Saturday, December 19, 2009
From Gökhan Turhan’s
A Bit of Everything
Labels: vispo
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A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.
When I was in the process of putting Lauren Levin’s Not Time in my Recently Received list for the blog a couple of weeks ago, I noted that this volume, small even by chapbook standards (13 pages says the website, but only seven hold text), was uncommonly handsome, with a vellum cover and obvious attention to production values. As I mostly do, I glanced at the text, the first line of which reads:
Saccade is not a word I would use because it is too interesting
That stopped me right in my tracks. Saccade, meaning rapid eye movement, is not a word I would use because it is too interesting? This was already the most interesting line I had read in a few weeks, which is what got me to head over to the Boxwood Editions website for the book where I discovered the video I linked to here on November 29th. Listening to the video, I felt the excitement one gets realizing that a new enthusiasm is the real deal.
There were only 75 copies of Not Time printed, so I don’t know if you can still get one in time for Christmas or not. But if it’s possible, you should do so. It’s a great little book. Levin is totally in touch with the aural materiality of the sign:
Filip. Thwacks. Thaddeus, stand, in that clearly
That’s a line further down the same first page (also the page with the most text, 16 lines of it, gathered in what I take to be four stanzas, tho a different reader might see three). The language there is as physical as any you might find in a poem by Robert Grenier or (to use a more classical ear) Kenneth Irby.
So I took the book with me up to New York City, along with a few others, and managed to make it last three full days by reading each page many times out loud before I considered that I had truly read it.
Casting about online to see what else I can find of hers, I come across other sections of Not Time that are not in this book, tho I can’t tell you why, plus a reading at Canessa Park that Andrew Kenower recorded back in 2007, a reference to an earlier book, and other work that’s online. Kenower’s site has a good set of links to what is online. The work in Typo feels close to me in spirit to what I see in Not Time, and MiPoesias offers both text & it being read by Levin. She also co-edits on of those little mags I’ve never seen, Mrs. Maybe, and how many journals these days are taking their titles from Robert Duncan?
For me, it always makes sense to say that some new work, or a new writer, is “like” or “closest” to X poet, because it helps me to keep the mental map in my head moderately orderly. But in Levin’s case, I can’t find any analogy that strikes me as appropriate. She’s really not like anyone else whose work I know, and when I do sometimes catch an echo of something (the syntax of the work in MiPoesias, for example, brought to mind Leslie Scalapino), it’s such a minor part of what’s there that it’s misleading almost to have the recognition.
All of which makes me wish that there was a big fat book, 100 pages plus, that I could pick up and just wade into. I’d figure out all the reasons this work excites me. And just maybe it would get wide enough distribution so that lots of other people would come to share my new enthusiasm.
Labels: Lauren Levin
Conversation Through Kitchen Window, 1992, Museum of Contemporary Photography
Larry Sultan
1946 – 2009
Labels: passing, Visual Arts
Photo by Ben Friedlander
Pierre Joris on Ken Irby
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Annie Finch:
“Chaos in 14 Lines”
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Not a lot of laughs
in Carol Ann Duffy
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Herta Mueller’s Nobel address
What inspired Mueller
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Jerome Rothenberg
on poets in society
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New American Poets:
Joseph Massey
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Marjorie Perloff:
Reading from Vienna Paradiox;
Talking with Charles Bernstein;
Talking some more
with Bernstein
§
What Bolaño read
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Enid Starkie on Paul Verlaine
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Once again,
The Best American Poetry
deserves to be called
The Geezers Guide
with contributors averaging 55 years of age
(there has not been a volume
with an average age under 50
since 1997)
§
Remembering Lenore Kandel
“Romana Swartz,
a big Rumanian monster beauty”
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New American Poets:
Katie Degentesh
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Juliana Spahr
at Kelly Writers House,
November 2009
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The notebooks of William Blake
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Alan Golding:
“Charles Bernstein
and Professional Avant-Gardism”
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Jean Day in Portuguese
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Helen Vendler on
John Ashbery’s Planisphere
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Remembering Richard Brautigan
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Remembering Harold Norse
§
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New American Poets:
David Lau
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Elliot Bay Books is moving
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The 36th annual
New Years Day Marathon @ St. Marks
offers 133 of your fave poets,
with others TBA
§
Lethem, Doctorow
& a new kind of apocalypse
§
New American Poets:
Jennifer Chang
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Close reading Robert Grenier
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“I dream I met William Burroughs”
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A bridge for Beckett
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A bookstore where
On the Road
is the all-time best-selling title
(and it’s not City Lights)
§
25 Important Poetry Books of the 00s
No Tell
is running multiple top poetry lists
2009 Award Winners & Critics’ Picks
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New American Poets:
Zach Savich
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The novelist
who screwed his lover
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When Lorca met Neruda
(reg. req.)
