Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
On December 10, 2004, I posted the note below.
It was twenty years ago today that I last had a drink. Not that anyone’s counting. Well, as people who know me must understand by now, I tend to count everything, so why not this? I was seeing a therapist at the time, one Charlie Vella out at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco, & he suggested stopping “while we’re meeting,” but, once I stopped, I never went back. Something, curiously enough, I have in common with both Howard Dean and George W.
“Better to read Jack Spicer than to be Jack Spicer” is the way I’ve explained it to more than a few people over the years. That’s a sentence that’s underscored, in my case, by the coincidence that Jack Spicer & my father died on the same day.
When I was coming up as a young poet in the 1960s, there was still a romance to the myth of the hard-living poet, who drank ravenously, did drugs constantly & certainly did not practice what was not yet known as safe sex. I remember when first I met Paul Blackburn, seeing him rotate a quartet of substances – beer, whiskey, doobie & cigarette – constantly in motion. He was always sucking on something. As it happened, I never met Jack Spicer, precisely because alcohol killed him at the age of 40. Never met Kerouac for the same reason. Brad Gooch has detailed, accurately I think, how Frank O’Hara’s prodigious drinking made it impossible to keep him alive after he was hit by a dune buggy. Who knows what the impact of their habits might have been in the early deaths of Ted Berrigan or Charles Olson? There are at least three contributors to In the American Tree whose friends despair of ever getting clean & sober. And every poet in my age cohort recoils at the memory of how Darrell Gray destroyed himself. This is a list that, once you start drawing it up, never stops. And it always cuts close to home. I have a half-brother who is a late-stage alcoholic & there’s nothing I can do to counter that.
Over the years, I’ve had a few poets – three or four – tell me that it was important to them that I talked about this. So today feels like a good time to mention it here.
Five years later, the clock is still ticking. The trick is always the same. I only have to go without drinking for one day, but it has to be today. This somehow works. I’ve never been to an AA meeting, but I’m glad they’re around and when I go to a big event, such as a folk festival, it’s good to see a tent announcing the Friends of Bill W. Just knowing I’m not alone is a serious comfort. Allen Ginsberg once talked to me at length about how valuable NA had been for him in dealing with a relationship to a drug addict. It reminded me how, when I wrote to Ginsberg for the very first time – I must have been 18, sending a poem Richard Krech later printed in the Community Libertarian – Allen wrote back to tell me not to “take too much dex,” (i.e. Dexedrine). He sent this on a postcard & my mother thought the word was “sex.”
Since I posted that note five years ago, I’ve heard from quite a few other people, and have seen my note referenced on other blogs several times. So saying this out loud seems still to be a good idea. There is no reason you have to die for your art. In fact, it’s better if you don’t.
Labels: Personal
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Photo by Ben Friedlander
Reading Carla Harryman
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Travis Nichols:
This is Your Brain on Poetry
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Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Lorine Niedecker
DuPlessis on how
Pound managed a “muse”
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Strictly speaking on Caroline Bergvall
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Geof Huth
on a reading by
Lynn Behrendt, Anne Gorick,
Deborah Poe & Kate Greenstreet
with recordings by each
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The Threads Talk Series
on the book arts
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“Poets, really, they’re the laziest, stupidest people I know”
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Christian Bök & Carmine Starmino:
The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry
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Edwin Torres on Viva Futurism!
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Gerrit Lansing’s journal Set
available for download
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John Ashbery’s Planisphere
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Charles Bernstein’s Republics of Poetry
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Busting the chauffeur of Kenward Elmslie
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An NPR profile of Keith Waldrop
“If transcendental immanence were possible,
it would be because
Keith Waldrop had invented it…”
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Talking with Ron Padgett
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Is this the only reading by
Ronald Johnson
ever recorded?
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A reading & talk by Robert Glück
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Marianne Moore on animals
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The poems of Eugene Field
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Typebound:
books as sculpture,
typewriter poems
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Darwish’s map
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3 readings by Christopher Dewdney
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Leevi Lehto’s Lake Onega & Other Poems
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Pierre Joris,
remembering Robert Creeley
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A forgotten manifesto from the 1960s
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More Naked Lunch
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The semantic limitations of visual poetry
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Anselm Berrigan: “Reading Habits”
Part I, II, III
(part II is Gloria Frym’s response,
a talk she gave at Chautauqua in 1996)
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Victor Shklovsky:
“Art as Technique”
(reg. req.)
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Dmitri Golynko
talking with Charles Bernstein
Transcript of the conversation
Golynko reading
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Remembering Miklos Radnoti
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From an opera on
the Battle of Seattle
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Descent & transcendence
in African-American poetry
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Nobody fathered
contemporary African literature
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Theoretically unpublishable works
all published here
(Full disclosure: I declined to participate
since I don’t believe this category really exists)
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An open letter to Kent Johnson
on the subject of Boston
having “fallen into the sea”
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Poetic economies of performance
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Is BlazeVOX the Sub Pop of poetry?
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Can experimental poetry save the earth?
Yes, says John Kinsella
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A tale of 2 archives:
Poetry Archive’s Basil Bunting page
& that of PennSound
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The Mexican journal
Luvina
devotes its current issue
to the poets of LA
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Sophie Robinson & Nick Thurston
at The Other Room
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Leigh Davis
wins New Zealand’s
Kathleen Grattan Award
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Basil King reading
at the Side Walk Café in NYC
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Jose Emilio Pacheco wins Cervantes Prize
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LRL #4 has a big John Taggart feature
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Doug Messerli on Robin Blaser
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Are e-books the end of great writing?
What good is Kindle
without Dan Brown or Philip Roth?
The Atlantic turns to Kindle
Plan to sell Sony e-books
thru indie bookshops falters
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Emily Critchley on Lisa Robertson
Lisa Robertson: Dispatch from Jouhet
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Giuseppe Mazzotta:
Introduction to Dante
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Remembering Larry Eigner
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Tina Darragh & Marcella Durand
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Farrah Field’s Rising
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Talking with John Yau
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Beyond Neruda (Huerta & Bolaño)
Pablo Neruda’s seashells
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Finally, Whitman’s Camden home is a landmark
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3 poems by Nakahara Chuya
translated by Jerry Rothenberg & Yasuhiro Yotsumoto
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Divya Victor’s Sutures
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Universities won’t save journalism
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The future of literary magazines
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Poetry in new media
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Cormac McCarthy’s Lettera 32 Olivetti
brings $254,500
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Response to Bromige & Denner’s Spade
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A look back at Jack Kerouac
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Norma Cole’s Do the Monkey
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Jessica Wilkinson on Susan Howe
Howe’s Poems Found in a Pioneer Museum
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Stephen Spender, poet as printer
(part I) (part II)
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Haiku & its related forms
Haiku in the snow
William Appel
wins this year’s Haiku Challenge
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School snubs poet over body of work
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Fact vs. fiction in Machado de Assis
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60 years of
National Book
Award novels
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Philip Roth & “Stupidity’s Progress”
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W.S. Merwin’s “pure poetry”
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Translation now?
