Monday, December 31, 2007
What kind of year was 2007? If you judge by the books that came out – Rae Armantrout’s Next Life, Alice Notley’s In the Pines, collected editions of Whalen & Kyger, lots of good & great books, that whole shebang – 2007 was a good, even terrific year. But if you look at the loses the literary community sustained, it was a very bad year indeed.
Do the math. If there are – just to pick numbers that are plausible, reasonable – 10,000 publishing poets in English who have careers roughly of 50 years between the time when they first begin to turn up in print or in ezines and when they pass on, then we are very quickly going to live in a world in which 200 of these poets die every year. That we don’t quite have such numbers already has much to do with the degree to which the numbers skew young, not because many poets publish for a year or two then stop – tho that certainly is the case – but because the vast expanse of writers is to a significant degree fed by the unprecedented (if not unwarranted) growth in college level creative writing degrees. Still, looking back over any given year sometimes is just appalling when you think of the poets and writers who now are gone. Just a few of the voices we lost in 2007 include Tillie Olsen, Gene Frumkin, Michael Benedikt, Artie Gold, Emmett Williams, Nancy Shaw, Kurt Vonnegut, Sarah Hannah, Grace Paley, Mary Ellen Solt, Michael Hamburger, Darrell Grayson, Sekou Sundiata, Dmitri Prigov, Sandy Crimmins, Harvey Goldner, Gloria Helfgott, Liam Rector, Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Carol Bly, Siv Cedering, Margaret Avison, Aura Estrada, Tom Cuson, Bill Griffiths, Mary Rising Higgins, Sargon Boulus, Herschel Baron, Landis Everson, Norman Mailer, Jane M. Cooper, Sandy Taylor, Liam O’Gallagher, Diane Middlebrook, John Moritz, Sylvester Pollet & Vincent Ferrini. To this add many important musicians, such as Leroy Jenkins, Eric von Schmidt, Andrew Hill, Rod Poole, Luciano Pavarotti, Max Roach, Tommy Makem, Art Davis, Frank Morgan, Karlheinz Stockhausen & Oscar Peterson. To these lists, add the other important cultural workers who passed on as well, such as philosophers Jean Baudrillard & Richard Rorty, artists Sol Lewitt, R. B. Kitaj, Sigmund Laufer, Jeremy Blake & Theresa Dunan, filmmakers Ousman Sembène, Ingmar Bergman & Michelangelo Antonioni, photographer Fred McDarragh, columnist Molly Ivins & Elizabeth Hardwick, who co-founded the New York Review of Books.
Not everyone of these were people whose work I approved of or liked. I thought Hardwick had a pernicious impact on virtually everything she touched and said so in print. Baudrillard and I argued over the impact of celebrity on critical thinking. He was also the least considerate person I’ve ever met.
But some of these writers, like Artie Gold & John Moritz, I’ve long thought of as friends. I’ve slept in Gene Frumkin’s house & eaten his food – he was a fine writer & a wonderful guy. Others I’d met or at least seen in person, from Olsen – who may very well have been the first author to have given me a book as a gift – to Sembène. Many, even the non-writers, had an important influence on me in ways they themselves could scarcely have imagined. When I was a student at UC Berkeley, I used the school’s student rental program to get Kitaj’s portrait of Robert Duncan, which hung on my living room wall for a full school year. Lewitt’s sculptures are objects I’ve stared at long & hard because I sense that their aesthetic is very close to my own. So, in a completely different way, is the music of Leroy Jenkins.
Not everyone died at the end of a long & fruitful life the way Olsen & Ferrini did. Rod Poole got into an argument with a woman who nearly ran him over in a Mel’s Drive-In parking lot & her husband got out of the car & stabbed him to death. Dasuram Mahji, who wrote in the Dravidian tongue of Kui, died of cholera at the age of 35. In the 21st century. Orissa, the state where he lived in India, is one of that nation’s wealthiest. Darrell Grayson, who came to poetry while in prison, was executed by the state of Alabama in July. African-American, he’d been tried by an all-white jury & defended by a lawyer with no experience in criminal trials. Existing DNA evidence was never tested. In the 21st century.
Perhaps saddest of all, five people listed above took their own lives: Sarah Hannah, Liam Rector, Landis Everson & the artists Theresa Duncan & Jeremy Blake, a couple that also happened to live in the rectory at St. Marks Church. Of these, only Everson’s death makes even the slightest sense – he was not young & his ability to write had been cut off due to the effects of a stroke. But even he had recently had a book manuscript rejected by the publisher of his first book – disappointing certainly, but hardly the sort of thing that should cause anyone to walk out into the woods with a gun.
I have written before, and I almost certainly will write again, on the importance of recognizing & treating depression. It’s common enough in society as it is – but in the arts it’s an epidemic. One of the reasons I was so very glad to see Ken Rumble talk of his own challenges with this on CA Conrad’s blog awhile back is that bringing this up & bringing it out of the closet is the first step in dealing with it, both personally & in society. This is not to suggest that everybody should become macrobiotic, or that that is a program that will treat even a fraction of the depression that is out there, but it does apparently work for some, and getting help is absolutely essential for anyone in this condition.
It will be forty years, really, before we can intelligibly begin to talk about all the great writers & artists who were born in 2007 as well. Almost without question, that list will be much longer than the ones above. That’s the good news.¹ And that’s one other reason why the arts of the next generation won’t look remotely like the ones of this, or of any of the previous generations as well. If I’m around then, I’ll be 101 (and intolerably cranky). But since not one of my male ancestors ever made it to 75, I’m not going to worry about that.
¹ I was intrigued, reading Stanley Kunitz’ 1977 Paris Review interview the other day, to see him already talking back then about the impacts of the expansion in the number of poets over even the 1950s – this phenomenon is not new & Kunitz is right when he notes that it’s not just more writers, it’s more good writers as well, which is an infinitely trickier question to sort through in the long run.
Labels: Passings
Sunday, December 30, 2007
The conscience of
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Two readings by Philip Whalen
(over 2 hours total)
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Big-time notice for Dorthea Lasky’s Tiny Tour
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Hannah Weiner’s Open House
live at St. Marks
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New poems by Adrienne Rich
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Vincent Dussol on paths to iDEATH
in the work of Eleni Sikelianos & Ray DiPalma
(PDF)
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Kurt Schwitters live
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Hélène Aji on
poetry & autobiography
(PDF)
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Remembering Sandy Taylor
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Edward Byrne’s Poet of the Year
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s
”Poetry as Insurgent Art”
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Property, poverty & poetry
in the life of Lorine Niedecker
(PDF)
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NY Times poetry chronicles:
Kate Northrop, David Trinidad,
W.G. Sebald, Cathy Song, Paul Guest
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Seth Abramson on the
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The master of nonsense
(3 guesses who that is)
Autobiography & erasure in John Ashbery
(PDF)
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Doug Holder on
poetry, community & the small press
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Forthcoming British books
of & about poetry
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Metaphor in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red
(PDF)
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Eliza Jane Poitevent,
a 19th century
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Sonja James on Jean Valentine
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A short profile of Michael O’Brien
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Iraqi poet Mohammed Madlum
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Peter Klappert on the love poetry of
Richard Harteis
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The poet-maker of
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The Bible on the head of a pin
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Five academic publishers band together
to streamline production costs
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Do writing programs work?
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Story vs. literature
in the work of Philip Pullman
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Whitney Smith on Katherine Young
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Peter Schmitt treated
as a 19th century bauble
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The first great Saudi novel?
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Derek Walcott on Elizabeth Hardwick
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A blundering review of Gay’s Modernism
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The Society for Minimalist Music
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An assessment of Oscar Peterson
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MP3s and the quality of sound
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George Quasha’s Axial Stones
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Jacob Lawrence at the Whitney
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Jenny Holzer’s other paintings
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Special props
to Erea:
reveue d’études anglophones
Labels: links
Friday, December 28, 2007
The brand new image of
Melvin B. Tolson
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Marjorie Perloff on John Ashbery
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Carol Bly has died
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Merry Christmas:
Chicago Sun-Times
slashes book section
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Jenny Holzer opts for
”other, better poets”
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Amy Goodman
talks with
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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New reading videos
by Paul Hoover & Mark Young
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A prize that should go
to Joanne Kyger
by acclimation
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Time to start thinking
about your campaign for
Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere
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Didi Menendez’
portraits of American poets
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A new poetry web site
from Cuba
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Credit crisis goes
from bad to verse
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Sunken Garden
covers the world of poetry
all the way from A to B
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Granta publishes its 100th number
& includes some poetry
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Sir Gawain
”keeping his cool”
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Simon DeDeo
polls his readers
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The Maltese poet Dun Karm
finally makes it into Italian
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“blah blah blah purple monkey dishwasher”
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Art jargon
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Michael Dirda on Peter Gay’s Modernism
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Jazz pianist Oscar Peterson has died
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A different model
for a poetry marathon,
this one in Chennai
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Plus a January 1st marathon
in Baltimore!
Thursday, December 27, 2007
One reason that it seems clear to me that language poetry needs to be understood as a moment, rather than a movement, is that for many years now there has been nothing even remotely approximating a language poetry journal. Tottel’s, This, Roof, Hills, Temblor, Big Deal, A Hundred Posters, Doones, Oculist Witnesses, Streets and Roads, miam, Qu, The Difficulties, even L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E & Poetics Journal are all long gone. The last of these to go, Poetics Journal published its tenth & final issue in 1998, but that was after a seven year hiatus – the ninth & eighth issues themselves arriving on a two-year schedule, a marked decline from the first seven issues, which took just six years to come out. In reality, I think it’s difficult if not downright fanciful, to characterize anything as language poetry after 1985, and particularly the Vancouver Poetry Festival of that year. Still, as that roster of mags above suggests, that was a lot of energy to be concentrated into just 15 years or so, which also meant that there was a substantial vacancy to be filled going forward. In spite of some spirited attempts – the New Coast festival in Buffalo & the Apex of the M push circa 1990 were the most visible, memorable to many for a Mike Huckabee avant-la-lettre agenda – what has emerged instead is far more decentralized & pluralistic, a poetics suitable to a globalizing planet, multicultural & increasingly transnational. Some of the most important sites for American poetry, for example, now take place in
This may suggest why I felt such a jolt coming upon Ocho no. 14, the latest of the many ventures produced by Didi Menendez. Available in print & online versions – specifically one just for Amazon’s new Kindle – Ocho 14 is guest edited by Nick Piombino, the poet, critic & analyst. Nick is one of the original contributors to In the American Tree, my anthology of language poetry first published in 1986 (tho edited for the most part four & five years before). Of its 40 contributors, Nick was one of just two – Jackson Mac Low being the other – who appear only in its critical section. That’s because, when the collection was being edited, Nick was still known primarily for his critical writing, a circumstance that has happily changed over the years. And now that he’s retired from a long career as a psychological counselor in the
The jolt I felt was as tho I had a new issue of a language poetry journal in my hands for the first time in years. It was like a huge rush of adrenalin as I looked at its table of contents & began to dive right in. It’s a terrific issue, with nothing but good work from cover to cover. After reading it, tho, I realized that my jolt, or at least my sense of this as the latest thing in langpo, was something I brought to the occasion. For as good as Ocho 14 is, it really is something else.
