Saturday, February 14, 2009
Tuesday
February 17
6:30 PM
A celebration of The Alphabet
Kelly Writers House
3805 Locust Walk
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Ed Baker, Butcher of Oxen and Other Poems, Doxie Press,
C.E. Chaffin, Unexpected Light, Diminuendo Press,
William Corbett, Poems on Occasion, Pressed Wafer, Boston 2008
Michael Dickman, The End of the West,
Alexander Dickow, Caramboles, Argol, Paris 2008
Denise Duhamel, Ka-Ching,
Susanna Gardner, [lapsed insel weary], The Tangent,
Geoffrey Gatza, Housecat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children, Meritage,
Geoffrey Gatza, Kenmore: Poem Unlimited, GOSS 183 Casa Menendez,
Jamey Hecht, Limousine Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film, Red Hen Press, Los Angeles 2009
Kathleen Jesme, The Plum-Stone Game, Ahsahta Press, Boise 2009
Ann Lauterbach, Or To Begin Again, Penguin,
Tan Lin, Heath (Plagiarism / Outsource), Zasterle Press, La Laguna, Canary Islands 2007
Barbara Maloutas, The Whole Marie, Ahsahta Press, Boise 2009
Wayne Miller, The Book of Props, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis 2009
Charles North, Complete Lineups, Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn 2009
Akilah Oliver, A Toast in the House of Friends, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2009
Ric Royer, The Weather Not the Weather, Outside Voices: Bootstrap Productions,
Jill Stengel, Lagniappe, Nous-zōt Press & Dusie Books,
John Tyson, BARREN poise swill, singlepresse, probably Milwaukee 2007
John Tyson, (horizon), singlepresse, probably Milwaukee 2008
John Tyson, Killing Time, singlepresse, probably Milwaukee 2007
John Tyson, Spit &Sugar Evolution of Smoke, singlepresse, probably Milwaukee 2008
John Tyson, Strike Hard Old Diamond, singlepresse, probably Milwaukee 2007
JoSelle Vanderhooft, The
Megan A. Volpert, The Desense of Nonfense, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009
Anne Waldman, Manatee / Humanity, Penguin,
Books (Other)
Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space, Palm Press,
Robert Buckeye, Fade, House Organ (published as no. 65, Winter 2009),
Cid Corman & Ed Baker, Restoration Letters (1972 – 1978), Tel-let,
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Dust, Dalkey Archive,
Jennifer Firestone & Dana Teen Lomax, Letters to Poets: Coversation about Poetics, Politics, and Community, Saturnalia Books, Philadelphia 2008. Includes Anselm Berrigan & John Yau, Brenda Coultas & Victor Hernádez Cruz, Truong Tran & Wanda Coleman, Patrick Pritchett & Kathleen Fraser, Hajera Ghori & Alfred Arteaga, Jennifer Firestone & Eileen Myles, Karen Weiser & Anne Waldman, Jill Magi & Cecilia Vicuña, Rosamond S. King & Jayne Cortez, Judith Goldman & Leslie Scalapino, Traci Gourdine & Quincy Troupe, Brenda Iijima & Joan Retallack, Dana Teen Lomax & Claire Braz-Valentine, Albert Flynn DeSilver & Paul Hoover
James Tate, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee: 44 Stories, Wave Books,
Journals
Dichten =, no. 10, Providence 2008. 16 New (to American) German Poets. Includes Ann Cotton, Franz Josef Czernin, Michael Donhauser, Ute Eisinger, Daniel Falb, Hendrik Jackson, Marget Kreidl, Bert Papenfuss, Steffen Popp, Monika Rinck, Frahad Showghi, Hans Thrill, Raphael Urweider, Anja
Utler, Ron Winkler, Uljana Wolf. Translators include Andrew Duncan, Tony Frazer, Nicholas Grindell, Christian Hawkey, Ann Cotton, Ute Eisinger & Rosmarie Waldrop.
Model Homes, issue 3, Fall 2008,
Poetry Project Newsletter, no. 218, February / March 2009,
Still a big stack of books
waiting to be noted here
Labels: Recently Received
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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Reading report:
Kaia Sand, Yedda Morrison
& Kim Rosenfield
at Small Press Traffic
§
AWP events at Links Hall
§
Infection in the Sentence
Festival
§
J.H. Prynne & Pierre Alferi
at the Pompidou
§
M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
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Inger Christensen’s Alphabet
Remembering Christensen
§
Searching for Lorine Niedecker
§
Stephen Vincent’s Beverly Dahlen Haptic
Charles Alexander on Beverly Dahlen
Kathleen Fraser & Jocelyn Saidenberg
on Dahlen, her work & her impact
§
Jack Collom’s Exchanges of Earth and Sky
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Talking with John Ashbery
§
A chat with Ron Silliman
A memento of conferences past
§
The Segue series
at the Bowery Poetry Club
for Spring (PDF)
§
Is
to The Grand Piano?