“Admit the chaos”
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The NY Times’ notable book list
keeps it local (and corporate)
(and, for the most part, hardback)
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D.A. Powell, Louise Glück & the Bible
make LA Times 2009
“favorite fiction” list
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The library of Paddy McGuinness
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Reflections on the First International
Poetic Ecologies Conference
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Pynchon’s California novels
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Appropriation, intertext & authorship
in 21st Century poetry
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Paul Chowder’s presumptions
Nicholson Baker grows up
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Paula Bohince’s
Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods
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Ken Tucker
on H.L Hix & David Lehman
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Talking with Kassia Krozser
of BookSquare
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James Hoch’s Miscreants
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Robert Holdstock has died
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Walter Grallert has died
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Heaney:
Plant Hughes in the Poets’ Corner
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The Nabokov you weren’t supposed to read
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The value of hard copy
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A shopper’s guide to e- book readers
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Talking with Mark Coker
of Smashwords
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Katie Ford’s Colosseum
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Lethem skewers Manhattan
Lethem’s
“The Ecstasy of Influence – A Plagiarism”
(reg. req.)
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3 Peter Ganick works
“embodying contemporary literary theory”
tend. field. (a philosophy enters…)
(reg. req. for all 3)
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Can poetry mutter?
(A look back 15 years later)
Parts I, II, III, IV
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Geoffrey Hill’s Selected Poems
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Sarkozy honors Camus
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“The black tulip of American lit”
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Larry Levis remembered
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Going negative
on David Lehman’s dismissal
of “Going Negative”
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Peter Campion’s The Lions
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The San Francisco Chronicle’s
poetry gift guide
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Ken Kesey on the lam
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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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Talking with Caroline Leavitt
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Larkin loved mum & dad, really
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Victoria Chang’s Salvinia Molesta
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Anne Atick:
How It Was:
A Memoir of Samuel Beckett
(reg. req.)
Andrew Gibson:
Beckett and Badiou
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The poems of Al-Saddiq AlRaddi
as a book, PDF download or podcast,
each in two languages
Plus 10 other bilingual books
available in bound or PDF formats
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Anna Journey’s
If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting
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“Feminist Road Trip Uncovers Girl Power”
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Gravity’s Rainbow and The Spiral Jetty
(reg. req.)
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Just in time for the holidays:
snow globes of the deadly sins
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Judith Butler:
“Torture and the Ethics of Photography”
(reg. req.)
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Chaim Gross:
The Body, In Pieces
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Vermeer’s Milkmaid at the Met
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Andy Warhol’s “Red Portraits”
“Warhol ruptured all of art history.”
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Pat Steir:
Self-Portrait 1987-2009
David Carrier on Pat Steir
Anne Waldman & John Yau
reading for Pat Steir
Dec. 13 @ 4 PM
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The decade in art
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Museum shortfall derails Koons
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Anish Kapoor’s Memory
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The “state of unreal”
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Hal Foster:
“An Archival Impulse”
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Painting, Paris & the will to power
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The Whitney’s web redesign
almost works
§
A recommendation of
David Rawlings
that I will second
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Remembering Bess Lomax Hawes
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Annie Gosfield:
Advice to a Young Composer
Talking with Annie Gosfield
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Harry Northup
on being at Altamont
40 years ago this week
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The “imprisoned birdsongs”
of Thelonious Monk
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John Gallaher’s
Morton Feldman files:
(on art vs. craft)
(Give My Regards to Eighth Street)
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The Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra
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Queering the Pitch:
New Gay & Lesbian Musicology
(reg. req.)
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The last of the Clancy brothers, Liam, has died
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Setting Yeats to music
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A home in Park Slope, Brooklyn
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Rinde Eckert’s Orpheus X
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Tony Kushner on climate change
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The decline of Cornell West
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Jennifer Bartlett
on mothering as a rebellious act
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David Bell
on Manuel Castells & Donna Haraway
(reg. req.)
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Ales Debeljak:
In Praise of Hybridity
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Chris Lott’s
Closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis
§
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Editors at Wikipedia are bailing
§
Talking with Ayn Rand
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The new issue of
The Continental Review
offers lots to see & think about
§
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Tiger Woods
promotes a physics text
the hard way
Monday, December 07, 2009
A week ago Saturday night, I went out to hear some music. I wondered at the time if Kirby Olson, for example, would have preferred that I go hear Arlo Guthrie, one of America’s great folk troubadors, sing the songs of his fabled father, old commie icon Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, or if he’d prefer I go hear, say, some Ron Paul Republican. That’s a trick question, of course, since at this moment in history Arlo Guthrie is a Ron Paul Republican, even as he sings “Deportee” and “This Land is Your Land.” This was Arlo’s 40th holiday season concert at Carnegie Hall, a series begun I believe when he was accompanying Pete Seeger & very much the image of The Kid, the character he projected iconically in the song & subsequent film Alice’s Restaurant. I used to see Guthrie at folk festivals tho the last time I’d heard him live was at a HARP concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, HARP being the quartet briefly composed of Holly Near, Arlo, Ronnie Gilbert (of the Weavers) & Seeger. That was 1985 & he still seemed very much The Kid then, at least alongside Pete (born 1919, the same year as Robert Duncan) & Ronnie (one month younger than my mother). In 1985, he would have been 38, not really a kid at all.
But it didn’t seem like it had been 24 years since I’d last seen him, perhaps because WXPN, the University of Pennsylvania station, plays Alice’s Restaurant every Thanksgiving right around noon & it’s been a staple of that holiday for us now for the past 14 years. It doesn’t take much more than that one song – all 18 minutes of it – one time each year not only to make Guthrie feel present, but likewise to freeze him in time, The Kid.
Now, however, he’s very much the patriarch, a very different figure from his own father, and the concert was in fact billed as The Guthrie Family Rides Again. There were, by my count, 14 different people on stage at different moments, not counting the sound tech, all but two of them blood relatives, and a couple not much more than two-years-old.
Functionally there were two or three centers on stage, of which Arlo was only one. Almost as strong in their presence were Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion (her singing partner & husband), who opened the show with a short set of their own. Sarah Lee has something unique to the Guthrie family, a voice to die for, and I can imagine a scenario of returning here in another few decades to hear her headline a show that contains an even larger gaggle of Arlo’s kids, grandkids and (by then) great grandkids. It will look a little like the old Coke “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” commercial. But it might be pretty terrific.
The other real power center Saturday night belonged to Cathy Guthrie, who runs the family Rising Son Records label with her sister Annie. Cathy did just one tune from her Folk Uke CD (this being a duet she plays in with Willie Nelson’s daughter, Amy), but hers was the song – “Shit Makes the Flowers Grow” – I’ve been singing all week.
Those at least were the most visible focal points, tho I noted several times over the evening that for all of the guitars on stage, an awful lot of the music depended for its coherence on Abe Guthrie’s keyboards & that Johnny Irion, in addition to being Sarah Lee’s partner, is himself a good singer & a helluva guitarist.