For one thing, only three of its fifteen contributors are traditionally identified as language poets – Charles Bernstein, Alan Davies & Ray DiPalma. Piombino does make a point of putting them first, in that order, which I think must have triggered my response.¹ In fact, 13 of the 15 live somewhere within the confines of New York City, so somebody else might come across this same issue & see it as the current generation of the New York School, tho only five of the contributors – Elaine Equi, Mitch Highfill, Brenda Iijima, Kimberly Lyons & Jerome Sala – have ever been even loosely associated with that side of New York’s writing scene (and in each instance with some considerable qualification). Two are former
Piombino himself stresses the regional focus, enough to make me wonder if Nico or Mark ever lodged time in
Of the trio of Tree vets, Bernstein has the simplest & shortest contribution, a seemingly tossed off text (in fact, if he used a spread sheet or, worse, Word, it must have been excruciating to produce), a catalog of the 428 most commonly used words in his work, Girly Man, in descending order. This is cute for a few seconds but no one, least of all Bernstein, actually expects you to read it. It has a different relationship to the page than that and on that level is the most radical work in the issue.
Davies, on the other hand, offers a wide range of works, including some (textually) discrete poems, a long critical work that organizes itself as an a review of Anne Waldman’s Outrider, then a series of excerpts from a longer text – it seems too limiting to call it a poem – entitled This is Thinking. Davies hasn’t been publishing a lot in recent years & to see this much work at once, this much first-rate work, is completely bracing. He hasn’t lost a step & is every bit as uncompromising as ever. This actually can make Davies a difficult read at times, but it never is complexity just for the sake of showing off. He continues to be the Diogenes of the
There’s a reason for this. In spite of the fact that it has many more contributors than, say, President’s Choice, Ocho has a lot more pages, 180 to 64, which means that Piombino is able to give roughly a dozen to each contributor – every single selection is substantial. It would take 15 chapbooks to get this much writing from this many contributors otherwise – making the hard copy price an absolute steal, the Kindle contribution a virtual potlatch.
After Davies’ raw philosophical investigations, Ray DiPalma’s suave sense of verse form comes across instantly. Although they’ve lived in the same town & known one another for decades, Davies & DiPalma almost represent polar extremes of what langpo might mean. For Davies, form is always provisional & the quest for truth the obsessive center of any activity. For DiPalma, form is entirely sensual, his poems are elegant much in the same way good sex is, everything fits together just right. His books are always master classes in how to write & there’s a wit in his generally serious tone that comes over as inclusive & generous. I remember in my graduate seminar at SF State in 1981, the one that served as a first draft for In the American Tree, that DiPalma’s work – we read Planh – was the only one of the 16 writers we read who was enthusiastically liked by every single class member. At the time, that surprised me, but I think my class – which included Cole Swensen & Jerry Estrin among others – were ahead of me in seeing this side of DiPalma’s poetry. Over the years, he’s proven them right.
Elaine Equi follows DiPalma and, as has often the case for me with her poetry, she catches me off-guard & surprises me. The first poem, “Daily Doubles,” dedicated to Harry Crosby, appears to be couplets composed entirely of the names of race horses –
Inside Info
Runaway Banjo
Silver Knockers
Too Much Zip
I don’t know if that’s where she actually got these names, but a search of Google does indeed turn up a horse named Runaway Banjo. As a poem, it works, is lively & fun, tho not to the degree of the sequence that immediately follows, “At the Cinema Tarot,” nine short works predicated on the random drawing of cards, not from a tarot deck, but rather postcards of movies from the mid-century. Hence
#4 The Girl Can’t Help It
(Jayne Mansfield unbuttons her blouse)
Marilyn Monroe wasn’t Jean Harlow.
Jayne Mansfield wasn’t Marilyn Monroe.
Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t Jayne Mansfield.
Thankfully, there is only one Britney Spears.
But know, whoever you are,
whatever your gender, hair color, physique,
within you there does reside an unhappy blonde
archetype with enormous breasts.
It is her you need to contact.
The films included range from this b-movie bon-bon to a film classic like Black Orpheus. This pop-art deployment of media culture icons is a
Gordon often deploys known elements like this, but what’s really interesting in her poetry is the way in which poems transgress, that instant when they go willfully (deliberately seems too contained a word) out of control, off track, over the line. A poem beginning with Marianne Moore’s pseudo-dismissal of poetry – “I, too, dislike it” – turns very quickly into a litany of other worse things one could dislike:
I dislike that Elvis never bought ME a Cadillac
I dislike using “upscale” to describe something because it is a lazy way of describing something, even this upscale poem.
This move toward the transgressive goes quite a bit further, up to
a nuthatch perhaps, that has perched inside one’s urethra, like
elephants pushing into
a weak vulva or
a wild horse learning
how to sing.
The irony of ending a list like that with a simple period is clearly intentional.
The play between control – Gordon is deft craftsperson – and the over-the-top impulse is a continual see-saw in these works. Her longer piece, “Feminists Like To Blow Things Up / (And Then Cry As The Pieces Rain Down),” both extends this dynamic while ironizing her own self-knowledge of her impulses as a writer. Overall, Gordon’s selection is one of those powerful moments when, if you’d never read her work before (which might be the case, say, if you’re reading this in
If there is a problem in Gordon’s text, it’s really Mitch Highfill’s, who comes next. He’s an inherently quieter poet & turning to his first page is like going from Green Day to Erik Satie – not everyone’s going to manage that transition. If they do, tho, there’s much to like. Actually, Satie is too strong a contrast. If Mei-mei Berssenbrugge were to be Satie, Highfill is closer to Rufus Wainwright. Highfill is not without his own hijinx here:
I have seen the future and the future is flarf. The streets are filled with regret. Is that a watermark or a stain? Prophecy a function of memory. I want to see my stunt double. I want a copy of the scrub list. The tea leaves settle where the broken hearts stay. In search of the heaviside function.
But even here, the palette is subdued compared with Gordon’s. Highfill in a way strikes me as raising what I think is one of the primary – if usually unspoken – questions confronting contemporary poetry in the
Many of the other poets in Ocho are contending with this same question. Brenda Iijima, a little like Gordon, has the capacity to move from the flashy to the more deeply contemplative, a range that stands her well.
Of the later works in the issue, the one that jumps out at me – see tapdance on forehead metaphor in paragraph above – is Nico Vassilakis’ 15-page poem, “Lowered & Illuminated.” Vassilakis is somebody whom I know primarily as a visual poet, one of the best in the country. This however is pure text, quatrains separated by more than a little space from one to the next. They work beautifully, each quatrain not quite a work in and of itself, their lines often making the reader wonder if they are to be read singly – as four distinct entries – or in conjunction, running on:
This becomes involuntary finally
Eschewing some combinations otherwise
Dormant thrust into quasars
Detached and tungsten its sole benefactor
One’s mind’s eye goes back & forth here, trying to decide where the hinges in this text might fit. It’s possible, I suppose, for an unsubtle mind to just plow through, but what a loss that would entail. An awful lot of the music of this stanza is predicated entirely on the number of syllables involved in each word, the longer, noisier terms of the first two lines giving way to the stanza’s last half in which only the very final term has more than two. Like a lot of abstract work in poetry, this looks casual at first until you start close reading, which then begets an experience not unlike vertigo as you start to recognize just how many other dimensions come into play.
In sum, Ocho 14 is a great read, the liveliest number in this series’ exceptionally diverse & risk-taking issues to date. It’s worth noting that Didi Menendez is quite willing – actively trying, I suspect – to pick guest editors no one else would think of to put into the same sequence. The result is that each number is an exceptionally strong argument for a different aesthetic. And Piombino’s is the strongest argument to date.
¹ The reality is that this issue is strictly alphabetical, but I wonder if Nick picked his contributor’s with a sense of how that would play into the narrative of reading, front to back. The last two contributors are also the two Auslanders in this otherwise New York City-centric collection. Can that be pure chance?
Labels: Journals
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Films can succeed a million different ways, but when they do, each is entirely different from one another. The three best films I’ve seen all year – John Carney’s Irish alt-folk musical Once, Sean Penn’s riveting character portrait, Into the Wild, and Doug Block’s family documentary with a twist, 51 Birch Street – are alike only in the completeness of their directors’ vision. It’s not that there aren’t influences (Hard Day’s Night, for example, on Once), but that’s really all they ever seem to be. Films that don’t completely succeed, however, often feel like anthologies of homages to other, better films. Atonement, Joe Wright’s adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel, falls into this latter category. It’s not a bad film, but it doesn’t completely gel – there are moments when I felt I was watching a remake of The English Patient, followed by every Merchant-Ivory spectacle ever made. Then Saving Private Ryan showed up.
My favorite moments turned out to be the very first – 13-year-old Briony Tallis (played by Saoirse Ronan¹) finishes her play and runs throughout the manse looking to tell her mum & gather unwilling participants for an evening performance, the sounds of her typewriter fitting perfectly into the simple piano score of the scene itself along with her own shoes clattering across the parquet floors – and the very last – Vanessa Redgrave, also portraying Briony Tallis, now facing death & dementia, not in that order, giving one last interview, a pseudo-Brechtian moment in which Britain’s most famous Trotskyist gives a master class in acting just by showing with her mouth & eyes the continuity of character back to that same disturbed 13-year-old girl. The first scene is one of several moments in the film in which the sound composition is absolutely magisterial – this is one motion picture you could literally “watch” with your eyes shut.
But you would of course miss all the sumptuous visuals if you did, the camera lovingly lingering over doorways, mantels, tables, the same pleasure one takes in doing house tours of the ruling elites anywhere, and of course the costumes, in particular Keira Knightley’s green dress. There are scenes – more than a few – in which the green dress is the one instance of brilliant color anywhere on the screen. If ever a dress deserved a best supporting actor nomination, this gown is it. It almost makes you forget just how terribly underweight Keira Knightley is, dangerously so, a detail that periodically takes away from her terrific performance throughout. There is not a scene in this film in which she appears where she doesn’t own the stage, center the action, sometimes so subtly you don’t even quite catch how she does it. A lot of it actually seems to be in her spine & shoulders, which stiffen with anger or arch with arousal. Considering that she is the not the person who was wrongly accused, nor the accuser, it’s remarkable the degree to which Wright makes this a film about her. That may be just the formula for chick flick success, but it creates problems in that it’s not actually the story as given. And since Wright doesn’t make this a film about Knightley’s inner life, the narrative structure comes down like a pile of blocks in the game of Jenga. Had the movie kept the courtroom material of the original book, that might have been possible. But here it’s not.
