Friday, November 30, 2007
Photo by Ben Friedlander
Steve Evans
This is the time of year when newspapers that still have book review sections – a dwindling fraternity – run their “notable books of the year” feature in hopes of gaining a spike in advertising from publishers who hope to supplement sales with a few Christmas gift buys. In short, there’s a list for the same reason that this is the time of year when you can count on a big new coffee table book on some theme related to The Beatles, another to railroads, a third to covered bridges, etc. Most of these projects, like the one that will run in the New York Times on Sunday, are little more than attempts to move perfectly exchangeable product – there may be some great writers on the list (Rae Armantrout, Lydia Davis, Roberto Bolaño), but they’re there mostly to legitimate the rest of the roster.
Much more interesting is the fifth annual Attention Span survey conducted by Steve Evans. Evans asks roughly four dozen writers – mostly poets – to chart “their current interests in poetry and related fields” and then simply compiles the lists. One might be able to fault Evans for not having a perfect electoral college here – it sure is white & about two-thirds male – but he manages to include writers associated with everything from The New American poetry (Bill Berkson, Pierre Joris) to flarf (Kasey Mohammad) to even new formalism (Annie Finch). He includes Canadians & Aussies & generally ends up with a more democratic look at what contemporary English-language poetry looks like than almost any other cross-section I know.
This year’s contributors listed a total of
486 books, chapbooks, songs, films, magazines, websites, exhibits, and other cultural phenomena in their lists (the number increases significantly if titles embedded in comments are counted).
To give you some sense of scale, the whole of the Academy of American Poets website lists just 560 poets, stretching from Homer to Tony Tost. While Attention Span is capturing titles rather than individual poets, its focus is just one year of attention. Even there, it’s probably picking up only around 12 percent of the total number of titles published (even less, once you consider just how many of the works mentioned were published earlier), representing no more than five percent of all publishing English-language poets. So Attention Span suffers the curious problem of being both comprehensive and just the tip o’ the iceberg (pre-global warming).
The primary message here is diversity – less than four dozen readers nominated more than ten times that number of items, and exactly three books were listed on five separate lists, just over ten percent of this nominating committee. In a landscape that might be likened to
Jasper Bernes, Starsdown, from Ingirumimusnocteetcconsumimurigni.
Juliana Spahr, The Transformation, from Atelos
Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, from Kenning, edited by Patrick F. Durgin
Unless you think this is entirely haphazard, consider that Juliana Spahr had the second highest total in 2005. Lisa Robertson has twice finished first – in 2006 and 2004. And Evans’ list of nominators demonstrates that this isn’t an accident of him using a cloistered group of respondents. These lists pass the sniff test and, by being public with individual lists, Evans also manages to bypass most of the methodologically dodgy aspects that would drive something like Foetry into conniptions. If somebody is being very strategic in thinking out his or her answers this year – viz. Meredith Quartermain – it’s perfectly up front.
There is a rather perfect symmetry in these three choices – one a first book by a grad student at Cal, one the midcareer masterpiece of a poet in her prime, a text that situates precisely at the intersection between memoir, essay and the prose poem, and the selected writings of someone whom the WOM-PO list would characterize as a Foremother. Perhaps the more amazing feat is the size of these three presses – Atelos, founded by Lyn Hejinian & Travis Ortiz & operating mostly out of Hejinian’s house in
Another way of looking at this list is to consider that FSG and Ecco/Harper – the two presses that hold down three of the four poetry slots in the New York Times list – are not nearly as influential as they might want to believe. FSG is mentioned seven times, which ties it for eighth place with Atelos, Factory School & Couch House. Ecco/Harper doesn’t even make the list of the 71 presses mentioned more than once. In short, all the editorial, distribution and PR muscle of Ecco/Harper cannot match even a fraction of that of Ingirumimusnocteetcconsumimurigni. This makes perfect sense of course if you look at the New York trade presses and their poetry lists for what they are – a small press scene no different from any other save for the one minor detail of vast amounts of capital magnifying everything out of proportion.
Five presses were listed ten or more times and it’s instructive to note who they were: New Directions, the
Unlike the trade presses, which are driven by profit, and the independent small presses, many of whom want to change the world of poetry to better fit their own vision(s), university presses often see their own role as one of stewardship, so it is not a surprise to see UC and Wesleyan in the top five repeatedly. But not all university presses are equal and one has to drop down to a large tie for 19th place to find the likes of Chicago, Duke, Iowa, Yale or Stanford on the 2007 list, each mentioned three times. Pittsburgh and Louisiana are completely absent from the multiple mentions list. Again, quality of editorial vision has a huge impact here, and it’s not evenly distributed among college publishers.
One very good way to use this list is for shopping at SPD or Bridge Street Books or Woodland Pattern. But another is to recognize what the patterns here are suggesting – the currently literary scene is very flat in the sense that no one literary tendency dictates what everyone is reading. That’s both a plus and a problem – the absence of a shared literary culture is an issue with potentially serious consequences. The other is that if you write the right book, you are just as well off with
¹ In fact, Rae Armantrout’s Next Life, from Wesleyan is on the New York Times’ notable list as well as being the lone book in the National Book Critics Circle “best recommended” list that is not from one of the New York trade presses.
Labels: Steve Evans
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Charles Bernstein
on John Ashbery’s
Rivers and Mountains
& Bernstein
on speed
§
A.L.I.C.E.
is “not completely sure”
about her answers
to my questions in
Sunset Debris
§
interviews
two generations of leadership
at the Poetry Project
§
§
A profile of
Robert Hass
§
Douglas Manson
on
Robert Creeley’s
last books
Marjorie Perloff
on
Robert Creeley
& Douglas Barbour
on
Marjorie Perloff
§
Remembering
Gene Frumkin
§
Pound
and his enemies
§
The National Book Critics Circle
”best recommended” lists
for 2007
§
Domanski, Ondaatje
win
Governor General’s awards
§
Two Lives:
Gertrude and Janet
§
Wordsworth
and his ego
§
§
§
§
Talking with
Jim Bertolino
§
What constitutes
a canon?
§
Why contemporary art
is not
left wing
§
Adalaide Morris
on
How to Think (with)
Thinkertoys
§
The further adventures
of the
tiny tour
§
Norman Mailer
vs.
Gore Vidal
& Dick Cavett:
Norman responds
Mailer wins
one last prize
§
The Oregon Book Awards
poetry finalists
§
Remembering
Hassib Mroue
§
Chris Funkhouser
reading
The Electronic Literature Collection
§
to would-be
poets laureate:
Show me!
§
A profile of
Natasha Trethewey
§
“The last great
Arab classical poet”
§
§
Ted Hughes’
paper trail
Building the myth
of a substantial poet
§
“Miss Congeniality”
on the Governor General’s
shortlist
§
A reading series
in Qatar
§
“Poetry Days
in the Desert”
§
Saud Usmani
&
contemporary Urdu poetry
§
More on the Hollywood
writers’ strike
here
&
here & here
& the flip side here
§
Deadlines,
war & fiction
§
Censorship battle
in the Hamptons
§
§
Tenure
as a form
of hazing
§
Gravestone poem
held as evidence
133 years
§
The most successful playwright
of all time
is not William Shakespeare
§
Proust was not really
a neuroscientist
§
Is the library
sustainable?
§
Carnegie Mellon
has scanned
1.5 million books,
only one quarter of them
in English
§
Here is the new
Shorter OED
§
§
Modernism
for the masses
§
The first usable
e-book?
§
Poetry
as a healing art
§
19th annual
Cowboy Christmas
poetry reading
§
A reading
in
Malaysia
§
57,554
attend relaunch
of the
Detroit Institute of the Arts,
home of the
finest single painting
in the
§
§
Politically correct
Beowulf?
§
Walter Benn Michaels
on the films of
Christopher Nolan
§
Julian Schnabel
blinks
§
All 19 essays
in the
electropoetics thread
of the
Electronic Book Review
edited by
Lori Emerson
(Check out
the other threads
as well!)
§
§
§
Garrett Lisi:
why math?
§
§
James Turrell’s
Roden Crater
§
§
Ainu culture
plus hiphop?
§
Saving modernism
at Yale
§
Why are we
in
Vietnam?
§
A job
for an American Lit Specialist
in
Labels: links
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Maram al-Massri, A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend 2007
Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern, Snow Sensitive Skin, Atticus/Finch, Buffalo 2007
Elena Karina Byrne, Masque, Tupelo Press,
Ron Charach, Selected Portraits, Wolsak and Wynn,
Mark DuCharme, The Sensory Cabinet, BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo 2007
Mark DuCharme, The Crowd Poems, Potato Clock Editions, Boulder, CO 2007
Noah Falck, Homemade Engines from a Dream, Pudding House Chapbook Series,
Peter Ganick, recent text., folder press,
Matt Hill, The Cloud Reckoner, WingSpan Press,
Will Hubbard, The God is Quiet That Would Have You, Cap Gun Press, Brooklyn 2007
Charles Jensen, The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon, New Michigan Press, Grand Rapids, MI 2007
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Aquiline, Printed Matter Press,
Richard Krech, We are on the Verge of Ecstacy: Selected Early Poems, 1965-70, Green Panda Press,
Joel Lewis, Learning from New Jersey, Talisman House,
Karyna McGlynn, Scorpionica, New Michigan Press,
John Newlove, A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems, edited by Robert McTavish with an afterword by Jeff Derksen, Chaudiere Books, Ottawa 2007
Marthe Reed, Tender Box: A Wunderkammer, Lavender Ink, New Orleans 2007
G. Emíl Reutter, Stirring Within: Poems and Tales from Mount Caramel, BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo 2007
Hugh Seidman, Somebody Stand Up and Sing, New Issues,
Ulf Stolterfoht, Lingos I-IX, translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop, Burning Deck, Providence 2007
Mathias Svalina, Creation Myths, New Michigan Press,
John Tipton, Four Fables, Answer Tag Home Press, Chicago 2007
Christine Wertheim, +│’me’S-pace: doc. 001b, society for cUm│n’ linguistics (scum), Les Figues Press, Los Angeles 2007
Paul Wilson, Turning Mountain, Wolsak and Wynn,
Vincent Zompa, Jacket of the Straits, New Michigan Press,
Books (Other)
George Robert Minkoff, The Weight of Smoke, McPherson & Co.,
Tony Trigilio, Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics, Southern Illinois UP,
Journals
6x6, no. 14, Brooklyn 2007. Includes Prabhakar Vasan, Lori Shine, Douglas Rothschild, Randall Leigh Kaplan, Corina Copp & Fred Schmalz
Cap Gun 2, Brooklyn 2007. Includes Lynn Xu, Anna McDonald, Jackie Delamatre, Bronwen Tate, Tao Lin, Rodolfo Hinostroza, Sam Adams, Jackie Clark, Joshua Edwards, Will Hubbard, Eric Gelsinger, more.
