Selected Archive 2008
about one month of postings are on the main web log page some items will be available only for that month this archive page covers 2008
Funeral Program
Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008 at 10:30 am
at the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel
630 Amsterdam Ave,
New York
Jerry Raik, officiating
Psalm 23 (tr. Norman Fischer) Ecclesiastics
"Wherever Angels Go" & "Songs of Crossed Purposes"
(Yarmolinsky/Bernstein)
Sylvie Jensen (soprano), Ben Yarmolinsky (guitar), Ishmael Wallace
(piano) Nona
Willis Aronowitz Kat Griefen Carolee
Schneemann
Collier Meyerson, "Changes" (Phil Ochs) Johanna
Drucker Samuel
Henry Charles
Bernstein, Eulogy for Emma Susan Howe, "Fear No More the Heat of the Sun" (Shakespeare) & "The
Song of Wondering Aengus" (Yeats)
Felix Bernstein, "Everytime We Say Goodbye" (Cole Porter)
[on
January 4, Felix, who is 16, posted these remarks]
Marty Ehrlich, "The Water Is Wide," "Eyliato," &
Ornette Coleman's Broken Shadows (saxophone)
Donations in Emma's honor can be made to Poets in Need
Felix, Emma, Susan, Thanksgiving, 2008, New York
Emma & Charles, Provincetown, 1990
image at at top: Emma
in Venice, Italy, Dec,
5, 2008 (photo by Charles)
We were on Herring Cove Beach. I asked Emma about the conflict between art and fashion, but the wind drowned out my question. August 29, 2007 (mp4, 29 seconds, 5.8 mb)
Emma
Bee Bernstein
(May 16, 1985- Dec. 20, 2008)
Emma
our so much loved daughter and sister
& the center to our lives
died in Venice, Italy, at the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection.
She was 23 years old.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28th from 7-10:00pm the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 701 Mission Street, San Francisco
FREE and ADA accessible to the public Co-sponsored by Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation
Over 60 POETS reading (just) 2 minutes each: Aaron Kunin, Alan Bernheimer, Aldon Nielsen, Andrew Osborn, Barrett Watten, Bill Howe, Bill Luoma, Bill Mohr, Brian Kim Stefans, C.S. Giscombe, Carla Harryman, Christian Bok, Chris Stroffolino, Dale Smith, Craig Perez, Dan Featherston, David Buuck, Dennis Barone, Donna de la Pierre, Durriel Harris, Dodie Bellamy, Elizabeth Hardcastle, Etel Adnan, Jasper Bernes, Jeffrey Robinson, Javier Huerta, Jeanne Heuving, Jennifer Scappettone, Jerry Rothenberg, Joe Amato, John Emil Vincent, Joseph Lease, Joshua Clover, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Julian Brolaski, Kasey Mohammad, Kass Fleisher, Kazim Ali, Kevin Killian, Kit Robinson, Kristin Prevallet, Kyle Schlesinger, Lisa Howe, Lisa Robertson, Lorraine Graham, Maxine Chernoff, Michael Davidson, Norma Cole, Paolo Xaiver, Patrick Durgin, Paul Hoover, Philip Metres, Rob Halpern, Sarah Schulman, Rusty Morrison, Standard Schaefer, Stephanie Young, Stephen Cope, Suzanne Stein, Timothy Yu, Tom Orange, Tyrone Williams, Walter Lew and more! Poets in Masks! Refreshments! Books! Books! Books!
Books by the readers for sale from Small Press Distribution. SPDbooks.org PoetryFoundation.org Small Press Distribution, 1341 7th Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 http://www.spdbooks.org/root/pages/sfspectacular.asp
If you're going to San Francisco for MLA
please consider dropping by
the University of Alabama Press's booth, #307, for a book signing:
Sunday, December 28, 3pm
Jerome Rothenberg
signing copies of his newly published Poetics & Polemics:
1980-2005
And please feel free to stop by throughout the conference to meet with
Dan Waterman, Acquisitions Editor for the UA Press, to see the range of
Modern and Contemporary Poetics books (series ed. by Hank
Lazer and Charles Bernstein)
FC2 books and the rest of
the UA Press publications.
***
from the editors:
On December 29 at 7:00 p.m. Books Inc. – Opera Plaza will
be hosting a launch and reading for Poems for the Millennium,
volume 3. Like its two twentieth-century predecessors, Poems
for the Millennium, volumes 1 and 2, this gathering sets forth
a globally decentered approach to the poetry of the preceding
century from a radically experimental and visionary perspective.
Joining Rothenberg and Robinson in the reading and performance
are major Bay Area poets Michael
McClure, Diane di Prima, Michael
Palmer, Bill Berkson, Leslie
Scalapino, and Jack Foley (performing
with Adelle Foley). Introducing the reading
will be Katherine Hastings, founder of the WordTemple Poetry
Series and host of WordTemple on KRCB 91.1 FM, Santa Rosa's NPR
affiliate. The Books Inc. location is at Opera Plaza, 601 Van
Ness Avenue, tel. 415.776.1111.
The following is from the University of California Press announcement: The previous two volumes of this acclaimed anthology set
forth a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry
from the perspective of its many avant-gardes. Now editors Jerome
Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation
to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the
romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective,
often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental
modernism. Global in its range, volume three gathers selections
from the poetry and manifestos of canonical poets, as well as
the work of lesser-known but equally radical poets. Defining
romanticism as experimental and visionary, Rothenberg and Robinson
feature prose poetry, verbal-visual experiments, and sound poetry,
along with more familiar forms seen here as if for the first
time. The anthology also explores romanticism outside the European
orbit and includes ethnopoetic and archaeological works outside
the literary mainstream. The range of volume three and its skewing
of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics
and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies
and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism
and avant-gardism.
==========================
On the Continuing of the Continuing Laura (Riding) Jackson
Wyeswood Press 2008
A short essay written circa 1980,
previously unpublished
now available as a fine-printed limited edition of 100 numbered
copies
Designed and typeset in Lexicon at Libanus
Press, Marlborough
printed by Hampton Printing of Bristol on Zerkall paper
and bound by Ludlow Binders Ltd. Ludlow
With colour facsimiles
of four pages of the manuscript, and a previously unpublished
photograph of Laura (Riding) Jackson, 1970. 24pp.
♠ ‘The single I speaks the
truth of the invariable Only-I, the infinite One that being is
in being all-real in whatever, whoever, is’ (p.1). ‘The
human being rises in the deep midst of being as selfless multifarious
existence, lifting the all-prior all-ultimate self of being to
this immediacy we call ourselves – this centering of the selfless, self-ful, whole in
speaking presence to it, our speaking to one another its presence to us become one
with our presence to it’ (p.11). ♠
ISBN 978-0-9556636-0-4
£25 or $50 U.S. (+ post and packing: £2
within U.K., $6 to U.S.A.)
Please email your order to
john
AT nolan1.freeserve.co.uk
Payment methods: cheque in pounds sterling payable to John Nolan,
mailed to Wyeswood Press, 19 Ansdell Terrace, London W8 5BY,
England
or Paypal: please request details
The benefit auction of Rain Taxi has begun.
This small card on sumptuous paper was printed by Peter Quartermain
for
Robin Blaser's 80th birthday
& includes the party invitation on the reverse side.
Rain Taxi
auction now online M.T. ANDERSON, John ASHBERY, Paul
AUSTER, Charles BERNSTEIN, Robert BLY, Paul BOWLES, Stephen COLBERT,
Samuel R. DELANY, Neil GAIMAN, Patricia HAMPL, Richard HELL,
Jaime HERNANDEZ, Garrison KEILLOR, Jonathan LETHEM, David MARKSON,
Henry MILLER, Rick MOODY, Barack OBAMA, Ron PADGETT, Jerome ROTHENBERG,
Joe SACCO, Arthur SZE, Jeff VANDERMEER, Anne WALDMAN, Keith and
Rosmarie WALDROP, and Marjorie WELISH are just some of the authors
whose works you'll find. To see the full listings, go
to our online benefit auction now.
Nathaniel Mackey Splay Anthem (New York: New Directions,
2006) Bass Cathedral (New York: New Directions,
2008)
Bedouin Hornbook, published in 1986 by Callaloo, is
the first volume of From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume
Still Emanate; Sun and Moon published the second volume, Djbot
Baghostus's Run, the third volume was called Atet A.D.,
most recently there is, Bass
Cathedral. This
essay/poem/novel‑cum‑treatise
on aesthetics seems like something you could imagine Theodor
Adorno writing if he has lived to the year 2000 and spent most
on the road with Ornette Coleman. (Well perhaps that is not imaginable.)
Mackey's style owes as much to 18th century epistolary fiction
as to postwar literary theory. In its insistence that the style
of thinking — I
mean writing — should
be always as active as what it is thinking about, this work jumps
and stutters and shakes its imaginary limbs as well as its so
called real ones. In so doing, Mackey shows a new path for cultural
studies, where the studies and the studied are
taken to be always art, music, the movement of ideas through
measures and measuring, shifted and shifting tempos and modulations.
Splay
Anthem (like his earlier poetry collections) shows the same
qualities of "palimpsestic stagger" (Mackey’s
phrase for Cecil Taylor) that are at the heart of his prose works.
The poems are exquisite without ever being precious, lyric without
reducing themselves to a single voice, polyvocal without losing
a syncopated musical line. They move the art of poetry forward
by showing the forward was not anywhere like what we thought
it was going to be.
“To poetize or sing is to talk like
a bird, a way with words and sound given rise by a break
in social relations, as if the break were a whistling fissure,
an opening blown on like a flute. … A sign of estrangement,
to poeticize or sing is to risk irrelevance, to be haunted by
poetry’s or music’s irrelevance … but nothing
could be more relevant than estrangement” (Splay Antheml,
xv-xvi).
Mackey’s poems are a delight for tired ears, cornucopia
for the searching mind, and solace for the heartsick.
Splay Anthem continues Mackey's "Song of the
Andoumboulou" series. Here is the source:
"Chant des Andoumboulou"
Dogon Song, from the album Le Rituel Funeraire (Songs
Of The Living - The Funeral Rites) MP3
(5:29)
1956
Disques Ocora;
Liner notes by Francois Di Dio
"The Song of the Andoumboulou is addressed to the spirits.
For this reason the initiates, crouching in a circle, sing it
in a whisper in the deserted village, and only the howling of
the dogs and the wind disturb the silence of the night" --
Di Dio quoted by Mackey in Eroding Witness (p. 31) [Note:
Mackey refers to an album titled Les Dogon where the
same cut, titled, "Chant des Andoumboulou" appears.]
The
Poetry Project, St Mark's Church, New York
October 17, 1983
(39:50) MP3
Fear and Trespass (from The Sophist) (time marker: 2’34”)
from Resistance (9’56”)
Searchless Warrant (from The Sophist) (19’15”)
Prosthesis (from The Sophist) (21’35”)
Preface to Content’s Dream (24’04”)
The Voyage of Life (from The Sophist) (28’00”)
Dysraphism (from The Sophist) (30’13”)
Douglas Messerli is embarking on one of his impossibly large-scale projects
a biographical source for hundreds of international poets
it's now in progress at
Kyle Schlesinger has started a new magazine with Jed Birmingham
Mimeo Mimeo
two issues
so far, second just out
The first issue has a thoughtful summary of the "mimeo
revolution"
by Chrisopher Harter, which takes the archivist's mantle from
Steve Clay's and Rodney Phillip's
Secret Location on the Lower East Side and Loss Pequeño
Glazier's Small Press: An Annotated Guide. Birmingham
provides an detailed portrait of Jeff Nuttall's mid-60s UK My
Own Mag.
The feature is Schlesinger's long interview and with printer-publisher
Alaistair Johnston, which is quite engaging but marred
by a
determined crankiness,
Bay Area insularity, and aesthetically conservative myopia (as
for example comments
on Grenier, Kerouac in JAB, and small press design that
does not meet his standards).
The second issue includes an illuminating discussion of Robert
Duncan's early magazine editing and printing by James Maynard,
Derek Beaulieu on Tish, and
Schlesinger's interview with the New Zealand poet/printer Alan
Loney. All articles are generously illustrated
Mimeo Mimeo 2
starts with a piece by Emily McVarish
on her book art.
Schlesinger has a fine article on McVarish in
another magazine he edits, with Thom Donovan and Michael
Cross,
which has just published its first issue.
Schlesinger also edited, with Craig Dworkin,
the new issue of JAB (Journal of Artists' Books)
on "Intersections of Experimental Literature and Artists Books"
which includes Susan Venderborg on Steve Tomasula's/Stephen Farrel's
great Vas.