James McAvoy, as the servant’s child who grows up to be his mistress’ lover – at least until Knightley’s younger sister intervenes – does a decent job himself, though the weakest part of the film is his traipsing through the French countryside, separated from his forces, during the earliest moments of the Second World War, working his way back the northern port city of Dunkirk in hopes of evacuation back to England.
That segment of the film – when it goes from Merchant-Ivory and the doomed romance of The English Patient to wishing it were Saving Private Ryan – leads up to a long single shot sweep of the Dunkirk beach, filled with the wounded & miserable in the ruins of an old amusement park that feels like it lasts five minutes (watch the fellow in the deep background literally hanging from the ferris wheel – it almost feels like a Kara Walker cutout in action). It’s a fabulous scene – right out of Brueghel & Bosch by way of Spielberg – but it does little if anything to advance the action. Because of what director Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton have already excised from the book, it’s a detour on the scale of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings, tho to less purpose. It ultimately undercuts everything that came before & what little remains of the film.
Which may be why Vanessa Redgrave’s appearance in the final sequence with its twist of a surprise ending doesn’t feel so out of place – by this point, you’ve given up on the idea that this is a seamless reality, and at best are watching a series of short films ostensibly about a single set of characters. This of course requires that you completely give up on them as characters. Which is why I haven’t bothered to call Knightly Cecilia or McAvoy Robbie.
So many wonderful elements, so little cohesion. One wonders how & why the director lost his way. Was it
¹ About to become a huge star after the opening of The Lovely Bones, which Peter Jackson has been filming about three miles from my house. She’s quite good in a difficult role here.
Labels: Film
Thom Donovan’s
epic review
of Hannah Weiner’s Open House
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Philadelphia vs. Ho Chi Minh City:
a 2000 interview with Linh Dinh
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Jalal Toufic’s
Undeserving Lebanon
(PDF)
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Talking with Steve McCaffery
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“Wall Street Inferno”
from the 19th Century Brazilian epic
Wandering Guesa
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585 reviews
indexed
from the ezine
Jacket
Number of my solo books
that Jacket has reviewed
over its entire history:
zero
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Sandy Taylor,
founder of Curbstone Press,
has died
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Iranian poet
Jaleh Esfahani
has died
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Emory Sekaquaptewa,
who documented the Hopi language,
has died
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Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy
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The two sides of Robert Pinsky
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One-line poems
on the cusp of the 17th century
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The ten books
of the T.S. Eliot shortlist
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“a very great poet –
incomparably the greatest we have
on this side of the
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The two poetries:
Lowell vs. Ashbery
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“modernist poetry in English was launched
by a pair of Americans living in
who had little but contempt
for the complacent, hide-bound literary scene”
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Using your own name
in your poems
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Doug Messerli
on Inger Christensen
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Social networking
& Punjabi poetry
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TV brings poet brothers back together
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A Yiddish poet
in
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Ted Hughes:
better off dead?
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How many poets use
performance enhancing drugs?
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Jonathan Lethem:
The King of Sentences
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A profile of Paul Portugés
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“Bones of our wild forefathers”
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Gordon Lish as Freddy Kreuger?
The Cutting of Raymond Carver
“Beginners”:
Raymond Carver’s draft
Gordon Lish’s edit
Letters from Carver to Lish
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A review of
Balikbayang Mahal: Passages from Exile
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Pudding & trifles
with the
Mann Booker Prize jury
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This year’s buzzwords
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The selected poems
of Breyten Breytenbach
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From poetry to Slanguage
to theater
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The poetry paintings of Barry Spacks
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The first-ever translation
of Hungarian poetry into Punjabi
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David Byrne
talks with Thom Yorke
about the theory of distribution
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Charles Shere on
Stockhausen
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The LA Times obit for saxman
Frank Morgan
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Peter Schjeldahl on
junk art at the
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Pipilotti Rist
among the butoh dancers of
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Survival strategies
for emerging artists
§
The third marathon
of the winter season
is of course
the granddaddy (& grandmother)
of them all,
January 1
from 2:00 PM until the cows come home
down 2nd Ave
at the Poetry Project
at St Marks Church, New York
(Two questions:
is there anyone who will be reading
at the MLA offsite,
the Woodland Pattern January Marathon
& at St Marks?
And
are there any other poetry marathons
taking place between
Christmas & February 1?)
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Bob Perelman
4 early books:
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Liam O’Gallagher
has died
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Peter O’Leary
on Robert Duncan’s
”Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”
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Talking with
Kenneth Goldsmith
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4,000-year-old text
pulled from Ebay
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The “All Girl Poetry Slam”
Girl?
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William Burroughs
& the crying of lot 22
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Close reading,
but “not too close”
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Talking with
Christian Bök
Bök
on Steve McCaffery
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John Ashbery,
two poems in tiny print
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Ange Mlinko
on
art, class & taste
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Alice Walker’s archives
go to Emory
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Not hiring
Yevtushenko at Oxford
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The “caveman” writes verse
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Troy Jollimore
calls the criticism of Robert Hass
”beach reading”
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Full-page ad,
New York Times,
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Maybe the only document on the web
that calls me Ronald
§
Lisa Robertson:
Draft of a Voice-Over
for a Split-Screen Video
§
Year-end lists of best books of ‘07
by Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout,
Afaa Michael Weaver, Cate Marvin & Patricia Smith
§
Avant-garde poetics radio blog
§
§
Censoring Robinson Jeffers
§
Moscow bookseller Boris Kupriyanov
faces 2 years in prison
for selling “pornography”
(
§
Dub poets look to
§
Remembering
Ezenwa Ohaeto
§
“Brainless macho trash”
but with pretty pictures
§
“What we owe the New Critics”
& what we owe their publishers
§
A translation of The Táin
§
& an alternative Gawain,
one that’s fun to read aloud
§
A feminist bookstore
in
§
The cost models of academic journals
§
It’s a mistake
to edit the self-indulgence
out of Berryman’s work
§
The NY Times obit of Diane Middlebrook
A British obit of Diane Middlebrook
§
Miles Champion:
3 poems
that make very different use
of the space of the page
§
A noisy interview
with Umberto Eco
§
“Reading, that unpunished vice”
§
A grand buildup
to a sloppy, sentimental poem
§
An “index of joy”
(PDF)
§
Where the Writers Guild of
got its new radical core
§
Donald Revell’s
elegy
for Barbara Guest
§
Gerald Stern
on Muriel Rukeyser
§
The life & verse of
Edward Arlington Robinson
§
§
Ted Kooser
on Linda Gregg
§
Another article
celebrating the life & writing
of
English-language poet
§
A review of Alison Pelegrin
§
Freaked by the atheism
of Philip Pullman
§
§
§
Winsome Duncan / Lyrical Healer
§
John Greenleaf Whittier
at 200
§
A profile of John Mahoney
§
Talking with W.D. Snodgrass
§
John Milton Memorial
poetry celebration
§
Using YouTube
to combat
Canadian © revisions
§
Shopping for books
with Michael Jackson
§
An art house
in my home town
§
Wrapping up
Art Basel Miami
Looking at it
from the far end
of the country
§
Fight to save the Barnes
collapsing?
§
Trying to talk with
Daniel Libeskind
§
Two members
of the Mark Morris Dance Company
§
The year in dance
§
The year in (geriatric) jazz
§
Enforcing the laws of nature
§
Ramin Jahanbegloo
& the “crimes” of philosophy
§
Ibn Warraq,
”Enlightenment fundamentalist”
§
§
This year’s quotables
§
January 26
(not a typo)
2008 Woodland Pattern Poetry Marathon
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
If there is one single book I’d recommend this year as a present for just about anybody who is at all open to the idea of poetry, that book is The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, edited by Michael Rothenberg, just out in a lush hardback edition from Wesleyan University Press. It’s the book that Philip Whalen has deserved for decades. Indeed, although Whalen only died in 2002, this book could have been published in 1989 with the loss of exactly one three-line poem. The only thing about this book that isn’t just about perfect is that publication date – it would have been great to have had it when Whalen was still alive and able to see it.
If Whalen is a poet who for all purposes stopped writing 14 years before he died, it turns out – something I don’t think I’d quite realized before – he was something of a late starter as well. Outside of a group of early poems collected into a manuscript at Reed College in Oregon, where his close friends included both Gary Snyder (contributing a brief but loving foreword here) & the late Lew Welch, plus a couple of poems in the three years thereafter, Whalen really gets underway in 1955 when he pens a number of poems that would find their way into Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (NAP). In 1955, he’s already 32 years old.
Allen divided his anthology into groups or clusters, the Projectivists, the SF Renaissance, the Beats, the NY School & Everybody Else. Whalen was his choice to lead off this last group &, with 15 pages in the anthology, he’s given more space than John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer & a lot of other people. In fact, in this most turf-conscious of all literary anthologies, it’s easier to note who got more space than Whalen – Olson, Duncan, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Snyder & McClure. Like Snyder, Whalen has often been characterized since then as a member of the Beats. Indeed, his publisher’s web site tries it both ways, calling him “a legendary San Francisco Renaissance and Beat poet.” Neither appellation is really quite accurate – he was never an intimate of the Ginsberg-Kerouac-Corso-Burroughs circle, who really were East Coast tourists when they came to
But it does make sense to read Whalen as one of the key figures of another group – one that Allen really missed (tho enough of it is in his pages that I sometimes wonder why) – that I’ve called variously New Western or Zen Cowboy. These are poets mostly interested in themes local to, specific to, the Western United States, preferring the rural to the urban & with a significant interest in Buddhism – Whalen, Snyder, Joanne Kyger, the poets who appeared in Jim Koller’s Coyote’s Journal, including the likes of Drum Hadley, Bill Deemer & Clifford Burke – all largely fit this orientation, one that to this date half a century later never has been gathered into a single collection. I’ve often wondered why this group never gelled as a unit, even in terms of critical history, while the hoaxed up “San Francisco Renaissance” will get you 50,000 hits on Google.¹
Part of it no doubt has to do with the fact that none of these writers ever sought to make a group, movement or literary tendency of it. The closest might have been Koller, whose magazine was its clearest articulation. But his focus was the magazine (which still functionally exists, tho Koller himself has been in
In all my years in the Bay Area, I only saw Whalen give two readings, one at the UC Art Museum during the early 1970s with a number of other poets and a solo reading he gave in a crowded bookstore in San Francisco to celebrate the publication of On Bear’s Head, largest collection of his lifetime, brought out by New York trade publisher Harcourt Brace in conjunction with Coyote’s Journal. In both cases, he was so unassuming and humble that you sensed that he really didn’t know just how many people were deeply passionate about his poetry.
I’ve always thought of On Bear’s Head as the definitive book of Whalen’s work – until this Collected, it’s certainly been my favorite. In part, it’s just the size of the volume, but it also has a sprawling nature that feels very accurate to his poetry. I was surprised, therefore, to read this at the end of Michael Rothenberg’s editor’s note:
sometimes Philip Whalen’s “creative process” was simply to allow a publisher or editor to make their organizational choices. For example, when I asked PW why the poems in On Bear’s Head were not organized chronologically, he told me he had no idea, “It just came from the publisher that way.”
