Friday, February 29, 2008
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers, , Coffee House Press,
Brandon Brown, Wondrous Things I Have Seen, Big Game Books,
Sabrina Calle, The Gilles Poem: Winter 2006 Collection, Transmission Press, San Francisco 2007
Sarah Campbell, The Maximum, Bonfire Press, Fort Collins, CO 2008
Kate Colby, Unbecoming Behavior, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2008
Wade Fletcher, Snitch Culture, dusi/echaps, dusie.org, 2007
Alex Gildzen, It’s All a Movie, Otoliths,
Alex Gildzen, Outlaw Dreams, Green Panda Press,
Harvey Goldner, The Resurrection of Bert Ringold: Selected Poems, Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso 2008
Lars Gustafsson, A Time in Xanadu, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Linda Hogan, Rounding the Human Corners, , Coffee House Press,
Alexander Hutchison, Scales Dog, Salt Publishing,
Eugen Jebeleanu, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, translated from the Romanian by Matthew Zapruder & Radu Ioanid, introduction by Andrei Codrescu, , Coffee House Press,
Trevor Joyce, What’s in Store, New Writer’s Press & The Gig, Dublin & Toronto 2007
Luke Kennard, The Harbour Beyond the Movie, Salt Publishing,
David Kennedy, The Devil’s Bookshop, Salt Publishing,
Carolyn Knox, Quaker Guns, Wave Books,
Douglas A. Martin, In the Time of Assignments, Soft Skull Press, Berkeley 2008
Ander Monson, Our Aperture, New Michigan Press, Grand Rapids 2007
Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears, translated from Belarusian by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright & Franz Wright, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2008
Pablo Neruda, The Hands of Day, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Alexander Skidan, Red Shifting, translated by Genya Turovskaya, Eugene Ostashevsky, Evgeny Pavlov, Jacob Edmond & Natasha Randall, introduction by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2008
Joseph Somoza, Shock of White Hair, Sin Fronteras,
A.B. Spellman, Things I Must Have Known, Coffee House Press,
Ruth Stone, What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Will Stone, Glaciation, Salt Publishing,
Sandra Tappenden, Speed, Salt Publishing,
Heather Thomas, Blue Ruby, Foothills Publishing, Kanona, NY 2008
Steven Waling, Travelator, Salt Publishing,
Marjorie Welish, Isle of the Signatories, , Coffee House Press,
Jay Wright, Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms and Praise for Lois, Dalkey Archive,
Jay Wright, The Presentable Art of Reading Absence, Dalkey Archive,
Books (Anthologies)
Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, edited by Reginald Shepherd, Counterpath Press,
Poets Bookshelf II: Contemporary Poets on Books that Shaped Their Art, edited by Peter Davis & Tom Koontz, Barnwood Press, Seattle 2008. Includes Jack Anderson, Ivan Arguelles, Mary Jo Bang, Ellen Bass, Robert Bly, Andrea Hollander Budy, Mairead Byrne, Nick Carbó, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Clark, Joshua Clover, Andrei Codrescu, Shanna Compton, Alfred Corn, Catherine Daly, Linh Dinh, Edward Field, Forrest Gander, Sandra M. Gilbert, Kenneth Goldsmith, Noah Eli Gordon, H.L. Hix, Anselm Hollo, Janet
Holmes, Cathy Park Hong, Ilya Kaminsky, Robert Kelly, Amy King, Jennifer L. Knox, Ted Kooser, Greg Kuzma, Ben Lerner, Haki R. Madhubuti, David Mason, Gail Mazur, Judith Moffett, K. Silem Mohammad, Willam Mohr, Charles North, Kate Northrop, Jena Osman, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan, Simon Perchik, Bob Perelman, Marge Piercy, Katha Pollitt, David Ray, Jerome Rothenberg, Jerome Sala, Dennis Schmitz, Grace Schulman, Lloyd Schwartz, David Shapiro, Reginald Shepherd, Dale Smith, Eileen R. Tabios, Tony Tost, Diane Wakoski, Diane Ward, Barrett Watten, Miller Williams & many more.
Stacy S: Autoportraits, OMG Press, San Francisco 2007. Includes Trane Devore, Renee Gladman, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Anne Tardos, Tim Peterson (or Trace), Elizabeth Robinson, David Gatten & photos by Stacy Szymaszek.