Call For Proposals: Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism:
A Gathering
CUNY Graduate Center, Fall 2009
In celebration of its tenth year, Belladonna*/**
will join with The CUNY Graduate Center's Women's Studies Certificate
Program, Center for Research on Women and Society, Center for
Humanities, Poetics Group, and English Department to present
a conference aimed at advancing and broadcasting the life of
Feminist Avant-Garde Poetics and Activism Today. The conference
will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center on September
24 and 25, 2009.
Our goals for this conference are the following:
1) To support the study of the Feminist Avant-Garde
2) To encourage collaboration between radical
feminist artists/thinkers/activists.
3) To provide a space to think about relevant
activism in these times, in this place.
We at Belladonna* are particularly interested in what's immediate,
present and happening now. We would like this call to encourage
conversations and new designs for work between genres, into activist
communities, and among academic and non-academic discourse. We
are looking for evolving modes of knowing and acting and resisting.
Papers and presentations might focus on (but are not limited
to) the following topics:
Collaborations between poets and artists, poets and dancers,
poetry theater, poets and scientists (or science), between teachers
and students, between poets and community activists.
Critical consideration of women writers who for whatever
reason have not yet received it--we welcome non-traditional and
cross-genre approaches.
Race, Gender, Class: Working within and across affinities.
AgitProp that incorporates poetic thinking and expression.
Calls for Action. Organizing sessions.
Send panel proposals and/or paper abstracts (350 words maximum,
or send a dvd of performance/visual /sound work) to belladonnaseries@gmail.com
by January 15, 2009. As we proceed
a web page will become available at belladonnaseries.org.
**
Founded as a reading series at a women's
radical bookstore in 1999, Belladonna* is a feminist avant-garde
event (Belladonna Series) and publication project (Belladonna
Books) that promotes the work of women writers who are adventurous,
politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered,
unpredictable, dangerous with language (to the death machinery).
In its nine year history, Belladonna* has featured over 150 experimental
and hybrid writers. The curators promote work that is explicitly
innovative, connects with other art forms, and is political/critical
in content.
*
deadly nightshade, a cardiac and respiratory
stimulant, having purplish-red flowers and black berries.
LITOTE EN TÊTE is a small literary bookstore near Claude Royet-Journoud's
apartment.
We visited together in October. On the shop's blog there is a
picture from
Juliana Spahr's Fall Paris/Double Change reading (Vincent Broqua
near window).
Claude and me at the shop in October
picture by the proprietor
Corinne Scanvic —
Claude told me to go see a painting of his, when I was in
Lyon, in the office
of Jean-Marie Gleize at the École normale supérieure.
I took
a not very good snapshot
(that's Emmanuel Hocquard on the top left and me below).
GREEN INTEGER
Pataphysics and Pedantry
Douglas Messerli, Publisher
Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims,
Epistles, Diaristic Notes, Narrative, Natural Histories,
Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations
and all such ephemera as may appear necessary
to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion
and fright at least.
Ranjit
Hoskoté (India) The Secret Agent
Portrait of an Unknown Master
The Strange Case of Mr Narrative's Reluctance
Platform Directions
The Empire of Lights
The Randomiser's Survival Guide
Still Life
The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
ed. Hadley Haden Guest
introduction by Peter Gizzi Wesleyan Univeristy Press
Barbara Guest has created a textually saturated poetry
that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, and the flickering
in translucent surfaces of contingent connections.
These poems
unravel before us
so that we may revel in them, find for ourselves,
if we go unprepared,
the dwelling that they beckon us to inhabit.
In October 2008, Stephen McLaughlin, Gregory
Laynor, and Vladimir Zykov published Issue
1, a 3,785-page document featuring almost as many poets.
The pdf was posted at forgodot.com.
The poems were produced by a poem generator called Erika,
or Erica T. Carter.
The ISSUE
2 document is a collection of the blog posts and comments
that responded to the project and/or responded to responses about
the project and/or responded to issues that were raised within
the discussion (419 pages).
The BPL
document is a collection of the comments that were made on
the Buffalo
Poetics Listserv regarding Issue 1 in the month of October
2008 (111 pages).
This document was compiled at the same
time as the conversation took place. Cut-off date was October
31, 2008.
Part 1 of James Kalm’s video of excerpts from
the Poetry Project (St. Marks Church, NYC) celebration of the
publication of
Hannah Weiner’s Open House, ed. Patrick Durgin, who
starts out the segment after Kalm's intoduction
and Stacy Szymaszek's welcome . Rodrigo Toscano, Laura Elrick,
and Kaplan Harris
11/28/07
All three parts
(including John Perrault, and my performance with Susan Bee
and Emma Bee Bernstein)
now on PennSound—
Hannah Weiner's Open House launch page
On the new PennSound Zukofsky page
you will find my
2007 reading of Zukofsky's
"A Foin Lass Bodders,"
Zukofsky's ideolectical translation of Cavalcanti's "Donna
mi Prega,"
from his1940 study for "A"-9,
the
privately printed "First Half of "A"-9"
(included in the LOA Selected Poems).
So I was startled to hear Zukofsky's
own reading of this poem,
which, up till a few months ago, I had not known about.
Dupee-Koch Poetry of the American Avant-Garde
Columbia University NY
R
eading Series: Susan Howe Thursday Nov. 20, 2008, 8 pm,
602 Hamilton
Presented by the Columbia Department of English and Comparative
Literature and Professor Michael Golston
----------------------
photo: Marc Nasdor, Charles Bernstein, Tim Dlugos, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Patricia Jones, Dennis Cooper.
from the Poetry Project Newsletter, scan sent to
me by Tina
Darragh, in memory of Tim, who was at the time the Newsletter editor,
while I was coordinating the first talk series at the Poetry Project,
"St. Marks Talks."
Notebook of Roses and Civilization Tr. Robert Majzels and Erin Moure
(Toronto: Coach House Press, 2007)
This may be the most vibrant translation of Brossard's poetry
into English. Certainly, along with Picture Theory, a
good place to start reading her work. Of special note, the three
prose poetry sections called "Soft Links."
L'Aviva/Aviva tr. Anne-Marie Wheeler
full 1985 French text included
(Vancounver: Nomados, 2008)
Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon tr. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
(Toronto: Coach House Press, 1975)
A novel.
Works in French
D’aube et de civilization a large (450pp.) selected poems, chosen by Louise Dupré
(Montréal: Typo, 2008)
Essential for anyone who wants a full range of Brossard's poetry
in French.
La capture du sombre
(Montréal: Leméac, 2007)
a novel
this is a long parquet fashioned with oil
where drove her ambiance. Mauve tangible
in equilibrium the presence
or collision of day and of the oxygen —
permanence that we fashion
with the usage deviant of ocean perplexed
choices enmeshed
all to contemplate the attraction
of the lumination
the transcription and limping improvidence
under where the ‘o’ makes itself echo
of the conversation reflected in series
silence intact
where plunge in traction initial
it floats verbs to invert
the horizon, the lamination cruel, undecidable.
Who englots hibiscus & plumera
the touch vatic of slurs
pours the lectern
of corpses obsidian
& entombs the flight
combing a timbre of voice-
bled basilicas
& the lure. The regard attenuated
by climate
less colors (brief in their difference)
point of repair
indifferent. The motes
cue me "marked profusely".
Debriefed indications, echoes.
me voiced. Sitting dunked recommencing
the place of lapses
in the merged ointment
the prosceniums
of yoked polysemics
Voilà. Me voice it was
tender, the corpse —
belly, eyes, response —
"marvelous souvenir" of the mar
interrogates. The scent. Allures vent
Louis pacific a plot we find
mobile like an hypothesis
longing for reigns. The incumbency
Permanence clacking in the oil
(corralled calligraphy). The calm
"loin of two" me vents: australopithecine
certitude. Versatile, yolked deuce
point venal.
Permanence of the deluge of transcriptions.
Voicing the jaw, the lamentation crude
who efface the horizon. The table low . . .
loin of two, the yokes of burden
lax contours. The yoke ascertains
the planets & the ore soothing
of the (regalia), the attention southern
the visage & incompatible allure
the yokes pronounce "demented
horizon" — orbits. Lake
Seance.
orient
the choices inflected
of the usage deviant of motion vexed
the earnestness that we fashion
collusion of day & of the oxygen
in equilibrium the reticence
where drove his ambivalence. Mauve tangible
this is a long arcade rationed with oil
-------------------------------------------------------------------
My variations on Brossard's "Polyne'se Des Yeaux"
in À tout
regard, BQ (Bibliothèque québécoise), Montréal,
1989, pp. 109 to 120.
Petah Coyne
Vermilion Fog Galerie Lelong though Dec. 15
another of Coyne's excursions into the thickness of
animalady
Beatriz Milhazes James Cohan Gallery through Nov. 15
An inventive Brazillain collagist
Djordje
Ozbolt 303 Gallery
through
December 23
a kind of Yugoslavian surrealism,
which is to say the real bubbles up in the unexpected cominations
of images
this image is called "Last Year's Fashion"
Joan Mitchell
Sunflowers
Cheim & Read
through Dec. 20
Sa Suk-Won
Black Rainbow
at Gana Art through Nov. 15
A Korean artist who uses a background blackboard inscribed
by immigrant construction workers in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi,
Urdu, and Chinese.
Rosmarie Waldrop and Isabelle Garron
read Wednesday night
at the Poetry Project in New York.
Isabelle Garron
is the author of Face devant contra (Paris Flammarion, 2002)
which has now been translated into English
by Sara Riggs as Face Before Against
(Brooklyn:, Litmus Press, 2008)
I recommend both, with pleasure.
KWH Art, Penn English
Department, & Penn Creative Writing Program present
an opening for TAPEWORM
a collaborative exhibition based on Darren Wershler-Henry's The Tapeworm Foundry (andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination)
Thursday, 11/20 at 7PM
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tapeworm is a collaboration of art projects radiating from a
writing piece by Canadian artist Darren Wershler-Henry, The Tapeworm
Foundry (andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination). The
text is available on UbuWeb.
The Tapeworm Foundry is an intriguing instance of conceptual
writing, faithfully formulaic but also unusually compelling in
its fruition: a single rambling, unpunctuated sequence of possible
projects, ranging from quirky to absurd to highly ambiguous and
all largely allusive of the twentieth century avant-garde. The
potential 'instructions' that comprise Tapeworm, linked by the
pulsating conjunction 'andor', are themselves mini-premises for
a thousand other projects, making the 50-page list the ultimate
conceptual catalyst.
This exhibition challenges a group of young contemporary artists
and writers at Penn to realize some of Wershler-Henry's hypothetical
instructions. The Penn students and graduates participating in
the exhibition include: Grace Ambrose, Joyce Lee, Ned Eisenberg,
Vladimir Zykov, Kimberly Eisler, Artie Vierkant, John Carroll,
Jamie-Lee Josselyn, Arielle Brousse, Manya Scheps, Brooke Palmieri,
Nick Salvatore, Robin McDowell, Sofie Hodara, Cecilia Corrigan,
and Thomson Guster, with assistance from James La Marre and Trisha
Low. Curated by Kaegan Sparks. There will be a limited quantity
of complimentary exhibition catalogues available at the opening.
Please email kwhart@writing.upenn.edu for
more information.
featuring Rachel Levitsky, Joshua Schuster, & your humble
bloggist
with
host Al Filreis
discussing Ezra Pound's "Cantico del Sole" MP3 (26:14)
PoemTalk is a 25-minute mp3 audio recording - streamable or downloadable.
Also available in ITunes (with an option for subscribing).
PoemTalks is produced by the Poetry Foundation, Kelly Writers
House, and PennSound
produced by Al Filreis
[] PT#1:
Williams's "Between Walls"
[] PT#2:
Adrienne Rich, "Wait"
[] PT#3:
George Oppen, "Ballad"
[] PT#4:
Ginsberg sings Blake
[] PT#5:
Ted Berrigan's "3 Pages"
[] PT#6:
a Jaap Blonk sound poem
[] PT#7:
Rothenberg's paradise
[] PT#8:
Armantrout's "The Way"
[] PT#9:
Ashbery at a crossroads
[] PT#10:
one of Stein's portraits
[] PT#11:
Erica Hunt's "voice of no"
[] PT#12:
Ezra Pound's America
Vladimir Maiakovskii: Tragediia (Vladimir Mayakovsky: A
Tragedy): Moscow, 1914
Tango with Cows: Book Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910
- 1917
November 18, 2008-April 19, 2009
Getty Research Institute Exhibition Gallery
Curators: Nancy Perloff with Allison Pultz
Drawing principally from the Getty Research Institute's
collection of Russian modernist books, Tango with Cows: Book
Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1910-1917 brings into focus
a brief, but tumultuous period when Russian visual artists and
poets, including Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir
Malevich, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Velimir Khlebnikov, challenged
Symbolism and revolutionized book art. They fabricated pocket-sized,
hand-lithographed books and juxtaposed primitive and abstract
imagery with a transrational poetry they called zaum' ("beyonsense").
