Tagvverk Journal

02/09/2024

Tagvverk Journal (2014-2024)

It’s over.

Thanks so much to everyone reading. Tagvverk was an inherited project, started by Robert Meehan and Tyler Green in 2014.

In 2015, Xatherin Gonzalez, Steven Pérez, and I took over as editors. Miri Karraker later served as editor and confidant. I could not have been motivated to continue this project without these brilliant people, and their foundation and support.

As “editor-in-chief” of this journal since ~2016, I am proud of the space collectively created. I want to take no ownership over Tagvverk. I like to think of it as its own entity. It was a site developed by its contributors, readers, and those who decided to pay attention from time to time. Whatever part I played, I hope I took things in the best direction: honoring its initial concept as a place where divergent contemporary writing could find an audience.

The Tagvverk archive will be transferred to a new site and exist in perpetuity thanks to Theo Ellin Ballew and oral.pub.

A decade feels like an eternity. I’ll be publishing my own work now through Frantic Gesture. I hope that the spirit of the journal persists, but it is time for me to move on to other things. Space for concrete work, critical work, digital work, deleted work, ephemeral work, interactive work, long work, non-work, satirical work, visual work, wonky work—I hope these continue, as they are needed.

We made it. You read it.

– Barrett White, Editor

27/08/2024

“Temple of Phthalates” by Peter Milne Greiner.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/27/peter-milne-greiner-3/

*

“material at rest or perhaps�
the blood of the crystal

clear utility at rest�
or perhaps the blood

of the crystal clear�
compulsion at rest

or perhaps the blood�
of the crystal clear

black hole at rest or�
perhaps the blood of

two crystal clear black�
holes colliding...“

*

PETER MILNE GREINER is the author of Lost City Hydrothermal Field, a collection of poems and science fiction. His work has appeared recently in Fence, Works & Days, and the sci-fi anthology Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn published by MCD x FSG. PMG is a high school English teacher and a water quality tester for Newtown Creek Alliance. Join his Sci-Fi+ book community .

Temple of Phthalates Yore and Lift were gods to which days and curses belonged Weepers had their Finders back then and Firsts had their Earths Isotopes had their bonus neutrons and detritivores ate…

23/08/2024

Presenting “Poets Gynecology: A Theory of How Periods Synchronize” by Holly Melgard.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/23/holly-melgard/

*

“So, you know how scientists recently discovered that the mycelium fungus is basically the internet of trees? (They found that the mycelium’s web-like network under the forest floor transfers information between plants by serving as the connective tissue between root systems such that it enables trees to communicate with each other.)

Well, what if the candida fungus that grows in the human va**na is the internet of uteruses?”

*

HOLLY MELGARD is the author Fetal Position (Roof 2021) and Read Me: Selected Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). Prior to this, she co-founded and co-edited Troll Thread Press for over a decade, a dual release print-on-demand + free .pdf platform that straddles the digital and print paradigms, where she self-published ten other books of poems. Her new chaplet “Adam” (2024) was just published by Belladonna Collaborative. She lives in Brooklyn where she works as a writing teacher and freelance book designer.

“Poets Gynecology: A Theory of How Periods Synchronize” —For Abi By Holly Melgard       “La connaissance poétique nait le grand silence de la connaissance scientifique.” –Aimé Césair…

22/08/2024

Presenting “STUDY FOR SWIMMING HOLE (after Etel Adnan)” by Maxwell Gontarek.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/22/maxwell-gontarek/

*

“As for mirrors
Ways rhyme with ice
All we can do is shake them
Each one makes the same sound
And this is generally regarded as safe
The valley the vocabulary
the great camouflage”

*

MAXWELL GONTAREK has poems out or forthcoming in Coma, αntiphony, Lana Turner, Volt, Noir Sauna, Works & Days, and elsewhere. Co-translations with Léa Fougerolle into/from French can be found in verseant. His chapbook, H Is the Letter of the Door, is forthcoming from above/ground press and his pamphlet, A Perfect Donkey, is forthcoming from Creative Writing Department. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.

STUDY FOR SWIMMING HOLE after Etel Adnan     // Last time A prop of air peals Against all that has taken place Salt meadows extra accidentally beautiful Glass my hands are full of Hiving …

21/08/2024

Presenting three poems from Dana Venerable: “1st DnD Character Backstory,” “ the world in a daz-e,” and “laughingstock.”