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Darwish’s revenants
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On the essays of John Olson
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FitzGerald’s Rubiyat is 150
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Talking with Vasyl Makhno
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Dan’s Sestina Self-Study:
The Pie Chart
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§
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Rafael Zepeda’s Tao Driver
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William Gass’ “Splendid Idea”
“Success
is just another form of failure”
§
David Foster Wallace:
“All That”
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Talking with Jimmy Santiago Baca
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The ultimate poetry slam:
William Shatner vs. Sarah Palin
§
Alphabet updated
with 15 exciting new
replacement letters
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Gulliver, the jungle gym
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New American Poets:
Meghan O’Rourke
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Oxford Professor of Poetry
will be decided by
online voting
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Talking with Fred Marchant
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In the Lilly’s Rare Book Room
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Kim Jong-Gil’s Among the Flowering Reeds
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Talking with Thomas Lynch
§
Spain honors
Haruki Murakami
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Sherman Alexie is taking some risks
§
James Galvin’s As Is
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New American Poets:
Fred Moten
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John McPhee:
“unadulterate gin”
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At home with Frieda Hughes
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Great moments in typesetting
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40% discounts
on Alabama’s
newest poetics titles
§
Inventing Literary Modernism
at the Outbreak
of the Great War
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Dead mules & southern lit
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New American Poets:
Anna Moschovakis
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Anis Shivani's
published his
“10 best books of the decade”
list on Huffington Post,
plus the list for 2009
§
Salon’s best of ’09 list
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Faber & Faber’s
80th anniversary collection
§
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Getting editors to read poetry
in a recession
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Fighting ghosties
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New American Poets:
Jennifer Kronovet
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Talking with Emily Van Duyne
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DeLillo & Auster
turn up on
this “worst books of the decade” list
§
New American Poets:
Aracelis Girmay
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“beautiful language
with a sense of loss and disappointment”
§
Yeats in Ulysses
The Joyce Agenda:
Itō Sei & the Stream of Consciousness
§
What inspires writers:
52 sets of suggestions
from hot tea & baths
to Lucinda Childs’ work
with Sol Lewitt & Philip Glass
§
New American Poets:
Jericho Brown
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William H. Gass
on his favorite book of 2009
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Remembering J.G. Ballard
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Talking with Kristin Naca
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New American Poets:
Carmen Giménez Smith
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Proust, Woolf & Modern Fiction
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“Last Day on Planet Earth”
§
Recordings from this year’s
Academy of American Poets
award recipients
(Jean Valentine, Harryette Mullen,
Linda Gregg, Jennifer K. Sweeney
& J. Michael Martinez),
plus a gateway to its audio archive
§
New American Poets:
Chris Martin
§
Why Richard Kostelanetz, Kenny Goldsmith,
Henri Peyre & T.S. Eliot
are really the same person
Genealogical Fantasies:
T.S. Eliot & the Limits
of Intellectual Biography
§
New American Poets:
Arda Collins
§
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The haunts of Patricia Highsmith
Plus her “raging libido”
§
New American Poets:
The Brothers Dickman,
Matthew & Michael
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The poetry of Henri Cole
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Talking with Orhan Pamuk
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Yusef Komunyukayaa
headlines in Trenton, NJ
§
Kurdish poet Kajal Ahmad
A bi-lingual podcast
§
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Editor & Publisher
and
Kirkus Reviews
shut down!