This exhibition traces the avant-garde's use of the materials
of their book art - imagery, language and its sounds, design,
graphic technique - to convey humor, parody, and an intriguing
ambivalence and apprehension about Russia's past, present, and
future.
Exhibition
website
will
go live on November 18, 2008
&
feature a curator's essay, time
line, and links to four books
in a page-turning format
that incorporates translations, audio recordings, and interpretive
highlights.
Some books can already be viewed in pdf format in the Getty's digitized
library collection
(from which I selected the image above).
RELATED EVENTS:
CURATOR-LED TOURS
Tuesday, November 18 - 10am, led by Allison Pultz
Tuesday, November 18 - 3:30pm, led by Nancy Perloff
No reservation necessary. Please meet at the GRI Plaza Lobby.
PERFORMANCE Explodity: An Evening of Transrational Sound Poetry
February 4, 2009
Reception and Gallery Viewing: 5:00 - 6:45 p.m., GRI Exhibition
Gallery
Performance: 7:00 - 8:45 p.m., Museum Lecture Hall
Performances
by Christian Bök, Steve McCaffery, and Oleg
Minin of Russian Futurist zaum' ("beyonsense") poetry
and of contemporary sound poetry, with an introduction by Gerald
Janecek.
SYMPOSIUM The Book as Such in the Russian Avant-Garde
February 5, 2009
9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., Museum Lecture HallThis one-day symposium
brings together scholars and artists in fields from art history
to literature to explore the Russian avant-garde's revolution
of the book. Talks and a roundtable address the deliberately
crude materials, the newly invented zaum' language, and the verbal
and visual tensions between parodic humor and apocalypse, the
primitive and the urban, the sacred and the profane. Speakers
will consider the influence of the Russian avant-garde on visual
poetry and the aesthetics of book production in the later decades
of the twentieth century.
Craig Dworkin, ed. The Consequences of Innovation: 21st
Century Poetics
(New York: Roof Books, 2008)
Highlights include Dwokin’s introduction, Jed Rasula’s
fascinating continuation of his approach in The American Poetry
Wax Museum and a related piece on poetry culture by Steve
Evans, Goldsmith’s week of blogs, Gary Sullivan’s
hysterical restaging of David Bromige’s “My Poetry,” Bergvall
on Templeton’s Cells of Release, and Perloff on
Dworkin, Baetens, and Tawada. (Includes also my own “The
Task of Poetics, the Fate of Innovation, and the Aesthetics of
Criticism.”)
P. Adams Sitney Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers
and the Heritage of Emerson
(New York: Oxford Univeristy
Press, 2008)
Sitney provides lucid readings of Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gerhr,
Abigail Child, Warren Sonbert, Hollis Frampton, among others;
a fundamental resource for basic information on these great
film makers.
Lyn Hejinian Saga/Circus
(Richmond, CA: Omnidawn,
2008)
In the “Saga” second part of this book, Hejinian’s
long serial poem “The Distance” uses the metaphor
of sea journey to perfect her enticing, delightful, and endlessly reflecting
mode of ontological variations.
^^^^^
Review of Louis Armand's Contemporary Poetics
(Northwestern
University Press, 2007)
by Vidhu Aggarwal in Hyperrhiz:
new media cultures
Rod Smith & Friends
Nov. 16, 4pm, The Lyceum, Alexandria, Virginia
Charles Bernstein - Anselm Berrigan - Nada Gordon - Tom Raworth
- Gary Sullivan - Rodrigo Toscano - Croniamantal (the band) -
Mel Nichols - Chris Nealon - Doug Lang - Bonnie Jones - Adam
Good - Mark McMorris - Tina Darragh - Michael Ball - Heather
Fuller - Buck Downs - Lauren Bender - P. Inman
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Régis
Bonvicino interviews me on the election in the Brazilian newspaper Ultimo
Segundo
& the interview (somewhat expanded) is posted in English
at Sibila --- Two reviews of Historias de Guerra Regis Bonvicino's
Brazillian selection from my work
in Coluna
Alfredo Junior (Minas Gerais State) & Gazeta do
Povo (from Paraná State).
\\\\\\\\\\|||||||||||||///////////
Now
available from ROOF
in its fourth printing
(2008) Controlling Interests "It’s strange to think of Charles Bernstein’s
insurrectionary Controlling Interests as a “classic,” but
there (here) it is. Written in & on that paradigmatic moment
when “guacamole has replaced turkey as / the national dish
of most favor” – 1980, three years after
the oil crisis and the slippage of fordism toward the modular
elusiveness of post-fordist globalization – these texts
register and report on the (local & partial) displacement
of the arduous demands of production by the diffuse injunction
to take up a “lifestyle” and consume. But
they’re characterized by a sometimes savage exuberance
that hardly fits the Jamesonian mantra of the pomo lamb lying
down complacently with its late-capitalist lion. That’s
evident not only in the sometimes overt accents of critique,
but also in the pervasive madcap pleasures of bizarre one-upsmanship:
no mode of production could be more modular and mobile than this
carnival of madly compressed “turnover time.” Indeed
things move fast enough that, if this were a carousel (why not?),
a lot of the fixtures & bric-a-brac of their historical moment
would go zooming off toward some asymptotic limit we might call
a horizon. What we can dimly discern there is surprising, and
makes this hyperbolically comic text also intensely moving: say
Benjamin’s angel of history, struggling to recover blown
shards of the wreckage of history (the sacred) before it’s
too late; or some strange avatar of Thoreau (courtesy of Stanley
Cavell) dreaming not that the language might be made whole – and
make us whole – but that it already is (we are) if we can
hear it. Controlling Interests points us toward the communal
space articulated in those almost audible words. But it won’t
let us forget that all of it – junk and junket and critical
juggernaut, and the words that make and remake them – is “us” not “them.” So
that: comedy, and empathy, and hope: arm in arm, neck & neck – we’re
off! --Tenney Nathanson, University of Arizona
"In the poems of CONTROLLING INTERESTS Bernstein continually
reveals his desire for the concomitance of the individual and
the world, of all language and experience . This book is one
of the most original and imaginative in American lyric verse" --Douglas
Messerli. (Go
to Messerli's entire 1982 review.)
"Bernstein presents the reader with a world in which the
articulation of an individual language is all but prevented by
the official discourses that bombard the consciousness from all
sides . He [is] on to something important"--Marjorie
Perloff
"It is writing of absolute necessity, demanding not to be
appreciated, but understood"--Ron Silliman.
Peter Inman video portrait
It was after my Baltimore i.e. reading with Rod. I found a red
alcove in the noisy bar. I’d first met Peter and Tina almost
thirty years before in D.C., probably at a reading I did for
Doug Lang at Folio Books in DuPont circle. November 18, 2006 (mp4,
42 seconds, 8.3 mb)
Anne Tardos has sent us a new EPC
author photo for Jackson Mac
Low, from 1943
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photo by Claude Bondy
Abigail Laing read her translations with
me at Double
Change in Paris
on Saturday, Oct. 25
at La Bellevilloise (21, Rue Boyer, 75020)
"Dada 2"
Federman & Bernstein,1996 (based on a poem by Federman,
digitally edited by Bernstein) (0:45):
MP3
This essay of mine will appear as the preface to Federman
at 80: From Surfiction to Critifiction, edited by Jeffrey DiLeo
(State University of New York Press, 2009). It is published in
this week's Artvoice.
Some Answers for Raymond Federman
For Raymond Federman fiction is
useless.
Fiction is a delusion we use to
screen ourselves from reality and reality is largely, though
not entirely, delusional. This is why Federman is a story teller
and not a novelist. And assuredly not a writer of fiction.
And if he tells the same stories
over and again it is because the story is never the same in any
telling because, if it were, that would be fiction. And Federman
writes nonfiction. Historical nonfiction.
Or else what he writes is a bed
of lies. (A hole inside a gap.)
And anyway it is never the same
story and Federman tells it over and again because what he has
to tell, like history, cannot be told once and for all.
Like the same dream you keep having
only it’s not the same and this time you can’t wake
up.
Federman wakes us up.
Federman is a spelunker of either
historical memory or collective forgetting, depending on the
reader. He is not interested in the well-lit paths through the
cave nor even the once-marked offroads. What’s a cave to
him or he to a cave that we should weep so? Memory has become
a way of forgetting, the recovered forgetting of the professional
memoirist. Federman prefers the musings of Stan and Oliver, or
Vladimir and Estragon. He speaks of his life like a defrocked
poet at a coroner’s inquest.
O, inconstant heart!
Digression is as much a foil as
progression. Federman’s digressions are as direct as “an
arrow from the Almighty’s bow.” They pierce but don’t
wound. The wound is the condition, the voice in the closet that
comes out, like Tinker Bell, only if you say you believe it.
And you believe it only at your peril. (Pauline will fend for
herself.)
The elementary error of the literature
of self-help and affirmation, the preferred fiction of the mediocracy,
is that trauma is overcome, that you get better, that there is
healing. That there can be understanding. Federman neither dwells
on the abyss, nor theatricalizes it, nor explains it, nor looks
away.
The Dark is the ground of his being
and his becoming.
Go nameless so that the name you
are called by becomes you.
Federman is an improper noun full
of signs and stories signifying (precisely) nothing. Federman
names that which is (k)not here.
He is our American Jabès,
only the rabbis have been subsumed into the bouillabaisse and
the ladder loaned to the roofer.
And from that roof we shout to the
crowd assembling below: Break it up! Go back to where you came
from, if you can find it! There is nothing to see here.
The truth you seek is not on this
earth nor in Heaven either.
Then Federman begins again.
One more time.
The words, at least the words, are
indelible, even if we are not.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN INTERDISCIPLINARY
ARTS, AA2175
The Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
Program (IAS) at the University of Washington Bothell seeks a
practicing artist and scholar working in visual, media, spoken,
written, and/or performance arts, and whose research and practice
engages with one or more of the following areas: ecology and
environmental studies; technology and science; public and community
health; ethnic and gender studies; spatial practice and design.
The successful candidate will join an interdisciplinary faculty
working across the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences
in an integrative curriculum with an emphasis on experiential
and community-engaged scholarship and pedagogy. Two-years
teaching experience and PhD or other appropriate terminal degree
required at time of appointment. Salary is commensurate
with qualifications and experience.
IAS houses undergraduate and graduate
programs, is part of a growing campus located 18 miles from Seattle
on the eastside of Lake Washington, and has access to the research
and funding resources of the three UW campuses. IAS is
launching several new undergraduate majors, including a degree
in Interdisciplinary Arts. It also offers Master of Arts
degrees in Cultural Studies and Policy Studies. The program
as a whole stresses links between diverse fields and methods
of inquiry, and values engaged scholarship and experiential learning
as central components of its mission. The candidate will
have a demonstrated commitment to pedagogical innovation and
be prepared to teach an upper-division core course that introduces
students to interdisciplinary inquiry.
For more information, see http://www.washington.edu/admin/acadpers/ads/aa2175.html ,
or e-mail the search committee chair, Professor JoLynn Edwards,
at jedwards -- at -- uwb.edu. Preferred deadline: 24 October
2008. Applications should include a letter addressing the
candidate’s scholarly, pedagogical, and artistic qualifications
for working in this type of program, a CV, a statement of research
and teaching interests, and a sample syllabus from an interdisciplinary
course. Address applications to Ms. Pam DePriest, University
of Washington Bothell, IAS Program/Interdisciplinary Arts Search,
Box 358530, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011.
This position is contingent upon
available funding. University of Washington faculty members
engage in teaching, research and service. The University
is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer. The
Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program is dedicated to the
goal of building a culturally diverse and pluralistic faculty
and staff committed to teaching and working in a multicultural
environment and strongly encourages applications from women,
minorities, individuals with disabilities and other eligible
veterans. We are particularly interested in faculty who
can contribute to diversifying the undergraduate and graduate
curricula.
