post_moot notes

There's been extraordinary things happening at post_moot! I'm cross-posting this at their blog here.

Ryan Downey, Daniel Citro, and I presented papers yesterday on the first panel (we called it "[INSERTMASHUPWORDHERE]: THE POETICS OF FAILURE or Are You Failing Well Today Dear?"), arriving in Oxford, Ohio with less than thirty minutes to go for our panel (several misadventures later and very late) and found ourselves in a packed hall, much to our surprise. We had expected just a few early comers. The audience, much of it comprised of innocent undergrads, were exposed to a fatal mix of love, sex and dhokha (death, desecration, bullets, failed collages, mangled text-bodies, mangled languages etc, for those not into bollywood) but I think most of them survived.

Holly Bass performed after us: I loved her "vocollage" where she sampled and spasmed between various songs. During the q+a we were getting somewhere, exhausting the audience with rambling replies and trying to dissect the expectations that get set up for "narrative"/"straight" versus "abstract"/"experimental" writing. Then we ran out of time.

Most of the poets/performers from UK/Europe got stranded because of the ash-cloud situation, so people have been stepping in last minute to fill in. During the 5pm panel, Cathy Wagner read instead of Luke Roberts (she also read out some of the work he'd emailed her) and Stan Apps, along with Miami University MA in Poetry candidate, Jacqui Kari. I love Cathy's performances. I can listen to her songs many many times.

Mairead Byrne's presentation on color, chromatic homogeneity, legibility, heiroglyphic systems etc was interesting, though I can't see myself deviating from black fonts-on-white. I wonder if she'd be open to the idea of color as fashion as excess? 

Also, last night, a fascinating reading by the flarf poets (a word we dared not speak). What I remember: Adeena Karasick's preternatural and sexy verbal fireworks, K. Lorraine Graham applying her mascara onstage, K. Silem Mohammad's reconstitution of Shakespearean sonnets in perfect iambic pentameter, Mel Nichols's superpoooke, Rod Smith making us laugh a lot. It was a very long day.