Saturday, August 30, 2008
One of the New American poets who seems to be receding fast from view is Joel Oppenheimer. A one-time student at
Part of the problem, no doubt, is that Oppenheimer was part of the New York-Projectivist/post-Projectivist scene, that included Paul Blackburn, Armand Schwerner, Clayton Eshleman, Jerry Rothenberg, Michael Heller, Robert Kelly, Diane Wakoski, George Economou, Ed Sanders, Jackson Mac Low & others. This scene seemed to go in different directions after (a) Blackburn’s death, (b) the transformation of Caterpillar into Sulfur & (c) the diaspora of these poets away from lower
Still, like the Zen cowboy scene on the West Coast around Coyote’s Journal, which was quite apart from the Beat scene even if it included the likes of Gary Snyder, Lew Welch & Phil
Labels: Joel Oppenheimer
Friday, August 29, 2008
Barack Obama & Bob Casey in Paoli on April 19
The word I least expected to hear at the Democratic Convention in Denver this week was the name of my home town, Paoli, PA, population 5425. Paoli is but one portion of Tredyffrin township¹, which in its 300 year history, has elected exactly one Democrat to the local council. But there was Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s conservative Democratic senator, on the dais Tuesday night, proclaiming that he supported Barack Obama because he knew Barack Obama, partly because he had traveled with him “from Pittsburgh to Paoli” during the Pennsylvania primary.
Our one Dem, Paul Drucker, won a couple of years back &served mostly to wake the slumbering GOP, which promptly organized and made him a one-term pheenom. But the demographics of these here ‘burbs are changing, and Paul has a decent shot at the state house of representatives this coming November. Ironically, it’s been the Republican impulse to approve every new real estate development deal that has made the area affordable for folks moving out either from Philly or one of the inner suburbs. Right now both a steel mill and a golf course have been plowed over for new town home communities in the immediate vicinity. Thirteen years ago, when we moved here, this was the border between the suburbs and
¹ Townships are an odd governmental unit that I’d not come across until we moved to
Labels: Politics
Thursday, August 28, 2008
The tribes of art
§
11 new poems by
Linh Dinh
Nguyen Quoc Chanh
translated by Linh Dinh
§
Grammar police
busted as vandals
§
Nine poems
by Namdeo Dhasal
§
Rain Taxi reviews
The Age of Huts (compleat)
One of my favorite early poems
(i.e. pre-Ketjak)
is now available on the web
§
Recordings of readings by
Adeena Karasick, Jaap Blonk,
Gregory Betts & Gary Barwin
§
Kenny Goldsmith’s “New York Trilogy”
§
Tracie Morris down under
§
Top ten endangered languages
§
The most widely spoken
English dialect
in the world
§
Forrest Gander:
”Homage to Translation”
plus
”A Clearing”
§
Noah Eli Gordon
on 3 great chapbooks
§
More by Geof Huth
on the cover of
The Alphabet
Geof visits SPD
Visiting Richard Lopez & Richard Hansen
Geof on 2 booksellers in Berkeley
“a strange netherworld
between work and art”
§
The Daily Planet
agrees with Huth
about Berkeley bookstores
§
The idea of artists
in a museum
§
Sven Birkerts:
”Pensées”
§
Rushdie wins apology
§
Emily’s tryst
§
Anne Waldman:
”Che Guevara Came to Me in a Dream”
§
In
the 47th Struga Poetry Nights
§
One more reason
to avoid
contests that promise
to publish your book
Narratives of poetry publishing
§
Claudio Magris’
”The Self that Writes”
§
§
Joshua Corey
teaches creative writing
§
Norman Mailer:
werewolf autobiography
§
Tim Gaze
has a perfect name
for a visual poet
(Noology)
§
§
Talking with Kanwar Dinesh Singh
§
Talking with Siri Hustvedt (MP3)
§
Paul Auster’s bait & switch
§
What is the least literary
place of all?
§
§
Mary Karr on Meghan O’Rourke
§
What Darwish’s death tells us of
The view from Pakistan
§
§
§
stubs its toe
§
Book reading declines among college students
§
What best sellers say of a nation
§
Robert Burns & Michael Jackson
(yes, that Michael Jackson)
§
Plumly’s Posthumous Keats
reviewed in The Economist
§
Honoring Ed Lahey
§
Justin Marks & Ana Bozicevic-Bowling
§
A profile of Ibé Kaba
§
§
Chase Twitchell
on selling Ausable
§
The return of Ulysses
§
A Russian conductor
returns his native Osettia
to perform
§
Pierre Boulez
at 83
§
Tim Davis in
§
T.J. Clark on Matisse
§
§
“Unmentionables”
hung out to dry
§
Was Leger simply tossed?
§
A tip of the hat to
Almost Island
for a terrific new issue
Labels: links
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
One of the happenstances of being on vacation is getting to see a film a second time that one would not necessarily choose to see twice, in this instance The Dark Knight, about which I wrote here. I did not, as it happens, find much that I had missed the first time – notably who were the hostages dressed as clowns in the final confrontation scene. And how one particular officer telegraphs being “bought” by the other side even in the first scenes of the film.
More interestingly, tho, was how the violence plays a second time. As before, the only true moment of gore other than the creation of Two-Face is the self-stitching scene with Bruce Wayne & Alfred early on in the film. Now, however, all of the later scenes of violence – the blood & guts suggested rather than shown – is continually being foretold, seconds, even minutes before. The disappearing pencil trick, for example, is very different when you know where it is going. As a result there is only one surprising moment of violence in the film – when the Batman wannabe bangs against the window. And, with these other moments expanded, the film feels far more violent and dark than on first viewing. The second time through, it really does feel as tho the Joker’s perspective is very close to that of the director.
Labels: Film
Monday, August 25, 2008
Matthias Steiner of Germany won gold in the heaviest weight class in Beijing
As a kid, I used to watch a lot of sports on television. It didn’t matter if the event was a sport I deeply loved and played a lot, such as baseball, or was one I couldn’t imagine playing ever – such as boxing, which took up all of prime time on Fridays. Of course, what was on television in the 1950s, when there were just three networks, was a tiny percentage of what there is now, with ESPN, ESPN-2, the Sports Channel, the Golf Channel, a channel just for road racing & such pay packages as MLB-TV for baseball. One could watch sports 7 by 24 if one wanted. Indeed, one could watch a single sport 7 by 24 if you were willing to pony up to do so. I suppose that we’re just a few years away from universal access to all of the sports all of the time. At that point, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to watch any of them – the inundation level simply reduces the competition to a level of irrelevance. I’ve always thought that baseball lost something special when its customers no longer had to skip out of work for a day to attend a game.
So I can’t say that I’ve been riveted to the Olympic coverage the past couple of weeks. I enjoyed the whiz-bang of the opening ceremonies (I’d seen some of the choreography, it turns out, right here in Philly several months ago) & saw most of Michael Phelps’ races, thoroughly dominating a sport about which I care not a whit. But the two sports I really enjoyed watching were beach volleyball & weightlifting, the latter of which turned up at odd hours on the extended cable coverage of the games.
I’ve rarely played volleyball & have been dreadful whenever I tried, but as a kid I used to play a game called tetherball, where a ball is literally roped to the end of a pole. One player serves and the two combatants try to wrap it around the pole in their direction, not that of the opponent. My usual opposite in these games was my best bud from the middle school years, Bruce Downing, who later on would grow up to become an All-American volleyball player. The last time I saw Bruce, who now is a science & computer teacher in the
Weightlifting is a sport I got to know by accident in the early 1980s. I was working as the director of development & outreach at the California Institute of Integral Studies, then located on the border between the
While I was generally pathetic myself, I could always see exactly how far away from the very best in the world I was, a great motivator. Weight training is still my favorite form of exercise all these years later, and I’ve benefited greatly from Schmidt’s tutelage. The
No Americans competed in this weight category, and indeed just seven Americans competed in weightlifting in the Olympics at all, four of them women. Women only began to be allowed to compete in the 2000 Olympics, and I believe the last US medal of any sort in this sport was the bronze won that year by Cheryl Haworth.