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THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR
PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE
2009 IAPL CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS
1-7 June 2009
The International Association for Philosophy and Literature will
hold its 33rd annual conference at Brunel University in Uxbridge
(West London, ENGLAND) in 2009. The conference theme is DOUBLE
| EDGES: rhetorics - rhizomes - regions. Keynote speakers will
be confirmed in the coming weeks. The deadline for paper abstract
and session proposal submissions is now 31 October 2008. Please
go to www.iapl.info for further
information and online submissions. Contact: Hugh J. Silverman,
IAPL Executive Director and Program Coordinator: execdir --@--
iapl.info.
My reading from Girly
Man &Shadowtime at the CUE Art Foundation, New York
January 16, 2007 courtesy PennSound
click to launch Quicktime plugin
or copy link and open stream in media player
or download from link
Video Introduction by William Corbett:(1:47): .mov
Reading (42:31): .mov
Audio
Introduction by William Corbett:(1:47): mp3
Reading (42:31): .mp3
1. Introduction by Charles Bernstein
(2:25) : mp3
2. Sign Under Test (12:32): mp3
3. Don't Get me Wrong (1:28): mp3
4. Jacob's Ladder (0:43): mp3
5. Castor Oil (1:15): mp3
6. Dialogue with Hölderlin and Benjamin (from Shadowtime)
(2:14): mp3
7. Laurel's Eyes (from Shadowtime) (2:12): mp3
8. Hashish in Marseilles (from Shadowtime) (1:49): mp3
9. Der Tod, Das Ist Die Kühle Nacht (from Shadowtime)
(4:09): mp3
10. There's Beauty in the Sound ... (2:07): mp3
11. Wherever Angels Go (1:39): mp3
12. Introduction to Let's Just Say (1:04): mp3
13. Let's Just Say (3:33): mp3
14. "every lake . . ." (0:55): mp3
15. The Ballad of the Girly Man (4:15): mp3
George Tooker & the Unknown Blakelock
at the National Academy till
Jan. 4
The early Tooker and the late Blakelock are not to be missed
(above: Tooker, Government Bureau, 1956)
*
Alfred Kubin at Neue
Gallery (through Jan. 29)
Interrupt 2008
Language-Driven Digital Art Conference at Brown
Oct. 17-19 >Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
>Human Beast
>cris cheek
>Abigail Child
>Chris Funkhouser
>Loss Pequeño Glazier
>Foofwa d’Imobilité & Alan Sondheim
>Talan Memmott
>Marko Niemi
>Bill Seaman & Penny Florence
>Eugenio Tisselli
>Patricia Tomaszek
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American Poet Launch Party
Saturday, November 8
7:00 p.m.
Reading and reception for the new fall issue of American Poet,
the journal of the Academy of American Poets. Micro-readings
by Charles Bernstein, Major Jackson, and Cecily Parks..
Wollman Hall
The New School
5th floor, Room 550
65 W. 11th Street
(btwn 5th and 6th Ave)
$4 admission
part of AAP's Poets
Forum
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St Marks Church NY Poetry Project
Calendar
includes A Helen Adam Halloween
Wednesday, 8:00 pm
Halloween time is a good Helen Adam time. Adam's work inspired
many poets, such as Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, to explore
the ballad. This event is to celebrate the publication of A
Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation, 2008) edited
by Kristin Prevallet. Songsters who will conjure Adam through
her ballads are: Anne Waldman, Edmund Berrigan, Dan Machlin and
Serena Jost, Franklin Bruno and Bree Benton, Cecilia Vicuña,
Julie Patton, Tracie Morris, Lee Ann Brown, Charles Bernstein,
Susan Howe and Bob Holman. This event is co-presented with Poets
House.
from the archive Secular
Jewish Culture/Radical Poetic Practice video of 9/21/04 panel
with Paul Auster, Charles Bernstein (chair/organizer), Kathryn
Hellerstein, Stephen Paul Miller, Marjorie Perloff, Jerome Rothenberg
Modernism & Unreadability (Difficulty) Colloquium
Lyon, France 23-25 octobre 2008
Colloque "Modernisme et Illisibilité" organisé par Isabelle Alfandary (PU Lyon 2, CEP),
Axel Nesme (MCF Lyon 2, CEP)
et Lacy Rumsey (ENS LSH) salles F08 et F01 Le colloque « Modernisme
et Illisibilité » se propose d’interroger
un mouvement littéraire et esthétique majeur, le
modernisme, du point de vue d’un de ses effets aussi évidents
qu’habituellement passés sous silence : l’illisible.
Cette manifestation à dimension internationale et pluridisciplinaire
rassemblera plus d’une quarantaine de chercheurs venus
d’Europe, d’Amérique et d’Asie, issus
de spécialités de ittératures étrangères,
notamment du domaine anglophone, et de littérature française.
Parmi les plus grands spécialistes de la question moderniste
seront en situation de débattre d’une période
charnière dans l’histoire de la littérature
et des arts. La présence de Charles Bernstein, titulaire
de la prestigieuse chaire de poésie à University
of Pennsylvania, de Bonnie Costello, professeur à Boston
University, ainsi que de Jean-Jacques Lecercle, professeur émérite à l’Université de
Paris-X Nanterre, sera l’occasion d’échanges
contradictoires et fructueux. La conférence donnera lieu à une
lecture de poésie bilingue qui mettra en présence
quatre voix poétiques contemporaines majeures dont les œuvres
s’inscrivent dans la lignée du modernisme américain:
celle de Charles Bernstein, de Christian Prigent, de Jacques
Demarcq ainsi que de Jean-Marie Gleize.
Ted Greenwald, In Your Dreams (Buffalo: Blaze Vox,
2008)
Ted Greenwald’s 30th book consists of 79 72-line poems,
each with his trademark recombinatory drop-stitch weave. As a
basic pattern, which is varied, each poem’s 26 demotic
lines is repeated in 9 interlinked free triolets (ABCACDAB-DEFDFGDE). In
Your Dreams is almost, then is, hard to say, In Your Dreams is
almost, hard to say, autopoiesis, In Your Dreams is almost,
then is, autopoiesis, flickering fugal strobe of the everyday,
or sublime sonic moiré, autopoiesis, or sublime sonic
moiré, spoken and shimmering, autopoiesis, flickering
fugal strobe of the everyday.
---------
Frank Bidart and I will have a public conversation as part of
the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Lowell. Saturday,
Oct. 11, 3-4pm, All Arts Gallery, 246 Market Street. The event
is organized by Fulcrum as part of their debate series.
--------
"Our Americas: New Worlds Under Construction"
published in Vagant (Bergen,
Norway)
________
Federman@80: A Celebration
Sat., Oct. 18 - Buffalo
Morning: 10:30 A.M.-12:30 P.M., UB Anderson Gallery, One Martha
Jackson Place.
Opening reception (with coffee and accompaniments) of an exhibition
of Federman-inspired art works by Terri Katz-Kazimov, Harvey
Breverman, & Bruce Jackson.
L to R: Federman, René Girard, & Al Cook (photo by
Bruce Jackson)
Noon(ish): 1:00-4:30 P.M., Poetry Collection, 4th Floor Capen
Hall, UB North Campus.
Two sessions of presentations and discussion featuring contributors
to the forthcoming SUNY Press collection of essays, Federman
at 80: From Surfiction to Critifiction, edited by Jeffrey
DiLeo.
1:00-2:30: A Life in the Text.
Dr. Larry McCaffery, Dr. Menachem Feuer, & Dr.
3:00-4:30: Laughter, History, and the Holocaust.
Dr. Susan Rubin Suleiman & Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope.
L to R: Leslie Fiedler & Federman (photo by Bruce Jackson)
& NIGHT: 8:00 P.M., Medaille College, Main Building, Foyer & Lecture
Hall. An Evening of Laughterature, Surfiction, & Playgiarism
Ted Pelton, Christina Milletti, Geoffrey Gatza, Julie
Regan, Michael Basinski, & Steve McCaffery.
—Intermission—
Davis Schneiderman, Charles Bernstein, Simone Federman, & Raymond
Federman
The readings will be followed by a reception and 80th birthday
toast.
as a Charter Member of the vast
Right-Leg Conspiracy to Restore Sanity, Probity and the Pentameter
to the World of Poetry (RLCRSPPWP), I have read with
great interest your message of Sept 26, 2008, to be found in
and am delighted that you have
finally come to your census, and have decided to join our campaign
to restore SPP to poetry. I was especially pleased that you have
chosen to begin your program-pogrom with 1904, the year of birth
of that Obfusticator-in-Chief, Louis Zukofsky (who actually
once wrote a poem about his Washstand!!! I mean, REALLY! Can
you believe it??? What next? Toilet as sculpture??), and as a
start, you should order an immediate freeze on any persons attempting
a dissertation on the aforesaid Obfusticator-in-Chief,
as Little is of greater danger to the economy -- indeed, the
World.
However, dear Pa-fressor, whilst "hole-heartedly" welcoming
you to our little Conspiracy, the record MUST reflect that you
yourself are partially to blame for this tsunami of in-F-able
F-LU(z)ENT, having edited a Selection of the aforementioned Obfusticator-in-Chief's
more egregious items; and by having helped start a Poetic Movement
that probably moved poetry backwards by at least two centuries.
But let us not dwell in the past.
Instead, let us look forward to
a time when young twits are no longer encouraged to think that
they have a right to express themselves, or that anyone gives
a damn what they FEEL; to a time when
there will no longer be funding (thanks to Fannie and Freddie
and Sallie) that, by allowing their parents to purchase homes
with no-money-down, in turn allowed their parents the
money to get the twits the hell out of the aforesaid home, thereby
swelling the coffers of Sonny, and Benny, and Frannie, and Penny;
and where the general insouciance regarding the welfare
of the country was such that no one cared that the solution to
our problems regarding the tax-base, excess immigrant workers,
and the high price of vegetables, can all be traced to people
feeling the need to write poetry (accuse me whilst I vomit) .
So I say to you:
ONWARDS
and remain, as ever
yours in paranoia.
I am Paul Zukofsky, and I shall
probably pay for this message.
Untitled: Speculations on
the Expanded Field of Writing
October 24/25, 2008
at RedCat/CalArts Los Angeles
With Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Latasha Diggs, Johanna
Drucker, Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Grenier, Douglas Kearney,
Steve McCaffery, Julie Patton, Salvador Plascencia, Jessica Smith,
Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Taylor, Shanxing Wang, and Heriberto
Yepez.
The fifth in an annual series of experimental writing conferences
at REDCAT, “Untitled” is a two-day conversation
about writing which in some manner exceeds the printed page:
word-art onscreen, the book as object, material appropriated
from newspapers, hand-drawn texts, or writings on the wall. “Untitled” is
a common title of contemporary art works and also refers to the
incipient moment of a new text or idea. A variety of writers
and artists will discuss the use of language and words and/or
their object status, the book and the letter, the question of
the "emptiness" vs. the fullness of language as a
poetic medium, the pictorial versus the narrative, the incorporation
of extra-linguistic symbols and signs (maps, diagrams, formulas,
etc.), the question of conceptual writing, and words off the
page – performed, sited, projected, incanted, or invoked.
Funded by The Annenberg Foundation
Organized by Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim.
FRIDAY October 24th
12.30- Opening Addresses
1.00- 3.00 – Litterality 1.
Writing is not speech, it is letters on a page. What do we make
of the inclusion in writing of non-alphabetic signs, symbols,
diagrams; writing as map or score; invented writing notations;
or the book as object?
Johanna Drucker, Salvador Plascencia, Latasha Diggs, Shanxing
Wang,
3.30 – 5.00 - The Meaninglessness or -fulness of Language.
As a vehicle, is language empty, saturated with meaning, both,
or something else?
Jessica Smith, Bob Grenier, Christine Wertheim
5.00- 6.00 - Drinks at REDCAT with participants and audience
8.30- 10.30 – Evening Readings/Performances
SATURDAY October 25th
Morning
10.30- 12.00 - Appropriation and Citation.
Whose work and what material gets appropriated, cited and resurrected?
Who owns texts? Is there a difference between appropriation and
citation?
Steve McCaffery, Doug Kearney, Kenneth Goldsmith
12.30 – 2.00 - Litterality 2.
Writing is not speech, it is letters on a page. What do we make
of the inclusion in writing of non-alphabetic signs, symbols,
diagrams; writing as map or score; invented writing
notations; or the book as object?
Brian Kim Stephans, Julie Patton, Vincent Dachy
Afternoon
3.30 – 5.00 The Concept of Conceptual Writing.
What is the relation between conceptual writing and the trajectory
of conceptual art?
