Monday, July 06, 2009
Karl Young:
“Notation & the Art of Reading”
A Karl Young retrospectivie
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“the prosody of atrocity” –
Ange Mlinko on Frederick Seidel
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Remembering Albert Saijo
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The Slo Po of Lil Wayne
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Craig Dworkin’s “Fact”
Rob Fitterman’s “Directory”
Gary Sullivan’s “Am I Emo?”
Mel Nichols’ “I Google Myself”
Vanessa Place’s “Miss Scarlet”
Jordan Davis: Three poems on demand
Caroline Bergvall’s “The Not Tale (Funeral)”
K.Silem Mohammad’s “Poems About Trees”
Kenneth Goldsmith: Two Poems from The Day
Drew Gardner: “Why Do I Hate Flarf So Much?”
Sharon Mesmer’s “The Swiss Just Do Whatever”
Christian Bök’s “The Great Order of the Universe”
Nada Gordon’s “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas”
Flarf – From the Outhouse to the Art House
Somes notes on Flarf & Conceptual Writing
Poetry in the age of the internet
Vogon or flarf?
Gnoetry flarf
“Flarf, bleh”
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Heriberto Yepez on hybridism
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Rachel Loden & the Croaker poets
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Scene Report:
Moe’s Books in Berkeley
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Carol Ann Duffy:
an ode to Oxfam
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Jerry Rothenberg on
Poems for the Millennium, vol. 2
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Robert Duncan in Mallorca
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Talking with Robert Creeley
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Are school libraries a child’s right?
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Mesostomatic –
generate your own Mesostics!
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Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense
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A short history of
MNMLSM
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The fashion of poets (Laura Moriarty)
Nada Gordon’s detailed response
(in which I am described as “dapper”!)
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Tom Clark on Ted Berrigan
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How does language
shape how we think?
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But I did not shoot the poetry
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Word comes indirectly
that Seymour Faust,
one of the great neglectorinos,
has died
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Remembering Kaleem Omar
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The pleasures of rereading
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The end of the
Richard and Judy Book Club
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In Chicago, the Printers Ball
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Norman Fischer’s Charlotte’s Way
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Remembering Wislawa Szymborska
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Why Jim Murdoch hates love poetry
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Is this the future of the bookstore?
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7 reasons why
the CrunchPad
can crush Kindle
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The Kindle DX: the same, only bigger
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Faber branches into ebooks
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Stephen Wolfram takes on Google
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Talking with Ellen Bass
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“New” haiku by Shiki Masaoka found
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Sarith Peou’s Corpse Watching
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Sex & terror – the female p.o.v.
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Talking with Eduardo Galeano
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Brooklyn Copeland’s Longing / Belonging
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July 14 in Harrisburg:
Save the Arts rally
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Ambar Past:
from the introduction
to the Tzotzil “Incantations”
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Justice James Ogoola’s
Songs of Paradise
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The Millions Book Review Index
has a ways to go
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Fiction as reality in Frank O’Hara
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E.L. Doctorow:
treasures out of trash
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Judge rules for Salinger
in “sequel” dispute
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Basho’s last days
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The spoken word scene in Wichita
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Byron in Love –
the focus is not the poetry
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Haiku in Camp Lejeune
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Post-avant & epiphany
Artists to die for
Adam Fieled as an ideal reader
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The woeful plight of the book critic
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This season’s
heavily anticipated novels
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1,000 novels “everyone must read”
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“After 20 successful novels,
most author’s don’t get
the editing they still need,
and that seems to be the case with
Alice Hoffman”
Hoffman & her critics:
strike back or strike out?
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J.M. Coetzee’s
from “Summertime”:
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7 favorite NY locations in fiction
(somehow including Walt Whitman)
The bridge of poets
Literary Boston neighborhoods
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Walt Whitman’s new project –
marketing blue jeans
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Publisher caught red-handed
pimping The Post
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Free plagiarism charge
frames ‘net content debate
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Parsing Obama
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J.G. Ballard:
death of a dystopian
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The talk
as a good night out
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Collaborating with a dead son
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Poetry, soccer
& Middle-Eastern politics –
what’s not to like?
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Mary Oliver,
the “Bard of Provincetown”
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The Philip Roth booty-shaking ringtone
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Futurism turns 100
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A short history of Golden Books
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Basil Bunting on color film as art
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A Ray Bradbury “paranoia palimpsest” from Uzbekfilm
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Shouting Fire:
Stories from the Edge of Free Speech
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Mary Ruefle’s
Go Home and Go to Bed
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Coming to Brooklyn:
Ed Sanders’ Glyphs
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In the tradition of
Wright Morris & Jonathan Williams,
Linh Dinh
is a great writer who is also
a great photographer
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Schwabsky’s Biennale
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From LA MOCA to Amsterdam
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A premodern howl
against contemporary art
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In praise of self-portraits
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Che:
the history of an image
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Talking with Romeo Savoie
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The Smithsonian Folk Life Festival
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Failing to save buildings
by “beat architect” Ed White
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The world’s “most progressive company” –
Wal-Mart
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What has killed 80% of all
French cafés & bars?
In NYC in 1964,
poets battled bureacrats
to save Le Metro
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What American can learn
from Bayard Rustin
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And from William Appleman Williams
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Neoliberalism:
genesis of a swear word
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A bio of I.F. Stone
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A tip of the trilby
to Dan Silliman
from whom I got several
of these links
Saturday, July 04, 2009
In the 14 years and two months since we – my wife, my then-three-year-old sons & I – first moved to Pennsylvania, there have really been just two moments when it felt like hell to be so distant from the Bay Area. The first occurred early in 1996, still in the depths of our first real winter here, when Larry Eigner died. The second will be this Sunday, when there will be a memorial service for David Bromige at Ragle Ranch Park in Sebastapol from 1:00 to 4:30 pm (further details, with map, behind that link).
David was like an older brother to me, tho looking at those dates above I realize that he is closer to my parents’ age – six years younger than my dad, seven than my mother – than he is to mine. There is nothing I have written in the 41 years since I first met him that doesn’t have some tinge of his influence about it somewhere, even to my use of ampersands or the spelling of tho at the beginning of this paragraph, a last nod to what I once heard David call Robert Duncan Spelling, tho Duncan got it from Pound as Pound did from Blake, etc., an acknowledgement of the changeable and personal dimensions of language. And of a heritage that reaches back centuries, to the days when Shaxberd cld spell his name any way he damn pleased. Or pleas’d. Or pleasd.
When the first issue of This came out in 1971, David had already published six books. David never once played the “I’m the older poet” card with us youngsters, and if he could easily have garnered more fame had he just stayed what he had been in his youth – the heir apparent to whole SF Renaissance scene – he moved on from that with no sign of a second thought. His first appearance in This, in its third issues in 1972, was a far cry from the circuitous sentences & magesterial line breaks that had characterized his earlier books. Instead, he presented a series of six works from a larger (and I believe otherwise unpublished) project called “Homage to N. Rosenthal.” One piece was a single word: prettier. Two others were works of a single line, including the epic Get off my tits. One was a couplet as complex & mysterious as any two-line work I’ve ever read:
light work but
dear materials
You have to hear how that couplet opens & closes around the liquids of the two els that bracket this work to appreciate just how fine David’s ear could be. At one level, this poem might be read as being “about” writing, but at another, deeper level, it’s a celebration of the a sounds in its second line. Nor is the vowel sequence of the first – i, o, u – any less exquisite. Ditto the way hard consonants shut each one-syllable word of the first line, yet appear just twice – at the opening of dear and within materials.¹ David makes this look / sound effortless, but clearly it’s not. It’s a compression of formal detail at a level of force a new formalist, so-called, couldn’t even imagine. Just two years after Melnick & I weren’t sufficiently courageous to gamble on Robert Grenier in the Chicago Review, this couplet shows that David’s not only reading Grenier, but thoroughly gets it, to a degree that would take some of us (me, for example) several years still.
