Wednesday, July 30, 2008
I have been rereading William Carlos Williams'Spring & All in the 1970 Frontier Press edition. That edition reprints the original 1923 Contact Press edition published in a run of 300 copies and allowed to go out of print more or less immediately. The work has been available also since 1971 in the New Directions collection, Imaginations, a volume that crams together Williams' five most important prose works into what, to my eye, is a more or less unreadable crowd. That collection is so poorly done as to constitute an act of vandalism.
But if there is a single book that strikes me as representing the apotheosis of modernist writing, the single work that no other poet or writer could go “beyond” (tho Zukofsky’s “A”-22 & 23, which may also be the very last major text of the modernist movement, comes very close), Spring & All is it. Not coincidentally, it includes Williams’ best poetry and does so, for example, in a way that demonstrates how radically more a poem such as “Red Wheel Barrow” can be.
The book when it first came out did not have the impact on the world that it could have had with halfway decent distribution (equivalent, at least, to the self-publishing of Tender Buttons some 18 years earlier). The poems survived, and flourished, because Williams put them into other collections, most notably the Collected Earlier Poems. But the total book, which is where these poems make by far the most sense, stayed out of print until 1970 when Frontier Press brought out its edition just as New Directions was readying Imaginations.
For all I know, Harvey Brown’s Frontier Press might not have printed any more copies than did Contact Press. But through Serendipity Books in Berkeley, the forerunner to today’s Small Press Distribution, it reached a much wider range of readers very quickly. Suddenly the essays of Charles Olson no longer seemed so “out there” as the most significant act of theoretical/critical writing since Ezra Pound. And Williams, far from the charming local doc from
Of the works that separate out the New American Poetries of the 1950s, which include some work by New Americans, such as Creeley’s Pieces and Ashbery’s Three Poems, as well as Oppen’s Of Being Numerous & the late work of Zukofsky, Spring & All is one of those books that shows decisively just how far New American Poetry did NOT go. It had as much impact as any of the early books by Clark Coolidge, maybe as much as Grenier’s essays in the first issue of This.
But then it went out of print again, leaving only the crowded phone booth that is Imaginations for new readers interested in obtaining it. Of all the great books of that hinge moment in American poetry, this is the text that the fewest young readers have had a chance to see in its best possible format.
I had imagined that since any work published prior to 1923 was now in the public domain, that within a year or so, Spring & All would be as well. And this is a text I feel strongly enough about that I could imagine publishing it myself (not that I have the resources to do so). But now I realize that this impression was a misconception. The nature of the law is such that works published in 1923 or after, at least up until the 1970s, belong to a 95-years after publication rule. That would not put Spring & All into the public domain until 2018.
Which means that I can’t coax Chax or Green Integer or City Lights or whomever to do the right thing and bring this book back in the format that makes the greatest sense, as a small book that just about fits into your pocket. At least not for another decade.
And this makes me feel bereft.
Labels: WCW
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Fairfield Porter & John Ashbery
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Tracie Morris reading
at the
Conceptual Poetry & Its Others
conference (video)
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Walter Benjamin’s last
report on French lit
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Positions Colloquium:
6 days of poetry & panels
next month in
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“intensity may be
what matters most”
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Terror poems
are terrible poems
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Frank O’Hara on TV
in Emmy-nominated drama
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Charles Guenther has died
§
Doris Lessing’s “last book”
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The great gay hope
§
“what’s so interesting
about being a lout?”
§
The poetry of Radovan Karadzic
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Jon Goode
& the rise of spoken word
§
76 teams compete
in this year’s
National Slam
§
Is the net the enemy of reading?
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Even writers get it
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Larry McMurtry’s Books
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e-books
and the creation of a new art form
While cleaving us from the old
§
Pandora:
something
every national library
should have
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The 25 most modern
libraries in the world
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The Living Library
is coming to
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Emily Dickinson on stage
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Mimi White’s The Last Island
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Talking with Norbert Krapf
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Commemorating the death of
Theodore Roethke
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Mary Karr on Allen Grossman
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The poetry of Rowan Williams,
Archbishop of Canterbury
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Megawords goes storefront
§
Kyle Schlesinger
on artists’ books
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§
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A (very much) pre-feminist
claim for
the solidarity of poets
§
The communal solitude
of radio poetry
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The “how to” book on fiction
that barely mentions plot
“the great virtuoso of exceptionalism”
James Wood on Aleksandar Hemon
§
Forgetting Bernard Malamud
§
§
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Rhymes against the state
§
A profile of David Brooks
§
Calling for Clerihews
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Which great books did you forget to read?
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Books by Mick Imlah, Bernard O’Donoghue & Adam Foulds
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“how can five words about thoughts
NOT be a poem?”
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“America’s greatest living poet”
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The art of collecting stories
§
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Reassessing Raymond Williams
§
The professional integrity of Paul de Man
(ignoring, of course, a few other things)
§
Memoir of a literary forger
§
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Richard Diebenkorn & Carey Stanton
§
Bansky unmasked
§
The origin of the site visit
§
Mike Davis on the Democrats
§
The end of the Black American narrative?
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Monday, July 28, 2008
There are two books tucked into Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s Green and Gray, which came out last year from the
The outer volume might be characterized as a Zukofskian register: upper limit John Ashbery, lower limit Michael Palmer, two influences who never are very far from things here. Palmer goes so far as to contribute a blurb to the UC Press website for the book, and O’Brien, no surprise, has written critically on both. I don’t think of Palmer & Ashbery being that compatible within the same poetics – both are masters of indirection, but they use it to such different purposes. Palmer seems always to be seeking the chiseled edge of beauty, or a certain kind of beauty, where Ashbery on the other hand often feels far more content to be in the process, really in the process, which can sometimes feel like swimming beneath the surface of a sea composed of oatmeal, only prettier. Very few hard edges there.
But the Geoffrey G. O’Brien that fascinates me isn’t either of those gents, but this third one who comes through, as in the poem “
I saw the only man there is
walking home across a stage
Pushed to do so
Coming home from someplace else
as though inheriting
lights coming on over doors
Looking with the sense of having been
put there on purpose to survive
to be equal to a turning point
where something else was
where it was thick and now
the sense of no one following
Future perfect purple-brown
of twilight both ahead and behind
I saw the obvious houses
neither following nor stopping dead
the yield of a place in departure
curves of trees across the stage
The nature we were taught of
shadow of a magnet on the grass
some thing will soon disappear
the grass in the middle of its flight
from thought to neglect
returning again when needed
Doubtless to return again
I walked home across a stage
like weather beginning to
and here where myself in the distance
where apparitions and obligations
and a sense of being extended as
and in the depths of exchanges like changes
stories of the marketplace
audible worlds and their urns
I see a woman who’ll soon disappear
after having her part
in a rhythm like grasses
These longer works of a single stanza – just a hint there of the craft of Ted Greenwald &/or Tom Raworth – evolve & complete themselves in ways quite unlike anyone else. The poem maintains the same conceit – a person walking as tho on a stage, coming home toward sunset – throughout, although the narrative unity here seems not to be the point at all. Nor is it what is seen, exactly, “the only man,” “a woman who’ll soon disappear,” so much as it is how one sees, that internal framing that transforms the phenomenological into a kind of interior art, Future perfect purple-brown. Ashbery shows up here solely as a single twitch, that lapse into the first person plural. The poem is nearly as still as the wind, and what I come away with is an experience of reverie as complete as any I can think of in poetry.
O’Brien’s poems are, at their best, very quiet, even at times bleak. When they sometimes come across more chipper, the tone often feels borrowed, as in “A Word With a Poem Around It:”
Rhythm opposes any instant of itself
so too the tree that dumps itself
over a hedge lives in general time
beyond the concerns implied by sounds,
doesn’t resemble any instant of itself,
can no longer be recognized as
a set of interdependences there run together
to form a forward-facing bust of age.
