Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Some thoughts looking back on a busy time –
I got to hear live music twice in one week, a rarity at this point in my life. And the two events really do represent the range of what I like: James Fei playing solo sax at the CUE Art Foundation last Friday, then Joe Ely & Joel Guzman at the World Café in Philly on Sunday. Fei I’ve written about here. His solo performance was every bit as magical as the work of his quartet at the Rotunda in Philly earlier in the month. Again his work was the closest thing I’d seen / heard to a cerebral minimalism applied to free jazz. The combination is exhilarating.
Ely, on the other hand, is the Lubbock-raised country / folk / rockabilly veteran who’s a key part of the legendary Flatlanders (alongside Jimmie Dale Gilmore & Butch Hancock), a recurring member of Los Super Seven, & who’s played over the years with such folk as Bruce Springsteen & The Clash. He & accordion-wizard Guzman performed an hour & 45 minutes of mostly up-tempo pieces that included all of the above influences, a touch of mariachi, the requisite Townes Van Zandt song (“
I came away from Lights” at the New Museum (that strikethrough is part of the title). I have to sit with my reaction to the New Museum itself – I immediately liked the light inside, and the galleries felt appropriately sized, but I’m not at all sure about the wildly fluctuating “maximum occupancy” limitations from floor to floor. Also the fact that an eight-story building only proves capable of having three active galleries suggests that the whizbang architecture will have a long-term impact compromising curatorial impulses.
One show that I found somewhat disappointing, mostly because it was so Spartan, was the exhibition of Joe Brainard’s “Nancy” works (mostly, I think, from the volume If) at Tibor de Nagy, which was crowded into the gallery’s smaller alcove in order to leave the larger one to Ben Aronson’s lumbering & unwatchable urban ‘scapes. This is one of those cases where the book, which the
But the real train wreck was the Whitney & its lingering Biennale, even tho there were works there by people I like such as John Baldessari. Baldessari, who provided the cover for the first edition of my book Tjanting, has many virtues, but when he comes across looking like the master craftsperson in the building, something’s amiss. The theme appears to have been rubble (which would explain why the show includes Spike Lee’s magnificent HBO miniseries on
I missed the Poetry Society of America’s 98th annual awards ceremony earlier last week, due almost entirely to my pneumonia (which hangs on as I write) and its impact on my day job, plus my desire to be at the CUE opening. In addition to Aram Saroyan winning the William Carlos Williams Award, with Roberta Beary & Eileen Myles a finalists, the other winners (and judges) include:
Michael S. Harper, The Frost Medal (presumably given by the PSA board of governors)
Ed Roberson, The Shelley Memorial Award (judged by Lyn Hejinian & C.D. Wright)
Joanie Mackowski, The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award (judged by Donald Revell)
Brian Henry, Cecil Hemley Memorial Award (judged by Norma Cole)
Wayne Miller, Lyric Poetry Award (judged by Elizabeth Macklin)
Christina Pugh, Lucille Medwick Memorial Award (judged by Timothy Donnelly); finalist Sally Ball
Natasha Sajé, Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award (judged by Dean Young); finalists Kevin Prufer & James Richardson
Carey Powers, Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award (judged by David Roderick); finalists Willa Granger & Philip Sparks
Theresa Sotto, George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Prageeta Sharma)
Jocelyn Emerson, Robert Winner Memorial Award (judged by Annie Finch); finalists Rachel Conrad & Marsha Pomerantz
Catherine Imbriglio for Parts of the Mass, published by Burning Deck, Norma Farber First Book Award (judged by Thylias Moss); finalist Alena Hairston for The Logan Topographies, published by Persea.
What one notices first, or at least what I notice first, is the diversity. From Annie Finch & Dean Young to myself, C.D Wright, Norma Cole & Prageeta Sharma among the judges – that’s the broadest range I’ve seen for a set of awards. Last year’s judges (Thomas Sayers Ellis, Matthea Harvey, Tony Hoagland, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Srikanth Reddy, Eleni Sikelianos, Tracy K. Smith, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Eleanor Wilner) weren’t bad either. Whatever one thinks about awards, or these award winners, the fact that the PSA is making a concerted effort to reach a broader range of what poetry actually is can only be commended.
Which is not to say that it’s perfect. I made a point of recommending a specific work for inclusion in the program for the evening:
What I actually find in the program, which just arrived in the mail, is the following:
a man stands
on his
head one
minute –
then he
sit
down all
different
My original suggestion stresses what is unique about Saroyan’s volume. The poem actually used stresses the ways in which his writing in the 1960s might be seen as continuous with the lyric tradition. Both aspects, as I noted here, are present in Saroyan’s writing. But, especially given the ongoing ghettoization of vispo, which do you think is the more important message?
One final note: readers of this blog clicked on over 5,000 links on Monday, a first.
Labels: blogging, PSA, vispo, Visual Arts
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Laurel Blossom’s Degrees of Latitude is a booklength narrative poem about a woman’s life organized through metaphors of geography, starting with the North Pole & arriving, eight sections later, at the South. It’s smart, funny, well-crafted, thoroughly envisioned and hardly a wannabe novel. Or if it is, then it occupies that strange intermedia space inhabited by Samuel Beckett, Carole Maso, David Markson. In short, very good company.
To call this a narrative poem, as Blossom herself has, fails to acknowledge how uniquely each section builds & focuses dramatic tension, not by getting characters in & out of rooms but through a palimpsest of detail. The narrator, “I,” functions as daughter, as wife, as lover, even as parent, pretty much in that order. The common thread that runs through each relationship, tho, is alcohol. Like the ice-breaker image on the book’s cover, alcohol plows through everything here, a path of devastation that runs from pole to pole.
Looking at how Blossom accomplishes this is worth noting. Here are the opening pages of “The Intemperate Zone,” very possibly the most hopeful in the book:
Hello, I dreamed, and nobody stared. Nobody laughed, thought they all had their clothes on. Margo put her arm around my shoulders, Hi hon. She drew me behind the green counter. She called to one of the others, who brought a uniform; she helped me into the black and white starched cuffs on the pretty white capped sleeves. She tied the apron in a white starched bow. She gave me a pair of white socks and black sneakers. They fit. Then she placed a headband on my black and white hair like a starched crown. It read Happy New Year. She showed me the kitchen. She taught me whiskey down.
*
I make circles with my pencil (feather duster) in the air.
I don’t know what to do with myself.
I haven’t had a drink in two weeks.
*
It’s all uphill from here, whispers my dead father in my ear.
*
Still, I thought everything would be changed.
The first time I stayed up past
Ah, but my first drink.
*
Please, Freddie said when I tried to give up smoking, please have a cigarette.
*
Raise your arm, says Tolstoy.
You think it’s free will but it’s not. The whole chain of events from the start has led you up to.
Have a drink, said Freddie.
*
If the earth revolves around the sun, if cogito ergo sum, if reason reasons only with itself, if chance, if no plan, if whatever happens, that’s what it means, if ruled by our subconsciouses, if time equals space, if the world is mostly interstices, if relative, if probably, if we can blow the world to kingdom come, if language grumbles to itself alone.
*
In short:
For my eighteenth birthday, I bought myself a cocktail dress.
Martinis rampant on a navy field, embroidered down the side the heart is on.
*
I put glow-in-the-dark tape on the ashtray I used when I smoked in bed.
I may be a drunk, I told Freddie, but I’m not stupid.
This is not the language of lyric verse, nor of the particular sort of Quietist confessionalism one might associate, say, with Carolyn Forché or Jane Miller, both of whom blurbed this book. There is a grit to these descriptions & the language is constantly descriptive, not only of actions but of the unnamed narrator, who at no point in this work makes the slightest effort to be likeable. The ample use of white space accentuates the static nature of the writing – trying to write about a person who is, in so many senses of the word, stuck is profoundly risky.
I think this is almost certainly a project you get, and get in its entirety, or simply don’t get at all. I find it completely persuasive. The other risk – this trek through the devastation of what otherwise appears to have been a privileged life – what I think of as the Anne Sexton problem – will perhaps limit its readership even further. There is even a moment of potential incest, not however with the narrator as predator. I have no idea whether any or all of this might have some basis in Blossom’s own life (seen then as a roman a clef, Lionel taken for Leonard, etc.) and frankly don’t care. Blossom clearly knows deeply about what she is writing – the tape on the ashtray is a perfect alcoholic detail, building in all the little buffers to prevent challenging the larger elephant in the room.
Like Roberta Beary’s The Unworn Necklace, Degrees of Latitude is a book I almost certainly never would have come across absent the Poetry Society of America process. I don’t think it’s for everyone – and it surely wasn’t written with language poetry’s audience in mind – but it’s a powerful, intelligent book. Its sadness will stay with you for days.