So even a sport as elemental as weightlifting – it’s just you and gravity and mass – is changing. Watching the Olympics in 2008 was all about change – new vaulting platforms for gymnasts, new suits for the swimmers that have made all existing records obsolete, new sports (my favorite is a version of handball that looks like a combination of soccer & dodgeball), new rules for extra innings in baseball. It seems inevitable that in a few years, skateboarding & other extreme sports will all end up being included in the Olympics while some of the more traditional ones will disappear or else become marginalized, a fate that could happen to weightlifting.
One change that I have not been fond of this year has been the largely dishonest way the medal competition has been handled in the media. In past Olympics, the media has routinely reported this by counting first-place finishes as worth three points, second-place finishes as worth two and bronze as worth one. This year, instead, they’re simply totaling the medals without regard to finish. The result is that most coverage shows the
Gold Silver Bronze Total Points
China 46 15 22 83 190
United States 29 34 32 95 187
Russia 16 16 19 51 99
Great Britain 17 12 11 40 86
Australia 11 13 7 31 66
Since the first four columns are how this is being reported on the official Olympics website, no doubt official decisions were made to ensure this kind of reporting, but it should be instantly clear just who benefits from not taking into consideration whether your athletes won gold, silver or bronze.
Labels: sports
Saturday, August 23, 2008
I’m going to be at the shore for a few days, then out to the Olympic Peninsula for a wedding in Port Townsend. Expect things to be spotty and/or pretty quiet until Labor Day.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Portrait by / from J’s Theater
CAConrad interviews
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
§
Artists’ Books Online
(a tremendous resource
from Johanna Drucker)
§
Rae Armantrout’s
Collected Prose
§
Periodizing Robert Creeley
§
§
Lyn Hejinian’s
The Beginner
§
Aesthetics & ethics in
the
§
§
Robert Pinsky
on
§
Geof Huth
on his work
on the cover of The Alphabet
§
Is Radovan Karadzic’s poetry
evidence?
§
Close reading
John Ashbery
John Ashbery on autobiography & language
§
The PLO’s obit of Mahmoud Darwish
A man of many homes
Honoring Darwish’s translator,
Fady Joudah
§
Coney Island of the Mind
at 50
(note that the Guardian
actually tries to get the lines right)
City Lights at 55
Al Filreis on Ferlinghetti’s
”Baseball Canto”
§
Louise Glück
looking for the perfect (German) word
§
How many types of poetry are there?
§
§
Linh Dinh on
poetry & Stalin
§
Should books be rated
for age appropriateness?
§
Bloggers blog on bloggers:
21 reviews of each others’ work
§
Q&A with Kay Ryan
§
Talking with Kamla Kapur
§
A profile of Jan Steckel
§
How should poets help one another?
§
Kenneth Fearing & the future of journalism
§
“Language is about ambiguity”
§
Sex and the semi-colon
§
§
“50 Near-Perfect Books of
German Poetry”
The prose of Heinrich Heine
§
§
Do you buy poetry?
(analysis) (raw data)
§
On buying poetry &
on Landis Everson
§
In
§
§
What should you do with all those books?
§
§
Anthony Hecht:
Auden’s advice
§
Coleman Barks in
§
Not so Scruffy after all
§
A profile of John Toledo
§
Paul Siegell’s Poemergency Room
§
Poems etched in glass
Christopher Fritton’s My Fingernails are Fresnel Lenses
§
The “digital” (free) textbook debate
But hard copy book costs just go up
& price fixing is back
§
The Kindle controversy
§
& then there’s Kapil Sibal,
writing books on his Blackberry
§
6,311 jobs lost
in the nation’s 100 largest papers
in just the last year
(PDF)
§
§
Kristi Maxwell’s Realm Sixty-Four
§
W.S. Merwin:
meeting Ezra Pound
§
The letters of Penelope Fitzgerald
§
The “most beloved” author ever
in the
§
A thumbnail tour
of ancient Chinese classics
§
Audio of “faculty readings”
from this year’s
West Chester Poetry Conference
& from 2007
§
Cowboy poets
come to Stony Plain
§
A poet’s path
from Sierra Leone to Minnesota
§
Poetry at the Big Chill
§
Talking with D.C. Chambial
§
Talking with Jackie Kay
§
First Edwin Morgan Prize awarded
§
A profile of Allison McVety
§
What if Harvard’s English Department
had the same attitude
as its new theater director?
§
What college freshmen do & don’t know
§
Movies ruin novels --
here come Watchmen & On the Road
§
A boxing movie
based on a poem
§
Shakespeare & music
§
Finishing Kubla Khan
§
Podcast on
music & the brain
(MP3)
§
Solzhenitsyn & music
§
Sampling & intellectual property
in
§
Louis Zukofsky
& the Silver Jews?
§
Archiving art & poetry online:
a panel discussion
§
Post-literate:
asemic writing
One dozen asemic books
in PDF format
§
Extreme collecting:
the Cone sisters of Baltimore
§
CAPTCHA paintings
§
Richard Serra:
Thinking on Your Feet
§
LACMA lands Keinholz’
The Illegal Operation
§
Photography in the age
of total surveillance
§
Nic & Sloy:
life = art = poetry
§
Donald Baechler on style
in
§
Dance & the problem of genre
§
Count this
§
11 issues for the future
according to the
RAND Corporation
§
Jerry Wexler has died
As has Manny Farber
Thursday, August 21, 2008
When I picked Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems for the William Carlos Williams award earlier this year, I noted that there were some 19 books entered into the Poetry Society of America contest that were so good that I wanted to give them all awards. I have to date discussed 15 of those books here. One that I haven’t yet written about was also published by Saroyan’s own publisher, Ugly Duckling Presse¹ of Brooklyn. This is Laura Solomon’s Blue and Red Things, a slim book that would be thinner still if it did not reprint an earlier Solomon chapbook, Letters by which Sisters Will Know Brothers.
Solomon is a
Boots Made of Steel
Feet of little
consequence.
I will stomp
through the forest
so that even the very
tops of the trees can hear me.
Snow will not
bury my tracks.
Yet there is a seriousness here that one doesn’t automatically associate with the
What the Buzzard Had to Say
I am small and a weed
but this does not discourage me
with every circle I grow an acre with every road
I feed a tiny god.
There is a cognitive dissonance right at the juncture between tiny & god that is quite remarkable. Imagine a 30-second piece of music, complete in & of itself, that ends deliberately with a fingernail dragged along a blackboard. It’s an effect that only one composer I can imagine (Harry Partch) ever could have pulled off. Solomon makes it look effortless.
This skill comes in especially handy in the book’s two longer sequences, a ten-page piece entitled “Notes to the Music” and the book’s final section, “Letters by which Sisters Will Know Brothers.” In both instances, it’s hard to demonstrate this piecemeal, a quote here or a quote there. Solomon is quite willing to construct one seeming imperfect page after another in a manner that adds up to a great deal of emotional & intellectual power. The elegiac “Letters,” dedicated to two men who died too young at 22 & 44, is that rarest of creatures, a work in the NY School mode that could actually move you to tears. That sense of the imperfect – you can see it in the first poem above which could seem too static, or even in the book’s title, in the vagueness of the word Things – is I think a powerful device, precisely because it’s difficult (if not impossible) not to read it as sincerity. Solomon uses these imprecisions with almost zenlike mastery, like the “perfect” circle of stones that doesn’t come into focus until you move one (and only one) a few inches out of place.
