My name is Phill Provance; I am a person person who does things things....
Some Other Little Things:
AceHoyle.com
The Baltimore Sun
InQuest Gamer
Heartbreaker
decomP magazinE
Word Riot
Orbis #145
Orbis #147
The Axe Factory Review
Arsenic Lobster
Danse Macabre
Cha
Cy Gist Press
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10. “Do something fascinating, then live off the proceeds from sperm donation.” And No. 1…. 1. “Rely on social security.”
9. “Win Jeopardy.”
8. “Work at Wal-Mart.”
7. “Perform some feat of unnatural ridiculousness for which you will become famous in the ‘Guinness Book of World Records.’”
6. “Endear yourself to a wealthy patron.”
5. “Cross the street slowly so that someone eventually hits you with his car and you can sue for an immense sum in damages.”
4. “Work around asbestos, then sue your formal employer when diagnosed with lung cancer.”
3. “Participate in several drug trials until you begin suffering from bleeding bowels, seizures and all manner of awful things, then, yes darlings, sue.”
2. “Make millions as a day trader.”
Dear Readers,
Well, so my reading at the studio of friend and painter Shelton Walsmith last month seems to have gone well, and Mark and I are trucking right along with sales. I’ll be sure to post a picture of the chap’s cover when Mark gets back from Spain and gets the details for The Day the Sun Rolled Out of the Sky up on the Cy Gist Press blog.
While we wait for that, (but only if you are part of my so far 424 person-strong “inner circle” on Facebook) you can view some pictures of me, Ben Fama and Natalie Lyalin reading at Yardmeter Editions Thirteen—plus some of Doug Campbell’s exhibited paintings—in my Facebook photo gallery.
If, on the other hand, you are not part of my Facebook friend list, you have two options: Add me (I will of course accept), or don’t and miss the pics. Also, you can check out some other new developments with the name “Phill Provance” stamped on them by visiting Arsenic Lobster, where my poem “Hard to Say” went up today in their 24th issue.
What’s more, you can read my bio (this time with the word “new” in it) on Danse Macabre magazine’s About Us page. Our 42nd issue, “Nussknacker,” has yet to appear, I’m afraid, likely due to the holidays, but when it does you will have a very long and, I hope, perceptive review of Mark Lamoureux’s Spectre. And, then, you can stop over at the Lantern Review and read some (possibly) nice things one of their editors said about “St. Petersburg Has Many Churches.”
Finally, if you are really feeling froggy and live in the New Jersey/NYC/Philadelphia area, you are invited to attend my next reading as a presenter for the River Read reading series. This upcoming event will take place on Jan. 9, 2011, at NovelTeas, which is located at 78 Bridge Avenue, Red Bank, N.J. 07701. You can find all this on the blog of host and poet John Petrolino.
As for me, I’ll be up at some undisclosed location in the Poconos skiing with my family till New Years. In between times I’ll also be taking intermittent breaks to watch more episodes of one of my all-time favorite Britcoms, Blackadder, whose unabridged, definitive DVD set my brother Mike got me for Christmas.
God, I love that show! I’m even watching the audio commentaries that come on the disks. And I almost never do that. What can I say, Rowan Atkinson (whom you probably know as Mr. Bean) is just the funniest man alive and decidedly on my “List of the 10 People I’d Like to Befriend If I Ever Do Anything Substantially Worthwhile.” If you have never seen Blackadder you’ve got to get this DVD set and catch up. Otherwise you’re a minger.
Well, so, I suppose that’s all from me at the moment. But I did want to add one final note here because it seems people are getting my name wrong in several publications. So let me introduce myself: I am Phillip DeNune Provance, decedent of Mareen Duvall and a very distant relative of President Obama and President Truman, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, actor Robert Duvall and Iraq War whistle blower Samuel Provance.
Professionally I am a writer, editor and poet and as such I choose to go by the name “Phill Provance”—which appellation I feel has a familiar and folksy ring to it. This is the nom de plume I gave myself while in college, but often the (presumable) oversight of presiding editors has caused spelling errors.