I think David held his relationship to what was soon to be known as language poetry every bit as lightly he did his relation to the New American Poetry. What was interesting about this new work evolving in San Francisco interested him; whatever he found tedious, was easily ignored. When his doctoral committee at Berkeley balked at the first draft of his dissertation – it wasn’t sufficiently tailored to the MLA idea of prose – David decided that it was the degree itself that was unnecessary. He had what he needed to stay at Sonoma State & he’d done the thinking that was the actual core of the project. The rest ultimately was unimportant. As I think the many statements that can be read at the David Bromige website his son Chris has put up make clear, teaching for David was really about his students. He showed no interest in using the position to build a power base or an institution.
David had two gifts that stuck with him throughout his life. First, he had the best sense of the tension between line or linebreak & the sentence of any writer I have read. He might have learned this from Duncan, Creeley & Olson, but it was something he took deeper than any of his masters. Which may be why, when he started producing the little prose poems of Tight Corners & What’s Around Them, many of his devoted readers gasped. For the master of the line to forego his most powerful tool underscored just how serious he was about moving on as a poet.
Bromige’s second gift was that he was the finest reader I’ve ever heard. His voice, a warm baritone, combined with an accent that held equal measures of his childhood in Britain, his young adulthood in British Columbia & his life as an American. As I told Carolyn Jones of the Chronicle the other day, listening to David gave you a sense of what Dickens might have sounded like as a post-avant poet. But a Dickens tempered with the likes of Louis Dudek, Fred Wah, Robert Creeley & just possibly some American noir slang as well. You can hear a number of his East Coast readings on PennSound, but for me the archetypal Bromige events were always the ones in the Bay Area where David might know as much as 75% of the audience personally. David’s give & take with the audience between poems was as much a part of his presence as the poems themselves. All I have to do to hear David at his best, is just to think of them – they’re quite etched in my imagination, going all the way back to the reading at the Albany Public Library in 1968 where I first heard David, reading with Harvey Bialy & introduced by Paul Mariah. David Perry, a Bard grad & acolyte of Robert Kelly who was a fellow student of mine at San Francisco State, had coaxed me out to that event so that I could hear Bialy, who was fine. But it was the other reader, with this not quite British, not quite placeable accent, with this resonant voice & fine wit, who flat out blew me away. 41 years later, that remains one of the most eventful readings in my life.²
So this Sunday, starting at 1:00 PM Pacific Time, I will be turning my heart & my thoughts toward Sebastapol & toward the great gift that was David Bromige and to the people who loved him.
¹ Really at the start of the second syllable, a “soft” echo of the d in dear, the t serves almost as a pause to set up the flourish of the couplet’s final phonemes.
² Hitchhiking on my way home afterward that night, I got a ride with another of the event’s attendees, one David Melnick, who has likewise turned into a lifelong friend & influence.
Labels: David Bromige
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Dale Smith on the con
in F-Con Po
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Scene report:
Studio One in Oakland
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From haiku to sijo
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Marcella Durand
on the scene in France
Plus these two accounts
of the POEM/FACE Festival
12 poets, 7 translators,
4 events, 2 countries,
1 publication
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Matthea Harvey
reading to Philip Glass’
“String Quartet No. 5”
as performed by the Miró Quartet
Harvey’s text
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The messy garden of contemporary poetics
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Expat artists
watch Iranian revolt
from afar
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Borges in Iran
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Annie Finch is running with the wolves
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Julian Kornhauser’s Been and Gone
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Oxford UP chief
on why the Google deal
is a good thing
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Camille Dungy on
persistent resistance
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Collaborating between poets and languages:
chaturangik / Squares
by Aryanil Mukherjee & Pat Clifford
(in Bengali & English)
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Post-avant &/or multiculturalism
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Alice Hoffman tweets her critics
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Talking with Nathan Richardson
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Looking at
Jaroslaw Anders
looking at
recent Polish poetry
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The decline of book reviews in Canada
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New Indian women poets
turn away from the “strident” feminism
of a Kamala Das
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Souter’s farewell is full of Frost
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Katha Pollitt:
Poetry is not dead yet
But it’s awfully quiet
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Talking with James Midgley
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July 2nd in London:
an all-star lineup
featuring Tina Darragh & P. Inman
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Visiting Samuel Menashe
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Cop turns to poetry in prison
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Gordon Brown turns to Andrew Motion
for advice
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A profile of Texas laureate Karla Morton
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In Kansas, a transition of laureates
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Is Hindi poetry in decline?
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Daniel Nester’s selected tweets
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Another summertime reading list
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“Coors rocks Harrisburg” –
when lying becomes insincere
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Fred G. Leebron’s
In the Middle of It All
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The Guggenheim in red
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Iz the Wiz
is was
YouTube of one last tag
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The SF Mime Troupe at 50
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A profile of Bob Koester
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The culture wars take a break
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Chaos drives the brain
Labels: links
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Books Received
Poetry
Marie Buck, Life & Style, Patrick Lovelace Editions, Brooklyn 2009
Amy Catanzano, Multiversal, Fordham University Press,New York 2009
Joel Chace, matter no matter, Paper Kite Press, Kingston, PA 2008
Joel Chace, A Script, Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia 2009
René Char, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland, translated by Gustaf Sobin, with a foreward by Mary Ann Caws, Counterpath Press, Denver 2009
Jordan Davis, From Orange to Pink, Fewer & Further Press, Wendell, MA 2009
Olena Kalytiak Davis, On the Kitchen Table From Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed, Hollyridge Press, Venice, CA 2009
Brad Flis, Peasants, Patrick Lovelace Editions, Brooklyn 2009
Celia Gilbert, Something to Exchange, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009
Kevin Goodan, Winter Tenor, Alice James Books, Farmington, ME 2009
Linda Gregg, Things and Flesh, Graywolf Press, St. Paul 1999
Rob Halpern, Disaster Suites, Palm Press, Long Beach, CA 2009
Serkan Işin, Dada Korkut, Ebabil Yayinlari, Ankara, Turkey 2009
Ruth Lepson, I Went Looking for You, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009
Paul Pines, Last Call at the Tin Palace, Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway 2009
Amelia Rosselli, The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems 1953-1981, translated by Giuseppe Leporace & Deborah Woodard, Chelsea Editions, New York 2009
Tomaž Šalamun, There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair, translated by many hands, edited by Thomas Kane, Counterpath Press, Denver 2009
Rachel M. Simon, Marginal Road, Hollyridge Press, Venice, CA 2009
Stacy Szymaszek, Hyperglossia, Litmus Press, Brooklyn 2009
Gail Wronsky, Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling, Hollyridge Press, Venice, CA 2009
Deborah Woodard, Hunter Mnemonics, Hemel Press, no location listed (but look in Seattle) 2008
Other
Jeremy M. Davies, Rose Alley, Counterpath Press, Denver 2009
Michael Heller, Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study, Ahadada, Tokyo / Toronto 2009
Paul Pines, My Brother’s Madness: A Memoir, Curbstone Press, Willamantic, CT 2007
Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio, University of California Press, Berkeley 1999
Journals
Bombay Gin, vol. 35, no. 2, Boulder, 2009. Includes K. Silem Mohammad, Philip Jenks and Simone Muench, David Buuck, Savannah Schroll Guz, Joseph Cooper, Emily Carr, Theodore Worozbyt, dawn lonsinger, Eric Bogosian, Rachael Peckham, Sherman Alexie, Aase Berg translated by Johannes Göransson, Jane Bernstein, Marc Nasdor, Carol Mirakove, Brian Lennon, Adela Miencilova, Akilah Oliver, Alex Shakar, Steffi Drewes, Jefferson Navicky, Sasha Steensen, Steven Salmoni, Nguyen Quyen translated by Bruce Weigl and Nguyen Phoung, & Anne Waldman (from Naropa Audio Archives)
House Organ, no. 67, Summer 2009, Warren, OH. Includes Richard Grossinger, Harrison Fisher, Peter Lamborn Wilson, A.D. Winans, Sotère Torregian, Clayton Eshleman, Dale Smith, more.