TJ Sullivan
on the loss of E&P
The end of Kirkus
brings “anguish and relief”
§
You wanted to work in a bookstore?
§
Publishing conglomerates
develop alternative to Kindle
An audience of 144 million?
§
The Nook:
“slower than an anesthetized slug in winter”
“The Nook needs some work”
§
Legal battles over e-book rights
to older titles
§
An iPhone app
with 2,222 short stories
with an introductory price of
99¢
§
Publishers delay e-book releases
§
Publishers protest
e-books for the blind
§
The Not-Hulu of digital mags
20 Tweetable Truths about Magazines
§
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Scholarly writing & how to get it done!
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Talking with Per Petterson
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British laws on libel liable to change
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Activists are like poets, Heaney says
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A poem by Harold Monro
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Ron Hansen on Raymond Carver
Brad Gooch on Carver
Carver & the Captain
§
Eamon Grennan’s Matter of Fact:
“an utter slog”
§
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Talking with Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
“Sometimes a Small Redemption”
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Lit orgs that got NEA grants
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Ethnicity & young adult book jackets
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Poetry blogs that matter
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Larry McMurtry’s slipshod delight
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Scythe, the cutting edge
§
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“like having a degree in failure”
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Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son
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Over 14,700 jobs disappeared
in US newspapers in 2009
Half the journalists in jail
work online
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Cate Blanchett
as Blanche DuBois
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25 films by Akira Kurosawa
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Who sez
the art market’s dead?
§
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David Buuck’s
audio guide
for an art show in the dark
2nd version
performed by Cassandra Smith
§
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Arts bosses go back to school
§
An inspired exhibition in Harlem
§
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Richard Wright wins the Turner Prize
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11 best museum shows of 2009
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Basquiat in Miami
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Elaine de Kooning on Mark Rothko
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Warhol – the musical
§
Memoirs of Pop
Arthur Danto:
“The Window at Bonwit’s”
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Hockney’s return
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Bob Dylan, the comic
When Bob Dylan met John Lennon
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From
Time and Anthony Braxton
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Putting The Prelude to music
§
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“a definitive narrative biography
of the greatest jazz musician
of the 20th century”
“This is Louis, Dolly”
§
Zach Barocas of Jawbox
quotes William Carlos Williams’ “Seafarer”
on Jimmy Fallon’s TV show
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Jack Rose has died
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The Jazz Loft project
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The Clancy Brothers,
together again
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Where digital music is heading
& why 2009 sucked
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The Patti Smith story
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Lady Gaga, feminist?
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Langston Hughes & jazz
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Best Jazz Albums of 2009
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Networking:
The Net as Artwork
(reg. req.)
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Militant Modernism
(reg. req.)
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A spectre is haunting remainder bins…
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Robert Service’s Trotsky
The school of historical falsification
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Philosophy & the leisure class
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Talking with Martha Nussbaum
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Time’s
top ten of everything lists
§
The first,
& perhaps only,
sensible article on Tiger Woods
§
The Future of the Human
(reg. req.)
§
Amy King:
Gay may not be the new black, but…
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Tom Raworth’s Christmas card
Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot
through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Wharf Hypothesis from Lines Press, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. Among his honors, Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize, from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, PA. He is teaching in 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania and at Naropa.
NB: This blog receives a steady stream of review copies
of books of poetry, fiction, criticism & theory. While less than ten
percent of these books are ultimately reviewed here, it should be presumed that
any book review on this weblog is of a volume originally obtained as a review copy.
© 2002 - 2013 by Ron Silliman
