Chaps: Sara M. Larsen's Doubly Circulatory

Just before Thanksgiving, Anne Kingsbury and Karl Gartung, founders of Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, invited everyone passionate or curious about contemporary innovative writing and art to mark the occasion of their twenty-fifth birthday. Anne and Karl established the non-profit arts center in 1980 with a vision, as Karl then wrote, "to prove the living artist." Since then, their original stock of fewer than one thousand titles has grown to over 27,000 and includes an incredible array of small and fine press poetry books and broadsides. Because Anne and Karl remain dedicated to pursuing their original mission, artists working outside the mainstream continue to find a resource and space to share their work. In its inimitable way, Woodland Pattern called on poets, an essayist, fiction writers, a filmmaker, and musicians to sing them into their twenty-sixth year. Celebrations began Friday night with a reading and film screening, bringing together local talent and nationally known writers. Peggy Hong read work filled with movement and anatomy and was a perfect choice for the opening reader, bringing a tone of intimacy and celebration that endured throughout^ the weekend. Terri Kapsalis then read essays haunted with other voices: the] two main pieces, "Bound" and "Most Beautiful Experiment," were excerptsj from a larger project on the history of hysteria. "Bound," particularly arresting , examines the possession ofnuns in a French convent in the 1630s. Lisa Jarnot was the final reader of the evening, and her frequently funny, sound-based poems were enchanting. The sound repetitions seemed, with their sly shiftings, to extend indefinitely while remaining oddly self-contained. The effect was labyrinth-like. Friday concluded with Jennifer Montgomery's film Notes on the Death of Kodachrome documenting her cross-country trek to collect Super 8 film equipment loaned to various friends years earlier. The highpoint of the film is its final sequence, when, having recovered all ofher equipment, Montgomery uses Super 8 to recreate a dream both hilarious in its portrayal ofherself as a megalomaniacal filmmaker and lovely in its surface lushness. Celebrations reconvened Saturday evening with KikiAnderson and Roberto Harrison as the opening acts for Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. Anderson's poetry can be terse and edgy, and what seemed to me her most successful works were those that read through other texts. "The Cook," one in a series ofpoems drawn from endnotes to Balzac's Père Goriot (1834), was especially well crafted. • Harrison read from two forthcoming manuscripts, Counter Daemons and "Bicycle," a sequence from Os. Working with computer concepts, Harrison writes incantatory poems rife with anaphora that seem far more rooted in a natural world than in one of drives and gigs. '*While each of the events was lovely in its own right, the Waldrops were for me the highlight ofthe weekend. Both Rosmarie and Keith have enormous presence and graceful delivery. Rosmarie read from her newest ':books, Love, Like Pronouns (2003) and Blindsight (2003). More than anything, these poems convey an earnest mindfulness: how it is to think through language and to make language think. The musings of Jacob Delafon, the character ofKeith's latest book, The Real Subject * ' (2004), had the audience in high spirits by the end of the evening. ,. ' ' When the Waldrops read from one of their collaborative pieces, it was perhaps my favorite part of the entire weekend. Picking up ,^^0/Lthe last line of the other's previous stanza and writing/reading ^TÉ^·fromthatpoint, the work sustainedanevocativerecursiveness. 11^CtAs if that weren't enough, the night ended with turkey and 'memm. · - homemade pudding back at Anne and Karl's. lip : " The final events on Sunday included readings by Martha Bergland and Wanda Coleman, and an evening concert. * * Bergland read a wonderfully humorous and touching account of her childhood memories of farm life. Although Coleman was under the weather, she managed to make the hair on my arms stand up. Her voice, like an instrument, slid - from whispered hisses to full, reverberating chords as she read about her mother and deceased sister. To bring the celebration to a close, a group of twelve musicians, including Hal Rammel and Steve Nelson-Raney, played the twenty-fifth Anniversary Waltz without the waltz—two hours...