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/21/dana-venerable/

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“it’s a gift
being a chameleon of faux pas
for others to bond over
how fun it is to be behind the laughter
being all the rage & bounties dressing up
fitting in a fantasy
being tripped in the hallway
being kicked behind the knees
look, babe, it’s an all-time job for the taking
& with no closure in sight
& with no closure in sight
how dare we speak in emotion
how dare we speak”

*

DANA VENERABLE is an educator, occasional tap dancer, and writer. She is an English PhD candidate at SUNY University at Buffalo in Buffalo, NY and working at Kean University in Union, NJ. Dana has written for Peach Mag, P-Queue, Rigorous, Snail Trail Press, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, VIDA Review, What Happens and elsewhere. Currently, she’s returning to one of her childhood hobbies of songwriting.

1st DnD Character Backstory I’m Phoenixen Fahlite, Xennie for short and I’m a sorcerer by birth, a cipher for my deceased twin sister’s healing quest my parents are two angels, Enix and Phia who as…

20/08/2024

Pleased to present two untitled poems by Sofia Banzhaf.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/20/sofia-banzhaf/

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“a moldy girl
with copper hair and minced meat
freckles
sat moaning in the corner

desirous to see the
strange things of the world
sat weeping in the corner

eeeeeeaaaaarrrrrkkkhhhh!
she said
i'm practicing
she said”

*

SOFIA BANZHAF is the author of Pony Castle (Metatron, 2015). She is a writer, actress and filmmaker currently residing in Toronto.

good god look at the indifferent loaf grey dinner with martini ice shards rudely clinking i promised to clip his curtains the dangling lace color of eggs yes congratulations to a fantastic daug…

19/08/2024

Pleased to present “Imperfection, Achieving It,” a sequence of sixteen poems by Mark Francis Johnson.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/19/mark-francis-johnson/

*

“What they’ve cried
this evening over

loudspeakers – who knows,
noise. My guess, water is a

the least form of powder?
that’s true. However, that’s wrong

everything is the same,
it’s all conspired to kill

another of my teeth. Dear molar
how seldom really I saw you, yet

I am begging you look at me,
nine teeth down,

grieving you beneath a sky
loudspeakers occupy.

So, this is shock. No further points
just one: it is total fu***ng crap

I should lose another tooth to this world.”

*

MARK FRANCIS JOHNSON lives in Philadelphia. He is one-third of Hiding Press, along with Andy Martrich and Jon Gorman. His latest book is Diary of a String (Spiral Editions, 2024).

Imperfection, Achieving It   1 For my name-day treat last week’s watery pink dawn. Or, let’s examine a trunk, “a dwindling kit of sharps.” Whenever confusion fails to find expression a…

16/08/2024

Pleased to present three poems from Paul Ebenkamp: “Astral Rejection,” “Roomful of Equipment,” and “Peace.”

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/16/paul-ebenkamp/

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PAUL EBENKAMP is author of The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015), Late Hiss (Desert Pavilion, 2021) and Regular Acid Consciousness (Despite Editions, 2022) and also makes music as Position. He co-curates the Woolsey Heights reading series in Berkeley, CA.

Astral Rejection   Sounds fun I’ll be there. Yet what the odds won’t tell you is it’s an action-comedy truism how so many kisses… emulsify, diminish …these words for world- famous secrets that…

13/08/2024

Pleased to present an excerpt from BRICKED by Danny Snelson.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/13/danny-snelson/

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“BRICKED is an ongoing XR writing environment bearing witness to memory loss.

In the summer of 2019, my family orchestrated what would later become a final vacation with my grandmother, who had recently been diagnosed with dementia, and my father, who passed shortly thereafter. In the work, an exhaustive inventory of the objects that populated this trip is accompanied by text fragments on the losses that accumulate within both human and technical memory systems. These samples are arranged from assets in development, hung upon Tagvverk white as a defense against forgetting.

This version includes soft citations from Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, Wendy Chun, Hal Foster, N. Katherine Hayles, Habiba Ibrahim, Trevor Owens, Michel Serres, and Mackenzie Wark.”

*

DANNY SNELSON is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA. Recent works include Elden Poem (Hysterically Real, 2022), Full Bleed: A Mourning Letter for the Printed Page (Sync, 2019), and Apocalypse Reliquary: 1984-2000 (Monoskop, 2018). His forthcoming book, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), examines the networked afterlives of media-reflexive works of art and letters.

                              BRICKED is an ongoing XR writing environment bearing witness to memory loss. In the summer o…

09/08/2024

Presenting eight poems by Jeremy Hoevenaar: “Your fingertips,” “Generous loving,” “Trees dropped,” “Lay down these carbs,” “Road of excess leads,” “Eye to eye in lanes,” “The concrete blinking,” and “Bracing for inexact.”