In addition to songs by Woody & Arlo, Sarah Lee & Johnny, the Folk Uke tune, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, the evening even included one holiday tune co-written by Woody with his mother-in-law (Arlo’s grandmother), Jewish poet Aliza Greenblatt. In one sense, Arlo has stepped into the space left by Pete Seeger as he’s aged & mostly stopped performing, continuing the great American folk songbook – and this very casual hootenanny-style sing-along – everyone in a mostly full Carnegie Hall singing Shit in unison & on key – seems like a very natural extension of a phenomenon that’s hard to come by these days even at folk festivals.
Plus the work of Arlo’s sister Nora is bearing fruit. Nora has taken over managing Woody’s archives with the hundreds if not thousands of song lyrics just tucked in there waiting to be given some music & set free in the world. The Klezmatics, Wilco, Billy Bragg & Janis Ian are just some of the folks who’ve been entrusted to bring music to Woody’s lyrics and Arlo & family appear to be sampling them all.
Was it the best folk concert I’ve been to in recent years? Hardly. And I could imagine a concert just with Arlo’s kids that would really cook. Looking around Carnegie Hall, as staid a room as there is for music (albeit with crystalline acoustics), I realized that the majority of the audience there may have been my age, but not the vast majority. There were an awful lot of 30-somethings, which suggests that this music may just well survive its embodiment as a soundtrack of the ‘60s. And it wasn’t that this year. There was no singing of “Alice’s Restaurant,” with Arlo giving voice to Officer Obie calling him “Kid.” Just one story about Woodstock & nobody would have known that it was Arlo’s 40th year at Carnegie Hall if Sarah Lee hadn’t stopped everything toward the end to note it “since it seems obvious you’re not going to bring it up.” Any other performer would have used that occasion to set up a week’s worth of interviews in The Times & god knows where else so that the place would have been more than just mostly full. But that wouldn’t have been Arlo Guthrie, which is just what this great large gaggle of song turns out to be.
Labels: Music
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Friday, December 04, 2009
Two & one-half days is not long enough to spend in New York City, particularly since Krishna & I hadn’t done a trip there by ourselves in a long while. Sans kids? Maybe 20 years. Mostly I’m going up for readings or she’s going up with friends or for conferences, the other one at home to care for the nest. But our hulking 17-year-olds don’t feel much need these days. So we borrowed the flat of some friends & headed out to see what we could see, hear what we could hear, eat what we could eat.
Two places where we had better-than-great meals were Back 40, on Avenue B between 11th & 12th, and Bombay Talkie on Ninth Ave just up from 21st Street. At Back 40, we listened to some nice bluegrass over the sound system while the party at one table next to us talked about the scene at the Nuyorican Café & the party at the other table was discussing Gary Snyder. Add to this the best roasted Brussels Sprouts I’ve ever had, perfectly grilled trout (tho they could have been more generous with the chickpea puree that comes with it), and a chocolate bread pudding that we shared, but still took enough home to snack on for the next two days! At Bombay Talkie we shared the Baighan Bharta – I’m an eggplant addict -- & five-spice shrimp. I needed the mango lassi, two in fact, just to keep from bursting into flames. We walked 2.5 miles each way to get to Back 40, but it was well worth the trip. Plus we ran into Lewis Warsh at the market on the way back.
The first part of Saturday was spent looking at galleries in Chelsea. By far, the most wonderful show was Bill Viola’s Bodies of Light at James Cohan Gallery, pictured above. Viola has been around for quite a few years, but his work has an integrity that never gets old, and when accumulated into a gallery-wide installation, it’s just overwhelmingly beautiful, meditative, erotic & sad all at once. We didn’t get to nearly as many galleries as we’d planned on simply because we were transfixed by these pieces. In the installation pictured above – the last (or perhaps deepest) one – a pair of teenagers walk slowly up toward the camera on parallel screens on the wall to the left. They’re blurred at first, virtually without color, until they slowly come through a falling sheet of water you didn’t even realize (unless, of course, you’d seen the rest of the exhibit, where this motif is repeated several times) was there. In the photo above, you can see the young woman reaching her arms out as she penetrates the waterfall, while the guy, with pure teenage male energy, just crosses his arms & wades right in. It’s apparent that the young woman has trained as a dancer – even with her clothes soaking, she’s powerful & fierce. In the screen at the back a naked couple – he’s Asian, she’s European – pierce the waterfall more or less together & react to what they see or imagine. Whatever it is, it’s very different for each. These videos are done in slow motion, tho what really gives them their power is the infinite dignity of the performers.
Time & familiarity with an artist’s work can have mixed results. I liked the Joseph Raffael watercolors of flora at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, a side of his work I’d not seen before, a lot. But Ronnie Landfield’s intense color field paintings at the Stephen Haller Gallery made me want to see the Jules Olitski and Sam Francis originals. Deep sigh. Likewise I found Enrique Chagoya, an old favorite of mine from the Bay Area, predictable & making easy jabs at US culture.
Somebody who makes much more powerful and politically pointed use of cartoon culture in paintings, sculpture &, so help me, wallpaper, is Robert Williams. His show, “Conceptual Realism in the Service of the Hypothetical” at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery shows that this old Zap Comic artist (you can still find 19 of his works available through Last Gasp) has lost none of the fire that drives the best of lowbrow art. Next to Viola, this was the other must-see exhibit I came across Saturday.
Later that afternoon, we took a walk through – or is it on? – Highline Park, New York’s latest great idea (and one of the few that really is a good idea), a converted el route that has been planted with what look like native grasses and some sturdy wooden benchware and just turned over to the wandering masses. On our way there, we ran into Eileen Myles & Michael Friedman & his missus, just starting their own Chelsea tour from the southern rim of the nabe.
We saw one other show while we were in the city, the Georgia O’Keeffe abstractions at the Whitney Sunday morning. If all you know are the calla lilies, tulips & dried cattle bones, this is a must-see, must-do show. It’s big – all of the third floor – and chronological, starting with her student work in 1916 right up to the point where macular degeneration made it impossible for her to see well enough to continue painting. There is also one relatively small room of Alfred Stieglitz photos of her, including some nudes just to remind us (a) of her tenuous social position as the young lover of a successful artist 23 years her elder, and (b) that she wasn’t always the elderly wizard of the Southwest with whom so many of us grew up.
One thing is clear immediately, looking at the very first painting in the exhibit. Whereas abstraction in Europe meant straight lines & hard edges, the arrival of geometry & the rule of the protractor, O’Keeffe’s work is really about registering the movement of the hand: waves, curves, swoops are all possible. To Stieglitz, who probably knew as much at that point about European art developments as any American not actually living across the pond, the distinctness of O’Keeffe’s approach – she had not yet even settled on a career in painting – must have been apparent.
O’Keeffe’s work over the next decade is often brilliant, but it still seems searching & not entirely sure of itself. Then, in 1926, everything clicks. From this point forward, O’Keeffe is a master thoroughly in control. And, with the exception of a couple of late pieces – portraits in theory of her house in New Mexico that appear to be more in dialog with the painting of Josef Albers & maybe Hans Hoffmann – her style is unmistakable. It’s a moment almost as pronounced as Williams’ Spring & All, which wasn’t really the instant his work took off, tho it is the one when the shift into a newer, higher gear became impossible to ignore. So too ’26 & O’Keeffe.