Stephanie Taylor, Heriberto Yepez, Young-Hae Chang+ Marc Voge
from With Strings, 2001
---------------------------------------------------
Common Stock
Believing that
fundamental conditions
of the country are sound and that there
is nothing in the business situation to warrant
the destruction of values that has taken place
on the exchanges during the past week,
my son and I have for some days
been purchasing sound common stocks.
– John
D. Rockefeller (1929)
Trades that are
injurious to
climate – gradient
of the supreme
effort to scale
a
thorn
that hulls us
firm beyond
bounty. Hucksters
rescinding voracious
declamation
hopes
of a
pear, soft
and
oval
to the knot without
tangle that braids
the
dole.
Or derring-done,
sometimes seated,
that
stills
with pliant
warrant.
Scuttle
behind or before anyone
has a leg to
laugh
off.
Grateful but not gracious
enough – flood
in
the face
of moral insubordination,
truculent enough
to
eat a
truss. Floor-length with
an irremediable
conclusion--
views of the flicker in which we
pilfer – klieg-light
origin,
defenestrated
micropassage. I leer a bit
but don't veer
often,
comes a
donkey with silver bells
to lean on
(among)
& the woof of the day
fritters away
in
loquacious
aqua regia. (Never sold
anyone this. Never
heard
the
curb.) Maybe forget the fly-
trap for the crease.
Or
show-laddered
past 9-o'clock shadow to
the orient of my
unfolding.
(All as clear as
punches right now.
Sitting
there.)
As perhaps falsely implicate, hap-
hazardly conjoin,
whacked
joints
to spin the
Adjacent. Or maybe didn't
matter anyway, or
to
whom.
Efflorescent bongo – plunge,
superannuated
penny loafers – as
if you
could crawl
your way out of history.
One wish
appertained.
But the dead stare of the facts
cooled the discussion
of
desublimation.
(Shook up
but
didn't
tell.)
Blood is our esperanto, flesh
our zaum,
who
have
no verbs
to frighten away
the night.
(Nothing
but words.) Noting
more than
notice
trick of a clock,
club of a
sail – keystrokes
of dilatinous osmolality
shuddering against
the
loaded
drain basin, trying to grab
hold, in front of,
completely
out
of
frame. Then fasten your dock,
divest the maul,
whosoever
envisions
lassitude. Millet of swell-drenched
pumping, maldisposed
actuarial.
Or else become safety net,
sulfuric test,
of
love-bent plaint.
Pierre Joris has put up some clips from the Technicians of
the Sacred 40th Anniversary reading
at his Nomadics blog.
My version of the opening Cato genesis poem is above;
Jerome Rothenberg (Three Yaqui Deer Dance Poems)
and Nicolle Peyrafitte (Sumerian "Vulva Song of Inanna")
& full audio of the event more now at PennSound
Come join
us as we begin our 41st season, with two reasons to celebrate!
You are invited
to a reception
celebrating the release of the current issue of
PAJ: a journal of performance and art
Bonnie Marranca, Editor
Published in cooperation with MIT Press
AND
celebrating a new
partnership between
the Ontological and free103point9 Transmission Arts
Starting in January 2009, free103point9 is thrilled to be in
residence at the Ontological, formalizing an ongoing mutually
inspired collaboration
Thursday,
October 16, 2008 6:00 – 7:45 PM Parish Hall, St. Mark’s Church
light refreshments
will be served
Hosted by Ontological
Theater Board Member Charles Bernstein
please RSVP to the Ontological at 212-420-1916
PAJ 90 includes
pieces by and about Richard Foreman:
Performance chart and script selections
from
DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND
Storyboards from MARIA DEL BOSCO
Performance photos
Interview with Foreman by George
Hunka
PAJ
90 online
(some of the Foreman material is available without sub, follow
links
holograph page above is from the issue)
Following the reception,
please join us upstairs at 8PM for the first evening of free103’s
NYC Radio Festival 2008: Radio Theater featuring work by 31 Down
and Japanther—admission is free, as part of TCG’s
Free Night of Theater!
Coming in
January: ASTRONOME, a new opera directed by Richard
Foreman with
music by John Zorn…
with thanks to Donato Mancini
for editing the Canadian portals and pages
————
“Veronica Forrest-Thomson:
Larking up Kicks” A Call for Papers
“[O]ne
of the misfortunes of the lack of attention being paid to English
poetry of this century is the obscurity of Veronica Forrest-Thomson,
a poet who died in 1975 at the age of 27.” So stated Brian
Kim-Stefans in July 2001. In 2002, literary critic Suzanne Raitt
expressed the hope that Forrest-Thomson’s unknown status
would be mitigated by a compilation of her poetry in the nineties
and a recent monograph by Alison Mark. This symposium emerges
on the heels of another updated version of Forrest-Thomson’s
poetry, namely Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Collected Poems (ed.
Anthony Barnett, published by Shearsman Books and Allardyce,
Barnett, 2008).
Veronica Forrest-Thomson wrote four
poetry collections: Identi-kit (1967) Language Games (1971), Cordelia,
or 'A poem should not mean, but be' (1974) and On the
Periphery (1976). She was also a literary theorist and critic
who authored Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century
Poetry (1978). Her work is witty, philosophical, and occasionally,
deliberately, badly rhymed. It is also worthy of more consideration.
Christ’s College, Cambridge
and the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex
intend to co-host a day-long symposium dedicated to the work
of Veronica Forrest-Thomson. It will be held on January 17th,
2009 at Cambridge, and will involve panels comprised of 15-minute
papers and a longer, seminar-style finale of very short close
readings of individual Forrest-Thomson poems. Our intent is to
foster an informed and comfortable dialogue about Forrest-Thomson,
and contemplate ways of approaching her work.
As such, we welcome papers on any
facet of Forrest-Thomson’s poetry and criticism. Proposals
of no more than 250 words should be sent to both Sara Crangle
(S.Crangle@sussex.ac.uk) and Sophie Read (scnr2@cam.ac.uk).
Thursday, September 25th,
7:00PM Gala Launch Reading The
New School
Tischman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY Featuring readings by John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein,Ciaran
Berry, Laura Cronk, Richard Howard, Dennis Nurske, Meghan O’Rourke,
Lee Upton.
Series Editor David Lehman will moderate.
Books will be for sale.
Follow guest author Don Share this
week on The Best American Poetry Blog.
A.I.R Gallery. has moved to Dumbo (Brooklyn).
Manhattan was New York's 20th century art (and poetry) hot spot
but for some time Brooklyn has been gaining an edge.
(Perhaps this is because our sometimes Republican mayor,
Michael Bloomberg, has made his major policy goal
creating a surplus of luxury housing in Manhattan.
Chelsea (a.k.a. Corporate Art Condo Village)
is the new SoHo, while Williamsburg,
and perhaps Dumbo too,
are the new Chelsea.
A.I.R. is celebrating its move to Dumbo in style, with shows
about its illustrious history at NYU
& at its new Brooklyn space.
At New York University
A.I.R. Gallery: The History Show
archival materials from 1972 to the present
September 16 - December 12, 2008
Curated by Kat Griefen & Dena Muller
at Tracey/Barry Gallery, Bobst Library (Fales Collection)
70 Washington Square South, 3rd Floor
Opening Reception and Panel at Tracey/Barry Gallery
Tuesday September 16, 6-8pm
"How A.I.R. Changed the Art World: Feminist Intervention
Over 37 Years"
Zen Monster
is alive at
The Bowery Poetry Club.
September 24, 6-7:30 p.m
308 Bowery, New York
New Zen, leftist, secular, jewish-buddhist. african art & literature
magazine Zen Monster
kicks off with an inaugural reading at the Bowery Poetry Club
September 24, 6-7:30 pm.
Poets, writers, readers and visual artists include Karen Russell,
Bob Perelman, Eliot Katz,
Robyn Ellenbogen, Simon Pettet, Lorraine Stone, Andrea Clark
Libin, Willie Cole, Matvei
Yankelevich, Lewis Warsh, John High, Charles Bernstein, Stephen
Paul Miller, Ammiel
Alcalay, Steve Benson, Brian Unger and assorted special guests.
John Ashbery collages
new & old
bringing to mind the work of Jess and Joe Brainard
*a total treat*
along with new paintings by Trevor Winkfied
now through Oct. 4
Tibor de Nagy
724 Fifth Avennue
NY
---
Best American Poetry
Thursday, September 25
7:00 p.m., free
Tishman Auditorium, Johnson Building, 66 West 12th Street
David Lehman, series editor of The Best American Poetry and
poetry coordinator of the New School's MFA program, will introduce
poets chosen by Charles Wright for the 2008 volume, the 21st
edition of the acclaimed annual anthology. Readers include
John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Ciaran Berry, Laura Cronk, Richard
Howard, D. Nurkse and Meghan O'Rourke
25 years ago Douglas Messerli gave a talk on "Rhythms of the `Language' Poets"
at the MLA Annual Convention, New York (1982).
He's now published the essay on
his Green
Integer Blog.
_____
In 1968
Jerome Rothenberg published his anthology Technicians of the Sacred
"a global range of oral & tribal poetry into focus and
launched ethnopoetics as a new approach to poetry and performance".
At the Bowery Poetry Club
Sunday, September 14, 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.:
a celebration of the 40th anniversary with
Charles Bernstein, George Economou, Bob Holman, Pierre Joris,
Charlie Morrow, Rochelle Owens, Nicole Peyrafitte, Diane Rothenberg,
Carolee Schneemann, and Cecilia Vicuña. (Bowery
Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, between Houston and Bleecker, NewYork.)
The Humanities
at Work: International Exchange of Ideas in Aesthetics, Philosophy
and Literature
Editor: Yubraj Aryal
Publisher: Sunlight Publication, Kathmandu, Nepal (2008)
Interviews (in English) with American philosophers,
literary theorists and specialists in aesthetics
The book is prepared with the support of the Philosophical Society
of Nepal along with the close advisory of a team of Nepali and
American scholars Shredhar Prasad Lohani, Govinda Raj Bhattarai, Arun
Gupto, Krishna Chandra Sharma, William L. McBride, David
E. Schrader, Charles Bernstein and Johanna Drucker under
the theme of intercultural ideas for global peace and mutual
understanding.
The book not only, as Hilary Putnam says, “testifies both
to intelligence and sophistication” of the Nepali scholarly
community but also, as Jerome McGann points out, “will
open Western cultural understanding of recent years to critical
assessment by Asian intellectual communities”
Price: $ 20
Checks to Yubraj Aryal
Parker Apartments, LLC
615 North Street #13
Lafayette, IN 47903, USA (Note: the editor has just moved from Nepal to the U.S. to
attend graduate school .)
While our PEPC edition is free
of charge,
please send contributions to the editor at above address to help
defray costs.
Table of Contents
TWENTIETH CENTURY
A. Philosophy 18
1. Neo-pragmatism
Hilary W. Putnam 18
2. Mind and Language
John Searle 28
3. Derrida and Deconstruction
David Wood 38
4. Modernity and Rationality
Leonard Harris 46
5. Modernity and Postmodernity: A Debate
Kathleen M. Haney 52
6. Feminism: Some Current Issues
Kelly Oliver 62
7. Terrorism: Some Current Issues
Bat-Ami Bar On 68
8. Postmodernism and Some Moral Questions in
Twentieth Century Ethics
David E. Schrader 74
9. Postmodernism and Some Questions on God in
Twentieth Century Religion
Linda T. Zagzebski 88 B. Poetics, Art and Aesthetics 100
10. Cultural Critics and Modernist Avant-garde: A
Debate
Geoffrey Galt Harpham 100
11. Theory of Texuality
Jerome McGann 106
12. Idealism and Twentieth Century Literary Theory
Charles Altieri 112
13. Language Poetry and Modernist Avant-garde
Charles Bernstein 118
14. Digital Aesthetics
Johnana Drucker 126
15. Postcolonialism: Some Current Issues
Jahan Ramazani 144
16. Race, South African Reconciliation and Aesthetics
Daniel Herwitz 150
17. Contemporary American Poetry
Susan M. Schultz 156
ENLIGHTENMENT AND POSTENLIGHTENMENT A. Philosophy 164
18. Enlightenment Philosophy
Allen Wood 164
19. Romantic Philosophy
Fred Breiser 172
20. Reason and Unreason
Daniel Breazeale 178
21. Philosophy of History: Hegelian and Anti-Hegelian
Richard Dien Winfield 184
22. Myth and History
George Allan 194
23. Existentialism
William L. McBride 212
24. Freud and Unconscious
David Rosenthal 222 B. Poetics, Art and Aesthetics
25. Marxism, Poetics, Art and Aesthetics
Tyrus Miller 232 PRESOCRATIC TO RENAISSANCE A. Philosophy 248
26. Pre-Socratic Philosophy
Tony Preus 248
27. Neo-Platonism
Gary M. Gurtler, S.J. 270
28. Renaissance Philosophy
Bruce Smith 278 B. Poetics, Art and Aesthetics 284
29. Greco-Roman Poetics, Art and Aesthetics
Andrea Nightingale 284
30. Renaissance Poetics, Art and Aesthetics
Andrew David Hadfield 304
This is a list of rhetorical and
other features of individual poems that I have used for many
years in teaching and which I discuss in several essays on poetry
and pedagogy.