Matrix, no. 83, Summer 2009, Montreal. Includes derek beaulieu, Sam Cecil, Lindsay Cuff, Sarah Gilbert, March Hutchinson, Taien Ng-Chan, Dreen Whershler, more.
Other Formats
Jess Mynes, from Sky Brightly Picked, Fewer & Further Press, Wendell, MA 2009. Six poems on two sides of a single sheet of paper folded into fourths.
Many more books
still to catalog here
Labels: Recently Received
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
About two hours after I posted my note about American Hybrid Wednesday morning, one of my kids had a medical emergency & ended up in the hospital. Which explains why things here have been a little ragged since then. He's home now, but I'm at one least week behind on everything, including breathing, so it will take awhile to get back up to speed.
Labels: Personal
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sharon Mesmer on flarf (et al) in Poetry
Stan Apps close reads the issue
K. Silem Mohammad’s “Sonnagrams” from Shakespeare
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Simin Behbahani,
Iran’s National Poet,
speaks out
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Remembering David Bromige & Gerry Gilbert
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C.S. Perez on José Garcia Villa
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Stephen Ratcliffe & Ron Padgett
on how poets read
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Contextually reading
Hank Lazer’s Portions
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Andrew Wessels
with a different take on
American Hybrid
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William Carlos Williams
reading in the 1940s
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Anne Boyer & the edge of dream
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Geof Huth on Nico Vassilakis
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Can Seamus Heaney save the European Union?
Heaney in ought-4: “Beacons at Bealtaine”
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Neal Cassady: the dark side of fame
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Britain’s “most famous” poet
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Joe Biden outsources his poetry
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Stacie Cassarino’s Zero at the Bone
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Texas laureate celebrates “southern style”
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Post-avant & personism
Post-avant disjunct
Adam Fieled:
“Chaos is a friend of mine”
Artaud & “profound anarchy”
Iraq: a postmodern war
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Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick
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What people are reading over at Poetry
(hint: mostly not the Quietists)
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Naked Billy Collins
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Frank O’Hara
on writing about experience
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Ken Waldman,
Alaska’s fiddling poet
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Infinite summer: 3 mos. of David Foster Wallace
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“Why I’m a woman poet”
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Henry Gould, spy
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Arab poets mull threat of “western values”
to culture
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Egyptian poet makes it to second round
of Prince of Poets
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Charles Bernstein translates Victor Hugo
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Twitter poems from Iran
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Poetry Academy
signs agreement on intellectual property of
late UAE poet Bou Shihab
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Elizabeth Alexander’s
“anthem with text”
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Mathias Svalina’s
“I Am Extremely Terrified of Chinese People”
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Ken Siegelman,
Brooklyn’s laureate,
is dead
Who will fill Siegelman’s post?
One “short list”
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Sam Weller,
St. Lake bookseller,
has died
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The Book Depository offers
free worldwide delivery
on its books
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Roy Blount, Jr. for the Authors Guild
on the Google book settlement
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Loose Watch:
The Lost and Found Times Anthology
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Talking with Lucia Perillo
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Stephen Gyllenhaal,
poet & father
to two famous actors
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George Johnston, P.K. Page & Don Coles
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Talking with T.C. Boyle
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The first “official” Santa Clara County poem
is a collab (MP3)
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“Seven intellectuals in a bamboo forest”
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Talking with Ada Limón
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James McGrath’s Dreaming Invisible Voices
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The 9-word story
that will take 1,000 years
to read
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YouTubes of poets published in
The San Pedro River Review
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In search of Proust’s bedroom
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“The Bard of Berkeley,”
Robert Hass
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Lyn Lifshin’s Persephone
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Sandra Ridley & Gary Barwin
win the bpNichol Chapbook Award
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Lorca’s most impossible “impossible play”
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Living with Martin Amis
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Deborah Grossman,
laureate of Pleasanton, CA
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Crime scene tape for a book mark
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Recooking A Moveable Feast
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A curious list of poetry films
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Author acquitted in Turkish court
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Sarah Maclay’s The White Bride
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Ray Bradbury fights for libraries
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Quietists on the Appalachian Trail
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The spoken word scene
in Hartford, CT
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Talking with Rauan Klassnik
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Robert Barboza’s
The Way the Wind Bends Things
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Denis Johnson: Nobody Move
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Two books forthcoming on
David Foster Wallace
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A year with the Harvard Classics
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The formal conventions of stripper memoirs
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Talking with Tiffani O’Neil Chaney
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100 New Zealand poems about animals
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W.S. Merwin on Bill Moyers’ Journal
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Talking with Dannye Powell
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Arthur Miller & Gertrude Stein
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Entanglements,
a film by Ann Waldman & Ed Bowes
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Susan Bee: Liquid Perceptions
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The Karl Waldmann Museum
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Revisiting Bacon
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Bruce Elder wins Motherwell Book Prize
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The MFA Boston
acquires Scaasi’s collection
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A theory of parks & New York’s Highline
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Why Heidegger Matters:
Part I, II, III
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Adorno in August in Sussex
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Bar codes are 35
So is Prairie Home Companion
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Retailers reduce customer options
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Errata:
That reading by Charles Bernstein
listed on June 26
as being from the New Yipes
was really from
The (New) Reading Series
Mea maxima culpa
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Photo by Samuel James Henry
Tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein
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Charles Bernstein, reading at New Yipes in Oakland
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Allen Mozek
on Notes on Conceptualisms
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Peter Philpott’s dissertation
on the post-avant-garde
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What does a poem do?