So too nights induced to be serene
curve around the features, preparing them
to be once more deliberately overheard.
Once again work has been done while you sleep.
That last line slams the door shut as loudly as the signature theme on any segment of Law and Order. Yes, it’s Ashbery, and it doesn’t really contribute anything to the marvelous play between terminal -t and -cies that O’Brien deploys in the first sentence. This is a poem that could be read as tho each sentence were a separate work of art, the first of which is simply fabulous, the latter two almost character portraits, as if to see how compactly one might render such a silhouette of the New York School don. What’s the fewest number of words needed to give an impression of Ashbery that everyone would “get”?
But I don’t care if O’Brien can get it down to a single gesture, the way comics used to “do Groucho” just by flexing their eyebrows while pretending to tap ashes from an invisible cigar. That seems far less interesting than this brooding phenomenologist who’s a master already of the subdued tonal shift. O’Brien is the kind of writer, at his best, who makes you think that a booklength poem that did nothing other than describe the ocean surface off a winter coast could be the greatest thing in the world. And in his hands, it just might be.
Labels: Geoffrey G. O'Brien
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
Robert Grenier
reading the wall
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When typographers scribble
§
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This Sunday, reading
An Ear in Bartram’s Tree
in Bartram’s garden
§
Maxine Chernoff’s “World”
in English & Portuguese
§
Tom Raworth, who just turned 70,
talking with Charles Bernstein (MP3)
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Nancy Galbraith has died
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Charles Bernstein’s “Hero of the Local:
Robert Creeley & the Persistence of American Poetry”
(scroll down,
but if you read Spanish,
check out Antonio Ochoa’s
”Autobiografía de Robert Creeley”
on the same page)
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Some new recordings by yours truly
on the Academy of American Poets website:
“Albany” from The Alphabet
“Quindecagon,” also from The Alphabet
“A Love Song” by William Carlos Williams
“from ‘What,’” from The Alphabet
Another passage “from ‘What’”
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Robert Kelly reads Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan”
Susan Howe reads “The Nonconformist’s Memorial”
Clayton Eshleman reads César Vallejo’s “XIII”
Wanda Coleman reads “American Sonnet (35)”
Christian Bök reads Hugo Ball’s “Karawane”
Jena Osman reads “Mercury Rising (A Visualization”
Allen Ginsberg reads “Howl”
Anne Waldman reads “Stereo”
Richard Howard reads Browning’s “My Last Duchess”
§
Talking with Ravi Shankar
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Talking with Nick Piombino
§
Appreciating Zukofsky
from the other side of poetics
Robert Leiter on Zukofsky’s sound & sense
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53 new book reviews at Galatea Resurrects
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Jeffrey Beam on
(sound link good only until the weekend)
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Mark Truscott:
“interventions in poetry”
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A monument to Nicola Vaptsarov
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Talking with Blake Butler
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Some recognition for Penn Kemp
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Remembering William Studebaker
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Gloucester’s laureate announces his program
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Brian Turner on Fresh Air
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A profile of John McNamee
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Salman Rushdie, a novelist again
§
Talking with Ric Royer
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“We had to destroy the library
in order to save it”
§
Next season at the Folger:
Rae Armantrout &
a whole bunch o’ quietude
§
Talking with Francisco Aragon
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Peter Riley’s obit of Andrew Crozier
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“It is hard to turn away from running water”
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Opening ¶¶ for sale
§
From flarf to barf
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Kay Ryan, Alice Notley & tarot
An excellent profile of Kay Ryan
How much of any outsider is Ryan?
§
The Trial of Ezra Pound
(streaming audio available until the weekend)
§
Rilke & the question of self-identity
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Kevin Killian on Tom Devaney
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Is any Amis any good?
§
Poetry of the self-taught
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Message to Poetry:
more quietude please
(& quoting Zukofsky to justify it!)
§
The Dylan Thomas walking tour
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What’s in a name?
§
Tale of the Genji mss.
turns up after 68 years
§
Amazon’s impact on small publishers
§
How to speak Shakespeare
§
Sending in full professors
to teach comp.
§
The death of Harry Potter?
§
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A bookstore closes in Bakersfield
& in North Andover,
§
Newspapers are dying
The impact on “minority” journalists
§
Grim news
in the war on criticism
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Wikipedia goes into print
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French resistance to Google Book Search crumbling
§
In
How to store data digitally
for a century or more
§
Paul Hoover
on the decadence of the
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Did Google make Nicholas Carr stupid?
§
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Talking with Rem Koolhaas
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Everything is Godard
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Ebert says goodbye to TV
§
Blogging & theater criticism
§
Beckett’s novels on stage
Beckett’s voice
(a video!)
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Martin E.P. Seligman & the big Oops
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Thursday, July 24, 2008
The city of
Sweet God, it is lonely to be dead. Sweet Good, is there any God to worship? Sweet God, you stand in
Now Emily Dickinson is floating down the
This 1956 poem by Jack Spicer, which first appeared in The Poker, no. 5, in the winter of 2005, is taking on something of a promiscuous history. It appears in the current issue of The Massachusetts Review, devoted to GLBT writing, and is reprinted, with credit to the Mass Review, in the current edition of Harpers (subscription definitely required). Both, being
One can only imagine what Jack Spicer would have made of an appearance in Harpers, at least once he’d stopped puking his guts out. The cosmic joke at the heart of Book of Magazine Verse, the volume that was in press when Spicer died at the age of 40 in 1965, is that none of the magazines for which this diffident, supremely geo-centric author “wrote” his poems would ever have deigned to print them.
Not only did Spicer proleptically assume automatic rejection by The St. Louis Sporting News (now just The Sporting News) and Down Beat, two publications that didn’t (and still don’t) normally print poetry, but also by Ramparts, the SF-based Catholic theological journal that, in the 1960s, transformed itself into a radical antiwar publication (Mother Jones is a pretty direct descendent of Ramparts), Poetry – which by 1965 was regularly publishing Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley &, most pointedly from Spicer’s perspective, Robert Duncan – and The Nation (whose poetry editor at the time, Denise Levertov, Spicer despised as she did him¹), but even an emergent post-avant mimeo rag such as Vancouver’s Tish and the apparently non-existent Vancouver Festival.
Spicer was very protective of his outsider status. He would allow his mimeo magazine J to be distributed as far east as
In the past several months, tho, works by Spicer have turned up in both Poetry and The Nation, part of the run-up to the publication next month of My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, edited by Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi. Having seen the manuscript at different stages of editing, I can say without hesitation that this is one of the great books of the 20th and of the 21st centuries. Gizzi & Killian have done
a tremendous job.
Still, it is very strange to see Jack Spicer’s poetry turn up in places where it never would have done so in his own lifetime.²
§
Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer has a feature on the city’s Car Share program entitled – in 80-point type on the front of the Magazine section of the paper – “Drive, They Said.” Is this the largest print in which an allusion to Robert Creeley has ever appeared? And who at the Inky besides editor John Timpane & book reviewer Carlin Romano will even recognize it as such?
¹ Spicer appears to have seen her as a homophobic bluenose, an enemy of poetry. She seems to have seen him as a racist alcoholic. The fact that, in the mid-1960s, she was still something of an acolyte of Robert Duncan’s certainly did not help.
² I believe Spicer did send his poems both to Poetry and The Nation, both of which, true to his expectations, rejected them.
