Sunday, November 08, 2009
Contact: A Symposium in Memory of
Alexei Parshchikov
(1954 — 2009)
Tuesday, November 10, 4:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Room 402, Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
(click here for map)
In 1990 Russian poet Alexei Parshchikov enrolled in graduate study at Stanford University. His presence in California for the ensuing several years was a high water mark in the interactions between Russian and American poets as the Cold War was coming to a close. "Contact" will be devoted to a discussion of this moment in US-Russian poetic history, and in particular to Alexei Parshchikov's American sojourn. Symposium participants include a number of Parshchikov's interlocutors during those years.
Program:
4:00 Welcome
4:15 Alexei Parshchikov: A Bilingual Poetry Reading
5:00: Round Table Discussion with Charles Bernstein, Dmitry Golynko, John High, Eugene Ostashevsky, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, and Andrew Wachtel. Kevin M. F. Platt will moderate.
6:45-8:00 Dinner Reception for audience and participants.
Participants:
Charles Bernstein
Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn. Parshchikov translated his "Artifice of Absorption" into Russian. He is the author of My Way: Speeches and Poems and Girly Man.
Dmitry Golynko
Poet and cultural critic from Saint Petersburg. Golynko is poet in residence at Penn during fall 2009. He is the author of three books of poetry in Russian. He has recently been published in English in As It Turned Out by Ugly Duckling Presse.
John High
J High's most recent book is Here. A Book of Unknowing is forthcoming. Both books are by Talisman House. High was primary editor & translator for Crossing Centuries—The New Russian Poetry as well as co-translator of books by Ivan Zhdanov, Nina Iskrenko and Alexei Parshchikov's Blue Vitriol (along with Michael Molner and Michael Palmer.)
Eugene Ostashevsky
Russian-born American poet, author of The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (Ugly Duckling Presse) and editor and main translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern UP).
Bob Perelman
Poet and critic who teaches at U Penn. Books include Iflife (2006); Playing Bodies (with Francie Shaw, 2004); Ten to One (1999).
Kevin M. F. Platt
Teaches Russian and Comparative Literature at Penn. He is the author most recently of Terror and Greatness: Ivan IV and Peter I as Russian Myths (forthcoming from Cornell UP).
Ron Silliman
Author of over 30 volumes of poetry, criticism and memoirs, including The Alphabet (U. of Alabama, 2008). With Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian & Michael Davidson, Silliman is the co-author of Leningrad (Mercury House, 1991).
Andrew Wachtel
Dean of The Graduate School at Northwestern University. Wachtel has translated poetry and prose from Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Slovene and Bulgarian. His most recent book is Russian Literature co-written with Penn colleague Ilya Vinitsky.
This event is sponsored by
the University of Pennsylvania
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
and CEC ArtsLink
Labels: Events
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Lewis Turco, Morton Marcus & Vern Rutsala at Robinson Jeffer’s Tor House 2006
Morton Marcus
1936 – 2009
Labels: passing
Friday, November 06, 2009
So does the fact that what the Phillies have accomplished in the past three years – three Eastern Division championships, two National League championships, one World Championship – is more than the San Francisco Giants, the team of my youth, have accomplished in their 51 years in the Baghdad by the Bay, make up for my disappointment on Wednesday? No. Not really.
Already the mind starts to ponder just what the Phillies will need to do next year to (a) get back to the World Series and (b) be better than the Yankees (or whomever) when they get there. Seven of their eight everyday players have been there for two straight years and all eight should be back next year, although the Phillies have had a tendency of rotating out one outfielder per year, with center fielder Aaron Rowand going to the Giants two years ago and Pat Burrell to the AL champs in Tampa Bay last year. With Michael Taylor & Domonic Brown waiting in the minors that could happen again this year, tho my guess is not. Rather I think that they’ll start next season with the same outfield (including Ben Francisco as the fourth man), but bring Taylor up the instant something happens to Raul Ibañez. I don’t expect Ibañez to finish next season as a starter, but that’s okay. He’ll be a big improvement in Matt Stairs’ slot as primo pinch-hitter.
Stairs is just one of the bench players I don’t expect to see back next year. In fact, catcher Paul Bako & Francisco are the only bench players I do expect to return. The Phightins (you have to live in Philly to use that term, long i on the first syllable) had the worst bench of any team in the playoffs and it showed. It’s time to sign a better class of back-up players.
But the pitching is the real muddle. Brett Myers and Joe Blanton are, I believe, both at the ends of their contracts. Jamie Moyer is the oldest player in baseball. Pedro Martinez is gutty but running on fumes – less than half a season was more than he could handle this year. That leaves the Phils with Cliff Lee, one of the best pitchers in baseball, Cole Hamels, one of the most talented players in the game, J.A. (pronounced Jay) Happ, the probable rookie-of-the-year, as definite starters. I would actually anticipate seeing the Kyles in the number 4 & 5 slots next year: Kyle Kendrick, a young starter who got shoved into the minors by the crowd of pitchers on the mound this year, and Kyle Drabek, the Phillies’ top pitching prospect. If I’m Ruben Amaro, Jr., the Phillies’ general manager, I recognize that Myers won’t attract a big salary coming off a year in which he was injured, so I offer him a one-year contract with a club-option for a second and lots of incentives (both as starter & reliever) to motivate him. And if I’m Charlie Manuel, he’s my number three starter behind Lee & Happ. That leaves me with six quality starters, which is the minimum you need given the proclivity for injuries that come with throwing a ball 90 miles an hour.
Hamels is the real reclamation project here. He is one of the most talented players in the game from the neck down. But it’s what’s on top of his shoulders that keeps causing him to self-destruct the instant something goes wrong in a game. He reminds me, more than anything, of a very young Randy Johnson, the Randy Johnson of the Montreal Expos or the first few seasons in Seattle, all promise and very little to show for it. Johnson was 30 years old when he finally had his first good season with the Mariners and 34 when he first won 20 games. That could very easily be the Hamels story as well, but he won’t be 30 until the 2014 season. If I’m the Phillies I basically sit him next to Cliff Lee for the next few years to see how it’s done when it’s done right. Or, in their cases, left.
Jamie Moyer has one more year on his contract. If he doesn’t retire, I would offer him back to Seattle for that very famous player-to-be-named later, picking up much of his salary to improve my options as to which player that might be. If he does retire, I make him my roving pitching instructor in the minors in about two seconds. The man has forgotten more about pitching than most pitchers ever know.
The bullpen is an even bigger problem. Between Brad Lidge & Ryan Madson, the Phillies blew 17 saves during the season. Had they won them all (as they did the previous year), the Phils would have had 110 wins in 2009 and been the obvious favorites in the playoffs. Had Lidge not blown the hold in game three of the World Series, there very probably would have been a game seven on Thursday & the Phils just might be World Champions again. This is not a problem that can solved with just the players on hand.
There are several relief pitchers who probably deserve to come back – Ryan Madson, Chan Ho Park, Scott Eyres and Chad Durbin. I would want to hold onto J.C. Romero and see what happens when he can pitch in a whole season again. But Lidge lost his job as closer in the middle of the World Series once and for all. With the season on the line in the eighth inning in game six on Wednesday, Cholly – as the Phils call their manager Charlie Manuel – went with Madson. Can Lidge win the job back next spring? I’m skeptical and he’s got one more very expensive year on his contract, so I doubt that the Phils can move him. But I don’t think that Madson is the solution there either, nor Brett Myers (whom they could not use without re-signing Blanton). If I’m the Phillies, I’m taking whatever I might save on Blanton & Moyer & going out & getting the best closer available on the market. I might even toss in Ibañez or Victorino if somebody wanted to deal. Next year my bullpen looks like Lidge in the sixth inning, Romero in the seventh, Madson in the eighth & X as the closer. Barring major injuries (Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Jayson Werth, Cliff Lee), I think the 2010 season will depend very much on just who X is, and how good they are. Without a good closer, the season will be a long six months with a very sad end.