Therefore, if you find writing under the names “Phil Provance,” “Phill Provance,” “Phill Provence,” “Phil Provence,” “Phillip D. Provance,” “Phillip DeNune Provance” or any other unofficial, but likely variation it is definitely me. (Only one other “Phil Provance” has existed in the cyber age: A middle-age, distant relative who was a building contractor in Missouri and who sadly passed away recently.)
I hope that clears up any and all confusion you might have.;-)
-Phill Provance
P.S.: Sorry, Adam, I have no clue how to input a German esszet in Tumblr, but I did consider trying at least.:-)
To plaster over my bemoaning I thought I would post a positive note here on something very cool you can do with a line of poetry. Today, Zachary Schomburg posted this line from a Julie Doxsee poem:
I can’t remember if this line came from “Undersleep” or one of Julie’s newer books, but it is fantastic, isn’t it? Check out the lack of punctuation. It’s as if you can read the line multiple ways; she is using a kind of internal enjambment to achieve ambiguity. For instance, you can read it as:
“I pretend your hands are the cleaved sunup. This morning’s window hums toward the width of my animal syllable.”
OR
“I pretend you hands are the cleaved. Sunup, this morning’s window hums toward the width of my animal syllable.”
OR
“I pretend your hands are the cleaved sunup this morning’s window hums toward… the width of my animal syllable.”
It’s very nice, imho, to have these as options, or take them as all part of the same line. The words aren’t just working overtime. They’re working non-stop. They don’t stop, but are kinetic because they are simultaneously offering different readings and different ways of reading (take them together, or choose one or any two) that make one line jump into three, then fold into two, then back to one—then over to another two.
It’s very cool, shifting meaning like that—as if Julie has taken her experience and walked it past some amorphous fun-house mirror. What’s more, this weirdness and de-centering of meaning removes the burden of conveyance from Julie’s words. Like Zach said in one of his poems, “Look through a complex eye and see 1,000 of everything.”
Julie is giving us that complex eye, and we are not just seeing 1,000 things but 1,000 ways of seeing things. And in this way, I feel, she’s elevating her volta (the weird moment in the poem that changes everything; See: Zach’s sudden jaguars in “Scary, No Scary,” or even that mental shift you experience between lines 12 and 13 in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets) from simple tactile phenomenon to noumenon (something you perceive with your mind, not your senses).
She is doing this (at least to me), and not only wiping the map clean of simple signposts; she is also making us wonder if the hidden treasure of meaning is found by putting the meanings together, combining the best two, or choosing the best one as if we are playing at the Monty Hall problem. Then, too, she is making us wonder if we’ve found all the doors and if there really is a prize meaning behind one of those doors at all.
If not, the prize is whatever we put there ourselves. And probably that is the healthiest thing. After all, contrary to what your high school English teacher might have told you, a poem is not a riddle. Otherwise, we would not have two separate words for these verbal arrangements. And paradoxically, by making her line more of a riddle, Julie is in fact making her poem less of a riddle because we can’t say if there is really anything to “figure out” or “understand.”
Julie’s line looks more like entertainment and experience—like film—once we see this, than it looks like a puzzle we have to figure out. And maybe that’s what poetry needs to do. It needs to not be a puzzle. It needs to be a living art form people access for pleasure. Poets need to be less involved with trying to “trick” people and more involved with making people think, “Hmm, I’d like to relax and read a poem.”
A great film does not bother its viewers with the trivialities of its inventiveness or its cliches. It simply conveys experience and emotion. Whether there is meaning behind that, or even if part of that experience is experiencing its inventiveness is neither here nor there.
“Casablanca,” for instance, has one of the most wobbly prologues you’ll ever see, and it pulls many things from the hardboiled genre that saturated the literary pulp market of the 1930s. But we barely notice this, and that can hardly be called an effect of time because the folks in our grandparents’ generation barely noticed it either. It’s just a captivating film. It makes us experience and feel something. And this is what the best poetry should do too. By that standard, Julie’s line is a “Casablanca”—but a helluva’lot more inventive.
Very, very, very cool….
And to think Julie does all this just by cutting a few select dashes and dots very precisely. In the words of Liz Lemon, “I want to go there.”