So this volume, it turns out, is the first one, really, that gets it completely right – the sprawl, but also an order that one can argue back from or to the poetry itself.²
The sprawl is important because it touches on one of the two aspects of Whalen’s poetry that are unique, and which really account for his importance, not just to his peers in the 1950s, etc., but to poets & readers anywhere. The first is that Whalen has less of a distinction between poem X and poem Y than most any other writer around – it’s something that only Olson in the final volume of Maximus,
Caption for a Poem
A home of many-colored gas,
A way from A S I A, monster. Soul trap.
The first line is an allusion not to Ronald Johnson, whose book The Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses won’t appear for another eight years, but to Johnson’s own source, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eleonora” where it is the Edenic scene in which the blissful but incestuous relationship between the narrator and his doomed cousin takes place.
The second line is exceptionally complex. Whalen may have gotten his strategies for fragmentation & layering from Pound & his followers – the spacing between letters of A S I A is taken directly from Paul Blackburn. But what does he mean by monster. Soul trap. In Poe’s story, the narrator has promised his dying cousin that he will not abandon her nor their valley, but it ceases to blossom in his eyes and he departs, in turn marrying Ermengarde, only to be told by the voice of his dead cousin that he not worry about breaking the vow,
“thou art absolved, for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven, of thy vows unto Eleonora.”
In spite of the assurance, that’s an ominous & indeterminate climax for this tale. Whalen has posed Asia as his “home away from” home, that term all the more powerfully invoked by its absence. Is he likewise trapped by a vow. If so, which way?
The short poems of Phil Whalen often have this concentrated energy, but it’s their positioning amidst the longer pieces, the sprawl, that make you realize just how casually Whalen might insert something like this into a longer sequence not at all about his love/hate relationship with Asia. It was Whalen’s use of linked verse forms that, more than anyone, brought this tradition to
My favorite of these – for my money, Whalen’s best poem ever, bafflingly left out of Overtime – is “My Songs Induce Prophetic Dreams,” a 20-page linked series that took 15 months to write between late 1963 & winter ’65. It conveniently falls just about at the absolute center of this 860-page tome. It begins by quoting a letter from Artaud to René Gully some 15 years earlier”
“…Books, texts, magazines, are tombs … tombs that eventually will be opened. The duty I say again THE DUTY of the writer, of the poet, is not to go shut himself up as a coward in a text, a book, a magazine from which he will never emerge again but on the contrary to go out to shake up to attack the public spirit … if not of what use is he? And why was he born? … the quest for a speech that any road mender or dolt would have understood ….” (ellipses in the original)
This is, in fact, a radical program, even by the standards of the New Americans. What follows it is an inspired notebook that ranges between Whalen’s obsessive worries – he is the great worrier of his generation – where will he get money? where will he get food? who will love him? he’s growing old? (at the poem’s start, he’s five days short of his fortieth birthday, tho in the first section he displaces this anxiety by focusing instead on the fact that “I shall be 41 years old on 20:x:64.”
Other moments are more optimistic – “awake, I’m not sad any more / I have the chance to steal some food.” He imagines fortunes dropping out of the sky. One section reads simply “Genius”.
Yet just two pages later we find
I have
Three
Friends who
No longer want
To know me
Whalen incorporates his reading, lists of who attended which party, natural phenomena (he’s good on plant life), overheard phrases plucked out for what they reveal about speech. Some lines comically imagine the reader:
This is not what I paid lots of money to hear
*
Rare & fleeting Magic!
One result is that you’re never completely sure just how seriously to take any given complaint, situated as they are betwixt the completely serious and the studiously comic:
I have no food, no money; therefore, my friends say, I am foolish and wicked. Are they right? (Who cares?)
*
“Who cares what banks fail in
Long as you got a kiss that conquers?”
so Ira Gershwin says.
*
Wisdom. I must change my character. The flavor, shape smell taste color must be different. Whizbang.
*
Ezra Pound says, “More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.”
*
You always do what you have to do
I’m the one who has to like it – “irregardless,”
as people say
*
Now I am 40, I wish that I had died of my vices, excesses or violence at the age of 29
Elsewhere, he calculates the value of this poem at the 50¢ per line Poetry then paid for verse “if Mr. Rago were to find the poem / “convincing”.
Whalen closes what he calls his “food opera” by noting that
When I’m hungry, I’m free, and I have chosen freedom at this
price, a very small one to pay.
It’s worth noting that more than a few of the New American poets & their immediate friends were living very close to the edge – Ron Loewinsohn & Richard Brautigan lived for a time in a parked car, Bob Kaufman really was a street person much of his adult life, Neal Cassidy died of exposure next to a railroad track. At the moment when Whalen is writing this, he’s already quite famous, at least by poet standards.
Part of what makes this volume work so well, the chronology laid over the scrawl, is that you can see here exactly how very little formal distance there is between “My Songs Induce Prophetic Dreams” and the next poem, “April Showers Bring Rain?” written just two days later followed by a meditation on fish, I swear, entitled “Love Love Love Again,” penned that same day. Whalen’s loosey-goosey linked meditations, diaristic as they are, are as much an instance of “the words are my life” as the formal sweep of Zukofsky’s “A.” The number of poets you can directly track back to Whalen’s influence are sometimes startling – Snyder & Welch & Kyger, obviously, really all of the Zen Cowboy poets³, Anselm Hollo, Ted Berrigan, Aram Saroyan, Clark Coolidge & you could certainly throw my name in there for good measure.
With the publication over the past two years or so of the collected poems by Joanne Kyger, Ted Berrigan & the second volume of Creeley’s collected, we’re living in a moment of extraordinary access to what may yet prove to be the definitive generation of American poets, not just of the 20th century. They were, after all, the American poets right at the moment when this empire peaked. Wesleyan is soon to bring out a seriously expanded collected Jack Spicer & UC Press finally has the pieces in place to go forward with a collected Robert Duncan. It’s not a perfect view, by any means. But books likes these demonstrate just what is at the core of the New American Poetries in ways that “greatest hits” volumes never could. Nowhere is this more true than in the work of Phil Whalen, still the most underrated poet of his generation.
¹ The New Westerns weren’t the only group that largely disappeared. The Spicer Circle – the real SF grouping of the 1950s – met a similar fate, tho there it is clear that Spicer himself willed it by refusing to have any sort of cordial relations with poets east of the Caldecott Tunnel.
² Given the “in conjunction with Coyote’s Journal,” designation of On Bear’s Head, I wouldn’t be shocked to discover that Koller or another of the editors associated with that mag may have done the major editing work for OBH. The order may not be chronological, but it certainly isn’t bad.
³ You could diagram an integral, not unlike the one Zukofsky did for poetry, for the Zen Cowboy scene with Whalen at one end, Ed Dorn at the other, one all Zen & no cowboy, the other just the reverse. But it’s remarkable what a sweep passes between these two writers.
Labels: Phil Whalen
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Derek Beaulieu, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, afterword by Marjorie Perloff, Information as Material, York, U.K., 2007
Jasper Bernes, Starsdown, Ingirumimusnocteetcconsumimurigni, no location given 2007
Leslie Breeding, I’m Going Home, Green Zone, Brooklyn 2007
Stephen Brockwell, The Real Made Up, ECW Press, Toronto 2007
Julia Cohen, Who Could Forget the Sensational First Evening of the Night, H_NGM_N chapbook series #7, Natchitoches, LA 2007
Michael Cross, Throne b/w Michelle Detorie, A Coincidence of Wants b/w Johannes Göransson, Majakovskij en tragedy, Dos Press Chapbooks, San Marcos, TX 2007
Kenneth C. Fish Jr., Revisionist History, no location given, 2006
Phil Hall, The Bad Sequence, Book Thug, Toronto 2004
Phil Hall, Penis Lessons, Beautiful Outlaw, no location given, 2007
Phil Hall, White Porcupine, Book Thug, Toronto 2007
Mark Jarman, Epistles, Sarabande Books, Louiseville 2007
Jeffrey Jullich, Thine Instead Thank, Harry Tankoos Books, New York 2007
Bhanu Kapil (Rider), The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers,
Erin Keane, The Gravity Soundtrack, Wordfarm,
Valerie Kuehne,
Sarah Lang, The Work of Days, Coach House Press, Toronto 2007
Jackson Mac Low, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, edited by Anne Tardos, UC Press, Berkeley 2008
Donato Mancini, Ǽthel, New Star Books,
Joseph Massey, Within Hours, The Fault Line Press,
Ted Pearson, Encryptions, Singing Horse Press, San Diego 2007
Pattiann Rogers, Wayfare, Penguin, New York 2008
Jacob Scheier, More to Keep Us Warm, ECW Press, Toronto 2007
Emily Schultz, Songs for the Dancing Chicken, ECW Press, Toronto 2007
Prageeta Sharma, Infamous Landscapes, Fence Books,
Cedar Sigo, Expensive Magic, House Press,
Craig Morgan Teicher, Brenda is in the Room, Center for Literary Publishing, Fort Collins 2007
Eric Unger, Just as Form, House Press,
Philip Whalen, The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, edited by Michael Rothenberg, with foreword by Gary Snyder, introduction by Leslie Scalapino, Wesleyan University Press,
Bruce Whiteman, The Invisible World is in Decline, ECW Press, Toronto 2007
Mark Yakich, The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in
Books (Poetry Anthologies)
GPPReader, edited by Ed Kauffman, Guerilla Poetics Press, “Worldwide” (but really
Books (Other)
Matthew Abess, Make Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You,
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam, Soft Skull,
Wanda Coleman, Jazz and Twelve O’Clock Tales, Black Sparrow Books, Boston 2007
Robert Creeley & Brent Cunningham, An Interview with Robert Creeley, Hooke Press, Oakland 2007
Daniel Gabriel, Hart Crane and the Modernist Epic: Canon and Genre Formation in Crane, Pound, Eliot and Williams, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2007
Piotr K. Gwiazda, James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2007
Bhanu Kapil, Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Leon Works, New York 2006
Nicky Marsh, Democracy in Contemporary Women’s Poetry, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2007
Joyelle McSweeney, Flet: A Novel, Fence Books,
Journals
Antennae 9,
No issue 6, 2007, Santa Monica, CA. Includes John Ashbery, Miles Champion, Camille Guthrie, Gale Nelson, Beth Anderson, Evan S. Connell, Joan Retallack, Allen Grossman, Lisa Robertson, Guy Debord, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Arthur Sze, Ulf Stolterfoht, Magdalena Zurawski, Fiona Templeton, Jalal Toufic, Charles Altieri, Charles Bernstein, more.
