Review 2

Abstract

PERF Sara Larsen America! Review Review2 Chris Pusateri There is a sense in the small press community, in the Bay Area and around the country, that the writing happening now rustles the tops oftrees. An awakening is at hand; the readings around town are the very eye of it; and Small Press Traffic bounces the light around the mind. October 7, 2005: SPT presents readings by the renowned language poet Lyn Hejinian, and Paolo Javier, a young writer from New York. Before the k reading, there is the usual flurry of activity. Chapbooks and literary mags ^ exchange hands; book projects, writing salons, and other upcoming read- ^L ings generate a hum ofchatter. Reading series, especially SPT, serve as a ^A gathering ofthe tribes—a place to talk poetics and compare notes, to be ^^L inspired in the archaic sense: to breathe life into. ^^PSPT's reading series is the heart of experimental writing in San ^ Francisco, housed in a dim, intimate theatre/lecture hall at the California College of the Arts. Renowned for presentations of innovative work by established and emerging poets, SPT enters its fourth decade ofpresenting poets and writers whose work challenges and defies the boundaries of academically acceptable or "fashionable" poetics. SPT had its inception in 1974 in the backroom of a small bookstore, Paperback Traffic, in the Castro district. There it was conceived as a "non-profit small press book center, which would commit itselfto the needs of small presses throughout the U.S. and to the needs ofthe poets and writers these small presses represent." The bookstore no longer exists, but SPT has kept its original promise to cultivate a thriving, synergetic community for writers ofcolor, queer writers, and experimental writers. Readers in the SPT series vary wildly and have included Helen Adam, Charles Bernstein, John Ashbery, Norma Cole, Robert Duncan, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Juliana Spahr, and Jack Spicer—the list goes on. New Bay Area writers find a home here as well: be on the lookout for the work of Stephanie Young, Brandon Brown, Brent Cunningham, Del Ray Cross, Melissa Benham, and Taylor Brady, among others. Most people here have known Hejinian's work for a long while, and I'll admit that I'm nervous. In the ebb and flow of influence, Hejinian's work has in recent years receded from my personal sense of poetics. I have set aside her wonderfully complicated, investigative works, including the famous My Life (1987), in favor of other forms. Here is a chance to renew my fascination, to come back to the work with different eyes. But first up: Paolo Javier, and it's always a pleasure to discover a new writer. And his work is striking, fun, lyrically candid. Javier has energy and charisma from the moment he walks across the stage. "I feel like 1 should break-dance," he says, playing with the indelible energy he finds in a lineage that includes, as introducer Del Ray Cross notes, Ted Berrigan and Rilke. There are threads of all kinds of speech here: American, Tagalog, pop-culture refuse; a zany dance of repetitions. From the poem "Oh Grandiose Why Fecund": why hasten alter why in Manila do you notch trouble why laughfatigue siege, why why lemonade why a low exterior regresses why azaleas ofZaléela Montes The room crackles with urges to applaud every piece, while I scribble words like sing, organic, personal/political, and quotes like "death as a vanishing image" or "In the vast emptiness of a water pitcher, the loss of a host." Tanya Brolaski introduces Lyn Hejinian, noting that Hejinian is "endlessly relevant, inventive, innovative while remaining highly pleasurable," and pointing to the one-line-per-day blog "My Life by Lyn Hejinian," whose author is an imposten Hejinian, laughing, pronounces this latter..."creepy." She reads from Lola, her new chapbook, which she describes as a circus in a "Northern-California, small-town battlefield." Language is a player's field, and the reading amuses. "We want to piss in brilliant colors"; "even before I existed I was at work on myself; "1999 minus ice is the turn of the century." The audience becomes goofy-drunk on Hejinian's reading, on the...