Labels: Laurel Blossom
Monday, April 28, 2008
Linh Dinh on the art of misnarration
on translation
the miscegenation of languages
§
Ange Mlinko on National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month (different nation)
§
I am Joaquín: reading & assumptions
Another version of the text
CS Perez on the controversy
George Hartley on the history of its reception
§
The bookstore with a McArthur,
Librería Martinez
struggles to survive
§
But even the NY Times notices the expansion
in the number of books & writers
§
Cecilia Vicuña @ Kelly Writers House (MP3)
§
K. Silem Mohammad on Lyn Hejinian & Jack Collom
Hejinian, reading in an Irish pub (MP3)
§
Todd Swift on Charles Bernstein
§
Auster’s rebellion
§
The new Frank O’Hara Selected
§
Remembering Basil Bunting
§
A symposium in honor of Roy Miki
§
Alan Gilbert’s poetry roundup
§
§
§
A Coney Island of the Mind at 50
§
Katie Roiphe on Germaine Greer’s bio of Ann Hathaway
§
Juan Gelman wins the Cervantes
§
Charles Bernstein With Strings (MP3)
§
Edinburgh, the poem
§
Howard Junker
on the William Carlos Williams Award
& the predictable Bill Knott
letting me know I did good
Richard Hell finally reviews Saroyan for the NY Times
David Giacalone on
Roberta Beary being named a finalist
“this landmark achievement for the ‘haiku community”
“the amazon.com rankings
of other ‘serious’ haiku books
rose considerably”
§
“Mr. Kleinzahler’s poems
are of uncertain if not dubious
nutritional value.”
§
Neal Cassady’s website
§
§
Heather Paxton, blogging from Tikrit
§
Dorothy Wordsworth & her brother
§
The 13 poets laureate of the Bay Area
§
Carl Sennhenn leaves no mark
§
§
Talking with Dan Kaplan & his other
§
Quietude at the end of the alphabet
§
The Whorf hypothesis is back
§
In
a book ship threatens land-based stores
§
Thomas Gagnon on Niama Leslie Williams
§
§
“a canonic poet – of the academic breed”
§
Sparing Nabokov
§
Terrance Hayes on the PBS Newshour
§
Bringing order to The Strand is an art
§
Seattle’s Locus Awards
ignore poetry altogether
§
Jeffrey Frank on Zbigniew Herbert
§
Norman Mailer’s other archives
§
You can still get in to
Conceptual Poetry & its Others
§
One part of Google’s book-scanning project
One problem with Google
§
Wikipedia, the book
§
The death of a bookstore
in East Vancouver
§
§
Jay Parini on why the ‘60s matter
§
§
They’re not big on reading in Iran
§
Stanley Fish responds to his critics
§
Getting book reviews into newspapers
in a post-critical age
§
Michael Dirda on Joseph Conrad
§
Ray Craig, covering the classics
(the swimsuit issue)
§
dichtung = condensare
§
A profile of Ayanna Morris
§
Talking with Billy Collins
§
§
In
the right gets a novel pulled from award contention
(take action here)
§
Armitage’s Armitage
Daisy Fried likewise has rock & roll fantasies
§
In the garden of poetry
§
Poems from the street
§
A profile of Daniel Kolos
§
Agenda moves toward the half-century mark
§
§
Nadine McInnis’ Two Hemispheres
§
Stephen Romer’s Yellow Studio
§
§
§
§
A demographic immune to the arts?
§
McCain goes Optima
§
What are the limits of “fair use”?
§
The “so what” problem of academic books?
§
Joni Mitchell as poetry vs.
”today’s published crap”
§
Salman Rushdie feels the clock ticking
§
A self-published memoir short-listed for prize
§
§
§
Too many students at the library??
§
§
The web art of Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung
§
Yale opts for censorship
Acknowledging “abortion art” as “fiction”
In Germany, it’s death as art instead
Also: Hitler’s bunker as art gallery
§
Bill Berkson’s Sudden Address
§
Brainard’s Nancy at Tibor de Nagy
§
§
Steve Kurtz is cleared!
§
The prehistory of photography
§
Frida Kahlo “giving the world the finger”
§
Just what New York needs
§
The sax drive of Sonny Rollins
§
Is music criticism being sucked into the academy
(& how do Lyn Hejinian’s pauses differ from Public Enemy)?
Labels: links
Saturday, April 26, 2008
My comment here on April 10, that the William Carlos Williams Award
wasn’t your usual exploitive, pay the readers’ fee & hope your manuscript gets picked, book contest. Those contests always appall me, and I feel as badly for the winners – whom nobody ever takes seriously – as I do the losers who fund such ventures
has predictably taken some heat. TC’s presumption of my “armchair of established success and canonicity” may be amusing (I don’t see anyone offering me a teaching job, TC), but the question is serious enough to deserve being looking at more closely.
What does being the winner of a book contest tell us about a writer? That he or she got their work published outside of a literary community, predicated presumably upon anonymity. Unless the award itself is an extension of an existing community. Or unless the judge or judges did things that would make Foetry.Com steam & sputter.
Consider the best known of these awards, the Yale Younger Poets, and the piece I linked to last Monday from the Houston Chronicle about Fady Joudah winning the current round. The article states, reasonably enough, that
previous winners include such iconic figures as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander and W.S. Merwin
without quite noticing that not one of these figures is under the age of 78 and that maybe more recent winners have not gone on to such iconic status. But it’s worth remembering that anyone who is 78 began at a time when the number of publishing poets in the
If the Yale hasn’t had the same status-bestowing impact in recent decades, it’s not necessarily a sign that the quality of the writing selected for the award has eroded. If anything, I think the quality remains quite high. Louise Glück may not be my kind of poet, and she may have been the quietist (in every sense of that word) poet laureate ever, but she does know what she’s doing. The problem is that the
There is an important & complex relationship between audience and community. Think of any press that is well edited and has a personality of its own: Subpress, Copper Canyon, Pressed Wafer, Adventures in Poetry, Omnidawn, Roof, Apogee, O Books, Atelos, Chax, Cuneiform, Flood Editions, Singing Horse, Faux Press, Meritage, Burning Deck – the list is long (if not exactly endless). To the degree that all these are well edited enterprises, their lists themselves can be understood as a series of literary communities. A book by somebody I’ve never heard of before from one of these presses comes to me with a context that may help me to understand what the writer is trying to do. In marketing, this gets called brand equity, but in the low-level economics around poetry it really has to do with the degree that any well-run press is itself a concrete manifestation of an aesthetic community. It can be a geographic one, like Pressed Wafer, which tends to print the very best of
Contests, however, tend to do rather the opposite. Unless the judges stay in place year after year and only pick work from a narrow range of contestants – two things that actually made the Yale award meaningful – the list of winners over the course of a decade or two is going to be scattershot at best. So let’s say a contest does these things – what does it mean then for any entrant who is not already a part of that community? What about all those entries to the Yale that were not by John Ashbery?
In this regard, what is probably the best book competition currently in the U.S., the National Poetry Series, excels to the degree it does because there usually is some rational connection between the individual judge and the press which ultimately commits to publishing the winning manuscript – this may make it the competition most likely to run afoul of Foetry, but it ensures that the resulting book has some chance of reaching an audience primed to appreciate the volume’s virtues. Donna Stonecipher is an excellent poet for a Coffee House Press book & would be, whether or not she had been chosen for the role by John Yau. Rodrigo Toscano fits well with Fence Press whether or not he was chosen by Marjorie Welish. I don’t how much say the presses have in picking who will judge the volume they publish, but hopefully it is a lot. Yet it’s worth noting that, because the series has tended to shift at least one press each year and has multiple judges with different aesthetics doing the choosing, there is almost no brand equity, to use that term again, in being a National Poet selection. Even though its web site promotes all 150 books that have come out through this series since 1979, while the Yale doesn’t bother to keep a complete list of winners online. What matters more – that Ange Mlinko’s Starred Wire was a National Poetry selection or that it was an excellent book? Exactly.
But most contests aren’t the National Poetry Series nor even the Yale Younger Poets. Judges are cycled through too quickly, there’s no aesthetic focus, the resulting book series has little if any connection to an audience. One of the five books that I eliminated from the William Carlos Williams Award for utter incompetence was itself the “winner” of such a contest, one I’d never heard of before. The absolute number of such contests is daunting – the back pages of Poets & Writers are cluttered with them, a phenomenon that never fails to remind me of the ads for escorts & adult massage that bring up the rear of so many “alternative” weekly newspapers. Or consider Winning Writers – if you’re a contest junky, this is pure smack.
