Mike Lala

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You Are Nowhere

This tumblr is no longer active - for all updates, check out my website.

[mikelala-blog]

Exit Theater Now Available for Preorder

I'm so excited to reveal the front cover of my first book, Exit Theater, and to announce that it is now available for preorder. You can click the image above or the links below to your preferred outlet.

From Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Theater-Colorado-Prize-Poetry/dp/1885635532 UPC (the distributor): http://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3042-exit-theater Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/exit-theater-mike-lala/1124523653?ean=9781885635532 and Powell's: http://www.powells.com/book/exit-theater-9781885635532/61-0

And check out this very special bonus/promo deal from The Atlas Review, publisher of my long poem/chapbook, In the Gun Cabinet.

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Twenty-Four Exits (A Closet Drama) is a Present Tense Pamphlet

“Twenty Four-Exits (A Closet Drama)” - my brief play-poem documenting the covert war against Iran's nuclear program, the killing of an American family, and the people who made it possible - appears alongside an incredible list of writers as part of Danny Snelson and Mashinka Firunts' Present-Tense Pamphlets, a print/digital series they edited in conjunction with the exhibition “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s – 1980s” / the Present Tense Symposium at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern U.

You can read every one of these pamphlets by clicking on the link to the series here. There's amazing work by Toby Altman, Emily Barton Altman,Caroline Bergvall, Rob Fitterman, Shiv Kotecha, Sawako Nakayasu, Allyson Paty (SCORE POEMS!!!), Udita Upadhyaya, and more.

Read “Twenty-Four Exits” here.

BONUS: expect a full radio play (along with other recordings from my forthcoming full length, EXIT THEATER) in the weeks to come.

The full list: Chris Alexander, Avi Alpert, Toby Altman, Emily Barton Altman, Caroline Bergvall, Tom Comitta, Allen Conkle & Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Alessandro De Francesco, Roksana Filipowska & Maria Murphy, Aaron Finbloom & Sandeep Bhagwati, Rob Fitterman, Becket Flannery, Angela Genusa, Mark Johnson, Jennifer Karmin, Hans-Henning Korb, Shiv Kotecha, Mike Lala, Timothy Leonido & Jordan Topiel Paul, Nora Mapp,Didier Morelli, Ira S. Murfin, Sawako Nakayasu, Allyson Paty, Coral Pereda, Joshi Radin & Brian M. John & Linda Tegg, María Salgado, Fred Schmalz, Udita Upadhyaya, and Wilmer Wilson IV

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In the Gun Cabinet Reviewed at The Rumpus

A rave review of In the Gun Cabinet by Julie Marie Wade appears today at the Rumpus: 

The past is a place where everything is also something else, even and especially ourselves...I can think of few collections more necessary or irreplaceable than this one.

Read it here.

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In the Gun Cabinet Reviewed at Entropy

Toby Altman has written an incredibly incisive review of In the Gun Cabinet over at Entropy, alongside reviews of books by Nikki Wallschlaeger, Carrie Lorig, and Magus Magnus. Read it here.

Late in the poem Lala demands, “[A]m I so seduced       I believe / the time I spend / & what I produce / are untethered to the economy I live by”? In the Gun Cabinet thus engages a—perhaps the—longstanding avant-garde preoccupation: how, Lala asks, can the aesthetics of modernism be rescued from Clement Greenberg and the CIA? How can modernism be transformed from a tool of state power into a politically radical weapon against the state, its imperialism, its culture of violence? If the question is canonical, Lala’s answer swerves away from the tired, standard strategies of (to take an entirelyinnocent example) language writing. Rather than placing his faith in, say, syntactic disturbance or radical parataxis—that is, in an acceleration of modernism’s own aesthetic strategies—he uses those strategies to describe himself, to locate himself in an economy of violence. And vice versa: he uses his personal history as a mapping tool, which allows him to sketch the contours of contemporary violence. In this sense, his work stages a rapprochement between many modes of 20th century writing: mingling avant-garde difficulty with confessional directness, polemical energy with aesthetic depth and beauty. 

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Two Poems in Denver Quarterly

Two new poems from Exit Theater appear in the latest Denver Quarterly.