(scroll down a bit)
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Elizabeth Bishop & Neal Cassady
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A serious gourmand
reads Harry Mathews
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Plumbline poetry
Joseph Duemer on the plumbers
§
Beth Joselow:
from In the Green Zone
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The arts = jobs (PDF)
§
Gerald Stern sings Jimmy Durante
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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
§
Talking with Peter Porter
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Christopher Funkhouser on digital poetry
§
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Talking with Elizabeth Alexander
§
Oscar Wilde is set to close
So is the last indie bookstore in
Henderson, Nevada
§
The fading world of
Charing Cross Road
§
The importance of indie bookshops
§
The first SPD catalog?
I’m in the second one
§
Adding up
The NY Times Book Review
§
BookExpo Canada cancelled
§
The NY Times’ plan
to survive
§
Amazon by the numbers
§
§
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The Bards in the Bog
in Shetland
§
Valentine poetry from
by way of Ezra Pound
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Searching for Nicu Lutan
§
A profile of Walter Mosley
§
Mick O’Brien:
King of the Ode
§
A profile of Richard Howard
§
What Jack Micheline & Mary Oliver
have in common
§
Jordan Davis:
Are you better off than you were
13,000 years ago?
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Scenes from the poetry wars
§
Dale Smith on Jordan Davis
on Kevin Davies in The Nation
& on Gary Sullivan
on Sharon Mesmer in
The Poetry Project Newsletter
& on “symbolic efficiency”
§
K. Silem Mohammad
on Dale Smith’s “tough love”
These are your instructions
§
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Temple’s Spring reading series
starts Thursday
with Anselm Berrigan
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Richard Kostelanetz
gets around
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Falmouth, Massachusetts –
where everyone is reading poetry
§
Katy Lederer’s
The Heaven-Sent Leaf
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A haptic a day
for Barack Obama
§
Santa Clara searches
for its laureate
§
Much good stuff
in the exceedingly well-dressed
Scantily Clad Press
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The same is true for
Little Red Leaves
§
& the new mark(s)
§
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You can download LRL editions
or buy them hard copy
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A note on Hugh Fox
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Monday was
National Poetry Day
in
§
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Matthea Harvey
wins the Kingsley Tufts award
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Celebrating chapbooks
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Aracelis Girmay’s Teeth
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Philip Metres on Kent Johnson
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Larkin could read aloud
but what about others?
§
Philippe Soupault
on Breton, automatic writing, suicide
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11,000 out-of-print
Yiddish books
have gone online
§
§
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Sally Van Doren’s
Sex at Noon Taxes
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Editing Updike
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A profile of Carol Niederlander
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§
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Cost, space & time –
the problems of collecting
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Book dealer jailed over library thefts
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The amazing Donald Barthelme
§
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Tim Bowling & Oana Avasilichioaei
§
names J.D. McClatchy president
§
Zadie Smith:
A clear & unified voice
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What is the place of poetry
on a blog?
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A profile of Kathleen Graber
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Heading to read
at the Library of Congress
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Some writing resources
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Nikki Giovanni’s Bycycles
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The LA Times review
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Talking with Kenton Robinson
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A literary publishing roundtable
sans the literary
§
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Japanese Young Artists’ Book Fair
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Access Restricted:
nomadic lectures in prohibited space
§
Phong Bui
on art & development
in brooklyn
§
Harvard adds art
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Laura Moriarty
talking to Mai-Thu Perret
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Cops to Shepard Fairey:
Tag, you’re it
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Remembering art’s first superstar
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Siddhartha at Brandeis
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A nose for verse drama
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Daily performances of
John Cage’s 4’33”
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Fresh Air reviews
Anthony Braxton’s
Complete Arista
Recordings
§
Max Neuhaus has died
§
My KPFA,
an oral history in MP3s
of alternative culture’s most influential station
(includes everyone from Robin Blaser
to Charles Amirkhanian,
Larry Bensky to William Mandel,
Charles Shere to Phil Elwood)
[note also the ratio of genders!!]
