Monday, June 30, 2008
The “bad girl” in the arts is not new, but it has had a new lease on life in & around poetry & performance art since Kathy Acker – who rarely acknowledged the degree to which her novels functioned as part of the poetry scene – rewrote so many of the rules 35 years ago. Karen Finley, Leslie Dick, Dodie Bellamy, Tracy Emin, to name just four, have all demonstrated very different ways of being transgressive, especially around issues of the body & sexuality, in the years since.
Chelsey Minnis adds her name to the roster with a volume that wants to be outrageous, Bad Bad, from Fence Press. It’s a complicated project and one that demands the writer put herself out there for all pretty much to see. But it’s not, in the usual sense, a “difficult literature” – one can, in fact, plow right through the book.
I read Bad Bad three times in the process of judging the William Carlos Williams Award earlier this year and it joins that list books that I was unhappy I couldn’t give some kind of prize to, because it’s really very good. But reading it again after a couple of months hiatus, I find myself noticing its limitations more. This is a terrific book, yes, but it could have been a devastating one, and there’s a difference. And on a fourth reading it starts to show up.
Essentially Bad Bad consists of three types of work. First, thirty pages of prose-poem prefaces, a total of 68. Then a series of nine poems that would actually be very airy, just a few lines scattered around the page were it not for many rows of dots connecting them almost into a prose structure. And then finally some poems in a relatively conventional format. Each section is noticeably weaker than the one preceding it. Reading the book, I’m convinced that this is intentional – it’s part of the larger set of transgressions. But as a reader of the book, I’m not convinced that this is the best strategy. Like a lot of “uncreative” poetry from the conceptualists, this is actually more interesting to think about than it is to read.
But the prefaces here, on the other hand, are simply glorious. Here is “Preface 30,” my personal favorite. All of the ellipses are in the original:
Once I became a poet I could not be taught to be a poet…
It is like wearing a slit slip under a slit skirt…
Now I am careless of my statements…
And it feels good…like a champagne bidet…
I should not have poetry as a vanity and I should not have it as a career…
But I should have it!...like a doorknob covered with honey…
I would love to read the book for which that truly was the preface, but this is not that book. You can hear the pout of the narrator, half valley girl, half Eurotrash ingénue. At the same time there is, in almost every line, some remarkable observation. That first sentence is, as anyone who’s been around the scene for awhile will recognize, exactly on target.
The second section is roughly seventy pages long, but contains considerably less in the way of words than the prefaces. Not atypical is the following, picked pretty much at random:
The dots really do transform the text. The sensation is not unlike the experience of reading Ronald Johnson’s redaction of crossed-out original. This is very much a denial of blank space as a field, as those periods are intensely linear. In other places, it’s worth noting, they don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they cluster or spread out.
Underneath all this speckled energy, very much the same kind of persona emerges, totally irritating, totally charming. But it’s really in the final section, fifteen moderately conventional post-avant poems (one is a time-line), that the role of persona is most deeply underscored here. And my association in those poems was not with Kathy Acker at all, but with somebody completely different albeit from the same generation, the late Darrell Gray, especially of the Philippe Mignon poems, more satiric & less subtle than Kent Johnson’s more recent heteronyms.
At one level, this is all quite good. But on another, Minnis doesn’t quite pull the trigger – this is a work that cries out to be outrageous, but after Kathy Acker or Dodie Bellamy or the films of Carolee Schneeman¹ actually fucking her boyfriend of 30+ years ago, Minnis’ sort of kiss-and-tell hints about an unnamed mentor come over ultimately as coy.
But this fits with the book’s downward spiral structure, its use of truly dreadful headline fonts (see the cover above, readable enough at the 180 points – or whatever it is – there, but genuinely inhuman at 12 points in the “Prefaces”), not to mention the choice of pink – a Jeff Koons sort of “bad bad” – for the cover, rather than the black with a dog collar aesthetic of an Acker. Cheesy, instead of sleazy.
I think there are all kinds of questions here about how much of this is in Minnis’ control. Maybe all of it, but if you believe in the persona & equate it with the author, maybe not so much. And a lot of what you think about this book will probably depend on how you answer that question. After four times through, I find myself with different answers on different occasions. I don’t know that this means I’m getting closer to “the truth.” That remains elusive.
¹ Schneeman was never a “bad girl” that I can tell since she has always lacked the one thing that binds all the bad ones together – a sense of shame, some concept of all this being somehow dirty. Hers truly is a sex-positive position, with no sense of what Sianne Ngai calls Ugly Feelings. It’s interesting to contrast how Acker relies on this framework of social (and self-) condemnation whereas a later writer, such as Dodie Bellamy, is far more playful with these borders, able to evoke & examine but not be ruled by them.
Labels: Chelsey Minnis
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Massive thanks, endless thanks, unbelievable thanks to Lynn Behrendt for updating the entire blogroll! It’s up-to-date for the first time in a couple of years. In addition to being the
If you should see a “gotcha” or want to add, drop or change yours, please let me know via email. Thanks!
Labels: blogging, Lynn Behrendt
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The current “summer reading” issue of Poets & Writers magazine has this photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce’s Ulysses on its cover. It’s a complicated image:
The photo was taken in 1955 by Eve Arnold (still around & active today at the age of 96), who, like Monroe, was a largely self-taught trailblazer, taking up the camera with little formal training at 36 & becoming, just three years later, the first female member of Magnum, the international photographic cooperative. While
In 1955,
Some of the occurrences of this image on the web suggest that
Labels: photography
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Kit Robinson (photo by Tom Orange)
Writing as event:
reading The Grand Piano
at Orono
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In the Un-American Tree:
why langpo is a
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The PhillySound comes to Fanzine
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The editor strikes back!
Mark Scroggins on Charles Bernstein on Auggie Kleinzahler
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Bruce Andrews:
Meaning, Method, Motive
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Analyzing this blog’s secret sauce
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The uncollected Clark Coolidge
Language, memory & masculinity
in Coolidge’s work
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Talking with Lytton Smith
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“Non-imperial art is necessarily abstract art”
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The dark labyrinth of conceptual poetries
A Euro-conceptualist conception
of the perfect day
Beyond conceptualism & flarf:
toward a slow poetry!
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Anne Tardos, Kenny Goldsmith & Charles Bernstein
on Swedish radio (MP3)
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Hannah Weiner & Basic English
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The “Objectivist” issue of Poetry
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Bernadette Mayer & the Capitalization of everyday life
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Jay Wright’s Polynomials and Pollen
Wright’s The Presentable Art of Reading Absence
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Talking with Jared White & Farrah Field
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Clarity in Oppen & Pound
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Talking with Vincent Quatroche
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Patrick Durgin:
bringing Hannah Weiner to the fore
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Poem predicated on Progress
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John Ashbery’s optional apocalypse
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Talking with Renee Angle
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Jackson Mac Low
& the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E of intermedia
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Aleda Shirley has died
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Bricolage in Ronald Johnson’s ARK
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Video of Clayton Eshleman reading César Vallejo
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I think of this as the dancing alphabet
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“Spending actually declined” last year
in public college libraries
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What didn’t happen in the 1970s
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“On we” ennui
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Rachel Zolf wins Trillium
& Coach House wins the Premier’s Award
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Frank Kuenstler on PENNsound
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The power of poetry
over baseball
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Doubt & humor in Robert Creeley
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Mayakovsky & galoshes
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A piece on poets with disabilities
that makes no mention of
Larry Eigner, John Wieners,
Jimmy Schuyler, Hannah Weiner,
Lynn Strongin, Michael Cuddihy or Scott Bentley
One place you could begin
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“All models are wrong,
but some are useful”
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What would the perfect
online bookstore look like?
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Tombstones for bookstores
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Is Amazon publishing’s
”hope for the future”?
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Videos (and some sound clips) of events
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Camus’ notebooks
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Talking with James Winn
about The Poetry of War
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University presses
start to sell via Kindle
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“Everything is poetic
about Times Square”
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The Other Voices International Project
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Archiving the submissions
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The world’s “top thinker”?
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Contemporary poetry of
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Does Google rule the world?
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Bye –bye indie cinema
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Flarf’s sonic cousin
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Alan Gilbert on Theodore A. Harris
& the art of collaboration
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On Jed Perl’s attack on the present
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Dia gets a new director
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Twyla Tharp & the imitation of self
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Special kudos to
the National Poetry Foundation
for putting up
so many of the abstracts & documents
from the 1970s conference
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) contemplates the price she has already paid
for helping her roommate obtain an abortion
If you saw Christian Mungiu’s masterful, if harrowing, 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days in the theater and haven’t had a chance to catch it on DVD – it just came out – I recommend that you get hold of the little round platter just so that you can see the few extras burned onto the disc. If you haven’t yet seen it, I recommend that you do that now & return to this discussion later, for much of what follows will contain spoilers. There is a discussion that moves toward poetics in the last five paragraphs – beginning with “In a sense…” – that can be read separately.