One thing to avoid, tho, is the audio-program headset that comes free with your Whitney admission. It’s egregiously stupid, at one point (#308 on your clunky headset dial) getting the direction of O’Keeffe’s painting completely backwards in order to make some analogy between her abstractions & sexual symbolism. One sympathizes with O’Keeffe, who kept her abstractions to a minimum precisely because they seemed to permit critics to make gushing pronouncements about eroticism in her work. Nearly 40 years after her big retrospective at the Whitney cemented O’Keeffe’s reputation as a painter of the first rank, she still is being mishandled even there.
Labels: Visual Arts
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Michael & Flynn Lally (Photo © Star Black)
I’m happy to see that
Michael Lally
has been blogging
about the effects of
brain surgery
§
Geoffrey Gatza’s Thanksgiving Feast
menu poem extravaganza
this year is dedicated to
C.D. Wright
§
The Mottram Effect
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Q, W & X
are still illegal in Turkey
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Pogsound:
a great archive of readings in Tucson
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kari edwards’ Bharat jiva
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2009 George Oppen Memorial Lecture:
Rosmarie Waldrop
San Francisco, Dec. 16
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Laura Elrick’s Stalk
Dec. 10 in NYC
“Poetry, Ecology,
and the Reappropriation
of Lived Space”
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Ray DiPalma’s The Ancient Use of Stone
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Homophoning
“Jack & Jill” into French
back in the 18th Century
§
Talking with Sara Larsen & David Brazil
about one little mag I’ve never seen
§
An all-women shortlist
for BBC short story prize
As compared to
“a literary sausage party”
§
Poetry as Power:
The Dynamics of Cognitive Poetics
as a Scientific & Literary Paradigm
(reg. req.)
§
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Google has digitized
10,000,000 books
§
SPD’s annual open house
is December 6 -
20-50% off all books!
Hundreds of Buck-a-Book $1 books!
Plus readings & a poetry trading post
§
MacDiarmid’s muse’s menu
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Talking with Andrei Codrescu
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Don DeLillo’s “Midnight in Dostoevsky”
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Close reading aloud Vachel Lindsay
Vachel Lindsay reading
Lindsay as a sound poet:
“Mysterious Cat”
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Who’s been eating my Naked Lunch?
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Englynion –
Britain’s answer to the haiku
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Brenda Hillman
at Open Books
in Seattle
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The fate of
The Northwest Review
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Is sending Catullus a form of assault?
Wikipedia’s translation
§
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Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun –
a Ulysses for sci-fi?
§
Tweets lead to hard time
for Roger Avary
§
The demise of Borders
is not the end of bookselling
in the UK
§
The top word for 2009?
§
Philip Levine
on Robert Lowell & John Berryman
§
2010 Library of Congress
radio lineup announced
§
Finding Darwin on the toilet
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Only 2 books of poetry –
both Quietist –
make The NY Times
notable books of 2009
§
Prognosticating e-books for 2010
§
Christian Peet’s Big American Trip
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Bringing back Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
§
&s in court
What’s new with the font freaks
§
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The poetry poll
with the worst taste
§
The Bad Sex prize goes to
an American in Paris
Why they call it a “short list”
§
Charles Simic on being homeless
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James Wood on Paul Auster
§
Yours truly
at Poe’s tomb
§
An obit for Marcel
§
Yang Xianyi has died
§
What killed Jane Austen?
§
Yeats’ Blake
(reg. req.)
§
Talking with Cormac McCarthy
Want to buy McCarthy’s typewriter?
Bid here
The Road
is too faithful to the book
§
§
Or you could buy some Baudelaire
(including a suicide note)
§
Here come the interCaps
(as those of us
at ComputerLand called them
in the 1980s)
§
Walter Benjamin & Bertholt Brecht
§
A short history of hello
§
Who’s afraid of the big bad Whorf?
(reg. req.)
§
When Roald Dahl
became a children’s author
§
Finding the right readers
§
Brad Leithauser’s The Art Student’s War
§
Alice Munro’s Object Lesson
§
Phillip Lopate:
My favorite book from 2009
§
Novica Tadić’s Dark Things
§
Vonnegut’s letter home
§
What we talk about
when we talk about
style
§
The library in a phone booth
Libraries should sell books
§
Translating Tolstoy
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Jonathan Franzen:
Germany is like my parents
§
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Washington Post
closes all domestic bureaus
§
Zadie Smith
changes her mind
(& genre)
§
Three of the world’s top 5 Scrabble players
are Thai
§
Ian McEwan:
“The Use of Poetry”
§
Michael Wood on Eliot’s letters
§
The Bolaño Myth
& the Backlash Cycle
Some stray questions
for Roberto Bolaño
§
Terry Pratchett’s jokes
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James Ellroy,
tenuously reformed pervert
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Burns’ legacy “burns on”
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Franz Wright’s Wheeling Motel
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Eponyms Я Them
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“50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,”
starting with the Dali Lama & Christian Bök
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Feminist Review on GirlDrive
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The death of cool
§
Some books that inspired musicians
§
The Rockpile files
§
Jack Kerouac sings
“Ain’t We Got Fun”
§
Examining “Your Love” by The Outfield
§
Bess Lomax Hawes has died
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Some rare clips of Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain
§
Ten great singers
who can’t sing
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Satchmo & the Jews
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Vijay Iyer’s Historicity
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Art of the bar code
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The visual art of Yedda Morrison
§
The disappearance of Ford Beckman
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Edward Keinholz
& the sex trade
at the National Gallery
§
Manga at the British Museum
§
Artist whose medium
is hardware store windows
§
“Social painting” at Art Jamming
§
§
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Robert Frank:
never on time
§
Andy Warhol never died
Warhol’s screenwriter
§
Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art
§
Renzo Piano:
the architect as pirate
§
Cultural Cognition
as a Conception
of the Cultural Theory of Risk
§
Big Media gets quite a bit bigger
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What is living & what is dead in
social democracy
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Heimrad Bäcker,Transcript, translated by Patrick Greaney & Vincent Kling, edited & with an afterword by Friedrich Achleitner, Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign, 2010
Steve Carey, The Selected Poems of Steve Carey, edited by Edmund Berrigan, Subpress, no location given, 2009
kari edwards, Bharat jiva, Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, Brooklyn 2009
Thomas Fink, Yinglish Strophes 1 – 19, Truck Books, New York, 2009
Barbara Claire Freeman, Incivilities, Counterpath Press, Denver 2010
Jennica Harper, What It Feels Like for a Girl, Anvil Press, Vancouver 2008
Jen Hofer, One, Palm Press, Long Beach, 2009
Christine Hume, Shot, Counterpath Press, Denver 2010
Robert Kelly, Fire Exit, Black Widow Press, Boston, 2009
Nick Lantz, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis 2010
Lauren Levin, Not Time, Boxwood Editions, Chicago 2009
Catherine Owen, Frenzy, Anvil Press, Vancouver 2009
Marguerite Pigeon, Inventory, Anvil Press, Vancouver 2009
Catie Rosemurgy, The Stranger Manual, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis 2010
Mari-Lou Rowley, Suicide Psalms, Anvil Press, Vancouver 2008
Carol Snow, Placed: Karesansui Poems, Counterpath Press, Denver 2008
Eileen R. Tabios, Roman Holiday, Naissance, Kingston, PA, 2009
Books (Other)
Urs Allemann, Babyfucker, translated with an introduction by Peter Smith, afterword by Vanessa Place, Les Figues, Los Angeles, 2009
Julian Brolaski, erica kaufman & E. Tracy Grinnell, editors, No Gender:Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards, Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, Brooklyn 2009. Includes Cara Benson, Frances Blau, Mark Brasuell, Julian T. Brolaski, Reed Bye, Marcus Civin, CAConrad, Donna de la Perrière, E. Tracy Grinnell, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, erica kaufman, Kevin Killian, Wendy Kramer, Joseph Lease, Rachel Levitsky, Joan MacDonald, Bill Marsh, Chris Martin, Yedda Morrison, Eileen Myles, Akilah Oliver, Tim Peterson, Ellen Redbird, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Smoler, Sherman Souther, Eleni Stecopoulos, and Anne Waldman
Amanda Cushman, translator, (Original editor unknown), Zarma Folktales of Niger, Quale Press, Williamsburg, MA
Zachary German, Eat When You Feel Sad, Melville House, Brooklyn 2009
Stephen Ratcliffe, Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet, Counterpath Press, Denver 2010
Paul Vermeersch, editor, The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology, with an introduction by Dennis Lee, Harbour Publishing, Madeira Park, BC 2009. Includes Eurithe Purdy, F.R. Scott, George Galt, Joe Rosenblatt, Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, D.G Jones, Sid Marty, Steven Heighton, Howard White, David McFadden, David Helwig, Janet Lunn, Michael Ondaatje, more.
