Saturday, February 12, 2011
Charles Alexander
on letterpress publishing
Jim Irwin’s
Letterpress Finesse
Labels: Charles Alexander, Printing
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Friday, February 11, 2011
Ann Lauterbach
at the School of Visual Arts
(thanks to PennSound)
Labels: Ann Lauterbach, Readings
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Thursday, February 10, 2011
William S. Burroughs
live in Manchester, UK, 1982
Labels: Beat Poetry, Readings, William Burroughs
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Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Close Listening with Nathaniel Mackey
And reading
Robin Tremblay-McGaw
on reading
Mourning Édouard Glissant
Tisa Bryant on Claudia Rankine @ AWP
Ange Mlinko on The H.D. Book
Tyrone Williams’ “Genesis”
C.D. Wright’s
tour de force
Lisa Jarnot:
“After Catullus”
The plan to create a
Scottish Academy of Literature
has been dropped
Eileen Myles’ Inferno
has the best book trailer ever
What is the real story?
“The numbers speak for themselves”
Poetry notes dissents
Stephen Elliot:
Vida just scratches the surface
Meghan O’Rourke asks about causes
Slate:
why it matters
The literary glass ceiling
Jezebel:
the sorry state of women
Submitting work
as a “woman’s problem”
Jim Behrle weighs in
Laynie Browne’s
“Periodic Companions”
Are you ready for
Demi Moore’s poetry?
Maria Shriver,
poetry editor
Vanessa Place @ EPC
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Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Warning: it may seem that there are spoilers in what follows. But the answers to the really important questions are deliberately not dealt with here.
Poetry (Shi) is a beautiful if deeply sad motion picture from Korea about a woman who finds herself at a turning point in her life & decides to take a class in poetry being given at the cultural center of the unnamed farming town in which she lives. Directed by Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine, Oasis), Poetry stars Jeong-hie Yun as Mija Yang, who lives simply on a pension augmented by a part-time job providing elder-care while raising her teenage grandson, Wook. If Mija is a widow, we’re never told this directly and all we hear of Wook’s father is that the boy came to live with Mija after his mother’s divorce. The mother has moved to Busan to find work.
Mija has reasons for wanting to take a poetry class – as a child, she was told that she would become a poet one day. Now at 66, she is starting to have problems recalling the words for things, which can leave her confused and disoriented. She goes to the town’s clinic for a checkup, but there she comes upon a woman in the street hysterical with grief. The woman has just learned that her daughter has jumped from a bridge and drowned.
These events – the woman in the street, the trip to the doctor, the class in poetry – combine with Mija’s part-time job to make up most of the parameters of this complex, indirectly told tale. Poetry won the prize at Cannes for best screenplay, but it could very credibly have received awards for acting, direction & best film as well.
Poetry, the discipline, is not only a metaphor here. Your typical adult education course, the class is filled with beginners like Mija, led by a man in his 40s who obviously is a well-intentioned local poet doing his best to make ends meet with this job. His task for the month-long course is simple and straight-forward: they will write a single poem that month, but they will really write, finding that place in themselves that needs to be freed up in order to communicate whatever. He shows them an apple and asks them who has seen an apple before, which of course everyone has. Not really, he insists. You really have to look at the apple, really see it, before it will begin to appear.
Soon, Mija is dutifully carrying around a notebook, jotting down ideas, observations. She worries throughout the film that she never will be able to write a poem – she is waiting for an inspiration, a concept that the teacher teases her about. Were this all this film did, it might be a charming French film called Mija Writes a Poem.
But, at the same time, several other events are taking place that cause Mija enormous stress. One is her memory, another is that the old gentleman whom she tends is not such a gentleman at all, the third is the consequences of that woman hysterical in the streets. Her daughter had been in Wook’s grade, although Wook claims barely to have known her. The boy seems to have a life thoroughly confined to his PC, his little gang of buddies, and the video arcade. When his grandmother wants to play badminton because the doctor has told her to get exercise, Wook can barely stand having to do so.
One of the interesting aspects of this film, at least to this Anglo poet, are those points where contemporary Korean culture is nearly identical with life and institutions in the U.S. – one of which seems to be poetry as a social phenomenon – and the points where are they are radically dissimilar, such as the criminal justice system. It is perfectly okay, it would seem, to compensate victims for their suffering as though it were an ordinary business transaction. If all parties agree not to talk to the police, no investigation will ensue. If, for example, a teenage girl commits suicide after months of repeated gang rapes from a half-dozen boys in her grade, the fathers get together, come up with a figure, divide it among themselves and approach the girl’s family.