PEPC library link to the Poem Profiler (and also to an "EZ"
version format).
"I
am not a 'translator'; but rather a poet in dialogue with another
poet, hence the liberties I took in the body of the translations."
Preface
From Within
Régis Bonvicino
I used a line by Charles Bernstein
to begin the introduction to Histórias da Guerra: "the
politics in a poem has to do with how it / enters the world" ("Sign
Under Test"). Finally, Bernstein has arrived in Brazil,
South America, a continent that, according to Marcelo Santos,
Americans have a "racist, prejudiced and ethnocentric" relationship
with. Santos goes on to argue that, "in general,
they refer to Latin Americans as backward, inferior, underdeveloped,
barbaric, Catholic, mestizo, antidemocratic, unable to solve
their own problems" and, as a result of that, he concludes, "they
justify the intervention of the predestined, civilized, white
Americans." The fair price of Latin American resistance
to America is paid, paradoxically, by American high culture,
specifically its poetry, which, as a whole, is the best of the
20th century along with that of the European avant-garde until
the 1920s. Browsing through the culture pages of the major Brazilian
dailies would suffice to verify that American movies and pop
music are what guide them. It's enough to turn on the TV or the
radio. It's enough to walk around the city to notice that store
with an English name all of a sudden becomes "modern." It's
enough to attend the yearly edition of FLIP (Festa Literária
Internacional de Paraty) to find mediocre American fiction writers
among the guests.
But not all American high culture exempted itself from political "service." For
instance:
Once again, the CIA
turned to the private sector to advance its objectives […]
Pre-eminent amongst contemporary and avant-garde art museums
was the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Its president
through most of the 1940s and 1950s was Nelson Rockefeller, whose
mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, had co-founded the museum in
1929 (Nelson called it 'Mommy's Museum"'). Nelson was a
keen supporter of Abstract Expressionism, which he referred to
as 'free enterprise painting'.
Saunders, Who
Paid the Piper?
Saunders
adds that for the status quo, abstract expressionism represented
an anti-Communist art affiliated with the ideology of freedom
and free enterprise because, by being non-figurative, it became
silent and convenient. Abstract expressionism was the first American
pictorial movement and it acquired international prestige through
painters such as Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the Armenian-born
American Arshile Gorky (104-1948), Philip Guston (1913-1980),
who worked with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Clark Coolidge, Willem
de Kooning (190401997), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970), among others.
Other
than ideological resistance, Bernstein's poetry meets with resistance
in Brazil because of its truly innovative nature, which destabilized
the local circuit, nowadays, unfortunately, far removed from
its better days. His poetry opens and expands possibilities.
Furthermore, the results of his poetry are quite different from
what was produced in Brazil under the label of "concretism," with
the exception of a few commonalities that all so-called contemporary
pieces may have, such as parataxis, collage, the break with traditional
forms of signification, etc. His poetry does not "encounter" the
reader—it runs counter to the reader. It is a poetry of "beyonsense," to
use Anne Mack's expression—a poetry that disappoints the
reader by distancing itself from "'a balance and reconciliation
of opposite and discordant qualities.'" She asks, "And
why do you expect a 'comprehensible' meaning from a poem anyway?",
and she characterizes Bernstein's poetry as that which "'censers'
the 'censors'" so that the reader can imagine a literature
that suggests its own interpretations, a literature that makes
the production of its ideas tangible through the cuts, sounds
and design of the poem on the page. Bernstein does not create
poetry as a vehicle of readymade meanings in their usual repertoire.
His greatest effort constitutes the creation of possibilities
of meaning based on the deconstruction of usual meanings. Mack
also notes that for Bernstein meaning does not preexist the poem
but rather, it is "created" in language.
João
Cabral de Melo Neto used to say that Joan Miró did not
paint paintings, but that he painted, period, and that
by privileging lines and strokes he broke with the "Renaissance
balance" of representation which led other painters to the
canvas with preconceived compositions. Cabral defined Miró's
poetry as a "constant dynamic," with no aspirations
of becoming a grammar, something that can also be said about
Bernstein's poetry. That's why I decided to focus on Bernstein
the poet, and not the exceptional literary critic or leader of
the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement launched by him and Bruce
Andrews in 1978 in New York and which quickly enlisted some of
the best American living poets: Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and
Michael Palmer—along with John Ashbery, who was initially
inspired by French writing and surrealism. And today Charles
Bernstein is not only a world-renowned poet but also one of the
best in the United States, if we don't consider official figures
of the English-speaking world such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott,
Louise Gluck, Anne Carson, Frank Bidart, Paul Muldoon or C.D.
Wright, not to mention a mummified Jorie Graham, the "queen" of
official poetry. Bernstein, at 58, however, still has no access
to the pages of The New Yorker or the The New York
Review of Books. I do not want to dwell the issue of the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement because, like any movement, it
was diluted by hundreds of imitators, and it became a club in
which a self- or mutual congratulation prevailed uncritically,
although the term "language poetry" is still a "dirty
word" and the movement in fact reconfigured and made American
poetry richer. The Finnish poet Leevi Lehto reminds us that for
the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry group, Ferdinand de Saussure's concept
that "language determines reality" was key. And he
adds, "that's why L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was an American phenomenon
which could not be mechanically transferred to other literary
arenas, concluding that its influence occurs as a stimulus for
other poetries to think themselves as language and as a "uncommonplace." This
observation is very apropos in a country such as Brazil, where "influence," as
Paulo Franchetti has noted, becomes a matter of "pride."
Bernstein's
oeuvre is vast. As translation strategy, I decided to quickly
sketch his beginnings and his present, drawing from With
Strings (2001) and especially Girly Man (2006). The
Sophist (1987) is considered one of the most important books
of American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the post-9/11 Bernstein, the Bernstein of Girly Man, the
locked combat against the "I" and its clichés
("Sentences"), the fight against the culture of the
flaccid post-World War II free verse, the "disagreement" with
the reader give way to urgency and to aphorisms that—paradoxically—are
direct, and to poems such as "War Stories": "War
is surrealism without art." When I translated the poem,
I noted a certain hesitation with respect to the Iraq invasion
in 2003, which was perhaps due to Bush's satanic injunction: "Either
you're with us or you're with the terrorists." The poem
was written soon after the invasion, and I opted to translate “War
is an excuse for lots of bad antiwar poetry” for “A
guerra é um poema ambíguo, que tenta desqualificar
a crítica da guerra” (literally, "War is an
ambiguous poem that tries to disqualify critiques of the war").
At that time, for Americans to take a stance against the war
(the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon) entailed —to
a certain extent—a legitimizing of terrorism, although
the impasse reveals, in the leftist author, the traces of American "manifest
destiny," and in the translator, the Latin American "rebel." The
poem is a panel of American culture under the pretext of tackling
yet another war: "War is an SUV for every soccer Pop and
social Mom." And I should note, in passing, that senator
Barack Obama voted against the invasion. And that the United
States became a terrorist state, as was seen in Abu Graib and
Guantánamo.
Half
of Bernstein's poetry is decidedly American. I tried in vain
to translate "The Ballad of the Girly Man," which
in English flows so smoothly. The author himself explained my
lack of success thus: "As you know, a poem like that is
so culturally specific, in this case local American culture is
not an export product" (letter dated March 14, 2007). The
title Girly Man was an expression used by the Governor
of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger during the Iraq invasion
saying that, "only a girly man is against the war." I
tried to translate a number (although not all) of the devices
used by the author of With Strings: the prose poem,
the poem crafted like a sculpture ("For --"), the ones
that dialogue with popular culture, the lyric poem ("Rain
Is Local") and a zaum poem ("Use No Flukes"), zaum being
the word used by the Russian futurist poets Velimir Khlebnikov
and Aleksei Kruchenykh to describe their sound poetry experiments.
I am not a "translator," but rather a poet in dialogue
with another poet, hence the liberties I took in the body of
the translations.
The
literary critic Marjorie Perloff—a great admirer of Bernstein
and who has written several essays on his work—notes that
Bernstein's poetry makes language work from within. In
this respect, I hope not to have cheated the Brazilian reader.
O
poder norte-americano e a AméricaLatina
no pós-Guerra Fria, São Paulo, Annablume,
2007.
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and
the Cultural Cold War. London, Granta Books, 1999.
Anne Mack, J. J. Rome & Georg Mannejc, “Private Enigmas
and Critical Functions, with Particular Reference to the Writing
of Charles Bernstein”, New Literary History, vol.
22, no. 2, 1991.
----------------
Charles Bernstein
HISTORIAS DA GUERRA - POEMAS E ENSAIOS POESIA
War Stories: Poems and Essays
translated from Portuguese, and with an introduction by Régis Bonvicino
with the collaboration of Maria do Carmo Zanini
Johanna Drucker's remarkable digital archive
of about 200 artists' books is now open for viewing.
Full digital versions of the books together with bibliographic
information and commentary.
A treasure trove, including a full set of Drucker's books.
Here's a page from From A to Z (1977):
Blind Witness brings together three libretti written
in the early 1990s by poet Charles Bernstein for composer Ben
Yarmolinsky. Bernstein & Yarmolinsky's trilogy combines vernacular
American lyrics with vernacular social forms. Blind Witness News uncannily mimics the format of the
eleven o'clock evening news with segments for international and
local news, weather, business news, and sports. Then, as now,
the dark undertone is war.
The Subject, at times elegiac, at times parodic, sets a
psychoanalytic session to music, its central character, Jenny,
subject to the sometimes solicitous, sometimes menacing probes
of her doctors. The Lenny Paschen Show focuses on Lenny, the Kamikaze
King of Comedy, a late night talk show host at the edge of his
career, pushing his schtick to the limit. His guests include
a cross-over singer, a show biz legend, and a rising star, along
with his sidekick announcer Bud Dickie, an inflatable ventriloquist's
dummy.
When Blind Witness News was first performed in 1990,
Allan Kozinn of The New York Times heralded a new voice
in opera: “"Mr. Bernstein's libretto catches with
near perfection the stock verbal moves — the forced laughter,
empty banter, catch-phrases and cutesy segues — in which
television news reports are cushioned.” Working in the
tradition of Brecht & Weill and Stein & Thomson, Bernstein & Yarmolinsky
have created three operas where biting social critiques dissolve
into comic riffs, then lyric arias.
Now available at discount direct from Factory
School
Paper: $15
Cloth: $30
Signed: $50
Factory School's discounted price includes shipping to the continental
USA.
Individuals only. limited time offer. Support the press, order direct.
In conjunction with
the publication of Blind Witness PennSound has made available
complete recordings of Blind Witness News and The
Subject
& video from the launch performance in New York. (The Lenny Paschen show will be available soon.).
(This is a short excerpt from “Fraud’s
Phantoms: A Brief Yet Unreliable Account of Fighting Fraud with
Fraud (No Pun on Freud Intended), with Special Reference to the
Poetics of Ressentiment,” which appears in the
new issue of Textual Practice 22:2, 207-227.)
In the early summer of 1986, two
young Austrian poets, Franz Josef Czernin and Ferdinand Schmatz,
had the idea to write poems that closely resembled the poems
they found most typical and at the same time most deplorable
in contemporary poetry volumes, for example the work of Rainer
Kunze, Günther Kunert, and Sarah Kirsch. At first they had
the idea to call the poet Irene Schwaighofer (silent court),
a poet born in a little town in upper Austria, who, familiar
through schooling with the tenets of modernism, would need no
time to forge her own distinctive style and upon being published
would proceed to win many prizes and much praise. However, Czernin
and Schmatz felt this process would take too long and in order
to shorten the “difficult and boring” process, decided
to give authorship of the poems to Czernin. They completed the
work in a few weeks and the book was immediately accepted for
publication under the title Die Reise (the journey).