Labels: Sport
Thursday, November 05, 2009
What it came down to, finally, was the fact that the Phillies almost never use the exaggerated shift that was created originally to counter the late Ted Williams, the apotheosis of the left-handed pull hitter, with the third baseman taking over at short, the shortstop playing second, the second baseman playing a short right field so that the right fielder can more or less literally back up to the right field wall. After Williams retired, nearly 50 years ago, the shift disappeared until it was resurrected against Barry Bonds during his enhanced era. Now it gets done by a lot of clubs on a number of hitters. But it’s not a great move and if the pitcher doesn’t know that he needs to cover third on any stolen base attempt or play that sets on-base runners into motion, it can lead to disastrous consequences.
So that when Yankee Johnny Damon stole second base, Chooch, the Phillies catcher (given name Carlos Ruiz), was throwing to a “shortstop” unfamiliar with the position and nobody covering third. When the throw pulled the displaced third baseman, Pedro Feliz, to the right side of the bag, the quick-thinking Damon hopped up from his slide and ran to third before anyone could get there to cover the bag.
And with the runner on third in the ninth inning of a tie game, Phillies closer Brad Lidge was afraid to throw his slider, a ball that drops into the dirt and can squirt away from the catcher. This left him in the position of throwing only fast balls to Mark Teixeira, the American League home run champion, & Alex Rodriguez, who will eventually hold baseball’s all-time home run mark. In short, batters who live off the fastball. Very quickly the Yankees were ahead 7 to 4 and it took Mariano Rivera just eight pitches to retire the side, putting the Bronx Bombers up three games to one.
From that point forward, the Phillies’ weaknesses – leaving men on base, hitting solo homers, and a pitching staff that was questionable once you got past Cliff Lee – became too apparent. The Phils held on to what had been a six-run lead in game five to eke out a two-run victory, but didn’t look especially good doing so. The Yanks twice had the tying run at the plate in the ninth inning.
Back in New York for game six, the Phillies looked like a composite of their weaknesses all year. Starting pitcher Pedro Martinez couldn’t bluff his way past Yankee designated hitter Hideki Matsui. After Matsui had driven in four runs, the Yanks tacked on three more (two of them driven in by Matsui) off the bullpen. Only one of the seven Phillies who walked off not-great Yankee pitching managed to score. Pedro Feliz failed to drive in any of the five men who were on base when he came to bat. And the Phils two biggest bats in this series coming into the last game, Chase Utley & Jayson Werth, were a combined zero for five at the plate, albeit with three walks. Jimmy Rollins & Shane Victorino, the two hitters who have to get on base for the power hitters to have runs to drive in, were a combined one for eight.
So the New York Yankees – who spent over $400 million (not a typo) in the off-season last winter to sign Teixeira, and starting pitchers C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett – have won their 27th World Series, having made the post season in 40 of the 106 years the majors have had one. Until baseball has some kind of true spending cap, those kinds of numbers will be pretty typical. All I can say is congratulations.
Labels: Sport
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Photo by Irving Penn, 1970
Claude Lévi-Strauss
1908 – 2009
“Writing is a strange invention.
One might suppose that its emergence
could not fail to bring about profound changes
in the conditions of human existence,
and that these transformations
must of necessity
be of an intellectual nature….
Yet nothing we know
about writing
and the part it has played
in man’s evolution
justifies this view.”
– A Writing Lesson, Tristes Tropiques
Labels: passing
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
C.A. Conrad & Dale Smith
discuss Ed Dorn, AIDS & community
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Kenny G:
seeking to define
“queer voice” in art
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Rae Armantrout’s
reading at Kelly Writers House
Oct. 22, 2009
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5 translations of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”
all by Christian Bök
Gaga for Eunoia
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2 translations of Creeley’s “I Know a Man”
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Jena Osman, Craig Watson, Michael Gizzi
reading @ the Chapterhouse Café
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Kit Robinson
reading at Xavier University
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Ben Friedlander responds
to my post on his comments
re Marianne Moore
A third perspective,
this one with reference to music
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An account of
the &Now Conference
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Barbara Jane Reyes
on indie publishing
(part one)
(part two)
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A poetry marathon in London
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6 translations of Hans Carl Artmann
all by Rosmarie Waldrop
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Charles Alexander’s “Pushing Water”
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Jordan Scott
on the poetics of stammer
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Robert Grenier
talks at Naropa, 1992:
“Drawing from Nature”
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Chalk Editions,
publishing experimentalist e-books since July
(12 to date, some fairly hefty)
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Tony Trehy
on the reading as
a test installation
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Objections to Google book scans
from the Chinese Writers Association
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Talking with Kent Johnson
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Penn Kemp’s ear
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Poetry is better for your brain
than prose (duh!)
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Talking with Justin Marks
A less rumpled version of Justin
at the Tusculum Review
§
A trick question for Raymond Carver
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David Buuck
on EconVergence
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Juliana Spahr
at Temple,
Thursday, November 5
§
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The 100 “greatest” writers of all time
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Cuba gives Hemingway’s papers
to the JFK
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Yet another author’s heirs
fight over the estate
§
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The PennSound Anthology
of Restoration & 18th-Century Verse
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LRB turns 30
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A ceiling collapse
at Emily Dickinson’s house
§
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
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Misappropriating poetry
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Fielding Dawson’s
A Great Day for a Ballgame
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How to write language poetry
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Reading Aerial 8: Barrett Watten
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November 12 @
Columbia School for the Arts:
C.D. Wright:
“Concerning Why Poetry
Offers A Better Deal
Than The World's Biggest Retailer”
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Why Brian Fawcett quit writing poetry
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Why save dying languages?
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Why save indie bookshops?
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Is this literary history?
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Where are poetry’s prodigies?
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What is more “unwriterly”
than a poet’s blog?
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A “rebound series”
for out-of-print chapbooks
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Top 10 ghost-written books
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Summer with Empson
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Talking with Karen Lillis
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Talking with Jayne Anne Phillips
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Orhan Pamuk’s Lolita
Love as a relic, frozen in amber
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FBI “kills” VS Naipaul
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Duo Duo
wins top Oklahoma prize
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NDiaye wins the Goncourt
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The Good Writing Awards –
categories for fiction, even instruction manuels,
but none for poetry
What is “good writing”?
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Something’s amiss with Amis
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The book that changed your life
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“As prose,
these lines are awkward and squeamish”
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& of the moon
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Adam Kirsch
on the author of the book
that, next to the Bible,
has “most influenced” Americans
§
Keats-Shelley Prize
goes to
DH Maitreyabandhu
§
Roth steps up his Nobel campaign
§
A profile of William T. Vollmann
The author was packing heat
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“It is startling to recall
that Larkin died
less than 25 years ago”
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Alan Bennett,
on writing a play about Auden
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James Wright’s “Milkweed”
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Hopkins: the odd man out
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Frank Kermode on the authorized Golding bio
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Complaints about women
writing misogynist fiction
are a “red herring”
§
Southern Review
cuts back
§
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Newspaper circulation is crashing
§
The news of our demise
is premature,
warns The National Post
§
Profs suspended at Southwestern
may be charged
§
Hopeless at Hope College
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Elle Magazine on Girldrive
Elline Lipkin on Girldrive
The women of Girldrive
Talking with Nona Willis Aronowitiz
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Shock & Awe:
Futurism goes to war
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Oron Catts’ bio-artwork
Bio-Poetics workshop
November 15
@ Woodland Pattern
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Matthew Timmons’
Credit
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Talking with Curt Worden
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John Ashbery on Jane Freilicher
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Hans Ulrich Obrist:
more connections between painting & poetry
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
as fine at painting
as he is at poetry
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Talking with David Hockney
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Rosenquist on Rosenquist
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Liu Bolin: the invisible man
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Art market bargains
One market where Lehman is hot
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Experimental typography showcases
§
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Here comes
Ice House Detroit
Art from abandoned housing
§
van Gogh’s letters
§
Lawrence Halprin has died
§
NY Times obit for
Maryanne Amacher
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Litrock songs
(great website!)
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Bob Dylan’s secrets of aging
§
Norton Buffalo has died
§
Update on state arts funding
in Pennsylvania
from Andy Dinniman
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A need for narrative
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Readers of this blog
have now clicked on over
4,000,000 links
(plus visits are closing in on 2.5 million)
Monday, November 02, 2009
Char by Man Ray (1933)
I had an “aha moment” reading René Char’s The Brittle Age and Returning Upland,the two volumes of mid-sixties poetry translated by Gustaf Sobin & released this year by Counterpath Press in a design that winks at the New Directions volumes both authors had. Char’s an Objectivist. Well, not an Objectivist really, but he is someone who echoes some of the same concerns that show up in American poetry in the work of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff et al, writers who were in fact his contemporaries. In this sense, Gustav Sobin, Char’s neighbor & protégé, whose own poetry has always struck me – as do the work of John Taggart &, in places at least, the late Ronald Johnson – as shaped heavily by Objectivism, seems the perfect person to have tackled this work.