Labels: Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Kim Bridgford, In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records, Contemporary Poetry Review Press,
Catherine Savage Brosman, Range of Light,
Julie Carr, Equivocal, Alice James Books,
Maxine Chernoff, The Turning, Apogee Press, Berkeley 2008
Kelly Cherry, Hazard and Prospect,
Leigh Anne Couch, Houses Fly Away, Zone 3 Press,
Anne-Marie Cusac, Silkie, Many Mountains Moving Press, Longmont, CO 2007
Carol V. Davis, Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg,
Greg Delanty, The Ship of Birth,
Diana Der-Hovanessian, The Second Question, Sheep Meadow Press,
Brendan Galvin, Ocean Effects,
C.S. Giscombe, Prairie Style, Dalkey Archive,
Noah Eli Gordon, Acoustic Experience, Pavement Saw,
Jeff Gundy, Spoken Among the Trees,
Diane Jarvenpa, The Tender Wild Things, New Rivers Press,
Andrew Kozma, City of
J. Ladin, The Book of Anna, Sheep Meadow Press,
Joan Larkin, My Body, Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn 2007
Heller Levinson, Smelling Mary, Howling Dog Press, Berthoud, CO 2008
Karen Mac Cormack, Implexures, Chax Press & West House,
Herbert Woodward Martin, Inscribing My Name: Selected Poems: New, Used, and Repossessed, foreword by W.D. Snodgrass, Kent Sate University Press, Kent OH 2007
Steve McCaffery, Slightly Left of Thinking, Chax Press, Tucson 2008
Sandy McIntosh, Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death, Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, NY 2007
Constance Merritt, Blessings and Inclemencies,
Richard Miles, Boat of
Kate Northrop, Things are Disappearing Here, Persea Books, New York 2007
Sue Owen, The Devil’s Cookbook, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 2007
Hermine Pinson, Dolores is Blue / Dolores is Blues, Sheep Meadow Press,
David Ray, When, Howling Dog Press, Berthoud, CO 2007
William Reichard, This Brightness, Mid-List Press, Minneapolis 2007
Leonard Schwartz, A Message Back and Other Furors, Chax Press, Tucson 2008
Priscilla Sneff, O Woolly City,
Kathleen Spivak, Moments of Past Happiness, Earthwinds Editions, Chelsea, MA 2007
Elizabeth Treadwell, wardolly, Chax Press, Tucson 2008
Barbara Louise Ungar, The Origin of the Milky Way, Gival Press,
John Tritica, Sound Remains, Chax Press, Tucson 2008
Anca Vlasopolos, Penguins in a Warming World, Ragged Sky, Princeton 2007
Sam Witt, Sunflower Brother,
C. Dale Young, The Second Person,
Elizabeth Marie Young, Sonnets, Omahrahu, New York 2008
Journals
Sal Mimeo, no. 8, Spring 2008,
Other Media & Formats
Vincent Quatroche, Matador from Another Planet, Sleeping Giant Records, Fredonia 2004. Spoken word CD with soft-jazz ambient music background.
Vincent Quatroche, In Dreamthink, Sleeping Giant Records, Fredonia 2006. Spoken word CD with soft-jazz ambient music background.
Labels: Recently Received
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
The Dark Knight is a very good motion picture, a superb one in many respects. But count me out of any attempts to raise this film to the level, say, of The Godfather or even Lord of the Rings. Or, for that matter, the last film in which Heath Ledger & Christian Bale both appeared, the Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. There is something missing right at the core of this event.
I’m tempted to say that what’s absent is emotion. Where you really notice it is in the remarkably sanitized & muted demise of one of the key characters. It’s entirely off-screen as the heroes of this film rush to rescue another key character. There’s plenty of explosions, but it’s difficult to tell which are the ones that almost get our rescued one & which perhaps claimed the other. Everyone appears affected by the death, but not really. Batman is confused. The film’s other primary protagonist responds counter-intuitively, to say the least. Out of grief, that one decides to stand for everything the late one opposed. What’s wrong with that picture?
But to call this emotion is to confuse the effect with its cause, the less-than-perfect narrative skills of Christopher Nolan. The key to The Dark Knight, I fear, is its PG-13 rating. There are an enormous number of explosions, lots of shooting, more than a few key deaths, but very little blood or gore. The very worst of it is some stitching Bruce Wayne does to his own bicep fairly early in the going. The Joker, tho he talks a good knife, never actually deploys it onscreen. His own scars, which at one point he suggests are the consequence of child abuse, are covered by paint, coming across most of the time as a blur. His very best moment is his most femme, waltzing out of a hospital in a nurse’s uniform & red wig as the building implodes behind him.
The alleged gore that greets Two-Face is right out of The Terminator¹ and borders on the cartoon gore of Indy Jones or Ghostbusters, tho this is definitely Aaron Eckhart’s breakout motion picture. But one of the reasons he stands out is one of the deeper problems of the picture. Against Heath Ledger’s decidedly creepy & very hot adaptation of the Joker, Nolan has made the decision to keep everyone else, save Meister Eckhart, very very cool. The blue flame explosion that occurs in advance of the title at the beginning has it exactly right. Morgan Freeman is hardly used at all, Gary Oldman, again playing against type as the good cop, has exactly one meaty scene & that on his back², Michael Cane plays Bruce Wayne’s manservant in a much lower key than he did in Batman Begins, and Christian – “It hurts to smile” – Bale, the latest in the Robert Mitchum school of under-emoting, tones it down even further, if possible.
Eckhart tho, because he has the most complex role in the film, is allowed to ramp it up a little. And tho he’s not Laurence Olivier, nor even Heath Ledger, he does a credible job. He & Ledger are the two bright lights in this otherwise very dark & muted landscape.
Consider, by way of contrast, how the death of Sonny, played by James Caan, impacts The Godfather, how it transform every character, from Brando to Pacino all the way to John Cazale’s pathetic Fredo. This is exactly what we’re supposed to be feeling as Bruce Wayne tries to figure out whether or not to go on & as Two-Face does his flip into evil. But I didn’t feel it at all. Perhaps because you (I) never buy these characters as in any way people. Oldman & the one who gets blown up are really the only two exceptions.
What replaces characterization, the human element, is pacing. This is the strangest aspect of The Dark Knight . It keeps basically to the same rhythm from beginning to end. Whether it’s a chase scene under the el (with the Joker alternately driving a garbage truck & in the back of a moving van with rocket-propelled grenades – how does he do that?), or a swank fundraiser with the hoi polloi for the new DA, this film never lingers. Consider, again by way of contrast, how pacing was used in the latest Bond flick, Casino Royale, going from the hyperventilating opening chase to the feels-like-real-time game of poker. The Dark Knight feels more like a sluggish version of a Bourne film, the same incessant drift from scene to scene, but without the constant threat of capture.
So it just doesn’t quite work, at least for me. I should note that I think the balance between cool Christian Bale & hot, agitated, psycho-giggling Heath Ledger does. They counter one another quite effectively & their scenes together improve throughout the course of the film. When the Joker tells Batman he’ll never kill him because “you complete me,” you realize just what a great film this could have been. Ledger is the most memorable villain since Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, all of nine months ago, tho both pale against Anthony Hopkins’ original performance as Hannibal Lecter. Will Ledger get a supporting actor nomination from the Academy? Almost certainly. Will he win? Only against a very weak field.
¹ And if you forgot that, seeing an advance preview for Terminator Salvation, due out next year, starring not Ahnold the Govenator, but none other than Christian Bale (!!), ahead of Dark Knight, brings it all right back.
² Oldman’s amphetamine-fueled bad cop in The Professional (a.k.a. Leon) shows just how over-the-top he can go, much hotter & wilder than Ledger. One of the genuinely great character actors of our time, Oldman’s muted, even slack performance here clearly is a choice.