4 luni, as it might be abbreviated in its original Romanian, is the tale of a college student who helps her roommate obtain an illegal abortion during the last days of the (big C) Communist Ceauşescu regime in 1987. One of the most repressive & financially exhausted of all Soviet bloc countries,
For his police state, his cult of personality & his laws against abortion, the citizens of
I’m not going to recount the film’s narrative fully here, other than to note that this is a film all anti-abortion activists should see, since it shows in painful details what occurs when the procedure is illegal. And it’s one film that all volunteers at Planned Parenthood should see as an in-service training, not just to remind themselves why they put up with the bullshit of picket lines & death threats (and on occasion far worse), but also why every abortion itself is a tragedy of bad choices & poor planning, & why it’s so important to get contraceptive tools & information distributed far more widely than they are today. In 4 Months, the traditional risks of illegal abortion – arrest, death – are skirted, in part because the main characters are all educated people in their early 20s. Imagine this same film with 13-year-olds & the movie you get is a far cry from Juno.
But what interests me here are some decisions writer / producer / director Mongiu made in putting together this film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes & earned him a gold medal from the current president of a still impoverished Romania. The first is the absence of music, which appears only toward the end of the film’s credits. The second are the obvious dramatic threads that are picked up & left hanging, most notably a sequence in which Otilia surreptitiously picks through the abortionist’s bag & steals a knife, an item that foretells all manner of bad endings but never otherwise is used dramatically in the film (I think she notices it again much later, but does so I think just so we recall its presence). Mongiu discusses these in one of the most intelligent director interviews I’ve seen among the added features. In real life, Mongiu argues, life isn’t accompanied by a sound track, things occurs for which there is no closure, experience isn’t aestheticized – to replicate this he has had to build them into the film, adding details that then don’t get followed, eschewing music, refusing to make jump cuts within scenes so as to coerce an audience’s perception of the action. The result is that the film is a series of very long takes, that often Anamaria Marinca, the amazing actress who plays Otilia, has her back turned to the camera & that actual camera shifts within scenes – as when Otilia comes into the bathroom to wash herself out after having been raped by Mr. Bebe, the abortionist – almost cause a kind of vertigo because they’re so rare. In one key scene, the characters’ faces are entirely in darkness. Often the characters are not centered (an issue if you see this in the unletterboxed DVD version) onscreen. Otilia is left waiting in Mr. Bebe’s Soviet-era automobile while he steps out to argue with his mother, who otherwise has no role in this film.
But I don’t think that the only role these elements serve is to heighten our sense of the film’s imitation of real life – I think that Mongiu is being disingenuous in the interview when he suggests this. Rather, I think he is playing quite deliberately with the audience’s well developed expectations, and that the knife in particular is an exceptionally cagey choice for just such treatment. It’s not just that it’s a detail that doesn’t go anywhere, but Mongiu knows full well that we are all waiting for it to be used, to save Gâbita, to kill Mr. Bebe, whatever. Mongiu does exactly the same thing with a remarkable dinner sequence, as Otilia & her boyfriend Adi sit silently at dinner (she’s at the table, he’s behind her, as they celebrate his mother’s 48th birthday). With ten guests around a table that, in the U.S., would never be asked serve more than six, we can see the young couple’s alienation, from his parents & from one another, as the roomful of doctors (and doctors’ wives – Mongiu’s own parents are doctors & he was only a little younger than Adi when this story would have taken place) jabber away, a key detail being that the head of their “unit,” wherever they all work, got their not on his medical skills, but rather on his “healthy” ability to get on “in the [Communist] party”. Everyone talks, not quite at once, Otilia & Adi remain silent, the center of our screen &, with Adi’s mother, our attention. With few if any cuts, the scene took five days to film. Onscreen, it runs less than five minutes.
In a sense, Mongiu recognizes that, just as a poem is a “machine made of words,” to quote Dr. Williams, a film likewise is a “machine made of cuts & scenes” and thus has to achieve “artlessness” as a surface by building it in, not unlike the way Judy Grahn deliberately builds in artlessness to her very best (& relatively early) poems, such as “A Woman is Talking to Death” or “A Common Woman.” It isn’t inherent in the medium, whether film or poetry. Clarity, after all, isn’t a given – it’s an effect.
In the past few weeks I’ve noticed several comments, laments really, from people about the alleged “elitism” of post-avant poetics, including several comments the other day to my note contrasting flarf & conceptual poetics, but also on my nephew Daniel’s blog as well. As I noted on my links list Monday, connecting to one such complaint, it’s an argument that could have been made against some of the work of the troubadour poets in the High Middle Ages (1100 – 1350). And it’s become increasingly the case as other genres, from the novel to reality TV, have come along to absorb some of the social roles traditionally encased in the poem. The one function – the only one – that no other genre can take from poetry is its role as the art of language without limit. And in a nation in which 90 percent of the readers (and 100 percent of the editors) of the New York Review of Books are insane if they think that they’re literate, that does make poetry something that can only work for the masses under two circumstances –
♥ the poet her- or himself is capable only of a handful of surface effects (the Kooser / Collins road)
♥ the poet her- or himself makes conscious decisions to build in hooks that give the appearance of dumbing it down for the “average Joe” (the Robert Creeley / Judy Grahn / Frank O’Hara road)
One of these is, I would submit, a legitimate aesthetic choice. And one of these strikes me as having more to do with neurological pathology than it does literature. (If someone no brighter than George W. Bush wrote poetry, would Garrison Keillor think it “good”?) I think it’s clear that Mongiu’s road is that of the aesthetic choice.
A second “bonus” feature on the DVD gives us some indication as to why. One of the “benefits” of post-Communist life in
I have always – even as a teenager – been interested in what the troubadours called trobar clus, that writing they reserved for their best readers / listeners, themselves, the origin of the sestina. I want a poetry that does the very most it can do – all of the 19 books from the Poetry Society of America contest that I really loved (I have seven still to profile here) reflect that. Some do so in terms that enable them to reach broader audiences, but others don’t avail themselves of that choice, taking what I might call the Stein / Zukofsky / Beckett / Joyce / Watten road instead. The idea that one road (the Creeley / Grahn et al road) is morally superior to the Stein et al road is, I think, defensible only – and I do mean only – if you think that the population of the US, and the other English-speaking countries, is so deeply, even permanently damaged that a truly literate art of language can never fully exist. That’s a possibility, but I’m much more of an optimist than that.
¹ My experiences in
Labels: Film
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Writing as Event!
THE GRAND PIANO, Part 6
An Experiment in Collective Autobiography
San Francisco, 1975-1980
By Ron Silliman, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, and Tom Mandel.
"A vital contribution to the collective memory of the poetry of that period.... The relationship of the individual to the society and its intermediate institutions, such as the Grand Piano readings, is relevant to any thoughtful analysis of the place of poetry writing and production today."
—James Sherry, Jacket 34
"The collective autobiographers are less interested in revising the past and more interested in using the narratives of their history to further contextualize the complex poetics and communal history of that poetics for the future...to nurture an arena of possibilities where ideas can be exchanged."
—Rob Fitterman, “Futuring The Grand Piano”
"The Grand Piano is itself a veering off and an investigation and a playing or experimenting with the materials of language, history, textuality, and temporality, the personal and political, poetry and community.... There is an abundance to linger over in The Grand Piano even as and perhaps because of the large gaps and contradictions."
—Robin Tremblay-McGaw, How2
Copies of single volumes may be ordered from Small Press Distribution
Subscriptions to The Grand Piano (ten volumes, at quarterly intervals, beginning with parts 1–6), are available; Send order form and check for $90 made out to Lyn Hejinian, 2639 Russell Street, Berkeley, CA 94705. Partial subscriptions starting from no. 2 are $80; from no. 3, for $70; from no. 4, for $60, from no. 5, $50; from no. 6, $40, etc.