This is not, I think, an instance of the translator turning his subject into a mirror of his own obsessions – the volume presents not only Char’s French originals, but, as an appendix, a number of variant translations by Sobin himself, apparently done in “an earlier period.” Nor is it out of any conscious parallel on Char’s part – he knew of American poetry, as it knew of him. The book’s rear cover quotes some lines by Williams directed to Char by name: René Char / you are a poet who believes / in the power of beauty / to right all wrongs. / I believe it also. While the poems of The Brittle Age (L’Âge Cassant) may look reminiscent of Stein’s Tender Buttons (& thus, by inference at least, Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations), they’re nothing like them in tone or focus:
In fidelity we learn never to be consoled
*
No man, unless he be dead in living, can feel at anchor in this life.
*
How would the end justify the means? There is no end, only and forever the means, always more machinated.
However, these three poems could fit almost seamlessly into Of Being Numerous, George Oppen’s great poem of the same period. How is that possible? In what sense might these brief pieces conceivably capture the essence of Williams’ comment about beauty? If anything, the emotion of the first poem relies entirely on Char’s own obsessive commitment to fidelity in language, which is everywhere manifest in this volume.
It was Char, after all, who was Roland Barthes’ template of zero degree poetry in Writing Degree Zero, even if Barthes’ description sounds for all the world like early period Clark Coolidge. For Char does, like Zukofsky, like the best of Oppen, represent the turn toward language in the poem. Not in the aesthetic sense that one might think of, pointing to Baudelaire or Mallarmé or even Stein, but rather in the ethical one – where Char has a lot in common with Oppen, say, or with Ponge. Francis Ponge is the poet whom I’ve always thought of when I imagined a French equivalent for Objectivism. It is not simply his obsession with objects – “The Object is Poetics” the title of a key statement, intending very much both senses of that first noun – but the degree to which language & voice are intertwined in his thinking.
I don’t think of Ponge particularly when I think of Char, nor vice versa, but perhaps that’s a mistake on my part. Both were born within the same time frame as the Objectivists (dating from Reznikoff in ’94 through Oppen in ’08) – Ponge in ’99, Char in ’07. Both French poets died in 1988, four years after Oppen, a decade after Zukofsky.
All of these poets had their lives & careers disrupted by the Second World War. Char & Ponge were both active in the French Resistance. Oppen saw combat. In the U.S., the anti-communism & anti-semitism that led to the disappearance of most of the Objectivists from print & literary society between 1940 & 1962 prevented them from having the kind of international discovery of one another that one sees much more commonly today. It was, in fact, Cid Corman whose Origin first put both groups of poets together. But I don’t think I ever got the genius of Corman’s editing on this until I read Sobin’s translations.
As translations, they seem serviceable, but the appendix of variant translations – there are ten in all – tend to be more direct, more colloquial & more well constructed. Consider the opening lines of “Septentrion,” a word that is obsolete in English, refering to the North:
—Je me suis promenée au bord de la Folie.—
Aux questions de mon coeur,
S’il ne les posait point,
Ma compagne cédait,
Tant est inventive l’absence.
Here is the main translation from the body of the book:
—I walked along the edge of the Folie. —
To the unmentioned questions of my heart
My companion yielded,
So inventive is absence.
Here is the version from the appendix:
—I walked along the edge of the Folie. —
To the questions of my heart,
If none were forthcoming,
My companion yielded,
So inventive is absence.
I might have prefered “Which it failed to pose,” or even “Which I failed to pose” to “If none were forthcoming,” but there seems to me no way of avoiding the fact that Sobin’s earlier, rejected version is superior to the later “main” one. It better captures the cadence of Char’s logic that get irretrievably lost in inserting “unmentioned” into the first line of the second stanza. “Unmentioned” not only bloats the line, it’s a less exact rendering of Char’s original: unspoken would have been better.
This isn’t particularly a criticism of the book, however. Sobin has complete translations of the two volumes, and that’s what’s rendered here in the main body of the text. But he also has these other variations, some of which are considerably better than their counterparts in the completed project. One could have, I suppose, combined the two & only published the best versions. But this seems the much fuller view, showing Sobin approaching these poems not once, but twice. One wonders what cut short the earlier attempt. Either way, this is a wonderful book. Just be sure you read the appendix – some of the very best work is there.
Labels: Objectivism, Rene Char, translation
Friday, October 30, 2009
“The Grand Piano continues to amaze...” – David Meltzer
“...language, history, textuality, and temporality”
– Robin Tremblay-McGaw
§
The Grand Piano is an experiment in collective autobiography.
Order all ten volumes, individual copies or a partial set.
§
“…obsessively readable”– Mark Scroggins
“Une expérience vraiment captivante...” – Alain Cressan
Labels: Grand Piano
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Aaron Apps, Parrhesia, Lulu.com, no location, 2009 (free PDF here)
Mary Jo Bang, The Bride of E, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis 2009
Alan Bernheimer, The Spoonlight Institute, Adventures in Poetry, New York, 2009
Adrian Castro, Handling Destiny, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2009
Marilyn Chin, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis 2009
Jon Curley, New Shadows, Dos Madres, Loveland, OH 2009
Michel Delville, Third Body, translated by Gian Lombardo, Quale Press, New York 2009
Linh Dinh, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy, Chax Press, Tucson 2009
Ernest Farrés, Edward Hopper, translated from the Catalan by Lawrence Venuti, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis 2009
Laura Hinton, Sisyphus My Love (To Record a Dream in a Bathtub), BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009
Paul Hoover, Sonnet 56, Introduction by Ian Monk, Les Figues Press, Los Angeles 2009
Heather McHugh, Upgraded to Serious, Copper Canyon, Port Townsend 2009
Sarah O’Brien, Catch Light, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2009
Alessandro Porco, Augustine in Carthage, ECW Press, Toronto 2009
Donald Revell, The Bitter Withy, Alice James Books, Farmington, ME 2009
Christine Rhein, Wild Flight, Texas Tech University, Lubbock 2009
Robert Ronnow, New & Selected Poems / 1975 – 2005, The Barnwood Press, Seattle 2007
Edward Sanders, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2009
Edward Sanders, Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War: New & Selected Poems 1986-2009, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2009
Rick Snyder, Escape from Combray, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2009
Jack Spicer, Hokku Notebook, afterword by Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian, North Beach Yacht Club, Millbrook, NY 2009
William S. Trout, Times & Memory, edited with an introduction by J. Terry Zeller, American Literary Press, Baltimore 2008
Alli Warren, Well Meaning White Girl, Mitzvah Chaps, Lawrence KS 2009
Geoffrey Young, Not Twice Enough, Fountains of the Financial District, Great Barrington, MA 2009
Raúl Zurita, Purgatory, translated by Anna Deeny, foreword by C.D. Wright, University of California Press, Berkeley 2009
Books (Other)
Joe Amato, Once an Engineer, Excelsior Editions, Albany, NY 2009
Joel Bettridge, Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2009
Stephen Burt & Nick Halpern, editors, Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville 2009. Includes John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Lucie Brock-Broido, Stephen Burt, Eleanor Cook, Bonnie Costello, Rita Dove, Heather Dubrow, William Flesch, Deborah Forbes, Mark Ford, Roger Gilbert, Albert Goldbarth, Jorie Graham, Nick Halpern, DeSales Harrison, Seamus Heaney, August Kleinzahler, George S. Lensing, Christopher R. Miller, Carl Phillips, D. A. Powell, Laura Quinney, Jahan Ramazani, Elaine Scarry, Dave Smith, Willard Spiegelman, M. Wynn Thomas & Charles Wright
Tyrus Miller, Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 2009
Leslie Marmon Silko & James Wright, The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters, edited by Anne Wright, afterword by Joy Harjo, Graywolf, Minneapolis 2009
Alex Stein, Made-Up Interviews with Imaginary Artists, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2009
Anne Waldman & Laura Wright, Beats at Naropa, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2009. Includes Amiri Baraka, William S. Burroughs, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ann Charters, Clark Coolidge, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, David Henderson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, Marjorie Perloff, Edward Sanders, Gary Snyder, Janine Pommy Vega & Philip Whalen.