Conjunctions 49, A Writers’ Aviary (Special Portfolio: John Ashbery Tribute), Annandale-on-Hudson, 2008. Includes Howard Norman, Anne Waldman, Arthur Sze, Merrill Gilfillan, Forrest Gander, Diane Ackerman, Rick Moody, Nathaniel Tarn, John Kinsella, C.D. Wright, William H. Gass, Martine Bellen, Sven Birkerts, John Ashbery, Kevin Killian,
Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Graham Foust, Eileen Myles, Marjorie Welish, Jed Perl, Ron Silliman, Ben Lerner, Cole Swensen, David Shapiro, Susan Stewart, Marcella Durand, Brenda Hillman, Anselm Berrigan, Joan Retallack, Robert Kelly, more.
filling Station, thirty9, Calgary 2007. Includes Changming Yuan, Ingòlfur Gíslason, Haukur Màr Helgason, Jaspreet Singh, Eirikur Örn Norđdahl, Hye-Seung Jung, Kevin mcpherson eckhoff, more.
Open Letter, Thirteenth Series, No. 4, Fall 2007,
Poetry Project Newsletter, #213, December 2007/January 2008,
CDs/Other Media
Walter Wego, Come Sunday, vocals by Steve Benson, mix by Parker Waite, WERU-FM, Blue Hill, Maine 2007 (double CD)
All items received since November 7.
Labels: Recently Received
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
When Jean Valentine’s Dream Barker won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1965, the award was at its height of legitimation – Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, John Hollander, Alan Dugan & Jack Gilbert had all won in recent years, James Tate would soon enough inaugurate soft surrealism with The Lost Pilot in 1967. Regardless of what your allegiances might be in the “raw” vs. “cooked” debate of the period, many (most?) young poets would automatically buy whatever new volume came out in the Yale series and mull over what this new voice would mean for American poetry. Again, this was a time when the number of publishing poets in the U.S. was still under one thousand, a tenth (or less) of what it is today.
The Yale prize was – still is – thoroughly a creature of the
In this context, Jean Valentine’s poetry seemed at the time almost entirely out of place – it was linguistically interesting, for one thing, not really confessional or narrative, clearly not an instance of post-Brahmin formalism, yet just as distant from anything one might then have typed as New American. The part I kept coming back to, both there & in confronting her work mostly in journals in the four decades since, was her focus on linguistic surfaces. She wasn’t the only poet of the period who stood out in this way – Eliot Coleman down in Baltimore was fascinated with fragmentation while Donald Finkel in St. Louis had his own unique vision for the longpoem – but such writers seemed very few & far between. I never had any sense that they were in touch with one another, or ever needed to be. Each appeared to be entirely spun from their own devices, with their own concerns, sharing mostly their disconnectedness from the whole shebang.
Valentine has gone on, of course, to have a successful – her collected poems won the National Book Award in 2004 – if relatively subdued career. In over a quarter century of visiting
Yet Little Boat this year from Wesleyan is a true delight. It’s always readable, often brilliant, thoroughly consistent with the author of Dream Barker some 42 years before, and yet now calling out in ways that bring other, very different names to mind than the ones I might have thought of back then – Louise Niedecker, Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout. Maybe even Graham Foust & Joseph Massey. That, frankly, is great company.
Here, for example, is a poem that strikes me as perfectly constructed:
The Look
Pain took me, but
not woke me – no,
years later, your
look
woke me:
each shade and light:
to earth-love then
I came,
the first
beach grasses.
Trying to pin this poem down, narratively or figuratively, is simply not possible. That very first word, Pain, can be understood in so many different ways as can the other key noun in the first four lines, look. The poem is figured between an I and you, but you are superimposing your own interpretation even to suggest that there are two people here. What isn’t an imposition of the reader’s fantasy life, however, clearly is this text’s sense of motion: the use of enjambments, twists in the first three lines setting up a sonic entrance of considerable conflict, under which the softer sounding of the paired off-rhymes took/woke look/woke lead the reader right to the first of two colons: each functions as a gate enabling the reader to pass only in one direction. It’s no accident that each of the four words in the first stanza’s last line starts off open (each/and) or soft (shade/light), ending on a harder sound – that won’t happen again until the third line of the next stanza when the halt at the end of first sets up the echo of each in beach, opening to the final almost dreamlike sounds of grasses. I still have no clue what pain or which look might be intended here, but – as is so often the case with Rae Armantrout’s best work also – I find myself wrapped in total belief.
Yet where Armantrout’s poems seem continually to be testing for God, sounding in search of that echo, Valentine strikes me here as being closer to Fanny Howe – one of the texts borrows from Howe’s work & Valentine has dedicated at least one other poem to her prior to this book – in that she takes on the Christian frame very much as given:
Blessed are those
who break off from separateness
theirs is wild
heaven.
reads one untitled piece in its entirety. Or this more mysterious poem, “Eye of water,” from the book’s final sequence, “Mary Gravidas, Mary Expectant”:
I have nay ben nn
To keep nn safe
I cannot keep them safe
If nn tway
If nn thee
Keep them
Eye of water
Those double ns – four sets of them in the first five lines amaze me. If there is an “ordinary” explanation for such opacity, I don’t have the reference. Yet they function perfectly clearly, like a radio in a movie that gives off static & in so doing tells us into which decade this narrative fits. The poem alternates between despair & prayer – the third line makes clear what the first two enact, yet the ns of the second stanza operate differently altogether, almost as if the poem were coming up against a blind spot, or point beyond which words could not pass. The echoes of Scots & the nearly biblical thee serve to reinforce this.
Valentine often gathers these poems into sequences, yet for me what is so special here is how each never loses focus, never seeks to defer elsewhere. After reading Little Boat straight through, I actually found myself enjoying it more the second time, jumping around from page to page, not trying to construct larger frames. Again & again, Jean Valentine is an argument for the particular. She does it with exceptional grace.
Labels: Jean Valentine
Monday, November 26, 2007
(from left: cris cheek, Matthew Abess, Dr. Marvin Sackner, Maggie O’Sullivan, Charles Bernstein, unidentified)
Photo courtesy of Derek Love & PENNsound
Bob Cobbing:
Sockless in Sandals
(PDF)
Plus
Bob Cobbing at Penn
(last 3 weeks)
Plus plus
Bob Cobbing archives
at PENNsound
Plus plus plus
Bob Cobbing archives
on Ubuweb
§
Richard Owens responds
to my review of
Damn the Caesars
§
Howard Junker
reads Paul Muldoon
as editor
& has some interesting
observations
(why I call this
neophobia,
part 1)
§
Al Filreis
on anti-modernism
in 1960
(why I call this
neophobia,
part 2)
Al Filreis
on responses to
The Grand Piano
Al Filreis’
bookmarks
§
The New York Times’
list of “100 notable books of 2007”
contains just four volumes of poetry,
including one by Rae Armantrout
The three others
continue the hegemony
of what I once called
the “Gang of Eight”
(This year it’s just FSG & Ecco/Harper)
§
Erin Mouré’s
Transparency Machine
exhibit
§
Two books
from George Bowering
§
After 73 years
of publishing poetry,
Ruth Brin
tries a novel
§
Celebrating John Ashbery
in utter bafflement
§
Charles Bernstein
& Susan Bee
collaborating in 1971
§
Jim Harrison
on
Charles Bukowski
§
Vernon Scannell.
”drunk, boxer, and Army deserter,”
who “emerged a poet,”
has died
As has
Paul Roche
§
Kindle me this
§
Talking with
Kim Addonizio
§
Worth attending:
in
Geoffrey Young
reads
The Riot Act,
December 1
§
Worth attending
in
Big book
party/reading
for
The Collected Poems
of Philip Whalen,
Dec. 4
@ Moe’s
§
Worth attending
in NY:
David Shapiro
in conversation with
David Lehman
Dec. 11
@ The New School
§
Poets against the war
on the Monterey Peninsula
§
250 attend
marathon reading
in Traverse City, Michigan
§
In
20 years of poetry
at the Laughing Goat
§
22 poems
by 17 men
with one thing in common:
Guantanamo
§
Israeli verse
written in
European languages
§
A profile of
Nasreen Syed,
a Canadian poet
writing in
Urdu & Punjabi
§
African Asian Scottish
performance poet
§
Short profile of
Pham-Tien Duat
§
Slammin’
down under
§
From
Is English a foreign language?