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Waves at the Latino Poetry Review
Steven Schroeder’s review of Richard Vargas’
McLife & American Jesus
Richard Vargas’ letter to Schroeder
Barbara Jane Reyes’ perspective
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The role of the academy
in contemporary innovative
British poetry
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More David Bromige collaborations
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Kelly Writers House
in Second Life
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Talking with Paul Auster
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A case of plagiarism in Vietnam
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Talking with Murat Nemet-Nejat
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Ernesto Priego’s Not Even Dogs
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A fan of Urdu poetry:
Barack Obama
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Librarians fighting Google book deal
Google book search adds new features
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Print is dead & advertising will never recover
Steve Ballmer says
Dow Jones CEO:
Google is a blood sucker
Facebook gets more like Twitter
More newspapers dropping print
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Harvard lays off 275
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Andrew Schelling’s Ancient India
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Vincent Ferrini’s greatest hits
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Talking with David Hoenigman
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CA Conrad’s Advanced Elvis Course
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An introduction to Wallace Stevens
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Talking with Asher Ghaffar
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Bookshelf paintings
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Graham Swift’s Making an Elephant:
Writing from Within
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A profile of Sholem Aleichem
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Linda Gregg, reading
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Talking with Zachariah Wells
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Proust’s The Lemoine Affair,
another Charlotte Mandell translation
Alan Bernheimer’s photo
of Proust’s room
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The incommensurate
at Canessa Park
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Adam Phillips & Barbara Taylor
On Kindness
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Perseus cuts 20 jobs
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William Gibson’s Spook Country
Plus Pattern Recognition
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Three days of poetry in Seattle
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Mebane Robertson’s Signal from Draco
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Edmund White’s Rimbaud
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Talking with Ha Jin
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Maxine Chernoff & Arda Collins
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Sam Sampson’s Everything Talks
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“Poetry should be transparent,”
says Billy Collins
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Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
on Carl Phillips, Timothy Leary &
2 books by Norma Cole
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Rosanna Warren on Umberto Saba
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Elizabeth Robinson
on Travis Macdonald & Joshua Casteel
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Poetweets from the Scarab Club
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An anthology of women’s writing in English
that is not limited to Anglo-American work
Daisy Fried’s “Women’s Poetry”
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Quietist complaints
even in Nigeria
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The “founder” of American literature
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Michael Thomas
wins the Impac Dublin prize
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Guest editing & rejection
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Matthew Prior upon a corset
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Gary Copeland Lilley’s Alpha Zulu
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Language & schizophrenia:
a preliminary bibliography
7 pages long
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Haunted Poe
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Frank Wilson & the blue bloom
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Talking with Nicolette Bethel
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Wallace Stegner at 100
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“Most people have a single poem
that means something important to them”
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A year in prison
for quoting the Koran
in a love poem
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Mocking the pols
is a public service
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The San Francisco International Poetry Festival
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The joys of Nicholson Baker
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Georges Bataille’s Divine Filth
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Kill the brain, kill the ghoul
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Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World
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Wayne Koestenbaum on Ryan Trecartin
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Talking with Duncan Jones
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Talking with Yoko Ono
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Makoto Tojiki’s
designs in light
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The writing of Jack Smith
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Stacy Keach as Lear
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Just another brick in the wall
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Labels: links
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
American Hybrid is an important book, but also a very curious one. The anthology, edited by Cole Swensen & David St. John, is an attempt at a comprehensive anthology of “Third Way” poetics by poets representing both of the major traditions that feed into the hybridization process. This fact alone ensures the book’s historic importance, not only for the effort at codifying what hybrid poetics might actually be, but also because one of these two traditions has been historically shy about announcing its collective identity in the form of movements, wings, tendencies, whatever you might wish to call the collective formation of like-thinking writers.¹
The last significant instance of a Quietist movement, as such, was New Formalism, which was a lot like the Old Formalism, only younger, rising up about 20 years ago after the Iowists & Leaping Poets had taken the quietist mode of free verse lyric & confessional monolog about as far as they could go. Not unlike the New Coast / Apex of the M uprising at the same time amongst post-avant poetics, New Formalism saw itself as a corrective, a return to core values of a literary tradition that had been abandoned by their elders in a postmodern time. In parallel mode, Apex of the M noted that Language Writing, as such, had neglected Christian mysticism, which was true enough if you ignored the front-and-center-presence of Fanny Howe, the role of religion in the work of poets as diverse as Rae Armantrout & Alan Davies & all these connections that many langpos had to other spiritual traditions, from Zen to Judaism. New Formalism noted that the Old Formalists had come up empty – one anthology of formalism in the 20th century had not a single contributor born in the 1930s, as so many Old Formies had become apostate Quietist rebels, from Bill Merwin to Adrienne Rich to Donald Hall to Robert Bly & James Wright.
Hybrid poetics operates on very different principles. Rather than representing a revolt from within either literary tradition, it seeks to ameliorate the borders betwixt the two, to operate perhaps as if no chasm in aesthetic & cultural values gave rise to these traditions, as if, in fact, they didn’t always already represent something very real.
Cole Swensen admits as much right at the beginning of her very smart introduction:
The notion of a fundamental division in American poetry has become so ingrained that we take it for granted. Robert Lowell famously portrayed it in the 1950s and 1960s as a split between “the cooked and the uncooked,” and Eliot Weinberger updated the assertion over thirty years later in his anthology American Poetry Since 1950 (1993) when he stated that “For decades, American poetry has been divided into two camps.” Were the poetic landscapes of 1960 and 1993 as similar as these two statements might imply? And where are we in relation to them today, at the end of the first decade of the new millennium? This anthology springs from the conviction that the model of binary opposition is no longer the most accurate one and that, while extremes remain, and everywhere we find complex aesthetic and ideological differences, the contemporary moment is dominated by rich writings that cannot be categorized and that hybridize core attributes of previous “camps” in diverse and unprecedented ways.
I don’t know about 2009, but I do know that this is a position very close to the one that Cole Swensen took as my student in 1982 at San Francisco State University. It’s a belief long & deeply held. And she was already an awesomely talented young writer, capable of adapting from one form to the next, regardless of the mode’s origins. Much of what we did in that class was read through the books that would form the core of an anthology I was then in the process of editing, In the American Tree.
American Hybrid is not a take on the Tree, nor even a dissent as such, although it does very much remind me of one of its predecessors, Robert Kelly & Paris Leary’s underappreciated 1967 masterpiece, A Controversy of Poets. Kelly & Leary did not attempt to bandage over the gulf that separated the New American poets of the 1960s with the old school anglophiles of a self-styled mainstream – in fact, they wanted to highlight the differences. Each editor got half the choices in the volume, although both picked Robert Duncan (who in turn refused to participate in any anthology that had quietists in it). It was in a discussion of the Kelly-Leary anthology that I first invoked Edgar Allan Poe’s School of Quietude.
Yet Kelly & Leary didn’t do what might seem obvious: divide the book into two warring sections – 42 years later you would have been able to tell what kind of readers the book had by which pages were more worn. Rather Controversy shuffled them alphabetically, which muted the effect. That organizational principle – editors bringing their own kind to the collection & but then intermingling them A to Z – appears to be exactly what has happened with American Hybrid. One might go so far as to call this A Controversy of Poets, Vol. 2.
Which, I think, is where the curiosities start. For one thing, American Hybrid is a vast collection – although it has 100 fewer pages than Tree, it holds 74 contributors, dwarfing the 40 that appeared in my volume. Hybrid accomplishes this by holding everybody to roughly seven pages (a one-page intro/bionote, followed by six pages of text). No according influential elders, such as Barbara Guest, a broader sweep so as to underscore her enormous impact on women poets (and younger poets generally) over the past 25 years. And then there is the question of having a Barbara Guest, a John Ashbery, Etel Adnan, Charles Wright, Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop or Kathleen Fraser – all poets on the high side of 70 – in a collection of new poetry. Two of these writers were in The New American Poetry, the volume that, more than any other, engaged Quietism openly in 1960, challenging the conservative claim to being “mainstream.” And Fraser, whose first book did not appear until 1968 (when it was published by a follower of Robert Bly), has long insisted that she could have been included in that volume as well.
The inclusion of these older poets is an interesting decision, not only because I can recall coming to the opposite conclusion with Tree, deciding not to include older writers with fixed public identities prior to the rise of language writing – I thought it would blur the distinctness I was trying to highlight – but also because Hybrid’s incorporation of septuagenarian (or older) poets tells us something interesting & new about American poetry. When I was editing Tree in the early 1980s, the likes of Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Larry Eigner et al were not yet 60. Among the prior generation, the Objectivists, Zukofsky & Niedecker were dead, Bunting & Oppen were slipping back into silence, & Rakosi & Reznikoff were not a part of any discussions of then-contemporary poetry that I ever heard. Poets in their 70s & 80s were not having an important impact on shaping new poetry. Twenty-five years later, this is no longer the case. Hybrid is the first anthology I’m aware of to recognize & acknowledge this shift.
This does, however, have exactly the impact of blurring distinctness that I worried about with Tree, which Hybrid then exacerbates with alphabetical organization, the weakest editing strategy known to humankind. Actually, it’s not an editing strategy at all, but a marker of the abdication of one.² There are influential figures here – Guest, Jorie Graham, C.D. Wright, Robert Hass – but organizing the volume around such power centers would have led to a very different book. And possibly some real contentiousness amongst the editors & contributors, tho that could have been a good thing rather than a bad one if handled right. But it might have made clear that the answer to a typical question about contributors to this volume – say, What do Laura Moriarty or Juliana Spahr have to do with the poetry of Norman Dubie? – is in fact: nothing. But there are poets here presumably for whom Dubie is an important figure, or else his presence & the absence of another adventuresome Quietist (Frank Bidart, say, or Mark Doty) might raise eyebrows.
