Silliman's Blog: 3/30/08

Hosted by Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Thomas Devaney
& featuring
Stephen Cope, George Economou, Al Filreis,
Michael Heller, Ann Lauterbach, Tom Mandel,
Bob Perelman, & Ron Silliman

Monday, April 7

6:00 PM, Arts Café, Kelly Writers House
3805 Locust Walk
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia

George Oppen and his wife, Mary, sailed and hitchhiked from the West Coast to New York City in the 1920s. There, Oppen became a central member of the Objectivist Group of poets that flourished in the 1930s. George and Mary Oppen moved increasingly to the left during the Depression, becoming social activists and joining the Communist party in 1935. During this period Oppen's poems appeared in small journals such as Active Anthology, Poetry, and Hound and Horn, but he soon gave up writing for more than two decades. Oppen revived his poetic career when he returned to the United States in 1958. In 1962, New Directions published Oppen's second book of poetry, The Materials, which was followed by This in Which (1965). In 1969, Of Being Numerous (1968) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Oppen's Collected Poems (1975) includes all of his poetry from Discrete Series (1934) through his last work, Myth of the Blaze (1975). In the late 1960s, Oppen moved to San Francisco, where he lived until his death in 1984.

Poet and critic Stephen Cope is editor of George Oppen: Selected Prose Daybooks, and Papers (U. of California Press, 2008), and a founding editor of Essay Press. He has taught at universities in California, Iowa, and Ohio, and is on the faculty of Bard College's Language and Thinking program.

Thomas Devaney is the author A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007). He teaches in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and is editing a feature section "Oppen at 100" for Jacket 38 (October 2008).

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has both written on George Oppen's work and edited his Selected Letters (Duke U.P., 1990). DuPlessis has published numerous books of poetry and literary criticism; her most recent critical book is Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work. She teaches in the English Department of Temple University.

George Economou's latest book is Acts of Love, Ancient Greek Poetry from Aphrodite's Garden (Modern Library/Random House). Books of Cavafy translations and the poems & fragments of Ananios Kleitor are forthcoming.

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House and author of four books, most recently Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60.

Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. Forthcoming in 2008 are Eschaton, a new book of poems, Speaking the Estranged, a collection of his essays on George Oppen, and Marble Snows: Two Novellas.

Ann Lauterbach's most recent books are Hum and The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. She is Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she also co-directs Writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Tom Mandel grew up in Chicago and was educated in its jazz and blues clubs and at the University of Chicago. He is the author of more than a dozen books including To the Cognoscenti (2007) and is one of the authors of The Grand Piano, an ongoing experiment in collective autobiography.

Bob Perelman has published numerous books of poetry, most recently Iflife. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ron Silliman's most recent book is The Age of Huts (compleat) and several volumes of the collectively written Grand Piano project. In 2008, the University of Alabama Press will publish The Alphabet.

Labels: Events, George Oppen, Objectivism

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Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Photo courtesy of Big Bridge

Rochelle Ratner

1948 – 2008

Labels: passing

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Tuesday, April 01, 2008

If you look at the sax reeds in this picture closely, you will note that each is cut or notched, altered in some fashion so as to render them difficult to play. Play them – or at least some of them – the James Fei Alto Saxophone Quartet did last Tuesday at the Rotunda in Philadelphia. This is roughly two & one-half blocks from Writers House & across the street (more or less) from the Slought Foundation art gallery. I say more or less because the Rotunda is set back from the street & you have to walk down a bit of an alley & enter through a most unpresupposing door. Once there, tho, you’re in one of the best spaces for music in Philadelphia. With Last Words Bookstore, one of the city’s best used book dealers, just around the corner on 40^th, the Institute for Contemporary Arts & International House all in the immediate vicinity, you’re in Philadelphia’s real avenue of the arts here, far more so than the institutional fare on Broad Street.

The Taiwanese-born Fei, who looks at least a decade younger than his 34 years, brought his quartet to town to recreate the extraordinary works gathered together on James Fei Alto Quartets, the most recent CD from Fei’s Organized Sound label. Altered quartets is the way my mind wants to rework that title. Fei, who spends as much time working with live electronics as he does on his various saxophones, approaches the sax much the same way that Jimi Hendrix once approached the electric guitar or Cecil Taylor approaches the piano, which is to say that any aspect of the instrument might be employed to make sound, from “crippled” reeds (Fei’s word choice) to moisture in the horn’s bell, to playing so very shrill that the audience doesn’t so much hear the music as it does feel it, literally standing those microscopic hairs of the inner ear on end – simply cup a hand over your ear & the sound disappears entirely. You can hear “Work for crippled reeds” as an MP3 here.

Fei may still be better known as a side man to Anthony Braxton than on his own (Braxton shows up as a side man to Fei on one track of the Quartets) and Fei’s work shares Braxton’s intensely cerebral approach to jazz tradition, albeit with more of the rigor of the minimalist. The quartet’s current lineup – Fei, Jeff Hudgins, Jackson Moore & Aaron Ali Shaikh -- have all worked with Braxton or John Zorn, making it perhaps the most post-avant sax quartet since ROVA.¹ Minimalist not in the sense of Steve Reich’s (or Phil Glass’ or Terry Riley’s) phased reiterations, but rather each piece broken into the exploration of a single aspect of what’s possible, what I think of as the Command Idea. In a work like “Study III (Saliva)” (MP3), the quartet sits – they’re always sitting – with each musician leaning back, the bell of their horns resting on the knee of a crossed leg², so that the bell captures all of the musician’s supplemental moisture. It sounds half as if they are playing under water (& in a way they are), then as if they were playing while drowning. Similarly, what you hear in the piece for “crippled” reeds are the reeds. As is true with any form of minimalism – think of Bob Grenier’s micropoetics – what occurs is the magnification of one element of the work, which at times appears to have been blown up to the proportions of a public sculpture in an urban plaza.

Talking with Fei after the performance, he talks about bringing forward the “inaudible” aspects of music, the elements a musician is trained to minimize and which the audience pretends it can’t hear, exactly like moisture in the bell. This is so similar to what a lot of the best contemporary poetry is doing that one hardly needs to translate media in order to discuss the aspects of it from one field to the next.

Fei will be performing solo at the Cue Foundation Gallery in New York next month, as part of a reading that Charles Alexander & I will be giving in celebration of Cynthia Miller’s show that I curated. The event will be on Friday, April 25^th, the day after the show’s opening, and you would be advised to bring both eyes and ears to this event. I’ll give out more details a little closer to the date.

¹ I say post-avant because I think it’s more or less impossible to be avant-garde with a straight face in the 21^st century, but it should be noted that jazz or post-jazz still carries with it some of the trappings of the Olde Avant world, musicians mimicking mad scientists – Moore’s own group calls itself the Laboratory Band and Braxton’s scores look like something Lt. Whorf would use to command the bridge of the Enterprise.

² See the image of Fei on the lower left here playing this piece.

Labels: Music

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