Christine Wertheim, Feminaissance , Les Figues, Los Angeles 2010. Includes Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng,Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place, Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young & Lidia Yuknavitch
Journals
Chicago Review 55:1, Chicago, Winter 2010. Includes 7 poets from Berlin edited by Christian Hawkey, Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck, Hendrik Jackson, Uljana Wolf, Steffen Popp, Sabine Scho, and Ron Winkler with translations by Christian Hawkey, Nicholas Grindell, Nicholas Perrin, Catherine Hales, Susan Bernofsky, J.D. Schneider and Andrea Scott. Also includes Deb Olin Unferth, Jorge Edwards, Jorge Edwards & Patrick Iber, Jeffrey Yang, J.H. Prynne, Matthias Regan, Sam Eccleston, Michael Baltasi, Dustin Simpson, John Wilkinson, Dodie Bellamy and David Grubbs
Mimeo Mimeo, no. 3, Brooklyn, Autumn 2009. Whole issue devoted to Daniel Scott Snelson’s “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions,” with “The Infernal Method” by Aaron Cohick, a letterpress-printed (and hand-painted) newsprint pamphlet tipped in.
Sugar House Review, vol. 1, Salt Lake City, Fall / Winter 2009. Includes Jeffrey C. Alfier, Rane Arroyo, Ruth Bavetta , Candace Black,. Kenneth Brewer, Teresa Cader, Rob Carney, Star Coulbrooke, Tobi Cogswell, Brock Dethier, Cat Dixon, Gary Dop, William Doreski, Justin Evans, Howie Good, Dustin M. Hoffman, Natasha Kessler, Robin Linn, Grant Loveys, Matt Mason, Michael McLane, Paul Muldoon, J.R. Pearson, Nanette Rayman Rivera, Richard Robbins, Jerome Rothenberg, Sam Ruddick, Ki Russell, Natahsa Sajé, M.E. Silverman, David Starkey, Joanna Straughn, Billy Swift, Jacqueline West & Shari Zollinger
Just a tiny stack of books
still waiting to be noted here
Labels: Recently Received
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Mel Nichols, Elisabeth Workman & Nada Gordon
conducted by Drew Gardner
last weekend at the Zinc Bar, NYC
(best viewed full screen)
Labels: Flarf
Thursday, November 26, 2009
I have become accustomed to pausing to say thank you whenever this blog reaches a new milestone. Today, eleven months & one week after having passed the two million visit mark, we – you & I together – pass the 2.5 million threshold. Thank you, thank you, thank you. That it should happen today is one of the great little ironies of life.
2,500,000 feels quite amazing to me. To be honest, the 50,000 mark felt stunning when I reached it in August 2003, not quite a full year into this project. If you told me then what the numbers would be now, I would not have believed you.
Which brings up a good point someone on the comments stream, I think it may have been Johannes Göransson, made the other day ( not, I should note, Monday) – that my binary opposition of the two literary traditions, quietism and the post-avant, has become ludicrous. I’m of mixed minds about that criticism. When I look back, as I did Monday, at 28 straight years of quietist Pulitzers, a string still unbroken, I think the empirical evidence is flat out overwhelming. And when I think of Johannes' impluse (see Monday's comments stream) to read literature ahistorically, my instinct is to be distrustful. But when I look at my own blog, and at that list in the left column of more than 1,200 other blogs, 98% of which are likewise discussing poetry, day in & day out, I think Johannes is quite right. The old model of doing business has been irrevocably broken. Something completely new is afoot. If anything, the old binary could make it harder to see clearly just what that is.
How can both of these be true at the same time?
Partly I think the answer is generational. If you came into poetry in the mid-1960s as I did, when poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, John Ashbery & Larry Eigner were still in their thirties, as were Donald Hall, Bill Merwin & Robert Bly, when the Allen anthology was still a new book, Howl less than ten years old & the newly published Naked Lunch something that could be found in relatively few bookstores, the cleavage between the Raw & the Cooked – as Robert Lowell once characterized the two traditions – was a gulf. To anyone who is in their sixties now, or who (like The New York Times) primarily gets their information about poetry from people that age or older, that’s still pretty much the map on which all the pins must be placed. American hybrid? Hybrid of what, pray tell, if in fact that old binary isn’t operating just beneath the surface?
But I’ve made that mistake before, so maybe I shouldn’t make it twice. In the late 1980s, I proposed a model of poetry that suggested that the post-avant tradition was disproportionately white through the social function of narrative within different communities. Never having held the subject position, I suggested, people of color might find a need to explore that while others, having held it for centuries, might well be more interested in exploring its fissures & contradictions.
I caught hell for that, initially from Leslie Scalapino, but ultimately from a much wider range of poets, most of them people of color. What they were noticing that I had not was that the composition of younger poets had already changed not only on American campuses, but in the key metro areas that serve as incubators for so much that is new. You might in turn explain this by noting that the middle class itself had already expanded beyond the white enclave one sees, say, today in Mad Men’s recreation of the Sixties. The 1980s were not the 1960s & I was wrong for not noticing.