The result is a book toward which I have two distinct reactions. First, it’s serious in the way that life is also. Second, it makes me feel good about poetry, and about the future of poetry. So long as we have poets like Laura Solomon, we have hope.
¹ I find that terminal “e” unforgivably pretentious, like all the little boutiques that call themselves “shoppes” in every suburban mall in
Labels: Laura Solomon
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Available for pre-publication orders today!
This is the poem I’ve been working on since 1979. I can’t even begin to tell you just how much of my life & soul are poured into these pages. “The Alphabet,” it says on the publisher’s website (and I wouldn’t disagree), “is a work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices historical and private—that capture the dizzying evolution of America's social, cultural, and literary consciousness.” It’s also an extended meditation on the possibilities of form. Individual sections of The Alphabet include the following:
Blue
Carbon
Demo
Engines (written with Rae Armantrout)
Force
Hidden
Ink
Jones
Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect
Lit
Manifest
Non
Oz
Paradise
Quindecagon
®
Skies
Toner
Under
VOG
What
Xing
You
Zyxt
At roughly 1,000 pages, The Alphabet is not an inexpensive book – $39.95 in paper – tho compared with paying $16.95 for a sixty page book of poems, it’s an utter bargain. Fans of Geof Huth will recognize his work in the cover art. The book will be available in September.
With its publication, I am now in the position of having all of my mature poetry available in print. I’m aware of exactly how rare this is in the year 2008. That presses like UC, Salt & Alabama would make such a commitment to my writing is genuinely humbling.
Now it’s time to turn my attention to trying a long poem, Universe.
"Ron Silliman's ongoing long poem The Alphabet . . . mingles quotidian observation, linguistic-philosophical reflection, and street-level social critique to produce as vivid, systemic, and cumulatively moving an account of contemporary life as any poet now writing."
—Times Literary Supplement
Labels: Personal
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Javier Bardem & Rebecca Hall are at the center of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
There are some spoilers in what follows. Proceed with caution.
What makes Vicky Cristina Barcelona the perfect summer bon-bon is something that the film is missing, even more than all the things it has in great quantity – good writing, decent acting, eminently sympathetic characters, a fabulous soundtrack of Spanish guitar, the architecture of Antoni Gaudi for backdrops, almost perfect pacing. What it doesn’t have, for once in Woody Allen’s career, is Woody Allen. It’s not that he’s not a presence, complete with all the signature tics of his film style – a voiceover narrator, a film that loves to talk, people forever puzzled about love, even the latest in his line of screen muses in the presence of Scarlett Johansson – but Allen’s not on screen & nobody is a stand-in for Allen, not even Javier Bardem’s archetypal Latin lover, the painter Juan Antonio Gonzalo, the male at the center of this very female-focused film. As a result, Allen has done something new: made a movie about Other People. And done so very credibly.
The premise of the film is quite simple: two young American women, vaguely post-college, spend two months in
“She’s going to get pregnant,” advises this character’s wife, Patricia Clarkson, the relative who has offered her home to the two girls for July & August, “and that will answer all of her questions.” Except of course, obviously, it won’t. And that really is the story of this film, as it gradually portrays a world in which everyone is well-intentioned, everyone is unsatisfied in love (even Clarkson has a thing on the side with her husband’s business partner), all the women have secrets and the definition of a good life appears to be the willingness to keep asking questions & accept complexity & ambiguity.
None of this is new to cinema – Stealing Beauty, which made a star out of Liv Tyler, does the American-goes-to-Europe-to-find-herself more sensually than VCB (and is a far more accurate portrait of the life of an artist), Desperately Seeking Susan does the straight girl-bohemian girl bond with more zest & it would hard to find more stereotyped Spanish characters than the Bardem’s painter-Lothario & his firebrand ex-wife (from whom Bardem has gotten all of his painting ideas) portrayed with startling gusto by Penelope Cruz. The amazing thing here is that it all works. This is a film all about pacing & balance, with lots of intricate pieces in play at any given moment, in which the characters are forever talking & yet, when Vicky looks over at Juan Antonio as they listen to some Spanish guitar, the whole history of female-male desire is palpable in just her eyes. It’s a great moment & Hall is a terrific actress.
Hall, who received some minor film award nominations for her role in The Prestige, but is largely new to the movies (she comes from a British theater family), is one of the two anchors in this film, the other being Bardem. Bardem’s importance is obvious – he’s involved with all three women – but Hall’s is more subtle & her role more demanding. While Johansson’s Cristina is openly game for everything, up to & including becoming part of an ongoing threesome with the two Spanish painters, Hall has to play somebody more locked into her sense of right & wrong & appropriate. As the film progresses, Johansson’s character grows more certain of herself as a person who is willing to take risks, while Hall’s character discovers that she has depths that will never addressed by a “normal” life. By the film’s end, she’s willing to lie to her husband about how she got shot & you realize that she may very well go on and get pregnant, but that she certainly won’t rely on Doug to provide the depth & meaning to her world.
The only characters in this film about whose internal lives you don’t get some insight are Clarkson’s husband, Mark (character actor Kevin Dunn), & Hall’s husband, Doug, played by Chris Messina (Ted from Six Feet Under). Do they also live lives of quiet desperation or are they the stick figures presented here? The one hint Allen gives that he understands their plight also comes from a third male figure, a young American in a Spanish language class Vicky attends who is just getting started in his career at the embassy & is perfectly willing to hit on the American newly wed. He hasn’t reached the point where he can exteriorize his own insecurities with a boat, a swimming pool or little red sports car, but he’s testing the waters of life just like everyone else.
Of the minor characters, the most interesting is Juan Antonio’s father, a poet who refuses to publish, appears to live alone, & who talks openly about his desire to sleep with Juan Antonio’s ex-wife. Seeing Juan Antonio with his dad is what first softens Vicky’s attitude towards the fellow who, she is sure, just wants to get into her pants. Asked why his dad won’t publish, Juan Antonio replies that the old man “hates people” because “they refuse to love.” No further explanation as to what gave rise to that opinion. As an allegory, that doesn’t quite work. But as a narrative thread that is spun out but not completed – like the language student – it adds a layer of indeterminacy that serves this picture well.
This is one of those films in which the main characters, Vicky & Cristina, learn things about themselves and that is the plot. What they learn is not particularly comforting – Woody Allen doesn’t do comfort – but that they are capable of growth is perhaps the most optimistic message Allen has ever had.
Labels: Film
Monday, August 18, 2008
The Positions Colloquium schedule
Mark Wallace on the significance
of the conference
§
Remembering Lawrence Braithwaite
Family obit
§
Talking with Lydia Davis
§
An underground classic of conceptual writing
finally is available to all:
Mark Peters’ Men (PDF)
§
§
Haim Gouri remembers Mahmoud Darwish
The place of Mahmoud Darwish
(includes a last poem)
A second perspective
An award in Darwish’s name
§
Seedi Mohammed Weld Bamba
is the Prince of Poets
§
John Ashbery:
”Attabled with the Spinning Years”
§
Belonging:
New Poetry by Iranians
Around the World
§
Rodney Koeneke checks in
on poetry & technology
§
“When did I start to ignore my elders?”
§
Andy Gricevich on Michael Palmer’s Active Boundaries
§
The BlazeVOX
raffle & bake sale!