Ocho #14, December 2007,
String of Small Machines, September 2007, House Press,
Tarpaulin Sky, Issue # 13 / Print Issue #1, Fall/Winter 2007,
Broadsides & Other Formats
Kenneth Goldsmith, A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation, no location or date given, single sheet folded
Roberto Harrison, Ineffable Isthmus: Journals & Drawings,
Simon Morris, Kenneth Goldsmith: Sucking on Words, Information as Material,
Jessica Smith, Bird-Book, House Press, unbound pages in vellum envelope,
Asterisk 3, Fewer& Further Press, no location given, 2007. Includes Michael Carr, Andrew Mister, Christopher Rizzo single sheet, folded
Foursquare, vol. 2, no. 3, August 2007,
Foursquare, vol. 2, no. 4, September 2007,
All items received since November 28
Labels: Recently Received
Monday, December 17, 2007
"On Whether or Not The Pig is Indigenous to the New World"
from “I Hear America Cooking”
My own theory is that the pig landed near Miami circa 1542
and left the same day in a rented DeSoto
Sometime later, the pig arrived in the SW
and enjoyed the distinction of being
the only adventurer of European origin
to be both domesticated and savoured in that region.
In Greenland the Inuit use jackhammers
in order to break through the ice
and bury their dead
my own climate has the morality of a chainsaw
“The white man will freeze to death in the arctic,
if left to himself,” the elder said
after translation, “but now with schooling
some Inuit too have frozen.”
John Moritz
1946 – 2007
Labels: Passings
One model for the magazine that I like a lot is the journal that contains only a limited number of contributors, each of whom is afforded an ample amount of space in which to work. Two recent journals that employ this strategy are President’s Choice and 6x6. The former has seven contributors and runs to 63 pages, the latter, as you might imagine, offers six poets over an expanse of 56 unnumbered pages – so each generally gives its participants nine pages, enough to make a seriously good impression if the poet has any chops.
Several of the poets in President’s Choice 1 are poets who have been around for some time – Rodrigo Toscano, Craig Dworkin, Laura Elrick & Robert Fitterman, all fine writers. My immediate instinct, opening this issue, was not only that sense of endorphins releasing at the idea of reading new work by this quartet of folks, but also a sense that I’d probably come away liking the work of the three writers here whose names I didn’t immediately recognize, just because somebody (editor Steven Zultanski) thought to put them together. These turn out to be Marie Buck, Bhanu Kapil and Paper Rad. And it’s true – I really like the work of all three.
Except that, when I decided I had to find out where I could get more work by Marie Buck & googled her name, leading me to her Beard of Bees e-chapbook, I immediately recognized the photograph as being one of two almost intimidatingly brilliant young poets who picked me up at the airport in Detroit all of maybe eight weeks ago. Maybe I’d even received my copy of President’s Choice from one of them. I realized I couldn’t remember. Buck leads off the issue and one of the first things you notice is that while her poems are not all in the same mode, they’re all very good. My favorites here are excerpts from a larger sequence entitled Whole Foods. Here’s the shortest:
Authenticity
Cutting and exposure to the air darkens the flesh. We stood in unheated squats having tooth and not being limp. We were more art than science. We gently rubbed our skin in a circular motion.
I take the title here to allude to the first person plural that starts the final three sentences – you can bind a lot of material together if you just claim the same subject, especially if you claim it as yourself. In a not dissimilar way, skin in the last sentence harkens to, snags really, the term flesh from the first. This is a poem as formal as any written, even tho it claims for itself the realism of confession. This strikes me as an awful lot to do in such a short space.
If you download the Bird of Bees book, Life And Style, where Buck deploys language appropriated from MySpace – a gesture very close to Linh Dinh’s instant messaging poetics – that this degree of layering & density of affect is something Buck accomplishes routinely. She makes it look so simple when in fact it is anything but.
I had very much the same reaction here to the work of Bhanu Kapil – and I reacted in a parallel fashion by buying both of the books available at SPD by her (one of which is listed as having been written by Bhanu Kapil Rider). Humanimal, which is excerpted in President’s Choice, consists of numbered paragraphs, not all in the same font size, many of which function as contained narratives –
25.ii. Of the sixteen children who were born, only seven – six boys and a girl – survived into childhood proper. One of the boys pushed the girl off the roof and then there were six. My father was the second oldest and through I am not sure if the image – my aunt Subudhra falling upside down to her death, a kite’s slim rope still bound to her wrist and wrapped twice around her knuckles – is relevant to the story I am telling, it accompanies it. In the quick, black take of a body’s flight, a body’s eviction or sudden loss of place, the memory of descent functions as a subliminal flash.
Only one word – take – suggests the broader topic of film making, of which this section is actually one part.
Again, the larger effect here is of layering – there is a richness to Kapil’s work here that is completely wonderful. Each paragraph might be compared with an image of film in the process of montage, not so much the “new sentence” as the “new paragraph,” but the sequencing has the disjoint feel of an Abigail Child film, where image-image-image-image, each of them “real,” has a larger, broader, even more abstract impact that is nonetheless devastatingly powerful.
Paper Rad turns out to be a three-person art collective based both in
Diagram of the muscles of the face.
Diagram of the muscles of the face.
Small dog watching cat on the table.
Dog approaching another dog with hostile intentions.
Dog – in a humble and affectionate frame of mind.
Half-bred shepherd dog baring teeth.
Dog – caressing his master.
Diagram of the muscles of the
Cat, savage and prepared to fight.
Cat – in an affectionate frame of mind.
A little like Paper Rad, I found Craig Dworkin problematic here only by contrast with everything else. Dworkin’s work here is entirely conceptual, tho the concept leads to dense dense texts – his pieces here “describe” a text, doing so entirely by virtual of grammatical construction. The entire project is titled “Noun Compound Roman Numeral period,” the first section of which is called “Definite Article Adjective Noun period,” the second “Definite Article Noun genitive preposition definite article Noun period.” You can probably guess how the texts themselves read, each being three pages long. This reminds me of an idea I’ve long had of “reorganizing” The Waste Land so that you get all of its letters in alphabetical order. It would still be The Waste Land, right? If not, why not? For some reason I’ve never actually been bored enough to execute this project. But it pleases me to see just how close a project like Dworkin's comes to this same conceptual space.
I have a more muted different reaction to 6x6, some of which has nothing to do with the writing. The journal’s formal premise of cutting one corner off its page to produce a five-sided page and its idea of using rubber bands as binding strike me as off-puttingly over-cute. Unlike the clean roman font used by President’s Choice, the smaller font used by 6x6 looks like somebody working with a letter press for the very first time. That this is the 14th issue and somebody hasn’t bought a saddle stapler is not amusing. Twenty years from now, when those rubber bands are stiff and disintegrating, the editor is going to live to regret these decisions. So are the contributors.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that I find the work in 6x6 less compelling than President’s Choice as well.
Interestingly, tho, it’s the two poets whose work I do already know – Douglas Rothschild & Corina Copp – whose writing really jumps out at me. In fact, I’ll go further. This is the best selection of Rothschild’s work I ever recall reading, totally a delight, well formed & thoroughly tinged with the same acerbic wit the man is known for in person. It’s really the
The other works here – by Prabhakar Vasan, Lori Shine, Randall Leigh Kaplan and Fred Schmalz – are all interesting enough. But none of them sufficiently overcomes the poor choice in type face to make me want to rush out and get anything else they may have in print, unlike Buck and Kapil in President’s Choice. It’s hard for me to get a sense of whether this is because the work isn’t as brilliant – that the decisions in design reflect decisions in editing also – or if it is just that the format here doesn’t present the writing to good advantage. I’m hoping it’s the latter.
Labels: Journals
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Photo of Lewis MacAdams courtesy of Friends of the LA River
Lewis MacAdams
on the collected poems
of Philip Whalen & Joanne Kyger
§
Giorno Poetry Systems:
the podcast
§
§
Audio selections from the Sackner Archive
§
The Latin American Notebook
of William S. Burroughs
§
Why was Marina Tsvetaeva
such a neglectorino?
§
Neeli Cherkovski
on Phil Whalen
§
Diane Middlebrook
has died
§
Laura Huxley
has died
§
A portrait of Anne Stevenson
§
Charles Bernstein’s
galleries of video miniportraits
of poets, artists, filmmakers, etc.
Series 1: Scalapino, Bergvall,
Lakoff, Gross, Bonvicino, Hills, Glazer
Series 2: Drucker, Grenier,
Joris, Lehto, Curnow, Sherry
Series 3: Lauterbach, Mac Cormack,
McCaffery, Berssenbrugge, Piombino, Tuttle
The latest
is of Rod Smith
§
§
Hershman R. John,
swallowing turquoise
§
Jenny Holzer at Mass MoCA
§
The final issue of Origin,
Sixth Series
is ready for download
(PDF)
§
Talking with Bob Hass
in the Wall Street Journal
§
Lloyd Schwartz
talking about
Elizabeth Bishop
(PDF)
§
Remembering Martin Carter
§
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
in a bi-lingual edition,
translated from the Irish
by Paul Muldoon
§
§
A profile of
Gwyneth Lewis
§
A memoir of slammin’
in
§
Mochedisi,
becoming a household name
in African praise poetry
§
Robert Pinsky
playing with Jill Rosser’s skull
§
§
Sir Gawain
and his contemporaries today
§
What is poetry for?
§
§
Bruce Jackson:
The Story is True
§
The Johnston County witch hunt
§
Guantanamo poetics reach the
§
When pols write poetry…
§
A profile of Bill Chene
§
Ted Hughes
as translator & Shakespeare scholar
§
Kenn Nesbitt,
zany poet
§
An open mike
in Pahrump Valley
§
Three poets laureate
in close proximity
§
From web to book
§
Go ask Alice
§
Uploading the hidden archive
§
Against writers’ archives
§
The highest-selling
contemporary manuscript ever
is Beedle the Bard
§
Bookstore sales are up
only 0.3%
for the first ten months of 2007
§
In
”free” is verboten
While indies here push governors
to collect e-taxes
§
§
A contestable history of Latin
§
§
Changes loom
at the moribund NYRB
§
The studios aren’t budging
in the writers’ strike
So the writers guild
tries a different strategy
§
SymbioticA
has its ear to the ground
§
Underground art in
§
§
Dead flies & pickled cows
to the Tate
§
§
§
Deal making to steal the Barnes
§
Kenneth Baker
on the life of Picasso
§
The etchings of Lucien Freud
§
§
§
National identity
in postmodern Japanese dance
§
What bad music do you listen to?
§
A profile of Terry Eagleton
§
Lost in Translation no more
§
This year’s MLA offsite reading
with over 50 poets
will be
Friday, December 28
from
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Saturday, December 15, 2007
A muscled-up Ken Caminiti celebrates
winning the 1998 National League championship
with champagne. Caminiti, the 1996 NL MVP,
would be dead in six years.
