In a few days I'm off to Italy (R&R) then England, for the London Small Publishers Fair. The Fair, and 13 Nov, will go down in history as the official release of [ drum roll, please] two new Leafe Press Publications:
1,000 Views of “Girl Singing”
John Bloomberg-Rissman (ed.)
ISBN: 978-0-9561919-1-5
Since there's lots of color. the book’s kinda expensive. It will list for £23.00/$45.00. BUT: if you buy it from us, instead of Amazon or wherever else it's listed, we'll sell it for cost plus a little to help cover postage:
£16.00/$27.00
Here’s the story: I had come to #200 in a project called Autopoiesis and thought: time for a break, a new direction for a while. What to do, what to do? I’d been thinking about bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire project, and about Oulipo, especially Queneau’s Exercises in Style. And I’d been reading (with great pleasure) David Cameron’s Flowers of Bad. So I thought I’d take a poem, and translate it (so to speak) using every algorithm I could find. Next step: find a poem. I was reading Eileen Tabios, and came across her “The Secret Life of an Angel”; this appealed to me vis-à-vis my project, because it is already one step removed from a Jose Garcia Villa poem, “Girl Singing”, to which it is a response. So I had the poem, and the title, which, to please myself, was 1000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’, the Garcia Villa poem from which I would not work, but which was waving from the distance ...
So far, so good. Now, here’s where it gets interesting – to me, at least. I thought I’d do most of the work, while calling for a bit of input from others, à la a couple of Nichol’s “algorithms”. Well, it turned out that responses to my call for the memory translation and the homolinguistic translation were WAY more interesting than I had imagined, and WAY more plentiful. People sent text, vispo, other visuals, audio, video ... So I said hmmmm, I’m now editing an anthology. And my principle for compiling it will be: every time I encounter a “likely suspect” (and I wanted some who were not “professional” artistes) I’ll ask her/him/whatever if they’d like to play. I’d do this til 2008 runs out.Contributors:
Eileen R Tabios
John Bloomberg-Rissman
Geof Huth
Rebeka Lembo
Lolabola
Mark Young
Ernesto Priego
Sam Bloomberg-Rissman
Robert Rissman
Sheila E. Murphy
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Rebekah May
Jean Vengua
Lucy Morris/Ernesto Priego
Alan Baker
Franek Wygoda
harry k stammer
Kuei Chiu
Claire Rissman-Sherr
Rupert M Loydell
Ivy Alvarez
Ed Baker
Giles Goodland
Jared Schickling
Mike Cannell
Yichen Chiu
Steve Mitchell
Cecilia Sophia Ibardaloza
Rolly delos Santos
Tim Gaze
Cralan Kelder
Aileen Ibardaloza
Anny Ballardini
Lida Bushloper
John M. Bennett
C. J. Allen
Sasha Steensen
*for musical and video contributions, please see Girl Singing.com, which will be up and running by the time the book’s released.
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Abdellatif Laâbi
tr. Nancy Hadfield, Gordon Hadfield
ISBN: 978-0-9561919-0-8
£8.95/$15.00
Abdellatif Laâbi was born in 1942 in Fes, Morocco. He is Morrocco's foremost contemporary poet. In 1966 he founded Anfas/Souffles, an important literary review, which provided a focus for Moroccan creative energies. It was banned in 1972. Abdellatif Laâbi was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to ten years in prison for “crimes of opinion” (for his political beliefs and his writings) and served a sentence from 1972-1980. He was then forced into exile in France, where he has lived since 1985.
This single long poem was originally published in 1998 by Editions Paroles d’Aube. Fragments d’une genèse oubliée / Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis is a surrealistic refiguring of Genesis presented in twenty-six “fragments.” As a whole, the work is a mystical yet cynical re-visioning of both the Old Testament and the Koran.
English-French dual text
Check out a sample at Litter.
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If you’re in the Americas, contact j at johnbr dot com.
If you’re in Europa, contact leafepress at hotmail dot com.
If you’re elsewhere, contact either of us.
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I should have on and off (more on than off) connectivity throughout the trip, so we can stay in touch. I’ll be back 16 Nov. Y’all take care now.
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