If you’re in Hyde Park on Sat­ur­day, please come see me read my poems at Majel Con­nery’s fan­tas­tic Salon per­for­mance series.

On the Program:

Larry Zbikowski (guitar)
Harold Olivey (voice)
Michael Rob­bins (poetry)
Des Pickard (singer/songwriter)

at the home of
Sidney Nagel & Young-​Kee Kim
4913 S Kim­bark Ave.
Chicago, IL
7:30p doors
8:00p performances

& if you’re in Hyde Park tomor­row night, please come see Nick Demske & Gina Myers read their poems at Series A, at the Hyde Park Art Center!

Look, I don’t have time to do crit­i­cal jus­tice to Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, so I’m just going to say that it’s the best album of the year by far & you need it in your life. And that I hope what­ever morons at Jive passed on the record are tear­ing their eye­lashes out as they read the jubi­lant crit­i­cal responses. (“Too artsy,” they told him. Like Fellini or some­thing! Rule 4080 proved again.)

1/ From “Antagonism and Crisis,” Joshua Clover’s talk for the Rethink­ing Poet­ics conference:

But what do we lose, in this nuanc­ing? We lose too much. If we don’t lose much descrip­tively, we lose the one idea, the one real sit­u­a­tion that the dis­tinc­tion has been trying to pre­serve: that there is a fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism, that it has two sides, and that they are set against each other in a dynamic that is not eter­nal and abstract but con­crete and his­tor­i­cal. And the loss of this idea is unhap­pier for poetry than any hap­pi­ness we might gain by doing away with the distinction.

…

Anyway this Third Way, this Amer­i­can Hybrid, gen­er­ally uses the lan­guage of “get­ting past” the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nisms between the dominant-​mainstream and the emergent-​experimental (these terms are inex­act, but fairly well-​understood). The con­cep­tion of the hybrid is that we can simply choose to leave the antag­o­nism behind.

2/ From the intro­duc­tion to Clover’s inter­view with MIA in the new Believer:

Rioter or pas­sen­ger, out­sider or insider, rev­o­lu­tion­ary or sell­out? The cat­e­gories don’t work so well these days, if they ever did. This is the point, inevitably, of the music, and it is the music that mat­ters. It is art for a moment when cat­e­gories aren’t work­ing very well, when things are falling apart and cen­ters aren’t hold­ing. It does not try to con­tain this sit­u­a­tion but to reg­is­ter it, to give it a feel­ing, to get a sense of whether it might indeed be late in something—pop music, his­tory, the U.S. empire.

Just a note to say I have a new poem up at The Morn­ing News, which recently started pub­lish­ing poems (by the likes of D. A. Powell & Andrea Cohen, no less). “Slider” is from my “bad romance” period. Hope you dig.