§
Michael Wood on
Slumdog Millionaire
§
The W-word, back again
§
Jared Diamond:
why societies collapse
§
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Monday, February 09, 2009
There is a tonal shift in “Dark Matter,” the sequence that composes the second half of Rae Armantrout’s Versed, quite unlike anything elsewhere in her writing. I want very much to remove that qualifier, “her,” but I’d have to read more than I have. Let me say it this way: there is a tonal shift here quite unlike anything I have ever seen in writing. Armantrout has envisioned death in a new way. It’s not a subject I’d thought was available for this.
Consider the poem “Anchor”:
“Widely expected,
if you will,
cataclysm.”
Things I’d say,
am saying,
to persons no longer
present.
Yards away trim junipers
make their customary
bows.
”Oh, no thank you”
to any of it.
If you watch me
from increasing distance,
I am writing this
always
By the end of this short poem, the speaker, old friend “I,” exists solely as absence. Each one of us will, in time, reach that curious half-life (that is not one at all) in which others might talk to us the way I talk now to my dead grandparents who raised me or to Robert Duncan or to a dear friend who died far too soon. A one-way conversation. And one in which the other is frozen in time: I am writing this / always. What is real here is not the physical world at all, but the presence of time, time itself as presence. That’s exactly why the junipers appear, trans-temporal the way the natural world always appears. So the title of the poem refers not just to a television anchor who might have spoken the overheard words of the first stanza, but to what anchors nouns & to the way they in turn anchor speech.
The title of the poem on the facing page, “The Hole,” is even more concretely focused on absence:
A string of notes –
a string of words
could be a worm
or a needle
passing
in and out
through some hole –
stitching what to what?
I imagine myself
passing
among your thoughts,
a sleepwalker,
saying and doing things
I am ignorant of
as they occur.
These are poems, literally, from beyond the grave. Not at all in the sense of Topper or
Woman in a room near mine moans, “I’m dying. I want
to be fine. It’s my body!
Don’t let me! Don’t touch me!”
*
By definition,
I’m the blip
floating across my own
“field of vision . . ”
When this same narrative is actually named in the book’s second half, it’s presented in a frame that goes far past surrealism:
The woman on the mantel,
who doesn’t much resemble me,
is holding a chainsaw
away from her body,
with a shocked smile,
while an undiscovered tumor
squats on her kidney.
What keeps this from being black humor in the traditional sense of that phrase is not simply that to exist “on the mantel” (with its feminist echo of pedestal) one must be reduced to ash, which thereby renders the grotesquery of the image that follows – quite the figure for surgery – a scrambling of time (there are at least three present in this sentence). Rather, facing death unblinkingly, the fact that Armantrout was raised in a conservative protestant tradition – she’s referred to her mother as a “holy roller” – gives her access to a very different sense of the spiritual as pervasive presence. Indeed –
The present
is a sentimental favorite,
with its heady mix
of grandiosity
and abjection,
truncated,
framed.
These themes reach an apotheosis in Hoop, possibly the finest poem Armantrout has ever written:
God twirled
across the face of
what cannot be named
since it was not moving.
God was momentum then,
that impatience
with interruption,
stamping time’s blanks
with its own image
I’m not going to quote the poem’s longer second half, since it (and the book) ends with a twist. Somewhere in his prose, Olson says that if there is eternity, this is it, which is certainly the case. Here Armantrout literally offers us the face of God – not your stereotypical language poetry resistance to theme. It was Olson, ironically perhaps, who would be – in his own chess shorthand – “kinged by the kidney,” dying of cancer at roughly the age Armantrout is now. Her own, I believe, squatted if you will on her pancreas, the same type that took Jerry Estrin & which every story about the actor Patrick Swayze reminds us carries a minuscule survival rate. Thus far, Armantrout is doing amazingly well.
It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog to learn that Armantrout has been my best friend in poetry now for nearly 40 years. If I never did anything else in poetry other than offer feedback to her incessant drafts – five versions in a day is not rare – as part of the little focus group she’s been using for decades (myself, Fanny Howe, Bob Perelman, Lydia Davis, a few others), I would have had a substantial literary career. Indeed, I used to describe Armantrout as the sister I never had until the ghost in my own life, my long dead father, up & surprised me, giving me a “real” sister when I was 50. Life is funny like that. So I don’t read a book like Versed with any sense that I’m reviewing whether it’s “good” or not – I take it as a foundational principle of life that any serious person will want to read every word Armantrout’s ever written. But, within that framework, I have no doubt that Versed is her greatest book yet. Like John Ashbery, as Armantrout has aged, she’s been writing more & more. And also better & better. It’s an unparalleled gift to us all.
Labels: Rae Armantrout
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