Category Archives: Writing

Spring 2017 Readings & Events

Fri Feb 17:  Reading w Edwin Torres & Yesi Padilla, Verbatim Books, San Diego, 7pm

Sun Feb 19: Performance w SE Barnet, for her Drawings and Other Writing, Poetic Research Bureau, LA, 2pm

Wed Feb 22: Roof Books reading, w Laura Moriarty & Jean Day, Moe’s, Berkeley, 730pm

Tue March 21: Roof Books NY book releases, w Anna Vitale & Marie Buck, Le Poisson Rouge, NYC, 630pm

Thur March 23: Hunter College, details TBA

Fri March 24: “Poetry in a Time of Crisis” w Anna Vitale, Marie Buck, Jasmine Gibson, & Paolo Javier. Berl’s, Brooklyn, 7pm

Sat March 25: reading w Anna Vitale & Marie Buck, The Hiding Place, Philadelphia. 

Thur April 13: reading w Paula Mendoza & Bob Perelman, The Republican, Salt Lake City, 730

Fri April 14: Unpaged: a talk w Craig Dworkin, Salt Lake City Public Library, 1pm 

Discounted copies of THE SHUNT, now back in print

shunt

The new printing came back with the last three pages mussed up, so am offering copies for $8 (shipping included), along with a personalized errata slip. Contact me at dbuuck @ mindspring dot com or paypal me directly at that email.

Blurbs & Reviews:

The Shunt provocatively explores one of our most ordinary experiences of social discomfort—embarrassment for the flailing comedian and his all too visible affective labor—in a strikingly intelligent and utterly heartbreaking way. For all its acerbic tonality, The Shunt’s affective agenda is thus the exact opposite of ironic cynicism, which is one of this brilliantly discomforting book’s most delightful surprises.

— Sianne Ngai

With its stutters, fractures, puns, sarcasms, and ironies, The Shunt is part of a cluster of books recently written by US poets attempting to understand what it means to live in a country that is constantly bombing other countries. But with its relentless attention to the group psychosis that this state of siege induces in US citizens, The Shunt is also something sui generis. This is your brain on war.

— Juliana Spahr

Stuttering, hemming, hawing, failing, flailing, and flopping, the comedian tries to coerce the narrative ideology of wartime into a punch line, but the punch is always awready pre-packed by Big Brother’s Big Other. As Beckett almost observed, nothing is funnier (or sadder, depending on your tolerance for correct allegorical apprehension of permanent crisis) than someone trying repeatedly to slip on a flipping banana peel and getting shut down every time. The Shunt puts the “tic Alpo” back in “political poetry.” — K. Silem Mohammad 

 Review by Stan Apps at Jacket2

Review by Craig Santos Perez

“So Much Depends” @ Floor

new work from We Do the Polis @ Floor ….

*An Army of Lovers* now available

An Army of Lovers, by Juliana Spahr & David Buuck, is now out from City Lights

87286100344190M

upcoming readings:

10/3-5 @ the Poetry and/or Revolution Conference, Santa Cruz/Davis/Berkeley

10/10 @ City Lights Bookstore, 7pm

10/15 @ Radar/Litquake, San Francisco Public Library, 6pm

10/18 @ General Idea, Philadelphia, 7pm

10/20 @ DC Arts Center, Washington, DC, 3pm

The Simulators @ Artbound

29 Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center

29 Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center

an excerpt from a novel in progress…

thanks to Hillary Mushkin for the solicitation–

A Neural Net

downloadable here 

Collectively assembled by Rachel Levitsky & Ira Livingston (OoRS), Jen Hofer (ANTENA), Jen Scappettone, Kathy Westwater, & Seung-Jae Lee (PARK), and myself (BARGE)

for the Ecopoetics Conference panel “Ground Scores: Unburying Ecologies Through Embodied Practice”

 

New publications

itch

“Push” – a performance text by myself & Abby Crain, in the new Itch #15

& “17 Reasons Why” in Mission 17, 2004-2009, ed Clark Buckner & Laura Mott

On Performance & Writing @ Jacket2

Blogging at Jacket2 for the next few months …

Updated Pennsound page

new & old work, including video, here

thanks to Michael Hennessey for putting it together—

INDEX @ Under Under

“Index” for Under Under
at Konsthall C in Stockholm, Sweden
by David Buuck and Juliana Spahr
images by Mikael Lundberg

wall text:
One thousand, nine hundred and ten. Twelve thousand, seven hundred and ninety three. Five. Five hundred. Three hundred and forty thousand. One hundred thousand. Six eight thousand. Four point seven percent. One point two percent. Three point eight percent. Three thousand one hundred and forty. Thirty one thousand. Fifty nine thousand. Six billion, eight hundred and eleven million. Seven hundred and eleven billion, four hundred and twenty one million. Eight hundred and seventy eight million.

before
Participants wrote the numbers by jumping up as high as they could. And they wrote them as large as they could. Attention was paid to the jump, not the writing. They did not erase or edit. It was okay if the numbers overlapped. And they didn’t have to go from left to right. They wrote the numbers in whatever medium they desired. Sharpee was fine. Charcoal was fine. Ideally the writing instrument produced black marks. As many people as desired were used. And these people did this either before or at the opening. The point here was not legibility but difficulty. Yet the piece was not just the jumping, it was also the results. What was created was a collection of number-referencing abstract marks.

"Index" for Under Under by David Buuck and Juliana Spahr

"Index" for Under Under by David Buuck and Juliana Spahr
Underneath the text the following videos looped:
Call Me Maybe Cover – Kunar, Afghanistan – US Army Soldiers 
SABATON – In the army now (Afghanistan War) 
Images of US Soldiers With Afghan Corpses (Graphic NSFW) 
Tribute To The Swedish Soldiers In Afghanistan 
U.S. Army Sniper Engages Enemy Forces In Afghanistan 
Spectacular Footage of Taliban Attacking US Military Base, Afghanistan. 
Swedish soldiers VS Talibans in Afghanistan 
US military, CIA out of control in Afghanistan 
Swedish forces fighting the Talibans in Afghanistan 2011 
US Troops Burning Afghan Taliban Corpses 
Swedish Army Elite – The One And Only 
Gimme Shelter in Iraq and Afghanistan