Silliman's Blog

Youngmin Kim & Charles Bernstein
reading & talking at
Dongguk University, Seoul, Oct. 19, 2010

Labels: Brother Anthony, Charles Bernstein, Youngmin Kim

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Vanessa Place, reading
in The (New) Reading Series in Oakland
July 19, 2009

Labels: Conceptual poetics, Readings, Vanessa Place

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Photo by Tom Orange

Barrett Watten, reading
in The (New) Reading Series in Oakland
March 15, 2009

Labels: Barrett Watten, Readings

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Armantrout’s Money Shot
is “a stunner”

Geoffrey Gatza’s
2010 Thanksgiving Feast menu
& poetic cycle celebrates
David Shapiro

Talking with Kim Lyons

Monica Youn’s Ignatz

Talking & talking & talking
with Tao Lin

Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead

Pierre Joris: Justifying
Justifying the Margins

Talking with Sheila E. Murphy

Lisa Robertson, Edward Hirsch
& Derek Walcott
all make the NY Times
100 Notable Books of 2010 list

Dwight Garner puts Kay Ryan
at the top
of his personal list

The Guardian asks all their writers
& gets quite a lot of poetry,
including John Ashbery & Timothy Donnelly

Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation

19 poets recommend 19 titles

Talking with Margaret Atwood

Lunar Chandelier reading report

Labels: links, Passings

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I’m always reading a dozen books at once, sometimes twice that many. Even my “current novel,” literally my bedtime reading as I drift off to dreamland, is divided between Tao Lin’s sad but oddly beautiful Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, the latter of which I’m reading as an e-book, a PDF version of the Project Gutenberg edition on an old Palm Pilot that’s not much good for anything else these days. In part, this reading style is because I have an aversion to the immersive experience that is possible with literature. Sometimes, especially if I’m “away” on vacation, I’ll plop down in a deck chair on a porch somewhere with a big stack of books of poetry, ten or twelve at a time, reading maybe up to ten pages in a book, then moving it to a growing stack on the far side of the chair until I’ve gone through the entire pile. Then I start over in the other direction. I can keep myself entertained like this for hours. That is pretty close to my idea of the perfect vacation.

I’ve had this style of reading now for some 50 years – it’s not something I’m too likely to change – but I’ve long realized that this is profoundly not what some people want from their literature, and it’s the polar opposite of the experience of “getting lost” in a summer novel, say. Having been raised, as I was, by a grandmother who had long psychotic episodes makes one wary of the notion of “getting lost” in the fantasy life of another.

Labels: immersion, Theory

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Now – December 1 in Brockton, MA
Emily Dickinson
is the focus of The Big Read

Now – December 11 in NYC
Chris Doyle

Now – December 17 in Philadelphia
Charles Burwell

Now – December 18 in NYC
Robert Rauschenberg

Now thru January 2 in LA
Eva Hesse

Now thru January 9 in NYC
Paul Thek

Now – January 9 in NYC
The Perpetual Peace Project

Now – January 16 in Philadelphia
Michelangelo Pistoletto

Now – February 5 in Berklin
Mark Flood

Now thru February 6 in Berlin
Carsten Höller

In Washington, DC, thru March 27
Word, Shout, Sing

Now – April 13, in Philly,
Penn Humanities Forum
on Virtuality

Labels: Coming Events

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Labels: Simon J Ortiz

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