Labels: Film
Monday, July 21, 2008
Filreis & Bernstein in the PENNsound studio – photo by Mark Stehle
Charles Bernstein on Al Filreis’
Counter-Revolution of the Word:
The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960
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“an aversion to cooperative endeavors”
Edward Byrne on Kay Ryan
Adam Kirsch on Ryan
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Armantrout on Armantrout
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David Shapiro on the faux FOH controversy
Kent Johnson’s “reply”
Kirby Olson has an opinion
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The poetry collection with a six figure advance
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Patrick Oguejiofor’s Drums of Curfew
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Marjorie Perloff on an odd Mayakovsky medley
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Chingiz Aitmatov has died
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John Ashbery: readings from the 1960s & ‘70s
(also ‘80s, ‘90s & ‘00s)
Ashbery, talking for an hour with Al Filreis (MP3)
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Cognitive mapping, poetry & cluster bombs
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The relentlessness of Clayton Eshleman
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Sam Beckett in
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Reb Livingston’s Dream Poet Anthology
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The most redundant site on the web
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Yang Yi wins Akutagawa Prize
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Rabbit Light Movies:
a video zine of poets reading
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Karlo Mila’s A Well-Written Body
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The man who collects
Governor-General Award winners
§
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Larry McMurtry’s Books
§
a print-on-demand program
§
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Jerry Rothenberg on Jean Pierre Faye
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Did Robert Browning murder Elizabeth Barrett?
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Who was Homer?
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A profile of J.M. Barrie
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“Library funding support
is only marginally related
to library visitation”
§
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“the plums
that were
in the icebox”
& so much more
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Is this the Shakespeare thief?
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Wendy Cope
writes of & for the BBC
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Talking with Tobias Wolff
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Noel Hodgson’s Dancing over Cheviot
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Rushdie claims really stupid record
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Talking with Doug Manson
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A promo piece for poetry
for
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An unexpurgated First Circle at last
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Tess Taylor on Kathleen Jamie
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Talking with Mary Jo Salter
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A short profile of Jordie Albiston
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Ian Blake & a benign ghost
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A Borders closes in upstate NY
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Poetry CDs an alternative to talk radio
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The poetry of Carlos Rivera
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Edward Thomas’ Annotated Collected Poems
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Mary Karr on Charlie Simic
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25 years of interactive fiction
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Leslie Anne Mcilroy, live & with music
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War of the Worlds – the cover
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Talking with Douglas McLennan
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Christopher Hitchens, Damien Hirst
& the art of the stunt
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Steve Lopez on the violin music of
Nathaniel Ayers
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More Gonzo
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Deconstructing
the right’s attack on theory
§
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40 years after
the Prague Spring
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The
& the narrative of decline
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The problem of comments stream bullies
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Making Richard Rorty
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The nerd / geek divide
Friday, July 18, 2008
Kay Ryan has been named Poet Laureate of the
Still, Ryan could be called a genuine outsider. She doesn’t teach in
But if Ryan is a cipher to much of the poetry scene even in her own community, the reality is that she’s not a bad writer. Nor is she a typical quietist in her use of short forms & short lines. And the real test of her tenure won’t be whether or not she is worthy of the award – there are hundreds of poets, post-avant & quietist alike, with similar credentials. The test will be what she does with the position.
The task of the successful laureate presumably is to improve the conditions for poetry during his/her tenure in the office. In this regard, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Ted Kooser & Donald Hall were all successful, because they used the bully pulpit of the office to advocate for verse itself. Kooser may have also used the post to take some potshots at those who don’t confuse sentimental mawkishness for “plain speech,” but on the whole his American Life in Poetry newspaper feature, the main consequence of his term as PLOTUS, is a fair argument for what he likes, and it at least gets the idea of poetry out to audiences who might well have no other serendipitous access to the form.
By comparison, Louise Glück did a few interviews at the start of her term & otherwise disappeared into the night. Still, even a bump on a log could have made a more positive contribution to the genre than the office’s most recent occupant, the aforementioned Mr. Simic. He attacked what he didn’t like – big books, complexity, the New Americans – & let it go at that. Even the three years the post went vacant after Williams turned it down could not match Simic in diminishing its prestige & importance. The most polite thing that can be said about Simic is that he didn’t understand the position or the opportunity he had been given.
This places Ryan into an interesting situation. Expectations could hardly be lowered any further. The task before her is not simply to find new and useful ways to promote the diversity of American poetries, but to rehabilitate the office of PLOTUS itself. She can begin by presuming that she represents all of the poets & poetries of the nation, not just the same little clique that’s clung to the job since 1937.
¹
Labels: PLOTUS
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Christopher Arigo, In the Archives, Omnidawn,
Julianna Baggott, Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees, Pleiades Press, Warrensburg, MO & Rock Hill, SC
Carlos Blackburn, The Selected Poems of Hamster, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2008
Blesilda I.R. Carmona, A Novice in Altruism and Other Poems, Watermark Press,
Jack Cooper, Across My Silence, World Audience, New York 2007
Patrick Durgin & Jen Hofer, The Route, Atelos, Berkeley 2008
Craig Dworkin, Parse, Atelos, Berkeley 2008
Amy England, Victory and Her Opposites: A Guide, st1:City>
Susan Firer, Milwaukee Does Strange Things To People: New and Selected Poems, 1979 – 2007, The Backwaters Press, Omaha 2007
Keith Flynn, The Golden Ratio, Iris Press,
Terri Ford, Hams Beneath the Firmament,
Noah Falk, Measuring Tape for the
William Fuller, Three Replies, Barque, London 2008
John Gallaher, The Little Book of Guesses,
Kawita Kandpal, Folding A River, Marick Press,
Janet P. Kirchheimer, How to Spot One of Us, CLAL – The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, New York 2007
John Martone, Ordinary Fool, Dogwood & Honeysuckle,
Elizabeth Seydel Morgan, Without a Philosophy,
Paulann Petersen, Kindle, Mountains and Rivers Press,
Greg Rappleye, Figured Dark,
Rebecca Seiferle, Wild Tongue,
Nathalie Stephens, The Sorrow and the Fast of It, Nightboat Books,
Larissa Szporluk, Embryos & Idiots,
Susan Tichy, Bone Pagoda, Ahsahta Press, Boise 2007
Kyle Torke, Still in Soil, World Audience,
Lee Upton, Undid in the Land of Undone, New Issues Press, Kalamazoo 2007
Nance Van Winckel, No Starling,
Anne Waldman, Red Noir, Farfalla Press / McMillan & Parrish, Brooklyn 2008
Dana Ward, Goodnight Voice, House Press, Berkeley 2008
Rachel Zucker, The Bad Wife Handbook, Wesleyan,
Books (Other)
Joel Bettridge & Eric Murphy Selinger, editors, Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, National Poetry Foundation, Orono 2008. Includes essays by Mark Scroggins, Patrick Pritchett, Norman Finkelstein, Edward Foster, Donald Revell, Barbara Cole, Susan M. Schultz, Michael Basinski, Jonathan Brannen, Marjorie Perloff, Jena Osman, Nicholas Lawrence, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jonathan Skinner, Burt Kimmelman, Gregg Biglieri, Richard Deming, Graham Foust, Paul Naylor, Devin Johnston, and more.
Heimito von Doderer, Divertimenti and Variations, translated by Vincent Kling, Counterpath Press, Denver 2008
Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Absolutely
Journals
House Organ, No. 63, Summer 2008,
Matrix, issue 80, Summer 2008,
Parmentier, vol. 17, no. 2, June 2008,
Work, no. 6, no date listed,
Zen Monster, vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 2008,
Other Media & Formats
Robert Anbian, I Not I, Edgetone Records, El Cerrito 2008 (Double-CD)
Bobby Byrd & Joe Hayes, Bobby Byrd and Joe Hayes at the Outpost, Vox Audio,
Robin Demers, Ghost of light / Marcus Merritt, memory preserved, House Press, Berkeley 2008. Two-sided cardstock broadside, 5.5”x8.5”
Gene Frumkin, Gene Frumkin Reads, Vox Audio,
Larry Goodell, Larry Goodell Live in Placitas, Vox Audio,
Burt Hatlen, New Poems, Vox Audio,
Mary Rising Higgins, George Kalamaras, Mary Ann Cain, Gene Frumkin,
Mary Rising Higgins, Mary Rising Higgins, Vox Audio,
Joseph Massey, At Once, The Cultural Society, Minneapolis 2008. Cardstock broadside. 4.5” x 10”
Margaret Randall, Margaret Randall Reads, Vox Audio,
Michael Rothenberg & David Meltzer, Michael Rothenberg and David Meltzer at the Outpost, Vox Audio,
Cedar Sigo After DREAM, artwork by John Huston. House Press, Berkeley 2008. Two-sided cardstock broadside, 5.5”x8.5”
Bill Sylvester, Bill Sylvester Reads, Vox Audio,
Still catching up on all items received
since January 11.