Still, my outdated vision might have led one to expect that one day we would find a list of finalists for a major prize, such as the National Book Award, divided neatly between white post-avants & black conservatives – exactly the circumstance this year. (And, I might suggest, not the last time we’ll see that particular configuration.) Yet already Nate Mackey has won a National Book Award, so the historical narrative of all this comes as it does in real life, jumbled. The reality is that we live in a transitional period in which all of these phenomena can occur pretty much in any sequence at any time. There is not a right or wrong position here, tho there might well be a “less interesting” or “more interesting” one, which will vary depending on the position of the reader.
But it’s more important to recognize that while 1980s were not the 1960s, the teens of the current century – which get under way in less than 40 days – will not even remotely resemble the 1980s, and may even be more different from the first decade of the new millennium than this old fart is ready to concede. To be a young poet today is to come into a scene where there are already more than 1,000 blogs talking about poetry. I can’t imagine that world, even as I see it right here on my own web page.
So Johannes is unquestionably right. The old binary is just that: old & binary. It’s entirely inadequate to describe the scene of today, even as the inertia of that binary continues to drive some of the phenomena & some of the behavior. The old model will prove even less adequate tomorrow. The real question is, or should be, what models better characterize what is going on now, and what will be going on tomorrow?
Thus my own goal, going forward, will be to get my head out of the 1980s, the 1970s (the focal point, after all, of The Grand Piano project) & the 1960s, at least into the 21st century. Not that I won’t note the inertia of the past as it plays out in the present when that seems appropriate. But because I think the readers here deserve a response, however tentative & groping it may be, to the more interesting question: What’s next?
Labels: blogging, Schools of poetry
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
(Photo used by permission, all rights reserved, © Fiona Templeton)
Annette Barbasch & Steve Buscemi in Fiona Templeton’s Against Agreement, 1982
Fiona Templeton & Poets Theater
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Tan Lin Chalk Playground & LitTwitChalk
A review by Thom Donovan
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Arkadii Dragomoshchenko on Alexei Parshchikov
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Talking with Rosmarie Waldrop
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Bruce Boone & Gail Scott
at Small Press Traffic
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Mel Nichols’
Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon
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Sunday, Nov. 29
@ the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC:
a monster celebration of
Gerrit Lansing’s
Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth
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Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy
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Jim McCrary:
poet, anti-poet
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What Kerouac’s scroll
tells us about his art
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Allen Ginsberg’s
“Mind Writing Slogans”
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Charles Bernstein
talking at 80 Langston Street, 1983,
on characterization
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Margaret Atwood at 70
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75 years
of the
Academy of American Poets
“A Future for Poetry”
Marie Bullock
on the Academy of American Poets
in 1937
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Maggie Nelson: on color
(reg. req.)
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The US has SPD,
but Australia’s
got SPUNC
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SPD staff picks for 2009
Aren’t the best book lists
coming earlier this year?
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Clayton Eshleman does 2
broadcasts with the
Joe Milford Poetry Show
here & here
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Over 140 episodes
of the Joe Milford Poetry Show
can be accessed here
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PoemTalk,
the close-reading poetry show
from PennSound & the Poetry Foundation,
now has a Dutch cousin
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Dublin in December
means
the Wurmfest
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Neglectorinos of Ireland
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Susan Schultz
on the poets of Australia
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A short history of flarf
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K. Silem Mohammad’s
“Squirting Ringworm Taco”
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Where do the dogs go
in Baudelaire?
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If only I could read Afrikaans…
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She writes
about
SheWrites.com
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What is it to imagine a public?
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What would Jane Austen do?
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Spell-checking Hugh MacDiarmid
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Chris Tysh
translating Beckett’s novel Molloy
into verse
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Proust on Twitter
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Philip K. Dick,
deconstructing madness
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Hankering for a better map
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Shakespeare & Co’s new mural
Portraiture of the artists
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Noir tweets?
Pulp Fiction writer
is twittering from jail
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Anna Mendelssohn (Grace Lake)
has died
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Playing politics
with the bones of Camus
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The people in Stanley Kunitz’ house
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Auster’s Invisible
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Lorrie Moore:
“How to Talk to Your Mother”
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The forms of Sébastien Smirou
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Oulipo reading list
(reg. req.)
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The plagiarism of academic co-authorship
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Bring back the olde style book shoppe
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Oxfam seeks peace
with used bookdealers
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The demise of Borders UK
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The Nook sells out
its Christmas stock
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Black Friday is for suckers
(& so are e-readers, it says here)
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McClatchy papers
launch editions for the Kindle
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Stephen King on Raymond Carver
An “astonishingly complete” biography
“Carver didn’t fight Lish as vigorously as he should have”
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Saving Leopold Bloom’s soap shop
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Reading Kay Ryan
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Code X
transforms your PC
into a sound-poem machine
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Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch’s
Conversations over Stolen Food
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Crowns & Oranges:
Works by Young Philippine Poets
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Compulsively seeking quietist verse
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Alice Jones
won the first annual
Narrative poetry contest
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Remembering Don Carpenter
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Talking with Wayne Miller
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Joyce Kilmer talks with
Edwin Arlington Robinson
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More on
The Acorn Book of Contemporary Haiku
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A little Bashō reading list
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50 years of Beatitude
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Talking with Paul Chowder
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2 poets for the birds –
Simon Armitage
Billy Collins
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Literary primes – AARP Division
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Louis Zukofsky & the objectified poem
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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future
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DIY Harlequin
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Talking with Illinois laureate Kevin Stein
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Book reviews as “payback”
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Alice Munro “keeps getting better”
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Highway 74 revisited
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The Metrocard as art
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Getting a response to your poetry
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The Governor General’s Awards for 2009
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60 years of National Book Award
fiction winners
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The NBA’s Keith Waldrop page
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A conflict of interest
in the National Book Awards
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The “National Best Book Awards”
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Su Tong wins Man Asia
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There goes the Man Booker
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“We’re legit,”
ReaderSpoils protests
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Zadie Smith:
the essay has as much art as fiction
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Syllabus for a class on
literary editing
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John Gallaher’s
“Watermelon in the Afternoon”
Gallaher on Unterecker on Ashbery
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Douglas Skrief, stone poet
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Michael Longley in Calcutta
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Can Nick Cave
beat the modern Bulwer-Lytton
for the “bad sex” award?
(It’s not just the sex that’s bad
in The Humbling)
The bad sex “shortlist”
So where is the good sex?
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Can you name the last 3
National Book Award novels?
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A poetry tour of Washington, DC
& of Chicago
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Academe & the decline of news media
Needed: a philosophy of journalism
Can university-based reporting
keep journalism alive?
§
The San Francisco Panorama:
a new newspaper
that costs $16
& plans to print
just one issue
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Microsoft offers to
rescue Murdoch’s group
from Google Search
Can Murdoch pull this off?
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NaNoWriMo ends soon
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In praise of scattershot reading
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Judith Robinson’s Dinner Date
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Nabokov, “reduced to notes”
A debate over its publication
Laura manuscript is up for sale
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Vonnegut’s leftovers
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Michelle Huneven’s Blame
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When experts educate,
what do their metaphors say?
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“It might as well have cooties”
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Deleuze & Guattari:
Aesthetics & Politics
(reg. req.)