P.S.: You should probably buy these books by Julie:
Here: http://www.blackocean.org/objects-for-a-fog-death/
AND
Here: http://www.octopusbooks.net/main.html
If you like poems as much as I do you should read this: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/piccinnini-ashbery.shtml
and this: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-baus-ivb-king.shtml
They make so much sense together in that weird tenuous way that makes you want to sit for a whole day and fill in the planks. Of the bridge. See, I am doing it. Kudos to Jacket’s editors for putting together an issue with such great synergy. I mean, it is from last year, but if you are just now discovering it, isn’t it new?:-)
The first reading for “The Day the Sun Rolled Out of the Sky” will be in Brooklyn Nov. 13, 2010. You should go. I know I will.:-P
This is exciting! I just got some of the first preliminary art for a top-secret comics project called “Children of the Gods,” or “CotG,” which I’ll be working on after I finish up the chapbook. Check it out and let me know what you think. My artist, Edgar Arce, is a genius, no?
“Well I’m on my way/I don’t know where I’m going/I’m on my way/I’m takin’ my time but I don’t know where.”
Wow! I’m just ecstatic. My very first Pushcart Prize nomination came in from everyone’s favorite spot to find up-and-coming Asian poets. Also a nomination from them for the Best of the Web award. The nominated poem, “St. Petersburg Has Many Churches,” is definitely my best, and I’m so glad that’s the one that got the nomination. Hell! I’m just fucking excited by this, excited by getting some assurance that I’m moving in the right direction. This, plus the chapbook…. There’s still a long way to go; I need a book and to win a prize. But who knows. And at least I’m making some headway. Damn! How cool.:-)
Hi, guys. Here’s issue 12 of Cha put together by the lovely Tammy and her intended, Jeff (who is cool enough, by the by, to have the initials “J.Z.”). I am in it. But please don’t just read me. Cha, you see is Hong Kong’s first English-language online magazine, and as a result, it attracts the attention of many awesome poets and fiction writers (as well as press from all over). Yessir, I’m quite proud of this one. In fact, despite Tammy’s gushing, I’m quite sure I’m not the best in the lot. So read ‘em all and tell me how terribly awful mine were comparatively. Or don’t. Well, just say something, you know. Otherwise I won’t know if you read them at all.:-)
Check out this post from Cha editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming about what she thinks of my poetry. I’m just floored by the comparison she makes and am extremely grateful. I also want you guys to get to know Tammy as I’ve been following her stuff since I found her “Sending You Away” in decomP. She is exactly what a poet should be, in my opinion: Succinct, clear, thoughtful, expressive and powerful.
I’d also suggest checking out “Love and Lust” to get a feel for the new and exciting things happening across the Pacific (and in Tammy’s case, across the Atlantic). Perhaps English is the current Lingua Franca, but let’s not forget the influence of Asian poetry on folks like Pound that touched off what became Modernism.
What we have today, then, owes itself almost entirely to the Japanese tradition, and I think it’s very worthwhile delving deeper into Eastern poetry for more influences, even if it’s only for new ways of looking at things. Many of the mental back flips we see, for instance, in Zach’s, Heather’s and Matvei’s work come from similar neural performances from the Russians. And such perspectives are healthy for the troubled Western brain. As the poem Tammy is about to publish says:
When you look at a tree in a garden
it is easier if you look at all the things that are not a tree.
When you sleep under a blanket
it is important to remember it’s not the blanket that is warm,
but the space between it and your skin.
What it is, in my opinion, is the ability to transform otherness into familiarity, which could be very important for all humans to learn as we grow closer together. I am not advocating a loss of classic Western individualism, which I see as invaluable. But what I see at the heart of Western decay, a disregard for everything but the self, could be turned in on itself through simply identifying the self as distinct but inclusive.
Think about it: Self is essentially a composite of experience and experience is usually the result of interaction. We are each unique and special and entirely ourselves, but we are this way because of everyone we’ve interacted with. It is kind of like a social lineage to match our genetic one. And just imagine if the stock broker who went to college because he spoke with some derelict poet who morned his not making better career decisions had thought about himself this way; had thought of his individual self as everyone else.
Perhaps in such cases the world would be a better place. Perhaps combining Eastern and Western culture into World Culture could take us there. I think a good place to start on this project is to read Eastern poetry, and a great gateway into this is to read the works of Eastern writers working in English like Tammy.