Journals
Denver Quarterly, vol. 43, No. 4, Denver, 2009. Includes Dan Beachy-Quick, Robert J. Bertholf, Lily Brown, Thomas Fink, John Gallaher, Matthew Goulish, Rebecca Guyon, Jeffrey Hansen, Alice Jones, Terri Kapsalis, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Joanna Klink, Caroline Knox, Gina Litherland, Alexandra Mattraw, Susan Maxwell, Eugenio Montejo, Kirk Nesset, Elizabeth Robinson, Jason Daniel Schwartz, Jessica Wickens, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Valerie Wohlfeld, and John Yau.
Denver Quarterly, vol. 44, No. 1, Denver, 2009. Erica W. Adams, Jeff Alessandrelli, Andrew Allport, J.T. Barbarese, Judith Baumel, Molly Bendall, Bruce Bond, George Bradley, Lisabeth Burton, Brigitte Byrd, Dot Devota, Clayton Eshleman, Michael Farrell, Kate Greenstreet, Evelyn Hampton, Henry Hart, Terence Huber, George Kalamaras, John Kinsella, Jesse Lichtenstein, Trey Moody, Irena Praitis, Michele Ruby, Lisa Sewell, Katherine Soniat, Lisa Russ Spaar, Terese Svoboda, Susan Tichy, Nick Twemlow, Kenneth Warren, Catherine Webster, Paul West, Max Winter, and Gary Young.
House Organ, no. 68, Youngstown, NY, Fall 2009. Includes Dale Smith, Michael Boughn, Barbara Henning, Bob Herman, Paul Pines, George Held, Ed sanders, Sotère Torregian, Albert Glover, Duncan McNaughton, Theodore Enslin, Ed Baker, Jack Hirschman, Nathan Whiting, Clyff Fyman, more.
If P Then Q: Experimental Poetry, no. 4, Manchester, UK, Autumn 2009. Includes Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Philip Davenport, Ray DiPalma, Andrew Shelley, Lucy Harvest Clarke, Richard Makin, Allen Fisher, Joy as Tiresome Vandalism, Scott Thurston on Stuart Calton and Ira Lightman.
Or, no. 1, Los Angeles, October 2008. Includes Adonis, Amiri Baraka, Chiara Barzini, Art Beck, Ken Bullock, Neeli Cherkovski, Gillian Conoley, Ray DiPalma, Gary Gach, Marco Giovenale, Owen Hill, Laura Moriarty, Nick Piombino, Martha Ronk, Toni Simon, Paul Vangelisti, many more.
Or, no. 2, Los Angeles, April 2009. Includes Amy Allara, Guy Bennett, Julien Blaine, Robert Crosson, Mohammed Dib, Ray DiPalma, Mark DuCharme, Gary Gach, Marco Giovenale, Ko Un, Douglas Messerli, Ryan Murphy, Dennis Phillips, Martha Ronk, Nathaniel Tarn, William Xerra, many more.
Or, no. 3, Los Angeles, October 2009. Includes Solar Abdoh, Barbara Carle, Giorgio Cesarano, Neeli Cherkovski, Mary de Rachewiltz, Ray DiPalma, Richard Dove, F.T. Marinetti, John McBride, Bill Mohr, Valentino Zeichen, many more.
Saltgrass, no. 4, Brooklyn, 2009. Includes Laura Solomon, G.C. Waldrep, Cecily Iddings, Anne Boyer, Ben Mirov, Ish Klein, Claire Hero, Hugh Merwin, Jason Bredle, Carla Kelsey, Lisa Ciccarello, Danielle Pafunda, Brett Price, genya Turovskaya, Maureen Thorson, Ron Rash
Other Formats & Media
Michael Boughn, Michael Bough Reads from Cosmographia, Vox Audio, Magdalena NM 2009 (CD)
David Empfield, David Empfield Reads from Love in the KGB, Vox Audio, Magdalena NM 2009 (CD)
Joan Logghe, Joan Logghe Reads, Vox Audio, Magdalena NM 2009 (CD)
Janet Rodney, Janet Rodney Reads, Vox Audio, Magdalena NM 2009 (CD)
Lee Sharkey, Lee Sharkey Reads from A Darker, Sweeter String, Vox Audio, Magdalena NM 2009 (CD)
Nathaniel Tarn, Nathaniel Tarn Reads, Vox Audio, Magdalena NM 2009 (CD)
Nathaniel Tarn, Nathaniel Tarn Reads at Acequia Booksellers in Albuquerque, NM, Vox Audio, Magdalena NM 2009 (CD)
John Tritica, John Tritica Reads at Acequia Booksellers, Vox Audio, Magdalena NM 2009 (CD)
Still a big stack of books
waiting to be noted here
Labels: Recently Received
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Of all the links I posted on Tuesday of last week, the most disturbing (to me) was not Paul Zukofsky’s sad thrashing about with regards to his father’s work & its potential to support the violinist in his old age, distressing as that is, but Ben Friedlander’s more subversive declaration that
For me, Marianne Moore is the center of modernism, not Eliot, or Pound, or Williams, and that means I can read Merrill and Ashbery with equal pleasure, while finding Lowell and Duncan — who drank too deeply of the Four Quartets — almost unbearable.
Ben’s rationale was that, as a scholar of the 19th century (dissertation I believe on Dickinson) & a poet who began his career in the 20th, he has different responsibilities with regards to each period.
For instance, the fact that I’m happy ignoring whole areas of activity in the later period, whereas, in the earlier, I’d like someday to have an understanding of the whole. In the later period, I’m even willing to ignore major figures (so-called), whereas, in the earlier, importance, however defined, serves perfectly well as a basis for paying attention.
He characterizes this as a distinction between reading like a scholar vs. reading like a poet, arguing that while he can led by whim & desire in each period, in the former he has a need to comprehend the larger panorama that is American poetry that is not needed in the latter.
Certainly, there is plenty of evidence that a thorough understanding of the field of writing is unnecessary in order to create great work. Nobody ever took Rimbaud for a scholar. And several of Friedlander’s implicit & explicit value judgments strike me as perfectly reasonable – Four Quartets is an unforgivably turgid, even stupid piece of writing, Joanne Kyger’s poetry will prove far “more lasting” than that of Robert Frost, Lowell is for the most part unbearable (and some of Duncan is likewise), YET dot dot dot
I don’t think this permits me as a poet to hallucinate a world in which “Marianne Moore is the center of modernism.” It is, I think, irresponsible – to ourselves, most of all – to simply wish the world is some way that it never was. Irresponsible to ourselves, because this is the literary equivalent of presuming that I can drive on the left side of the road in the United States just because I’d prefer to do so. There are consequences & they’re not all pretty.
I don’t think that Moore was the center of modernism any more than I do Olson or Oppen or Zukofsky or Stein. Each has a particular, and vital, role to play in the history of this period – which largely was over by the time I was born at the end of World War 2 (and well before Friedlander was born) – but which cannot responsibly be characterized as central. I do think that you could argue that Pound and/or Eliot was in fact central, particularly in the period between the start of the first & end of the second World Wars. Stevens, Williams, Crane, Frost all fall well outside that central (centering) dynamic – and the work of each is more interesting because of this, I think. Ditto Stein, ditto H.D., ditto Langston Hughes, ditto Marianne Moore.
Moore’s poetry places her closer to her friends among the imagists than anywhere else in the American poetic landscape, but her professional practice, in particular her work at The Dial, positions her elsewhere. More than any other poet of the period, she was the one who managed to stay in the good graces of both sides of the divide between anglophile conventionalists & the avant-garde. She was, for all extents & purposes, the Cole Swensen of her day, the perfect hybrid.