What the growth in such awards really is responding to, I think, is a new problematic in American poetry, one that I frankly did not have to put with when I began publishing books in 1971. If there were only a few hundred publishing poets in the 1950s, by 1970 that total had swollen to some number over 1,000, but not so dramatically over it that it was difficult for a new poet to get heard.
My first book, Crow, was published by Ithaca House, a student-run press bankrolled (oh, more like piggy-bankrolled) by Baxter Hathaway, a major figure in the writing program at Cornell for many years. The person who selected my book – who asked for it – was David McAleavey, who was getting his PhD at Cornell and whom I knew from our days together at
My fourth book, the one that really transformed how much attention I got as a poet, Ketjak, was published by Barrett Watten. Watten was still in high school when I first met him, and I was only just out of it. I wrote Ketjak while we shared a flat on Potrero Hill in
Today, however, there are at least ten thousand publishing poets working in the English language in & around
The enormous growth in the number of practicing poets has some interesting consequences, not all of them bad. Rachel Blau DuPlessis likes to talk about what
Yet I think for a lot of young writers, in particular, especially those coming out of MFA mills (and especially the programs that don’t quite “get” contemporary poetry, which is to say most of them), I think the transition to becoming a practicing writer can be a daunting, even crushing task. It’s when most people stop writing. They find that the context they had for poetry in school no longer exists in the “real” world and don’t know how to build one out of whole cloth. These are the people for whom contests exist, and it’s why I think they’re ultimately damaging. For one thing, the odds are preposterous. For another, unless they actually know the work of the judge, and know who the judge is, there is no way to ascertain if there is any reasonable expectation of even being competitive. They send in their money and their manuscript, they hope and they can feel crushed if they lose, sometimes again & again & again. Where if they would just get together with their friends and publish one another, they would be making enormous headway much more quickly. And their books would be reaching the right audiences. Which is (again) why it’s far better to have a volume published by Pressed Wafer, if you’re a
Even the Williams award, which is for already existing books by small, nonprofit or university presses, has some of these problematic elements, which is why I was so ambivalent at first when they asked me to judge this award. What does it mean to not win this award, especially to the 18 other poets whose books I found to be completely wonderful? Does it mean you’re a loser? In fact, every one of these people is doing luminous work. They’re brilliant & challenging. But they just didn’t win. One could say something quite similar about the 50 poets who were in that next pile (it turns out that there were 69 poets writing 70 books there, as one writer had books, both quite good, nominated by two different presses). I would not want to discourage any of these people, even slightly.
Labels: contests
Friday, April 25, 2008
Of the 16 other books from Poetry Society of America entrants that I feel all deserve awards, hoopla, and great notice, three are books that I’ve already reviewed here on the blog: Jean Valentine’s Little Boat, Jennifer Moxley’s The Line & Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets. It has now been five months, nine months & a year respectively since I first read & reviewed each of these volumes, and one of the substantial pleasures of judging the William Carlos Williams Award lies in seeing just how very well each stands up. It gives me great confidence that when (not if) I return to these books ten, maybe even twenty years from now, they will continue to shine just as brightly.
I’m not going to re-review these work here – you can click on the links above & go back to my original notes as well as get to further links through which each can be ordered. And you should – these are books that deserve to be in everybody’s library. But I want to note here one of the telling facets of this contest for me. Of the nineteen books that totally convinced me they deserve such kudos as these, 13 are by women. Just stacking the books from the next layer, the male pile is almost identical to the stack of books by women (I note however that more guys have “fat” books than gals). The implication is obvious: we have arrived at a moment when women have reached at least parity when it comes to the production of poetry – and at the highest levels it may be much more than just parity. Yet if I go back to the hoopla that surrounded the “numbers trouble” (PDF) debate several months back, I recall that Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young had tracked reviews in this here blog o’ mine and noted that I too skewed male, noticeably so, when it came to reviewing books of poetry. Yet even I’m willing to concede that of the 19 best books of last year, at least 13 are by female authors, a ratio of better than two to one. What gives?
I think there are a couple of things going on here. The most significant I think is my age: 61. I first came into the world of writing when the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poetry, was at its height at defining the New American canon – and that book had just four female contributors among its 44 poets. Also hot news there in the mid-1960s was the Totem /
My generation really came of age as poets in the early 1970s, and while women were starting to write in great numbers in that decade, what Judy Grahn has called the “strategic decision” of separatism on the part of many women poets actually reduced the number who were participating in scenes that included the likes of me. If nothing else, this had the short-term impact of reinforcing the maleness of some scenes. When, in 1981 & ’82, I put together In the American Tree as an anthology of what had become known as language poetry, I had the opportunity to decide whether to stick to the historical record of who published what & where, or of puffing the book up in the name of a better political balance. As I’ve noted here before, there were just three poets who fit the objective qualifications for the anthology who were not included. Two were male – Curtis Faville & David Gitin – both of whom had at that point stopped publishing. But the omission of Abigail Child was, in retrospect, a flat out blunder on my part. Still, In the American Tree was 75 percent male & Abby’s inclusion would not have radically revised those numbers.
If you factor in the number of women on the scene who were obviously post-avant, but who consciously distanced themselves from langpo – the writers who would make up the core of (HOW)ever, for example – you can see that the overall balance in the 1970s was clearly changing, but it was still a far cry from what we have today.
To the degree that I am a creature of my generation, focusing on my own age cohort and those immediately older, say up to the age of my parents, the numbers you see here on the blog are, I think, pretty predictable. When I focus on writers who are older than I, the numbers will be a little worse, and on my own generation, a little better, tho still a far cry from parity. But to the degree that I focus on what is going on in poetry right now, recognizing that the real changes in contemporary writing are now being done by a group of writers all quite a bit younger than I, then I think it’s apparent that these figures have to change.
This isn’t easy. Of the poets of my parents’ generation, the one who really took an interest in younger writers, reading them, promoting them, actively engaging their concerns, was Robert Creeley. Of the poets from the intervening generation, between my parents & my own, the poets who have done this have been Jerry Rothenberg & the Waldrops. That’s not exactly a long list. Most poets as they age tend to stay fixed right where they focused when they first matured as writers & readers. And as the writers in whom they are interested die or go silent, most poets as readers find their world contracting, rather than shifting down to the next generation(s).
I have an active interest in trying to get to that next generation (or three) of younger poets – I want to see how the story of poetry itself continues to evolve, even as I have an increasingly complicated relationship to the question of “now.” So here’s to the idea that, over time, the percentages here of male to female will have to change, just to reflect the real world.
Labels: Jean Valentine, Jennifer Moxley, Laynie Browne, PSA
Thursday, April 24, 2008
When the CUE Art Foundation asked me last year if I would curate a show this spring for its
Cynthia Miller has been a key figure in the
Here is a little statement I’ve contributed to the gallery’s catalog for the exhibition:
Blending so-called high and low genre, the Arts & Crafts Movement anticipated much that we now think of as postmodern. Many of the forms that concerned William Morris, for example, including wallpaper, carpets & floor runners, were not only designed for domestic use, but also engaged visual traditions that deployed imagery as pattern, muting or deflecting the narrative of a "scene." Many other "Other" traditions likewise share exactly these features, from the cubism of African sculpture to the pottery & tapestries of Central & South America, and of course the American Southwest.
The objects envisioned are simple – quail, a tea kettle, a flower pot – but seldom used simply. Rather, like the blue deer, the red pony or the red and yellow birds, each is cast so as to let in many possible connotations. Two crows represent two crows, yet they completely reframe the spatial relations of the two vases, one white, the other not (or the third vase, half hidden red against orange in the leftmost field). The result is a painting that conveys a sense of anxiety without ever telling why. Yet look at the lush leafwork about the crow on the right, or the transparent foliage about the darker vase.
The fields on which these translucent images sit are themselves visually rich, not unlike the flowers surrounding the road behind the blue antlers of Out West. The background tones often proceed from pink or red or red-orange to blue or blue green. At times I think this figures the seasons, at times the hours in a day, at times I think it is there precisely to resist figuration.
The opening reception is tonight from 6 until
Labels: Cynthia Miller, Visual Arts
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Roberta Beary & Eileen Myles
My two William Carlos Williams Award finalists – the term that the Poetry Society of America prefers for those books that also deserve some special attention – could not be more unlike one another.
In addition to being a finance attorney in
thunder
the roses shift
into shadow
If slam poets & visual poets go around thinking that nobody takes their genres seriously as literature, haiku poetry has been off the map altogether – a genuinely popular literary art form that receives no attention whatsoever from what Charles Bernstein would call Official Verse Culture unless it is for a new translation of one of the classics, or work by a poet, such as Anselm Hollo, already widely known and respected for writing in other forms. The whole idea of all these contests – not unlike slam competitions – is to create its own alternative institutional universe.