Lyle Alzado was the first professional athlete I was aware of to cop to using steroids. Alzado was a football player who played for the Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns & L.A. Raiders from 1971 into 1985. Alzado, who later became a professional wrestler & occasional actor, blamed steroids for the brain tumor that killed him at the age of 43 in 1992. What I remember about him – what made him stand out at the time at a position, defensive end, where frankly few football players ever garner fame – was the intensity with which he performed. Alzado on the field seemed driven by an insane rage. This made him very effective closing in on hapless quarterbacks, tho it also led to more than a few penalty flags over the course of his career. That’s a perennial problem with loose cannons: they go off in all directions.
Thursday’s report (PDF) to Major League Baseball (MLB) by George Mitchell reminded of this, in part because the years of Alzado’s career really predate baseball’s admission of its own “drug problem.” When Alzado died, the controversy of the role of steroids in his death caused these medications to get written up in all the sports sections. One of the side-effects, it seemed, was “’roid rage,” emotional volatility that was a direct reaction to many steroids. And quite effective at intimidating opponents on the field, at least if it was directed in the right direction.
Reading those articles at the time made me realize that I’d already seen one transparently obvious instance of ‘roid rage on the baseball diamond. It occurred in the 1990 American League championship series, which pitted the
This doesn’t mean that the Mitchell report is much of a document, however. With the exception of a couple of interviews that MLB effectively coerced, most of the documentation in the report amounts to old news clippings and hearsay. None of it would stand up in a court of law and most of the players named are not of the Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds type elites. Even without chemical enhancements, Clemens and Bonds were the best pitcher and best hitter of the era. If you don’t believe me, look at Bond’s strikeouts, which border on non-existent. That kind of coordination is not enhanced by muscle mass – if anything, just the opposite. Yet nobody has come close to Bonds in the last several decades in the old basic “see the ball, hit the ball” side of the game.
Which is why steroids don’t help every player – one of the 91 current or former players named in the report was David Bell, a hardnosed hustler of a third baseman who was a so-so fielder and an even worse hitter.
Ball players will do anything to survive and excel. Not long ago, an episode of Mythbusters demonstrated conclusively that corking a bat actually robs it of somewhere between ten and twenty percent of its power. Yet how many players have bought into the urban legend about the power of the corked bat and gotten caught – and suspended – for actually compromising their hitting power? They might as well have been hitting with microwaved poodles. The funny thing is that more than a few of these players have hit home runs with these compromised bats – the placebo effect is strong. As Yogi Berra says, “90 percent of baseball is half mental.” Whether Gaylord Perry threw the illegal spitball or not was a lot less important than the belief players had that he did. Perhaps he only threw it often enough to get caught and keep the myth alive.
What all of this means, I think, is this. Baseball has been abusing drugs much more widely, and for far longer, than the Mitchell report suggests. Olympic doping scandals date to the 1950s. The days when ballplayers could simply scoop up some “uppers,” “greenies” as Willie Mays used to call them, from a bowl in the locker room may be behind us, but it’s telling that the Mitchell report doesn’t address the ongoing problem of methamphetamines in the game. Just what would those day games after a night game look like if some folks weren’t buzzing around on speed?
I’m prepared to wager that there has not been a game since at least 1975 – if not 1945 – in which a minimum of two players on either side were not somehow “enhanced.” After all, Mitchell got 91 names basically from a Lexis-Nexis search plus a pair of interviews. What if he’d had subpoena power and access to the trainers for all thirty teams? We’re not talking dozens of violators, we’re talking hundreds, perhaps thousands. Just look at Wikipedia’s list of athletes penalized in doping scandals, only a tiny fraction of who played baseball. Which means that it has been the norm, not the exception. Athletes will do anything to improve the odds in their favor. If there is a culture of acceptance, they will push the envelope that much further. Is this any worse than software programmers living off of Jolt and working until three in the morning, or fighter pilots in Iraq using “go pills?”
It can be for the players. Steroids are nasty meds. Most any asthmatic in the
Performance enhancing medications simply underwrite the much broader drug culture in sports, which includes hard drugs and bad habits like needle sharing. I’m not concerned that a ball player may get high. But I am concerned about a Ken Caminiti dying of an overdose or an Alan Wiggins dying of AIDS. That’s the real price of drugs in sports. Just like rock ‘n’ roll.
What is most depressing here is the charade of mock righteousness on the part of owners and baseball executives – including the Giants’ Brian Sabean who was warned about Bonds’ activities and never spoke up, and Bud Selig, one-time owner of the Milwaukee Brewers during this very same period (ever check out the muscles of Rob Deer, Bud?) … and even that former owner of Texas Rangers & one-time employer of Sammy Sosa, George W. Bush. It’s the owners far more than the individual players who are culpable in this sad affair. If there is a culture of permission, it begins there. Relatively little of this could occur without the tacit acceptance of baseball execs, anxious to see their product performed at the “highest” level. If there are a few casualties along the way – Hey, I’m not the one shooting myself up in the butt every day. And pass me that cosmo. If Selig wants to hand out suspensions or expulsions, these are the folks who should go first. Don’t hold your breath.
The other group that I find completely appalling in all this are the sportswriters, a profession itself that has always lived large off of chemical enhancements, in its case mostly alcohol. The thought of one more self-righteous diatribe from a red-eyed sports hack about the “purity” of this pastime – the very same game that Cap Anson organized in the 1870s to expel players of color & which threw its world championship in 1919, and which brags to this day about the feats of Babe Ruth, who hardly ever inhaled a sober breath (and died of cancer young because of it) – well, it troubles my sleep.
Labels: sports
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Ocho 12
is the first poetry mag
available on Kindle
§
But
Kindle is a total loser
argues Cory Doctorow
§
Homeophonic Celan
by Robert Kelly
§
§
W00t
is the “word of the year”
sayeth Merriam-Webster
Elsewhere,
locavores
garner publicity
for a dictionary
§
Sean Duffy, DJ Hi-Res & Tom Devaney
in The Grove
at
§
Clayton Eshleman’s
Juniper Fuse
§
Talking with
Wilson Orhiunu
§
Transcript of a web chat
with Robert Pinsky
§
Michele Leggott
is the first Poet Laureate
of
§
Jordan Davis
on
Richard Garcia
§
An in-depth interview
with Jim Bertolino
§
Thom Donovan
on Kyle Schlesinger’s
Hello Helicopter
§
A profile of
Afaa Michael Weaver
§
He’s ba-ack!
Ed Dorn Live
§
Talking with
Dorianne Laux
§
At La MaMa in
Monday, December 17,
”Gangs of the New York School”
§
Nation Book Critics Circle members
think linking reviews & ads
is ethical
The actual survey
The same survey in 1987
(PDF)
§
Philip M. Parker
is the most prolific author
in history!
(scroll down)
§
Joyelle McSweeney
on Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise
§
A gathering of
Indian & Pakistani poets
in
§
Vèvè Amasasa Clark
has died
§
The Arab world
begins to open
to Western lit
§
Paul Zarzyski,
”the Kerouac of cowboy poets”
§
Orgies in
§
Translating William Carlos Williams
into Chinese
A profile of PoetrySky
§
e.e. cummings
in the
§
“You say you want a revolution…,”
how about Yusef Komunyakaa instead?
§
Ibrahim Al-Hadrani
has died
§
“The quiet moral authority”
of Robert Hass
§
Tony Harrison
&
Anthony Thwaite
§
Remembering
Martin Carter,
”national poet” of
§
Hyam Plutzik,
”obscure poet”
§
A. Van Jordan
on poetry and film
§
The problem of “classics”
in the school curriculum
Imagine judging school districts
by how they teach poetry
“Report reveals all poetry is rubbish”
§
The literary genius
of Karl Rove
§
This week’s death-of-a-bookstore article
is about a leading institution
in
Perhaps even more alarming,
Bookstore Tourism
has shut down
§
A study of the Iraqi poet
Sa’di Yûsuf
§
A librarian’s
”worst nightmare”
§
Jay Parini
on Umberto Eco
§
Philip Larkin,
rock god
§
The
is heading for disaster
§
& the changes may fail
§
Talking with
Ashley Capps
§
Living your script
can be deadly
§
Papers from the
Postgraduate Conference
on Language & Linguistics
§
Grim stat:
dropouts & reading
§
A Nordic-Bangla poetry fest
§
Japanese weeklies
have begun to decline
§
or the Magna Carta
§
The works of Sigmund Laufer
§
The NY Times goes to
Art Basel Miami Beach
§
Dia has sold its Chelsea building
for $38.55 million
& what that really means
§
The strange deaths
of Jeremy Blake & Theresa Duncan
§
§
§
Remembering Stockhausen
The San Francisco Chronicle
finally runs a reprint
of the LA Times’
Stockhausen obit
(and has yet to run one
for Landis Everson,
tho he lived in
§
Elliott Carter:
What Next?
§
Talking with
John Seely Brown
§
§
“Workers of the world, unite!”
Labels: links
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Singing “
I see where A.O. Scott of The New York Times has listed Murray Lerner’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s performances at the Newport Folk Festival between 1963 & ’65, The Other Side of the Mirror, as one of his critic’s picks for the week, and given it a brief review here. I’ve had the DVD sitting atop my TV set since summer, when I bought it the instant it became available at the ever entrepreneurial bobdylan.com website. I’ve been planning to see I’m Not There, but the only location in
The funny thing is, he’s as changeable here as I suspect he is with six different folks portraying him in the Todd Haynes film. That may be overstating it, but only a little. What it’s really like is that feeling you have when you see some friends maybe once a year and their kids are teenagers – one year they’re kids, the next long and gawky and infinitely awkward & the year after that they seem to be complete adults who tower over their parents. Dylan in The Other Side of the Mirror is only a little older, really, going from the age of 22 in 1963 to 24 in 1965. In the process, he’s not only transformed, but the whole of American pop and folk have as well, dragged along in the wake of his effortless density as a songwriter.
In 1963, Dylan is nervous, humble, earnest, seemingly hyperconscious of the experience & expertise, not to mention talent, surrounding him as he sings “North Country Blues” while Judy Collins, Doc Watson & Clarence Ashley listen intently, merely the most famous of the large crowd attending an afternoon workshop on which they too were probably on the bill. Dylan at this point has already written “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Girl from the
By 1964, Dylan is complete a star & conscious of it. The opening scene for that year is of Dylan at the topical song workshop singing – for the first time before a large audience – “Mr. Tambourine Man,” newly penned. You can see Pete Seeger sitting silently, looking down, frowning, trying somehow to fathom what is “topical” about the “jingle-jangle morning” in which “I’ll come following you.” According to Lerner in his interview,
Lerner is incredibly fortunate in that Dylan sang two songs at more than one festival, first “With God on Our Side” in 1963 and 64 – twice in 1963, both times with Joan Baez, the first at the workshop – a version that is widely known and deservedly famous for its appearance on one of the Newport anthology albums that appeared in the 1960s – then in her performance on one of the evening shows. The second is “Tambourine Man,” which Dylan sings only at the workshop in 1964, but reprises in the 1965 concert after he was persuaded to return to the stage and do a couple of acoustic numbers (the other is “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Dylan’s farewell to Newport) after the raucous crowd reaction to the intense & brilliant – but decidedly paradigm shattering – performance of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” (another song completely unfamiliar to the crowd, tho it had just been released as a single) with electric versions accompanied by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Considering its content, it may seem curious that the key element differentiating the performances of “With God on Our Side” is Dylan’s relationship to Baez. At the workshop in 1963, they’re giggly young lovers, she’s the superstar and he’s very much her project – as he was Pete Seeger’s, the two determined to let the world know how good Dylan is and make him famous (be careful what you wish for). At the 1963 evening concert, tho, Dylan & Baez are all business and it’s very straightforward – and it's not as good a performance, frankly, because of this. In 1964, Dylan & Baez have evolved into good friends – you can see his affection in his grin as he looks at her while they sing, really an extraordinary moment given Dylan’s “head down, focus on the song” performance mode that he’s made the hallmark now of a long career.