And it’s at the level – a given for any anthology – of looking at who got included, and who did not, that American Hybrid is perhaps at its quirkiest. If it’s hard to fathom why, for example, Dubie, Arthur Vogelsang or Charles Wright – standard off-the-shelf Quietists – are here; the same is true for Juliana Spahr, Harryette Mullen or Rod Smith, poets who are forever pushing boundaries. If Spahr, Mullen & Smith are here, why not Jena Osman or Kevin Davies? If Dubie, why not Robert Pinsky? Why so few poets out of the New York School (Ashbery, Guest, Alice Notley, John Yau) and so many language poets (Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, the sisters Howe, Michael Palmer, Stephen Ratcliffe, Mullen, Moriarty)? Why aren’t Maxine Chernoff, Elaine Equi, Leslie Scalapino or Beth Baruch Joselow included? Or many, many younger poets who seem entirely enscribed within hybridism, from Jasper Bernes to Donna Stonecipher to Thalia Field? Why Dean Young & not Kevin Young? And why not Bob Perelman or James Tate, poets who have had a shaping influence on Dean Young’s work, and are certainly not outside whatever circle could include both Spahr & Dubie? Those are exactly the sorts of questions that an actual editing strategy would have raised up & forced the editors to more concretely & explicitly address. (In fact, taking American Hybrid & editing it would be a terrific assignment for a graduate poetry seminar.)
There are, of course, limitations. But what jumps out at least for this reader is that, with 74 contributors, this collection is much, much shorter than it could have been. Further, there seems to be an overwhelming emphasis on poets who teach creative writing. Over 50 of the poets included currently teach writing, a number that would have been higher had there not been several emeritae faculty and two dead poets in the collection.³ Schools with multiple faculty included are UCLA, UNLV, Berkeley, Mills, San Francisco State, Bard, Brown, U. Mass Amherst, the University of Denver, Princeton and the University of Iowa. Twelve of the poets here either currently teach in the Bay Area, or have done so in the not too distant past. In a world with at least 20,000 English-language poets & some 808 degree-granting writing programs, there simply aren’t enough jobs in colleges for poets for this to be a statistical accident.
This I think points to the problem that underscores this collection. It would have made far greater sense to have focused not on some of the questionable choices here, but on the writing of the next generation – their students. If there truly is an American hybrid poetics, it is not in some mythic place where Lyn Hejinian & Norman Dubie are in any sense “the same thing” or even part of a larger confluence, but in the work of their students, people conceivably influenced by both. This would have left you with a very different book – the average age of the authors would not be, as it seems here, on the high side of 50 – with many more contributors than we find in the Swensen-St. John collection. And you could have done it without shifting the aesthetics of the book one inch.
So is there an American hybrid writing? Surely, although it is not so clear the degree to which it exists as a self-aware literary tendency, the way language poetry or slow poetry (I prefer the rubric “developmentally challenged”) have been. To the degree that we see Quietists actually articulating some sense of a literary movement, it can only be a good thing. To the utopian notion that hybridism will somehow, some day, heal the broader cultural and political rupture between aesthetic conservatives & progressives, I’m much more skeptical. Asking William Logan to write as though the 20th century has begun (let alone the 21st) is like recruiting Rush Limbaugh for your MoveOn group. A more comprehensive (& adequate) set of questions might form around an issue such as what is it that younger writers can take from both traditions, and why is it that so many younger writers are conflict averse in a world in which conflict itself is inherent? What is the attraction to not taking a stand?
¹ It’s not the first anthology to focus specifically on this group of writers. Reginald Shepherd’s Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries covers much the same ground. Sixteen of his 22 contributors are included among the 74 in American Hybrid. One could read American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, edited by Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell, in a like vein, although it has a broader reach , and just four of its 13 contributors show up in Hybrid.
² This abdication is an echo of the worst of the poltical tendencies of the left in the 1970s, groups that protested the misuse of power by major institutions &, so as not to do likewise themselves (as had the New Left in the 1960s, especially where issues of gender were concerned), refused to exercise power themselves, creating organizational vacuums that simply compromised the effectiveness of several different movements while rendering the actual power politics of the group invisible to all but a handful of insiders.
³ Poets included in American Hybrid & their current or listed teaching affiliations:
Etel Adnan
Ralph Angel, University of Redland
Rae Armantrout, UC San Diego
John Ashbery, Bard
Mary Jo Bang, Washington University (St. Louis)
Joshua Beckman
Cal Bedient, UCLA
Molly Bendall, USC
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Michael Burkhard, Syracuse
Killarney Clarey
Norma Cole
Gillian Conoley, Sonoma State
Martin Corless-Smith, Boise State
Stacy Doris, San Francisco State
Norman Dubie, Arizona State
Lynn Emanuel, Univesity of Pittsburgh
Kathleen Fraser, emerita, San Francisco State
Alice Fulton, Cornell
James Galvin, Iowa City
Forrest Gander, Brown
C.S. Giscombe, Berkeley
Peter Gizzi, U Mass Amhest
Albert Goldbarth, Wichita State
Jorie Graham, Harvard
Barbara Guest, deceased
Robert Hass, Berkeley
Lyn Hejinian, Berkeley
Brenda Hillman, St. Mary’s (Moraga)
Paul Hoover, San Francisco State
Fanny Howe, emerita, UC San Diego
Susan Howe, emerita, SUNY Buffalo
Andrew Joron
Claudia Keelan, UNLV
Myung Mi Kim, SUNY Buffalo
Ann Lauterbach, Bard
Mark Levine, Iowa
Nathaniel Mackey, UC Santa Cruz
Stefany Marlis
Mark McMorris, Georgetown
Jane Miller, University of Arizona
Laura Moriarty
Jennifer Moxley, Maine
Harryette Mullen, UCLA
Laura Mullen, LSU
Alice Notley
Michael Palmer
D.A. Powell, USF
Bin Ramke, U of Denver
Claudia Rankine, Pomona
Stephen Ratcliffe, Mills
Donald Revell, UNLV
Elizabeth Robinson
Martha Ronk, Occidental
Mary Ruefle
Reginald Shepherd, deceased
Eleni Sikelianos, U. of Denver
Rod Smith
Carol Snow
Juliana Spahr, Mills
Susan Stewart, Princeton
John Taggart, emeritus, U. of Shippensburg
Arthur Vogelsang
Anne Waldman, Naropa
Keith Waldrop, Brown
Rosmarie Waldrop
Marjorie Welish
Susan Wheeler, Princeton
Dara Wier, U. Mas Amherst
Elizabeth Willis, Wesleyan
C.D. Wright, Brown
Charles Wright, Virginia
John Yau, Rutgers
Dean Young, U. Texas, Austin
Labels: Schools of poetry
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Dan Featherston on David Bromige
The Petrarch Project:
4 new collaborations with Rychard Denner
& an interview
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John Olson’s “Extreme Reading”
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Poetry as site of resistance
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John Ashbery &/or Andrew Marvell
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Guardian obit for Kamala Das
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Timothy Yu’s Race and the Avant-Garde
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Ange Mlinko:
“No matter how weird you are,
English really is weirder”
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Language & the myth of authenticity
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Cooking Naked Lunch
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Stealing plums from the ice box
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Paul Muldoon on the Colbert Report
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Ralph Maud fact checks Tom Clark in
Charles Olson at the Harbor
Olson’s notes on Henry Corbin
Stephen Walter’s London,
Charles Olson’s cartography
Nick Lawrence’s “Olson’s Republic”
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FrancEyE has died
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Paradise Lost on the runway
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560,626 new book titles
were published last year
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Jonathan Mayhew’s Apocryphal Lorca
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The Big Bridge Slow Poetry feature
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Post-avant discourse
Jordan Stempleman
& the limits of the post-avant
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Book designs
for 40 imaginary books
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Denis Barone,
the Laureate of West Hartford, CT
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Geof Huth:
A poetics
Part 2 focuses on WCW
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The essays of Leonard Michaels
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Talking with Aaron Tieger
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Allegory in the work of Bruce Andrews
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Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai
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Harold Norse,
a Zelig for our time
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A profile of Adonis
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What became of the Novísimos
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“T.S. Eliot spent his summers in Gloucester”
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Talking with Howard Junker
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What is the relationship
between language &
nature?