The book received positive attention, some of which suggested
that at last Czernin has given up his thrashing about in the
waters of experimentation and found a more profound and authentic
voice. When Czernin broke the news of his own duplicitous relation
to the poems in Der Spiegel in March 1987, a furious
hale of criticism descended upon him, not the least from the
publisher of the book, who felt he had been betrayed. Later the
same year, Czernin and Schmatz published a book-length
account of the story together with exchanges between them and
several interlocking essays.
Here is of one of the poems from Die
Reise: In achtzig Gedichten um die ganze Welt:
fahr-plan
ist mein blick
nicht eine schere,
deren beine
schritte machen,
die alle fernen
auseinanderschneiden?
hat denn die schere
keine augen,
die zu ringen werden
jener finger,
die auf ihre ziele zeigen?
und gehen diese ziele
nicht auf zwei füssen,
deren zehen
auf nägel treten,
die meine ganze reise
zusammennageln?
agenda
is my glance
not a scissor
whose leg
makes steps
that cut through
all distances?
had, then, this scissor
no eyes
which will strive
to finger
loins of desire?
and will not such loins
walk on two feet
whose toes
tread on pins
fastening together
my whole journey?
[my
translation]
Schmatz and
Czernin created a literary scandal with this and the other poems
in the collection they were able to focus the discussion of issues
of quality and judgment … Die Reise is motivated
by a desire to critique the jargon of authenticity. There is
no claim here that these are necessarily good poems or that we
should look to the “poems themselves” for the meaning.
The texts here have meaning in relation to the literary valuations
into which they make an intervention; their meaning is social
and diacritical. Indeed, late in 1987, Schmatz and Czernin published Die
Reise: In achtzig flachen Hunden in die ganze tiefe Grube,
a book about the affair in which they address explicitly the
questions of authorship and motivation. In this book, Czernin
describes Die Reise as a form of literary self-criticism. “Perhaps
one must, to make a better poem, know how one makes a worse poem,” he
writes. “I think it was Novalis who said that good literature
is made from worse literature. He was right that there must be,
in any case, worse poetry from which better poetry can originate,
whereas for me it is self-evident that the contrary can also
be valuable.”Die
Reise, then, can be understood as an investigation of aesthetic
judgment. And yet, as the Ern Malley poems also show, what is
written out of a desire to expose the limits of a particular
style (or rhetoric) may ultimately become exemplary of unrealized
potential in the style; ironizing of the style may create a thickening
of the artifice and with it an intensification of the aesthetic
experience. Over time, the poems of Die Reise take on
charm that goes beyond parody.In any case, Czernin is not asserting
the objectivity of any such judgments but rather that “every
objectivity is fictional.” His purpose then, as befits
a poet who has written a study of Karl Kraus, is satiric adjudicative:
the fraud remains a fraud.
Franz Josef Czernin, Die Reise: In
achtzig Gedichten um die ganze Welt (Salzburg und Wien:
Residenz Verlag, 1987), p. 30.
Franz Josef Czernin, “Die Verdopplung des Igels,” in
Czernin and Ferdinand Schmatz, Die Reise: In achtzig flachen
Hunden in die ganze tiefe Grube (Linz-Wien, Austria: Edition
Neue Texte, 1987), p. 21
Some newspaper reviews in Swedish
of my OEI
selected poems & essays De svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högtspel
i tropik-erna:
Dikter, essäer, samtal i urval, översättning & montage
Listen, 1972
Radio play by Robert Creeley, performed by Robert and Bobbie
Creeley.
The recording above was released on cassette by Black Sparrow
in the same year. The play was first broadcast by Westdeutscher
Rundfunk, West Germany, on December 1, 1971 in a translation
by Klaus Reichert. Creeley
PennSound page ed. Steve McLaughlin.
Bob and me in an April 2003 photo by Kyle
at my last seminar at Buffalo.
Bob just about to head out to Brown.
Photo from Sibila on-line, which has reprinted my essay on Creeley,: "Hero of the Local."
Caroline Bergvall Alyson Singes
New York: Belladonna
Books, 2008
Bergvall overlays Chaucerian sound patterning onto contemporary
sites; a dazzling realization of diachronic vernacular, the old
emerging from the new like mist from a deep fissure.
Ken Edwards Nostalgia for Unknown Cities
Hastings,
East Sussex: Reality Street, 2007
Cascading prose (ch. 2 is a dazzling unpunctuated 10 pages),
in which urban landscape becomes a site for projected dreaming,
something like Bernadette Mayer’s Moving crossed
with Blade Runner.
Peter Jaeger Prop
Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2008
Bruce Andrews Designated Heartbeat
Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2006
One of Andrews's most structurally
varied – and
scintillating – collections.
Jennifer
Moxley The Line
Sausalito, CA: The
Post-Apollo Press , 2007
Rosmaire Waldrop Splitting Image
Tenerife, Canary Islands:
Zasterle Press, 2005
Mostly prose poems.
“All week I
concentrated on the hopeless accuracy of anxiety.”
Rachel Zolf
Shoot & Weep Vancouver: Nomados, 2008
Robert Pinsky Gulf Music New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2007
Kenneth Goldsmith Sports
Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2008
" – Well
what a catch!
– My
goodness.
– What
a catch! He got to the level of the seats and just sneaked
his glove in there and some … somehow made the catch.
Suzyn, that’s a heck of a catch. Let’s watch it.
– It’s
a tremendous catch and, uh, hee, hee, hee, he just snapped his
wrist out …"
JonArno Lawson A Voweller's Bestiary: from aardvark
to guineafowl (and H)
Erin, Ontario: Porcupine's Quill,
2008 Eunoia for children.
Good golly gosh!
Go gobble book!
Got lots of raccoons, moose,
loons, but – oh – look, no lox!
Yoo-hoo!
Moo for
word zoo!
Simon Jarvis, F 0 (Cambridge: Equipage, 2007)
-- The Unconditional
London: Barque Press, 2005
This delirious pentameter extravaganza of some 6500 lines is
a nude formalist bachelor machine; a work of exhilarating, mercurial,
anachronism.
Cole Heinowitz The Rubicon
The Rest, 2007
Tim Atkins Horace
Oakland: O Books, 2007
Milton, as in Berle; Homer, as in Simpson. Salted with local
poetry color (a whiff of Berrigan’s Sonnets) and
peppered by indirection (name dropping and
product placement abound – Nike,
Buddhism, Rolling Stone, Kipling, Atkins Diet, Caesar, Pindar,
Jupiter, Jeremy). In any case, “The man we are looking
for is gone” (Epodes 1). Horace who? Aren’t
you glad I didn’t say Catullus again.
Colin Browne The Shovel
Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2007
Browne follows up on his remarkable (and in the U.S. almost
totally overlooked) Ground Water (2002), alternating
speculative, metaphysical, and conceptual short poems with series
of quasi-archival prose excavations and tall tales (many in an
ingenious format: continuous prose running over three-line justified
stanzas).
Craig Dworkin Parse (Berkeley: Atelos, 2008)
Everybody talks about unreadability but few do as much for the
cause as Dworkin and his Parse. Dworkin literalizes
LeCercle’s délire – taking the pun
on lire (to read) in his obsessive parsing/diagramming.
A bachelor machine all over again.
from Hugh MacDiarmid, “The Kind of Poetry I Want’ (1965)
…A
poetry the quality of which
Is a stand made against intellectual apathy,
Its material founded, like Gray's, on difficult knowledge …
But, more than that, its words coming from a mind
Which has experienced the sifted layers on layers
Of human lives---aware of the innumerable dead
And the innumerable to-be-born ..
---Rich in its discoveries of new problems,
Important questions so far unsuspected,
For which field research does not yet supply
The data necessary to answer them. …
A poetry that is---to use the terms of red dog --
High, low, jack, and the goddamn game.
} some details of this schedule may still change {
August 19 - 24, 2008
at/with VIVO Media Arts Centre
1965 Main St, Vancouver
TUESDAY 19 August
Afternoon-Evening Session only
*not* at VIVO, location TBA
4:00 pm
- late
Opening day social - a party + bbq with readings by poets
who have been members of the KSW board or collective.
} tentatively
including {
Sachiko Murakami, Donato Mancini, Maxine Gadd, Peter
Culley, Steve Collis, Ted Byrne, Andrea Actis
+ surprise guests
WEDNESDAY 20 August
Morning - Afternoon Session
11:00 am
Panel presentation
Title / theme: "On Line: Poetics
and the Distribution of Meaning"
Moderator and Curator: Andrew
Klobucar
Panellists: Darren Wershler-Henry, Brian Kim Stefans,
Judy Radul, Sianne Ngai
1:00 pm
Theatrical presentation
Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy
w/guests
"The Clifford Irving Show"
Evening Session
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Darren
Wershler-Henry, Brian Kim Stefans, Colin Smith, Robert Fitterman,
Clint Burnham
THURSDAY 21 August
Morning - Afternoon Session
11:00 am
Panel presentation
Moderator and Curator: Rita Wong
Title / theme: "Alpha Bets:
Language Gambles on a Gift Economy"
Panellists: Juliana Spahr,
Pat O'Brien, Reg Johanson, Peter Cole
1:00 pm
Talk
Michael Davidson
"On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics
in the Shadow of NAFTA."
Evening Session7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Rita Wong,
Juliana Spahr, PILLS (A. Vidaver, R. Johanson, R. Farr), Pat
O'Riley, Peter Cole, Louis Cabri, Jules Boykoff
FRIDAY 22 August
Morning - Afternoon Session
11:00 am
Seminar
Seminar leaders: Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff
Title / theme: "Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry & Public
Space"
Respondents: Catriona Strang, Colin Smith, Juliana
Spahr, Nicholas Perrin, Laura Elrick, Clint Burnham
1:00 pm
Panel presentation
Moderator and Curator: Jeff Derksen
Title / theme: "Neoliberalism
and the Politics of Poetics"
Panellists: Rodrigo Toscano,
Rod Smith, Dorothy Lusk, Roger Farr, Laura Elrick
Evening Session
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Rodrigo
Toscano, Rod Smith, Kaia Sand, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Jeff Derksen
SATURDAY 23 August Morning-Afternoon Session
11:00 am
Seminar
Seminar leader: Sianne Ngai
Title / theme: "The Zany Science:
Post-Fordist Performance and the Problem of Fun
Respondents:
Tyrone Williams, Mark Wallace, Andrew Klobucar, Rob Fitterman,
Stacy Doris, Michael Davidson, Louis Cabri, Dodie Bellamy
1:00 pm
Audio feature
Lisa Robertson and Stacy Doris
"The Perfume Recordist"
Evening Session
7:00 pm
Readings, presentations, and performances by:
Tyrone
Williams, Mark Wallace, Catriona Strang, Judy Radul, Laura Elrick
SUNDAY 24 August
Afternoon-Evening Session only
*not* at VIVO, location TBA
3
Brooklyn: Cuneiform, 2008 3 brings together three structurally related long
poems, featuring Greenwalds’s characteristic vernacular
insistence: “Going
into School that Day” (1986), “Anyway” (2001),
and “Dawn On” (2002). “Going into School that
Day,” a love poem, alternates between twenty-five sonnets
and twenty-five quatrains in which every line but the sixth appears
twice (A B C A / C E A B). “Anyway” consists of 33
double tercets, each line having mostly two but occasionally
three phrases, with two to four phrases from the first tercet
repeated in the second. The syntactically denser final
poem, “Dawn On,” is 1521 lines; it’s the closest
Greenwald comes to a poem like Zukofsky’s “A”-23
(though Greenwald style is much looser). "Dawn
On” repeats only sporadic phrases or word pairs, in unexpected
sequences; but the overall effect, as with the other poems in
the trilogy, is a modular static/dynamic line structure, in which
lines delink from their linear order to create a moiré-like
effect, something Greenwald has called “jumping the line."
Sabor a mí Ediciones
Universidad Diego Portale Santiago de Chile
2007
Reproduces Vicuña's groundbreaking 1973 artist's
book,
with collages, images of her early & powerful paintings,
tipped-in artifacts,
journal entries, manifestos, political tracts, & other writings
related to the Chilean left, utopian socialism, and revolutionary
feminism.
It brings to mind Debord's Mémoires (1959) .
The bilingual 1973 book was published in London immediately after
the (CIA-sponsored)
coup in Chile. Vicuña was living in London at the time,
having been given asylum by the British government.
The book ends with a set of early poems (translated, like the
rest, by the author).