To declare her thus “the center of modernism” is to erase the historical shape & direction of this phenomenon altogether. I wonder about the consequences of this. Possibly it enables Ben to read what follows with more of an open mind, so that if he should decide that, say, Steve Jonas is a more interesting writer than W.S. Merwin, that doesn’t carry with it a host of repercussions that make it harder for him to appreciate George Starbuck or Gerald Stern, or force him to prefer Joel Oppenheimer to Thom Gunn. Just because you like Jack Spicer doesn’t mean you have to love Harold Dull or George Stanley. Liking Robert Duncan (as Ben apparently does not) doesn’t commit you to liking Helen Adam. Nor, for that matter, vice versa.
A history of recent writing that is idiosyncratic to the point of seeming arbitrary isn’t just to drive on the wrong side of the road, but to leave the road entirely, plowing through back yards & fields alike. It’s not illiteracy so much as it is a willful a-literacy that Friedlander seems to seek as a poet. With the presumptive advantage that it will be more useful to learn how best to read Donald Finkel than to dismiss him out of hand because he hung out with the wrong crowd.
Maybe a better analogy would be a walk in the woods, an experience that is entirely transformed if at some point in your life you become an active & moderately knowledgeable birdwatcher, or get to know the names of the flora & fauna. The difference between a salamander & a skink can transform an afternoon. Knowing the spiral-like call of Swainson’s thrush echoing through the trees gives shape to a forest it would not otherwise have, even if you never actually see the bird.
Friedlander’s position here is to organize his terrain along some axis of his own choosing, like determining that birds should be grouped not by genus, but perhaps by color, so that the flamingo, the cardinal & the rufus-sided towhee are of a “kind,” birds bearing red. The problem in this analogy is that Friedlander the poet is a bird in this terrain as well, just as is Moore. And a robin or swallow that can’t distinguish between a sparrow & a kestrel is going to lose its young to the latter.
Friedlander argues that his approach is necessary because so much recent poetry – from mid-century on, it would seem – “irritates” him. I’ve always thought that this was why he chose the 19th century as his specialization in the first place – he knew that Robert Lowell was at best a mediocre writer (albeit major, largely wasted, talent) but didn’t want to have to say so in public where it might offend those who are still picking through the carrion of the Boston Brahmins. Nobody is much offended if you say you like/don’t like any particular 19th century poet mostly because those bones have been picked clean.
The poet whose absence looms large in all this – the one who sits squarely between Pound & Eliot, provoking the former & giving some kind of permission to the worst impulses of the latter – is William Butler Yeats. A problematic case in that he was not American & is virtually the point at which the history of the two literatures (with Auden being the second, yet another instance of Marx’s adage about the first time as tragedy, the second farce) commingle. Is Yeats the first hint of modernism or the last whimper of Victorian literary values? He clearly is the source that enables The Four Quartets & the mushy overwriting that Duncan permitted himself, especially before his confrontation with Charles Olson at Black Mountain. (And if you want to see what the SF Renaissance, so-called, might have looked like without that blast from Olson – and with & thru him Pound, Zukofsky, Creeley – the one to read is the Canadian Louis Dudek. The Duncan of the years before Bending the Bow seems very much on Dudek’s wavelength, but after the impact of Olson it’s as tho Dudek & Duncan are of different generations altogether.)
Yeats was a Victorian through & through. There is nothing modernist in his work, nothing in his world that remained by the time I was born. Eliot’s quietism, implicit even in the great early works (he hates the modern world), is exactly where he wanted to be. Four Quartets is for him a real choice. Eliot’s modernism, we have known now for the past three decades, is almost entirely the consequence of Pound’s editing. As hateful as Pound was as a person, and as crazy as he got to be, any defintion of a center for American modernist poetry that doesn’t at least present him as one pole of what was going on, is a strange beast indeed. I can buy a version that sees it as a contest between Pound’s sense of modernity & the inherent conservatism of Eliot & the agrarians (and their New England protégé, Robert Lowell), tho a far more sensible one would be between Pound & an American-centric verse (largely the Objectivists) versus a more cosmopolitan & internationalist one centered around Stein & Paris, or even a push-pull phenomenon between all three poles. But Moore at best is the modernist wing of quietism, or vice versa, a domesticated variant on the Pound-Eliot collaboration/contestation.
But it’s precisely the disjunctions & cloudiness between these two sets of triumvirates – Pound, Eliot, Yeats being the first; Quietism, the Pound-WCW-Zukofsky complex & rue de Fleuris modernism being the second – that gives rise to so many bizarre interpretations of what “modernism” means in poetry. The two triads are not parallel, not equivalent. But they are active dynamics. To talk about a center in modernism – and modernism was perhaps the last aesthetic tendency to dream of such a thing¹ – entails accounting for the pull of each. The polished poetics of Marianne Moore, as hard-edged as any Jeff Koons rabbit, seems to me the very denial of this dynamic.
¹ Which is why abstract expressionists were modernists, not posties.
Labels: Ben Friedlander, Modernism, Schools of poetry
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Rae Armantrout’s poetry
Entertainment Weekly
on the National Book Award
§
Eileen Myles talks with CA Conrad
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Rachel Zolf:
the MFA as an institution
within larger state apparatuses
Tendencies begins
Oct. 29 @ CUNY
with Zolf, Robert Glück & Trish Salah
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Paul Vangelisti talks with Mary de Rachelwiltz
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Federal Trade Commission
identifies a threat:
book bloggers
§
Ray DiPalma:
The Ancient Use of Stone
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Digging Lorca
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SF Chronicle’s obit
of Lenore Kandel
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Philip Lamantia’s impact
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Close reading aloud:
Barbara Guest
§
A great interview with Harry Northup
§
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Walt Whitman
& the “most offensive”
commercial ever produced
Sinatra beats out
Whitman
– also Einstein –
for dorm at Montclair State
(good thing Tony Soprano wasn’t eligible)
§
The Noun Game
& the clash of civilizations
§
The Eaters of the Living
have eaten the prize
§
Barnes & Noble
unveils “the nook”
e-book fans keep format
in spotlight
§
Rob Halpern
on Baudelaire’s prose poems
as social hieroglyphs
§
Michael O’Keefe’s
Swimming from Under My Father
§
George Oppen
on the Great Recession of ’08 & ‘09
§
Nick Piombino on David Bromige
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Talking with Reb Livingston
§
Magical Puppy
on hybrid poetics
§
Jeanette Winterson:
In praise of the crack-up
§
Tom Devaney
on Poe’s madmen
§
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Using poetry to preserve culture
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A small press store online
§
Bookfair fires official
for approach to Chinese
China complains
Google violates ©
§
Cape Ann Museum
is looking for Olson’s letters
(scroll down)
§
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Talking with Richard Wilbur
§
Erica Jong:
Big News: Women can Write!
§
Book reviewer quits over
“increasing sexist violence”
§
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
under surveillance
§
Régis Bonvicino
talking with Charles Bernstein
& reading (with translations)
§
LA bookstores adopting Twitter
§
Misremembering Jack Kerouac
Kerouac’s attempt
to escape the hype
is now a deluxe box set
Kerouac’s Big Sur
Beat Tangiers today
Meanwhile, on Desolation Peak
Saint Pete, Florida –
“a good place
to come to die”
§
James Wright, Jack Kerouac, John Keats
§
Kate Durbin’s book launch for
The Ravenous Audience
§
Mark Woods on Raymond Federman
§
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The menace of the public option
(libraries, that is)
§
Crowdsourcing Coraline
§
Emily Dickinson goes to war
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Poetry & gunfire in Cincinnati
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Saudi journalists sentenced
to the lash
for discussing sex
§
350 Poems
very quickly became
an extraordinary anthology
§
ABA calls for Justice Dept. investigation
§
What to do with
all these books?
§
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The New Sentence,
23 years in print,
turns up on a best-seller list
§
The intro to How Words Mean
§
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Music in the work of Matthew Shenoda
§
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A challenge to Paul Zukofsky
& another
A sad prediction
All of “A” as a PDF
EZ PZ,
a movie translating Paul’s folly
& a play
“Paul Zukofsky
may have sex with reptiles”
Just add animals
§
Sense and Sensibility
and Sea Monsters
§
Reinventing Alice
§
Galsworthy’s hot,
Joyce is not
§
What celebrity novels tell us
§
Tony Harrison:
my heroes
Tony Harrison, John Keats
& class resentment
§
Any word on how
the &Now Conference went?
§
Sherman Alexie without borders
§
Cavafy fades in Alexandria
§
Marie NDiaye
favored to capture Goncourt
§
Lyrical/electric conceptualism
§
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Wikia + MagCloud =
the future of the magazine?