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Mark Doty:
some digressions on Frank O’Hara
in the Hamptons
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A profile of Benjamin Zephaniah
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In praise of William McGonagall
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Talking with Ryan Buynak
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“the most thoughtful, the wisest
and yet most accessible
of all modern poets”
Henryson’s Testament
as translated by Seamus Heaney
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Celebrating Brian Friel
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Does your state have a poet laureate?
The first state laureate was Ina Coolbrith
California, 1915
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William Butler Yeats:
sex & death in Ireland
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Katha Pollitt,
leaving the Garden of Eden
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A jazz poet in Emporia, Kansas
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Old jazz, new poetry & the NBA
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Greg Rappleye,
late starter
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Banning Hemingway, Sedaris, King & Lippman
from the high school reading list
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The indie bookseller book prize
short list
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Defending Kanye West
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CA Conrad on Elvis’ queer content
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Highlights of the Danowski collection
at Emory University
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“The Fallacy of Rejecting Closure”
Digital photography & reader empowerment
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“Were it not for Persian poetry,
English poetry
would have no rhyme”
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Ian Hamilton’s Collected Poems
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Tom Beckett:
a tale of two desks
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Minefields of the memoir
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Let’s
Doghouse:
A Tribute to Liam Rector
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Talking with A.E. Stallings
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Deborah Kay Davies
wins the Wales Book Award
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The battle ground
in the war on tenure
is the junior college
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“Those Armageddon Rapture Headed
End-Time Blues”
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Why newsprint still beats Kindle
Autographing the Kindle:
“This bespells doom”
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The one news magazine that is thriving
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An archive of 19th century British newspapers
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Overheard at the West Chester Poetry Conference
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Wallace Shawn:
writing about sex is…
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Shakespeare in the Hudson Valley
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Talking with Jonathan Galassi
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Why Ulysses
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Azar Nafisi
on the situation in Iran
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Uniformity & blandness
in book design
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“Tart cards”
as a design form
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Does the net
make you a better writer?
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A short career at
The New Yorker
told entirely in tweets
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Typos will set you free
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Remembering Trilling
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Street photographers
fear for their art
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Art Spiegelman:
“The St. Louis Refugee Ship Blues”
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Another taste of Bacon
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Futurism at the Tate Modern
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Max Gurvich is dead:
can we get rid of his sculptures?
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Performing outside the comfort zone
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Michael Lally on Chris and Don
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Barbara Jane Reyes
on criticism, reviews &
The Resistance of Philippine Cinema
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Francis Ford Coppola at 70:
just getting started
as an indie director
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Naked Lunch:
what became of the Neanderthals
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The Crisis in Iran
Protests outside Tehran
Use Twitterfall filters
#iranelection
Basij
Tehran
But beware
fake Iranian tweeters
Evidence of fraud in the election numbers
A good Flickr site
is Mousavi1388
Photos from Saturday’s riot in Tehran
Injured demonstrators arrested at hospitals
The latest coverage from Stratfor
Nieman Reports:
Iran – can its stories be told?
LiveBlogging the Uprising
Labels: Politics
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
Lyn Hejinian, David Bromige, Cecelia Belle, Tilden Park 2003
The San Francisco Chronicle obit
for David Bromige
Bromige’s funeral pamphlet
The collection of tales & reminiscences has now grown to over 90
Some Bromige collaborations
David Bromige in Portuguese
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Narrative vs. vulgar narrative
in hybrid & New Thang poetries
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Penn’s George Oppen podcast
features Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Bob Perelman
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Keeping it real re the # of English words
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Talking with Chris Higgs
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Barrett Watten reading
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June 21 @ 21 Grand (Oakland)
Judith Goldman & Charles Bernstein
(his first Bay Area reading in 5 years)
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The Charles Olson Centenary Conference
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Wallace Stevens “in” Europe
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How independent
are indie bestseller lists?
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Steve Farmer, Lindsay Boldt & Joshua Clover
reading at Artifact
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Charles Plymell:
the benzedrine highway interview
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Q&A with Robert Archembeau
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Annie Finch on
Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3
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Liu Hongbin,
a poet in exile
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Talking with Halé Tokay
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Jeramy Dodds wins the Trillium for poetry
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This year’s short list
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Some criteria of poetic analysis
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Alan Baker
on Gertrude Stein & Tony Lopez
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The death of painting
& its threat to poetry
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Will the real post-avants please stand up?
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Problems with post-avant writing
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Remembering Karen Brodine
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Poets reveal
the strangest place
they’ve “done it”
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Poet with the worst day job ever
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“A poet must know how to kick”
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University presses
“are getting hammered”
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Intercontinental
& damn proud of it
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Countries represented in
The Poetry Society’s
translation prize contest for this year
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When books become design statements
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The Whitman of the national security state
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Is Carol Ann Duffy
inferior to a weather report?
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Carolyn Smart’s Hooked
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Moon Chung-hee’s Woman on Terrace
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Talking with Desmond Kon
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A poetry festival on Martha’s Vineyard
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Todd Rubenstein:
obviously one of the best
poets-in-the-schools
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The advantage of poetry
over music
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Does the internet
make you a better writer?
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Kindle & class readers
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The lineup for
SoundEye #13
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Thibault Raoult’s El P.E.
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A profile of Jeffrey Beam
with several poems
(scroll down)
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A Text Festival update
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Haaretz lets poets produce the news
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Scott Urban & the news
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Flannery & the peacocks
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Neeli Cherkovski’s
elegy for
Harold Norse
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Byron sans editing
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Why rappers are the natural succesors
to Tennyson
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Reading report:
Kafka tribute in New York
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The Scottish Poetry Library
is 25!
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Joshua Kotin on Devin Johnston
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Lightsey Darst’s Ginnunagap
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The 15th Lariat Laureate is Ken Cook
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Amazon has suggestions
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“It’s a parody”
claims
Salinger sequel author
Judge issues temporary restraining order
to block publication
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A Bloomsday quiz
& Bloomsday FAQs
Burying your grandfather
in Ulysses
How Ulysses
got its title
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Talking with Wendy Mnookin
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Talking with Danny Solis
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Kanye West:
“Proud non-reader”
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Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian
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Talking with Paul Stephens
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Subscriptions are now open to
The Journal of British & Irish
Innovative Poetry
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Susan Sontag:
Waiting for Godot
in Sarajevo
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AP to distribute
nonprofit journalism
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Are games what’s killing
the music industry
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Jonathan Williams’
photography archives
arrive at Yale
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Banksy in Bristol
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Grace Hartigan & the “boys club”
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Artists say No to Google
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Ian Hamilton Finlay & co.
