Cid Corman

"Cid Corman continues to add to his massive quantity of small, quiet, but vast poems in Kyoto, Japan." —Jeffery Beam

A conversation with Cid Corman via live audiocast - 9 PM (eastern time), Monday, November 19, 2001. Co-moderated by

Cid Corman
Cid Corman

Here is an MP3 recording of the program, and a link to Cid Corman on PennSound.

With great pleasure we invite you to join us for a reading and conversation with Cid Corman, who will join us from his home in Kyoto, Japan. The program will be audiocast live worldwide. You can join us by coming to the Kelly Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk in Philadelphia, where an audience will converse directly with Corman by an amplified telephone connection. That conversation will be audiocast, and thus you can also join us, wherever you are, by making a simple connection to the web. Audiocast participants will be able to pose questions for Cid Corman via email. If you intend to participate, please write to whcorman@english.upenn.edu - and be sure to indicate if you will attend at the Writers House or will participate from a distance through the audiocast.

"A hint or tint of
music - as if the silence
were being turned on."



Biography

Cid Corman, b. 1924, was born in Boston, and received his B.A. from Tufts. He did graduate work at the University of Michigan, where he won the Hopwood Award for Poetry, and the University of North Carolina. Throughout the 1950's and 1960's Corman's magazine ORIGIN published some of the major works of the Black Mountain poets, as well as other important work, choosing mostly poems not yet readily available elsewhere: the early poetry of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov with the late works of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. He carried on a fascinating correspondence with Stevens, who greatly respected what Origin was doing. Corman has published over seventy volumes of poetry, translated several French and Japanese poets, and published four volumes of essays. He has lived in Kyoto, Japan since 1958 where he and his wife run a business, Cid Corman's Dessert Shop. Corman is one of "late" modernism's most significant enablers, a poet of talent himself, and a master of "production" -- whose work, both as poet and publisher, is intertwined with the Objectivists Zukofsky and Oppen, as well as Creeley and Olson. Among those poetic colleagues and many younger poets worldwide, Corman's verse is perhaps the most committed to the sublime, refusing the temptation of "effect" for the tactile ink of line and "touch." His collection Nothing Doing is full of poetry of cognitive conundrum, but also of uncompromising wisdom, where Corman can definitively declare: "There's only / one poem: / this is it."

Cid Corman in 1995

Cid Corman in 1995
(courtesy Fran Ryan)

Corman was one of the first to theorize what modernist verse can do on the radio. In Poetry (1952) he wrote a piece on poetry and radio that reads, in part: "What few poets seem to realize is that radio is their best potential outlet these days. It puts the stress rightly on the spoken word, tests the imagination of writer and listener spoken revives the need of the oral-aural commitment in verse, and permits the largest possible audience to experience the poem. As a rare diet, of course, it undermines itself. But there is no reason today, under sincere and determined effort, that good poetry programs should not be available throughout the country. They con be noncommercial sustaining programs, like This Is Poetry. Nearly three years ago I initiated my weekly broadcasts, known as This Is Poetry, from WMEX (1510 kc.) in Boston. The program has been usually a fifteen-minute reading of modern verse on Saturday evenings at seventhirty; however, I have taken some liberties and have read from Moby Dick and from stories by Dylan Thomas, Robert Creeley, and Joyce. In the approximately 150 programs to date, during which I have had the opportunity to improve my delivery and to appreciate oral detail, I have offered the program to many guest poets, to read and discuss their work. About a third of the programs have been of this kind. My guests have included such writers as John Crowe Ransom, Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Spender, John Ciardi, Theodore Roethke, Pierre Emmanuel, Allan Curnow, Richard Wilbur, Richard Eberbart, Katherine Hoskins, and Vincent Ferrini. A number of the programs have been bilingual, in English and French, Spanish, German, or Italian. I have had young but highly qualified persons, native to the tongues, read the originals against my reading of translations. Programs have been given to Corbiere, Eluard, Lorca, Ungaretti, Benn, and others. Imagine hearing Claudio Guillen, son of Jorge Guillen, read a poem that Lorca wrote for him when he was a child in Spain...."