§
A little YouTube vispo
from Nico Vassilakis
§
Poet Populist
isn’t an academic
§
Bringing Gulzar
to Bollywood
§
Bringing Western writing
into Arabic
at last
§
Performer murdered
during play
in
§
A profile of
David Solway
§
W.S. Merwin
at 80
§
Seamus Heaney
on the poetry
of
§
year of Quietude
(plus Galway Kinnell)
in review
§
Andrew Motion’s
Christmas recommendations
find Ted Hughes’s world
”as compelling as Yeats's,
but more instantly sympathetic
and approachable”
§
§
Robert Pinsky
offers
Merwin’s Neruda
§
Norman Mailer’s work
in the
New York Review of Books
§
Software
to guide you
through your
paint-by-the-numbers
novel
§
Jenny Holzer
gets literary
and
political
at Mass MoCA
§
Barry Schwabsky
on
Kara Walker
§
§
In a land where
the few hundred
publishing poets
of the 1950s
have begat
over 10,000 today,
the rise of arts culture
is inescapable
§
Peter Gay’s
pop modernism
§
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Two completely separate topics:
First, I’ve been going slowly through Geoffrey Gatza’s Thanksgiving poem for me (PDF), enjoying it more and more with each reading. It’s actually easier to see & read in the PDF format than in the two large packages it arrived in via the mail. It’s elegant in a way that would please both Oulipo and the finest French restaurants I’ve encountered & filled at the same time, with remarkably close fitting wit plus some happy surprises (e.g., an email chain in which David Shaddock suddenly turns up!). Today, I’m in awe of the suite of six dishes that go into The Baking Parchment Scroll – which arrived in a long tube the same day as the box – and which just happens to translate a significant portion of The Chinese Notebook – Gatza’s choice as his favorite poem of mine – into the discourse of cuisine. But yesterday it was the Cornucopia of World Cheeses, Spiced Cashews and Port in the form of a cartoon in which the
§
Second, I’ve been contemplating what to do with/about the comments stream here. It’s gradually (or maybe not so gradually) descended into such a playground of pathology that I hear quite regularly from people who either cite it as the reason their weblogs don’t have comments streams, or who write me personal notes (always welcome!) because they don’t want their words subjected to the “debased discourse” that has become the norm there. I’m certainly aware of more than a few times of late when I wanted to wash my hands (or more) just from having to go through the moderation process. I’ve thought seriously about turning the comments stream off entirely. And if what I’m about to try doesn’t improve matters much, that probably is what I will do. But I do think there is a place for response here, at least potentially. And it pains me to see the posturing that absorbs and cancels out that possibility for far too many readers.
So I’ve decided to reverse the dynamics, at least for the time being. Henceforth, the presumption is going to be that comments don’t get approved unless they make useful and intelligent contributions to the discourse. My gut feel being the decider. The simply snide, the put down, the sexually and racially inappropriate, the whole repertoire of dysfunction, will have to build its own blogs or find other comment streams to inhabit. That should mean that it will get a lot quieter here right away, but hopefully over time this will lead to a rational and more human discourse that will be of greater value to everyone. This begins now.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Giant Benefit Reading
for Will Alexander
at the
Donations: $10-up
Readers include:
Nate Mackey
Juliana Spahr
Taylor Brady
Lyn Hejinian
Andrew Joron
Tisa Bryant
Adam Cornford
D.S. Marriott
and more!
As you may know, poet Will Alexander
is quite ill with cancer and is undergoing
chemotherapy. He’s spent his life largely
off the poetry grid, and has no financial
support or health insurance. Donations
will be bundled & sent directly to Will.
If you cannot make it, but would like to
contribute, look to
Joseph Mosconi's blog for information.
Hosted by David Buuck and Small Press Traffic
Labels: Readings
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Lyn Hejinian
A quick note on what is Thanksgiving in the
I am, in honesty, thankful for many things, from my family to my readers to my health. I’ve outlived the span of my own father’s life now by some 23 years, so I’m acutely aware that there are no guarantees. But this year one group of people I really want to note just how much I appreciate are my collaborators on the Grand Piano project. These are all people I’ve known for at least 30 years – Barrett Watten and I go back 43 years, Rae Armantrout and I 38.
Lyn Hejinian and I first appeared on facing pages in the magazine Arts in Society 40 years ago, tho I wouldn’t begin corresponding with her for another several years, and wouldn’t actually meet her until October 1976. I can recall the event exactly. There was a book fair at Fort Mason in San Francisco – the art fort as we thought of it in the years I lived in the City, a couple of piers and buildings of a decommissioned military facility turned over to non-profit use. Hejinian had a table for her Tuumba Press chapbooks, tho she had not at that point printed all that many of them, as number 4, Kenneth Irby’s Archipelago, was sitting there on the table with its deep blue cover and “Tuumba 4” & “November 1976” printed on the upper left & lower right corners of the cover and here it was not yet November.
Although I knew who Lyn was – we’d had a fitful correspondence earlier as I’d misunderstood what she was trying to do in her writing – and I knew, at some level, that she was the person responsible for Tuumba, so that this person behind the table very likely would be her, I just burst into some rhapsody about how wonderful I thought the poetry of Ken Irby was – still do, in fact – and that it was terrific to see that a new press existed that recognized this. She then introduced herself – count on her to have the better social skills here – and I apologized for being such an idiot during our correspondence, and we took it from there, a conversation that in some important ways is still continuing, in good part of late thanks to the Grand Piano. Irby must have been around that weekend as well – when did he moved back to
I think it’s remarkable that a group of friends – the circle doesn’t stop at the border of this particular series of books – can have the kind of lifelong sustaining relationships that we have had & are still having in the lives and work of one another. As a writing project, The Grand Piano is a fascinating, complicated, sometimes extremely difficult task. (Right this very moment, I’m ten days overdue on my assignment of turning in a draft of my section for volume six, the book in which I go first.) Although we are now in the second year of our actual writing & production of the series, we have been discussing this project now for ten years, mostly via email & a listserv. When I was in
It’s certainly true that The Grand Piano is a work empowered by the literary diaspora of the West Coast language poets & that it wouldn’t likely be happening now if we were all still living within a BART ride of one another. Yet in the past year, I’ve been most fortunate to see seven of my collaborators, eight including Bernheimer. Barry & Carla have been good enough to let me sleep under their roof, as has Tom Mandel & his spouse Beth Joselow. Bob Perelman & I have found ourselves at the gardening store buying plants together, or at least accompanying Krishna & Francie who are the knowledgeable ones in that domain. But the Piano gives us each so many other ways to be involved in each other’s lives – the work itself is an act of joy.
I look at other collaborative projects around poetry, such as the Subpress Collective that has produced so many important books in the past eight years or so, and I hope that there’s more to this experience for its editors than simply the process of taking turns putting out editions, each the lonely accomplishment of just one or two individuals. The real difference between the Grand Piano poets and so many of the other collective or collaborative literary formations over the past century always seems to me just how deeply and for how long we have meant so much to one another. Whenever I hear language bashing today, what I really hear most profoundly is an envy on the part of isolated individuals that language poets, so-called, seem to have such a big, loud, mostly happy family. It’s something I wish every writer had the opportunity to experience. So today I want to say thank you to Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Alan Bernheimer, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson & Barrett Watten – your lifetimes of generosity are extraordinary.
§
Plus a special thanks today also to Geoffrey Gatza, who each year creates a menu of poetry for a member of the literary community for Thanksgiving. This year’s selection (which is now on the BlazeVOX website) is This is It, a feast in the shape of an alphabet, and the guest of honor c’est moi. It’s a sumptuous feast in several ways, those you’d expect and some you wouldn’t. I put on two pounds just reading the table of contents.
Labels: Geoffrey Gatza, The Grand Piano
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Julian Brolaski
on
Stacy Szymaszek’s
queer poetics
§
Reginald Shepherd
on John Ashbery’s
Some Trees
§
But Amazon
tries to
invent a better book
Nonsense, say Forbes,
the real competition
for reading
is the web
§
GASP!
William Shakespeare’s works
were really written by…
William Shakespeare!
§
Language Poetry & the Body:
the complete panel
(Maria Damon, Steve Benson,
Leslie Scalapino & Bruce Andrews,
moderated by Tim Peterson
& Erica Kaufman)
§
§
I am “out of fashion”
(actually, he gets what I’m trying to do,
but mostly isn’t interested)
§
The ghost-writer
of
§
Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop
in
§
Auctioning
contemporary poetry archives
§
J.H. Prynne
on
Ken Edwards’ novel
Futures
Plus an excerpt
from Edwards’
latest novel
§
The Marin Independent Journal
on the suicide of
Landis Everson
§
Charles Alexander
reading
Creeley whole
§
A peek at
Beedle the Bard
§
Barrett Watten on
the radical particular:
critical regionalism
vs. globalization
§
Readers’ reports:
an assassin’s list
for contemporary books
§
How
War and Peace
works
§
A column on academic presses
in the daily paper?
The first one
§
Tenney Nathanson
on
the poetics of
Leslie Scalapino
§
§
Covering Norman Mailer
or not
in
Rethinking his place
in
The LA Times
§
Matthew Sweeney
makes the test
§
A new
Aeneid
§
Michael Gottlieb
on
Proust
§
Contemporary poetics
for a whole new century
§
Even more dismal
than the Costa Book Award shortlist
is the roster of judges
who turn up year after year
An oft-rejected novel
makes the list
§
“Like playing tunes
out of your armpit”
§
§
Robert Pinsky
celebrating
a fatty, artery clogging
slice of sentimentality
from Mark Strand
§
Angela Veronica Wong
in between
§
A Queen’s Medal
for a noisy Quietist
& the Royal Society
honors
Peter Porter
§
The trouble with
Janet Malcolm’s
Stein & Toklas
§
A poet’s portrait
with a rare history
§
Alan Davies
on
Roberto Harrison
& on
Norman Fischer
§
Canadian book prices
start to fall
§
The lone poet
on
football team
§
James Emanuel,
neglectorino
in his own time
§
A little Edith Wharton mystery
appears to solve itself
§
The dynamics
of web-based
social networks
§
Lawrence Weiner’s
word art
§
§
Loving Picasso’s biography
§
§
Surfer dude
stuns physics
An Exceptionally Simple
Theory of Everything
(PDF)
§
Gutting
The San Jose Mercury News
§
Do newspapers favor
the striking screenwriters?
§
The first film postponed by the strike
is Dan Brown’s
Da Vinci Code prequel
§
§
Vaclav Havel
returns to theater
§
Stephen Paul Miller
on
Radiohead
§
The Bob Dylan
camouflage military hat
§
Special thanks
to
E O A G H
for so much
wonderfulness
Labels: links
Monday, November 19, 2007
Most of the screen writers I’ve known came out of theater, worked like dogs for no money for decades & hoped for the rare occasional big payday, meanwhile gradually making a living through script doctoring – basically rendering the bland marginally more intelligible. When it comes to security and benefits, it’s just like adjunct teaching, save for the fact that screen writing is more sporadic, less certain.