Deleuzean literary machines
of Woolf, Lawrence & Joyce
(reg. req.)
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Reading GirlDrive in St. Louis
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Eric Gans’ “generative anthropology”
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These are the sounds of silence
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Michael Löwy’s Morningstar:
Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism,
Situationism, Utopia
(reg. req.)
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6 practical reasons
for arts education
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The handmade books
of Alice Austin
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Mark Scroggins
on modernist prints
§
The modernist difference
can been seen in the sex
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MoCA at 30
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Van Gogh’s letters
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Epilepsy as an art form?
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UC museum
cancels its new building
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Andy Warhol:
October Files
(reg. req.)
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The dark side of Francis Bacon
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When in Marfa…
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Talking with Fanfarlo’s
Simon Balthazar
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Talking with Timothy O’Dwyer
about The Braxton Project
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Bob Dylan:
Must Be Santa
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Patricia MacCormack:
Cinesexuality
(reg. req.)
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The linguist behind the language
of Avatar
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Conversations with Žižek
(reg. req.)
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Heidegger déjà vu
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Claude Lévi-Strauss:
an introduction
(reg. req.)
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The war within the Left
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Faculty members mediate
between protestors & the cops
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A Zombie Manifesto
(reg. req.)
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
She was the youngest winner ever of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the first one born in the 20th century. Just 24, it wasn’t even her first book, coming seven years after The House of Silk. He was older and more established, holding the post that is now called Poet Laureate of the United States. Not only were they husband & wife, but she was also the great-great granddaughter of Percy Bysshe Shelley. They were, in short, as close to a pure power couple the field of verse in America has had. Today, however, few people remember Audrey Wurdemann & Joseph Auslander. I think of them not just as an index of exactly how quiet the School of Quietude can be – here is the title poem of Ms. Wurdemann’s prize-winning volume, published 11 years after William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All, twenty years after Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons¹ – but as a symbol of just how significant prizes & titles prove to be.
If you are going to have a life with any sort of impact in poetry, prizes are entirely unimportant. The absence of a top award had no perceptible negative impact on the work of Stein, nor Ezra Pound, nor H.D. nor Hart Crane. More recently Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson & Jack Spicer demonstrated this all over again. And as if to underscore the point that the opposite is true as well – having a major award or title will not ensure a lasting legacy – Ms. Wurdemann’s 1935 prize was bracketed by Pulitzers given to Robert Silliman Hillyer in 1934 & Robert P. Tristram Coffin in 1936, two names that don’t much resonate some 70-plus years after they were judged to be the very best there was in American poetry. Folks who remember Hillyer do so for his contributions to the anti-communist hysteria of the postwar period, not his verse.
Still, awards & prizes must mean something. How else explain the joy one saw on literary listservs, in this blog’s comments stream or in various conversations & emails Thursday morning as word got out that Keith Waldrop had received the National Book Award for 2009? Mairead Byrne’s 3-line missive is a haiku-like example that pretty much captures the spirit of it all:
oh keith waldrop
keith waldrop!
KEITH WALDROP!!!!!
Keith Waldrop indeed. I think the reason for all this exuberance is pretty simple. Hundreds & perhaps thousands of people around the world of poetry know that
(a) Keith Waldrop is a wonderful writer & that Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy is a better-than-excellent book, and
(b) Keith Waldrop is a beautiful human being, one of the true good guys of poetry, who has spent a lifetime building resources for the poem in every way conceivable, both on his own & with his partner Rosmarie Waldrop.
It makes people happy when the good guys win. And it makes people happy when somebody who is genuinely humble & likewise terrific at what he does gets public acknowledgement for being the great force for good that he is. Giving Keith Waldrop the National Book Award accomplishes all of the above. Ultimately it is Keith Waldrop who honors the National Book Award far more than the other way around. He lets the prize achieve its full potential, which is perhaps the very most you can ask for in giving an award.
The funny thing is, perhaps as many as four of the five finalists for the National Book Award would have led to similar reactions, the judges for this award having done as good a job as I’ve ever seen in coming up with a roster of fine work from which to choose. This seems to be possible with the National Book Award far more than is the case with the other major award for verse, the Pulitzer Prize. Since the NBA began in 1950, there has not been a single case in which the award went to somebody who disappeared as completely from the annals of poetry as that trio of mid-1930s Pulitzer bards has. Looking over the list of Pulitzer winners from the past 25 years suggests, I think, that a couple of these folks are destined to be remembered just about as well as Ms. Wurdemann or Mr. Coffin.
It could be worse: the once important Yale Younger Poets award has fallen on such hard times that winning the prize appears to be worse for one’s career than not having published a book at all. Until he disappeared on an island trek earlier this year, I had never even heard of Craig Arnold. Fady Joudah’s award has, I would wager, had but a fraction of the impact of his translations of Mahmoud Darwish’s work in spreading his own reputation. The Wikipedia page for the prize – like the one at Yale itself – tacitly acknowledges all this by not even bothering to print a complete list of previous winners. I once saw Jack Gilbert read a list of the early winners just to underscore the point that it was a great predictor of mediocrity. Gilbert himself was a recent winner at the time.
In looking at awards, it is always useful to pay attention to what is being promoted by the event. The Pulitzer exists to promote the credibility of newspapers, in this instance as reviewers of poetry. Or more accurately, as a site for advertising books of poems. I think we all know just how credible that is. Do an advanced search on “Keith Waldrop” on the New York Times web site and you will find that the one-sentence paragraph in the Times’ story on the National Book Award is only the third mention ever made of his existence in The Times. The first is a review of Waldrop’s translation of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil by Joshua Clover in 2006, the second a pair of letters noting what a great review it was. The Times apparently didn’t take the hint. In contrast, the Times has had 30 pieces over the years that mention or review the work of Frederick Seidel. If that doesn’t give you a sense of the Times’ scale of value, nothing will.
The purpose of the National Book Award is more direct: to promote the legitimacy of books, or at least of trade publishing, publishing as an industrialized activity. The Times piece on this year’s NBA openly wonders about the relevancy of the award, given that none of the finalists in any category have sold more than 19,000 copies. This in a world in which trade publishers plow their energy into the wall-to-wall promotion of a ghost-written memoir of Sarah Palin. A world in which there are over 200,000 titles published each year, compared with the 8,000 or so that were the norm in the years right after World War 2. Is it any wonder that serious writing seems lost in the blather of how much I’m going to have to pay Barnes & Noble to have my cardboard display of this week’s vampire novel up towards the front door?
At least the NBA has panels of active participants in the various disciplines decide on which books to include as finalists and on which to award prizes. Poetry judges Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, A. Van Jordan, Cole Swensen, & Kevin Young can take a lot of credit for this year’s result. And whoever selected them can do likewise.