§
Poet booted from J-Street
for comparing
Guantanamo to Auschwitz
§
John Gallaher’s Guidebook poems
§
Introducing
Christopher Nealon & Catherine Wagner
§
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Nabokov’s last twist
§
The New Romantics –
panel & reading
for Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3
§
The Poets’ Cookbook
in action
§
Rewriting Moby Dick
in emoticons
§
The Christian politics
of T.S. Eliot
The continuing popularity of
The Waste Land
Protecting Nayland Rock shelter
§
2 Irish poets
on the Eliot Prize shortlist
§
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Gary Fitzgerald:
This I Believe
§
Israel & Germany
fight over Kafka
§
Roman Jakobson
on metaphor & metonymy
§
3 new books
by or about
Rilke
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Poe’s balloon hoax
§
Melissa Friedling is to poetry
what Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking”
is to civics & current events
§
A panel on the Philadelphia
poetry scene
§
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Carol Ann Duffy:
“I write best in chaos”
§
Project Censored’s
new top ten list
§
Peter Ganick’s
Remove a Concept –
3 volumes (921 pp.)
available for purchase,
download or to be read online
(vol. 1) (vol. 2) (vol. 3)
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Australia’s
most prolific poet
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Charlie Simic
runs into students
smarter than he is
§
Nicholson Baker,
the antagonist protagonist
“You can learn a lot
from a man’s shelves”
Blame it on poetry
§
“Performance poetry is less obscure
and has a three-minute time limit”
§
Dawn Lundy Martin
shuffling through her reading
§
Talking with Jericho Brown
§
Cal Bedient’s Days of Unwilling
§
Seth Abramson’s MFA rankings:
predicated on bogus methodology?
Vanderbilt:
We’re # 18!
§
Jean Rhys,
drunk & disorderly
§
Is that a poem in your pocket?
§
Knut Hamsun,
Hitler’s novelist
Nobel laureates in literature:
the good, the bad, the Nazi
§
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Orhan Pamuk’s
The Museum of Innocence
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Poetry & community colleges
The Community College Poetry Project
§
Midwest Studies in Philosophy
devotes its current number to poetry
§
Carl Sandburg’s school grades
(plus those for Bonzo co-star)
§
Restoring Joaquin Miller’s “abbey”
§
Patricia Carlin’s Quantum Jitters
§
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Harlan Ellison
reviewing Slaughterhouse Five
§
Cathy Coleman’s
Beauty’s Tattoo
§
Buying spree
leads to
big pile o’ books
§
§
Frederick Seidel reading
§
Printmaking + poetry
@ Wellesley
§
When did “Brechtian”
become a dirty word?
§
§
§
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Girldrive:
starred review in Publisher’s Weekly
Launching the book
at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn,
Friday, Oct. 30
§
Barry Schwabsky on Thomas Demand:
“RTFM!”
§
Rocco Landesman speaks
§
Nicola Calas:
nomad as surrealist
§
The Intimacies Project,
live from
Port Authority
§
Leonard Cohen:
Waiting for the Miracle
§
§
Not quite the Traveling Wilburys
§
The jazz photographs of W. Eugene Smith
§
The meaning of music
(to be continued)
§
§
The opera Handel
didn’t know he wrote
The yoke’s on him
(note the sign language)
§
Wynton Marsalis to receive
French Legion of Honor
§
Check out the feature on
Toni Simon
§
The Barnes is dead,
long live the Barnes
§
§
Ruth Duckworth has died
§
& on Hans Bellmer
§
Two cheers for socialist realism
§
Not Indian art
§
Irving Penn:
thoughts at the end
§
The God of R. Crumb
§
Ryan Trecartin
wins Wolgin Prize
§
LAPD’s piggy public art
§
PS 1 names new director
§
London arts nominee vetoed
§
5 short plays by Tony Kushner
§
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Jane Campion:
“I was terrified of poetry”
(it shows)
§
Polanski:
the victim’s words
§
Moving the Abbey Theatre
§
The end of American architecture
§
Every issue of LIFE magazine
§
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You too, Jonathan Greene
Monday, October 26, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
I have always thought of Summer Brenner as a poet who sometimes writes fiction, so I was surprised to see in the front matter to I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex, that Brenner has published six novels to just two volumes of verse, and that she hasn’t published a book of poems in 32 years. Having now read – and completely enjoyed – I-5, I still think Summer Brenner is a poet, but one with notable narrative skills & a deep commitment both to her characters & to justice. I-5 is an effective novel, tho certainly not perfect, and one that would translate easily to the big screen. It has all the elements: a tough-as-nails hooker heroine who is also the protagonist & very much the “good guy,” plus a variety of secondary characters, minor Russian mafia wannabes, other prostitutes, a trucker with an illicit cargo, prison guards with their own demons & secrets, and a villainous capitalist trying to control everyone in his orbit. It has an ending that is both very much what the reader will be hoping for & yet almost
entirely a surprise.
I-5 follows the path of Anya, a young Russian woman kidnapped into the world of involuntary sex traffic, shuttled from brothel to brothel in the United States. The premise of the book is that she’s being moved from Southern California to Oakland where Mr. Kupkin, her “owner” very much in the tradition of slavery everywhere, plans to expand his empire of young women, duped or stolen mostly from Eastern Europe. To get there entails a ride up I-5, the great (albeit boring) north-south highway of the West Coast. As they proceed north, Anya, her immediate boss & pimp Marty, a comic thug alternately called Pedro & the Tarantula & a nameless young woman who will be delivered to a new owner along the way, they get caught in the Central Valley’s infamous tule fog as well as the valley’s one growing-like-gangbusters industry, prisons. Things happen, people get separated & we get to see Anya’s complex (and ambivalent) relationship to her own slavery. More things happen & Anya & Marty reach Oakland, though not as they’d intended. More things happen still.
This is one of those books where you know from page 2, if not page 1, what Anya’s fate holds in store, though certainly not the what & how of it. Publishing the novel in a deeply noir format – Roderick Constance’s cover image is ironic without being comical – underscores what is predictable here, which is actually part of the fun of the book (how will Anya do it?). And Anya is the character here to whom Brenner is committed. To some degree, every other character in I-5 is defined by her, or at least by their function in her story.
If there are any weaknesses here, they’re relatively minor. Brenner gives us what amounts to a lesson in the history & meteorology of the Central Valley, setting up both the fog & the scene at the prison. This isn’t something Anya knows or understands, any more than she understands the back story of the young guard or of what Kupkin’s life is like in Atlanta. Brenner tells us all this & more because she wants us to know and in these postmodern times, nobody is worrying all that much about ontological or narrative consistency. If anything, Brenner makes great use of indeterminacy in the later chapters to reveal not just what happens but what can happen. But reading of the nature of tule fog or of the expansion of California’s prison system¹ feels disruptive – it was the one moment in the book where I could imagine becoming dislodged from the story itself.
Years ago, when she was writing the book that turned into The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Kathy Acker & I had a long conversation about the nature of character. The great trick of narrative or figurative literature, of course, is that the language on the page integrates syntactically not into a greater argument or expository structure, but instead to a displacement, an invocation of a referred world. A character represents a particular configuration of this referred world, and the difficulty of this displacement is such that we commonly acknowledge that the highest compliment one can pay to a character is that he or she is “believable.” Anya certainly is believable, but she also is a cipher, a symbol of the thousands – millions, if we think of sex traffic on its worldwide scale – of young women who submit to rape everyday. Brenner wants us to see this world through the eyes of one woman, someone young enough still to remember what hope is, even if old enough now in experience to understand just how difficult this is. I-5 is in this sense a political novel, though Brenner never lets this obstruct our view of her character. Anya is someone you will never forget.
¹ In my work in the prison movement, 1972-77, I was the lobbyist responsible for stopping funding for new prisons and was successful in each of those years. But it was already evident that the Department of Corrections, the guard’s union and far right rural legislators were bringing together the unholy alliance that would see the system explode from the nine joints I had to deal with in the 1970s to the 33 of today. The Department of Corrections is now the second largest police agency in the United States, second only to NYPD.