§
§
The value of a compact edition
§
Listening to poems from PENNsound
whilst trekking thru France
§
Jeffrey Beam
talking about & reading from
The Beautiful Tendons
(MP3)
§
§
Martin Burke’s I Ching
§
derek beaulieu on Jordon Scott’s blert
§
Frank Ledwell has died
§
Paul Martínez Pompa
is the winner of
the 2008 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
§
Travis Nichols on SloPo
§
§
White Heat –
Emily Dickinson & Thomas Higginson
§
Polis is this:
writing & place
§
Meetings with Improbable Danglers
§
Remembering Gerald Burns
§
Penchant –
a poetry collective
in
§
Parks & poetry
§
New pages at the
for
Donato Mancini
rob mclennan
Gustave Morin
§
A library of (mostly) unread books
§
A list of newsletters & blogs
focused on publishing
§
Indexing as a form of visual art
§
© & the problem of
private property
§
Appeals court rules against family
in Steinbeck rights case
§
“a fungus that’s seep into the marrow of
the Body Poetic”
§
Steve McCaffery, Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein:
What’s the Word?
(MP3)
§
Howard Junker to retire
§
Reginald Shepherd on Poetry & Criticism
(part 2) (part 3)
Plus a poem in this week’s Nation
(sub may be required)
§
Bob Dylan’s book of poems
§
Dylan Thomas’ wife’s diary
is for sale
§
Dannie Abse:
writing through grief
§
Cynthia Anderson
leaves
§
Talking with Sebastian Matthews
§
§
Some eyebrow-raising quotations
from John Gardner’s
On Moral Fiction
§
A salute to Ted Solotaroff
§
Banjo Paterson poems
found in 109-year-old diary
§
§
Matthew Cheney’s list of lists
§
Mary Biddinger’s
“unwritten rules” for writing poetry
§
The “worst writing of 2008” is …
§
“a place in the line of distinguished
light-verse practitioners”
§
Mary Karr on Philip Larkin
§
Defending Robert Burns
§
Robert Lowell
& the summer of too many poets
§
§
A profile of Francis Wyndham
§
Cyril Goffe –
the poet at 100
§
Shklovsky, Barthes, James Wood?
§
Barnes & Noble
will pass
on buying Borders
(sub required for full article)
§
The uselessness
of the literary agent
§
Should
§
How romantic
are today’s authors?
§
Byron’s fan mail
§
“kind of like
a beauty pageant”
§
Alan Sokal
continues to harvest
his little mischief
§
4 questions for arts education?
§
Coming soon to Black Rock
§
Theodore A Harris’ Our Flesh of Flames
§
The governor thinks not
§
Losing money on Richard Serra
§
Why are movies about
Andy Warhol
always so bad?
§
§
Replacing the B.A. with a test?
Sunday, August 17, 2008
My turn on Joe Milford’s internet radio show – all 90 minutes of it – can be streamed or downloaded from the website today. Just click on the logo in the note below. The reading / chat was fun to do and I’ve gotten very positive emails about it from three different continents over the past 18 hours. I read from the PDF of my original manuscript of The Alphabet. Which is to say that I was staring into a screen, talking on the phone. It’s an interesting way to do an event.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Saturday, August 16
Joe Milford Hosts Ron Silliman
on the Jane Crown Show
Call-in Number (646) 200-0176
Photo © Star Black 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Tens of thousands mourn Darwish
Palestinians turn out for Darwish
Agence France Press obit for
Mahmoud Darwish
A salute to Darwish
in Dar Al-Hayat
Al Jazeerah
(video)
§
Laura Carter reads Rae Armantrout
§
Charles Olson:
Language as Physical Fact
(a conference in
§
Khlebnikov Carnival
§
Tonight in Philly --
Mina Loy celebration
§
SlamCharlotte
repeats as National Slam Champion
A detailed account
of the final night
The week in review
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The day Robert Creeley met Franz Kline
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Close reading John Ashbery
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Remembering (reconjuring?)
Steve Abbbott
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Best summer reading list, 2008
§
Stan Apps on how flarf differs
from previous avant tendencies
Kasey Mohammad on the value
of critical distance
Dark Fantom’s
”Breaking News”
How to avoid fleeting poetry trends
§
Mayakovsky’s Night Wraps the Sky
§
Russians reverse themselves
on the censoring of
Sofi Oksanen
§
The accidental Keats
§
§
Terry Teachout’s
unfortunate omissions
§
Lisa Russ Spaar’s
Satin Cash
§
Talking with Elizabeth Trew
§
Crossing TV’s alps
with Charles Van Doren
§
Kindle hype boosts Amazon stock
Can Kindle break the e-book curse?
§
6 months of short reviews
from the librarians at
the University of Arizona
Poetry Center
§
Lorna Page
takes care of her posse
§
April Ossman’s
Anxious Music
§
§
Why yuck?
§
§
Nate Pritts’
Sensational Spectacular
§
“The Englishness of English Poetry”
(part 1) (part 2)
§
Fady Joudah’s
The Earth in the Attic
§
The short story wars
in
§
This year’s Hugo Awards
§
Susan Hutton’s
On the Vanishing of Large Creatures
§
“the finest of modernist poets…”
§
“Haiku’d” –
McCain & Obama ads
reduced to 17 syllabobbles
§
Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s
In No One’s Land
§
Caitlin Thomas’ diary is for sale
Her copy of Dylan Thomas’ first book
valued at £25,000
§
Ted Solotaroff has died
Richard Stern on Solotaroff,
Dariwsh & the Olympics
§
The new Photo-Eye
is devoted to the 50th anniversary
of Robert Frank’s Americans
§
Is this your art?
§
Saving Iowa City
§
Dog turd runs amok
§
John Cage
In a Landscape
§
A chord sequence you’ve never heard before
§
When tape was king –
The San Francisco Tape Music Center
§
Where size is all
§
What is the Singularity?
§
Jürgen Habermas :
§
§
Some 80 blogs
added to the roster
this past month,
thanks to Lynn Behrendt!
§
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Roger Rice, Katrina Sings the Blues
Quite some time ago – at least 14 years¹ – I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama to give a reading & my host, Hank Lazer, was rightfully escorting me to the wonders & surprises of a college town as deep in the Old South as one could get, such as a two-unit ice cream “chain” that had one shop in Tuscaloosa, but the other in Havana. At one point, on one of the town’s main commercial streets, we ducked into a store tucked among the shoe repair & hardware merchants & came upon the finest folk art gallery I had ever seen – or have ever seen since.
Robert Cargo had been a French professor at
When I returned home, I raved to
Then in November 2006, the folk artist Mose Tolliver died, an artist whose work I knew & I heard a lovely remembrance of him on All Things Considered. Later that day, or maybe later that week, I went online to see if there were any images of his work on the web. Indeed there were, and the first one I clicked on took me right back to Cargo Folk Art, the fabulous little gallery in
Only it wasn’t in
There is, of course, a story to that, it being that as Helen’s health had failed, Robert Cargo had to turn more of his attention to care giving, so that his daughter Caroline Cargo took over the directorship of the gallery, moving it up to her home here in Paoli. An added irony, perhaps, might be that Caroline Cargo is that most rare of beings, a citizen of Paoli who once lived, as we did, in
So this past Wednesday, I took the afternoon off work & Krishna & I finally got to visit the Cargo Folk Art gallery together. It’s open by appointment, which has the advantage that every visit is a guided tour of one of the great folk art collections in the
And while there was a while on Wednesday when Caroline & Krishna were unfolding quilt after quilt on the living room floor, most of what we saw that afternoon were paintings & sculpture. The first artist we focused on – my old prison movement background coming to the fore – were the paintings and drawings of Roger Rice, who did the watercolor at the top of this note. Rice is serving a life sentence in
Access to materials was not the issue with artists like Jimmy Lee Sudduth, a painter whose works were often done on boards, which might be gouged or burned for an effect, and who combined common house paints with mud (“earth pigments,” the gallery website calls this). Sudduth, like Tolliver and several of the other artists in the collection, has passed away now. One of those was Joseph Hardin, a man so crippled by arthritis that he was barely able to move – an artist Cargo knew was delivering food to Hardin in the Meals on Wheels program & recognized the quality of the work, putting Cargo in touch with artist.