Meanwhile the same corporate forces that try to control all media do everything in their power to keep writers (also actors, stage hands, etc.) in roughly the same relationship that the old record companies used to have with blues musicians who could neither read nor write. It would seem that these corporate forces have a bit of a potential windfall from the newer interactive modes of distribution if they can but monetize the web, raking in profits that should, in all fairness, have been the wages of writers. So the writers are out on the picket line & the longer they stay out, the longer it will be before I can see the final season of Battlestar Gallactica next year. But compared to the sacrifices the screen writers & other workers in
Labels: Film
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Kenny Goldsmith’s
playlist
for November
in the NY Times
(Marie Osmond does Hugo Ball,
Charles Bernstein, Christian Bök,
Joseph Beuys, La Monte Young, Terry Fox,
the complete Beatles, more,
all with MP3s)
§
Profiles of
Sawako Nakayasu
&
Aaron Kunin
§
Confronting
aesthetic diversity
§
A profile of
Ron Padgett
§
Ange Mlinko
on
Tom Pickard
§
Slammin’
with
Saul Williams
§
Two poets of Buchenwald
translated by
Fanny Howe
§
A review of
the most recent
volume of
The Grand Piano
§
Ananda Rajakaruna
& a specific moment
in the evolution of modernism
in Sinhala verse
§
A belated obit
for Bill Griffiths
makes it finally
to The Times
§
Ditto Jane Cooper
& The LA Times
§
A memorial reading
for
Dmitri Prigov,
Sunday, Nov. 18
at the Bowery Poetry Club,
NYC
(Scroll down)
§
The New Criterion’s
Roger Kimball
is ready to take on
Norman Mailer
now that he can’t fight back
Dick Cavett
remembers
when Mailer could
& did
still bring it on
Robert Fulford
&
Kyle Smith
just generally
despise Mailer
Jim Lewis
has a more complicated
response
Cynthia Crossen
blames it
on fame
But Suzanne Fields
was charmed
§
Mailer’s ghost
loomed large
over the
National Book Awards
§
Bob Hass
deservedly won the
National Book Award
(Sherman Alexie &
Denis Johnson
also received awards)
Cold Front’s
National Book Award
”Value Pack”
§
The end
of the
Great American Novel?
§
Picador
abandons
hardbacks
§
§
Nat Hentoff
on
Fred McDarrah
§
Japanese Women Poets:
An Anthology
§
Academy of American Poets
Poets Forum Reading
MP3s
(Lyn Hejinian, Robert Hass,
Frank Bidart, Susan Stewart,
Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell,
Sharon Olds, James Tate,
Robert Pinsky, Kay Ryan,
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Gerald Stern,
Carl Phillips)
§
The Olson documentary
comes to
his undergraduate school
§
Hart Crane
in
§
A Peter Ciccariello
I just
got completely absorbed in
which I link here
to say I’m sorry
for having, for two days,
misspelled his name
(a problem it seems
of a wandering i)
§
§
Talking with
Susan Gillis
§
Poetry
on the rails
§
C.K. Williams
hasn’t
”come very far”
in 71 years
§
Memories of my melancholy
Iranian censors
§
Getting naked with
Carmine Sarracino
§
A profile of
Tanya Davis
§
The need for a Complete
T.S. Eliot
§
Andrew Motion
on the new
Ezra Pound biography
§
Searching
for the right myth
§
§
new formalist
§
Judge rules
that intent
defines poetry
§
“Poetry has no serious contenders
as the English national art”
§
Jacques Barzun
at 100
has become a hero
to the right
§
As the audience ages,
so do fiction’s characters
§
Do geezers rule
at writing?
(The John Llewellyn Rhys shortlist:
those over 35
need not apply)
§
Studs Terkel
& the Popular Front
§
Reed Whittemore
telling it slant
§
Have all the gay stories
already been told?
§
In
the big chain stores
will start selling books
at
§
Bookstore browsing
in the
Pioneer Valley
§
The National Council on
Bookstore Tourism
§
§
The challenges
indie bookstores
are facing
§
Community college
to print its own
text books
§
Thirteen
new bookstores
that opened
in October
§
The literary scene
in Iceland
§
Harry Potter’s auntie
takes on
Samuel Beckett
§
§
A short profile
of
Michael Collier
§
Poetry at
Ohio State
§
Language study is up
at American colleges
(Arabic has more than
doubled)
§
Scholarship
in the digital age
§
Social networking
as a part of
reporting
§
§
Results of the
Pimp my Bookcart
contest
§
Creative writing
on
Craigslist
§
Fighting
”libel tourism”
§
Best practices in
”fair use,”
cinema division
§
Against
improvisation
§
Talking with
Aesop Rock
§
Talking with
Jim Dine
The prints of
Jim Dine
§
On seeing Edward Hopper
through the eyes of
Alexander Nemerov
§
Violette de Mazia’s
defenders
come forth
§
Rothko sells for $34.2M,
Warhol’s “Liz” for $23.7M
&
Koons’ “Hanging Heart”
for $23.6M
§
Labels: links
Thursday, November 15, 2007
The new issue of Damn the Caesars, Richard Owens’ magazine out of
DtheC starts off with a longish poem – a single 327-line stanza, the lines themselves stretching most of the way across the page – by Thomas Meyer. “The Magician’s Assistant” is so atypical of Meyer’s mature work that it is by definition a major publication. I can report also that it’s a terrific poem, dense, fresh, surprising, full of wit, a great read. It more than justifies the $10 price of the magazine.
The Meyer piece starts off the opening section of the journal, containing also work by Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack & Dale Smith. All are given a substantial space to work with – excluding one Korean feature, the journal gives each contributor an average of 8.5 pages, and everyone seems to have taken advantage of this by sending in their very best work.
The Korean feature is the volume’s second section, a selection of five major contemporary poets – Ko Un, Kim Seung-Hui,
The third section again contains the poetry of four English-speaking poets – the late Bill Griffiths (who must have died while this was in press), Stan Mir, Peter Finch & Thom Donovan. The selection by
The fourth section consists of a 20-page selection of poetry by Andrzej Bursa, a brilliant Polish poet who died of congenital heart failure at the of 25 in 1957 (that is him on the left in the image above, the cover of the issue). In a five-page introductory essay, Kevin Christianson, one of the two translators, compares Bursa variously to Dorothy Parker, Phillip Larkin, ee cummings & the Beats, which mostly tells you that Christianson doesn’t read contemporary poetry. The poems here, however, sound like they were written just yesterday, maybe by a sharp young poet taking workshops at St. Marks. You’re more aware here of the scrim of translation between reader & “original” than with the earlier Korean materials, but on the whole these are very good.
The last general section contains the work of six poets – Sotère Torregian, Michael Kelleher, Richard Deming, Rachel Levitsky, Jonathan Greene & Billy Childish. Only Childish, one of the key figures of anti-conceptual British Stuckism, is new to me here. Since Childish appears to have published some 30 books, made many records & painted over 1,000 paintings, my lack of familiarity suggests either (a) I need to get out more or (b) British work still has a terrible time with U.S. distribution. The Torregian is especially interesting, given this latter-day surrealist’s & one-time NY School poet (he’s lived in
But what really struck most in this issue is a tone that shows up almost satirically in Childish’s “I Come With Shin Bones Like Knives.” Here is its first stanza, the extra spacing part of the original:
it is wonderfull being a man
and
washing your body down at the sink
in the early morning
with a flannel rough as a badgers arse
And here, a page later, is the final stanza:
this
is my shit
and it smells good to me
This is almost Archie Bunkerville in its masculinist take on the world. It does, however, serve to call attention to the rest of Damn the Caesars as a whole. And here I note that I misspoke above when I suggested that the issue led off with work by Thomas Meyer. There is, in fact, a short epigraph facing Meyer’s first page with a quote from Michael Palmer’s “The Flower of Capital”:
Politics seems a realm of power and persuasion that would like to subsume poetry (and science, and fashion, and …)under its mantle, for whatever noble or base motives. Yet if poetry is to function – politically – with integrity, it must resist such appeals as certainly as it resists others.
Editor Owens makes something of the same point in a final essay that looks at the editing process under the belligerent heading of “Take It or Leave It.” Pointedly, Owens writes:
This journal is no different. It is implicated in precisely the thing it aims to critique – exclusion and the willful production of scarcity. This is, after all, a print journal, and, as a print journal, limits are immediately imposed upon the range of things it can do.
So let’s take a quick peek at who is being limited through exclusion. Mostly it’s women. The current issue has 15 contributors outside of the Korean selection, of whom just two are female, 13 percent. One of the five Koreans is female. By page count, it’s even worse – Karen Mac Cormack, Kim Seung-Hui and Rachel Levitsky have just 13 pages or eight percent of the 162 pages given to content. Let me put this another way: 92 percent of the content is by men.
Nor is volume III exceptional in this regard, going back through the archives, one quickly realizes that of the 101 contributors to the journal’s history (a big second volume, plus all four issues of the first) whose gender can be identified (I failed in the case of Jan Bender), only 18 have been women. Volume II, with 24 percent of its contributors being women, is the best Damn the Caesars has ever done.
I know that this plays into Stephanie Young & Juliana Spahr’s critique of a gendered poetry world (PDF) in the new Chicago Review as well as the statistical analysis (PDF) done there by ChiRev editors Joshua Kotin & Robert P. Baird. In general, Kotin & Baird focus on more institutional publications, The Nation, New Yorker,
It’s one thing to suggest, as I have at times, that we are in the midst of a long historic transformation between the roles played by various genders and that different moments and/or stages are discernible along the way, and a journal like DtheC that behaves as if the 1950s were still the present. Eight percent? At least the Allen anthology 43 years ago got to nine with its four contributors out of 44.