A poem like “thunder” might tell you a lot about a poet like Beary, but almost nothing about this extraordinary book. For one thing, she’s not a fundamentalist on haiku form – this piece has only ten syllables, seven shy the standard 17. Further, with the reiteration of an opening sh right after the caesura of the second line & the start of the poem’s last word, she’s a writer who likes subtle formalities. Finally, and this is sort of traditionally the point of haiku, she likes specificity of detail. As far as this little poem goes, it does very well.
By itself, tho, it’s hardly distinct from any of the hundreds of well-written works in these books, not just my final 19 volumes or even the broader group of books I liked. The reality, tho, is that it’s atypical of The Unworn Necklace, which is really a 70-poem not-quite-narrative cycle that has the weight and emotional force of a novel. A sprawling & powerful novel. A novel specifically about a woman’s midlife relationships as her marriage goes south, her father dies, her daughter takes flight, a new relationship is tested. A more typical poem here might be
his death notice . . .
the get-well card
still in my briefcase
or
mother’s day
a nurse unties
the restraints
These poems are compact, but remarkably well placed in the construction of a larger whole. I wonder if these 70 might not be extracted from a far greater number – there’s no way to know. But the aesthetic here of absolutely minimal strokes accumulating to create a far more powerful picture is really overwhelming. This is a book I never would have picked up – probably never would have seen, although it’s already gone into a second printing – that made me completely grateful to the Poetry Society of America and the Williams Carlos Williams Award for putting it into my hands. I think it was the only British book in the entire process – Snapshot Press is one of the standard-bearers for haiku and tanka, but has thus far a pretty rudimentary website.
In contrast, Eileen Myles is a poet who has been a presence on the scene for decades, particularly in
Sorry, Tree is flat out a terrific book, joining what seem to be the simplest personal poems with a poetic craft that dazzles. It’s an aesthetic that sounds like what some part of the School of Quietude would be up to, but Myles takes a tradition that includes everything from Ginsberg to Berrigan to Bukowski to Patti Smith & Lee Ann Brown, and definitely Anne Waldman, Barbara Barg & Elaine Equi, and even Ed Sanders & Paul Blackburn, to forge a writing that comes across simultaneously as effortless & utterly gorgeous. I read “No Rewriting,” the second poem in this book, and just burst into tears with amazement:
nobody’s going to come in
and take my cup of money
sometimes the only no I have
is to reverse things
I agree. It’s a good place to shit.
This morning it was summer
while I stayed in
I watched spring fade
I went out in chill fall
and walked my dog,
in winters rectangles of trash
striking our face
the wind turning flags and banners
into danger
man the wind was big
in this fragmented
city
I want to be a part of something bigger than myself
not the university of california but it’s a start
my dad was a gorilla
who did you think I would be
how do you spell university
it always looks cilly
I will think
I will read
I will wake up loving you and when I come home
I will love you.
Look I bought tickets for the movies for tomorrow night
I will buy you a hot dog then you know what
They didn’t know I was so great
it was humbling
now it is fine
I sent her this email about the big awards
the paranoia I feel about all the award
winners
now I’m like king of the losers again
I said king king king
it’s like genitals
I want to show you all these tiny parts
but I’m public public public
I went to the University of Massachusetts
and for all these years the city of New
York has given me a rent stabilization
grant
and now California golden state opens her
arms to us
come to mama
I wrote this poem twenty-four years ago
but nobody saw it yet
so I’m safe
she said you are such a good boy
and onward for another five-plus pages. To be able to write with such gentleness & force all at the same time is such a gift, and Myles is completely generous in how she uses this.
Absent Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, I knew I would have given the WCW Award to one of these two books. That is really all that distinguishes them from the 16 other great books I was still enthralled with as I finished my work for the Poetry Society of America. The only thing these books share in common is their power, and it’s interesting to imagine what kind of statement either would have made had it been the volume selected. This is what I just hate about contests. Each of these volumes is a total winner.
Labels: Eileen Myles, PSA, Roberta Beary
Monday, April 21, 2008
Barack Obama & Bob Casey right here in Paoli on Saturday (Photo by Sleeping Cat Beads)
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Jeffrey Side interviews Marjorie Perloff
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Tom Clark needs your help
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Lyn Hejinian at
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Michael Dirda on Scroggins' Zukofsky
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Wikipedia discriminates against small press poets
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Elizabeth Willis talking with Charles Bernstein
Elizabeth Willis reading
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In
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Talking with Al Young
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Contemporary poetry from the Middle East, Asia & beyond
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Thomas Braichet has died of cancer at 30
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NY Times obit for Aimé Césaire
The Associated Press obit
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Langdon Hammer on John Ashbery
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Community & post-colonial poetics
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An excellent obit of Andrew Crozier
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On the question of the line
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Stephen Burt against argument
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Talking with Robert Creeley
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Yet another appreciation of Jonathan Williams
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Walt Whitman reads aloud
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Craig Perez on Aram Saroyan & the “ethnic-avant”
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What went on at the
Chicago Poetry Symposium
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A free verse novel about werewolves
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A poem by Gustaf Sobin
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North Carolina’s contributions to Beat culture
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Jack Hirschman remembers the Beats
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Talking with Jorie Graham
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The globalized fictioneer
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Sam Cornish in Jamaica Plain
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Robert Pinsky’s poetry FAQs
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Axel Pinpin, poet & political prisoner
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Bernard O’Donoghue’s Selected Poems
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Letters from Stephen Burt, Slavoy Žižek, Frank Kermode et al
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The history of poetry in 362 words
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Talking with Anne Stevenson (PDF)
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10 questions for Ivy Alvarez
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Rereading The Morning of the Poem
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The failures of Philip Schultz
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Imagining Akhmatova
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Cavafy vs. Dylan & Catullus
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A profile of Darrell Kinsey
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The national poets of Wales
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New Brazilian anthology seems bland
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James Winn on The Poetry of War
And in the hands of the troops
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Writing at V Tech
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“A professor, a poet, and a nun all walk into a bar . . . “
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In
& in
Face-off challenger Sandra Dunn
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The poem in your pocket
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A profile of Beth Ann Fennelly
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Frost’s prose
& Frost as fiction
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John Betjeman’s “muse”
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Charlie Simic goes to Choate
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A profile of George Barker
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With Ted Kooser, WYSIWYG
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A panel on the art of translation
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Slammin’ for “Greek Week”
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Ed Hirsch on what poetry is
Hirsch’s “Cotton Candy”
A profile of Hirsch
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The gender gap in contest panels
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Snippets of quietude
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Amsterdam:
World Book Capital 2008
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Recent Library of Congress readings:
Philip Nikolayev (MP3)
Naomi Shihab Nye (RAM)
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The new Parnassus
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Poetry for the young
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LSU & two small presses
make up the SIBA poetry shortlist
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Mishima on stage
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Rescuing Steinbeck
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Joyce Carol Oates on the last days
of famous writers
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Family vs. writing in the fiction of
Erica Jong
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Creating Slaughterhouse Five
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Talking with Lewis Turco
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Studying the smell of old books
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Favorite bookstores
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Bruce Sterling at Innovationsforum
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Sit shiva for narrative
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Is Georgia State the new Kinko’s?
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Free, online, open source textbooks
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French Theory is not “just another Fish story”
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Against critics as “neuroscience groupies”
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The “100 most powerful people” in British culture
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Happy birthday, John Chamberlain
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Remembering Pippa Bacca
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“Benefits Supervisor Sleeping”
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The photographs of Walter Crump
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Kitaj’s last works
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Amy Sillman – the ultimate
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The Beijing art market
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Rodchenko at the
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Film revisits the case of Roman Polanski
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The heritage of being Wagner
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Battlestar Galactica’s composer
blogs the show
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A YouTube blues tour
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Felicity,
the center of the world
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Thursday, April 24th & Friday, April 25th
All at the CUE Art Foundation
(between 10th & 11th avenues)
212.206.3538
ж ж ж
Paintings
Curated by Ron Silliman
Opening reception:
Thursday, April 24,
The show will be up through May 31
Gallery hours, Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6
Closed Sunday & Monday
Catalog available
ж ж ж
Words + Music,
Ron Silliman
Charles Alexander
James Fei
images © 2008 by Cynthia Miller
Labels: Charles Alexander, Cynthia Miller, James Fei, Music, Visual Arts
Friday, April 18, 2008
I was planning on running this note next Tuesday, after the awards ceremony dinner on Monday. But as Ugly Duckling Presse has already posted a notice on its website & sent an email to its list, I’m running it today.