I recommend exploring the gallery web site to get some sense of this great place. And, if you have any serious interest in folk art or in collecting, I really recommend calling and setting up an appointment to see it all firsthand. It’s one of the treasures not just of
My own interest in folk art is that the work of untrained artists often strike me as being much closer to what I’m doing in my poetry than the excessively processed works of the MFA mills. The perpetual construction that was Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, for example, is exactly what I think I’m doing with my own life poem that keeps on adding sections in all directions. The use of found materials, whether the bottle caps embedded in the Towers or the use of mud or the decision to work on board or, in one case, paper bags treated as canvases – not unlike the way the Gee’s Bend quilters recycle old blue jeans into their quilts – makes perfect intuitive sense to me. Of course one’s art should be continuous with life as we find it. And when it works, as with a painting done on an old tree truck, there’s a magic I can’t quite articulate. So I have to just sit down & look & be dazzled & amazed.
¹ My version of carbon dating: as we crossed the University of Alabama campus, we encountered George Starbuck, whom I’d met briefly at San Francisco State in the 1960s & for whose work I’ve always had a distinct fondness. Hank mentioned my reading, which I believe was the following night, and George apologized, saying that, at his age, he didn’t get out to readings much any more. My memory is that this occurred maybe two years before Starbuck passed away in 1996 at the age of 65, meaning that he would have been one year older than I am now.
Labels: Visual Arts
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Benjamin’s grave, Portbou, Spain
So what role might theory play today, both for poetry and in the broader world?
There is no such thing as a poem without a theory. Or one might reverse that and say that all poetry embodies theory, but not in the manner of a proof. Rather, theory is – when it is done intelligently – a statement of the assumptions that are being made, the underlying forces that are at play, the interplay between the potential of a poem & its actual existence in the world. When a writer says that he or she “has no” theory or just simply writes whatever they may be “given” to write, it does not mean that there is no theory, but rather that they refuse to look at these things, and that that is a critical, indeed foundational, part of their own theory, i.e. their own practice as poets.
I’m of course interested in that writing that explores the potential of these dynamics to an intense degree, which puts me somewhat on the other end of the spectrum, although I also will invariably write “what I am given” & worry about its implications later. But I try to be awake to these things, both in the moment of writing & later.
Right now it feels to me that poetry is in a particularly interesting – if precarious – position in that the relationships between writer & reader are changing simply because of external (or, if you will, social) forces. A nation of 10,000 poets is very different from one of 500, particularly if the overall population of the former is just double that of the latter. And soon enough we will be able to look back and say how a nation of 10,000 poets were the “good old days,” when there weren’t so many poets about. So those changes are setting a whole series of dynamics into play and I don’t think anybody – surely not me – can tell yet quite what that all means.
But some people seem to me to working very hard diving into the question, whether or not they even think that’s the question they’re addressing, and I have enormous admiration for them. This seems to me the essence of flarf, frankly, the whole idea of asking what is “appropriate” is to suggest that the definitions thereof might be in flux. Do I think they have the answers? Not yet, I don’t. But I don’t see anybody else asking the most important questions any more sharply than this. And so I think it’s something we would all do well to heed.
There are hundreds of poets, indeed hundreds of types of poetry that proceed along as though nothing has changed, is changing, will change. And yet it has, it is doing so, and will even more tomorrow. Some of this work is terrific, but it now enters into a different world, perhaps even than the one the poet had suspected. It’s interesting to watch where and how it goes. But I worry that these poets leave themselves open – perhaps too open – to being buffeted by the winds of history without thinking through the risks and implications. I sometimes worry that this is where I’d put my own poetry today if I really thought about it hard.
In the larger world than just poetry, it seems to me that theory without a social movement is severely reduced in what it can do. The theoretical orientation of western Marxism seems to me never to have been surpassed – capital continues to be the most powerful social force in human history – even as the practical utility of Marxism has shown its limitations. Marx himself was able to see quite perceptibly into the future up to, say, the age of automated manufacturing, but once capital ceased to be based on manufacturing as a primary engine of wealth creation, it was able to move well beyond the reach of unionized labor. It bothers me no end to realize that Marx, who was the first true advocate of globalization, would cringe to see the various forms of protectionist thinking that are taking place today without regard of political orientation. The fight to keep jobs in the
But what do I mean by globalization in that last paragraph? Simply the evolution of a single world market, both for goods & services, raw materials & finished products, such that company X in nation A cannot flee to nation B the minute the workers get uppity. We are still far from that day in a world in which the majority of the world’s citizens have never heard a dial tone. But we are moving in that direction quite rapidly.
Marx himself appears to have imagined globalization as being immanent in the late 19th century. We know this from the fact that he saw it as a necessary precondition for working to create real change. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” was the next century’s attempt to get around that fundamental principle, and the result was mass starvation.
I don’t see anything approaching a movement that could provide the sustaining force to a new generation of theory approximating anything even remotely as rich as that which rose up in Europe in the wake of the two world wars & which flourished for a time in the U.S. after 1968. The environmental movement is the only one that strikes me as even having anything even remotely approaching a global potential, but it is dispersed & fragmented & easily distracted. Tho the reality is that we will have to address the limitation of natural resources question before we have achieved globalization.
In such a time one thing theory can do – one secondary social role it has long fulfilled – is to function as a guilty conscience, a nag, a doubt. Any historic marker that what exists now is neither inevitable nor permanent, that it was different once & will be again. Whether we like those changes or not.
Two things do seem to follow from this. One is a bias on my part toward work that more closely approximates the best of Walter Benjamin. In & around the work of art, I am tempted to call this a sociology of form. Those are two terms that sit very uneasily near one another, and that discomfort is I think a primary dynamic. A lot of what I try to accomplish on this blog amounts to poking one or the other of these terms, trying to push each into some interaction with the other, to see what turns up.
The second is a commitment of theory toward use. What I mean by that is that one has to ask, repeatedly, how does this connect to practice? Both to those social formations who are struggling today for peace, justice, change, the reclamation of the planet itself, and with regards to art to the actual creation of new works. Theory that is content to fixate on the 19th century novel is, by definition, useless. We’re just not there anymore. And haven’t been, by my watch, for over 108 years. Unless it can explain, or deepen our understanding, as to what befell the serious novel, a genre that is all but extinct even as poetry grows & grows & grows.
Labels: Theory
Monday, August 11, 2008
A “state funeral” for
Mahmoud Darwish
in the
Palestinians mourn national poet
Should Darwish be taught in Israeli schools?
(see the article on
Darwish article in Al-Ahram Weekly
New York Times obit
§
51 years after publication,
Mad Men hype provokes a run on
O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency
§
Kristin Prevallet’s I, Afterlife
§
George Oppen & the value
of a well-edited Collected
§
Hearing Creeley read
§
Talking with Michelle Naka Pierce
§
Stephen Burt on Juan Felipe Herrera
§
“I have seen the future…
and it is Hermitage Books”
§
“I remember Al Purdy”
§
Gina Myers on Justin Sirois
§
§
Defining fine press categories
§
August 8, 1876 –
the start of the mimeo revolution
§
Kindle sales reach 240,000
§
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From slams to marriage
§
Ten things to do
at the 2008 National Poetry Slam
Day one of the National Slam
The Wednesday night competition
The Thursday night quarter finals
Plus the Nerd Slam
§
Slams across the border
§
An actual poetry-in-the-Olympics story!