Books (Other)
Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2008
Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA 2007
Sophocles,
Joseph Torra, They Say: A Novel, Quale Press,
Journals
First Intensity, no. 22, Fall 2007,
Matrix, no. 79, 2008,
Phoebe vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2008,
Pleiades 28:1, University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO. Includes Stephen Burt, Mark Halliday, Kim Addonizio, Claire Hero, Astrid Cabral (translated by Alexis Levitin), David Wagoner, Ngo Tu Lap (translated by Martha Collins & the author), Albert Goldbarth, Malachi Black, Campbell McGrath, Roberto Bolaño (translated by Laura Healy), Page Hill Starzinger, Robert Archambeau, Jerry Harp, Nancy Kuhl, Joan Houlihan on Sarah Hannah, more, more, more.
The Sienese Shredder, no. 2,
Small Town XII, San Francisco 2007. Includes rob mclennan, Arielle Guy, Michael Slosek, Robin Demers, Carrie Hunter, Kathryn l. pringle, John Sakkis, Dorthea Lasky, Brandon Brown.
Zoland Poetry no. 1,
Zoland Poetry no. 2,
Just some of the items received since January 11
-- to be continued
Labels: Recently Received
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Photo by Howard Junker
What national literary landmark appears in the motion picture Annie Hall? Hint: it’s not in
Now Beyond Baroque’s lease is up – March 1st – and an anti-literacy city attorney is opposing its renewal. These hallowed grounds are in serious jeopardy. Anyone who remembers what a disaster it was when Intersection in
Click on the Beyond Baroque website to see how you can help save this institution. It’s certainly worth a phone call – especially long distance. Let’em know that the whole world is watching.
¹
Labels: Beyond Baroque, institutions, Los Angeles
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Talking with John Ashbery
Poetry that is never “about”
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Lyn Hejinian & the
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Using Jennifer Moxley’s Middle Room
as a “biblical text”
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Remembering Raul Salinas
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Charles Bernstein’s Objectivist Blues
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Pierre Joris:
3 poems & an interview
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A profile of Geoffrey Gatza
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Joseph Massey’s Out of Light
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Ghostwriting Gabriel García Márquez
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Gary Sullivan on “Numbers Troubles”
& an early”anthology” of mine
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Evie Shockley, Rudyard Fearon
& the rise of Barack Obama
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The Quietist as collector
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A profile of Le Hinton
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Committing Poetry in a Time of War
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Where poetry is more popular than soccer
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To Thomas De Quincy, Dorothy Wordsworth was
”the very wildest …person I have ever known”
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First Person:
New Media as Story, Performance & Game
Second Person:
Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media
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Roald Hoffmann, Nobel chemist & poet
on the art’s relation to science
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Talking with Bob Hass
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To Milton for the politics
“By far the most intelligent and serious of English poets”
“Musicality is central to the poet’s works”
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The Year of Zbignew Herbert
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Remembering Robbe-Grillet
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This week’s death-of-a-bookstore pieces
involve the last indie
in the western half of
& a Brentwood indie
with deep ties to the
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Looking for Theodore Roethke’s Saginaw
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Slammin’ against hip-hop
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“Slammin’” on the Northern Mariana Islands
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A biography of Wallace Stegner
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Talking with Ursula Le Guin
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Postcolonial poetry in English & the web (PDF)
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A profile of Eric “Bear Dance” Breland
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P.E.I. poet laureate
launches website
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Poetry in the schools, Jakarta style
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Fear No Fear Shakespeare
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A book fair in Bangladesh
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A biography of Audre Lorde
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Robert Frost unplugged
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Try a different hat
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He’s ba-ack:
BBC to broadcast lost Larkin poems
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Kashmiri poets document conflict
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A profile of Con Hilberry
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The oddest book titles shortlist
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Why open-source publishing is like
anti-slavery abolitionism
Some comments thereon
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Litfest ends amid recriminations
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Writing & Hollywood:
take the money & run
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When shock & awe belonged to the arts
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Why should you suffer?