Here is my statement, as it will appear in the awards ceremony program on Monday, April 21st, giving the William Carlos Williams Award to Aram Saroyan for Complete Minimal Poems from Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn:
The world was not ready when William Carlos Williams first published Kora in Hell in 1920 and the complete version of Spring & All three years later. Those books had a profound impact on American writing, even though they languished out of print for decades until they were brought back by City Lights in 1957 and Frontier Press in 1970. Aram Saroyan's minimal poems were even more of a scandal when they first appeared in the 1960s, foretelling not one, but several of the directions that American poetry would take in their wake, even as they too went out of print and stayed that way for over thirty years until Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn seized the opportunity to make them available again. Like all miniaturists, Aram Saroyan uses the poem as a giant magnifying glass on the language of our lives and the processes we use to understand this. A work like "Blod" - that's the entire text - calls up not merely the words blood and bod, but all the sexuality that truncated latter term conveys, refusing to settle on one side or the other. Reading Complete Minimal Poems, we are struck by just how sturdy these poems have proven to be and just how brightly Saroyan's sense of humor shines through these pages. These poems are works of great optimism, and are as radical and strong in 2008 as the day they were written.
As I noted when I submitted this to the folks at the PSA, I think that the William Carlos Williams Award is the perfect prize for this book, and that this book is the perfect selection for this prize. The synergies just don’t get any better.
Here is a poem from the book that I recommended also be included in the awards ceremony program:
That borders on being visual poetry, as do a number of works in this extraordinary book. I wondered at the time if a visual poem had ever been included in a PSA program before. And I wonder even now if readers will recognize the ways in which this very brief poem engages the oldest of literary devices, rhyme. One of the things I like about it is the way it makes clear that visual poetry & “poetry” are not entirely separate genres. Other poems here echo the shorter works of Louis Zukofsky:
Not a
cricket
ticks a
clock
Nor am I imagining the connection. There is at least one work in this volume explicitly dedicated to “L.Z..” One thing this larger collection really accomplishes is to spell out just how rich & various Saroyan’s different strategies were with such a densely compact canvas.
Complete Minimal Poems contains the work from three books that appeared between 1968 & 1971, two of them from Random House. A fourth section appeared as part of the
As a result, Saroyan took the heat for an awful lot of writing that would come after, which could not have been fun. By the early 1970s, he’d done what he wanted with this form & moved on. But these works stand on their own almost shockingly well. Since I’ve never met him (I suppose it’s conceivable that we’ve been at the same event at some point, tho I’m not aware of it) I’ve never had the opportunity to thank him for opening up the landscape so broadly. I was only one of dozens & dozens of poets who benefited from these poems. The William Carlos Williams Award seems like the perfect opportunity to note just how important these poems have been.
Labels: Aram Saroyan, PSA
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Continuing with my narrative of the William Carlos Williams Award.
The next time through, the stacks on the blue chest were down to two piles, seventy books. It’s not that this was any neater – I don’t do neat – but the lower level of clutter there as one walked in the front door of our house immediately suggested that I was making progress. What had seemed like an overwhelming task a couple of weeks ago, now began to seem do-able. I was already beginning to think about which of these books deserved to seen as the best of the best of the best.
I dragged another small bookcase down to my office and shelved the books from the other two stacks there (with the exception of those where I already owned copies, which I put instead into a separate pile from which I donate periodically to Kelly Writers House). I wouldn’t be returning to those books, at least as part of this contest.
I was much more playful in my rereading, I think, than I had been in my first round. If there was a poem in a book that I really liked, I tended to head for it first. Tho sometimes I would do just the opposite, go first to one that had completely puzzled me. In several cases, I wasn’t reading the book for the second time, but at least the third as I’d read it – in a couple of cases even reviewed here on the blog – before I received my three cartons of books.
In the process, maybe six books – but no more – got demoted from the “I want to give this book a prize” pile to the second, larger stack. On the other hand, five of the volumes in that second stack got promoted to the prize pile. By the end of my second read-through, I had a stack of 19 books, every one of which surely deserves some award for brilliant writing.
Thirteen of these books were by women. Only two or three of the books represented a kind of poetry that I’m not certain William Carlos Williams would have approved of, were he still alive. And I began to think about Williams and what it means to have his name on this award. I reflected on the fact that Williams had been far more militant about schools of poetry than I’ve ever been (indeed, more militant than Pound, whom he never quite forgave for imagining a more creative & intelligent T.S. Eliot than the banker himself could have fashioned). As the most significant modernist not to flee to
Thinking of Williams & his relations to presses & to kinds of poetry gave me a template for thinking through these 19 volumes. His idea that the function of art is to create additions to nature, to make of the world a more abundant place, seems to me almost the baseline of what should expected from a poet. If you’re only going to write poems that look just like the poems that existed before you got here, what is your value? All of the nineteen volumes move poetry forward in ways that should make a reader optimistic about poetry, even on a blood-drenched planet that is devouring the last of its major natural resources.
At this point I knew pretty clearly which book spoke to this award in the most forceful way. I wanted a book that I could say – as one could of Williams’ best – that it was a book that would change poetry itself, deeply & permanently. I told my wife & kids which volume, were I to be hit by a truck, they should tell the Poetry Society of America should receive the prize.
But I still wanted to read a half dozen books again, and did, just to see if I wanted to name “finalists” – the PSA allows you to cite up to two – and if so whom. One volume seemed to me easy to settle on, because there was just one book that actually made me cry while reading it (tho I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the author’s intent – it was just so amazingly well done). And then a second finalist I thought long and hard about – more than a day just contemplating this book & this question – since the volume did represent a kind of poetry I’m pretty sure Williams would have, at the least, furrowed his brow over. But it was/is too brilliant not to cite, so I decided to name two finalists.
The winner already knows who they are, as do the finalists. On Monday, there will be an awards ceremony at a dinner in
Labels: PSA
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Photo courtesy of Jacket
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Stephen Burt on John Ashbery
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Ron Padgett on A Prairie Home Companion
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Michael Lally on Joe Brainard’s Nancy
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The Patrick Herron publishing renaissance
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Oppen in
Robert Creeley on George Oppen
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the empire strikes back
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PEN award to jailed Chinese writer
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Fady Joudah is the new Yale Younger Poet
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E.A. “Archie” Markham
(who sometimes published as Valerie Goodman)
has died
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Halvard Johnson reports that
Rebecca Kavaler has died
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Death row poet executed in
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A profile of Elliott Levin
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Bookstores brace for the next chapter
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Oni Buchanan’s The Mandrake Vehicles
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Why is Charles Bernstein on this agenda?
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A profile of M.H. Abrams
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What people like,
Madison version
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A Rae Armantrout page
(tho it calls me, more than once,
”Ron Stillman”)
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A Situationist & his ©
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Is the Arabic world ready
for a literary revolution?
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A survey for readers of books
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“The most published author
in the history of the planet”
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Talking with Sam Green
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How Boston’s poets are coping with
National Poetry Month
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Shakespeare in contemporary cinema
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Why poets sound like that
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“Why should everything be easy?”
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The emotions in Jan Beatty’s poetry
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Poetry can be your friend
Or poetry can be your salvation
& it can entertain the kids
You can put it in your pocket
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A new bio of Isaac Rosenberg
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Are human brains unique?
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Can pols be curators?
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The town saved by quilting
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Tan Dun, Philip Glass
& how much you can get away with
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
I spend the next several weeks reading, reading, reading. This contest is almost a Rorschach of contemporary American poetry. In spite of the name William Carlos Williams attached to the award and the prohibition against books from trade publishers, there is no single aesthetic spin to what has been sent in. There are volumes written by World War Two veterans about their experiences in that war, new formalists, long narratives, haiku poets who only send their works to journals that specialize in that form, every manner of post-avant and anti-avant combined. More than a few of these are by poets – and in some instances presses – who are openly at odds with everything William Carlos Williams ever stood for. In such circumstances, what exactly do they think they’re doing in such a contest? Is his name up there simply as Famous Dead Guy? Or, more likely, it’s really a sign that the Poetry Society of America has not lived up to the stewardship of this award, using far too many judges over the years who were themselves opposed to the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tradition.
My method is to take three or four books that feel, on first glance, pretty different from one another and to read back and forth through them until they’re done. Then I allocate them into those stacks I described yesterday. Most of what I’m reading is fairly good. When I’m doing going through everything once, I look at my piles, all still stacked up on the blue bench in the foyer. There are 20 volumes in the “I want to give this book the prize” pile.