§
Brent Cunningham in Publisher’s Weekly:
why small press publishing
is like baseball
§
Talking with Sun Yung Shin
§
§
John Ashbery on Elizabeth Bishop (MP3)
Ashbery reading from Chinese Whispers (MP3)
§
“Picking winners” & the “true avant-garde”
§
Kazem Al Saher
to perform on
Prince of Poets
§
Ten propositions on flarf
§
A survey on purchasing poetry
Geof Huth’s answers
§
A profile of Fady Joudah
§
A Kurdish bestseller
about poetry
§
Celebrating Jonathan Williams
§
§
Publishing & literary culture
in the shadow of
The Birds’ Nest
§
In India,
a pol publishes a book
of poems written
on his cellphone
§
“I thought language poetry was…”
(scroll down)
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When cowboys come to Prescott
Marge Tucker, cowboy poet
§
Solzhenitsyn obits & articles:
The Stratfor intelligence group
Philadelphia Inquirer
Wall Street Journal
New York Times
NY Times again
The Guardian
LA Times
Reuters
Pravda
BBC
NPR
§
As entertaining as C-SPAN2 ever gets
§
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Ted Greenwald at the EPC
§
Some Iowa City press releases
never change
§
One topic on which
Reginald Shepherd & I
agree 100%
§
A year of reading alphabetically
§
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Where to sit
when writing poetry or prose
§
A response to a reading by
Michael Cross & Rob Halpern
§
Los Angeles, Detroit &
critical regionalism within PoMo theory
§
Ray Bradbury:
Long Beach is at war
with books
§
Dodie Bellamy’s
bedtime reading
§
Doris Lessing’s parents
§
A report on the Pigeon Poetry Cup
with a great photo
§
Amazon has agreed to buy Abebooks.com
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Talking of Dickinson & Higginson
with Brenda Wineapple
§
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A profile of Susanne Dubroff
§
The LA Times is backfilling
some old literary pieces online,
including this assessment of Charles Bukowski
by Aram Saroyan
§
Ron Slate on Warren Woessner
§
Heidi Williamson,
poet-in-residence
at the
§
Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats
§
Reading Philip Larkin in
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Mick Imlah, master of verse
§
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The future of Hebrew
§
Zilka Joseph between two worlds
§
Tagore in the rain
§
On the Road – a radio tribute
(available until 8/15)
§
Getting Guyana’s national poet
into the schools
§
Pentti Saarikoski’s The Edge of
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The francophone poetry
of the
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New writing in South Africa
§
A novel too dangerous to publish?
Random House thinks so
§
The impact of the market on
(mostly) School of Quietude
recording archives
§
James Tate reading (MP3)
§
The art scene in Taos
§
“100 Near Perfect Books of Poetry”
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Poetry invites introspection
§
Mary Karr on Robert Hayden
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Saving the library
in Timbuktu
§
§
A profile of the Book Barn
(one of 3 indies
still in my neck of the woods)
§
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One way to boost book revenues
§
Floods in Montpelier
hit a bookstore
§
Why McNally works
§
§
Finnish PEN
protests Russian censorship
§
Longing for Ye Olde New Criticism
§
Who framed George Lakoff?
§
More on Orwell’s diaries online
§
Kayoko Hashimoto & Ban’ya Natsuishi
§
Pearse Hutchinson’s At Least for Awhile
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Poet, goaltender, nut bar
§
Talking with Gulzar
§
What role for the Prime Minister in
the Prime Minister’s Awards
in Australia?
§
Gift poetry & music
in Zimbabwe
§
“Good bad
but not evil”
§
Binding Charles Alexander (MP4)
§
This is your brain
on Shakespeare
§
Larry Lessig:
When art becomes crime
§
Is the BBC
killing the writing?
§
French publishing
looks forward to
a gloomy fall
§
Film, translation, subtitles & dubs
§
Paul Lansky unplugs
§
Anthony Braxton:
Trans-idiomatic model building
§
Music theory
in the academy vs.
music theory
in music
§
David Byrne’s bike racks
§
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“What I call a sound”
§
§
§
§
§
§
The dean of Indian painting
takes up poetry
§
Visual culture’s number 1 subject
§
Jim Murdoch on poetry & art
(part 1) (part 2)
§
Who was Francis Bacon?
Damien Hirst on “dirty painters
who wrestle with the dark stuff”
§
§
Shades of John Ashcroft!
§
When the judge quits over the art
§
Jackson Pollock & the Iowa City flood
§
Tagging Keith Haring
§
Anthropology – “’postmodern’ cesspool”
§
Boredom as cultural resistance
§
In praise of elitism
(a tale of Vegas & Chicago)
§
How theory “damaged” the humanities
§
But the East Bay Vivarium
is still my favorite store
for browsing!
§
Farewell to Tony Russo
§
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Donna Haraway
But didn’t theory fail? Didn’t these grand texts that once promised to change to world simply devolve into being one more “thing,” one last (and slightly sour) dish in the buffet of academic fashion? Isn’t it true that you can’t find Freudian analysis in most psych departments, not even in an updated post-Lacanian mode? Or that Marx is missing in the econ department? I’ve actually heard somebody have to explain who Saussure was to linguistics majors. Aren’t these old texts & so-called old masters all a little, well, tattered?
Here it’s worth noting a couple of things. One is that just one of the texts I listed Friday really qualifies in any real sense as an instance of American academic writing: Fred Jameson’s Marxism and Form. Jameson’s impact on what has come to be called theory in America is, I think, something that in itself would be well worthy of examination, setting a horizon over the field that positions American theory as forever secondary in its concerns. Thus one of the real attractions several decades hence of the muddle that is Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri’s Empire (PDF) is that it shows a literature professor, Hardt, attempting to take on theory in the largest possible terms. That in itself is refreshing. That he bungles it is another story altogether.
One might go further & claim that the rest of the texts on that list aren’t really academic writing at all, tho that’s a bit of an overstatement. Rather, what each of the others has in common is that its author, whether the Ur-situationist Lefebvre or Charles Olson writing in his most telegraphic critical mode, saw their work, these specific books, as making contributions to practice(s) whose hoped-for fruition existed principally away from the university, whether writing in writing poetry or making a political revolution. They are not contributions to a professional debate.
And what happened to theory in
There were, depending on how you count it, two or three distinct stages ( & some might see a fourth) in theory’s role in
And what made theory in
But the collapse of SDS & the failure of post-Kent State organizing on every campus in the country to bring the war to a close left many activists asking themselves why – just what were they (we) doing wrong – and theory promised a path through which to rethink many deeply help assumptions. This was then reinforced, profoundly so, by a generation of activists who returned to college between 1968 & 1980 to go to grad school. It is not an accident that the list I posted yesterday consists of works first published in English from 1965 through 1978. Subtract Olson & it all would fit neatly into the ’68-’78 decade.