Labels: Recently Received
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Ben Friedlander
on flarf, SloPo & slow food
from his vantage in
§
The role of the muse in flarf
§
Juliana Spahr & Eliot Weinberger’s
”post-9/11 poetics”
§
Rachel Blau DuPlessis & William Watkin
discuss Draft 33: Deixis
§
Many recordings of Bill Griffiths
§
Lyn Hejinian & Giorgio Agamben
§
Daisy Fried & Carl Meinhardt
on
§
UC Berkeley obit for Alfred Arteaga
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J.H. Prynne
reading John Wieners’ “Cocaine”
§
William Studebaker
is missing & presumed drowned
§
Clayton Eshleman talking with
Paul Hoover & Maxine Chernoff
§
Seth Abramson on
the state of the small press
And part 2
§
Eleven poems read by Lee Harwood
§
David Vincenti
on classification in poetry
§
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Paul Hoover on Newlipo
§
Andrea Brady’s page
at Archive of the Now
§
Charles Bernstein:
Every True Religion is Bound to Fail
§
Geoff Nunberg on language & technology
§
The Pessoa-Crowley correspondence
is for sale
Some poems by Pessoa
in the International Herald Tribune
§
Howard Junker on “Aunt Lute’s Women”
§
When an editor take a best-seller with him
§
Rigoberto Gonzáles on Gabriela Juaregui
§
Outrage & a resignation
over Gloucester’s new laureate
§
Tracking George Colburn
§
§
A dozen MP3s of poems by Patricia Farrell
§
Jen Hadfield, Peter Manson & Mervyn Peake
§
Selima Hill’s Gloria: Selected Poems
§
§
Performing Shakespeare’s Sonnets
§
Recordings & resources
for Kaia Sand
§
The logic of fighting
”cultural decay”
§
Alan Shapiro’s Old War
§
“Is it curtains for critics?”
(sans photos)
The critics
§
The return of British avant-garde fiction
§
§
Talking with Edward Hirsch
§
Are ereaders the iPod of books?
§
An arrest at last in the theft of
”the most important printed book
in the English language”
§
A reading in Mangalore
§
Elizabeth Hardwick,
with & without Robert Lowell
§
§
Appropriation, quotation, ©, theft
§
Wordsworth “Daffodil” estate for sale
§
§
A David von Schlegell timeline
§
§
§
§
Playing David Byrne’s building
§
Wright’s Buffalo masterpiece
shines again
§
The reconstruction of Seymour Papert
§
The next renaissance
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Warning: spoilers ahead. If you plan to see Hancock anytime soon, you probably don’t want to read this until you have done so.
Hancock is a mess. I can’t recall the last time I saw a major sci-fi flick with this many narrative holes – narrative canyons, really. Example: one week after a botched bank robbery that cost him his hand, the mastermind of the job is already in prison, outfitted with a prosthetic hook & teamed up with the two cons who most dislike our film’s eponymous hero. We learn that this minor mastermind (groomed to look like the replicant in Bladerunner who failed his psych test) is, by training, a psychology professor who originally put together a gang of grad students. Absolutely nothing ever comes of this seemingly significant & interesting detail, even as the trio break out of
Example: Our hero “gives himself up” to the law for the incidental damage he causes to buildings, trains, freeways and goes off to jail, and goes to court accompanied not by his lawyer, but by his PR guy. Yeah, I know: adding an extra character and giving him/her lines means having to pay them. But what’s wrong with this picture?
Example: Aforementioned PR guy, Ray Embry (played by Jason Bateman, a bland everyman for Will Smith & Charlize Theron to bounce off of), makes Hancock a superhero uniform to upgrade the street wino image Will Smith’s character has heretofore cultivated. It’s bulletproof so long as the character inside it is. How does it do that? Where did Embry come up with this? It’s a detail, but hey, that’s where the devil is in this production.
Example: Embry is trying to get his PR career off the ground. His wife appears to have no employment. They live in what has to be a multi-million dollar home in LA. Nice trick if you can do it.
Example: In a key scene at the hospital, Embry comes up with an ax to rescue Hancock from the one-handed psych prof. Not just one of those dainty little fireman’s hatchets you might find behind glass and under the word “Emergency.” A big, long-handled lumberjack ax. Nice to have when you need it, but where exactly do they keep these in your hospital?
Oh, and did I mention yet that there’s a second superhero in this plot, one who never rescues any of the citizens from scofflaws and whose only goal in life appears to be making meatballs on Thursday? And watching crime stories on local news. Why & what’s that about? It’s not like these are tossed-off details such as the bank robber’s degree in psych or the fact that Attila the Hun was totally cross-eyed – it’s a major element of the story but it’s never explored. In many ways, this is the most interesting character in the film. And an enormous narrative opportunity not taken.
I thought, while sitting there wondering if this would all make sense, well, sometimes the details you’re given in the original material – such as a graphic novel – create these problems themselves (just watch them try to shoehorn all the extraneous detail into The Watchmen if & when that classic ever makes it to the screen). But it turns out that Hancock isn’t an adaptation. TV writer Vincent Ngo created an original script – then called Tonight, He Comes – that was then rewritten by X-Files veteran Vince Gilligan, who added, for example, the second superhero.
Then there is the biggest gap of all in this film – its rampant homophobia. This occurs in at least four separate places and ways in the movie. The PR guy shows Hancock a series of comic book covers to get him into the idea of a superhero uniform and asks Will Smith what these remind him of. Every response Hancock gives ends on the noun homo. It’s in character & played for laughs & I probably wouldn’t be bothered by it if it weren’t for the other two incidents. Incident two involves a prison fight that is resolved by what most state penal codes would refer to as sodomy by an object (a human head). It’s played for laughs also, even as it propels two of the major baddies toward the film’s final conflict. When asked how it felt later, the psych prof has to prod the victim to “use his words.” In short, this biker type is the victim of a rape conducted by Hancock. The film may remind us of this, but it never suggests that Hancock’s actions are in any major way reprehensible. The third instance is the bully who is terrorizing the Embry’s kid. Why make him a longhair francophone whose name Michel rhymes with the female name Michelle? How does anyone with that profile become the leader of a gang, even in the white upper-class enclaves of LA? What is that about? Finally, there is the film’s favorite epithet: asshole. From beginning to end, that word is never very far from the surface.
Have I mentioned that I think this film is worth seeing? It is, if you can get beyond the homophobia, the narrative chasms & more gore than is usual in the sanitized violence of superhero films. The principle reasons are the acting of Charlize Theron, who is tremendous even if her character is an opportunity the film wastes, and Will Smith, who does a better-than-good job with a range of complex emotions here and is far less loveable than in any of his previous films. (If you thought George Clooney was unloveable in Michael Clayton, you have yet to see Will Smith blow his nose.) When ten-year-olds call Smith an asshole, it has a certain ring of accuracy.
