In the course of The First 100 Days of President Obama, (haptics and reflective commentary), I am often at poetry readings and panels. A 'taste', or go direct to the blog at http://stephenvincent.net/blog/

Last night we in San Francisco had an invasion of two Canadian
poets: Rachel Zolf (by way of New York), and Christian Bok. Unlike this
past week’s meeting of President Obama and Canada’s Prime Minister - in
which the advertised Obama intention was to give reassurances
to our northern neighbor that a “Buy American” agenda will not destroy
Canada’s economy - Bok and Zolf were enthusiastically received as poets
with much strong work to offer the local poetry economy that
is the audience of primarily poets in the Small Press Traffic audience.
It was an intense evening that also partied late into the night at The Right Spot, the night club Bar at the corner of 17h & Folsom.
	There
is not time or space to blog on at length here. But. first off, Rachel
Zolf’s work cuts right across the spectrum that constitutes coping with
the internal contradictions of being Jewish and confronting Israel’s
occupation, if not already the start of the decimation and/or removal
of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. “De-Arabization” was her
short hand for what has been initiated in Gaza. Or, to point in the
opposite direction, in “a priori”, the opening poem, from a series
conditional propositions she asks,

If Israel is not in Israel

As if not to dispose of the idea of Israel as a spiritual home &
refuge, but to pose the idea that concept of Israel is not
‘geo-dependent’ but one with a fluid sense of location, and/or that its
current geographic location is actually a counter-Israel.
	The poem is from a beautifully produced new chapbook Shoot and Weep ,
(Nomados: Vancouver). Her language moves with the stinging velocity of
a counter-Biblical, righteous sense of query, one that strips bare the
‘wire’ filled on-the-ground reality of asymmetrical moral and physical
violence. 
	If the Sabbath is a form of constraint

If jihad is the firt word learn to spell

If Elie Wiesel is the Holocaust

If must expropriate gently

If messianism licks at the edge of thought

If the truth does not lie in silence

If naf means self and brother

If the space between words can be bridged

If moderate physical pressure is acceptable…
	Zolf’s language embraces, explores and is torn by the contradictions of the condition called Israel It’s brave and fearless work.

This work, among others in her reading, was part of other works that
embed themselves in the ‘data’ condition of being global, corporate and
modern. A person who has not yet chose an academic career, she has
clearly worked as a writer in the ‘technical & training manual
bowels’ of the corporate world. The poems navigate a space in which
numbers co-opt words as transmitters of knowledge. It’s a space in
which a human, bodily and psychological presence is not acknowledged.
The poems wrestle, for example, with the numerical negations of
sexuality, gender and difference. As so much begins to unravel - the
demolition of the global Economy, including more and more Failed States - Zolf’s language - moving with the parodic speed of a computer computation -  invokes  the texture of an increasing world enfolding anxiety.
In the manner of an Oppen vision, the poems read/perform as signals,
the words and histories resisting and flashing on and off as from
lights of shipwreck.....(On to Christian Bok)


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Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/