The reason I even have the second pile – books I know I need to reread just to be sure that they don’t really deserve to be in the first group also – is because I’m sure that there are poets – Robert Duncan in his prime would be a good example, but so would James Wright or John Berryman – whose work doesn’t always “click” on first reading, but which turns out to be of even greater value long term than the simple flashy book one can “get” as a single sitting, first time. There are roughly 50 books in this second pile. And it includes a wide range of poets including new formalists, soft surrealists, narrative poets
There are maybe 60 books in the third group, writers whose work strikes me – at least in these specific volumes – as at least decently crafted, but without any other larger driving idea or passion behind it. Again, there is no single aesthetic trend, just a general lack of ambition. You might be able to say that that is an aesthetic trend, in and of itself, tho I would say that’s very sad. And I don’t see any monk-like renunciations of the material world in the poetry here.
The last pile, that of books that are genuinely incompetent, has just five volumes in it. That’s it. Just five of the candidates nominated by their presses really appeared to be by writers without a clue. Does this mean that I really think that 97 percent of American poetry is, at the very least, competently written? Not really. I believe that the self-selection process accounts for a lot of this. First, you have to write enough work to warrant a book and persuade a publisher to take it on. Then they have to believe in your work strongly enough to submit it. Still, that a contest like this can get this much writing that doesn’t embarrass itself is really noteworthy.
Setting aside the last two stacks, I still have seventy books to think about. I decide I have to read them all one more time. I realize that I could make a case, a plausible one, for every one of these books winning this award. That there are at least seventy books worthy of such attention in any one year’s crop – not to mention those other volumes I held out on the basis of my relationship with their authors and those volumes that never got submitted – probably is the best assessment of the quality of writing that is taking place at this very moment. It’s really a stunning realization. At least it stunned me.
Labels: PSA
Monday, April 14, 2008
I emptied the three cartons of books sent to me by the Poetry Society of America onto a blue chest we keep in our foyer to contain a household’s worth of backpacks & canvas bags (and, on a more impromptu basis, one of my kid’s bass guitar). Piled into about eight stacks of not-quite-twenty books each, several other things became immediately apparent to me.
First, my own The Age of Huts (compleat) was not the only volume in which I felt too close to the author to make a dispassionate judgment about the work. There were several books, for example, by contributors to my anthology, In the American Tree. There were other books by poets whom I’ve known well for decades, know the spouse, maybe knew the last spouse as well, even in one case a parent, have lunch with them whenever we’re in the same region. Further, some of the books involved are terrific. I can think of two that are better than any volume that has received a Pulitzer in the last quarter century. Since, say, Jimmy Schuyler’s Morning of the Poem in 1981, the last completely great book to receive that award. With a fairly deep (and fairly literal) sigh, I set about a dozen books aside. I tell myself that if nothing else proves worthy, I can return to these and rethink this if I need to do so later.
Second, it becomes almost immediately apparent that some very obvious contenders are absent. Where is, for example, Joanne Kyger’s collected poems, About Now? While I have known Kyger slightly for forty years, I’ve been to her home in Bolinas exactly once (about 35 years ago) and have never really had a correspondence, save when David Melnick & I selected her work for a feature in The Chicago Review in 1970, which consisted of maybe three notes (one of them an apology on our part for the Review’s first attempt at computer typesetting screwing up her contributor’s note – it declared that Gary Snyder was her second volume). Plus, About Now is one of the volumes that came out last year comparable in quality to something like Morning of the Poem. But it’s not here at all. Since I’m not W.H. Auden, I don’t see any value gained by my changing the rules as I go along, so I don’t feel I can merely toss About Now into the pile, knowing that it would almost certainly have been at least a finalist. Instead, I give another heavy sigh at the idea of a university press series that does less promotion than Lulu.com.
Third, I also realize that of the remaining books, maybe 136 in all, I’ve already read at least a quarter, perhaps a third, one of the consequences of doing this blog. This is probably the first moment when I think that, hey, maybe reading all these books in such a concentrated fashion won’t seem so bad. I know that I like quite a few of these. I have a second thought almost as quickly as the first – oh dear, I’m going to have to select from several volumes I really like. There are several volumes I already know to be terrific. This is not going to be easy. I realize that I never will return to those books I originally pulled out of the process.
My plan is this. I’m going to read everything all the way through – or until utter incompetence stops me – at least once. I’m going to segregate the books as I go along into a number of different piles:
Books that are terrific and really deserve a prize
Books I need to reread to make sure I shouldn’t be giving them the prize instead
Books that seem mostly competent, but don’t do anything of great import one way or another.
Books that are not competent at all.
I anticipate that this last category is going to be fairly large. The first one I expect to be quite small, and the second one likewise. Most of what I have here I believe will divide pretty naturally into the final two groups.
Fat lot I know.
Labels: PSA
Sunday, April 13, 2008
PBS does Walt Whitman
Ending “poetry-lite”
(and using Billy Collins to do so)
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Today is the day
for Tayari Jones’
on eBay
with “items” from Jones, Sarah Schulman,
George Saunders, D. Nurske, Natasha Trethewey
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Carleen Brice & more
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A great interview:
Stacy Szymaszek talking with Sina Queyras
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“How to trivialize women’s poetry”
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The Washington Post obit of Jonathan Williams
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MP3s of
are now online
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Celebrating Siv Cedering
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Cutting and “creative writing”
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The sexual politics of
The New York Times Book Review
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An obit for Andrew Crozier
§
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The Griffin Poetry Prize shortlists
are full of good poets
But old ones
§
Sridala Swami
on conceptual poetry in
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“Flarf, like Soylent Green,
is people”
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dedicated to vispo
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You can interview Allen Fisher
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Daisy Fried on Joe Torra
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Sentences in experimental fiction
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Find the gals at the Chicago Poetry Symposium
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One Young wins the Fred Cody award,
two others are nominated for poetrty
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Talking with Bob Hass
Talking with Philip Schultz
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MP3s of the “lost lectures” of Jorge Luis Borges (in English!)
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Seeing Bunting in Adam Fould’s The Broken World
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The poetry of Heather Thomas & Doug Arnold
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Joanna Scott on Donald Barthelme
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W.D. Snodgrass on confessional poetry
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Talking with Valerie Martínez
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Dan Beachy-Quick on Philip Jenks
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Poetry & emotion
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§
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Some bumps in the death of the hardback
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The end is nigh at Rapture
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The scene in Madison
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April 17th is
Poem in Your Pocket Day
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The worldwide Shakespeare marathon
“more about fantasies than the real world”
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Queen’s Poet wins competition
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Reviews of Nate Mackey, Hilton Obenzinger & Louis Masur
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Two Welsh poets,
one the daughter of Dylan Thomas
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The International Dictionary of Neologisms
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“Poetry is not dead”
tho you might not know it from this
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Everything you ever needed to know about
poetry at Knopf
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Jerry Rothenberg picks Clayton Eshleman for translation award
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Grace Paley’s posthumous poems
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Ballard’s memoir
§
On the journal Sixty-six
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The “SLO (every pun intended) poet laureate” speaks
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East of the asterisk
§
§
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The authorized biography of a not-nice guy
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A profile of Grace Maycock
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One shoe I’ve been waiting to hear drop
§
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A profile of Marilyn Lerch
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Kyle Schlesinger’s “good ol’ days”
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Madison’s poet laureate sets an agenda
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In Duluth, a laureate looks back
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Talking with Kevin Stein
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Talking with Ted Kooser
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Talking with Elise Partridge
§
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Mark Bauerlein on the history of deconstruction in the U.S.
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Dyslexia impacts the brain
differently for different languages
§
On symmetry
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The future of book nostalgia
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Spam gets literary
§
Are we sure we need a tour
of Bukowski’s L.A.
§
Ahsan Saleem, an impressionist poet in Urdu
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A profile of Mark Strand
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Talking with Tobias Wolff
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An evening of Quietude
for one of its favorite novelists
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The future of newspapers
§
Against tenure
§
Salman Rushdie on Islam
§
Adam Kirsch’s Adorno
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Selling Sonnabend
§
The physical problems of
contemporary public art
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The galleries of Vegas
§
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Eugenia Butler has died
§
Roger Ebert leaves TV
§
Al Gore’s new slide show
Labels: links
Friday, April 11, 2008
It was when the kind reader pointed out to me that not only had I misspelled Matthew Zapruder’s name and that of his book (which, frankly, looks alien to me in any possible spelling), but that I had also misspelled the title of my own book, that I had to concede that this here bronchitis is taking more of a toll than I’d care to admit. I’m going to give it a rest for a few days and see if I can’t push my IQ back up to a dull normal.