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Time to say goodbye
to your Polaroids
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The saxophone in South Indian music
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The myth of democracy on the web
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Pure hype
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A generational revolution in Bay theater
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Images, metaphors & “movies” in the brain
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A nation where all university jobs
are temporary
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The 1,500,000th visit
came at
from somebody at
the City University of New York
who appears to have been searching
for something in the October 2004
archive
Labels: links
Because it is a three-dimensional art, dance functions on at least two planes: one vertical, where the axis is the dancer’s spine (singular or plural), the other horizontal, the stage itself a two- (or more) dimensional canvas. Anyone who can remember footage of Busby Berkeley extravaganzas, or even the June Taylor Dancers of the 1950s, will recognize that there are forms of dance where a seat in the middle of the main level of a theater is a disadvantage. Another artist who makes great use of the horizontal as well as vertical plane is Shen Wei, the MacArthur-winning choreographer behind Shen Wei Dance Arts. Born in the province of Hunan & trained in calligraphy, painting and Chinese opera before helping to found the first modern dance company in China & then moving to the US in 1995, Shen Wei – he always uses both names – is a polymath & showman of the first order: his images & work will help to open & close the Olympics later this year in Beijing.
Considering the show his dance company performed a little over a week ago in the Perelman Theater of the
The most obvious one is that Shen Wei isn’t dancing with his troupe, but he does just about everything else, from sets to costumes to make-up. The first of his two pieces at the Kimmel was Map, a seven-part construction to excerpts from Steve Reich’s The Desert Music. Choreography to Reich’s music is so 1980s & Reich’s glaring misreading of William Carlos Williams’ poem of depression & despair is itself an odd choice for a work that seeks “to create an abstract dance of raw and pure movement.” But Shen Wei has no apparent interest in the work’s underlying text, so much as in the work’s construction into a symmetry of seven movements, rather on the order of a palindrome: ABCDCBA. Shen Wei uses each section to create a work that often is defined mathematically, using four groups of dancers for the most part in threes. The photo at the top of this note shows one moment of the work in which three groups are onstage simultaneously, involved in coordinated but separate activities. From up high – second balcony, first row – this is even more effective than viewed head on. Shen Wei’s experience as a painter comes across more powerfully here than in the I-wish-I-was-Robert-Rauschenberg-or-Jasper-Johns backdrop that is the set for this work.
There are some extraordinary moments in Map, starting with the beginning when the dancers snaking across the floor at the start of the opening section. The most extraordinary is the opening of the fifth section, and it’s worth quoting from the program, penned by Thea Little when the work was first performed in 2005:
In this section, the first dancer feels the internal flow of her center, leading her to eventually move to places of suspension and momentum. As she continues this for most of the section, a group forms to repeat an adagio phrase that is based on lengthening the space between the joints. The movement comes from the joints, as the shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints spread apart and lengthen to the fingertips. Thus, the limbs are lengthened as they swing from position to position with no effort. The movements are nonmuscular, with a floating internal quality. Soon, one by one, the dancers peel off from the group and dance their own solos until they are off stage.
The very opening portion, with the first dancer solo on the stage, her back turned to the audience, sort of wriggling up from her spine as she extends further & further, is flat out one of the most erotic moments I’ve ever seen in dance – even in blue jeans & a perfectly modest halter top.
In later sections, there are movements in which the dancers appear to mime the course of fireworks in the sky, or schools of fish darting about a tank. One can watch almost perfectly relaxed as the mind constantly rehearses the mathematical ratios as they play out on the stage.
The second, and much shorter, piece was Re- (Part I), “broadly based on the feeling of the land, the people, the religion and the culture of
So read the messages: modernism, Tai Chi, sand painting, abstract expressionism, Tibetan music – it’s almost a perfect pastiche of globalization in dance. As a whole, it proved more cohesive than Map, tho it did so by sacrificing some of the high points of the first work. My wife, who studied dance at the
What to make of all this? Should I be happy that so much of what I’ve enjoyed elsewhere over the past 30 or so years is connecting now with larger audiences in a slick motif? You don’t get a larger audience than the Olympic opening & closing ceremonies. Or should the constant appropriation of everything creep me out? There is, in fact, some first rate dance here, and some moments of first-rate choreography. But what I really saw & heard at the Kimmel was the cool construction of terrific theater, and a glimpse into the process by which what was once avant-garde becomes source material for pure pop.
Labels: dance
Monday, February 25, 2008
It took this blog two years & five months – from August 2002 until the end of January 2005 – to receive its first 250,000 visits. But it took only three years & two months – just nine more months – to receive the next quarter million and hit the half-million threshold. That ramp upward got steeper still as it took just 16 months to receive the next 500,000 and hit the million visit mark. That was February of last year – sometime Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, the 1,500,000th visitor will click on through.
These are not the sort of numbers I normally associate with poetry. That is three Woodstocks, or the current population of Philadelphia.