1980 was the second major moment in the history of theory in
If you look at the history of The Socialist Review, you can see these stages in fairly clear terms. In the 1960s, SR did not exist, although founder James Weinstein (who later went on to start the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly covering the Berkeley-Oakland side of the Bay, & then In These Times) was active in the earlier journal, Studies on the American Left, the Madison-based theory journal that broke up after 1968 precisely around the question of whether or not to become the “official” theoretical journal of the new American revolution. Weinstein’s faction had been opposed to that idea, preferring to offer critical support from outside of this theoretical object, the Revolution, but by the new journal finally got under way in San Francisco in 1972, it was calling itself Socialist Revolution and its key participants were mostly grad students at Berkeley, several of them having returned to school after some years of organizing in the community.
For many years, the journal had a dual mission – offering deep theory dives on aspects of the left and also developing a connection between theory, as such, and the actual practice of community organizers. If you were a political activist committed to the democratic left in the 1970s, SR was your journal, just as either the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (Michael Harrington’s group of Socialist Party members who exited the SP over its failure to oppose the war in Vietnam) or the New American Movement (a regrouping of sorts of the non-Weather Underground tendencies in & around SDS) was going to be your organization.
By the early 1980s, Socialist Revolution had become Socialist Review and there were now two editorial collectives. Each was autonomous, and neither cared much for the other. The one in the Bay Area still consisted primarily of local activists plus grad students from Berkeley, which made it very open not just to the second real wave of theory, the postmodern boom that moved away from master narratives, even celebrating identarian fragmentation. The collective in
By the time I arrived on the West Coast collective in 1986, there were active discussions about changing the journal’s name again, this time just to the initials SR (this never happened) and refocusing it more in the direction of what eventually would become Lingua Franca, a serious critical journal about the academy itself (this also never happened). The journal stopped publishing altogether in the late ‘90s³, before being revived in 2002 under a new name, Radical Society.
SR is just one example, although a good one. In each stage of the post-WW2 left, theory’s underlying primary motive was transformed by events outside of theory. What seemed possible prior to 1968 was far more problematic after – and this was the period when theory blossomed, both on the American left and in humanities graduate programs. But by the early 1980s, what you could hope to get from it was far more constrained. From Socialist Revolution to Radical Society may all be phraseology from the left lexicon, but it echoes the very same rightward drift that governed the
One might argue that language poetry was the writing of a generation that was smart about theory, and particularly about that which still sought to transform the world. And it’s interesting to think about how the general time frame of the Grand Piano project – say 1965 to 1985 – overlaps but is not identical to this critical 12-year period, 1968-’80. The smart critic could do a lot with that.
¹ Although in the wake of the
² In fact, one could easily argue just the opposite, that the identarian push came first with feminism, a movement predicated on a majority.
³ I served as executive editor from 1986 through ’89 and left the collective when my twins were born three years later.
Labels: Theory
Friday, August 08, 2008
Valentin N. Vološinov
I’m thinking out loud here. For a future part of the Grand Piano project, we’ve been tossing around the idea of putting together some sort of bibliography of works that were influential to us during the general period in which we were collectively active in the
I was something of an omnivorous reader in those days, more so than I am now, alas. But what are / were the works outside of poetry per se that had an impact. I tried to put together a list of just ten books, excluding volumes of poetry, and the following is at least my first draft of such a roster. I left some obvious works off of it, such as books by Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes, or the great anthology of works from the 1966 “post-structuralist” conference at Johns Hopkins (Bruce Andrews being the one poet I know who attended) since other people were already bandying their names about. Ditto Fred Jameson’s Prison-House of Language. And there were a number of vitally important works for me that were published prior to 1965, such as Sartre’s What is Literature?, the volumes of Wittgenstein that I found most valuable, the class notes that pass for the collected writings of Saussure. Other works were important, but either not yet in book form (like Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” which first appeared in Socialist Review in April 1985, a year before I signed on as editor), or not reducible to book form at all (the performance art of Terry Fox, the music of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, the films of Abigail Child). And every time I think of one text, I think of a dozen more (why not, say, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a book that led me eventually to blogging?).
But at least today, if I had to choose ten with all of those constraints, these are some books I might think to name, and a hint as to why.
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 1971, NY, Monthly Review Press. Althusser is an embarrassment in the annals of Western Marxism, the old Stalinoid who turned out to be a homicidal maniac. His ideas on how to read Marx’s Capital, the most important essay of which appears in this volume, are all wrong. But his piece on “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation),” the centerpiece of this volume, is the best statement of what ideology is and how it functions in practice I’ve ever read. The current Monthly Review Press edition is updated some from the version I have.
Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, 1978,
Fred Jameson, Marxism and Form, 1974,
Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 1968,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique, 1974,
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard, 1973, New York & Washington, Praeger. The full title gives some of the flavor of this great book. It was (still is) the Junior Woodchuck’s handbook (Huey, Dewey & Louie’s antecedent of Wikipedia) for all performance and conceptual art. I may have gotten more diverse ideas from this volume than from any other. The current UC Press edition cuts the title off just before the second colon.
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 1968,
Charles Olson, Proprioception, 1965, San Francisco, Four Seasons Foundation. This is Olson’s best critical work, and in many ways is a restatement of Lefebvre’s concepts applied directly to literature. I would read them together, Lefebvre’s first. This is now available in Olson’s Collected Prose.
Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Linguistics and Economics, 1975,
Valentin Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1973, Seminar Press,
¹ I had work accepted into Poetry, TriQuarterly, Poetry Northwest and The Southern Review by the time I was 21. My first big complaint about the SoQ was that basically it’s too easy, a poetic practice for the intellectually lazy.
Labels: Theory
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Not the School of Quietude: Williams with cat, Rutherford, NJ, 1916
(Front row, L-R: Alison Hartpence, Afred Kreymborg, WCW, Skip Cannell
Back row, L-R: Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Arensberg,
Man Ray, R.A. Sanborn, Maxwell Bodenheim)
Billy Joe Harris notes – and is quite right – that Spring & All is printed in its entirety in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I (1909-1939) edited by A. Walton Litz & Christopher MacGowan, and that this version doesn’t have any of the crowded page disadvantages that render Imaginations unnecessarily reader unfriendly. It’s also worth noting that it’s a good looking book, always a bit of a miracle at New Directions.
The Descent of Winter, Williams’ prose & verse linked diary – I doubt that he knew the word haibun – is also included in this volume. Unfortunately, Kora in Hell: Improvisations, the third volume of poetry from Imaginations, is not. Kora appears to be out of print in its City Lights Pocket Poets edition as well. Like the Frontier Press edition of Spring & All, the 1958 City Lights edition is the one that had a dramatic impact on my generation of poets. It’s still hard to find a book of prose poems as radical as this one Williams penned in 1920.
Kessinger Editions of Whitefish,
Labels: William Carlos Williams
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
I could tell you I’m taking the day off, it being my birthday & all, but the truth is that I’m on my second business trip in as many weeks and just too darn busy.
Labels: Personal
Monday, August 04, 2008
photo by Kaplan Harris
Andy Gricevich on the work of Barrett Watten
Watten’s talk on
”The Expanded Object of the Poetic Field;
or, What is a Poet / Critic?”