at London’s ICA
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Gagosian decides that now
is the time to expand
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The radical art of sowing seeds
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Women playwrights
arrive in the West End
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Graham Greene on film
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John Rawls & Barack Obama
Labels: links
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Books Received
Poetry
David Buuck, The Shunt, Palm Press, Long Beach, CA 2009
Chris Cheek, part: short life housing, The Gig, Toronto 2009
Camelia Elias, Eight Senses Plus Two, Eye Corner Press, Roskilde, Denmark 2009
James Galvin, As Is, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend 2009
Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan, Burning Deck, Providence 2009
Scott Glassman & Sheila E. Murphy, Quaternity, Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia 2009
Albert Goldbarth, To Be Read in 500 Years: All New Poems, Graywolf, St. Paul 2009
James Guida, Marbles, Turtle Point Press, New York 2009
Rae Desmond Jones, Blow Out, Island Press, Summer Hill, Australia 2009
Rachel Loden, Dick of the Dead, Ahsahta Press, Boise 2009
James Maughn, Kata, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009
Sarah Menefee, In Your Fish Helmet, Transmission Press 2009
Paul Naylor, Jammed Transmission, Tinfish, Kāne’ohe, HI 2009
Frank Parker, zig-zag journeys, frankshome.org, no location (but look in Tucson), 2009
Lawrence Raab, The History of Forgetting, Penguin, New York & London, 2009
Joanna Rawson, Unrest, Graywolf Press, St. Paul 2009
Betsy Sholl, Rough Cradle, Alice James Books, Farmington, ME 2009
Paul Siegell, Jambandbootleg, A-head Publishing, Nicasio, CA 2009
Laura Sims, Stranger, Fence, Albany, NY 2009
Michael Slosek, Interdiction, Transmission Press, San Francisco 2008
Robert Sward, Heavenly Sex, Palm Poets Series (Black Moss Press), Windsor, Ontario 2002
Robert Sward, The Collected Poems: 1957-2004, Black Moss Press, Windsor, Ontario 2004
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition, edited by Jason Stacy, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2009
Elizabeth Marie Young, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, Fence, Albany NY 2009
Poetry Anthologies
Dennis Barone & James Finnegan, Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2009. Includes John Ashbery, Paul Auster, John Berryman, Robert Bly, William Bronk, Robert Creeley, W.S. Di Piero, Annie Finch, Forrest Gander, Dana Gioia, Peter Gizzi, Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard, Susan Howe, Donald Justice, Ann Lauterbach, Robert Lowell, Paul Mariani, James Merrill, Marianne Moore, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, David St. John, Carl Sandburg, Ravi Shankar, Mark Strand, William Carlos Williams, Charles Wright & many more.
No editor listed, The Book of Practical Pussies, drawings by Michelle Rollman, texts by D-L Alvarez, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Bob Glück, Kevin Killian, Scott MacLeod, Yedda Morrison, Camille Roy, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Krupskaya / Tender Buttons, San Francisco / New York 2009
Judith Goldman & Leslie Scalapino, War and Peace: Vision and Text, vol. 4, O Books, Oakland 2009. Includes Petah Coyne, Kiki Smith & Leslie Scalapino, Abigail Child, Susan Bee & Charles Bernstein, Amy Evans McClure & Michael McClure, Marjorie Welish & Judith Goldman, Len Hejinian, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, E. Tracy Grinnell, Simon Fattal, Michael Cross, Denise newman, Gigi Janchang, Thom Donovan, Etal Adnan, Fanny Howe, John Beer, Patrick Gurgin, Jen Scappettone, Jenny Boully & Lauren Shufran, Liz Willis, Brenda Iijima, Alan Halsey, Stephen Ratcliffe, Kim Rosenfield &
Cheryl Donegan
Cole Swensen & David St. John, American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, Norton, New York 2009. Includes Etal Adnan, Ralph Angel, Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Mary Jo Bang, Joshua Beckman, Cal Bedient, Molly Bendall, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Michael Burkhard, Killarney Clary, Norma Cole, Gillian Conoley, Martin Corless-Smith, Stacy Doris, Norman Dubie, Lynnn Emanuel, Kathleen Fraser, Alice Fulton, James Galvin, Forrest Gander, C.S. Giscombe, Peter Gizzi, Albert Goldbarth, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Paul Hoover, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Andrew Joron, Claudia Keelan, Ann Lauterbach, Mark Levine, Nathaniel Mackey, Stefanie Marlis, Mark McMorris, Jane Miller, Laura Moriarty, Jennifer Moxley, Harreytte Mullen, Laura Mullen, Michael Palmer, D.A. Powell, Bin Ramke, Claudia Rankine, Stephen Ratcliffe, Donald Revell, Elizabeth Robinson, Martha Ronk, Mary Ruefle, Eleni Sikelianos, Rod Smith, Carol Snow, Juliana Spahr, Susan Stewart, John Taggart, Arthur Vogelsang, Anne Waldman, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Marjorie Welish, Susan Wheeler, Dara Wier, Elizabeth Willis, C.D. Wright, Charles Wright, John Yau, Dean Young
Other
Summer Brenner, I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex, PM Press, Oakland 2009
Devin Johnston, Creaturely and Other Essays, Turtle Point Press, New York 2009
Ishmael Reed, The Plays, Dalkey Archive, Champaign, IL 2009
Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde, Stanford, Palo Alto 2009
Journals
Celery Flute: The Kenneth Patchen Newsletter, no. 4 (vol. 2, no. 1), Buffalo 2009. Includes Chris Covics, Ayesgul Tözeren, Bree, Karl Kempton, Reeve Stone, Douglas Manson, T.L. Kryss, Douglas Paisely, Brent Cunningham & Markk.
Meridian, no. 23, May 2009, Charlottesville, VA. Includes Katherine Anne Porter, Tao Lin, , Jane Mead, Kenneth Goldsmith, Nahal Suzanne Jamir, Aby Kaupang, Alyssa Knickerbocker, Alice Notley, Sam Witt, more.
Process: Prolegomena to the Study of Any Future, no. 2, Gloucester, MA 2009. Includes Gerrit Lansing, Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman, Donald Wellman, James Cook, Ben Tripp, Bill Corbett & Lisa Rich.
Other Formats
. Pew Fellowships in the Arts, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia, 2009. What used to be an annual catalog is now an irregularly shaped brochure containing a DVD with 12 short films about the 2008 winners: Charles Burwell, J. Rufus Caleb, Matthew Cox, Russell Davis, Katherine Clark Gray, Nan Korantema Ayeboafo, Felix “Pupi” Legarreta, Vera Nakonechny, Venissa Santí, Anne Seidman, Edgar J. Shockley III
& Mauro Zamora.
Tuesday: An Art Project, fifth issue, Spring 2009, Arlington, MA. Stack of 5”x7” cards wrapped in a cover of 18”x12” construction paper. Contributors include Joshua Beckman, Jarita Davis, Christopher DeWeese, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Karen Lee, David Lehman, Bernard Noël, Eléna Rivera, Mary Ruefle, Evie Schockley, more.
Many more books
still to catalog here
Labels: Recently Received
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
I had just gotten off the phone with a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, doing background work for an obit of David Bromige, when I got an email telling me that Victoria Rathbun, a fine young poet who hung with the Actualists in the late 1970s, had passed away last month. Actualism was the brainchild of Darrell Gray, an attempt to create a 3rd-generation NY School out of the Iowa City-Bay Area axis, and a number of its practitioners were first-rate poets. Of course the whole idea of the NY School sans New York is an interesting, if problematic, concept to begin with, but Actualism was never able to transcend Darrell’s mercurial (and fatal) alcoholism. If you hunt for Victoria Rathbun (there’s more than one) on Google, what you’ll find for the poet is the Dick Grossinger-Kevin Karrane anthology, Baseball Diamonds, in which she has work alongside Tom Clark, John Sayles, Philip Roth, Fielding Dawson, Roger Angell and A. Bartlett Giamatti; records of two readings at the Grand Piano (one a Punk Rock Reading – a quintessentially Actualist event – with G.P. Skratz & Michael-Sean Lazarchuk, the other with me); a reading & chat with Alan Bernheimer on the radio show In the American Tree (MP3); and mention of her participating in an Actualist Convention video among the archives of the defundt La Mamelle artspace.
I don’t know why Victoria Rathbun didn’t publish more in other post-Actualist contexts. But the email (like the phone call from the Chron) came right while I was at the end of a more thorough reading of Stephen Burt’s “New Thing” essay, thinking of the heated reactions to it I’ve seen & heard, and it made me think of all the old questions of survival as an artist, individuality & community, the phenomenon of groupness, the shadow side of critical discourse, and the fate of poetry in a managerial society such as the United States.