Labels: Personal
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Photograph by Jonathan Williams
When I was asked if I would judge this year’s William Carlos Williams Award for the Poetry Society of America (PSA), I had some serious bouts of ambivalence. I am not, as readers of this space will know, a fan of prizes in general. When they are done at all well, it is the giver who is ultimately honored for having had the good sense to pick wisely. And when they’re done badly, well, the good folks at Foetry will be happy to tell you all about that. The Williams award, ostensibly for the best book by a small, non-profit or university press volume, has had as mixed a record as any. Neither the PSA nor Wikipedia lists a comprehensive list of winners for every year, so I can’t tell you if it’s been awarded every year since, say, Williams died in 1963. Or was it simply thought up in the 1980s to acknowledge the fact that to give book awards to trade press publications (this year’s Pulitzer is shared by Harcourt and Ecco presses) profoundly distorts the actually existing field of poetry?
Diane Wakoski won the Williams Prize in 1989 for her selected poems, Emerald Ice, the one instance I can see in which it was given in something akin to the spirit of Williams himself. Most of the winners since then have been decidedly mixed. It’s worth noting that Fanny Howe was the judge one year and gave the award to Ralph J. Mills & that Marjorie Welish awarded it to Brenda Hillman two years ago. Last year’s judge, Tony Hoagland, gave the prize to Matthew Zapruder for his Copper Canyon Collection, The Pijamaist. That’s not a bad choice, though it’s almost certainly not the one I would have made had I been the judge. But what would I do under such a circumstance? That thought nagged at me. I, after all, had my “aha” experience as a teenager – that thunderclap event that let me know then & there that I was going to be a poet – as the result of reading The Desert Music, published by New Directions. I have some very strong ideas about the role & meaning of Williams’ in American poetry & writing general. And this was a prize for an already published volume – it wasn’t your usual exploitive, pay the readers’ fee & hope your manuscript gets picked, book contest. Those contests always appall me, and I feel as badly for the winners – whom nobody ever takes seriously – as I do the losers who fund such ventures.
So I said yes. I was told that I could expect to receive between 70 and 100 volumes and that they would show up sometime in January. When they did, there were three large cartons and a total of 150 books in all. How was I going to pick a winner out of that? I got open a box cutter and sliced into the first carton. There, right smack at the top, was a volume that jolted me into fairly uncontrollable laughter – my own The Age of Huts (compleat). When I was finally able to catch my breath I picked it up, rather the way Hamlet holds the skull of Yorick, and addressed it (probably out loud): Well, little fella, you finally have found an award that shares your own sense of aesthetics, and you don’t stand a chance.
Labels: PSA
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Mark Wallace on poetry readings.
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Ed Mycue’s ten favorite books
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Remembering Rochelle Ratner
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Aaron McCollough on
Barrett Watten & textsound,
manufactured landscapes in China &
Linh Dinh’s attempt to align me
along side Kenny Goldsmith
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Joyelle McSweeney on Hannah Wiener
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Dale Smith on the prose
of Forrest Gander
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Robert Kelly on Jonathan Williams
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Robert Hass (Ecco Press) & Philip Schultz (Harcourt) share
this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
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Geof Huth’s long & winding blog
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A Lee-Ann-thology of concrete poetry (MOV)
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Walt Whitman as spiritual leader
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Gillian Ferguson’s 1000-page
online epic
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What If I Am a Literary Gangster?
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Alistair McCartney’s The End of the World Book
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The new Mipoesias can be downloaded (PDF)
or eaten straight from the can
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Frances Richey’s war poetry
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Would you trust Stanley Fish’s
account of deconstruction?
Me neither
§
“I Heard the Google Gong”
“I Heard It is One of Many Possibilities”
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A profile of Virago
§
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Outdoing Kent Johnson even
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The several lives of Joseph Conrad
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A profile of Tracy K. Smith
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Are professorships doomed?
The thesaurus is dying
And what about bookstores?
Among the newly doomed:
Acres of Books in LA
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So, are ebooks starting to catch on?
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Alice Fogel’s passion for nature
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The commodification of poetry
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Emory opens the Danowski Poetry Library
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Sartre’s harem & Simone de Beauvoir
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North Andover’s laureate is finishing his term
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Talking with Brian Hall
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Poets of the Kitsap Peninsula
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Talking with Billy Collins
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Simon Armitage:
My life with air guitar
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Naipaul the monster
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Simon Michael Bessie, the last person
to build a major trade publishing firm
from scratch, has died
§
The success of Jodi Picoult
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Roseanne Cash:
Returning to writing
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Just who benefits from
giving a Pulitzer to Dylan?
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Nobody sounds like Messiaen
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Pavarotti lip-synched his last performance
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Gabriel Gomez’ The Outer Bands
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Recreating Dan Flavin’s ’64 show
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The art of Doris Lee
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The work of Ralph Rapson
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Fisk to appeal order protecting O’Keefe collection
Labels: links
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Mike Allen, The Journey to Kailash, Norilana Books,
Allen Bramhall, Days Poem, Vol. 1 and 2, Meritage Press,
Michael Cirelli, Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Hanging Loose Press,
Jack Collom & Lyn Hejinian, Situations, Sings, Adventures in Poetry,
Gaius Valerius Catullus, The Complete Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, translated, with essays, by Ryan Gallagher, Bootstrap Press,
Tom Jenks, A Priori, If P then Q Classics, no location given, 2008
R. Zimora Linmark, The Evolution of a Sign, Hanging Loose Press,
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Abdallah Jones and the Disappearing-Dust Caper, Ecstatic Exchange,
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Laughing Buddha, Weeping Sufi, Ecstatic Exchange, Philadelphia, 2005
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Love is a Letter Burning in a High Wind, Ecstatic Exchange,
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Mars and Beyond, Ecstatic Exchange,
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, Psalms for the Brokenhearted, Ecstatic Exchange,
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Daniel Abdal-Hayy
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark With Sugar, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Hazel Smith, The Erotics of Geography: Poetry, Performance Texts, New Media Works, Tinfish Press, Kāne’ohe, HI 2008 (includes CD/CDR)
Books (Anthologies)
April Lindner, COBPEMEHHAЯ AMERИKAHCKAЯ ПOЭЭЯ, introduction by Dana Gioia, no publisher given, no location given. Includes Kay Ryan, Adrian C. Louis, Thomas Lux, Marilyn Nelson, Ron Silliman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Amy Uyematsu, William Baer, R.S. Gwynn, David Lehman, Heather McHugh, Timothy Steele, Lyn Emanuel,
Rychard Denner,
Books (Other)
Joe Brainard, The Nancy Book, with essays by Ann Lauterbach & Ron Padgett and including collaborations with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett & James Schuyler, Siglio, Los Angeles 2008
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Penguin,
Journals
Area Sneaks, no. 1,
House Organ, 62, Spring 2008,
Open Letter, Thirteenth Series, No. 5, Spring 2008. bpNichols +20 issue, edited by Lori Emerson. Includes Rob Winger, Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, Dan Warber, Steve McCaffery, Lynette Hunter, more.
Other Formats
Alan Davies, I) write on the other side of doom, postcard broadside, House Press, Buffalo, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, 2008
Anthony Robinson, Asterisk 4, folded broadside, Fewer & Further Press,
Just a few more of the items received since January 11
-- to be continued
Labels: Recently Received
Monday, April 07, 2008
I was somewhere in the vicinity of 20 to 22-years-old when, during an intermission at a marathon antiwar reading at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco where I was hovering, as was my wont, at the periphery of a crowd that surrounded Robert Duncan, who had just read, when Mark Linenthal, whom I knew from his role as the director of the San Francisco Poetry Center, approached with a granite-faced man and said to Duncan, “Robert, I want you to meet George Oppen.” I can recall also Oppen’s first words to
My second regret, unfortunately not an uncommon one for anyone who was a renter for decades, especially in an area like San Francisco or the East Bay, where one is forever having to balance space & the needs of one’s book collection, is that I no longer appear to possess one of my favorite volumes of that period, four decades ago, a copy of Oppen’s first book, Discrete Series, published not by Oppen himself, but a chapbook reprint done by Ron Caplan out of Cleveland. At a time when everyone I knew seemed to own copies of The Materials, This in Which, and Of Being Numerous, I was just about the only person I knew who owned a copy of that.
I’d acquired my copy of The Materials early on, I don’t know where, almost certainly at Cody’s or Moe’s in Berkeley or (far less likely) City Lights across the Bay. This in Which I’d appropriated, the old five-finger-discount, the first time I’d ever seen a copy, from the university bookstore at UWM, the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, in the summer of 1967. Rochelle Nameroff, my wife at the time, and I couldn’t believe our good fortune. Here was this old Objectivist, actually alive & writing again, producing great work. There are poems there, such as “Street,” as fine as anyone has written:
Ah these are the poor,
These are the poor –
Humiliation,
Hardship . . .
Nor are they very good to each other;
It is not that. I want
An end of poverty
As much as anyone
For the sake of intelligence,
‘The conquest of existence’ –
It has been said, and is true –
And this is the real pain,
Moreover. It is terrible to see the children,
The righteous little girls;
So good, they expect to be so good . . .