Labels: Fiction, Summer Brenner
Thursday, October 22, 2009
David Bromige reading in Seattle, May 2003
Today is David Bromige’s 76th birthday & it will be the first time in many a decade that I won’t have the opportunity to call or at least email him to wish him well. David’s baritone has long been a touchstone for me, one of those familiars that immediately bring comfort, no doubt because I associate it with love & wit. Thanks to PennSound, I can revisit that voice whenever I need to, as no doubt I will today. The latest addition there, I think, is a talk David gave in Bob Perelman’s talk series in 1977 on “Poetry and Intention.”
Last Friday, I traveled to Manhattan to participate in a memorial service for David at Poets House, now ensconced into its Battery Park City home with something akin to a 70-year lease – the venerable organization has room to grow, but also happens to be in the one place on the island that actually is hard to get to without walking several windy rainy blocks along the Hudson River. Joel Lewis, the bard of Hoboken, joked that it was easier to get to from New Jersey.
The following roster will give you some idea who spoke & what they read. Stephen Motika, who’s just finished working on a Collected Poems for Leland Hickman, was the organizer & moderator.
Kathleen Fraser: taped remembrance of David
Ron Silliman:"First" and "The Final Mission" from The Ends of the Earth
Nicholas Piombino: "Soul Mates" and "The End of The Stranger" from Desire
Gary Sullivan: first two pages of the piece My Poetry
Bob Perelman: from My Poetry
Geoffrey Young: from My Poetry
Charles Bernstein: "My Daddy's at His Office Now" from "American Testament 4"
Laura Sims for Rachel Levitsky: comments and poem (I forgot to note which)
Corina Copp reading from "Joy Cone" from Hills 9 (1983)
Taking Amtrak’s Keystone Special up that afternoon, I’d thought this would be a terrific, joyous event, with no sense of sadness at David’s passing. The work is just so damn great & I’d never had the opportunity to read these two special poems in public before, almost as tho they were my own. But the instant I started to talk, I could hear my voice break – just a little – so I cut my palaver short & dove directly into the joy of the work.
Because we were asked to keep our remarks generally to 7 minutes each (to keep the reading to a reasonable [by NY standards] time – even with nine readers, it ran to 90 minutes – neither Bob Perelman or I were able to read our sections from the forthcoming 9th volume of The Grand Piano, both of which deal with David. It was interesting – and proves a long-held hunch of mine (or at least is evidence for same) – that My Poetry was the work most often cited here. It is, as I note in my piece for the Piano, David’s iconic book, even though it appeared only in an edition of 650 copies and was never reprinted. Geoff Young, who published My Poetry, conceded that he too has just one copy of this great book.
For my reading,I turned to earlier work – the premise of the order that night (at least after Kathy Fraser) was by the chronology of David’s writing – two poems that I heard David read on the night that I first met him in 1968. But since I didn’t get to read it at Poets House, here is my section from the next Grand Piano, which should be out in a week or two.
--------
Furthest Up the Trail
SOMETIME AROUND late 1967, a then recent graduate of Bard, David Perry, arrived in San Francisco State’s creative writing program & he & I quickly discovered that we shared an enthusiasm for the work of Robert Kelly & the many poets Kelly had been teaching, basically The New American Poetry. David also knew all the recent Bard College grads who either lived in the Bay Area (John Gorham, Harvey Bialy) or were visiting (Tom Meyer, still then a teenager I believe). One day very early in ’68, David convinced me that we had to go to the Albany Public Library to hear Bialy read. It was the very place where I’d first discovered poetry some six years earlier, but I hadn’t set foot in that building on Solano since I’d left home, so for me the reading was already laden with symbolic power before Paul Mariah, who curated the series there, introduced the readers. Bialy was fine, maybe a little quieter than I’d expected, but it was the poet reading with him, somebody I’d never heard of before, who blew me away. David Bromige was tall with a long face, a resonant baritone, a mastery of syntax that I had not found anywhere, even in the work of Robert Duncan, & a ready, almost twinkly wit that gave me the impression that had Charles Dickens been alive and a New American poet, he would have been very much like this fellow. It was a stunning, eye-opening performance & I vowed to get to know this poet.1
At thirty-five, Bromige was a grad student at Berkeley, writing a dissertation on the Black Mountain poets, far more widely read than I & just a little suspicious of the motives of twenty-one-year-olds. He lived in a cottage apartment with his then-wife, fiction writer Sherril Jaffe, just north of the campus, not far from Josephine Miles’s place & a short walk to Serendipity Books, which in those days encompassed not only the rare books business it is today, but a bookstore & the distribution operations that subsequently evolved into SPD. I would meet David at his place or at Serendipity, or we would walk over to a beer & pizza den on Shattuck just off University & have long discussions, part gossip, part theory.
Our positions in those days were not at all equivalent. Having already had poems accepted by Poetry, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review & the like, I was full of myself, hyperconscious of my status as a “published poet,” which was somewhat unusual among undergraduates even at San Francisco State. But I was also painfully aware of just how hollow all of that truly was & appalled—daily!—at how little I knew & how much I had yet to learn. Not that I would have admitted that to anyone, least of all myself. Compared with David Bromige, I was an absolute beginner.
As the 60s gave way to the next decade, the grand pooh-bah of poetry in the Bay Area was manifestly Robert Duncan, who was only too happy to remind you of this himself. Of all the poets around him, David was by far the most accomplished, most published, most widely read. David already had four books: The Gathering, The Ends of the Earth, The Quivering Roadway & Please, Like Me. Two of these volumes were from Black Sparrow Press, a “big” small press publisher that aimed to be more to be like New Directions or City Lights than, say, White Rabbit or Oyez.
To read more, pick up the 9th volume of the Grand Piano.
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1. Nor did this prove to be my only important discovery that evening. Hitchhiking back to my apartment by Lake Merrit in Oakland, I caught a ride with someone who recognized me from the reading—David Melnick. Forty-one years later, I’m actively involved in editing the collected works of both Davids.
Labels: David Bromige, Events, Grand Piano
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Poe sites in Bal’more
§
Rosmarie Waldrop
on the two directions of American poetry,
metaphor & metonymy
§
Nov. 12 in NYC:
Wittgenstein’s Voice
with Rosmarie Waldrop, Marjorie Perloff,
Tom Pepper, Sissi Tax,
moderated by Jean-Michel Rabate
§
The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis
§
Charlotte Mandell,
reading her translation of
Matias Énard’s Zone
(part 1 of 7)
§
Steven Fama:
“I have seen the future of poetry on Blogger
and it’s name is”
Stephen Ratcliffe
§
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Parting the nightgown of the poem
§
The impact of poetry on pea soup
§
Veronic Forrest-Thomson:
Poetic Artifice
(reg. req.)
§
NY Times obit for Raymond Federman
§
Carter Monroe:
The Spicer Series
§
Lynn Behrendt & Ann Lauterbach
§
§
Kurt Vonnegut:
“Look at the Birdie”
§
Philadelphia, Oct. 22:
Rae Armantrout
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Philadelphia, Oct. 24:
Jena Osman, Michael Gizzi, Craig Watson
§
The Internet as Playground & Factory
& its poetry panel
§
Does the brain like e-books?
§
Digitizing rare Chinese books
§
“Not a book fair but a rights fair”
§
Paul Zukofsky re-invents “fair use”
Wikipedia on fair use
The U.S. © office on fair use
§ 107, the fair use statute
Stanford’s © & fair use site
§
So you want to borrow an e-book
§
Nov. 9 at the 92nd St. Y in NYC,
Orhan Pamuk
Nov. 16,
reading Nabokov’s Laura
with Martin Amis et al
Nov. 30,
Paul Auster & Javier Marias
§
Jonathan Lethem on the Upper East Side
§
Talking with Joan Houlihan
§
§
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About Britain’s “favourite poem”
§
A new edition of Gary Snyder’s Riprap
§
Ben Friedlander:
“Marianne Moore is the center of modernism”
§
The Kerouac Big Sur film
is being shown in many cities this week,
most often tonight
A profile of “little Jimmy Sampas”
§
Bill Sherman on Jean Rhys
§
Atwood’s Flood
§
Sherman Alexie:
serious writer, funny guy
§
Talking with Craig Raine
§
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Chimamanda Adichie:
the danger of the single story
A discussion of
Half of a Yellow Sun
(part 1) (part 2)
§
Shakespeare’s collab
with Thomas Kyd
UCLA gets $2M
Shakespeare collection
§
That obscure object of
the National Book Award
Siglio Press’ Keith Waldrop page
§
Co-author a story with Neil Gaiman on Twitter
§
Clive James:
poetry + showbiz
§
A poet in the Peace Corps in Mozambique
§
50 years of Naked Lunch
§
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A word quiz worth contemplating
§
The Valparaiso Poetry Review
turns 10
§
Padgett Powell’s
The Interrogative Mood
§
Tom Leonard’s Outside the Narrative
§
Anselm Berrigan favorites
§
Walt Whitman’s
astrology chart
Walt Whitman –
the puppet show
(with F. Garcia Lorca)
§
Kara Candito’s Taste of Cherry
§
Robert Sheppard
introduces Cliff Yates
§
The Electro-Plasmic Hyrdocephalic
Genre-Fiction Generator
§
What to do with used poems?