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/09/jeremy-hoevenaar/

*

“impact smash yrself
against the wall until
yr an abstraction don’t
short sell yr interior
decompositional balance
the infinite’s revealed
in a controlled glitch
life as management
of this bubbling up
of fear my ears are in
my knees when you speak
thank you O unseen
wheelies of light
an extension of the common
resigned feeling then sleep
with the tourmaline
in yr mouth quiet
dreams will pool in
yr unplaceable center…”

*

JEREMY HOEVENAAR lives in a barrel he can wear to the marketplace. He is the author of Our Insolvency, Cold Mountain Mirror Displacement, and Adaptations of Pelt and Hoof.

Your fingertips imprint the veil removing paralysis one object at a time a dent we seek to match the color of this offloading future—try hoarder— no more leaning stacking pushing under piling on to…

06/08/2024

Pleased to present poems by Zoe Darsee.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/06/zoe-darsee/

*

“[Seeing bandages as ghoul eyes, seeing]

Seeing bandages as ghoul eyes, seeing�
thought as blowholes or bandages, white�
gulls, dirty. Flyers already know how�
to move. It’s obvious, thoughts are bandages�
are ghosts healing. Actually�
do not touch me again. This is not frantic�
to be a splayed whale, when I’m all out.�
Then you give me a lemon�
from your grocery bag. What�
if I were a grocery bag.”

*

ZOE DARSEE was born around noon on a Tuesday. They are the author of BELL LOGIC (Spiral Editions) and Anzündkind (Creative Writing Department). Together with Nadia Marcus, they run TABLOID Press. This work continues. More at zoedarsee.com.

[Mouthgazing] Mouthgazing for the lost popular bougainvillaea eco-poetic RANGE ROVER fire-split mirror “Oh here under here you will see “see” rubs the mouthless, fireless vacuuming lot, “that which…

02/08/2024

Presenting “I Did It,” a poem by Josef Kaplan.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/08/02/josef-kaplan/

*

“Everything that was happening
in that moment was entirely logical
and understandable – I know that now.
But at the time it was inconceivable.
It’s so funny, how far from ourselves
we can be. I imagine, in that moment,
there were two,
parallel versions of myself,
held within the same outline, their
appearance and movements exactly
the same, doubled so precisely that
any deviance from an absolute
sameness of appearance was
imperceptible to the naked human eye.
And yet, I also imagine that those
two versions of myself existed,
simultaneously, at the furthest
reaches of metaphysical coherence
from one another. They were two
beings sharing an identical
physical reality, and yet
existing in two realities of intention
so dissimilar that it’s maybe impossible
to refer to both as something even
akin to a reality, as if they each
represented a matrix
of discernible, graspable
indicators, some aligned some not.”

*

JOSEF KAPLAN is the author of Loser, recently out from Make Now Books. His other books include Poem Without Suffering; All Nightmare: Introductions, 2011-2012; Kill List; and Democracy Is Not for the People. He lives in Philadelphia.

I Did It I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t think, even once, before it happened, of wanting to do it, of wanting anyone to do it, let alone me. I was free from want. I was obliviou…

30/07/2024

Pleased to present “Ripe Fire,” a poem by Chloe Bliss Snyder.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/07/30/chloe-bliss-snyder/

*

“And yet
schisms like synonyms
are still syntaxing me,
this-ing-of-that-ing
in fissions without frisson, as if
the old ode on Keat’s Greek urn
were in potsherds,
Truth and Beauty
in sharts,
so one reads now only
Know and Need.”

*

CHLOE BLISS SNYDER lives and writes in upstate New York. Her work has appeared in Annulet, Caesura, Grotto, and New American Poetry, among other publications. Her chapbook Ekho and Narkissos was published by The Swan pamphlet series, and its recording may be heard on PennSound.

RIPE FIRE I. All the card-readers in town have been drawing the Moon for me. God forbid one flips the fifteenth, he’ll see — o, but they tend to not take these things literally. Still, I know they …

26/07/2024

Pleased to present an excerpt from Psalms After Jamme by Timothy Otte, comprising English-to-English "translations" of Biblical Psalms. The pieces primarily rely on the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and are variations on the "tablet poem" form of Franck André Jamme.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/07/26/timothy-otte/

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“T O D E T H R O N E
T H E E N E M I E S
O F G O D W H O H U
N T M E L I K E A L
I O N H U N T S A Z
E B R A E A G E R T
O R E N D F L E S H”

*

TIMOTHY OTTE (he/they) is the author of the chapbook Rebound, Restart, Renew, Rebuild, Rejoice (Lithic Press), a mentor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and writer of an occasional newsletter called Stanza Break that focuses on poetry in translation and books outside of a publicity cycle. Other Psalms have appeared in Yalobusha Review, Timber, Sink Review, Bat City Review, and an earlier version of “Psalm 22” appeared in FENCE. Their work has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the Loft Literary Center Mentor Series. Otte lives in North Minneapolis. More at www.timothyotte.com.

