated to reviews of live poetry readings), which maybe I'll just try to import all over here at some point, but still something, and the reading was a good place to extricate some peace after what was, in many way, a BIT of a day.

Horn to Lips

Elegiac sense, the voice quivering near the clearest pitch touching near to monday hearts, lolling head on the shoulder. A son born late into the light. No more impression gongs sounding, weighing down the air, keeping it close to the mouths. Calling back to a dead line to fall down through that empty-tone pit at the bottom of it all, crawling up into the middle of it imaging the silence in its place like darkness, not void of light, but hoarding the images of everything that can be seen. The quiet where you can hear every sound.



No actual sex, but lots of amoramity. Not a place for dreams. Instead she sits against the railing on the steps of the gazebo in the center of the park. She feels protected by the topiary of a dog behind her. The heat drags her out and maybe she'll sleep on a bench near the fountain tonight, not far from the leafy mutt.



Lingering voices in the sun, awaiting a reason to stand up and walk away from the park in the bright and heat, staring like the lost at boys dressed in the bodies of men coming home from their lives to homes full of steam. Your juice for free. Nothing devoured like the mind dejected. Lost song lyrics locked away, replaced people looking, unheard and unregistered.

Memorizing W.C. Williams

I've never been a great memorizer. Speeches were something of an exception to this, so the art was not lost to me, just hidden more often than not. Maybe I just never made the time to do it. I've spent the last three days committing this to memory. I have typed it here from memory, and I think it is right.

This is from W.C. Williams Paterson, speaking of the falls on the Passaic River:

"Jostled, as are the waters approaching
the brink ; his thoughts
interlace, repel, and cut under,

Rise rock-thwarted and turn back
but forever strain forward - or strike
an eddy and whirl ; marked by a
leaf or curdy spume ; seeming
to forget.

Retake later the advance and
are replaced by the succeeding hordes
pushing forward ; they coalesce now,
glass-smooth with their swiftness,
quiet, or seem to quiet as at the close
they leap to the conclusion and
fall! fall in air, as if
floating, relieved of their weight
split-apart, ribbons ; dazed, drunk
on the catastrophe of the descent
floating unsupported
to hit the rocks ; to a thunder,
as if lightning had struck"

Just something to make me use my mind in a different way.

Coveted Nails Comic

For some time now, I have slowly and determinedly been writing an epic pop cultural poem. Wait, no, it's a Pop-Cultural Epic. Yeah, that's the stuff. It is a sprawling affair that comprises 13 episodes, and skews determinedly across media structures and character archetypes to tell what is a simple story: two-people trying to figure it all out. I've written nearly two-thirds of the book, so there is still much more to write and certainly a good deal of editing yet to do.

I am calling the book Coveted Nails.

The book that this will become was always designed with a fluidity into and out of itself, and so I decided a couple of months ago to try and offer something from the book in another form I've been a fan and pursuer of, comics. Here is the first page of Coveted Nails: The Comic, drawn by Dominic Salerno-

A Notice of Judgement

We're crowded together,

tunneling through the humanity

we reciprocate

according to the humor of our

statehood; there are some 

wishing more books carried the

embossments of dreams and the

keys to hell.

We spend disappointment

forgetting our invincibility and

the power of flight.