I haven’t seen Theron in Ǽon Flux, her previous sci-fi effort, nor in The Legend of Bagger Vance, her earlier effort with Smith. So this is a side of her that was new to me – and she completely pulls it off. Not unlike Naomi Watts in King Kong, Theron tends to own every scene in which she plays, regardless of who else is on screen nor how strong they’re supposed to be. This is not always a plus. One of the hardest parts of the film to believe is why this woman would have taken up would have taken on Embry, a puppy-dog PR tyro who was then just a widower with an infant. At one point, Embry asks her about her past – you would have thought a married couple might have had that discussion awhile ago – but her back story is, as I’ve said, the
This is not an unenjoyable bit of summer fluff. The premise – that being a superhero brings with it a major psychic toll is a theme that’s been around for some time (viz The Watchmen or The Dark Knight) and, since 9/11, it’s become rampant at the Cineplex. The idea of the one-of-kind being also being alcoholic is as old, at least, as The Man Who Fell to Earth. Hancock brings together & expands the range of these genres. And brings with it some first-rate acting that is just a pleasure to watch. But if you try to make this film work in your head, it’ll just drive you crazy.
Labels: Film
Monday, July 14, 2008
Direct by radio from Mars:
11 new poems & letters by Jack Spicer
(intro by Kevin Killian & Peter Gizzi)
here, here, here, here, here, here & here
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Barrett Watten on the Poetry of the 1970s,
the Orono conference &
the structures of history
§
Reviews by Alan Davies, of
Fritz Peters’ Boyhood with Gurdjieff,
Carla Harryman’s Open Box,
Kristin Prevallet’s Shadow Evidence Intelligence,
Leslie Scalapino’s “Can’t” is “Night”
& my own The Age of Huts (compleat)
§
Sameness vs. Otherness in American poetry:
Robert Archambeau does his Rodney King speech
in the face of history
Archambeau on Bad Ron vs. Good Ron
§
“The pleasure of this book
is that it’s a slow read”
§
§
al purdy’s home is for sale
§
Lyn Hejinian’s Saga / Circus
is about to appear
§
Is Elizabeth Bishop
a Canadian poet?
§
Tagore’s voice
§
Egyptian star Angham
appears on Prince of Poets
§
Sitting with Fire
(Tassajara fire blog)
The Henry Miller Library’s
§
Flood update on Iowa museums
§
Haki Madhubuti on meeting Gwendolyn Brooks
§
Mike Begnal on the Selected Zukofsky
§
L’affaire faux FOH
Andrew Epstein’s letter on
”Finding ‘Finding Leroi a Lawyer’”
Tony Towle’s letter
Andrew Epstein’s reply to Tony Towle
Bill Berkson’s letter
Kent Johnson’s “true account”
Further thoughts by Epstein & John Latta
§
Tim Atkins on Araki in the
§
Steve Dalachinsky,
jazz poet for the 21st century
§
Contemporary poetry:
schizophrenia vs. aphasia
§
In its first 32 issues,
Shampoo
has had 717 contributors
§
Gary Sullivan on art & consumption
§
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Talking with
In
§
Joe Hutchison
takes exception to my note
of last Saturday
§
Marjorie Perloff on
the clichés of Auggie Kleinzahler
§
Vincent Ferrini’s last works
§
Literary Tats, I kid you not
§
Geoffrey Gatza reading on the rooftop
(with video)
§
The MFA weblog
announces the forthcoming
program at UCSD
§
A South African blog
with a sharp focus
on William Carlos Williams
§
Preparing for a poetry fest
in Jerusalem
§
How is the net changing style?
§
David Orr on poetry & politics
§
Karen Houle’s During
§
A critical biography of Ruth Pitter
§
Copyediting jobs are the latest
to be outsourced to
§
In the culture wars,
do facts matter?
§
An article on poetry & cities
that’s reasonably fact free
§
National Review reporter
attends poetry reading
§
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Timothy Kelly’s The Extemities
Not to be confused with
Rae Armantrout’s classic collection
§
Alan Wearne
on the cultural scene
in
§
Edward Byrnes lists his blog’s
12 most popular reviews
§
Robert Glück:
I Boombox
§
Scroll down here
to read about
the pigeon poetry championship
in
§
§
A profile of Guyanese novelist
Edgar Austen Mittelholzer
(& part 2)
Before Naipul & Walcott
there was Mittelholzer
§
A three-hour video conversation with Katha Pollitt
§
§
Funny dude: Salman Rushdie
The key: literary tourism
§
Shakespeare first folio recovered
§
Eleanor Wilner on Howard Nemerov
§
§
§
“the greatest American novel … about marriage”
§
Marjorie Perloff on Guy Davenport
§
Keeping literature alive in Baghdad
§
§
§
§
John Donlan & Louise Bernice Halfe
§
In
books & borders
§
Homer is where the heart is
§
“The girl with colitis goes by”
§
“critics resent poets who are understandable”
§
§
Talking with Tom Daley
§
Talking, for 3 hours, with Alice Walker
§
A good report on
the Warwick Writers’ Circle
§
Chick Lit cover trend: headless women
§
“the short and brutal careers”
in the humanities today
§
Jacob Bennett on low-residency MFAs
§
§
Are books on the brink?
§
Today’s death-of-a-bookstore piece
is more like suspended animation
§
Can newspapers survive?
§
The book business bible on
§
de Chirico and poetry
§
Leah Garchik, Paule Anglim & Michael McClure on Bruce Conner
Kenneth Baker on Conner’s work & wit
LA Times obit for Bruce Conner
§
Dutch cartoonist arrested
for “offensive” work
(may require sub)
§
Music has its own
And it’s just as off-key
§
If they use your music for torture,
do they owe you a fee?
§
George Lewis: Improvised Music after 1950 (PDF)
George Lewis’ history of the AACM
§
Die Soldaten in
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In Chicago, the blues is dying
§
§
Richard Brody’s Godard bio:
Everything is Cinema
§
§
The “long tail” debate
Labels: links
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Lynn Behrendt has again updated the blogroll, correcting a half dozen accent disappearances, adding & subtracting those that people sent us notes about. The presumption is that once we’ve done this a couple of times that changes will decrease and require less tending of the garden, so to speak. I continue to be in awe of the amount of work she’s done. There are 813 blogs listed.
Labels: blogging, Lynn Behrendt
Saturday, July 12, 2008
I know I’m repeating myself, but this seems to be a point that a lot of people get stuck on. Plus this is my 2,000th post to the blog, and I’m feeling feisty. The history of poetry, like the history of any art form, is not a procession of its “best works.” Indeed, the well-wrought urn is, if anything, the deservedly forgotten one. Having codified and smoothed out the rough edges of any given tendency in poetry, such works are monuments to triviality and soon ignored.
In the 1960s, there were dozens of young poets who wrote “just like” Robert Creeley or any of a number of other, first-generation Projectivists. John Sinclair was a terrific approximation of Charles Olson transplanted to
In The New American Poetry, Ron Loewinsohn – just 23 when the book was first published – demonstrated an uncanny ability to channel the style of William Carlos Williams. A look at his professor emeritus page at UC Berkeley shows no publication of new poetry since 1976, no new writing of any kind in over twenty years. Yet Against the Silences to Come, Loewinsohn’s 1965 chapbook from Four Seasons Foundation, arguably is the best work ever written “in the Williams mode” of stepped free verse. Who (but me) celebrates that?
That’s the phenomenon in micro- form. It has a macro- variation as well. Articulating the possibilities of the prose poem, say, or dramatic monologue, or free verse – the three great formal innovations of the 19th century – has meant dramatically transforming what those genre mean. Charles Olson’s Maximus is possibly the only innovation in dramatic monolog in the 20th century even worth discussing. But look at how Pessoa’s heteronyms carry the underlying dynamics of dissociating author from speaker in a completely different direction. Now, a few decades hence, heteronyms are a dime a dozen as well.