Order forms may be downloaded here: color or b&w
Designed and published by Barrett Watten, Mode A/This Press (
Labels: The Grand Piano
Monday, June 23, 2008
A tribute to Keith Wilson
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Flood pictures
of the University of Iowa
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Context, misreading & aggression
at the Aggression Conference
Juliana Spahr on the distinction
between a poetics of difference
& one of indeterminacy
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A response to The Grand Piano
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Kristin Prevallet on The Age of Huts (compleat) (PDF)
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Joel Brouwer
on C.D. Wright
Angela Garbes on Rising, Falling, Hovering
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Talking with Mark Wallace
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Tracie Morris on PENNsound
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John Ashbery live
at the Griffin Prize
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A field guide to poetry in Cleveland
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Alan Gilbert on the Beats in
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Philip Metres on Bruce Andrews
(with the Bill O’Reilly video)
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Jasper Bernes on the 1970s conference
Peter O’Leary on same (& day 2)
Rodney Koeneke’s An Alphabet for Orono (& part 2)
Thinking about (the Experimental Poetry) Community
Ben Friedlander’s photos now number 187
including this group shot
(click on the big version)
Patrick Pritchett’s photos
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For an Unoriginal Literature
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Reading Mac Low,
reading me reading Mac Low
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A planh one could have made
about the troubadours
Flarf is people…
Animal, human, flarf, conceptual
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Long live the Prince of Poets
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Eshleman reads
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Talking with Honor Moore
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The blood of Sarah Manguso
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Leila Wilson on Eileen Myles (PDF)
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Howl & the paperback revolution
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Four Jack Spicer poems in Portuguese
(plus “Thing Language” read by Jack)
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“a Human Rights Watch
labor report
refashioned in free verse”
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Susan Howe reading “The Nonconformist’s Memorial”
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Didi Menendez on the Joe Milford Poetry Show
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Mark Nowack on Fordism & poetics
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In which Scribbleskiff
discovers Jonathan Williams
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Jena Osman reading “Mercury: A Visualization”
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2 versions of a poem by Phil Whalen
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Fond of fonts
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Rise of the mini-lecture
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Jackson Mac Low reads “Stein 100: A Feather Likeness
of the Justice Chair”
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Who killed the semi-colon?
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A profile of “Crazzy” Dave Dessler,
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A profile of Kanwal Bharti
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A.S. Byatt: from text to textile
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Travis Nichols: anthologies offer poetic diplomacy
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Travis Nichols on the problems of laureates
“we don’t need a poet laureate”
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John Ronan succeeds Ferrini
as
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A profile of
Gregory Gibson
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In
Olsson’s is closing
one of its DC stores
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In
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Indies fight to stay afloat
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Blackwell’s to launch
print-on-demand
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In Portsmouth, NH, a move
to hold readings year round
The Portsmouth Laureate home page
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Anne Waldman reads “Stereo”
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Lutheran Surrealism: summing up
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J.G. Ballard’s surrealism of the suburbs
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Patti Smith’s Auguries of Innocence,
expanded & reissued
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Wanda Coleman reads “American Sonnet (35)”
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A correspondence with Guy Davenport
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B.S. Johnson’s novel in a box
(some assembly required)
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Poetry & society
in
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Linh Dinh on sports nationalism in poetry
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How Louis Jenkins’ “Back Country”
got recited at the Tony Awards
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“a poet trying to have an experience”
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D.A. Powell on New
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21st century medievalists
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Blackburn-born poet returns to roots
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Jay Parini on the punishing poetry
of Robert Frost
“Out, Out”
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“Are you a member of the School of Quietude?”
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Naguib Mahfouz’
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52 countries will be represented
at this Macedonian poetry conference
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“an exaggerated sense of importance”
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Ladi Soyode, lawyer, poet & politician
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A transcript of Mary Karr
doing Q&A online
Karr on Keats
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Mark Doty bemoans
”conservativism that holds on in the literary world”
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New book from “old, dead, dull poet”
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Adam Kirsch, rereading Robert Lowell
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What about Charles Williams,
asks the Archbishop of Canterbury
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A novelist’s take on
the Iowa Writers Workshop
of the 1980s
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More people who lost “their voice ”
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Richard Shelton
& poetry in prison
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The question of politics
in Anglophone Cameroon poetry
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Carlin Romano on Salman Rushdie
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Talking with Pamuk & Oe
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The novelist and the murderers
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Dylan Thomas: propagandist
“The Art of Conversation” (PDF)
“A poet for people who really don’t like poetry”
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Getting paid for writing well
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Covering the poems of James Joyce
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An “antidote to the image
of poet as princess”
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Edwin Morgan: modest magus
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Alex Lemon, a poet of white space
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Poughkeepsie teen
wins a top award
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Rereading Lolita
from the girl’s point of view
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Imagining Sylvia Plath
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Think of it as a sales opportunity
Or a good career move
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There’s more to research than Google
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AUTO / PALSY / PLAZA
& other “rubber haiku”
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Reading Peter Bürger
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Barry Schwabsky on Peter Schjeldahl
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Monday at MoMA:
Writing Dalí
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Luc Sante on graffiti vs. advertising
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Would
Censorship isn’t the answer
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When art & sports critics
trade jobs
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A Jeff Koons retrospective
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Frank Stella, campaigning
against the “orphan ©” law
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The joy of dumbed-down trophy art
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Hirst bypassing galleries altogether
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The ultimate elitist object
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Philip Guston & the poets
Brother from another planet
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Talking with Robert Irwin
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Suing the Basquiat authentication committee
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Twombly at the Tate
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The most expensive painting
ever sold in Australia
is still a Picasso
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Big Bird turns 74
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A profile of Jean Eustache
A retrospective of his films
next month in
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Godard:
Everything is Cinema
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Transgender Turkish pop star
faces jail for anti-war message
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Deconstructing “Luka”
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Ho, ho, hey, hey
the old New Left is in the way
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Lakoff’s Obama
Lakoff’s brain
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Bye-bye George Carlin
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Am I the only one who has noticed that what we have just experienced were three relatively mutually exclusive post-avant poetry conferences in this country? Mutually exclusive mostly because they occurred at the same time, mas o menos, but at least partly because they focused the idea of what the post-avant might be in such different ways. Having been to none of them, my sense of what they must have been were:
♥ An academic conference that focused on the poetries of 30 years ago, all still quite active & present to this day. Held at a college in the center of
♥ An academic conference that focused on just one of the poetries of the present moment, similarly held at a geographic remove from the major urban writing centers of either coast. My impression is that this was the least well-attended of the three.
♥ A community-based conference held in
What’s missing? A flarf conference? Community-based conferences in
For all the world, this scenario sounds to me like the different conceivable aesthetic coalitions of the moment are tentatively stalking out their ground. These conferences may be the antithesis of the summer writing camps of the School of Q, manuscript & workshop-based gatherings of wannabes learning that writing means submitting to hierarchy. But for the folks who are always getting on my case about my sorting poets into this or that socially defined bucket, I wonder if anyone is really paying attention to just what is going on. Take a step back & think about it.
Labels: Schools of poetry
Friday, June 20, 2008
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Joe Bonomo, Installations, Penguin,
Kamau Brathwaite, Trench Town Rock, Lost Roads,
Amy Catanzano, iEpiphany, Erudite Fangs, Boulder 2008
Michael Chitwood, from Whence,
Michael Chitwood, Spill,
Stephen Collis, The Commons, Talon Books, Vancouver 2008
Jim Daniels, In Line for the Exterminator,
C.B. Follett, Hold and Release, Time Being Books, St. Louis 2007
Richard Howard, Without Saying, Turtle Point Press, New York 2008
Devin Johnston, Sources, Turtle
Paul Kane, Work Life, Turtle
Thomas David Lisk, Tentative List (A), Kitchen Press, Hell’s Kitchen (NYC) 2008
John Martone, Grammaire Magalénien, no publisher, location or date listed (but Charleston IL 2008)
Paul McCormick, The Exotic Moods of Les Baxter, Tarpaulin Sky Press,
W.S. Merwin, Spanish Ballads, Copper Canyon Classics, Port Townsend 2008 (reprint of the 1961 Doubleday volume with a new foreword by the author)
Jeffrey Miller, The Heart is a Quarter Pounder, with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu & an afterword by Bruce Cheney, farfalla press / McMillan & Parrish,
Leslie Adrienne Miller, The Resurrection Trade, Graywolf Press, St. Paul 2007
Mark Nepo, Surviving Has Made Me Crazy, CavanKerry Press,
J. Allyn Rosser, Foiled Again, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago 2007
Mary Ruefle, Indeed I was Pleased with the World, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh 2007
Kate Schapira, Case Fbdy., Rope-a-Dope Press Collective, South Boston 2008
Frank Stanford, The Singing Knives,
Frank Stanford, You, Lost Roads,
Virginia Chase Sutton, What Brings You to Del Amo, with an introduction by Charles Harper Webb, Northeastern University Press, Boston 2007
Books (Other)
Susan M. Schultz, Dementia Blog, Singing Horse Press, San Diego 2008
Journals
Chicago Review, 53:4 & 54:1/2,
Fence, vol, 11, no. 1,
Lutheran Forum, vol. 42, no. 2,
Other Media & Formats
The Blue Letter, first issue,
Bowery Broadside Series, limited-edition broadsides made in conjunction with Farfalla Press / McMillan and Parrish & the Bowery Poetry Club, mostly 11-by-17 inches with original artwork by George Schneeman.
