Renee Gladman and The Reach
This recording from the Naropa Poetics Audio Archives features Renee Gladman (among others) speaking on a panel about narrative across cultures. Renee’s portion is very quiet, you have turn your volume all the way up to hear it and even then, it is difficult. But well worth it. I think the audio accident underscores the shape of her work. Here is a bit of transcription.
“While I am not quite interested in the content of events I am interested in the space between, above, ahead, below and behind them.”
“it’s ceaseless presumptions and possible leaps ”
“it is being in one place and reaching out toward another”
“For me prose has become abstracted from any one kind of writing and is now a gesture, a way of thinking. It exists outside of form. I see it as a reach beyond containable reality, a reach beyond the boundaries and questions of one field or one genre.”
Listen here.
You will also hear Bhanu Kapil giving a forceful and fluid definition of a border.
February 26, 2008
Press Release, Newcomer Can’t Swim
Newcomer Can’t Swim, Renee Gladman. Kelsey St. Press, 2007.
Written as seven loosely connected pieces, Renee Gladman’s Newcomer Can’t Swim mixes poetry with prose to recreate life for the twenty-first century flaneur in urban America, where, amid a confusion of aims, identities, and miscommunication devices, being attuned to different frequencies also means being lost. In this contemporary world of signs that crisscross a global culture, how can one maintain a firm existence and make human connections? Gladman posits a fluid self and parallel existence: “The / body moves away from living, from the flesh and bone of life, / and becomes regions. I take on / water. I look outward.” In languages of elegy and splintered consciousness, Newcomer holds all frequencies together, keeping the contradiction of a life that animates the “I” of this book at the same time that it goes on without her.
February 24, 2008
A Reading by Renee Gladman
In January 2008 I met Renee Gladman for the fist time when she flew to San Francisco from Brown University, where she teaches, to give a reading at my alma mater, the California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC). Since my time there, the San Francisco campus has acquired an entire building devoted to its graduate writing program. Renee read in a spacious room with her back to door length windows overlooking an urban garden. She read from work so recent she showed us the editing marks she was still making on the page. She then read from Newcomer Can’t Swim, a book that redefines the term flaneur by creating confusion that refuses to resolve itself into clarity for confusion’s sake. Being lost is a value in this book. Book designer Jeff Clark’s abstract cover resembles the hull of a barge submerged in rusty water. >
When CCA faculty, Gloria Frym introduced Renee, she said some people might interpret her writing as surreal, but they would be wrong. During the Q & A Renee said that after writing one sentence, she’ll often write another that exists in an entirely different reality. A visual echo of this idea, the section titles run off the edges of the pages. Renee described the form of Newcomer as a collection of tableaus or settings for performative acts by characters. Tableaus they may be, but there is nothing still about them.
Posted by Ramsay Breslin, editor, Newcomer Can’t Swim by Renee Gladman, published by Kelsey Street Press in December 2007.
Berssenbrugge/Smith collaboration
My history at Kelsey Street began in 2006 with the publication of Concordance, a collaboration between poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and visual artist Kiki Smith. Our artists don’t illustrate, any more than our writers caption images. These books are true collaborations, by which I mean a collective labor in which each party puts the same number of peas on each side of the scale. The weight is light, the way the soul is light, and yet, the balance is maintained between artists whose work speaks for itself without the words that accompany it, and vice versa.
–Ramsay
January 20, 2008
From Letterpress to Hypertext–KSP on the Web!
In 2004, Kelsey St. Press celebrated its 30th anniversary. Now, just four years later, we are excited to say that we are growing and changing in many ways. What started in 1974 with an old letterpress dressed in leopard print in Patricia Dienstfrey’s basement has extended its arc through pixels and html. With much thanks to Jerrold Shiroma, who redesigned our web site, we can offer online ordering for our readers for the first time. Please try out this new feature and if you don’t already have it, add Renee Gladman s Newcomer Can’t Swim (2007) to your shopping cart!
The internet has become a vital part of today’s small press world and as a long time member of the publishing community, KSP is thrilled to begin this blog and have a voice in this forum. Like any good blog, the goal is to keep you up-to-date on projects, readings and other news related to our authors, artists and friends in innovative writing. But we also hope to bring you special features—not only interviews with our authors and artists but by newer writers, book artists and designers. Just as with works like Symbiosis and our most recent, Concordance, we welcome collaboration and we are eager to see where that can go in the more impromptu and open space of the blog.
In the next year or two, I hope to revisit and blog about the KSP oeuvre from start to finish, to better familiarize myself, as a new member with our history, but also to revitalize dialogue around these books. This kind of re-imagining is happening on many levels at KSP. Other members are exploring possibilities for e-books, re-issuing out-of-print works, and, any moment now, you will be able to visit our Listen page and hear readings and other audio from KSP writers. We have been able to make these recording thanks to Ross Craig’s know-how and generous donation of studio space. Stay tuned for recordings from Bhanu Kapil, Kathleen Fraser, Laynie Brown, Susan Gevirtz and more!
And please email me with your questions, comments, or ideas about blog features, interviews, guest writers, etc. Also, don’t forget to send me links to your personal blog or press so I can be sure to add them to the side bar. Finally, be sure to join our brand new e-mail list. Click on the About page to sign up.
Posted by Amber DiPietra.