The problem with all this is that Wook has no father around to participate in such negotiations, his grandmother has no money to speak of, and the price they settle on – 30 million won – is roughly $27,000 US divided six ways. When the girl’s mother balks, the fathers implore Mija to speak with her, woman to woman. In many ways, Poetry is about the total lack of power women have in contemporary Korean society. Mija is as alone, and nearly as devastated by these events, as the girl’s mother. How will Mija come up with $4,500? What should she do with this feral grandchild, who is clearly a follower in his crowd, the one kid without a dad around?
Mija learns the dead girl’s name, Agnes, attends the funeral mass & goes to the farm where the girl’s mother lives. She makes some difficult decisions as to how to raise the funds. And Mija finds herself writing in her notebook as she goes through all these experiences. Even when the fathers are in the midst of tense negotiations, Mija just steps outdoors & pulls out her notebook. When we hear later what the other poetry students are (or are not) doing, airy, foggy musings that wrestle with memories and loss, Mija’s simple straightforward descriptions in her notebook take on enormous depth. There is one scene with an apricot worth the price of admission.
At this point in the narrative, Mija attends a reading in town, which looks like a local open-mic event. Some people are reading their work, others reading poems from favorite books. Afterwards, everyone heads to a bar where she complains that one guy, who used his reading to tell off-color jokes, was abusing poetry. One of the other women makes sure that everyone knows Mija feels this way – tho in fact somebody points out that this poet is an okay guy, a local detective who had been a big-city cop until exposing corruption got him demoted to the boonies – when who of all people turns up but Mija’s poetry teacher, who has been drinking in the same establishment with some of his writer friends. This is a fascinating moment, that instant when the local world of the community workshop, the small-town narcissism of the open reading, and the world of “the professional poets” suddenly interconnect. One of the poet’s drinking pals – an intense young man who we are told has been nominated for a major prize -- hears what his friend has been telling the locals about finding the poem inside themselves and letting it fly and can barely contain a certain snarky glee.
All of the important decisions in this film occur from this point forward, most of them off camera, and I won’t discuss them here, other than to note that the director lets us see them, just barely, without ever telling us precisely what they are. It’s a fabulous bit of not saying too much, steering away from that fatal disease of so much American cinema.
Poetry has played at several festivals and is about to make a run of art-theaters and campus film society one-nighters, starting this week in Rohnert Park. Given Lee Chang-dong’s reputation as the leader of Korean new wave cinema – and the sorry fact that his key works, such as Oasis & Secret Sunshine, are not yet available on DVD, this would represent a major film event even if it had nothing to do with poetry. That Lee Chang-dong actually gets it and gets it right in terms of what a poem can be as an act of thinking is itself an accomplishment on a whole other level.
Labels: Film
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Monday, February 07, 2011
February 10 in Providence
Memorial for Michael Gizzi
February 10 in NYC
Sparrow with Foamola & Tsipi Keller
February 10 in New Haven, CT
Christian Hawkey
February 10 in Philadelphia
A talk by Julie Weitz
February 10 in Chicago
John Wilkinson
February 10 in Devon, UK
Norman Jope
February 10 in Buffalo
Aimee Nezhukumatahil
February 10 in Boston
Elizabeth Bishop is still 100
with Frank Bidart, Olga Broumas, Peter Campion,
Dan Chiasson, Henri Cole, Bonnie Costello,
Maggie Dietz, David Ferry, Erica Funkhauser,
Jonathan Galassi, Jorie Graham, Melissa Green,
Saskia Hamilton, George Kalogeris, Gail Mazur,
Alice Quinn, Christopher Ricks, Peter Sacks,
Mary Jo Salter, & Lloyd Schwartz.
February 10 in Hampstead, NH
Ellen Doré Watson
February 10 – May 1 in NYC
The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
February 11 in SF
Sueyuen Juliette Lee, Maxi Kim,
Jacqueline Frost
February 11 & continuing in NYC
Poetry – a film by Lee Chang-dong
February 11 in NYC
Steven Karl & Kathleen Miller
February 11 in Brooklyn
Paige Taggart, Christie Ann Reynolds, & Ish Klein
February 11 in Bolinas, CA
W.S. Merwin
February 11 in Venice, CA
Gerald Locklin & Rick Smith
February 11 & 13 in Rohnert Park, CA
Poetry – a film by Lee Chang-dong
February 12 in movie theaters everywhere
Peter Sellars – John Adams live at The Met in HD
Nixon in China
February 12 in Portland, OR
A celebration of Leslie Scalapino
February 12 in Kingston, NY
Cynthia Arrieu-King & George Quasha
Labels: Coming Events
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Sunday, February 06, 2011