Burt’s essay, to the degree that it focuses on what might be called neo-Objectivism or the new minimalism, is not half so bad as the critics of it make it sound. But you can see where he brings the reaction on himself by over-reaching, especially toward the end, trying to make a case for a new relationship toward referents in language, one that allows him to invoke both C.D. Wright – an iconic “Third Way” poet – and Juliana Spahr, whom I might characterize as a political conceptualist, as further examples of what he’s getting at. At which point, it sort of dissolves into a fog of anything goes that dissipates the earlier force of his argument.
More interesting perhaps is the way he frames the discussion at the outset, as an alternative to the old bad regime of Elliptical poetics,
slippery, digressive, polyvocalic creators of overlapping, colorful fragments. Their poems were avowedly personal, although they never retold the poets’ life stories (they did not tell stories at all), the poets used, or at least mentioned, difficult ideas, especially from continental philosophy, although they never laid put philosophical arguments (they did not lay out arguments at all). Nor did they describe concrete truths at length. Full of illogic, of associative leaps, their poems resembled dreams, performances, speeches, or pieces of music, and they were, in M.H. Abrams’ famous formulation, less mirror than lamp: the poets sought to project their own experiences, in sparkling bursts of voluble utterance. Their models, among older aughors, were Emily Dickinson, John Berryman, John Ashbery, perhaps Frank O’Hara, some at had studied (or studied with) Jorie Graham, and many had picked up devices from the Language Writers of the West Coast.
Given that Burt was himself instrumental in first describing this phenomenon eleven years ago, what jumps out at me more than anything is just how bad this framing is as description. Dismissive in each of its characterizations, it notably fails to mention the single most influential poet that the American Hybrid, Abstract Lyric or Third-Way poets have responded to over the past twenty years: Barbara Guest. And it fails to acknowledge just how Guest’s proliferating work toward the end of her life – the first 30 years of her career accounts for just 40% of her Collected Poems, the last 15 for all the rest – transformed for many young writers the meaning of the New York School as profoundly as the resurrection of George Oppen in the late 1950s reconfigured Objectivism. Indeed, Burt’s use of Objectivism in this essay largely means Oppen, Neidecker & possibly Rakosi, but not Zukofsky.
So Burt sets himself up for trouble both at the beginning & end of an otherwise reasonable assessment of the New Minimalism. But what may make this maldescription of The Old Thing particularly poignant in 2009 is that it occurs almost simultaneous with the publication of American Hybrid, the anthology edited by Cole Swensen & David St. John. The anthology represents the first major attempt by the poets involved to characterize this new aesthetic, right at the moment that Burt is throwing it out for a new one predicated upon (his words) fidelity & restraint. Their anthology is every bit as problematic as Burt’s cast of thing-based poets, and the problems of both are perhaps best noted by the names that show up in American Hybrid who are on Burt’s list of anti-hybrid poets, starting with the very first: Rae Armantrout.
Further, Burt doesn’t seem to notice that his description of Language Poetry as congruent with hybrid poetics (he could have pointed to Lyn Hejinian, the sisters Howe, or Michael Palmer, all in American Hybrid as well, had he wanted to) obscures the fact that its relationship to language & reference is much closer, in many cases, to what he’s calling The New Thing. The fact-based poetics of Barrett Watten (or, for that matter, most of my work & virtually all of Hejinian’s) comes right at that point where Burt starts to overreach and lose his way – he just doesn’t notice.
Clustering – whether done internally, such as a bunch of poets announcing that they represent X, whether it’s New Formalism or Flarf, or done externally, by a critic like Burt – is an attempt to give shape to the literary landscape. It highlights & foregrounds, and ideally what it highlights shows the poets’ work to best advantage. Sometimes it can have a terrific impact on a writer’s work being noticed – Carl Rakosi, by his own admission, had not even read poetry in 25 years when Andrew Crozier tracked him down because of his relationship to the Objectivists. But sometimes it misfires too. Hardly anyone remembers the Mesa phenomenon in Bolinas in the early 1970s, tho there were terrific poets involved. The Activist Poets around Lawrence Hart, Robert Barlow, Rosalie Moore, Marie Wells & Jeanne McGahey in the 1940s likewise have disappeared, though Barlow was H.P. Lovecraft’s literary executor & collaborator & a teacher of William Burroughs. The Actualists are gone as well.
As the absolute number of practicing poets swells – I find Seth Abramson’s figure of 50,000 plus in the English language unconvincing, but 20,000 does seem reasonable – I anticipate that we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of clustering, whether around journals or “scenes” or aesthetic fundamentals. The whole notion of the poet as a solitary practitioner – the splendid isolato – is so out of touch with reality as to be bizarre. Sure there are poets who eschew the companionship of their peers – but there is a reason for it. These are poets with issues.
Still, it would be well worth the effort to think through in greater depth than I can do tonight just why one group goes on to provide a nourishing context for its members – the New York School, Language Poetry, Surrealism are all examples – while others do not. One of the obvious answers, I think, is that the poets themselves have to recognize & acknowledge their internal dynamics, maybe even honor them as such. They have to have a reason to talk with one another.
So I can’t tell you when Victoria was born, but David Highsmith has forwarded a photo. If you listen to that show with Alan Bernheimer, I think you’ll agree that we lost a very talented woman.
Labels: passing, Schools of poetry, The New Thing
Monday, June 15, 2009
Tony Green at Writers House
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David Bromige’s 75th birthday
with a significant present
David Bromige & the irony of action
“Some quotes & found poems”
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LA Times obit for Harold Norse
NY Times obit
SF Chronicle obit
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NY Times obit for Kamala Das
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Remembering Mario Benedetti
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Jerry Rothenberg:
Poetry in the 1950s
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Walks with Paul Celan
A new Celan translation
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Giving Cavafy back his voice
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Bill Knott on Hart Crane
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Alan Davies on Brian Kim Stefans
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Library of America’s latest atrocity:
Ashbery’s “wacky wavering”
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“The anthology is the enemy of the poet”
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broadsheet no. 3
has an interview with Robert Creeley
(PDF)
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Outsider Poems:
A Mini-Anthology in Progress
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Geraldine Monk & Martin Archer
performing at
TextMusicTextMusic
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Bellow’s indictment of “poeticide”
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Charles Bernstein’s The Lenny Paschen Show
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The lost poet: Seymour Faust
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Joseph Harrington
on Loden’s Nixon
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Beats go Hollywood
An abridged (highly)
Junky by William Burroughs
Talking with George Whitman
of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris
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New Criticism & the CIA
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William Matthews vs. Bill Knott
as seen by Pierre Bourdieu
(maybe)
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“acrobatic macaroni
or at a music-boiled battle scene”
(this videopoem
cries out to be viewed
full-screen)
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Rodrigo Toscano’s
Collapsible Poetics Theater
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Two Jacks
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Jim Jarmusch’s summer reading list
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Reading Olson at the river
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Nada Gordon on conceptual writing
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Jackie Clark on Justin Marks
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The 2009 NYFA
Poetry Fellows
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Will Scribd challenge Kindle?
6 lessons about e-books
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June 30:
Eileen Myles’
The Collection of Silence
(scroll down)
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Talking with Campbell McGrath
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Wordsworth:
“How sweet it is…”
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Brooklyn Copeland’s Borrowed House
Post-avant & the feminist impulse
Post-avant & imagination
Apocalypse & post-avant
Where is the edge of edgy?
The Argonaut Folly
(part 2)(part 3)
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Simon &Schuster to sell
e-books on Scribd
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Brad Flis’ Peasants
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Talking with Shaindel Beers
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This week in NJ:
Paterson: The Province of the Poem
A conference on William Carlos Williams
Lewis Turco on the prosody of WCW
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Designing Oblivion
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“Wasting paper” –
white space & poetry
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BBC’s Poetry Season –
how was it for you?
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100+ poets
descend on Duluth
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Talking with Frank Giampietro
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