** TIMOTHY OTTE (he/they) is the author of the chapbook Rebound, Restart, Renew, Rebuild, Rejoice (Lithic Press), a mentor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and writer of an occasional ne…

23/07/2024

Pleased to present a series of abecedarian-inflected prose poems from “…AGAIN” by Mark Nowak.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/07/23/mark-nowak/

Other poems from “…AGAIN” have previously appeared in Ludd Gang, Threefold, NYTimes, Rabbit: A Journal of Nonfiction Poetry, and in a chapbook from Kenning Editions.

*

“Lithium. Lingerie. Abandoned NAPA auto parts store near Lebanon Valley Speedway. Old RVs settled in for the upcoming winter. A few leftover fires. Limp tires, retreads. Get Little Caesars delivered. Landscaping businesses. Northern lights. Like it or not. At one point in history we were called the lumpenproletariat (from the German lumpen, “rag, rogue”). Just labor now. Belabored. Refugee workers, migrant child laborers. Crumbling factories that lack investment capital. Lack love. An era that’s lost its luster.”

*

MARK NOWAK’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He recently edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021) and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is founding director of the Worker Writers School.

from …AGAIN   Jack pines. Junk food. 1-800-GOT-JUNK. It’s just another episode of Hoarders. It’s just another empty parking lot outside another shuttered JCPenney. J. Crew relocated to t…

19/07/2024

Pleased to present work from Colin Reid Bolton ().

https://tagvverk.info/2024/07/19/colin-reid-bolton/

Selections include:
“untitled pages 1-9”
“marmalade emperor corners” (excerpts)
“Eucalyptus” (excerpts)
“and ideas, my son: the Frosted Money of Delaware January”
“the sun’s rays” (excerpts)
as well as an assortment of images (or visual poems, as you like)

Check out the Total Arrangement at tagvverk [dot] info
[emojis]

*

“under LIZARD color falls
sings it character
threatens to court-martial anyone
who sings the mistake, the song for ‘willing audiences,’
songs which have extremely noisy meanings.”

*

You can reach COLIN in the clouds at [email protected].

                                                        &…

16/07/2024

Pleased to present sections 291-300 from “A Thousand Albums” by Brian Ang.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/07/16/brian-ang/

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“Self-mythologizing fascist anthem reputation playlists / Revolving cacophony synthesizer sky dissonance transgressions / Label panel barriers / Unfinished hyperactive romantic policing upstairs remix reason spirit hipster / Supplying babble bird mysterians / Cuteness / Smiling star scene avoidance rage crowd voice”

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BRIAN ANG wrote The Totality Cantos (Atelos 2022). totalitycantos.net includes the complete text, links to buy copies, and a generator that randomizes assemblages of its one thousand sections. Prose: “Assemblage Poetics”; editor: Assemblage Sampler and ASSEMBLAGE; current poetic project: A Thousand Albums, open to the totality of music.

** BRIAN ANG wrote The Totality Cantos (Atelos 2022). totalitycantos.net includes the complete text, links to buy copies, and a generator that randomizes assemblages of its one thousand sections. P…

12/07/2024

Very pleased to present “PATMOS: a hymn” (after hölderlin after grenier after waltuch after dworkin) by Zack Brown.

https://tagvverk.info/2024/07/12/zack-brown/

Borrowing the html format of Eclipse Archive’s presentation of Robert Grenier’s “Sentences,” Brown’s piece is an interactive homage that acts, through both its formal echoes and sonic mimicry, as a “Grenierian” rewriting of the first four lines of Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Patmos” (1802), using the delayed cognition of Grenier’s work to encompass the poem as a whole in just those lines through puns, resonances, and the process of coming into the intelligibility of the language.

*

“a forest for us to

it’s hard to
fashion
the letter

where a bear is
the letter

A BARE ASS”

*

ZACK BROWN is a PhD Candidate in the poetics program at SUNY Buffalo. From 2019-2022, with Dana Venerable, he was the co-editor of the literary journal P-Queue. He is the author of Receipts (LUMA/89plus). In 2023, his poem “Deeds of the Princes” appeared in Polish Translation for the “US Poetry” special feature in Wizje magazine. With Courtlin Byrd, Brent Cox, and Simon Eales, he records the podcast Buried Text. In an ongoing project to consider alternate medial possibilities for poetry, he does weekly livestreamed performances of poetry and philosophy on Twitch: twitch.tv/luminancebloom.

        ** ZACK BROWN is a PhD Candidate in the poetics program at SUNY Buffalo. From 2019-2022, with Dana Venerable, he was the co-editor of the literary journal P-Queue. He is…