Anselm Berrigan, Comodesty in Advance
Edmund Berrigan, I’m Angry and You Are Next To Me
Tyler Burba, Thirty, for Jen DeNike
John Coletti, Whole States Move
Brenda Coultas, Some Nouns in My Possession
Marcella Durand, from Traffic & Weather
Jessica Fiorini, Battle Mile
Corrine Fitzpatrick, love poem
John High, For Florence & Paul
Bob Holman, It Might Be Lonelier (Without the Loneliness)
Stefania Iryne Marthakis, from a filmmaker’s handbook
Chris Martin, from Disequilibrium
Gary Parrish, Sonnet, for George and Katie
Simon Pettit, kundalini serpent power in readiness
Kristin Prevallet, Orphée
Arlo Quint, I live on at least two more worlds
Lee Ranaldo, inefficient polymath
Jessica Rogers, from A Procession of Persons, Traveling Together
Shappy Seaholtz, America!
Nathaniel Siegel, Untitled, for Michael Alago
Stacy Szymaszek, Untitled
Anne Waldman, High Shine on the Wood Blocks, for Anselm Hollo
Lewis Warsh, Disaster Relief
Dustin Williamson, Life in the Late Aught Nots
Still catching up on all items received
since January 11.
Labels: Recently Received
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
One test of a book is how you feel about the writer & his or her work on completing the volume. In the case of Joseph Lease’s Broken World, I want to read everything he’s ever written, and for everything that’s written but not yet in print to get published as soon as possible. Broken World is a dazzling performance whose only weakness, to my eye & ear, is that it could have been much longer. At 66 pages, some of which have works only two lines long upon them, it’s not much larger than a chapbook. But Lease is a poet who combines the political earnestness of a George Oppen with the sound-driven poetics, say, of Robert Duncan, the richness of which really grows over time & reading. Broken World consists of two sections – one a gathering of eight relatively short poems, the other a longer work (it’s nearly half the book) in which nearly every section has the same title, “Free Again.” My sense is that, presuming that these works are representative, the ideal Lease volume would probably contain five sections on the order of these two. If it did, you’d have something on the scale – both in terms of richness & accomplishment – of
An example of how this works in practice. While the first section of this book appears to be eight individual & distinct poems, it makes use of reiteration – I’m tempted to say rhyme – in ways that may recall Jack Spicer’s use of the same poem in two places in Book of Magazine Verse at least as much as it does Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. Here, in its entirety is “Little Lightning Bolt”:
Simon says, put your hands on your head. Simon says, put your finger on your nose. Simon says, you haven’t done enough. Simon says, you don’t care enough. Simon says, compulsive old answers can’t leave the world alone. Simon says, you’re going to die. Simon says, don’t let yourself care. Simon says, you can’t stop caring. Simon says, man-tall but thin as a phone call, compulsive old answers can’t leave the world alone. Simon says, you only have blood, marsh light, and sparrow. Simon says, put your hands on your head –
And here is the second section of “Prayer, Broken Off,” three poems & eight pages later:
Simon says, put your hands on your head, Simon says, put your finger on your nose, Simon says you haven’t done enough, Simon says you don’t care enough, Simon says, you can’t stop caring –
Oh look at you – once again you’re a machine made of words, once again you’re a death, a failure, your responses always too big and dirty
and you want them to get bigger and dirtier –
And tho the Simon says trope doesn’t appear elsewhere, the tone & rhythm of these two pieces are absolutely central to the first section of this book. This is a book unashamed of its feelings, or perhaps ashamed but willing to go forward with them anyway. And, as should be obvious here, the voice here is less that of the poet than of the dialog betwixt self & superego. Here is the first section of the second work, entitled – as almost all of these sections are – “Free Again”:
When I can’t sleep I am full of red buds and torn curtains and shiny cars parked in a lot. My lower-middle-class manners tear through my upper-middle-class manners: I stared at braided colors in water while my peers figured out the art of the deal. I was (I wanted to be) a Midwestern boy with a disco in my eyes – Chicago Jew, greengolden suburb Jew, son of a Coney Island Jew. When I drank I got punched up by luminous waves of anger. I thought I had to choose between winning in
It’s not an accident that this piece uses justified margins (most sections here don’t) or that almost all of Lease’ poems end with an em dash. This is a poetry not just of rhythms but of recriminations. It’s not an accident that it seems bounded between the disasters of the holocaust & AIDS. I believe him when he writes of anger, yet there is an undercurrent of humor here, as in the end of this piece, also called “Free Again”:
give the prince of business the days of wine and roses – the smell of frost and coffee – don’t be absurd: you’ll never meet princes of business – you don’t know any “upper-class” people – but you could just go to sleep, that would be good – you could sleep here – you would be warm.
This is, in the most literal sense, cold comfort – it almost sounds like the last thoughts of someone dying of hypothermia.
There are going to be people who really seriously hate this poetry, who I think are going to take Lease for some sort of hothouse flower. That’s why I think it would have been good to have had perhaps twice as much work here. It’s a cumulative effect, and if you get it, it can be exceptionally powerful. But if you don’t, I think Lease will make you squirm. Although, and I think (hope) Lease knows as much, if you do, then you deserve to squirm, absolutely.
Labels: Joseph Lease
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Tom Beckett
on three books
using the same cover photo
§
Saving books from the flood
in Iowa City
§
Blogging
the “Poetry of the 1970s” conference
from
Tom Orange’s photos (195 of them)
Ben Friedlander’s photos (75)
Kaplan Harris’s photos (37)
A 2-minute video of Clark Coolidge reading
Kit Robinson reading from Ted Greenwald’s You Bet
§
The Nonconceptualist Manifesto
A note on boundaries
§
Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein,
A.R. Ammons & Charlie Simic
in the new issue of Poetry
§
Jerry Rothenberg’s blog
§
§
Talking with Patricia Smith
§
Iman Bakry,
an Egyptian poet
with a sense of politics & puns
§
§
If there are 2 million professional artists
in the
how many are poets?
§
Craig Dworkin’s The Consequence of Innovation
§
Robert Vasquez’ Braille for the Heart
§
Talking with Li-Young Lee
§
Patrick Lovelace
on the archaeology of
Bill Pearlman’s Inzorbital
§
Stephen Vincent
tracing Charles Olson’s
Mayan footsteps
§
Nearly 3 years after being destroyed
by Hurricane Katrina,
the Afro-American Book Stop is back
§
Nashville’s one gay bookstore
is for sale
§
Montpelier
looks past the closure of
Yankee Paperback
(just 3 dozen indies left
in the state of
§
A profile of
Book Zoo
§
Beth Kanell
against prose on the MTA
§
Robert Duncan in DailyKos
§
Befriending stingrays
where poetry is a virus
§
§
Ihechukwu Madubuike,
a major African literary critic
§
Ben Jonson’s elegies for his children
§
Lucinda Williams & her dad
§
“The Jerry Seinfeld of American poetry”
§
David Trinidad’s The Late Show
§
Verbal art & linguistic science:
building on an idea of Kent Johnson’s (PDF)
§
John Godfrey in The Nation
(subscription required)
§
Mary Rudge,
Poet Laureate of
§
Talking with Eva Salzman
§
Johanna Skibsrud’s
Late Nights with Wild Cowboys
§
Karen Houle, Allesandro Porco,
Jordan Scott & R.M. Vaughan
§
What the
But women are baling right & left
§
Joyce Brinkman’s tenure
as
§
The Dylan Thomas trail
& Homer’s
§
Blogging, public intellectuals
& the academy
Public intellectuals, 2.0 (DOC)
§
William Logan’s “Valentine’s Day Massacre”
§
§
How much money does a writer need?
§
§
Omissions
in the “Complete Works”
of Shakespeare
§
C.K. Williams on his father
§
Djelloul Marbrook’s
Far from
§
A Village Award for the Poetry Project
§
A discussion with Asa Boxer
§
Rawi Hage beats the big names
for the Impac Award
§
A profile of Punjabi poet, Surjit Patar
§
Remembering Faiz Ahmed Faiz
in
§
Talking with Bharathi Devi
§
Talking with Lauren Best
§
Talking with Gore Vidal
§
Reconsidering R.S. Thomas
§
Talking with Raymond McDaniel
§
James Reaney has died
§
Who cares about book reviews?
§
§
Some books you could buy today
but only at Christie’s
§
Mike Barnes, Mark Clement & Jenny Bryan
§
§
A profile of Billy Collins
§
More on “the world’s worst poet”
§
“The enduring influence of Edward Thomas”
§
Mary Karr on poems about fathers
§
§
A profile of Bucky Fuller
§
§
Variety teaches the
how to read a book
§
They serve other purposes too:
”Beautify with books”
§
Electronic records preservation
§
Hell for Adorno
§
Will the left ever learn
how to communicate
across generations?