All of which leaves me with this very uneasy feeling – a sense that Owens’ afterward may in fact be as much a prophylactic against such criticism than a statement in & for itself. On the one hand, this is a wonderful issue with much great stuff worth reading. On the other, I have a hard – impossible – time imagining any woman ever wanting to buy this issue & I have to confess that I myself come away from it feeling very sad indeed. And I don’t think that was the editor’s intent.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Books Galore, Festus, Missouri
Of books as a system
Pierre Bayard’s first chapter
Talking with
Pierre Bayard
§
Supreme Court disses
Amiri Baraka
§
Talking with
Aram Saroyan
§
Adam Day’s
Roar Shock
§
A profile of
Glenna Luschei
§
Talking with
Robert Hass
Placing Bob Hass
& Mark Strand
on a spectrum
that stretches
all the way from
Robert Lowell
to
John Berryman
Completely flustered
by that old avant-gardist,
Robert Hass
§
Big Brother
is reading your verse
§
§
Norman Mailer
reading
at the
Mailer
on Bush & Iraq
§
Talking with
David Amram
§
The Poetry Farm
§
§
A profile of
Lawson Inada
§
Remembering
Nima
§
Philip Schultz’ Failure
§
Leonard Cohen
with
Philip Glass
§
§
David Trinidad’s
”confection-laced”
Late Show
§
Arab poets
at Jack Hirschman’s
International Poetry Fest
§
A fall reading tour
that includes
20 separate colleges
§
On the road movie
§
Poets’ mugs
adorn
poets’ mug
§
Jean Valentine
once again in
The New Yorker
§
Pinsky wins
lifetime award
Pinsky on
Margaret Atwood
§
A poet worthy
of the
Mütter Museum
§
Anne Stevenson,
Paula Gunn Allen
&
Sineád Morrisey
receive
Lannan Literary Fellowships
for their poetry
§
Canadian
bookstore rage
§
When it comes to rereading,
The Bible
comes in behind
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
§
History poems
from
§
$1 million demand
to ensure
a poetry reading
by cowboy poets?
§
James Michie
has died
§
A “cringe-making” book of poetry
by the Tory candidate
for mayor of
§
Vairamuthu
unplugged
§
Jay Rogoff’s
Long Fault
§
Robert Bly,
reduced to
parodying himself
§
Six
quietists
§
A novel from
Ha Jin
§
As Albee
nears 80
§
Re-launching
the real
DIA
§
A defense of public art
in
§
A new eye
in
§
The Radiohead “experiment”
§
Žižek:
”Resistance is Surrender”
§
Andrew Sullivan
reads this blog
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Tom Wilkinson has been a professional actor for over thirty years, tho it’s only been in the last decade that he’s been rightfully acknowledged as one of the best character actors of his generation. Often he plays fairly buttoned-down types, so it’s a special pleasure to see him cut loose in Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy’s film of corporate suspense, in a role fit for a somewhat older Philip Seymour Hoffman. Wilkinson is a top trial lawyer for a firm that specializes in defending sleazeball corporations, this time a food-processing conglomerate called uFront. It’s a class action that has been dragging on for years because it involves the death of many a Midwestern farmer, and, in a deposition in Milwaukee, Wilkinson’s character, who is bipolar in addition to being a “killer” litigator, has gone off his meds & goes over the edge, stripping naked in front of the teenage girl he’s in the process of deposing, as well as two teams of astonished attorneys. Almost lost in the chaos that ensues is the little detail that Wilkinson’s planning to give the plaintiffs the smoking gun memo that will seal the fate of his client.
Wilkinson’s bread scene – you’ll know which it is instantly – is an actor’s master’s class, given here by one of the greats. Wilkinson’s isn’t the only outstanding performance in this film, which comes oh so close to actually working, the other being Tilda Swinton channeling Carly Fiorina as the corporate counsel for uNorth, overwhelmed at trying to contain the damage created by Wilkinson, trying too hard to be ruthless in a job for which she doesn’t feel qualified. I would say that this is one of Swinton’s best quirky acting roles ever, except for the fact that I’d probably say that about almost all of her characters over her career – she is one of the very best actors alive and is completely brilliant here. Watching her face half-hide a million rapid-fire emotions is one of the very best things about Michael Clayton, which as I said comes oh so close to working.
Michael Clayton is Tony Gilroy’s first directorial credit, having made a successful career writing thriller screenplays – the Bourne trilogy most notably – and he does a decent job with his own script, or at least with his actors, as the story gets away from him. The first thirty minutes of the film are simply terrific as it spins out so many narrative threads without picking them up in any predictable fashion that the viewer’s head feels ready to burst just keeping track. That’s my kind of fun and, at this point, I was completely taken with this film. What follows over the next 89 minutes doesn’t entirely fulfill the promise of this opening sequence, and that really is the tale of Michael Clayton.
The title role of course belongs to George Clooney, who knows that a movie star’s first task is to be himself regardless of his character, which function he performs admirably in somewhat difficult circumstances. What George Clooney does best is smile – his grin has made him very wealthy & very famous – but Michael Clayton is a character with very little to smile about & Clooney dutifully tones it down a notch. Clayton is a fixer for the law firm employed by uNorth, something of a protégé to Tom Wilkinson’s character, the person dispatched to handle “messy” personal situations that can get in the way of client relations. Indeed, the first part of the film has him being dispatched up to Westchester to aide a client who has just committed a hit-&-run of a midnight jogger out there in the ‘burbs. His job is to hold the customer’s hand and get the best possible local criminal defense lawyer there before the police show up at the front door. In this case, the customer is a jerk with serious anger management issues who wants to blame the victim. Clooney is having none of this and lets the customer know it. On his way back, he stops to look at a trio of horses under a tree on a hill. As he stands staring at the horses, his car explodes.
That’s the basic set-up and a lot to handle right there. On top of this, we have a plot about a failed restaurant, Clooney’s gambling addiction – seventeen years with a top law firm & he’s at risk to being jacked up by loan sharks over a relatively small debt – his relationship with his brothers (one a cop, the other a druggie) and his son Henry, whom he drives to school tho he doesn’t live with the mother. Add to this the corporate plot lines & you have far more than
Clooney actually does a decent job here, but it’s an impossible circumstance. He’s never quite desperate enough for his circumstances because desperate isn’t something George Clooney does. His awkwardness in the family scenes is only half because of the narrative context being presented. The result is a picture that leaps into another dimension whenever Wilkinson comes on screen during its first half, whenever Swinton is on screen mostly in the second. The other notably good role here belongs to Sydney Pollack of all people, as the head of Clooney’s law firm. Pollack is invariably irritating whenever he acts, but here
Labels: Film
Monday, November 12, 2007
The last time I saw Norman Mailer on the television – I never met him personally – he was on C-Span2 on one of that channel’s all-book days, talking at
One test of a great novelist, any great writer really, I’ve always thought lay in the size of their vocabulary and the ease with which they deployed it. I always come away from Shakespeare, for example, hyperconscious of how much more there is to the language than what I normally hear in daily life. Just this past week, after a phone presentation with one of the customers on my day job, a multibillion dollar global systems integrator, I got an email from the lead person on the customer’s team, thanking me for using the word “loquacious” & reminding him that a world existed where such terms could be used.
After the high modernists, especially Joyce & Faulkner, the two novelists who do the most to expand one’s vocabulary are Henry Miller & Norman Mailer. DeLillo & Pynchon aren’t bad in this regard, either. Miller of course is better known for the frankness of his writings on sex, but it’s the vocabulary’s scope that persuades me, not just the use of an occasional four-letter word.
With Mailer the two books that I find matter most are Armies of the Night, easily the best prose work about American political life in the 1960s, and the remarkably off-kilter Why Are We in Vietnam? I’ve always felt that latter book was an attempt to channel a later version of Jack Kerouac in a way that directly anticipates, of all people, Donna Haraway & Greg Tate. Here is just the first paragraph of “Intro Beep 1”:
Hip hole and hupmobile, Braunschweiger, you didn’t invite Geiger and his counter for nothing – hold tight young
It doesn’t quite work, which actually proves to be an important part of its charm, critical to the linguistic vertigo that sucks the reader in. 224 pages of this can feel exhausting, but you aren’t actually going to open up to the work until you get to that moment, not some sort of suspension of disbelief, but rather through disbelief completely. It’s a move that takes Mailer out of the pallid circuit of Bellow, Roth, Doctorow & Updike & places him more fairly against Kerouac, Olson, Melville. While I like Doctorow, only Mailer can write with the intensity, word to word, of those poet-novelists even if it doesn’t come through in everything he did.
Here be some links that popped up in the days since he died:
Boston Globe photo essay
Tributes from various folks,
including the President of France
From around Atlanta
Labels: Fiction, Norman Mailer, Passings
Sunday, November 11, 2007
§
Woman convicted of terrorism
in part because of poetry
§
CAConrad’s
Thanksgiving for Peace
§
§
Recognizability
& identity
in
§
Kenny Goldsmith:
Sucking on Words
§
§
Talking with
Gil Scott-Heron
§
”one of the most
shoplifted books
in the English-speaking
world”
§
Black Diamond Golden Boy
Takes Bull by Horns
§
Bob Hass’
impeccable poetics
§
Eventually even
The New York Times
catches up
with Silliman’s blog:
Jane Cooper obit
Fred McDarrah obit
§
§
Cornelius Eady’s
Brutal Imagination
§
Deep Trance Behavior
in Potatoland
(PDF)
Richard Foreman’s
page at
the
Foreman
in coversation
§
The dark vision
of
Margaret Atwood
§
Ivor Gurney’s
Rewards of Wonder
§
El Cógido Da Vinci
has sold 300,000 copies
in the
§
Academics like it
digital
§
But Harper
(publisher of Ashbery, Pinsky,
Bukowski & Noah Eli Gordon)
is tanking
§
Christine Wertheim’s
+│’me’S-pace
§
Fighting to save
the language
Euskera
§
Talking with
Marvin Bell
§
Opening a rare book shop
with $8 million in inventory
mostly from your own
personal library
§
Life in the rare book trade
in
§
On the French book prize scene,
the Renaudot
goes to an author
not even on the shortlist
§
Looking at Czech poets
in translation
from the vantage of
§
Mini-reviews of
Bill Kushner, Janine Pommy Vega
& Nate Pritts
§
Remembering
an imagined
gay mafia
§
Forgetting the taste
of madelines
§
Ads
come to
library books
§
Bad book?
Sue the author!