With “Tambourine Man” in 1964, it’s very much the serious get-through-the-song Dylan onstage at the workshop. (He was, in fact, still carrying the lyrics around in his pocket, as I learned when he sat next to me at a party during that festival and I asked what he was writing – he pulled a thermal photocopy of “Tambourine Man” out of his coat pocket to show me.) In 1965, after very distinct choruses of booing to his electric set, he was coaxed back onstage by Peter Yarrow and had to ask the audience for somebody to throw him an E harmonica – there’s a clatter as dozens hit the stage – and Dylan then gives what I can only describe as the most intimate performance of that song I’ve ever heard.
The politics of the
By 1965, nobody makes any attempt to thwart the gods of audience adulation. Dylan’s workshop appearance has a vast audience and his evening concert closes the festival (as it had in 1963). The ’65 concert is legendary as the moment that folk let rock & roll through the door. In addition to the evening concert, two songs electric, then after he’s talked back onstage, two acoustic, the film also shows Dylan’s afternoon sound check with the Butterfield Blues Band (sans Paul Butterfield, who is visible in a single shot, watching from a distance). Dylan of course used Mike Bloomfield, the best rock guitarist ever not named Hendrix, on the recordings of Highway 61 Revisited, as well as Al Kooper who replaces
Given its controversy at the time, it’s ironic that this live version of “Maggie’s Farm” is the best arrangement & recording that song has ever had. For one thing, the Butterfield Band had a cohesiveness as a unit that The Band (nee The Hawks) never valued. Whereas Dylan’s own arrangements during the entire period up to the enforced hiatus due to the motorcycle accident the following July are effective, if sometimes ethereal, the hard-driving blues sound of the Butterfield Band has often struck me as an opportunity not taken by Dylan, and “Maggie’s Farm” is my evidence for that. It is the
The final element that holds all of this together, curiously, is Peter Yarrow, he of Paul & Mary, who serves as the emcee for all but one of the events Lerner has captured of Dylan. It is Yarrow who says, of the 22-year-old Dylan in 1963, that he has “his pulse on his generation.” It is Yarrow who has to cope with tens of thousands unhappy customers as Dylan completes his 1964 evening concert so that Odetta & Dave Van Ronk don’t get left out. It is Yarrow who beseeches Dylan to come back and do a couple of acoustic numbers in 1965, telling the audience to be patient, “Bobby has to find an acoustic guitar.” It is Yarrow who scolds Dylan & the Butterfield Band that they have to have their settings “down cold” because they won’t have a chance to fix it during the concert. He’s a funny presence, very much the figure of Before as Dylan passes through folk music – more so in this documentary than Pete Seeger, who’s only visible for the finale of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963 and the topical song workshop in ’64. Yarrow’s binding presence is, like Dylan’s repetition of “With God on Our Side” & “Mr. Tambourine Man,” another instance of Murray Lerner’s incredible luck putting together this almost perfect presentation of Dylan’s career as a folk musician. This is one of those works where everything turned out just right.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
This way to Hogwarts
Not having read Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass is, I suspect, an advantage in watching the film by that same name, which I did on its opening night last Friday. One of my kids, a moderately serious Pullman aficionado, used the word “irritating” within ten seconds of the credit roll at film’s end. Which is to say that his problems with this film were different from my own. The film he saw, I gather, was a badly cut stew of moments from the book – minus its dénouement. The film I saw was an enjoyable enough couple of hours in the theater, a mishmash of every kids’ epic that’s been made over the past few years, with the most recent Bond flick, Casino Royale, tossed in for good measure. Addressing some of my son’s issues with the film – at 113 minutes it tries to tell a story that really deserves a full three hours – might have helped some of mine, tho hardly all.
The primary failure of this film is the director’s inability to envision a complete world in which all of these different actions should take place. A good part of what makes Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter franchises work literally is their unmistakable distinctness as realities. You know you’re in Middle Earth instantly & completely, and you can stay there for three films running roughly nine hours total. The Potter series isn’t nearly so well done – different directors for different films is a real problem – but you know when you’re at Hogwarts or Diagon Alley. The Golden Compass, on the other hand, gives you its own version of Hogwarts, only much blander, and leads you to a battle on the ice that is lacking only in Orcs, led, by of all things, a bear out of a Coke commercial. There are even a couple of moments right out of Lemony Snicket & Stuart Little. Woe is the media-literate child who tries to make a world out of this collage.
To make it worse, much worse, director Chris Weitz has cast veterans of Lord of the Rings into a couple of important roles – Ian McKellen is the voice of Iorek (pronounced Yorick), the dethroned prince of the ice bears who enters into a contract with Lyra, the girl who seeks to rescue her uncle in the North, and Christopher Lee, Saruman in Lord of the Rings, has a cameo as a key member of the Majesterium, the faux Catholic Church that functions here much the way the Empire does in Star Wars. It would have been far better had Weitz chosen to reverse their roles, giving the Bear the resonating timbre of Lee & not reminding us, every time one or the other speaks, how much better the Ring trilogy is. Eva Green, fresh from Casino Royale, does a turn playing Cate Blanchett/Liv Tyler from LOTR and wouldn’t you know that James Bond (Daniel Craig) is good Lord Asriel himself. Fortunately, Nicole Kidman chews the scenery in her Cruella De Vil imitation – not quite as wicked as Glenn Close, but not bad. Also fortunately, Sam Elliott seems only capable of playing himself, the friendly cowpoke who gives good moustache, so you don’t even notice, almost, that he’s really Han Solo.
Is it any wonder these parts never gel?
Not having read
Much has been made in the media about Compass’ abstention from using the word Church to describe The Authority that is trying to stamp out free will. Frankly, a nomad off the tundra in Tuva could recognize the Majesterium as Catholicism in, oh, maybe eight seconds.
Labels: Film
Monday, December 10, 2007
Photo by Leslie Poirier
In The Nation,
Joshua Clover
on Rod Smith
§
Doris Lessing’s
Nobel Prize acceptance speech
§
Barbara Henning
on
Brenda Coultas
§
Film’s relationship
to literature
Barrett Watten
on
I’m Not There
§
A haven for writers
in the Ivy League
Some local reaction
§
Susan Bee & Jerry Rothenberg:
The Burning Babe (PDF)
§
On the Road
on the bus
§
Relational poetics
Plus a replica
of Ketjak
§
I’m out, but Philly is in
& Reginald Shepherd’s blog
is both in & out
in Major Jackson’s
Poetry blog
(my favorite –
Gertrude Stein is out
Gertrude Schnackenberg is in
– pretty much says it all)
§
Individual
National Book Critics Circle
recommendations:
§
Nine months suspended sentence
for “terror poetry” in the
§
Turkish publisher on trial
for “insulting
§
Ghulam Farid
& the idea that poetry
”teaches spiritual democracy”
§
What winning the Nobel has meant
for Orhan Pamuk
§
Worth attending in NYC
December 11,
The Medead
by Fiona Templeton
§
Worth noting in NYC
December 19,
Shab-e She’r Poetry Night
at the Bowery Poetry Club
§
Tony Tost’s
Complex Sleep
§
Charles Simic
on his own poetry
§
In The New York Times,
David Orr
on Michael O’Brien
§
A striking
Battlestar Gallactica
writer
starts a blog
§
A good place
to meet writers
in
is on the picket line
§
The “godmother
of Canadian slam”
§
Ivan Blatný’s
Drug of Art
§
Paperspine:
Netflix for books?
§
The limits of Kindle
Cynthia Ozick &
Sam Lipsyte
consider Amazon’s ebook
§
§
The
in Spanish-language books
§
Life, death, art
on the border
§
The Butterfly’s Burden
by Mahmoud Darwish
§
Bukowski
in
§
Reading
Forugh Farrokhzad
§
Alan Brownjohn
reviews 4 books
in 5 paragraphs
§
Theodore Roethke
as a poet for children
§
Postmodern Bourgeois
Poetaster Blues
§
Is policy killing poetry
in the U.K.?
§
Publishers
to kiss up
to critics
§
Terry Teachout,
deeply confused
by the
two modernisms
§
Of two marriages:
Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore,
Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas
§
Knowing
what not to read
And what to read twice
§
Shakespeare on the brain
§
Beyond celebrity poetry
with Ethan Coen
§
Considering
Daniil Kharms
§
Vu Cao
& Pham Tien Duat
have died
§
The Brits & science fiction
§
“Like being in the presence
of a couple of great
surrealists….”
§
Not liking Denis Johnson
§
Wendy Cope
wants to be
the RIAA
of bad poets
§
§
Talking with Kirsten Dierking
§
An echo
of Olson’s plaint
in Northumbria
§
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore piece
comes from
Washington, DC
§
Bookstore readings
flourish in Marin
§
Unable to prevent
the implosion
of a
Cody’s Andy Ross
finally quits
§
§
A life of poetry
in
§
Trethewey to receive
honorary doctorate
§
§
If reading
were the same
as writing
§
§
In praise of bathos
Larkin’s “The Explosion”
§
§
§
Paul Brach has died
§
The “real” Richard Prince
§
Art skateboards
at Printed Matter
§
art market
§
Paul McCarthy’s
latest sculpture
§
Art
Fashion as high art
Design
§
§
Godard stole to make films
§
New work from
Margie Jenkins
§
Talking with
Radiohead
§
A profile of Peter Gay
§
Where blogging really counts
Labels: links
Sunday, December 09, 2007
A quick note to acknowledge that, in the two weeks since I’ve switched my policy on the comments stream, I’ve only rejected two comments, considerably fewer than I had in the 24 hours prior to the change. Overall the average number of comments per blognote has gone up, both genders have been commenting, and the quality of discussion overall has risen markedly. All good things. The stream no longer has the feel of, as one correspondent put it, “a middle school boy’s locker room.” I don’t mind if people are critical of one another so long as it doesn’t descend to name calling, and I don’t mind if you take verbal shots at me.