The NBA began in 1950 & its first three recipients were William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens & Marianne Moore, all then in their sixties. The award has been given to Allen Ginsberg (The Fall of America), Frank O’Hara (The Collected Works), William Bronk (Life Supports), Nate Mackey (Splay Anthem), Adrienne Rich (Diving into the Wreck) & A.R. Ammons (Collected Poems). That sort of aesthetic diversity shows up far less often with the Pulitzer – George Oppen & a posthumous award to Williams in the 1960s, Gary Snyder & John Ashbery in the 1970s, Jimmy Schuyler in the 1980s, & then a solid wall of quietism now for 28 straight years.²
The positioning of the two awards in Williams’ life is telling. The NBA came just three years before his nomination to the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress – the “Poet Laureate of the United States” slot – was derailed partly because of concerns for his leftist politics & modernist sympathies. The Pulitzer arrived when he was safely dead, no longer able to embarrass anyone. That wasn’t necessarily a new stance for the Pulitzer. In its first seven years, back in the 1920s, the Pulitzer was awarded three times to Edwin Arlington Robinson, about as militant a rejection of modernism, indeed of modernity itself, as one can imagine. Today, a glance at the Pulitzer’s board – which must approve the work of any nominating committee – suggests that current situation there has not changed. Is there any individual on that list whom you would consider a reliable authority of poetry? And where is a board clueless about poetry but dedicated to the legitimization of newspapers mostly to turn for direction?
Happily, where The New York Times offered us just one frail sentence about Waldrop’s triumph, CBS News was able to do more & the Providence Journal went whole hog with a real story. Siglio Press, which recently published Waldrop’s collection of collages, Several Gravities, has an excerpt from editor Robert Seydel’s essay on the art works, an interview with Keith done by Peter Gizzi, and even a mini-slide show from the book up on its website. You can check out Waldrop’s sites at the Electronic Poetry Center and PennSound. And SPD lists 19 of his books – many with fewer than 10 copies available – for sale.
¹ Tender Buttons was written in 1911, the same year Ms. Wurdemann was born.
² Eat your heart out, George Steinbrenner. This is one record the Yankees will never touch.
Labels: Keith Waldrop, Prizes
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Carol Hannah Whitfield’s exploding skirt
In which I note that I accurately predicted the winner of Project Runway on October 15. Nothing in the final collections made me change my mind about the superiority of Irina Shabayeva’s vision. While the single best look in the three runway shows at Bryant Park may have belonged to Carol Hannah Whitfield’s dress with exploding skirt (or however you characterize that), the cohesiveness of Shabayeva’s collection (here & the following 12 screens) was beyond what previous Runway winners have accomplished. Check out her website for other collections by her.
LA Times on PR’s finale
Talking with Tim Gunn
Stephen Burt on the Project Runway phenomenon
in the current issue of Poetry.
Labels: Project Runway
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Rising of the Ashes ,translated by Cullen Goldblatt, City Lights, San Francisco 2009
Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Some Very Popular Songs, translated by Mark Terrill, Toad Press, Claremont, CA 2009
Cathy Eisenhower, would with and, Roof Books, New York, 2009
Ben Estes, Cymbals, The Song Cave, no location given (but Northampton, MA) 2009
Garth Graeper, Into the Forest Engine, Projective Industries, Chicago & Houston 2009
Mike Hauser, Psychic Headset, Mitzvah Chaps, Lawrence, KS 2008
Margo Lockwood, More Than I Want To, Pressed Wafer, Boston 2009
Gina Myers, A Model Year, Coconut Books, Atlanta 2009
Amanda Nadelberg, Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married, The Song Cave, no location given (but Northampton, MA), 2009
Karl Parker, Personationskin, No Tell Books, Reston, VA 2009
K. Silem Mohammad, The Front, Roof, New York 2009
Barbara Jane Reyes, Easter Sunday, Ypolita Press, San Francisco 2008
Karen Weiser, To Light Out, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2010
Maged Zaher, Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer, Pressed Wafer, Boston 2009
Journals
Area Sneaks, no. 2, Los Angeles, 2009.Includes Edgar Arceneaux & Noellie Roussel, Robert Grenier, Johanna Drucker, Peter Ciccariello, Jessica Smith, William R. Howe, Derek Beaulieu, K. Lorraine Graham, Analia Saban & Claire de Dobay Rifelj, Aaron Kunin, Doug Nufer, Harold Abramowitz & Amanda Ackerman, Franklin Bruno, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Ara Shirinyan, Mathew Timmons, Will Alexander, Richard Kostelanetz, Jody Zellen, Nick Moudry & Kerry Tribe, Jen Hofer & Hillary Mushkin, and Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney
Grain, vol. 37, no. 1, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, October 2009. Includes Jiang Jie, Tim Lilburn, Sue Goyette, Dani Couture, Don Domanski, Eleanor Wachtel, Xi Chuan, Kyle Borner, Wang Jiaxin, Warren Heiti, Myrna Kostash, Chuqiao (Teresa) Yang, Tamara Bond, Steven Hayward & Melanie Bell.
Open Letter, Fourteenth Series, No. 1, Strathroy, Ontario, Fall 2009. “The Martyrology: Survivors’ Retrospective,” guest edited by David Rosenberg. Includes David Shapiro, Frank Davey, Chris Tysh, Victor Coleman, Alice Notley, George Bowering, Lewis Warsh, Tony Tost, Fred Wah & Susan Wheeler.
Tinfish, no. 19, Tinfish, Kāne’ohe, HI 2009. Includes Jill Yamasawa, Gizelle Gajelonia, Ryan Oishi, Jody Arthur, Aurora Brackett, Barbara Jane Reyes, Janna Plant, Jennifer Reimer, Daniel Tiffany, Emelighter Kihleng, Dennis Phillips, Ellen Welcker, Mandy Luo, Kenny Tanemura, Brandon Shimoda, Rachel Loden, Oscar Bermeo, Deborah Woodard, Michael McPherson & Paul Naylor
Vanitas, no. 4, New York, 2009. Includes Yuko Otomo, Eileen R. Tabios, Michael Schorsch, Jonathan Mayhew, Raphael Rubinstein, Stephen Vincent, Ed Sanders, Catullus, Horace, Theodora Danylevich, Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Charles Baudelaire, John Tranter, Arthur Rimbaud, Valery Larbaud, Mario de Andrade, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Dino Campana, Vincente Huidobro, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Tadeusz Browski, Henri Michaux, Juan Luis Martinez, Paulo Leminski, Francesco Clemente, Laura Solorzano, Alberto Masala,Lindsey Boldt, Frank Andre Jamme, Anne Waldman, Paul Violi, Lisa Jarnot, Ray Di Palma. Translators of various works include Tim Atkins, Mary Jo Bang, Charles Bernstein, Lindsey Boldt, Augusto de Campos, Sean Casey, Mark Du Charme, Alan Davies, Brandon Downing, Joanna Fuhrman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jack Hirschman, Jen Hofer, Ron Horning, Mary Maxwell, David Meltzer, Jess Morse, Ron Padgett & Bill Zavatsky, Ray DiPalma, Charles Perrone, Kit Robinson, Raphael Rubinstein, Ed Sanders, Barry Schwabsky, Cedar Sigo & Sara Bilandzija, Mónica de la Torre, John Tranter, Lewis Warsh, Dalt Wonk, Laura Wright, Elizabeth Young, and many more.
Just a tiny stack of books
still waiting to be noted here
Labels: Recently Received