§
§
Larry Lessig
on
© vs. creativity
§
Damien Flores,
Poet of the Year
§
Maha Chakri Sirindhorn,
poet & Thai princess
§
The poet laureate of the town
in which
Charles Olson was raised
§
The poet laureate
of
§
/r/
as a vowel
§
Diversity
and the romance novel
§
Walt Whitman’s
birthplace
§
Poetry,
cattle &
Remembrance Day
§
The most re-read books
in the
§
The news anchor
who loves poetry
§
Remembering
Francis Thompson
§
Twain play debuts
a century late
§
Reading report:
Tim Seibles
§
Jessy Randall
on texts & gumballs
§
Against
BookTV
§
A neophobe looks
at Auden’s
Phi Beta Kappa poem
§
Returning
looted books
126 years later
§
Resurrecting neglectorinos
in the
§
Kara Provost
&
Provincetown poets
§
The poems of Jackie Kay
§
You don’t even have to
ride the bus
to read
poetry in motion
§
Success defined
as being read
by Garrison Keillor
§
There once was a laureate
from Nantucket
§
Yes,
you too
are an imposter
§
Bravo,
Performa 07
(be sure to check out
the slide show)
§
Yvonne Rainer’s
RoS Indexical
§
“My name is
Albert Ayler”
§
Sound art,
art sound
§
John Carroll
by the numbers
§
Picasso
at his peak
§
At the Barnes,
the finger pointing
has begun
§
“Dude,
you’re getting
a Dos Equis”
Labels: links
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Friday, November 09, 2007
I shouldn’t whine. Whenever I complain that the School of Quietude has held something close to a monopoly position on American poetry’s institutional awards, in spite of just being one scene among many – and an insistently derivative & conservative one at that – I have to at least admit that there have been breakthroughs, particularly over the last decade, poets who have won awards (Nate Mackey, say) or been on notable shortlists (Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen), gotten teaching jobs at significant schools from Mills & UC San Diego & Berkeley to Ivy League bastions Penn & Brown. The walls may once have seemed impregnable but now surely they’re coming down. Indeed, that seems to be precisely what has Charlie Simic’s knickers in such a twist.
But I’m looking at all this from a particular perspective, a position that can be historically located along the long arc of generative poetics that stretch from Wordsworth, Blake & Baudelaire to the present. The marginality that characterized Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson, the first two American poets to completely abandon the Anglophile notions of the
Consider then this same literary history from the vantage of visual poetry. From that perspective, it still must feel like 1940. There are major practitioners, a significant and growing critical discourse & the institutions of poetry have thus far paid almost zero attention. No volume of vispo has ever made a major prize shortlist. No visual poets sit as chancellors at the
I’m sure that from some neophobe perspective, the deeper question might be what makes vispo poetry? As if one pass through the works of William Blake doesn’t silence that dubious line of argument forever. When I gave my talk on recognizability at the
I’ve been looking for the past two weeks at the breath-taking work of Peter Ciccariello in his book Uncommon Vision, which I heartily & unreservedly recommend to anyone who has even the slightest doubt as to the potential value of vispo. The image at the top of this note, Language as Authority, actually doesn’t appear in the book itself, but it’s representative of Ciccariello’s best work and what you will find in those pages. Uncommon Vision divides Ciccariello’s work into two groups, images that don’t incorporate texts and those that do, the latter section (appropriately designated “Word”) headed off with a one-page appreciation by Geof Huth, tracing writing back to the very idea of drawing letters¹ and talking about the experience of confronting these as texts without actually discussing in any great detail how Ciccariello does all this & only starting to suggest its implications for the process we think of as reading.
The Digital ImageMaker, where Ciccariello won a photography contest for one of the non-text works, Bird in a Basket, that does appear in Uncommon Vision², describes Language as Authority as
a digital collage containing a number of photographs and fragments of text all merged with an underlying structure of geometric forms texture mapped with additional photographs and rendered in Bryce. Postwork is done in Photoshop and Painter.
Don’t you just know this is how Charlie Simic characterizes his writing process also? Not likely. But then again, me neither. I’m still drawing words in notebooks, but they don’t especially look any different once I type them up from other text-ridden (or written) poetry.
What you read when you read a visual poem differs markedly from poet to poet, poem to poem, just as with any other genre of verse. What you’re not going to get, here or most other places (George Starbuck & the shaped poems of John Hollander excepted perhaps), is persona or the old, cold verse form conformities of an earlier century. In fact Ciccariello’s work is not that far from the scrawl texts of Robert Grenier where the task of the reader is ultimately to fathom out what it says. Where Grenier gives you nothing but the hand of the poet, using marker or even crayon, Ciccariello offers landscapes that recall the works of Dali or sci-fi book jackets across which texts are stretched & folded much as they are on the figure above. Letters are discernable, words less so, themes – well, themes are really a balance between what the landscape itself tells us and what few words come across, or even what font. There are, for example, multiple layers to the text above with its image of a ghost warrior & giant lower-case g foregrounded as it is. Both Language as Authority and the landscapes of Uncommon Vision remind me of passages of Claude Levi-Strauss’ great Tristes Tropique where Levi-Strauss compares reading to the visual inspection of a field, whether that of a contemporary geologist’s or a pre-modern hunter. Where does reading begin works like this beg of us. How do we even think to make sense of the visual field? Grenier and Ciccariello have very different responses to this – I can’t imagine Grenier engaging the concept of depth perception as part of his project, while it feels close to central to Cicciarello’s – I’m tempted to say that his work is all about seeing depth on a two-dimensional plane, tho I know that’s an overstatement. And where Grenier deploys fairly rudimentary colors to distinguish word from overlapping word (thus this reads “I saw it where is it”), the real process of Greier’s poem the coming to recognition of the word, Cicciarello is far more about effects that are at the edge of language, one of which is his obsession with the color brown (it can’t just be that he lives in Providence, home to a university by that name), which is “off the charts” on the old color wheel & which brings forth a whole terrain’s worth of connotation – in most of his works, the text is lighter than its background. What changes when you read it like that? Is that, or is that not, a mode of meaning? And which meaning is that?
If Grenier then offers us a poetry of coming into language, of recognition, Cicciarello seems far more a poet going in the other direction, concerned instead with the moment things pass into unintelligibility, the instant of rupture. Several of the texts in Uncommon Vision speak to this in their titles as well: Our own vestigial language shuddering toward obscurity or Proposed monument to the language of rupture.
All of which is to note that I’m persuaded, completely, by this work. Ciccariello would seem to me to be a perfectly reasonable candidate for any major book award you might think of, and would certainly be far less of an embarrassment as PLOTUS than that position’s current appointee. So, let me ask you again, why the total exclusion of visual poetry?
¹ Anyone who has ever tried to make their way through my own pathetic penmanship will recognize that drawing letters is exactly what I do and no amount of Palmer method script training ever has been able to break me of this primal habit.
² Bird in a Basket also won first prize in the Donnie 2007 Award of the
Labels: Peter Cicciarello, vispo
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Shanna Compton, For Girls (& Others), Bloof Books, no location given, 2007
John Crouse, Monodys, Small Chapbook Project,
Sarah Hannah, Inflorescence,
Mary Rising Higgins, Borderlning: Pieces from R & B, Small Chapbook Project,
Jukka-Pekka Kervcinen, Paragraphs, Small Chapbook Project,
Jennifer Knox, Drunk by Noon, Bloof Books, no location given, 2007
Tony Lopez, Covers, Salt, Cambridge 2007
Chris Martin, American Music, Copper Canyon, Port
rob mclennan,
Helen Mirra, Cloud, the, 3, Christoph Keller Editions, JRP Ringier, Zurich 2007
Brian Mornar, Repatterning, Punch Press, Buffalo 2007
bpNichol, The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader, edited by Darren Wershler-Henry & Lori Emerson, Coach House Press, Toronto 2007
Brian Strang, Dark Adapt, Small Chapbook Project,
Books (Other)
Ken Edwards, Nostalgia for Unknown Cities, Reality Street,
Tony Lopez & Anthony Caleshu, editors, Poetry and Public Language, Shearsman Books,
Matt Marinovich, Strange Skies, Harper Perennial, New York 2007
Journals
Chicago Review, 53: 2/3, Autumn 2007,
Damn the Caesars, vol. III, 2007, Buffalo. Includes Thomas Meyer, Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack, Dale Smith, Bill Griffiths, Thom Donovan, Sotère Torregian, Michael Kelleher, Richard Deming, Jonathan Levitsky, Jonathan Greene, Contemporary Korean Poetry feature, more.
Modern Review, Issue III.1, Fall 2007,
Broadside
Richard Owens, from Bel & the Dragon, no date or location given.
All items received since Halloween
Labels: Recently Received
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Photo by Steve McNamara, courtesy of Jacket
Ange Mlinko
on
poetry & community
“Numbers trouble” –
A.E. Stallings
on
women & publishing
Emily Warn
on
essentialism & gender
(Essays all in response
to Spahr & Young (PDF)
in the new
Chicago Review
on the subject of gender,
diversity, anthologies,
Jennifer Ashton (PDF)
& [sigh]
Silliman’s Blog)
”Poetry Magazines & Women Poets”
by the editors of
The Chicago Review
(PDF)
Further commentary by
Stephanie Young & Juliana Spahr
&
Dale Smith
&
K. Lorraine Graham
&
Simon DeDeo
§
Mlinko’s blog archives
for the
Poetry Foundation
§
A review of
Lydia Davis’
Varieties of Disturbances
§
At a slam
in Kuala Lumpur
six of the seven contestants
are women
§
Ruth Stone
isn’t slowing down
§
A portrait of
Nikki Giovanni
§
§
Jackson Mac Low
in conversation
§
“Is the avant-garde
necessary?”
§
Christian Bök’s blogs
for the
Poetry Foundation
§
Bob Hass,
political poet
§
Campus librarians
fight surveillance
§
Bonnefoy
receives Czech prize
§
Talking with
Franz Wright
§
One Kansas Poet Laureate
looks at a predecessor
§
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore article
comes from
Santa Barbara
§
But the Irish
book market
is doing okay
§
The bard
behind bars
§
Robert Pinsky
on
Reed Whittemore
§
“But is it poetry?
I can answer positively
in the negative.”