§
How the ‘60s
energized the right
§
Staying smart in the new dark ages
§
Gerard Souzay
singing Duparc’s
”La invitation au voyage”
(MP3)
§
The latest in
sub-vertising
§
Blek le Rat
& the roots of Banksy
§
The street art of Seyed Alavi
§
How to control the art world
§
Kenneth Baker on
Frida Kahlo at SF MoMA
My review of the same show
in
§
Jess at Tibor de Nagy
§
§
A collection of essays
that shows
why it’s been a disaster
for 30 film critics
to quit or lose their jobs
in the last two years
Monday, June 16, 2008
This is only going to get me into trouble, but…
I was thinking about the debate, to call it that, between flarf & conceptual writing, and specifically thinking that such a debate was in many respects the healthiest single phenomenon I’ve seen regarding poetry in several decades, because it meant that there were two contending (contesting) approaches to the new, and that you can actually feel the discourse getting off the dime finally of what to do after langpo and just doing it. And that feels so long overdue, frankly.¹
Then I had the thought, what if this were the 1950s? There are some interesting parallels. Flarf & conceptual writing appear literally decades after the last collective literary tendency, not unlike how the New Americans showed up 20 years after the rise of Objectivism. And there are already different voices & formations, again as in the 1950s. So the question occurred to me: if these are the new 1950s, just who are flarf & conceptualism. And then suddenly it was as clear as sunlight in spring:
Flarf is Projective Verse
Conceptual Poetry is the
Flarf, precisely by its interest in “deliberately awful” writing, is amazingly writerly. Its first notable device, Google sculpting, is not unlike way Olson et al reconceived the use of the linebreak & its relationship to speech so as to completely redefine how everyone (not just the Projectivists) would think about poetry. In this scenario, Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson is For Love for its generation. K. Silem Mohammad’s Dear Head Nation is what – the first Maximus? I don’t want to carry this analogy too far – Nada Gordon & Katie Degentesh don’t have to fight over who gets to be Denise Levertov (both are considerably more interesting in the long run, anyway). It would be valuable to note the differences between these formations as well – flarf is far more democratic, small d, for one. One doesn’t see Gary Sullivan pulling a “
Conceptual Poetry, like the NY School, borrows importantly on concepts from the
So where are the new Beats? Is that what slam or def jam poetics are about? I doubt it, actually, given just how completely the key early Beats were into form & literary history, but the whole valorization of the street poet, especially by the numbskulls who confuse Bukowski for a beat, has a deeply anti-intellectual strain one finds at a lot of slams.
And what would be the new SF Renaissance? One senses that the New Brutalist phenomenon really has not borne a distinct literary sensibility (one doesn’t hear anyone speaking of the New Yipes series as the foundation for a new poetics, for example, tho maybe I’m just hard of hearing). Is there a distinct aesthetic perceptible in Bay Poetics? Or are Bay Poetics as much of a fiction as was the first SF Renaissance? Maybe what that scene needs is a Jack Spicer, but is there anyone just plain grumpy enough?
It will, I think, be obvious that such an analogy as this does a lot of violence to all those named, for which I apologize, sort of. Sort of, because I don’t think my gut feel here is wrong. What we are seeing is the resurrection of some very basic tendencies active within poetry for over half a century, seeing them coalescing once again into shapely coalitions we can actually name. From my perspective, old collectivist that I am, this can only be a good thing for moving poetry forward.
¹ From my perspective the great “tragedy” of langpo is that there were no other seriously contesting approaches to poetry. Actualism, which I’ve written about before, dissipated after the death-by-alcoholism of Darrell Gray, and the NY School, gen 3, was never interested in working out its relationship to other poetics, period. Everyone else was pursuing the isolato mode of individualism, still the most popular (and futile) option.
Labels: Conceptual poetics, Flarf, New American Poetry
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Videos, audio & papers from
Conceptual Poetry & Its Others
§
Retyping On the Road
to get inside
Kerouac’s head
§
Rare event in NY:
Joanne Kyger reads
Sunday at
§
§
A poem by Roy Fisher
§
Aaron Shurin’s King of Shadows
§
Founder of the Scottish Poetry Library,
Angus Calder has died
§
Readings from Ceptuetics Radio:
Rodrigo Toscano, Marie Buck, Barbara Cole, Rod Smith,
Bruce Andrews, Kenny Goldsmith, Anselm Berrigan,
Judith Goldman, Anne Tardos, Laura Elrick, more.
(maybe 9 hours of MP3s)
§
Talking with Frances Sjoberg
§
Videos of readings from
include Maggie O’Sullivan, Charles Bernstein, Sean Bonney
§
William Burroughs’ 3-CD set:
Real English Tea Made Here
§
Events this week at MoCA D
(
include a talk by Bill Berkson Thursday PM
followed immediately by a reading
in memory of Jim Gustafson
§
§
“Best online language tools
for word nerds”
§
7,000 poets apply
for
”Prince of Poets” competition
§
Books in Arabic & cultural isolation
Using the internet to pose choices
The Swedish Writers Union’s forthcoming congress
on literacy, digitalization & international dialog
§
§
A primer on langpo that thinks This
was a “NY magazine”
(issues 1 & 2 were
then later moved to
§
Kwame Dawes
on the poster girl
who was cut out of the picture
Using poetry to combat HIV/AIDS in
§
It’s like the game of telephone:
I say X, and you report it as X¹,
which then gets repeated as X²
& repeated again as X³,
which no longer
bears any resemblance to X
§
Should poets lament
the decline of literature
§
Is Kindle the iPod of ebooks?
§
The Google Book Search Bibliography
§
Encyclopedia Britannica goes Wiki
§
§
One decisive advantage old books
have over ebooks
§
Pataphysics & negative capability
§
Joan Houlihan on theories of meaning
§
What I’ve always suspected:
we’re older than DiRT
§
An epic purse
for scribes of verse
§
Talking with Jay Parini
§
The “torn poet,” Heinrich Heine
§
Frank Bidart, Gabriela Juaregui
& a Vietnamese anthology from Nguyen Do & Paul
reviewed by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
§
More
reject laureate’s post
§
Berwyn Moore’s literary compost
§
The writer as brand
§
Talking, by email, with B.T. Shaw
§
A book of poetry in English
by an Austrian-born American
published in Beirut
§
Frieda Hughes: how to write
§
A tribute to Tharabharathy
§
“Tenure-track professors
don’t have a place
in this new higher education universe”
On academic labor
(with a great comments screen)
§
Paul Piccone: public intellectual
§
The richest book prize in the world
§
Talking with the founders of
Rose Metal Press
§
Linking libraries
& the big trade publishers
ever closer together
§
The internet & its discontents
§
Are blogs good for books?
§
Is Google making you stupid?