You can buy the issue here.

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New Work from Points of Return: [The World Killer]

I’m happy that this piece from a new project, Points of Return, appears today in The Offing, thanks to Morgan Parker and Christine Larusso. It’s called, rather unimaginatively, “The World Killer,” as it borrows largely from Lucy Ives' fantastic and devastating novel The Worldkillers (from her book of the same title, which you can and should purchase here.  

A brief statement on this project, should you care to read:

Two years ago Dolan Morgan asked me to write something interacting with a story from his book That's When the Knives Come Down, "Cells." What resulted was a weird cento-esque excerpting and reworking of his story involving handwriting, images, and some very basic xerography, which I called “The Small Room.”

After a relatively unproductive year spent feeling down on my work, reading obsessively through climate studies, and making little notes in a mess of a Word doc, I started thinking about this idea of points in time in which people might make the collective decision to move away from fossil fuels, back to safe levels of carbon in the atmosphere, and what those returns, variously, might look like and mean for our lives. I saw that a lot of my thoughts were running alongside ideas I found in texts I was reading - texts by Paolo Virno, Mark Augé, Celan, Neruda, and contemporary writers Dolan Morgan and Lucy Ives. One night I went to bed, and between wakefulness and sleep I had what I guess some people call a vision. A white page with printed text falling down over a surface, followed by a translucent page falling over the printed text, slightly obscuring it, followed by bits and scraps of differently colored paper with handwriting falling over the vellum. Mysticism disturbs and embarrasses me but the vividness of this scene, whatever you want to call it, was inescapable. A few weeks later, I went to Detroit, holed up in a friend's studio, and worked out a plan, and over the next (last) summer made more than 100 images composed with paper, printed text, vellum, colored paper, ink, sharpie, and xerography, scanning the images into a computer and formatting them into plates. Every part of this process was recycling, salvage, and waste; the ideas in this project aren't mine, though they terrify and inhabit me. The language is by and large from or based off language in other texts. Obscene amounts of paper were used, ruined, smudged, re-used, torn, glued, and trashed (but recycled). The result is a probably unprintable, imperfect and loose collection that is an homage to writing I love; ideas that are central to my sense of ethics (and still, not mine); an expression of personal limits, ineptitude, and anxiety; and a lament for a dying world.

“The World Killer” is the first part of Points of Return to appear online, thanks to the generosity of Ives, The Offing, and a number of photographers who believe in the possibilities of Creative Commons (or who simply let me use their photographs). All of those sources are below, and can be found in the Works section at the end of the piece. 

I look forward to sharing more from Points of Return with you in our shared, rapidly narrowing, yet salvageable, future.

Works

by order of appearance

Lucy Ives, The WorldKillers, SplitLevel Texts, 2014. 9780985811143

Mark Augé (trans. John Howe), The Future, Verso, 2014. 9781781685662

Paolo Virno (trans. David Broder), Déjà Vu and the End of History, Verso, 2015. 9781781686126

M R, “Mansion Exterior, Epernay,” Flickr, 2015. Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-No Derivatives.

Jypsygen, “Belo Mansion Foyer,” Flickr, 2011. Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 2.0.

Kansas Sebastian, “04a 8 Chester Pl – Doheny Mansion – HCM-30 – Foyer (E),” Flickr, 2010. Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 2.0.

Mara Kofoed, A Blog About Love, Untitled, from post “Christmas in B-Town: Christmas Dinner in Park Slope,” 2014.

Allan Harris, “New York Christmas – The Morgan,” Flickr, 2014. Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 2.0.

Leeds Museum and Galleries, “South Bedroom,” Flickr, 2007. Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 2.0.

Paolo Margari, “il giardino di sopra. Palazzo cezzi-tamborrino, lecce, salento, Italy,” Flickr, 2009. Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Dervatives 2.0.

Allan Harris, “New York Christmas – The Morgan,” Flickr, 2014. Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 2.0.

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In the Gun Cabinet reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail

This is a world of sharp color—black, white, blue, red—and texture—wood appears often, as well as images of drawers and veils. We are in the theatrics of the body as well as of the mind. Memory plays tricks on us and recollection of trauma is deceitful. Mike Lala has proven that form can do much more than we thought by subverting our expectations.In the Gun Cabinet is an astonishing act of formal accomplishment.