§
The
youth slam
§
What parts of the bookstore
to kill next
§
Visit to a rare book shop
§
Remembering
Jaun Elia
& the witch of
§
The Marine poet
of YouTube
§
Ted Hughes,
”eco-warrior”
§
A review of
Galway Kinnell
§
Subtleties
of global English
§
Simon Armitage,
war poet
by proxy
§
The T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist
is pure
School of Snoozy-tude
§
Another review
of
Edmund Wilson
§
Bad books
about Homer
§
Kahlil Gibran,
from bad to verse
§
Galway Kinnell,
raconteur
§
Erica Jong
on
Fernando Botero
§
Auctioning art
in a bad economy
§
Michael Roth
on
John Brenkman
on
democracy post-9/11
§
Is there anyone
who can report
on the reading
of Robert Grenier
& Aram Saroyan
at Beyond Baroque
November 2nd?
Labels: links
Monday, November 05, 2007
Where is the body? In the North American version of the old game of Clue – Cluedo in its original British setting – Mr. Boddy, two Ds, is the only given in the game (in the U.K. he’s Mr. Black) – you have to puzzle out who did it, where they did it & with what weapon. It might even have been yourself. Playing the game as a kid, it was always a mystery to me how we could always know there is a body without actually knowing where the crime occurred. Nowadays, with the benefit of CSI, such possibilities proliferate into a cornucopia of potential false clues & wrong turns. Even when the body is present & fully opened up on the morgue slab – such a far cry from the tales of viewers vomiting as they fled Stan Brakhage’s film The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes mid-screening – it’s narratively rich, capable of telling any number of different stories.
Where’s the body in the text? That’s a recurrent question in poetry, one that I think is at least implicit in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads over two centuries ago & which turns up explicitly at last in the work of Charles Olson & the Projectivists. They are, after all, the first writers I can think of who actually theorized the text’s relation to the body that created it. The whole idea of the line as a tracking of the poet’s breath, the break that pause needed to inhale only to set forth again anew, very much suggests that each set of lungs will beget something different. In recordings, you can hear Olson’s scale, all 6’8” of him, wheezing as he reads into the mic. A much smaller man, Robert Creeley had shorter more hesitant lines. You can hear the tobacco clouds in his lungs as well – decades of smoking brought him to emphysema.
Among the Projectivists, Robert Duncan was different. He emphasized not the lung, but the hand & often employs the figure of the dance as an allegory for his own creative process. I must say that I never saw him truly dance, and can’t quite imagine him actually doing so. My own memory is of a man most at home sitting down. Even when he wore his cape publicly, its effect was to enshroud the body. The one period in which he did emphasize the line in his readings – the presentation of the complete, at least to that point, Passages over a couple of readings in Berkeley in 1970 or ’71¹ – Duncan audibly counted to three between each line of text, whispering the numbers as he went.
My own personal image of the Projectivists & the body is of Denise Levertov, the MC at a large, vastly overcrowded anti-war reading at Glide Church in San Francisco, getting genuinely hysterical onstage at the sight of The People’s Prick, an attendee who turn up in a six-foot tall bright pink terrycloth dildo costume. She threatened to shut the evening down on the spot and it took several of her peers to talk her down from this position, her own body visibly trembling with anger. She did not view this little bit of agitprop attendance – a direct antecedent, I suppose, of the panda who showed up at my reading last month in Ashland – in the spirit of women going topless at rock concerts, common enough at the time, but rather in the sense of the penis as an ever-present assault on women. Where is the body in this sense fragments almost instantly into questions of which body, where body, how body, and ultimately whose body is it? What might have happened had The People’s Prick been any other color, even blue?
In 1967, in an undergraduate writing class taught by Jack Gilbert at San Francisco State, two dancers suddenly burst through the door stark naked, did a short duet that was only vaguely erotic & dashed back out across the hall where presumably their clothes were waiting in another classroom. Jack had us each write down what we saw. The remainder of the class consisted of a demonstration of how different the experience was for each, that the eyewitness version was hardly neutral or objective.
That same year, in another course taught by George Hitchcock, he argued repeatedly that any author of a play needed occasionally to act, if only to understand that you had to write from the perspective of the actor, that you couldn’t give the actor things to do that were physically impossible. In 1970, I heard that same argument being made in an undergraduate drama class at UC Berkeley – I forget that teacher’s name – but this was a class in which some students actually had sex on stage. This was, I suppose, a logical next step after Michael McClure’s The Beard, which had been prosecuted a few years earlier largely because of the simulated act of cunnilingus that occurs during the play’s climax. The one time I saw The Beard performed – at the Fillmore Auditorium to a sizeable audience – the performers had mics, which rendered the physical & practical process of Billy the Kid proclaiming his lines from between Jean Harlow’s thighs problematic, to say the least. The class at Berkeley may have been notorious, but it was never busted, tho perhaps that was because, in the year of Kent State & the way UC, among so many other campuses, responded by transforming into fulltime antiwar machines canceling all else, teenagers having sex in front of their peers was the least of anybody’s problems.
I’m reminded that Steve Benson once played Billy the Kid in a production of The Beard, tho it’s not clear to me quite where or when. Before I knew him certainly. Steve is the person I think of first when I hear the question where is the body asked in connection with language poetry. All of his performance pieces seem rooted in the body, such as improvising onstage while listening to a work of classical music over headphones. So much of what actually occurs, way beyond what you can see in the later printed text, has to do with his own body language, full of hesitation & literal twitches, even tho he is one of the most graceful men I’ve ever known. As wonderful as Steve’s texts are, those that replicate his performances function to my mind as documenta – the “real” occasion is the performance itself, in real time, not replicable as such.
One step – and only one step – removed from this is the work of the language version of Poet’s Theater, and especially the writing of Carla Harryman, both there and in her other work that continues to this day.
Hardly any accusation about language poetry makes me more furious than the one that it had (has) no relation to the body. One hears this in different forms – two that I’ve come across recently were that the language poets never mention sex and “language poets can’t dance” – neither claim is even remotely true. It is no accident that the first poem in The Age of Huts, Ketjak, alludes both in its title & formal structure to the Balinese “monkey chant” by that name, nor that Ketjak is the name of the larger cycle of which The Age of Huts, Tjanting, The Alphabet, and Universe are parts. One need only hear the David Lewiston recording to find out exactly where I’m coming from as a poet. On the question of sex in my poetry, just spend a few pages reading Sunset Debris (PDF), also in The Age of Huts. Nor is it coincidental that the vast majority of my poems are originally written by hand, in notebooks. In The Alphabet, only my collaboration with Rae Armantrout, Engines, was first composed entirely on a keyboard.
One could, I think, go through the entire roster of contributors to The Grand Piano and discover much the same all through the list. Indeed, I responded to an earlier generation of this same insinuation about the lack of eroticism in language poetry, in that instance from Jeff Hansen, with the following on February 10, 1996:
Geez, Jeff,
I think there's lots of eroticism in most all of my langpo friends. Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian's collaboration The Wide Road would be an obvious place to start, but Bob Perelman's early 11 Romantic Positions wouldn't be bad either (tho it's a more fugitive work). I've been criticized for having too much in my own writing. So your question puzzles me
Nor was I alone. Douglas Messerli, Rae Armantrout, Joe Amato & Rod Smith all offered their own suggestions. Rae’s brief note pointed out that
Carla Harryman and Ron Silliman’s work (just for starters) is very much engaged with the erotic.
I’m reminded of this today because of reading in the big pink anthology, The noulipian Analects, which is an anthology that might be said to report on, cover, and/or have been provoked by, Noulipo: The Conference, held October 28-29, 2005, in Los Angeles. The anthology itself describes the event (on p. 149) as follows:
The purpose of noulipo was to examine the legacy of Oulipian constraint-based writing among Anglophone writers. Organized by Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim, the event consisted of five discussion panels, a summary panel, and two evening readings.
I just happened at this same moment to be reading a series of reports about the Politics of Constraint panel at this same event, specifically Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young’s attempt to spell out what they called Foulipo, which must stand for Feminist Oulipo, much in the way that noulipo signifies an Oulipo + n, at least theoretically an unknown, a supplement, a transformation to a new stage. The conference itself appears to have been interesting, even if hijacked to some degree by the success by scandal of Spahr & Young, who stripped during their presentation & were joined by three other naked performers, and who made claims made about the nature of Oulipo & the body, especially women’s bodies, that turned out to be controversial. A lot of this was documented in the eighth issue of Drunken Boat, one of the better webzines around. Of particular interest are the text of the event itself, Kenneth Goldsmith’s scolding response, which begins (not inaccurately)
Stephanie Young & Juliana Spahr’s “Foulipo” is awash in nostalgia….
Also worth noting here are Young’s brief report of the event, which she uses as a lead-in to the paper itself, and Joseph Mosconi’s far more reportorial essay, presented on his blog. An edited version of Mosconi’s piece appears in The noulipian Analects under “Politics of Constraint: The Panel.”
I have to admit that I concur with Goldsmith’s judgment here – Spahr & Young had taken some potshots at Fidget – and that the whole conference as presented in this anthology reminds me of Rae Armantrout’s joke that she has to bring her very worn copy of the Rolling Stones LP Let it Bleed to school at least once each year to let certain undergraduates know that they did not invent nihilism, punk, dressing in black, whatever. Oulipo itself represents but a minuscule fraction of constraint-based literature – one can trace it back well past the trobar clus of the troubadours to the invention of rhyme itself – and to note that a conference on constraint-based literature that so fetishizes Oulipo, as this one did, has already gone off the tracks avant la lettre.
In the actual instance of Young & Spahr, the constraint placed on their piece on the body & writing was not the omission of the letter r from portions of the text nearly so much as it was historical amnesia. They’re permitted to discover that they have bodies by virtue of forgetting that everybody else got there first. At one level, this is not unlike children who cannot imagine the erotic lives of their parents.
By comparison, the body in language poetry occurs not only in Steve Benson’s performances or Poet’s Theater – they’re just the obvious places. Steve Benson once wrote a work that was composed in a notebook while he waited for his computer to boot up each date. How can anything that entails time not entail the body? What else is there, after all, through which to experience this? In
Language poetry came into being in San Francisco within a literary community that had included Kathy Acker (Noulipo conference co-convener Matias Viegener, Acker’s literary executor, must know this) and that her works were as important for their use of procedures as they were for her formula that pornography plus plagiarism equals autobiography. Acker went so far as to work in the sex industry, making low-end porn flicks that would play in the Tenderloin back when I still worked there. Her work in that context has to be seen in the broader historical framework that included, for example, the existence of both the Cockettes & the Angels of Light, the post-Stonewall pre-AIDS explosion of gay sex-positive culture, a large infrastructure of bath houses in San Francisco where relatively anonymous sex was not uncommon, including one or two bath houses aimed at least partly at the straight community. It’s in this frame that I would argue, happily, that what was/is revolutionary about Kathy Acker was not that she was a writer who was willing to fuck onscreen, or to kiss & tell in her writing, but that she breached the bad girl, post-Burroughs genre of the novel using procedures. This is, after all, a dozen years after works like Carolee Schneeman’s Meat Joy.