The history of poetry is the history of change in poetry, an account not of best works, but of shifts in direction, new devices, new forms, as Williams once put it, “as additions to nature.” The cruder writing & rougher edges of the first to do X, whatever it might be, invariably are preferable. Better Spicer than Ross Feld. Better Howl than _________ – you can fill in that blank yourself.
There are of course poets and readers who hate change, sometimes hate it intensely. There are, for example, those who claim that Pound’s “good” writing stops basically at “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” avant The Cantos. Pound in those years was something of a stylistic gigolo, plagiarizing all that was interesting in Victorian poetics. Had he stopped there, he would have been the Ron Loewinsohn of his generation. And you would never have read him.
This may be why, actually, the
Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in
Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. Change, when it occurs, is driven by this confrontation.
But this may also be why, at least partly, there are so many poets still thoroughly, even comfortably, ensconced in the aesthetics of the 19th, let alone 20th, century. Why not? There are plenty of people to read you now. Do you even care what readers think 40 years after you’re gone? By their actions, Simic & Kleinzahler & Logan are telling us they do, but should we assume that this is true of every conservative or traditional poet? Can’t you just be Wendell Berry & do your thing? I’d like to say, sure – just don’t go throwing tantrums. (Those tantrums aren’t about aesthetics, anyway – they’re about power.)
All of which is to say that I take the current murmurings of flarf, conceptual poetry & now even slow poetry to be a very good thing indeed. In contrast with Simic et al, this really is the right way to discuss change. Not that any one of these is the “solution” to the question of What Comes Next in poetry, nor even that the roster of possibilities is anywhere near to being filled out. But we are hearing the first signs of a new discussion and that’s a necessary stage, preparing the ground for whatever will in fact show up. Which ought to be some great writing (and in some instances already is).
Part of this discussion, at least as its currently being framed, makes me wonder just how much of these aesthetics are being conditioned, for example, by the existence of the net, and beyond that by changes in technology, capital formation & globalization. Both conceptualism and flarf are, in very different ways, enabled by the existence of new technology, while slow poetry seems precisely to define itself by carrying forward other, older literary values. You could probably do a Harvey Ball chart plotting how each of these formations relate to a series of these kinds of issues and the answers would be interesting. Maybe even enlightening.
Some people have been complaining about the use of labels in this discussion – they’re still pissed at the idea of post-avant & the
If you step back and look at all this anthropologically, it has a logic – almost an inevitability – to it that seems unassailable. This discussion – where is poetry going? – needs to occur right now, and we need it to be passionate and detailed and committed. I can see pros & cons to every position out there, and I really don’t have a dog in this race. Or maybe mine just hasn’t shown up yet. But I look at other, just slightly earlier formations – I’m thinking of New Brutalism and the PhillySound – that made use of this same kind of group adhesive without positing an accompanying aesthetics. It’s as if they were announcing the need for this discussion without actually starting it. What I wonder is will they – can they – now revisit the question (all these questions) and come forward with their own ideas? Here’s hoping they can.
Labels: Schools of poetry
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Alan Gilbert on the King Kong
of summer writing conferences
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Close reading Rae Armantrout
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Minimal man, Aram Saroyan
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Kyle Schlesinger on the books of Ted Greenwald
§
Leon Lewis & William Bradley
on why the know-nothing approach to Zukofsky
knows less than it thinks
§
Dale Smith on Andrew Schelling’s Orono talk
about the Zen Cowboy / Wounded Buffalo school(s)
Slow Poetry & temporary autonomous zones
§
Mark Scroggins on Graham Foust
& the risk of short poems
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Reginald Shepherd on the New American Poetry
§
Books by Lewis Warsh, Geoffrey Young & Edmund Berrigan
§
Amanda Stewart reading (MP3)
§
MP3s from the Aggression conference
§
The last interview of Thomas Disch (MP3)
An obit from The Telegraph
§
Movie City Indie obit of Bruce Conner
with lots of film clips
NY Times obit
Artforum obit
§
Lawrence Joseph,
in conversation with Charles Bernstein (MP3)
Joseph reading (MP3)
§
Neruda’s love poems
to his wife’s niece
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Experiment,
but like you vote conservative
§
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Reviews of Phil Whalen, Hannah Weiner,
Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics
& much more in ABR’s
LineOnLine (PDF)
§
Indiana judge opts for the First Amendment (PDF)
How predictable was this?
§
Salman Rushdie in
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Taking it to the street
in New Zealand
§
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Of 1,000 journalism jobs that were lost last year,
121 belonged to critics
§
Garrick Davis’ love song for New Criticism
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Books by & about Mahmoud Darwish
Darwish: sarcasm & hope
§
Travis Nichols’
tracks the blogs responding
to William Logan’s
trashing of Frank O’Hara
§
A love that begins
at Beyond Baroque
§
Peter Gizzi,
narrating his bewilderment
§
Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life
§
Reading Zukofsky without much context
§
When bad books happen to good writers
§
“the quiet labor of refinement”
§
Talking with Kevin Goodan
§
The sexiest poets (living)
§
The Green Lake Poet is back!
§
APR’s latest all-Philly supplement
§
A bookstore in Nairobi
§
On Martha’s Vineyard,
A Bunch of Grapes burns
(a 2003 profile of the store)
Grapes plans to rebuild
§
Karuta,
the Japanese poetry card game
travels to
§
CFP:
Naked Lunch @ 50
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Grammar trouble, gender trouble
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A Nepali poetry fest
in
§
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Shetland poets in
§
Ron Hansen’s Exiles
§
Slammin’ in Atlanta
§
Robert Minhinnick explains himself
§
Davis McCombs’ Dismal Rock
§
A profile of Jacob Erin-Cilberto
§
Mark Ward’s Thunder Alley
§
4 poems by Dana Gioia
§
Billy Mills on poetry & memory
§
A mild-mannered accountant by day
& a psychopath at night
§
A profile of Vivian Bogardus
§
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Do pizzas need poetry?
§
Adobe lets PDF go open source
& become an ISO standard
§
Mondegreen is now a word
§
Memoir of widowhood
wins for Abse
§
Tung-Hui Hu
in
§
The peculiar institution
on the honorary degree
§
§
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An “ATM for books”
§
Digital Imaging Best Practices 2.0 (PDF)
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NPR expands its book coverage
§
Maxwell Corydon Wheat’s
still not pulling punches
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A profile of Kafayat Abdul-Quadri
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God’s Red Poet:
The Life of Kenneth Leslie
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A Zimbabwean poet
in Che in Verse
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The Times’ original (1922) review
of the poems of Isaac Rosenberg
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A poet of the Congo
writing in English
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Aim for the omnivore
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An Allan Bloom for Generation Next
(blame it on technology)
And a Chong
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Jay Parini:
why poetry matters
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The only First World War poet
with surviving children
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Million’s Poet
ups the ante
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JoAnn Balingit,
Sam Green,
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Restoring
Poe’s home in the
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Reading Surender Bhutani
in
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A Brazilian bookfest
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Perfectionism:
crime against humanity
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The end of theory
scientific method
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Is the future of English already here?
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The impact of censorship
on search engines
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The death of Antioch
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The “burden of the humanities”
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Technologically,
the best promo for a literary / art mag
I’ve yet seen
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Why no good films
about great writers?
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Language, acting, “professionalism”
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Movie critics do matter
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S l o w music
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Too old to be hip?
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When you’re glad it’s a Strad
& when you’re not
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The music of Harry Hewitt
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Indie film:
the sky really is falling
Can it be stopped?
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At Mass MoCA,
creating Sol Lewitt
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Talking with Frank Gehry
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“There’s never been a great woman artist”
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Koons at
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Chairman Mao & Chinese (post)modern art
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Charles Bernstein’s one-word review
of J.M.W. Turner at the Met
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At the Barnes,
blaming the woman
Just who are the Barnes’
true friends ?
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The Louvre’s deal in Abu Dhabi
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Goya the plagiarist?