§
The state of literary theory
Nostalgia for theory
is running high these days
Why we like the French
§
The rise of fan fiction & comix culture
§
One way to promote reading
§
Measuring productivity in print
§
How to destroy the LA Times
§
Carlin Romano dissing Baudrillard
§
New ways to promote books
§
The future of free speech
§
In
used to silence debate
§
Dangerous Ideas
& why
to the religious thinking
of atheists
§
Censorship in
§
Paul Chan’s 7 Lights
§
Japanese women thriving
in the Bay arts scene
§
Diebenkorn’s greatness
§
Mexican & Mexican-American artists
in the SF Bay Area
§
Wynn Kramarsky talks to Bill Corbett
§
A new home for the UC Art Museum
§
Licthenstein’s “Girls”
§
Judging the Barnes case
§
Sometimes Joe Goode
really is Joe Great
§
Tharp attacks dance
§
A review of this blog
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Sandy Baldwin, I Did the
Dawn-Michelle Baude, The Flying House,
Jeffrey Beam, The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems, 1969 – 2007, White Crane Books, Brooklyn 2008
Robert Bense, Readings in Ordinary Time, The Backwaters Press, Omaha 2007
Gregory Betts, with Matt Donovan & Hallie Siegel, Haikube, BookThug, Toronto 2006
Gregory Betts, If Language, BookThug, Toronto 2005
Gregory Betts, The Curse of Canada, above/ground press,
Gregory Betts, The Others Raisd in Me, Trainwreck Press, St. John’s, NL 2008
Cid Corman, The Next One Thousand Years, Longhouse,
Jen Currin, Hagiography, Coach House Press, Toronto 2008
Mark DeCarteret, (If This Is the) New World, March Street Press,
Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Collected Poems, Shearsman,
Geoffrey Gatza, Not So Fast Robespierre, Menendez Publishing,
C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style, Dalkey Archive,
Kenneth Goldsmith, Sports, Make Now, Los Angeles 2008
Noah Eli Gordon, A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, New Issues, Kalamazoo 2007
Ted Greenwald, 3, Cuneiform, Brooklyn 2008
Lars Gustafsson, A Time in Xanadu, translated from the Swedish by John Irons, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend, WA 2008
Michael S. Hennessey, Last Days in the Bomb Shelter (17 Narrower Poems), Satellite 7 Press, no location given, 2008
Yang Lian, Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections, translated from the Chinese by Brian Holton, Shearsman,
Tao Lin, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Melville House, Brooklyn 2008
Peter Manson, Between Cup and Lip,
D.S. Marriott, Hoodoo Voodoo, Shearsman Books,
John Martone, Box Turtle, Dogwood & Honeysuckle,
John Martone, Embryology, Dogwood & Honeysuckle,
Rebecca McClanahan, Deep Light: New and Selected Poems 1987 – 2007, Iris Press, Oak Ridge, TN 2007
Jonathan Williams, A Hornet’s Nest, compiled by Jeffrey Beam, Jargon Society & Green Finch Press, Highlands & Hillsborough, NC 2008
Robert Mittenthal, Value Unmapped, Nomados, Vancouver 2007
Pablo Neruda, The Hands of Day, translated from the Spanish by William O’Daly, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2008
Alison Pelegrin, Big Muddy River of Stars, University of Akron Press, Akron, OH 2007
Donald Revell, A Thief of Strings, Alice James Books,
Christine Rhein, Wild Flight,
Howard W. Robertson, The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi, The Backwaters Press, Omaha 2007
Fiona Robyn, Small Stones: A Year of Moments, Lulu, Hampshire UK 2008
Leonard Schwartz, The Library of Seven Readings, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2008
Jordan Scott, blert, Coach House Press, Toronto 2008
Ruth Stone, What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Mark Svenvold, Empire Burlesque,
R.M. Vaughan, Troubled, Coach House Press, Toronto 2008
Jay Wright, The Guide Signs: Book One and Book Two,
Books (Other)
Malcolm Boyd, A Prophet in His Own Land: A Malcolm Boyd Reader: Selected Writings, 1950-2007, White Crane Books, Brooklyn 2008
Journals
6x6, no. 15,
antennae 9,
Bird Dog, no. 9,
filling Station, 40, Calgary 2008. Includes Tom Wayman, Karen Mac Cormack, Kate Eichorn, George Bowering, Sina Queyras, Daisy Fried, Kate Greenstreet, Laura Sims, Carol Mirakove, Jena Osman, Nada Gordon, more.
filling Station, 41, Calgary 2008. Includes George Bowering, Michael Coolidge, Peter Jaeger, Andrew Klobucar, rob mclennan, Wanda O’Connor, Spencer Selby, Natalie Simpson.
Mimeo Mimeo, no. 1,
PRECIPICe, vol. 15, no. 1, St. Catherines, Ontario 2008. Includes Ahniko, D.A. Feinfield, Erin McKnight, Margaret Christakos, Nathalie Stephens, rob mclennan, bill bissett, more.
PRECIPICe, vol. 15, no. 2, St. Catherines, Ontario 2008. Includes Jay MillAr, Angela Long, Kate Eichorn, derek beaulieu, Camille Martin, Keith Inman, Wanda O’Connor, Richard Kostelanetz, more.
Primary Writing 41,
Versal 6,
Work, no. 4, no location given (
Other Media & Formats
Kenneth Goldsmith, A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation, no publisher, location or date listed, single sheet “12-page” brochure
Hassle no. 4,
John Martone, Untitled, no data given (including author’s name), but apparently 13 poems (depending on how one counts what might be division marks) from Dogwood & Honeysuckle,
Still catching up on all items received
since January 11.
Labels: Recently Received
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
”Carrie” has the arms of a weightlifter in Sex and the City
My guess is that – just speculatin’ here – I’m not exactly whom writer/director Michael Patrick King had in mind when he created the movie version of Sex and the City. But when a key member of my wife’s girl gang ended up seeing the film with her husband – which led to interesting discussions (the word “traitor” was used) – I ended up taking
The plot will be familiar to anyone who’s seen even a few of the shows – the gang of four (Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, a freelance writer whose topics are sex & love, Kim Cattrall as Samantha Jones, the ultimate cougar [a women whose preference is for younger men] and a longtime marketing exec, Cynthia Nixon as lawyer Miranda Hobbes & Kristin Davis as Charlotte York, a bubbly airhead whose money is strictly inherited) are all roughly ten years older than we saw them last. Two are married – Charlotte & Miranda – while the other two are in what have become longtime committed relationships, Samantha to a hunky young TV star who is shockingly nice & considerate to the partner who also serves as his manager, having moved with him to LA, and Carrie to financier Mr. Big (Law & Order’s Chris Noth). Over the course of the next 150 minutes all four women will be tested – Charlotte will get pregnant, Samantha will wonder if monogamy is all that great, Miranda leaves her marriage after her husband admits cheating (“just once”), and Carrie & Big decide to get married, then split after he gets cold feet literally at the steps to the event after Carrie has let their “little” wedding spiral out of control – full spread in Vogue, the wedding itself at the New York Public Library, the “no name” dress transforming into a Vivienne Westwood gown.
Ostensibly this film is about the choices these women make & how they resolve their issues. Yet given that three of the women are having major relationship difficulties, it’s curious that the one woman in a happy marriage, Charlotte, is the character least on view here, her husband, played by Evan Handler (whom West Wing fans will recognize as the acerbic campaign consultant with the shaved head), has almost no dialogue outside of one hospital scene after Charlotte delivers. Both Cynthia’s marriage & Carrie’s wedding collapse after the husband makes a critical mistake & Samantha finds her goody-two-shoes telly star isn’t enough to keep her from longing after her neighbor, Dante, who is wont to have trysts with different women every day (the curtains are always open) and who likes to shower on his back porch. Particularly after her beau has to work late on Valentine’s Day while Cattrall lies waiting for him dressed in nothing but homemade sushi (“places where wasabi has no right to go”).
So the men give the women an excuse to opt out, which three of them do, and they’re all there for each other (save for a curious subplot regarding Miranda and Carrie’s betrothed), then two of them learn little lessons about forgiveness & all’s well that end’s well. There’s another little tale-within-the-tale involving a personal assistant to Carrie, portrayed by Jennifer Hudson, who does seem to handle these film cameos with great élan. But that’s basically it for two-and-a-half hours.
So what takes so much time? First, it seems to be harder to introduce characters whom 98 percent of the audience already knows than it would have been on their own – the first 30 minutes of this film are really awkward & slow, so that it’s all uphill from there. Second, the main narrative arc – Big & Carrie finding “the perfect apartment” (it’s a penthouse) gives them time to contemplate making over the shell of a unit (the object of desire here is a closet) & Carrie has to decide what to take & what to pitch after 20 years in her previous place, which occasions much trying on of vintage wear. Then the run up to the wedding takes a great deal of time as every little item suddenly gets bigger, from the dress (from a “no name” dress to high art couture), to the location (the aforementioned NYPL), to the guest list – 75 to over 200. Somewhere in there is a trip to Fashion Week – I’m not kidding – and we get to see one collection its entirety. Not to mention the Vogue shoot. Finally there is the item that drew the loudest and most awed gasps from the audience I saw the film with in Plymouth Meeting, PA, the closest thing in this film to pure porn – the redesigned walk-in closet, larger than a lot of New York apartments.
This is a film all about surfaces & labels – indeed, it admits as much in the very first sentence of Carrie’s voiceover at the start of the film – “young women come to
Which is why, I suspect, that only one of the couples thinks about therapy – Miranda & her philandering ex-. If you have to choose between psychology & shoes, the Sex and the City franchise will opt always for the latter, even as it knows, in the pit of its guilty stomach, that the former really is more important. In a film that is all about surfaces, it’s difficult to create a tale of insight. Perhaps this is why the decision of Miranda & Steve to meet midway on the
It would be interesting actually – I mean this in a completely serious way – to revisit this quartet again in ten years & just maybe another time ten years after that, not unlike Michael Apted’s Up film series (the last episode of which was 49 Up after following the same real people since they were seven). At what moment, do you think, does life become about something more than shoes given who these people are? Will Samantha ever contract a serious STD? Or figure out that her lifestyle, the female equivalent of Joe Namath or Wilt Chamberlain, is itself terribly lonely? At what moment will 25-year-old men stop responding? Will Miranda ever get beyond being uptight? Perhaps as a judge? Will parenting turn
Seeing Sex and the City the same weekend that Hillary Clinton finally withdrew from the presidential race gave this film’s overlaps with feminist subtexts a sharper edge than they might have had some other time. This is, after all, a franchise that shows women as successful and superficial all at once, a contradiction it never fully owns or explores, tho it does seem from time to time to be conscious of its presence. Clinton’s candidacy was sunk more by her vote on Iraq & poor planning – ignoring the caucus states will live in infamy as Mark Penn’s dumbest move – than it was by the continual misogyny of cable news & others (try to imagine a black stereotype piece of merchandise equivalent to the Hillary Clinton nutcracker!) but that misogyny was a constant irritant & has, I think, rubbed a lot of people quite raw over the past several months. I’m not convinced, frankly, that Sex and the City itself is free of such misogyny, even as it markets itself as the ultimate female guilty pleasure.
