Summer/Fall 2019
&Now & Whenever It's Needed
Issue 48
Welcome to the special &NOW issue of the Notre Dame Review. Now in its fifteenth year, &NOW is a festival that brings together poets and novelists, fiction authors, artists, critics, musicians, programmers, performers and creators of visual, found, electronic, multimedia and other hybrid forms in a celebration of readings, panels, and other performances of innovative writing. &NOW asks: what happens when writing that crosses boundaries, when new artistic forms, when text, when visual art, when music, when filmmaking, when performance, when critical theory, when tongues, when graphics, when a poem, when a play, when experiments, when literary collage, when performance scores, when sound and visual poetry, when theater, when hyper-opera, when conceptual writing, when theory-fiction, when philosophy, when electronic and multimedia scripts, when live film narration, when ghost catching, when cutting and scratching, when installation, when bilingual, when invented languages, when super-titling, when a notepad, when spirit-writing, when a soundbite, when a computer code, when a ritual, when a bio, when re-verb, when a tag, when trance, when a confession, when a rant, when a protest, when today…. Some of the notes taken at &NOW by Brent Cox, and presented in this issue, offer insight.
The Guardian describes the biennial &NOW Festival as the Anglosphere’s most important celebration of the literary avant-garde. Last year’s edition was held at the University of Notre Dame, and this special issue of the Notre Dame Review offers a sampling of some of the work that was presented at it, including poetry by and an interview with Douglas Kearney, who with Renee Gladman and Johanna Drucker joined a long list of featured readers. The issue contains a suite of works performed online or off-site as well as a suite of critical works presented at one of the many panels held over the course of the two-day festival.
Together they explore the role of language in the formation of identities and social norms; they share a belief that contemporary pressures, especially at watershed moments or moments of political or existential crisis such as the one we are in, require equally outré responses. Perhaps at no time has this been more true than now: a time when the forces of racism, sexism, class warfare, and even planet-wide extinction have absorbed the formerly liberating forms of postmodernism to substitute fictions for reality, and ‘fake news’ for facts, all in defense of the status quo. The subtitle for this edition of &NOW is And Whenever It’s Necessary. Perhaps there has never been a time when the exploration of language, that traditional battleground for social norms, has seemed more necessary. To be a part of future &NOWs, look for us via social media.
Frank Rogaczewski
story
Toward Smart-Ass Proletarian Poetry
Vi Khi Nao
story
Pulverized Oat Wheels
Laawrence Coates
story
The Home They Had Always Looked For
Jennifer Karmin & Bernadette Mayer
poetry
Are We There Yet?
Analeah Rosen
poetry
Weldon Spring
Douglas Kearney & Patricia Hartland
interview
Douglas Kearney in Conversation with Patricia Hartland
Scott Rettberg & Roderick Coover
poetry and photography
Penelope
Christine Hume
nonfiction
Consider the Sex Offender
Michael Workman
performance art
Broke Moves; Intimate Conversation
Intimate Conversation and Broke Moves are written choreographies that may be performed. These work sample videos show each of the videography by Justin Williams, and interpreted by Nicole S. Lane. Broke Moves videography by Tuli Bera, with a performance led by audience members. All performance scores by Michael Workman. Readers/viewers are invited to re-perform these scores and tag Michael Workman (on facebook and instagram: michaelworkman1) in any social media postings. More information at michael-workman.com."
Intimate Conversation (video link)
Jean Dibble & John Matthias
poetry and art
After Five Words Englished from the Russian
Emily Carr
story
Excerpt from Name Your Bird Without a Gun: A Tarot Romance
Paul Cunningham
story
Song of Polymers
Noy Holland
story
Blood Country
Daniel Uncapher
story
The Lion of Lincoln Park
Kanika Agrawal
poetry
from Okazaki Fragments
Brooks Sterritt
story
Excerpt from The History of America in My Lifetime: a novel
Aimee Parkison
flash fiction
Girl in Intelligence Test; Girl in Haircut
Mary-Kim Arnold
essay
Open Wounds: A Poetics of Personal History at the Point of Public Locution
Sarah Roth
essay
Fragments of Diagnosis
Anthony Enns
essay
Paratexuality and the Lost Urtext
Joel Katelnikoff
essay
Christian Bök Recombined: "whatever lives must also write"
Mark Tardi
art
Psychoacustics
“Psychoacoustics” is a project that was performed during the &Now festival held at the University of Notre Dame. Using the famed geometer H.S. M. Coxeter’s dedication and resourcefulness as a guide, I’ve tried to consider my own poetic redrawing of multi-dimensional space within a two-dimensional plane: some elements are more vigorously focused on the pictorial plane, and other elements are purely textual. Overall, the project is a multi-faced meditation on place, corporeality and consciousness in dialogue with the landscapes of Nizwa, Oman using combinations of ink, graphite, charcoal and pastel. One question that lingered in the project was: how to give voice to the pulse of geological time and a landscape indifferent to human life?
Mike Barrett
review
Orgone Grinding and Its Discontents: The Poetry of Frank Rogaczewski
Shira Dentz
hybrid prose
Flecks; Topaz; South; Conjoined; Yellow, Gold, Amber or Red
Amanda Goldblatt
story
The Final Defeat of My Colonialist Body, Washington DC 2017
Ian Hatcher
poetry
Colony
S. Yarberry & Analeah Rosen
poetry
A Manifesto/ A Prolgue; The Royale, St. Louis, Missouri
Larkin Higgins
art
Logographic Drawings: signal/overturned; roadway/intersection; out of control/overturning; left turn/right turn/impact
Douglas Kearney
poetry
Ecce Cuniculus
Becca Klaver
poetry
Walking After Midnight or 9 p.m.; Notes for a Shrinking Future
Jessica Anne
story
Excerpt from I AM A FINITE JESS
Rebecca Goodman
story
from a Likeness of Home
Lauren Russell
essay
Excerpt from Descent
Lance Olsen
story
yellow: one hundred and seventy grams, an excerpt from my red heaven
Brent Cox
art
&NOW Notes: 01; 02; 03; 04
Steve Owen
story
Humanseed
Nick Montfort
poetry
Three Commodore 64 Poems
Daniel Magers
story
Where’s Judy?
Aimee Parkison & Carol Guess
flash fiction
Girl1 in Pink Flower2
J. I. Daniels
story
Body, Etc.
Mez Breeze
story
A Place Called Ormalcy
This story is a special 3D/VR story found online here. The story link above also includes chapter links.
martin nakell
prose
How to Survive a Bombing Raid in a Syrian Village, 2018
Suzanne Scanlon
prose
Resistant Narratives/Resisting Narrative
Richard Holeton
slide show
Afterword(s): Take a Book/Leave a Book
Jennifer Natalya Fink & Julie Laffin
performance
Toxic Tango
Suite of Critical and Nonfiction Presentations given at &NOW
Wojciech Drąg
essay
Collage and Crisis
Gretchen Henderson
essay
Intermedia Genres: Breathing lessons in Changing Climates
Becca Klaver
essay
Saying “No”: The Feminist Poetics of Refusal
Eckhard Gerdes
essay
Against Defining Experimental Fiction