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The “Long Tail” isn’t
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The best-seller nobody wants to review
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Bourgeois anarchism & authoritarian democracies
Labels: links
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Because we had an hour between the end of breakfast on Saturday morning & when we needed to be back at the inn to gussy ourselves up for the wedding later that afternoon,
The Bookstore of Gloucester is an indie new-book emporium, with a decent poetry section overall, not as far back as it could be and twice the size of the selection at your typical Barnes & Noble. They only had one Charles Olson volume – the paperback Collected Poems – but they had a half dozen Vincent Ferrini titles and even carry chapbooks. I picked up two Ferrini books I’d not seen before: Magdalene Silences (Igneus Press, Bedford, NH 1992) and The Indweller / Emperor of Mars (Igneus Press again, 2000). “We miss Vincent,” said the woman who took my money, who also made a point of telling me that there is a new Ferrini volume coming out quite soon & that they would be having a reading for it later in July.
Dogtown Book Shop is across the street & up the block, which means of course that it’s nowhere near Dogtown – and a good thing too, given that commerce in those environs that were taken back over by brambles & “open space” ages ago would not be possible. Mostly it’s a used bookshop, tho there were multiple copies of a big coffee table book on the antique homes of
Dogtown Books otherwise is your standard used book shop. Not a lot of poetry, but at least not in the furthest back corner. “Turn left at Robert Frost” is literally the way the fellow at the register pointed me toward it. Not a lot of books there either, tho I did find two gems, an early Stephen Ratcliffe volume that somehow escaped me 22 years ago, Distance (Avenue B, Bolinas 1986). Since Ratcliffe is one of the poets I think everybody needs to own all of – the scope of his project is spectacular, especially when you consider his fidelity to detail – this is a serious find.
The other volume is the Random House gathering of works by V.R. “Bunny” Lang that includes Alison Lurie’s 70-page memoir of Lang to give the book a very modest collected works heft. Lang died very young, just 32, in 1956, and her absence in The New American Poetry is to this day legitimately a scandal – Lang’s poetry was so much a piece of the New York scene that one of her poems ended up in Frank O’Hara’s Collected mislabeled as his work.
Otherwise, the most notable thing about the store’s selection was a considerable collection of older critical books about Ezra Pound – somebody had obviously dumped his or her collection – many of them hardback review copies.
Walking around reminded me that Polis is This turned up a lot of people who still remembered Charles Olson, tho he’s been gone now over three dozen years. That’s the sort of continuity one associates with small town life.
Labels: Gloucester
Monday, July 07, 2008
Abusing Laura Riding
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Lin Zhao’s last works,
written in blood
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Jonathan Williams on Jesse Helms
CA Conrad on Jonathan Williams on Jesse Helms
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Isabelle Garron & Sarah Riggs
in conversation
(along with many other YouTube poetry treats)
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Doug Lang on the poetry of the 1970s
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Refuting the myth of solitary genius
right at Romanticism’s birth
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Robert Creeley & Paul Blackburn:
fighting quietude in the 1940s
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Two from The Spoonlight Institute
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The fate of Iowa City
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Talking Flood Editions
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Philip Metres celebrates & sings himself
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James Wagner
on Eshleman’s approach to translation
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Homophonic
translations of non-English videos
have become a YouTube fad
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Your translation quiz
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John Latta is shocked, shocked!
that the NY Times
would assign a reactionary buffoon
to review Frank O’Hara
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The body’s grammar is distinct
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A profile of Nick Flynn
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Worshipping Walt Whitman
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Worshipping William Stafford
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Grace Cavalieri on Louise Bogan (MP3)
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Dannie Abse wins Welsh book award
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Resurrecting Walter Lowenfels
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The soul of the School of Quietude
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A biography of Isaac Rosenberg
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John Latta on Shurin & Zukofsky (Paul)
while giving “the stinkeye”
to anything post-avant
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Mary Karr on Terrance Hayes
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The “top 100”
Liberal Arts Professor blogs
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Talking with Robert Pinsky
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Muldoon’s shadow
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Marge Compfort
has passed away
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to hold Jonathan Williams tribute
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A profile of Frost’s home
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“One © to rule them all,
one © to bind them”
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Philly’s lone poet-owned bookstore,
Molly’s Books,
is closing this month
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The future of newspapers
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Waterboarding Christopher Hitchens
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There goes the neighborhood
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Joseph Cornell’s Rose
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A profile of Daniel Lezama
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Thursday, July 03, 2008
For the record, just weeding the blogroll of dead links caused the list to shrink by roughly 250 names, one quarter of its size. There will no doubt be a flurry of new additions – Lynn & I have already received something like 20 additional requests that we’ll get to in the next week or two. As I’ve noted to one or two people already, just because your zine, reading series or line of chapbooks has a Blogspot page doesn’t mean that it should be a part of the blogroll. The entire purpose of this blog, blogroll included, is to encourage discussion between poets & readers of poetry, and that’s really what the list itself is intended to signify & encourage. As is the case with the news links I post once or twice each week, I don’t have to approve of what’s being said, but, so long as it doesn’t strike me as overtly racist or sexist, I have no problems creating a link. Overall, I’ve been pleased overall with reactions to these features – for an hour one day last week, people were clicking on links at a pace slightly faster than one every six seconds.
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This link won’t be good for long. But you can catch Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book as a radio play if you hurry.
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I’m going to be on the road for a few days & won’t be taking the laptop. You are on your own till Monday.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Julianna Baggott, Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees, Pleiades Press, Rock Hill, SC / Warrensburg, MO 2007
Ben Lyle Bedard, Implicit Lyrics, Punch Press, Buffalo 2008
David Blair, Ascension Days,
Laure-Anne Bosselaar, A New Hunger, Ausable Press,
Trevor Calvert, Rarer and More Wonderful, Scrambler Books,
Peter Conners, Of Whiskey and Winter: Prose Poems, White Pine Press, Buffalo 2007
Andrei Codrescu, Jealous Witness, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2008. Includes CD of
“Maelstrom: Songs of Storm & Exile,” performed by Codrescu and the New Orleans Klezmer AllStars
William Corbett, Opening Day, Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn 2008
Peter Culley, The Age of Briggs & Stratton, New Star Books,
Jim Daniels, Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies,
Ben Friedlander, Drastic Measures, An Anachronism, porci con le ali,
Isabelle Garron, Face Before Against, translated by Sarah Riggs, Litmus, Brooklyn 2008
Robert Gibb, World Over Water,
Gary Gildner, Cleaning a Rainbow, BkMk Press,
Diane Glancy, Asylum in the Grasslands,
Mariela Griffor, House, Mayapple Press,
John Godfrey, City of Corners, Wave Books,
Forrest Hamer, Rift,
Fanny Howe, The Lyrics, Graywolf Press, St. Paul 2007
J II, Three Trios, translated by Judith Hall, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL 2007
Laura Kasischke, Lilies Without, Ausable Press, Keene, NY 2007
P.H. Liotta, The Graveyard of Fallen Monuments, Quale Press,
Glenna Luschei, Libido Dreams, Artamo Press, Santa Monica 2007
Jack Marshall, The Steel Veil, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2008
Charlotte Matthews, Still Enough to be Dreaming, Iris Press,
John Matthias, Kedging, Salt,
Jane Mead, The Usable Field, Alice James Books,
Joseph Millar, Fortune, Eastern
Roger Mitchell, Half / Mask,
Sheila E. Murphy, Lineations, Cricket Press (for the Small Chapbook Project),
David Mutschlecner, Sign, Ahsahta Press, Boise 2007
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, At the Drive-In Volcano,
Charles North, Cadenza, Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn 2007
Donald Platt, My Father Says Grace,
Luke Roberts, Ripcord Worship, Grasp Press,
Judith Roitman, No Face: Selected & New Poems, First Intensity,