§
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What will Kindle do to territorial rights?
§
A color screen for B&N e-reader
§
Meet Alex
Is Alex the B&N e-reader?
§
Kindle killers?
The boom in e-readers
§
Will Google sell ads with each book?
It’s not ruling it out
§
Google Editions:
“Buy anywhere, read anywhere”
§
§
The Number 1
roadside rhyme in America is….
§
Robert Wells’ Collected Poems & Translations
§
Talking with Edmund White
§
Queer writing in surreal space
§
The era of email is over!
§
Charles Bernstein:
Futurist Manifestos
§
§
Bruce Sterling:
“design has more to offer fiction
at the moment
than literature has to offer design”
§
Talking with Meena Kandasamy
§
Cheever’s demons
§
Albert Huffstickler’s Soul Gallery,
now an e-book
§
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4 reviews by
Susanna Childress
§
The last poet to win the Nobel Prize
§
Walter de la Mare
through fresh eyes
§
Carol Muske-Dukes:
3 quietists
§
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Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
§
In Hartford, CT,
Nov. 7,
Marjorie Perloff
@ the 14th Annual
Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash
§
Remembering Henry Gibson
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Talking with Paul Siegell
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Back when poetry & science mixed
§
Talking with Galway Kinnell
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Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
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Charles Wright’s recent books
§
Talking with Renée Alberts
§
Patti Tana,
Long Island Poet of the Year
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Oct. 24 & 25:
Seattle Bookfest
§
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Kaja Silverman
talking with Judith Butler & Anne Wagner
Berkeley, Oct. 29
§
Stubborn bookstore hangs on
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Aronowitz & Bernstein’s Girldrive
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Dylan’s defiance
§
The autobiography of Ralph Stanley
§
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Auggie Kleinzahler
on the new Monk bio
§
Corn flakes with John Lennon
(Part 2)
§
Willem Defoe is Richard Foreman’s
Idiot Savant
§
If only they’d known
Polanski owned
a chalet in Switzerland
declare the Swiss….
§
§
Suzanne Fiol has passed
§
Talking with Maurice Sendak,
Dave Eggers & Spike Jonze
§
Nothing doesn’t exist
(micro-sculpture)
§
What is an Andy Warhol?
§
What to see in London
§
Damien Hirst’s latest work
Hirst’s “blue period”
A slide show of the new paintings
§
Man Ray, African art & the modernist lens
§
Jeanne Suspuglas’ Home
§
Robert Bergman at the National Gallery
§
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But what’s with the black face photo shoot?
§
Play this article to the tune of
Bruce Springsteen’s “My Home Town”
Cleaning up is hard to do
Monday, October 19, 2009
Bright Star, Jane Campion’s portrait of Fanny Brawne & her relationship with the boy next door, John Keats, is a weepy, and if it weren’t marketed as a biography of Keats, I suspect that the gender balance in the cinema would tilt heavily female. As it was, when we caught the movie at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, the average age of the audience must have been on the high side of sixty, though the theater itself was packed. Senior date night.
For what it is – a weepy, not a biography of Keats – the film is quite decent. Campion is an efficient director & the acting, with one notable exception, is excellent, especially Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne. She gets first billing on the posters and thoroughly deserves it. In a way, she is exactly whom you would turn to if you were looking for Kate Winslet, but ten years younger. Cornish here lacks the raw wildness that is at the heart of Winslet’s best roles, but then so did Winslet once upon a time. Ben Whishaw, having recently played Bob Dylan as Arthur Rimbaud in I’m Not There (where he was the weakest of the Dylan surrogates), is fine as the young man dependent on everyone else for everything – money, food, shelter, love. If I have problems with Whishaw’s Keats – and I have huge problems – it’s not with Whishaw’s portrayal but with Campion’s presentation of the finest of the second generation Romantics as a weak, mostly passive nincompoop. Mouthing Keats’ lines does not make you Keats if every other action you take in the picture suggests utterly no ability to see into the world with the intensity necessary to craft such poems. Staring dreamily out the window is not insight. The one moment where Whishaw’s Keats comes close to seeming a poet is when he compares poetry into diving into a lake, but Whishaw’s presentation seems abstract – he’s saying the lines, but he doesn’t appear to get them. You have to go back to Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love to find a major poet presented in such underwhelming fashion.
Campion doesn’t make Whishaw’s job any easier. Of all the characters, his Keats is the one most apt to use terms – pantaloons – that don’t come easily to a modern tongue. For the most part, Whishaw makes them sound like part of the discussion, not an excerpt from Shakespeare. This is an improvement over, say, Paul Schneider’s Charles Armitage Brown, Keats’ friend & patron, who appears to have wandered in from a sitcom. Where every other portrayal in the film is muted, Schneider overstates everything. His postmortem confession to Fanny that “I failed John Keats” is pronounced with all the subtlety & heartfelt emotion of a Billy Mays infomercial.
But the person whom this film depends on, around whom everything centers, is Cornish & she handles all Campion throws at her, up to & including a final scene where, in mourning, she traipses off into the snow reciting a poem aloud. It’s such a cliché that it’s hard not to guffaw, right at the film’s end. It’s a sign of how well Cornish performs that we don’t ask what she sees in this callow slacker.
Whishaw recites one of the six poems that turn up in this 119-minute feature over the closing credits, but it was literally impossible to tell which one over the rising & shuffling bodies of departing movie-goers. I’m a devoted credits reader & could go on at length about the imbeciles who bolt the instant they start to roll. You could see how involved in the poetry they were.
Focusing on the female character may be a convention of the weepy, but it also gives Campion more room to work, since Brawne is less well known, still without her own Wikipedia page. She’s older here than she was in real life just because Cornish is, but that also makes her emotions come across as all the more tragic because all the more adult. One could of course argue that 17-year-olds were indeed adult in the early 19th century in England (my great grandmother had the first of her 13 children at 15, and that was nearly 50 years after the 1818-21 time period figured here). But Campion goes further, neglecting to mention that Brawne did indeed marry at the age of 33 & bore three children. Campion also makes Brawne the one who appears more completely committed to the relationship, where Keats’ letters to her suggest otherwise – as does La Belle Dame Sans Merci – that to some degree she toyed with his affections. If you think about it, the tragic ending would have been even deeper had they played it by the book.
So this finally is not a film about two historical characters so much as it is about two possible characters. The world they inhabit may be interesting even if it’s not the one we inhabit. That film has yet to be made.
Fanny Brawne
Labels: Film, John Keats
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Most Interesting National Book Award
Finalists’ List Ever¹
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (U. of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (UC Press)
Thanks to judges Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, A. Van Jordan,
Cole Swensen, & Kevin Young
for accomplishing the seemingly impossible:
nominating 5 excellent books
¹ This would be true also
if this were the list for the Pulitzer,
the National Book Critics’ Circle
or just about any other US-based prize
Labels: Prizes
Friday, October 16, 2009
Today, 7:00pm
Living in Advance:
A Tribute to David Bromige
with Charles Bernstein, Corina Copp, Rachel Levitsky,
Daniel Nohejl, Bob Perelman, Nick Piombino,
Ron Silliman, Gary Sullivan, Geoffrey Young & Others
Poets House | 10 River Terrace | New York, NY 10282
(212) 431-7920 | info@poetshouse.org
Cosponsored by the Poetry Project
Admission Free
Labels: David Bromige, Events, Readings