For what it’s worth, comments and emails about the change have been overwhelmingly positive. Male correspondents favor the change by roughly a two-to-one ratio, female correspondents favor it by a nine-to-one ratio. And that divergence pretty much says it all.
So I’m going to continue with the current regime – the presumption is that any note that doesn’t contribute usefully to the discussion will be rejected. That seems to be enough to keep people on their best behavior, which is something we should strive for always.
Labels: blogging
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Stockhausen is fifth from the left, back row, just to the left of W.C. Fields
Karlheinz Stockhausen
1928 - 2007
Friday, December 07, 2007
Several contributors to the comments stream Tuesday noted the distinction between narrative and plot, and they are of course entirely correct on that point. Plot is narrative at its most vulgar, just as the novel constructed entirely around a single character is but a step in the direction of dramatic monolog, that (mostly) dead end of the Victorian era.
Narrative in the purest sense is the unfolding of meaning over time. It moves in the direction of plot to the degree that it becomes figurative, something that can occur in very small increments. This is why (and how, for that matter) a painting can be called narrative simply because it presents a scene. In works of mine that deploy the new sentence, such as Ketjak, Tjanting and many of the sections of The Alphabet, many if not all of the individual sentences can themselves be understood as narratives, often on two & sometimes three levels. First there is an unfolding of meaning in the sentence itself –
A sequence of objects which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line.
– then there is a frame set up by what comes before and what comes after otherwise “discontinuous” sentences –
The implications of power within the ability to draw a single, vertical straight line. Look at that room filled with fleshy babies. We ate them.
– then, in certain works, individual sentences evolve & elaborate as they reoccur during the course of the work –
A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, fringed surreys, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point, signified by a palm tree on the horizon.
Bob Perelman was, I think, the first person to observe that in Ketjak sentences themselves function as characters. Indeed, even juxtapositions have a life of their own – the distance between the variation of “The implications of power” that occurs in the final paragraph of Ketjak in The Age of Huts (compleat), which now reads “The power implicit…,” and “We ate them” is four pages, the first on 97, the latter on 101. In Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect, one section of The Alphabet, that distance will double when the book comes out from
All of this is narrative, tho relatively little of it could be associated with plot at the level of the signified, the referential illusion that is realist fiction’s proto-cinematic trope – and which gives way directly to the origin of cinema, so that today a book is judged realist more by how “cinematic” its writing seeks to be than ever was the case in the days of Dreiser and Norris.
Cinema, of course, can be every bit as sophisticated in its use of such devices – the films of Abigail Child are every bit “as narrative” in this sense as any work of fiction & far more so than your formula chaser, be it James Bond or Jason Bourne. Films like Rear Window or Blow-Up are all about the construction of narratives, and a film like Vertigo kicks it up a notch from there.
Peter Davis makes the point (without using these exact words) that certain poems can today function as a mode of flash fiction. His case in point, Bill Stafford’s “Traveling Through Dark,” tho, sort of the high point of American kitsch, functions not so much as an efficient narrative as it uses plot to set up the arch-silliness of “I thought hard for us all – my only swerving –,” a perfect instance of feigned & posed seriousness & just possibly the single most pompous line ever written. Pomposity figured as caring is in fact a good example of what I meant by the pathological aspects of the
Even a poem like Aram Saroyan’s
has a beginning, middle and end. Engaging the history of typography, it has a social context and makes a point. One might even see in Saroyan’s humor here the same flash of personality one intuits from “I thought hard for us all” (except which poet would you rather spend time talking to at a party?). Strictly as a narrative poem, on the same terms as
My argument would be that these shared levels are only a few of the many pleasures of the Saroyan poem – the play of the letter n as it appears to the mind both before and aft the root m triggers a level not even present in the two sermons. Saroyan’s work is the most complex of the three, and once you realize that, the awkwardness of the others becomes their overwhelming feature.
So, yes, perhaps I should have used the term plot to indicate vulgar narrative on Tuesday. Contemporary poetry is not less narrative today, just less apt to confuse these levels, far more apt to ask the question: narrative to what end?
Labels: narrative
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Photo by Ben Friedlander
A reading
of
Rob Fitterman’s
Metropolis
§
kari edwards’ ashes
returned to the sea
§
Rae Armantrout,
talking with
Francis Raven
§
Some recent Drafts
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis:
Draft 83: Listings
(Three Drafts
translated into French
by Chris Tysh
& J-P Auxemery
here)
§
A critical collaboration
in the mode of a wiki
on Robert Pinsky’s
praise of difficult poetry
§
In the American Tree,
the radio show,
(includes broadcasts with
Ted Berrigan,
Alan Bernheimer,
Stephen Rodefer,
more)
§
A story by
Roberto Bolaño
And
a poem
§
Charles Bernstein
shooting blanks
§
Waiting for Godot
in
§
Talking with
Alice Notley
§
Jill Magi
destroys
her book
§
The secret poetry of
John Phillip Santos,
halfway betwixt
Laura (Riding) Jackson
&
Naomi Shihab Nye
§
Joyelle McSweeney
interviews
Carlos M. Luis
& Derek White
§
The plight of newspaper
book reviews
ignores the detail that
newspaper book reviews
mostly are crap
§
Conjunctions’
audio vault
is a great little resource
tho not in MP3s, alas
§
Almmiel Alcalay
on the limits
of translation
§
Mario Hibert
talking with
Kent Johnson
Plus Bill Friend
on Johnson”s
Epigramititis
§
A report on one of my readings,
or really the talk after a reading,
tho “invisible flan”
doesn’t say which one
(it’s
§
In Boston tonight,
a benefit
for Melissa Green,
featuring
Fanny Howe, William Corbett,
Jennifer Moxley,
Frank Bidart, Derek Walcott,
Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren
& more
§
Talking with
Kimiko Hahn
§
Joe Ceravolo,
two readings
§
The politics
of the
Nobel Prize,
an African perspective
§
Talking with
J.C. Todd
§
Attila Jozsef’s poems
will return to the web
January 1,
the day © expires
§
An unsigned review
of John Ashbery
that talks mostly about
Robert Lowell
§
C.D. Wright’s
use of
lists
§
Does
”creative nonfiction”
exist?
§
§
Getting divorced,
Angela Ball
is a
”happy poet”
§
Mary Ann Samyn
talking with
Kelly Moffett
§
Remembering
Jawdat Haidar,
a Lebanese poet
who wrote in English
§
19th Century
sound poetry
§
The roots of Saussure
& modern linguistics
§
e-books
start to catch on
§
§
A tale of
two bookshops
§
Powell’s
faces challenges
§
Rare book fest
in
§
Against
speed reading
§
What is reading
anyway?
§
Googlization
& its enemies
§
Spectacle & aporia
in Ted Kooser
& John Ashbery
§
Holly Green
is the Wirral’s
Young Poet Laureate
§
James Emanuel,
a formalist
for the simple people
§
Tom Paulin
on
Ted Hughes’
letters
§
Talking with
Stephen King
§
Kinds of Canadian
conservatives:
George Johnston
&
Peter Richardson
§
Taylor Mali,
rapping
in
§
Talking with
James Longenbach
§
Everybody
knows
Gertrude Stein
§
Hauling the fathers
through the trees
§
Stein
not as a playwright
but as a subject
for theater
§
Talking with
Janet Malcolm
§
Unauthorized
Stegner novel
published
§
Can Beowulf
survive guilt?
§
§
Abebe Payne
takes first
at
Writers Awards Dinner
§
Iranian-American
fiction
§
§
How to reach
4,000,000
possible readers
in one day
§
John Berger’s
”little book of hope”
§
100 years
of
Mills & Boon
§
Talking with
John Adams
§
Cecil Payne,
master of the baritone sax,
has died
§
The future of
post-classical
music
§
Is there a there there
in
I’m Not There?
§
Nobody’s getting
CDs for Christmas
§
§
Time capsules
from
Andy Warhol
§
Mug shots
of the truly criminal
§
Banksy et al
find a use
for
”security wall”
Plus
Banksy in New York
§
§
Peter Schjeldahl
on what’s great
about Chicago
§
Where is
”great art”?
§
In Julian Bell’s
new art history,
the avant-garde
came to an end
§
But Richard Serra
is back!
§
Mark Wallinger
wins
the Turner Prize
for
State Britain
§
Damien Hirst:
the other white meat
§
§
Why vandalize art?
§
The Radiohead model
works
in
§
Rethinking
performance space
§
At stake in Hollywood:
the value of entertainment
&
the role of writing
§
The new Russian
culture wars
§
Culture, art
& the decline of
France
§
The inverse Orientalism
of Edward Said
§
The gospel
according to
Terry Eagleton
§
§
Why dance criticism
sucks
§
§
The fate
of the essay
§
Movies better than the books
from which they were begot
§
Anthropologists return
to a world
of ethics
Or do they?
§
§
Special thanks
to
Reconfigurations,
a nifty journal
in the form
of a blog
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
When I last reviewed a film here (Michael Clayton), somebody identified only as Vance wrote in the comments stream,:
Are you ever struck, Ron, by the difference between your movie reviews and your writing on poetry? From my perspective, they might as well be written by different people. The movies you watch are mostly the same ones I read about in the Times, and the kinds of things you focus on (plot, stars) are not so far from that genre either. The same can't be said for the poetry reviews!
I used to be struck by this too when Michael Bérubé was still blogging. Without knowing in advance, you'd never guess the comments on music and on books came from the same mind. (Similar prose facility, I suppose, but radically different notions of what's worth talking about, what counts as evidence or a reference point, what the goal might be.)
The answer is Yes. And also No. It’s really a cogent point & one I’ve thought about a good deal since he first made it, but drafting my note on Lust, Caution brought it back front & center. So maybe I ought to venture a response.
There are really two kinds of points being made here about me – Michael Bérubé has to fend for himself, which he does perfectly well – one about my discussion of “stars,” the other about my discussion of “plot” in cinema. They’re really different points.
Cinema, like theater & much music, is a collaborative art form. It’s entirely possible to be uninterested in every other element of an event, but to be entranced by how well (or even how badly) a performer does his or her thing. Like John Latta writing about how Kit Robinson or Tom Mandel works in The Grand Piano without necessarily – at least in the same note – presiding over a presentation of the whole project. Most poetry – tho not all – is a profoundly individual endeavor. Emily Dickinson being the iconic instance thereof. Tho in fact I have written about books noting only what is written blurbwise on the jacket – that got a bunch of angry responses – or talking about the editing of an issue of a magazine, rather than the work therein.
I agree with Pierre Bayard that literature – he goes further & says culture – is a “system” before it is individual books, individual poets, individual poems. Which is what I mean when I say that there is no such thing as a poet, there are only kinds of poets. It’s not about what you write – it’s about location, location, location. What you write is what gets you into (or out of) a particular location. I know it’s not how it feels when you or I write a poem, but that is the overarching social dynamic that takes place. One of the reasons I keep putting in links about English-language poetry stories from such diverse places as Nigeria & Pakistan is because I want to understand now what the worl