- Simona Blat for The Brooklyn Rail

Read more here.

And if you want one of the last 10 copies.

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EXIT THEATER wins the Colorado Prize for Poetry

For the last four years, I've been working on a book of poems - my first full length - a book that's gone through many iterations (and submissions), and is tied to this very personal crisis I'm continually having with myself about the value, because everything must have a value, of making art, writing poetry no less, in a time of war.

This book is called EXIT THEATER, and I'm honored and extremely grateful to Tyrone Williams for having chosen it for the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry. It will be published later this year by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State. 

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New Interview - Brooklyn Poets

Click here for an interview with Jason Koo and Justin Maki of Brooklyn Poets. 

In the Gun Cabinet comes out of these complex personal relationships to family, paternity and brotherhood; placelessness; state violence; and on a very basic level the knowledge that the hand that fed me as a child is the hand of death. It’s one aspect of my life—who I am—that I needed to put down in a time of war.

You can also hear me read a short excerpt from In the Gun Cabinet:

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In the Gun Cabinet Release 3/19

In the Gun Cabinet releases Sat. 3/19 at 7 p.m. at La Sala in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

58 N. 3rd Street (back of Cantina Royale), Brooklyn L train to Bedford, G train to Grand/Metropolitan

Featuring readings by: Mike Lala (In the Gun Cabinet) Natalie Diaz (When My Brother Was an Aztec) Simone White (Of Being Dispersed)

Free and open to the public. 

Facebook event here.

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In the Gun Cabinet available for preorder

My long-poem/play-turned-chapbook, In the Gun Cabinet, is available for preorder from The Atlas Review’s TAR Chapbook series, here.

Here’s what editor Natalie Eilbert has to say about it:

In the Gun Cabinet is a multimedia long poem by Mike Lala that blends oppositions with a mastery of language and trouble. The long, eponymous poem is theatrical in its starkness, pantomiming a danger that has ended and replays on loop. Here, memory is an indictment. Violence and whim walk the long path toward and away from place. Place is home or it is militant. One wears the uniform of birth or else the uniform of a soldier or else the uniform of a body, cock out and sentenced to wreckage.

Here, the gun cabinet rises as a monolith to annunciate a series of cruel family events, becalmed of violence as much as it is complicit with a violence. Embedded in this chapbook are screenshots of static, a dismantling of roles, an appetite for destruction, an interrogation of trauma, and a one-act play of self. Lala writes,

I was born, beauty ended my appetite for destruction cock out, tongue fluttering under the pantry as it emptied

On-sale in February. Available for preorder now. Get 'em while it's hot and terrifying. (Spoiler alert: It will remain hot and terrifying until we are dust.)

Promo image by Tom Oristaglio.

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New work at LitHub

Moby Dick, Frank Stella, ambition and blubber. Read it here.

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Upcoming events / readings

Thurs., Oct. 22, 8 p.m. - Silent Barn Benefit, Molasses Books, Brooklyn, NY

Tues., Nov. 10, 7:30 p.m. - w/ Plays Inverse/Justin Limoli et. al, SOLAS, NY, NY

Sat., Nov. 14, 12:20 p.m. - Moby Dick Marathon NYC, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, NY

Fri., Dec. 18, 7 p.m. - w/ Billy Mark et. al, Ditto Ditto Books, Detroit, MI

Sat., Dec. 19, 1:30 p.m. - The Writers Block @ Detroit Film Theater (Premier. Dir. Katie Barkel, HDV & Super 8, 76 min, 2015)

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New chapbook: IN THE GUN CABINET

My long poem IN THE GUN CABINET drops next year from The Atlas Review’s TAR Chapbook Series, alongside new work from Soleil Ho, Megan Giddings, Zoe Dzunko, and Roberto Montes. See you in 2016.

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Young Poets on “What Is a Culture?”

Amy King continues a particularly luminous residency at the Poetry Foundation Blog, Harriet, with some questions about culture and community in poetry. I answered. Read here.