One thing this tally doesn’t represent is anything like 1.5 million separate individuals. There are a few hundred people who show up here daily and a few thousand more who come by with some regularity – once or twice a week perhaps. And a third, larger cluster that is far less regular, some of whom may do so only while taking a class that requires it. My guess is that those three groups combined add up to six or eight thousand people. That’s less than the number of poets who write in English, but still a sizeable fraction of the number of folks who care about poetry. And it’s more than the thirty a day I had hoped for when I first started this project.
There are all kinds of interesting ways that a marketer would want to cut such numbers, demographics being the default in that mode of thinking. What percentage of my readers are men and how does that relate to the percentage of people interested in poetry who happen to be male? What are the age breakdowns? Race? Religion – how many Lutheran are there here (how many Lutheran Surrealists)? How many readings do we attend each month & do we go out for a meal before or after? How much do we each spend on books? Etc. I know that among my comrades in the Grand Piano project, there are some who appear never to read this blog, and two or three who seem always to do so. I would suggest that this is probably to be expected from a cohort that ranges in age from late 50s to mid 60s – all of us are what we call “digital immigrants” where I work, people who came to the technology a little late in life, unlike my children who are digital natives, having used PCs since they were toddlers & Richard Scary’s Busytown was the software package of choice. Except that my Grand Piano co-authors are all people who have known me for at least 30 years, so I think that may boost the numbers artificially. After all, I do know poets from my age group who still avoid PCs pretty much altogether. They’re the last of a dying breed, and I think they know it.
I try to imagine what it must be like to be a poet today, particularly in the U.S., who is entirely off-line and still working with a typewriter. If I were that poet, I think I would find it strange, as if the social domain that is poetry were somehow getting away from me & becoming more & more ethereal. Where I used to see all the “important” literary magazines, say, in Cody’s or Moe’s in Berkeley or in City Lights in San Francisco, there are now many important journals that seem locked up out of sight, because they don’t exist in the print world – How(2), Jacket, mark(s), Big Bridge & so many more. I remember being a teenager & not being able to get hold of a copy of Locus Solus or Art & Literature & feeling totally frustrated by that. Try to envision this same phenomenon many times over for the poet who is not wired.
I can’t say that I’ve met any younger poets who consciously disengage from poetry’s existence on the net, tho I suspect some must exist. We are moving, faster than I think any of us (or me anyway) are conscious of, toward a day on which poetry is something that exists primarily on the web, having made the migration away from print & bookstores to a degree that right now seems unfathomable. Those older poets who currently refuse to publish on the web – they do exist – will discover soon enough that they have painted themselves into the proverbial corner. Far from being a “debased” terrain where works commingle without being presorted by “value,” the web simply is becoming the commons for such work.
I have been fortunate, especially being an old paradigm guy, to have had some success with this new medium. I don’t think what I’m doing here is in any way unique. I think I’m more consistent & dogged, and that I’ve thought through my positions whether or not anyone agrees with them. When people who do generally disagree with me sit around and argue over a concept I first threw out here – like post-avant or school of quietude – I have to admit feeling pleased. Even rejecting one of these ideas, if done thoughtfully, furthers the discourse, and that is the point really.
Do I have the capacity to stick this out another five years & six months? I have no idea. I do know that this process functions as the most powerful crucible for new ideas, for me, that I’ve found since the very earliest days of poets’ talks in the late 1970s. And that’s a powerful motivation. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Les Murray: Publish my wife
& I’ll give you a blurb
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Auggie Kleinzahler on Creeley’s Selected Poems
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Bill Manhire: “bump into meaning”
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The poetry of Berkeley in the sixties
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Nate Mackey’s Bass Cathedral
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Five new poems by Rae Armantrout
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The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry
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Edna St. Vincent Millay: hustler with a lyric voice
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“Substitute, say, ‘language poetry’ for ‘fascism’…. “
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Ron Loewinsohn’s memoir of mimeo days
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Three poems by Jean Day
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Coldfront’s “2007 in Review”
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Alan Davies’ “Stone”
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Langston Hughes in
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Walt Nygard, war poet
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Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s poems
to remain in curriculum for two more years
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A profile of the Tipton Poetry Journal
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In
100 poets read, one minute each
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Shin Gyeong-lim’s The Camel
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Slam poet Boris “Bluz” Rogers
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Brigit Pegeen Kelly, typical “distinguished American poet”
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Richard Kenney’s The One-Strand River
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The first anthology of Macau poetry in English
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Helen Dunmore: Catullus as cliché
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Cody’s to move & shrink again
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