Ellipses, as they say, in the original. There are small moments here that I don’t think I fully understood or appreciated as a young man, the doubleness created by “An end of poverty,” rather than the more standard preposition to. Or the reiteration in that last line, which at the time I might have read as sentiment rather than the certainty of horror. Or that most curious of words, Moreover, concluding the longest of this poem’s disjointed, half-broken sentences. This is a poem that works precisely in all the ways its syntax appears not to.
But the poems of Discrete Series, composed between 1929 & 1934, spoke to me then, as they do to me now, with a directness I find nowhere else in Oppen’s work. It’s not simply that they were the poems of someone in his early twenties, the same age I was when I came upon that volume at Serendipity Books in
Thus
Hides the
Parts – the prudery
Of Frigidaire, of
Soda-jerking –
Thus
Above the
Plane of lunch, of wives
Removes itself
(As soda-jerking from
the private act
Of
Cracking eggs);
big-Business
This poem operates like a tiny Moebius strip in that the dangling final noun-phrase big-Business is precisely that which “Hides the // Parts – the prudery / Of Frigidaire.” There is, in any consumer business, including one as simple as a lunch counter, a radical gap between that which is customer-facing & that which is not. This dissociation between public & private is paralleled by that alienation that transforms any “private act” into labor for pay. Thus if the gaps of “Street” stand for just how good those righteous little girls won’t be soon enough, and how and why, the vertigo of sheer terror, the unmarked ellipses of this earlier poem stand for processes no less brutal, but hardly inevitable. Only one of these exists in a world in which political action is even conceivable.
I will always be an advocate for the earliest Oppen. Far from the unrealized works of a beginning writer, they show us the poems of an optimist, someone who has not yet adjusted to the permanent defeat that was Stalinism. The later work, at least through Of Being Numerous, is no less luminous, but its relationship to the world is chastened, perhaps even depressed. This of course leads to my last regret – those twenty-five years between poems.
ж ж ж
A Celebration of
George Oppen’s 100th Birthday
100 minutes of talk & poetry
Hosted by Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Thomas Devaney
& featuring
Stephen Cope, George Economou, Al Filreis,
Michael Heller, Ann Lauterbach, Tom Mandel,
Bob Perelman, & Ron Silliman
Today, April 7
3805
Labels: George Oppen
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Remembering Anne Spencer
in Lynchburg,
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What do we want
digital poetry to be?
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What Reginald Shepherd & Rae Armantrout
& Bill Zavatsky & Forrest Gander
all have in common
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Squaring Kenneth Goldsmith & Reginald Shepherd
on the poetics of identity
§
Talking with Suzanne Vega
§
John Tranter, in conversation with Charles Bernstein (MP3)
Tranter, reading from Urban Myths (MP3)
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d.a. levy and the mimeo-graph revolution
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Voice of
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Falling for the charms
of Daniil Kharms
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Linh Dinh on poetry & technology
Reginald Shepherd on the same
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Dihn on the war poetry of Tran Da Tu
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Of all the books in the history of the world,
the one I most desire
is Robert Grenier’s Cambridge M’Ass
Barring that, I would love to get my hands
on the individual
who stole the copy off my office door
at SF State in 1981
§
Fou is an excellent new e-journal
§
Honoring Donald Finkel
§
Jean Valentine, Li-Young Lee and Gary Snyder
at a poetry conference
spittin’ distance from the Bush estate in
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Jorie Graham’s Sea Change
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A profile of Thomas Sayers Ellis
§
Shakespeare in court
§
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Slam Poetry
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“the slithering syntax of John Kinsella”
§
Aaron Anstett, a laureate for
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Karla Van Vliet reads to the door
§
Why good poets work in pickle factories
§
Using the web to build demand
§
“I should note, as a bookseller, I hate everyone”
§
The LA Times on national poetry month
Elsewhere in Los Angeles
Meanwhile in the Hamptons
Around Washington, DC
Atlanta chooses the Quietist route
§
Reed Whittemore at 88
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The largest poetry festival in Maine
is not in Orono
§
10 Questions for Rachel Bunting
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Being interviewed posthumously by Robert Creeley
§
Book buying in Boise
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Are boomers the last book-centered generation?
§
Malayalam poetry and its mass connection
§
A profile of Cheryl Lachowski
§
A good look at the Allen anthology
hidden away among some bad HTML
§
Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American
§
Frost in fiction
§
Virginia Gillespie’s Taoist Inner Tube Rider
§
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Bei Dao in
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Why Richard Kenney is not a language poet
§
Naipaul the sexist
§
The war poems of Brian Turner
§
Gillian Clarke is named Wales National Poet
§
Talking with Linda Pastan
§
$50,000 for one of the least risky poets
in
But Daisy Fried likes him too
§
Fried on Janet Malcolm
§
How do you review a book like
Guy Gavriel Kay’s Beyond This Dark House?
§
Kwame Dawes on
life & HIV in
§
Chatting with Cherkovski
§
The Impac Prize shortlist
§
A profile of Salman Rushdie
that’s not fatwa-centric
§
Rupert Smith
on his life in porn
§
Mary Karr on Heather McHugh
§
§
“no official diagnosis of
death by blogging”
§
Symptomatic Reading & Its Aftermath
§
The narcissism of small differences
§
When time stood still in Grand Central Station
Labels: links
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Labels: Passings
Friday, April 04, 2008
The bpNichol website has gone live
Life on bpNichol Lane
§
What an interview should be:
CA Conrad interviewing Rachel Blau DuPlessis
§
Frank O’Hara in The New Yorker
§
Bruce Andrews turned 60 on Tuesday,
making him one day younger than Al Gore
§
§
Reginald Shepherd, Rachel Zolf & C. Dale Young
all are on the Lambda Poetry shortlist
§
Ed Sanders in
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The first Pericles in
in 150 years
§
Some questions about conceptual poetry
§
Alfred Corn on Jonathan Williams
The
The Highlander’s obit
Another
A reading in Cambridge (the real one) in 1973
James Jaffe’s eulogy
Bookseller David Lovely’s comments
Those of Hermeneutic Circle
Having dinner with Jonathan 31 years ago
§
Rae Armantrout in The New Yorker
§
Long poems coming to
§
Maya Angelou at 80
§
Bob Creeley died three years ago this week
§
The Whalen tribute reading in
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Didi Menendez’ When I Said Goodbye
§
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Is the web destroying your living?
§
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The number of words in the English language
§
An Oppen Centennial salute in
§
Talking with Jorie Graham
§
“Is there onne Earthe a Manne more trewe
Thanne Willy Shakspeare is toe you”
§
Talking with Grace Paley
§
20 favorite poets for National Poetry Month
§
PEN protests Horsley’s ban
§
Somehow I missed the cringe event of the season
With “the perfect accessory”
& even ringtones
§
The “darling of the NPR set”
§
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Flarf: not dead yet
§
The “science of literature”
§
The “national epic” of
§
§
Another elegy for The Bookroom
§
12 statements about reading
§
A Welsh poet in
§
§
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The best travel bookstore ever?
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The best New Zealand poems of 2007
isn’t 30 pages long
§
Buying what he thinks is
Lyn Hejinian’s first book
(He obviously has not seen
The Grreat Adventure!)
§
Love me, love my books
§
A poet living “off-the-grid”
§
Poet Populist & local laureate collaborate
§
The last reader of Julian Barnes
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More fun with ©
§
A profile of Margaret Gibson
§
The Wharton estate struggles
§
Poetry on the radio in Zimbabwe
§
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The last newspaper
§
Between criticism & intolerance
§
Questioning the politics of tenure
§
In search of “Tom Thumb’s Blues”
§
§
From Bauhaus to Black Mountain
§
An exhibition of fierce pussy
§
Faint praise for Jasper Johns
§
Art Institute cowers at threats from animal activists
§
The world’s oldest adolescent
§
Publications are dumping movie critics
Labels: links
Thursday, April 03, 2008
A Celebration of
George Oppen’s 100th Birthday
100 minutes of talk & poetry
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
3805
George Oppen and his wife, Mary, sailed and hitchhiked from the West Coast to
Poet and critic Stephen Cope is editor of George Oppen: Selected Prose Daybooks, and Papers (
Thomas Devaney is the author A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007). He teaches in the Critical Writing Program at the
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
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
Tom Mandel grew up in
Bob Perelman has published numerous books of poetry, most recently Iflife. He teaches at the
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
Labels: Events, George Oppen
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
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
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
¹ I say post-avant because I think it’s more or less impossible to be avant-garde with a straight face in the 21st 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