You’re always aware that the hierarchies here are in place. Not just as in label versus no-label, but even among the actresses. Parker never disrobes (to the degree that in the final love-in-a-closet climax, the two are lying on the shag rug fully clothed afterwards, their hair perfectly in place), while it is Nixon who has the hot sex scene with everything out there for the audience to see. It’s Cattrall under all those
Monday, June 09, 2008
Talking with Tao Lin
§
A profile of Caroline Bergvall
§
Flarf vs. conceptualism –
the war begins
§
In
the “inventor” of conceptual poetry,
Dmitri Prigov
“Citizens Please Mind Yourselves”
§
More comments on
the Conceptual Poetry Symposium
from Charles Alexander
And even more from Vanessa Place
Vispo at the symposium
Tracie Morris on black code
Cole Swensen’s negative ekphrasis
Kenny G seeks to get a last word
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Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy
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Octogenarians rule
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Joan Houlihan dissing
Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life
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Poetry in the 1970s
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Talking with Liz Mariani
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Mary Oliver’s 12th collection
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In the
would mean progress
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When you conflate high modernism & the avant-garde
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Bringing together Chinese & British poetries
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Jack Foley on Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Lamantia & Hoffman together again
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LA Times obit for Paula Gunn Allen
UCLA Newsroom obit
Talking with Paula Gunn Allen
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This just in:
Guardian runs obit of Jonathan Williams
An appreciation from Mitzel in Fag Rag
Another by Norbert Blei in Poetry Dispatch
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The importance of Jeffrey Beam
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“the most successful publisher of poetry in history”
stops
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Dale Smith on lyric strategies
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Reading Beth Bachmann
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Remembering Josephine Jacobsen
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A profile of Maxine Kumin
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Youg Shu Hoong readings in
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The latest on Walcott vs. Naipaul
David Rieff on Naipaul
The first chapter of Naipaul’s latest
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A blog on the social function of diaries
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3 poems by Charles Bernstein
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What we hear in readings
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Mark Nowak asks the age-old question
about poetry in a post- (and anti-) literate society
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Elizabeth Bradfield’s Interpretive Work
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Nam Le & “ethnic lit”
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Major Jackson on voicemail poetics
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MP3s from the Twin Cities’ slamfest
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Re-envisioning Djuna Barnes’
Book of Repulsive Women
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Mary Karr on William Matthews
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The Edgar Lee Masters poetry reading
& tractor show
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Death of a bookstore on
Martha’s Vineyard
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Black Oak Books’
SF branch has closed
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One place where reading is rising – Spain
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A profile of Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
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The to-do over Wetlands
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Charles Murray’s attempt
to re-edit his past
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The fate of Ford Maddox Ford
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The writers’ strike cost $2.1B
& 37,000 jobs
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The poets of Greenville, Ohio
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Talking with Mary Lou Sanelli
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Talking with Charles Nevsimal
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Talking with William Jay Smith
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Nampa, Idaho
where ignorance is not only bliss
but policy
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Talking with Paul Siegell
Not quite a profile of Siegell
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Talking with Monica Youn (MP3)
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Rushdie’s
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A sonnet by Billy Collins
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In the end, we’re all the Grateful Dead
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Tracy Emin: My life in a column
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Barry Schwabsky on Jess
(subscription required)
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Master photographers at the Met
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Aussie cops drop Henson prosecution
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Something to look forward to
Labels: links
Saturday, June 07, 2008
My point in posting so many links on Thursday – there were 122 sections, many with multiple links – was not to overwhelm you, but to indicate rather just how much is now going on in poetry. These represent just five days' worth of activity on the web of news stories, noteworthy blog comments & interesting new web sites. And it’s not “National Poetry Month” anymore either, which artificially pumps up the number of events and stories in the “regular” media concerning the existence of poetry. I’m sure that I missed many other items, especially blog notes, as interesting as those I chose to include. Plus there were at least as many other stories from newspaper sites that I didn’t include, either promoting a slam next Friday night or that a tenth grader has won the local poetry contest or whatever. I do include such items on occasion, but only when an aspect of the story illuminates something or the promo piece contains a substantive profile of the headline poet.
My point is that the problems of poetry today have, at least in terms of what’s going on, very little to do with scarcity & much more to do with hyper-abundance, a condition that poetry’s traditional institutions – schools, the publishing industry, arts programs in general – institutions that, at best, represent overlapping concerns that sometimes touch upon poetry, are ill-equipped to handle.
Consider publishing. There were last year over 400,000 different titles published in the
One the other hand, in the late 1940s, there was one book title for every 18,750 Americans. Today there is a title for every 750 Americans. This suggests a far more crowded marketplace and it’s no wonder that the economics of book distribution have gone wonky. What percentage of this year’s 4,000 poetry titles are on the shelves of your look book merchant? In my case, if I look to the local Barnes & Noble superstore, it's less than one percent. If I go about twice as far, and in a direction I seldom travel, I can get to the Chester County Book Company, which can brag – legitimately – that it carries maybe three percent. Unfortunately, its proximity to
Somebody joked in the comments stream the other day that he was the only poet in
I don’t think it’s any harder today for a young poet to get published, it may even be simpler than it was when I was a pup. I do think it’s more difficult, considerably, for young poets to develop audiences sizeable enough to enable them to do such things as a serious national reading tour. That one book title for every 750 Americans – at a time when people are reading fewer books per person than ever before – suggests that the audience per book is going to be proportionately smaller than it was 20, 40, 60 years ago. The overall audience – what marketers like to call the total addressable market (TAM) – may be larger, even significantly so, but it’s just such a crowded marketplace.
This is where the institutions of poetry come into play. Art programs can fund readings that pay well enough to fund the travel of writers. Schools sometimes fund travel, especially to conferences. Awards generate attention & sometimes even a little distribution for their winners. Control the institutions & you can channel a lot of access. That’s why this year’s Lambda Awards are so disheartening. The Lambda Literary Foundation is, in its own words, “the country’s leading organization for LGBT literature,” the acronym standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender. This year’s winner, Henri Cole’s Blackbird and Wolf, was published by Farrar Straus Giroux, Macmillan’s literary brand. The former executive director of the Academy of American Poets back when it focused almost exclusively on School of Quietude poets, Cole is not only one of the most conservative of the finalists – the others were Rachel Zolf, Reginald Shepherd, C. Dale Young, Carol Potter & Dawn Lundy Martin – but the one finalist with a trade press book. Zolf is the only one of these poets who could truly be called post-avant. Some of the 45 poets whose books were entered but who did not make it even to the short list were Eileen Myles, Nicole Brossard, David Trinidad, Nathalie Stephens, Amy King, Ellen Bass, Edward Field, Forrest Hamer, Joan Larkin & Adrienne Rich. Overall, there were 35 books nominated by small presses, 7 by university presses, and 3 by the big trades. On the short list, one book was by a trade, two by university presses, and three by independent presses. In practice this meant that a small press book had a one-in-ten chance of getting onto the short list, while both trades & university presses had roughly one chance in three. Now these numbers are obviously too small to be statistically significant, but this is a scenario that we have all seen far too many times in the past.
Lambda doesn’t list its judges, but says on its web site that there were 80 of them – “writers, journalists, booksellers, librarians, professors.” The web site doesn’t indicate how many of each, or whether they subdivided the 21 categories amongst themselves, four judges for this category, five or that, or if they voted on them all as a group. Nor does the web site indicate how the short-list was developed. But it strikes me, looking at these lists, which get progressively less interesting as they proceed from long list to short to winner, that structurally this award is doing exactly what it was set up to accomplish – to promote gay-identified commercial projects within a distribution system for literature where all books are product. The award reinforces precisely the business model that enables GLBT bookstores in major metros, but it also is the model that has given us Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders. Lambda’s goal isn’t to change the model, merely to ensure that gay-identified merchandise has a little better representation in the marketplace. In that regard, Henri Cole could not have been a better choice.