(PDF)
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Gricevich & Carrie Etter on
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead
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The house of John Ashbery
Ashbery in Italian
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Poetry and Public Language:
the book
“Poetry is slow politics”
No hope for the disappeared
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Terence Winch on Tim Dlugos
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My nightmare
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Mark Nowack on Bill Griffiths
“A working-class hero is something to be”
Alan Gilbert takes the bait
Gilbert on
art and/or propaganda
Freestyle or fakin’ it
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Sharon Mesmer on the “I” in flarf
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Alejandro Aura has died
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Defending O’Hara’s Collected
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Summer camp with Bernadette Mayer
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The growing world reputation of
José Garcia-Villa
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Marianne Moore & Magic Johnson
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Small Press Traffic
is looking for a leader
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Reading Hejinian Slowly
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Reginald Shepherd on Jack Spicer
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“the Jerry Seinfeld of American poetry”
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On difficulty, real or feigned
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Michael Palmer’s selected essays
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The Irish-American anthology that never was
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“World’s first poetry anthology…
by lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans
Christians”
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Third Word:
Post-Socialist Poetry
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Lucia Perillo on Kenneth Patchen
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Natasha Trethewey’s Canadian roots
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A poetry bookstore in Beacon, NY
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Pierre Berès has died
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Andrew Crozier & literary connection
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Poetry’s back in Baltimore
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Why D.A. Powell isn’t a critic
Catholic (big C) tastes in poetry
Powell on Alice Dunbar-Nelson
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Juvenilia for Spring & All
Ginsberg on Creeley & Williams
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Alvin Feinman has passed away
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The Epithalamium of Harry Matthews
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Rejecting Bill Knott
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A new reading of Emily Dickinson
Alberto Mancini’s ED-based paintings
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More poetry of Radovan Karadzic,
this time from
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Terence Winch on Doug Lang
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Mary Karr on Etheridge Knight
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Restarting the rep of Felicia Hemans
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Going back with Christopher Wiseman
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Two books by William Michaelian
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Roberto Bolaño’s “Clara”
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Kipling’s elegy for his son
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& more horsies!
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LA bids farewell to
Scott Wannberg
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What is literacy, anyway?
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Kay Ryan’s wild ride
Assessing Kay Ryan
“malnourished,
under muscled,
simply lifeless
and still as a rusty coin in a cushion crack”
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Al Young’s latest collection
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Dave P. Fisher has won
the Will Rogers Medallion
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Anne Stevenson’s latest foreword
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Aussie books want trade protection
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Scruffy is unamused
He’s the bookies’ favorite
in the Mann-Booker long list
Fatwa memoir forthcoming?
A Salman Rushdie podcast (MP3)
On writing Midnight’s Children
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The Forward Prize shortlists
India roots for one of its own
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Shakespeare in your brain
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20th century poetry,
from a Tamil point-of-view
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A visit with Sam Cornish
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Mary Ann O’Gorman’s Life in This House
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Pitching every woman’s book as “chick lit”
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Talking with Charmai Lai Chaman
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Talking with Doris Lessing
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Milwaukee’s team readies
for the National Slam
Madison readies for 76 teams
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Updating campus bookshops
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In
are set to disappear
tho the bookstores themselves will survive
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Poetry & the origins of fly fishing
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More regulations coming
on file sharing at school
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Poetry & the material world
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Murder at the book warehouse
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A literary renaissance in Point Reyes?
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Remembering Zbignew Herbert
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Henry Gould & All
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Pasternak & creativity
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Poetry vs. poetics
plus a game
plus a forthcoming conference
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Not George Bush’ poet laureate
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E.M. Forster, Middle Manager
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Poetry at the Calgary Fringe Fest
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Dear temperamental adjective
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A unique writing program in Arvon
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A television prop
comes to life
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Microsoft adds tools
for academic publishing
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Ishmael Reed’s “informed rant”
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Talking with Ray Bradbury
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The heritage of gout
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This is a break-even proposition
if & only if
Tao Lin’s novel makes $31,250
worth of royalties
(do the math here)
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Buildings have a short list too
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The films of Ish Klein
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Peter Schjeldahl on “After Nature”
at the New Museum
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Ad Reinhardt at the Guggie
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& the dysfunctional one in China
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Hirst’s first – a blow
to the gallery system?
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Henry Darger’s room
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Saving Pollock’s
Mural
in the
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Saving rock art
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Great art disasters
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Robert Irwin
on the
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The “Mr. Big” of indigenous art
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Dance + Visual Art = performance??
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Does post-genre music really exist?
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Gilberto Gil chooses
art over politics
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New Albion goes to Bard
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Don’t forget Comic-Con
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The comic art of Gary Sullivan
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Dissing anthropology
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Unfortunately, so does Main Core
Friday, August 01, 2008
There is an exactness, both of vision and execution, in Martha Ronk’s Vertigo that literally alters your sense of perception, as if after months or years you’d put on new glasses through which the world instantly snapped into a newer, sharper focus. She is the kind of poet who is willing to risk perfection, often I think a foolish gamble but never once so here. There are moments in this book where she comes ridiculously close to achieving just that.
In a way, it’s doubly interesting to come on Vertigo right after reading Geoffrey G. O’Brien, since Ronk also reflects some influence on the part of John Ashbery, but in her case the presence & impact is quite different – it’s as tho you’re getting to see where Ashbery’s patented logic might lead, say, a century hence. A good example might be this poem, from the first of the book’s three sections. Note that the quotation marks are part of the title itself:
“It seemed similar to choice, although in an adjacent register”
Ferns and jewelweed fanning the air too slowly for the coming shift
as if the package as yet unwrapped had already arrived
in another time zone, the desert hot and dry.
Anticipation veiled what could be seen from the window.
We remained seated for about a quarter of an hour
counting the number of trees in order to put off the inevitable,
in order to see the effect the change would have before it happened
giving up what perhaps needn’t have been given up,
selecting pain as one of the necessary elements,
not to lessen its effect, but to notice the precise moment of selection.
A poem like this is very careful in not naming whatever it might be about. The word it in fact is easily the most important term, yet only in its last – and possessive – occurrence can we even say exactly what it is. What we get instead, as with so many third-way poets – Vertigo was selected for the National Poetry Series by C.D. Wright & includes front-matter blurbs from Donald Revell & Cole Swensen – is what I sometimes think of as the new symbolism. At its best, and Vertigo certainly is that, such poetry plays on the reader’s emotions with extraordinary impact, scenes that reek of loss, ennui or despair, such as the way the desert landscape here is associated with a pain one might choose.
Yet exactly which pain is that? If I have any hesitation here, it’s the same one I have with most of the new symbolism, that it tends to occur almost entirely at the limit of naming and typically in the frame of a certain class. Where, for example, does the following poem take place?
“Whenever she speaks to him in that voice, an infrequent enough occurrence”
What’s the difference between trying to lift an arm and lifting an arm,
between desire and that other thing. I’m glad to hear you’re coming.
I am glad to hear you think you’re coming despite the fact
she does take up the entire conversation, expressive as her dress
coming off in colors near the edge of every year she’s ever been in.
Yet she talks during the entire playing of the cello piece
displacing it into what she wants us to hear and into the silence
written on her when she takes on your voice at dinner
when you’ll arrive and now she speaks out of her beautifully disjointed face,
out of her hair wet from the pond, never in the voice she came in with.
When he lost his hearing, he heard only the cello’s low notes
and what he heard changed his way of hearing the piece forever.
This poem is full of terrific small effects – the way the ear picks up the pun in coming, a word repeated three times, the ambiguous gender of you, or the far more mysterious presence of he in the final couplet, which teeters on the razor-thin border between profound & profoundly obvious.
Ronk is really good & I’m impressed by how many times in this slender book¹ she not only takes risks like that last one, but manages to pull them off. There are no false notes anywhere. She’s a poet I’ve been vaguely aware of for some time – she’s had seven earlier books, plus three chaps, over the past 18 years – but maybe I needed the nudge of C.D. Wright on this volume to get me to pay closer attention. I’ve learned over the past quarter century that C.D. is one of the smartest people in poetry, indeed one of the smartest people period. I’ve benefited from C.D.’s advice on who to read more than once, and I owe her again for making this book happen.
¹ It uses the blurbs as well as both notes & acknowledgements to puff it up above 70 pages.
Labels: Martha Ronk