It’s true that in the 1970s poets who were then younger & single, or at least not yet fixed in their life partnerships, did more, and more various, things than these same people do today turning 60. When I first met X, that
Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Johanna Drucker, Paul Fournel, Jen Hofer, Tan Lin, Bernadette Mayer, Ian Monk, Joseph Mosconi, Harryette Mullen, Doug Nufer, Vanessa Place, Janet Sarbanes, Juliana Spahr, Brian Kim Stefans, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener, Christine Wertheim, Rob Wittig, Stephanie Young
are much more interesting to think about not for what they’re doing that’s oulipian, but rather what’s new.
¹ I’ve donated my tapes of those events to PENNsound, but much remains to be done digitizing them, making them audible, getting permission of
Labels: Oulipo, procedures, the body
Sunday, November 04, 2007
§
Gil Ott
interviews
Jackson Mac Low
§
Three views
of
Joanne Kyger’s
About Now
Plus
Jacket’s
2000 feature
on Kyger
§
Helen Adam
on
PENNsound
§
12 poets
look at the impact
of their first books
§
Thomas Fink
on
the poetics
of questions
§
Did Kenneth Koch
really write
”A True Account
of Talking to the Sun
at Fire Island”?
& a dreadful review
of Koch’s
On the Edge:
Collected Longer Poems
§
Maggie O’Sullivan
on
PENNsound
§
Reading
On the Road
in
§
Lucas Klein
on Victor Segalen’s
Stèles / 古今碑錄,
stone prose poems
of a pre-modern
(Volume 2
&
the complete
original text
of
Stèles / 古今碑錄
are available online)
§
Thomas Fink
interviews
Noah Eli Gordon
§
English
as an
invention
§
Is an MFA
or PhD
really necessary?
§
Washoe,
the first chimp
to use sign language,
has died
§
Rigoberto González
on online journals
§
Digitalization
& its discontents
§
§
§
Talking with Philip Corbett,
the man in charge
of grammar & style
at The New York Times
§
Tom Beckett
interviews
Alan Davies
§
“33 Rules of Poetry
for Poets
23 and Under”
from old man
Kent Johnson
(one should be
”never use
poetry & poets
in the same sentence”)
Plus Kent’s
”I Once Met”
which includes
”I once met Ron Silliman”
§
Rethinking
d.a. levy
§
Amos Oz
on
literature vs. hate
§
Harriet Monroe
&
Alice Corbin Henderson’s
1917
New Poetry anthology
digitized by Google Books
§
Microsoft will scan
Yale library
§
Mina Loy
& the myth
of
Arthur Cravan
§
Tom Beckett
interviews
Stephen Vincent
§
“
Vilas Sarang
is like eating
blue cheese”
§
language school
goes bankrupt
§
Pinsky
on teaching English
at
§
Check out
Michael Ondaatje’s answers
to questions posed
of the Giller Prize shortlist
§
A profile of
Carlos Piocos
§
A review of
Janet Malcolm’s
Gertrude and Alice
almost as unsympathetic
to Stein’s work
as Malcolm herself
§
Leigh Ann Couch
&
Andrew Kozma
§
Rethinking
Wilfred Owen
§
“How to Get Your Poetry Published”
(a panel
with the least appropriate
speakers imaginable)
§
The Tales of
Beedle the Bard
§
Mikhail Epstein’s
Cries in the New Wilderness
§
Nathan Brown
blames his obscurity
on writers
who demand
more from readers
§
Rafael Campo,
new formalist
§
Graham Mort:
”consequences
cannot
be avoided”
§
§
A profile of
Dave Schonfelder
§
Where retro meets metro:
what’s new
with the Paris Review
§
More about
what’s wrong with
The Atlantic
§
Why Latin lives
§
Women
& modernist architecture
§
§
Right now
we’re around numbers
6 through 8
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Dear Mr. Silliman:
You recently posted as having received The noulipian Analects, noting "author unknown." For 411 purposes, The noulipian Analects is a collection of contemporary constraint-based writing and writing about constraint-based writing – the publishers' synopsis:
The noulipian Analects is an alphabetical survey of constrained writing in modern English. The book gathers critical and creative pieces from some of the most prominent and influential writers using constraint and generative procedures – Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Johanna Drucker, Paul Fournel, Jen Hofer, Tan Lin, Bernadette Mayer, Ian Monk, Joseph Mosconi, Harryette Mullen, Doug Nufer, Vanessa Place, Janet Sarbanes, Juliana Spahr, Brian Kim Stefans, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener, Christine Wertheim, Rob Wittig, Stephanie Young – adding the unknown variable n to the great legacy of Oulipo. The result: an excellent mix of introductory notes for those new to constraint-based writing, blended with in-depth exposition and critique for those already avid readers and writers.
or, as Charles Bernstein's blurb says:
An Alpha Bestiary of Exogenously Exotic Essays and Dazzlingly Delectable Design, Complexly Charismatic Constraints and Occasional Oulipian Outrages, Thoughtful Theoretical Threads and Ludicrously Ludic Limits, Gutsy Gender Gaiety and Dantesque destinies Detourned, Quixotic Queneau Quests and Cocky Combinatorial Collisions, Real Rubber Roses & Radiantly Removed R’s…What We Wanton Woeful Whimsical Wanderers Willingly Want. – Charles Bernstein
Thank you for your attention,
Friday, November 02, 2007
If Polis is This: Charles Olson and The Persistence of Place isn’t the best motion picture ever made about an American poet – a claim attributed to Bill Corbett on the film’s website – it’s mostly because What Happened to Kerouac? the 1986 documentary made by Richard Lerner & Lewis Mac Adams (with major post-production editorial work from co-producer Nathaniel Dorsky) set the bar so very high. But perhaps because Kerouac in death as in life has long been an icon in the American popular imagination, while Olson remains primarily of interest to other poets, the task of these two films is fundamentally different.
In fact, one of the best sequences in Polis comes early on with the filmmaker wandering around
Most of the limits of the film are the consequence of attempting to pack so much into a one-hour time slot. Polis hardly touches the last decade of Olson’s life – particularly odd given his status as a late-starter & his death at 59 – which also means that the question of alcohol is never addressed. Nor the ways in which the death of his wife Betty in an auto accident in 1964 set him emotionally adrift. And there are themes within his work, places literally, that the film could have detailed far better for the reader who has not (yet) wandered the streets of
Perhaps the film’s main weakness, tho, is one that it shares with What Happened to Kerouac? The scarcity of women & women’s voices. There are just a handful, notably Susan Thackery, Anne Waldman & Diane DiPrima. The most glaring omission turns out to be Frances Boldereff, Olson’s mistress during the period in which he formulated “Projective Verse” and Maximus both. Even if it’s overblown to set Boldereff up as Olson’s muse, the “secret sauce” that makes possible these epoch-changing projects, her impact was nonetheless profound. Her absence, even if it was a condition of the family’s cooperation, doesn’t serve Olson well.
But the larger problem isn’t so much the erasure of Boldereff – whose existence wasn’t widely known even to Olson’s friends at the time – as it is the whole question of the New American Poetry’s way of relating to women. The Allen anthology includes just four females among its 44 contributors: Denise Levertov, Barbara Guest, Madeline Gleason and Helen Adam. Only Levertov, who died in 1997, would have made sense in the context of this film, tho she never was a student at
Labels: Charles Olson, Film
Thursday, November 01, 2007
§
Plus
talking with
Cynthia Hogue
& Elizabeth Frost
§
Adrienne Rich
reading
in
§
30 years of
Anglo-Québec
poetry
§
Orhan Pamuk:
Evoking the Other
is a
political act
§
A review of
Grand Piano 3
§
A poetry of muscle
§
Reading
Eric Mottram
on Robert Duncan
§
Robert Hass,
time traveler
§
Fear & loathing
& the
Poet Laureate
(No, not that one)
§
Bush poets
(No, not that Bush)
§
Curtis Faville
on
Robert Grenier
§
“Belles with Balls” –
Niama Leslie Williams
interviewed by
Tuck Self
§
Forrest
on
John Ashbery
§
Jon Anderson
has died
§
Fup,
the dean of bookstore cats,
has died
§
Talking with
Bob Arnold
§
Rumi’s
ambiguous legacy
in the west
§
Talking with
Shanxing Wang
§
Mark Strand,
alone at 73,
starting over
§
On Gael Turnbull’s
Collected Poems
§
Another poet
back from Iraq
§
Jennifer Moxley
on
John Wieners
& Arthur Rimbaud
Plus John Temple
on Wieners
§
The persistence of
the printed page
§
The
at 150 –
the senility
is complete
§
Save a magazine:
reverse
the postal rate hikes!
§
On Ted Berrigan’s
Collected Poems
§
Cut-Up
Poetry Scrabble
§
Saving a bookstore
in Park Slope,
§
Congressman Braley
opens
Pandora’s Box
§
A European
bookstore blog
§
“Pissed-Off Zombies” –
Linh Dinh
on the state of the nation
§
Another poet
who died too young
§
Zuckerman’s
(Roth’s)
aesthetic:
George Plimpton
as literary giant
§
A piece
on the letters
of Ted Hughes
with links
to large excerpts
§
More on
poetry & cricket
§
A.E. Stallings
here in
§
P.B. Shelley,
the poet as stud
§
Performa 07
is under way!
§
§
Schwabsky
on
Picabia
§
Schjeldahl
on
Frida Kahlo
§
The “new” Prado
§
Evaluating
Philip Glass
§
Aesthetics
&
information
§
Special thanks
to John Tranter
& Pam Brown
for making
Jacket
the best zine
on the web