So think of these as alternative logics – one a process of winnowing everything down to a single book from a trade press, and that long list of links here Thursday as a counterbalance intended to suggest that the world of poetry is not like this at all.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Aggression:
the conference blog
(many, many presentations & readings)
“Oh my god, it was like the best conference ever”
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John Ashbery & Robin Blaser
win the Griffin Prize
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“young emerging writers…don’t get a lot of exposure or coverage”
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Talking with Ish Klein
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A reading of Legend:
Andrews, Bernstein, DiPalma, Silliman
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The “patriarchs of flarf”
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Lora Moriarty on “Women of the 70s”
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Blazing tongues at Calabash
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“Poetry Question Stumps McCain”
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Michael McClure on the influence
of the Six Gallery reading
today
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Susan Howe’s Souls of the Labadie Tract
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Saving American languages
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Yusef Juma, Uzbeki poet & political prisoner
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A tribute to Ed Baker
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Roberto Bolaño:
The
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Henny Youngman with a Powerpoint:
Charles Bernstein at the
Conceptual Poetry Symposium (PPT)
Charles Alexander’s report on the Symposium
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Belinda Subraman’s
podcasts with poets
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Uncle Milty at 400
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Trying not to disturb Willie’s bones
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Close-reading (aloud)
Jerry Rothenberg’s “Paradise of Poets”
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Hanif Kureishi:
creative writing departments are
”the new mental hospitals”
Plus reviving liberal humanism
Martín Espada confesses
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“obscure figures like Lew Welch”
The Poetry Bookshop of Hay-on-Wye
The literary festival from hell
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A wonderful profile of Jonathan Williams
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The Jane Austen Hair Club
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Hemingway, the poet
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Derek Walcott doing the dozens
on V.S. Naipaul
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The “Indian Shakespeare”
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Emily Dickinson after 9/11
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David McFadden on why he hates prizes
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Frank Wilson retires
as book review editor of the Inky
& this is the thanks he gets (PDF)
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Ten years of editing a book review section
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Have e-books reached the tipping point?
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On-demand books fuel the increase
in overall titles
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A computer model of how
the brain makes meaning
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Talking with Eva Salzman
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Remembering Jason Shinder
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Shann Palmer pulls together links
in memory of George Garrett
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Talking with Gore Vidal
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A “new” Nabokov story from 1924
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Amy King’s Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country
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Check out IndieBound
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Jay Parini on Edwin Muir
Parini: why poetry matters
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The “lyrical correlative”:
talking with Katie Ford
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Elaine Feinstein’s
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William Stafford, false witness
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A profile of Gulzar
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The book collection that devoured my life
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The bookstore with a secret address
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Underground poet’s post at minimum wage?
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Major Jackson on poets & their birthdays
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Michael Cirelli’s Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard
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Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American
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Ron Padgett among some quietists
coming to
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Talking collaboration with
Leah Browning & Ira Joel Haber
“Under Construction” (PDF)
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A bibliography for famous Seamus
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Bill Knott pleads of FSG to
”Let my poems go!”
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What is a “failed poet”?
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“I read poetry about as often –
and with about as much enthusiasm –
as I jab sharp sticks into my eyes”
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Poetry: read it when you’re drunk
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Calling Mary Jo Salter
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The threat of reader-supplied content
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Microsoft’s exit
won’t slow book digitization
Libraries ponder the future
Research libraries opting for e-books
What else they spend money on
(registration may be required)
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Amazon bulking up
on e-book stock
& on Kindle
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The Digitalist:
Macmillan’s blog on all things e-
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Bye-bye backlist
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All Things Considered on
kill all bookstores
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Talking with David Foster Wallace
about his book on John McCain
(may require subscription)
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A profile of Wendy Cope
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What about Clive James?
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A novel of Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Talking with Timothy Gager
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Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader
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In the
of “age ranges” for kids’ books
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Talking with Roger Lloyd Pack
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Poet & painter in Luminous Mud
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Restoring the farm of
Byron Herbert Reece
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Edward Hirsch’s Special Orders
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Talking with Andrew Motion
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Plumly’s Keats
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The John Stuart Mill of Brazil
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Will blogging replace newspapers?
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Adorno, genius & nationalism
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How to control randomness
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Why economists should not rule the world
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Remembering U. Utah Phillips
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Talking with
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Trying to parody John Cage
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Talking with Billy Bragg
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Close-reading Amy Winehouse
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Two artists of the Harlem Renaissance
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Nan Goldin at the Tate Modern
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The problem with art criticism
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Street art at the Tate sans Banksy
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The fate of the Barnes
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Armed guards for Hirst’s lamb
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“the greatest painter you never heard of”
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Alton Kelly, a founder of the Family Dog,
has passed away
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008
A quick note. I’m getting 300 emails a day in my life, not including spam, maybe half related to my day job, but fully a third related to this blog. Many people send me poems they hope I will read & perhaps comment on, articles – I get a lot of links this way – cartoons, and questions from students. I have no secretarial support and a job that can easily run to 70 hours per week. I also have a family. I’m over a year behind in updating my blogroll, and have a growing list of requests related to that. If you sent me something and I haven’t responded, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t necessarily looked at it, or that I hated it. Often it does mean that I don’t have the time to give it the attention I can see it deserves.
Labels: Personal
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Brian Henry’s The Stripping Point is a book containing two longish poetic sequences. Yet I could imagine, say, David Markson or Carole Maso writing something not so terribly far from this and calling it a novel, or perhaps two novella – whatever the plural of that might be. It’s a fascinating, difficult, daring project and Henry, whose poetry I didn’t know before this turned up in the Poetry Society of America’s cartons of William Carlos Williams contestants (I’ve been aware of his work as critic & editor for some time), Henry basically pulls it off.
In an interview on Counterpath Press’ website, Henry describes the longer of the two sequences – “ More Dangerous than Dying” – as having its origins in a narrative sequence, or at least a sequence that he had written some ten years earlier, in which the poems were connected by their protagonists. When he picked up the sequence again in 2005, he revised the work, as I understand it, to meld characters, making the poem less of a narrative but actually more cohesive in that the perspective now is much more that of an interior subject, old friend “I”. I wonder if this isn’t also when he decided to balance each (or nearly each, the sole exception is the first poem¹) with an epigram placed on the facing page.
The epigrams are an interesting feature, and serve the work as a whole in more than a few ways. They comment on, or even against, the text of the poems themselves. And tho they’re not identified in the main body of the text (there is a four-page “sources” note at the poem’s end), they serve also to place the action of this scrambled narrative – it’s about a paper mill apparently, tho it could as easily be an auto plant or any sizeable manufacturing operation – within a larger community of voices. Henry’s choices are as interesting & reflect as much thought (and a lot of close reading) as every other part of this work: Louis Zukofsky & James Schuyler, both used three times, J.H. Prynne, Tom Clark, Donald Revell, Peter Gizzi, John Yau, Andrea Brady, Jean Donnelly, C.D. Wright (twice cited), but also James Merrill & Henri Cole. One might argue that this is almost a “third way” pantheon, that attempt to meld the history of post-avant poetics & that other of the most traditional poets in the language. What virtually all of these writers hold in common is a tendency – one sees this in Henry’s own writing – toward fine distinction, exact detail, a sense of the lushness of sound, tho the details presented often are as gritty as any Ben Shahn painting:
A top-down directive
requires a shuffling of cubicles
Farewell faithful smokestack!
Farewell tower of the freshly cut!
Air redolent of pulp and death!
Farewell farewell farewell!
Eleven rows of cars my new vista
their gleam and window glare
their histories laid bare to me
my Daily Journal of Heretofore Unknown Events
No one to ignore me
when I’m through
Across the page to the left, we read two lines from Zukofsky’s “A”-8: The company is constantly / experimenting on its own people. All of Henry’s quotations are in italics, albeit unidentified until the end note, so that they never quite seem on a par with the ongoing text. It makes the poem twice the length it might otherwise have been, but also works to make it feel almost airy & light. There is a lot of white space here, and it is all content.
The title poem works very differently. It lets you know this almost instantly, the first line being Decide on deciduous or remain ever green. Five lines later we find Vanishment in ravishment will produce a. At which point the stanza & page come to their conclusion. If there’s an antecedent for such verse, it’s in the work of Robert Duncan’s prior to The Opening of the Field, when
A blanket of blankets swarms the bed
Ten degrees and cropping six sheets to the wind
The door frame chipped and tawdry
Who succumbs to coming twice in an evening
Tram or bus tram or bus tram or bus tram
Or bus tram or bus tram or bus tram
Which version of the verb to come here is the pun, since both are in play? The terms tram and cropping hint at the fact that Henry was living in
The sum of all these inclinations won’t shock anyone, I suspect, who reads Verse, or who has read Henry’s earlier books. People like to point out that there is no such thing as “third way” poetics, that mythic midpoint betwixt the