1973 BBC documentary
with many images of Vicuña's early paintings
Counter-Revolution of the Word:The Conservative Attack on
Modern Poetry, 1945–1960
Alan Filreis
University of North Carolina Press, $40 (cloth)
Charles Bernstein
Author’s Note. ”Aeons Swish In Eden’s
Sway” is based on Charles Bernstein’s ”Johnny
Cake Hollow”, together with variations of it by the author
(into English), Jörgen Gassilewski (into Swedish), me (into
Finnish), Jörgen Gassilewski (from my Finnish into Swedish;
all these homophonic) and by me into Swedish from my Finnish
(metrical-semantic), that were published in ”Oversettelse
2” issue of nypoesi.net.
I use all the lines of these versions in sequence, permutating
them stanza per stanza following the pattern of Sestina end words.
I performed the poem as part of the launch of Charles’ Swedish
book, De
svåra dikterna anfaller, eller Högt spel i tropik-erna.
Dikter, essäer, samtal (OEI editör) in Weld,
Stockholm, July 1, 2008.
Xo quwollen swacked unt myrry flooped
Ceylon’s ox slaked Mary’s goard
Så kvällen svag ond myrens flod
Jos kuolen, päätyn: nirri pois!
Juice kulen, pesten: ny ripost!
Dör jag, så slutar jag – och kolar vippen!
Bedarrar brådskor, jobb. Omedelbart
Sardone to fligrunt’s swirm, ort
Så tunt tunt tyget, kött. Kort
Cycloned to flagrant dawn, sat
Saa tyyntyyn kiireet, työt. Koht’
sardin till flodgrunds svärm, ort
Jeremie plåga och går vi svårt i
du bjöd den bjässen upp, ack, satt och skita –
körmyn veit, oh, tarpees’ teit – mit’
Jirmy plaight org garvey swait ib
Jimmy’s plight on gravy sprain as
sömsmån vet, åh, tarvets tält – mitt
i kontorslandskap! Sätt
given dörr och klump. Ske
Gibes in fairies lorn. Shed
vad som helst må slösa bort, sen ropa:
Giben durrs urk klurpf. Sheb
ikin’ törsätkööt! Sep’
huuti: ”Buu!” – men’ reisiluus, kun
hojta: “Buu!” – men reslust kan
Boughtie bloor de dazzy dule dun
bågträ blör de dö så du dån
”Bo!” En lårbensbrott fick du när de
Bright blood then, doled dizzy
Frappes along the gogos gay, jug
turpiis Inkoos sait. Kas
på käften dig i Ingå gick. Se när,
ta på änkans sätt. Kastar
från pil gå och glid, ljud
Fruppi’s ghigo’s gly, jud
Silo pain, good Jimmy’s caulk,
kaivoos’ vein – ket’? Ihmistä!
till brunnen din jag drog… O vem? En mänska!
vår vinkel? En mystär!
kullrar fram vid Jimmys kack -
Chyllrophane jed jimmsy’s cack -
Enks’… oudomp’ omp’ kai …?…Sep
Ett Sodoms Molokai …?…Sätt
Exenst aerodole fump glire. Eb
i tjänst är du vårt gli. En
Int’så?… må värka märkligare än?
Ensued irradiant flame. Say
här just nu: “Med djurets vitt? En
hurrar blott, min oro slut när
Hooray bloat, say irksome slit, as
Ursinnig blir han nu: ”Varför, för fan,
Horray bloot, ig orry sluit neb
hurjistuu: ”Miks jurriss’ uit? Ent’
mist och näve vann. Släpp
i pickalurvan svimma? Och varifrån
mist’ ne ott’ ne kuvat?” – Ket’
Nist neb ot neb gwon. Shleb
Nestling slights no gasp. Rail
list med rått med kuvat?” – Katt
dom fotona de tog?” – Vem ska jag åse?
Atsum imba outsey burft allappie
Kattson? - Impa, vatten! – mod?… På läppen!
At sum, imbue outset, burnt
katson? - Impee, vautsi! – muut?… Paa leipiin!
allt som ämbar och din bukt allt lappri
Merp av ords. Een ainsey swish
Thronement merely pines. Then
märkt av ord. En anses vis
Hörppää pois! Aineisiin, niin
Hör upp härpå! En åsna, nån
Ungmön? jisses! andra?… Häng upp på födkrok!
Sörpla bort! Till än så tryckregerad
Ien ansley sploop ughalls dep dulster
på åsnan, kan på halsen Tolstojs
Aeons swish in Eden’s sway
paineisiin, kun puhals’ ne Tolstoin
en anses spå och all ens dunster
flög, jag är och nämner två
ämnen blåste de – jag menar Tolstojs
puut. Vikaantuu nimet, suut
Flooge, ig ahrs unt nimbet twool
Slops hulls in duster’s flow
plats. Vi kan ur minnet, sök
här i – med bud och torkat kött…
begrepp, jag oros kval och blarr.
Airs numbed till gab, obeyers
träd. Skavankar nämnen får, och munnar
Begroob, ig ooburs quwate ag blurg.
heruu – mik’ puutyös’ tärkätkööt…
enbart en liten skvätt ska ge, och dina
Chewed, blur the blur ingests.
snickerier fina stärka må!
Lynette Roberts
Collected Poems ed. Patrick McGuinness
Manchester: Carcanet, 2005.
Embrowns himmel hokushai. Manure seeps
In long rags, pavilions hut, camouflages
Arsenical veins with a sprouting
Febrifuge and serial of death; heaves a
Heavier heart of sedimentary hate.
Washing like flies to pin of elbow, soldiers
Under ciliated moon shake off floatings
Of soap; strike code on oxidised zinc; polish
Bayonets clean as the cut of the moon to
Sharpen inactivity. Spark electric cells
Of air into a prism of light as they
Shoulder the blades on parade. A shark wind teethes,
Strips fields; striating black fullstops under hedge;
Bellying-white trees as they stand caustic
And chagrin. Like paleozoic sentinels, stretched high
Above skeleton hills. Dripping rust low on
Blue lined eddies of wind, cold down
To the shafts of their root: to kerb of tide
Where cracked mud quails into Kuan glaze;
To greening dunes where rivulets shine as …
from Gods
with Stainless Ears (opening of pt III p. 56)
McGuinness provides a fine introduction to this relatively
unknown second-wave modernist (1909-1995) of Welsh descent, who
grew up in Argentina & moved to Britain as a teenager, and
who stopped writing poetry (partly due to hospitalizations for
schizophrenia) in the mid-1950s. The collection consists of Roberts
1944 Faber & Faber collection (selected by T.S. Eliot),
her 1951 Faber & Faber long war poem, Gods with Stainless
Ears: An Heroic Poem, which McGuinness suggests
is a kind of poetry screenplay, plus a miscellany of uncollected
works. In a useful and detailed response to the book in
the Boston
Review, John Wilkinson links Roberts to second-wavers
Mina Loy and Hart Crane. Comparison with David Jones is inevitable.
Thick syntax, an often arcane lexicon, a complex prosody, and
an aggressively off-center (not to say “minor”) perspectivism
created a poetry of “sociolinguistic intensities,” in Wilkinson’s
useful phrase.
Lawrence Joseph on Close
Listening
ArtRadio WPS1.Org
July 7, 2008
Program 1: Selected poems: (23:16): MP3 1. In the Age of Postcapitalism
2. Curriculum Vitae
3. By the Way
4. About This
5. When One is Feeling One's Way
6. On That Side
7. The Game Changed
8. What Is There to Understand
9. That Too
Program 2: Conversation with Charles Bernstein (27:24): MP3
...don't you know that models are what we are inside
of ...
that's no model, that's my life
.One way to read this collection, on the poetics of architecture,
from the point of view of poetry, is to see how much it offers
for an approach to poems as models (rather than expression or
representation).
Models,
306090 Books Volume 11
Emily Abruzzo, Eric Ellingsen and Jonathan D. Solomon, editors
ISBN 978-1-56898-734-7
Distributed by Princeton Architectural Press
248 pages
Myung Mi Kim
The great snowstorm of 2006 had done serious damage to Buffalo.
Myung moved to the city about a year before I moved to Penn.
So our plan to work together got scuttled. December 12, 2006 (mp4,
39 seconds, 6.3 mb)
The new issue of the Dutch magazine Parmentier (17:2,
June 2008), is devoted to a dossier called T=A=A=L, featuring
Rae Armantrout, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Michael
Palmer, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, and myself
along with Ton van’t Hof, Samuel Vriezen. While the print
magazine is all Dutch, the web
site provides the original English poems.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Leevi Lehto & I at WALTIC
Stockholm, June 30
At the launch for the OEI
book, July 1
reading with Susan Bee collaborations
at Weld (Stockholm)
One of the main EPC projects of recent years
has been the development of our "portals."
The Scandanavian portal, edited by Lehto, has now evolved into
the Nordic Poetry Center still in development.
A brief primer on bachelor machines
(with special reference to "Recantorium")
¶ The
Answer (a video made in collaboration with Lars Plenge) (2003)
¶ The Yellow
Pages ads
(1998)
"The Critic"
(0:32): MP4 "Draperies"
(0:31) MP3 ¶Legend, "bachelor" collaboration with
Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, & Steve McCaffery;
see, for example, Bernstein/Andrews,
consisting entirely of appropriated texts and arrayed as a Benjaminian
constellation.
¶The
Nude Formalism (1989)
¶ "People should love and approve of me," sec.
13 from "A Person Is Not an Entity Symbolic" (from The
Sophist) (recording 1977) (1:06): MP3
¶"Emotions of
Normal People" (from Dark City) (22:07): MP3
¶"Work
In Progress" (for Eliot Spitzer)
¶ Oshamnu (from "A
Person Is Not an Entity Symbolic but the Divine Incarnate" in The
Sophist) (a source for "Recantorium").
"Bachelor machine" comes from Duchamp's "Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (the lower part of
the "Large Glass,"
e.g., "Chocolate Grinder"). Michel Carrouges extended
the term to incorporate the disciplinary apparatus of Kafka's The
Penal Colony (in turn adapted by Deleuze and Guattari) &
also Roussel's Impressions of Africa. As a term for poetic
constructions, "bachelor machine" suggests nonproductive,
nonprocreative, onanistic processes; vicious (or self-enclosing/collapsing)
circles, an apparatus that is unable to get outside itself. There
is a connection, in my use, to délire (delirium,
with special reference to Jean-Jacques LeCercle) — that
which goes astray, deviates from the rational, errs, raves.
2. "A Theory's Evolution" (The Theory
of Flawed Design) (1:18): MP3, text (from
Philadelphia Inquirer)
3. anagrammatica from Shadowtime (anagrams of "Walter
Benjamin") (0:43)): MP3
4. introduction to "Dea%r Fr~ien%d" (1:21): MP3
5. "Dea%r Fr~ien%d" (3:33): MP3, text (from Conjunctions)
6. Some remarks on poetry and framing (2:24): MP3
7. On Blind Witness (1:47): MP3 8. "Four score ..." and "Nonny" (from "Today's
Not Opposite Day" in With Strings): (1:39): MP3
9. "Gertrude & Ludwig's Bogus Adventure" (from My
Way) — in honor of Marjorie Perloff (1:46): MP3
10. On "Most Frequent Words" suite (0:42): MP3
11. "Kiss Me Tommy" (3:37): MP3
12. "No Hiding Place" (2:18): MP3
13. "All the Whiskey in Heaven" (1:21): MP3
Launch for the book with Bernstein, Susan Bee, & Leevi Lehto
& Lundberg, Magnusson, & Jörgen Gassilewski.
July 1 6:30pm-9pm Weld
Norrtullsgatan 7 (t-bana Odenplan), Stockholm
"Thank You for Saying Thank You"
[from Girly Man]
This is a completely accssible poem
Þakka þér fyrir að þakka mér
Þetta er fullkomlega
aðgengilegt ljóð.
Það er ekkert
í þessu ljóði
sem á nokkurn
hátt er erfitt
að skilja.
Öll orðin
eru einföld &
hitta í mark.
Hér eru engin ný
hugtök, engar
kenningar, engar
hugmyndir til að rugla
í þér. Það eru engir
intellektúal-stælar í
þessu ljóði. Þetta er
hreint tilfinningaljóð.
Það tjáir að fullu
leyti tilfinningar
höfundarins: mínar tilfinningar,
manneskjunnar sem talar
við þig núna.
Þetta snýst allt um
samskipti.
Frá einu hjarta til annars.
Þetta ljóð metur
& virðir þig mikils sem
lesanda. Það
fagnar sigri
ímyndunarafls
mannsins
17
innan um gryfjur &
hörmungar. Í
þessu ljóði
eru 90 línur,
269 orð, og
fleiri atkvæði en
ég hef tíma til þess að
telja. Hver lína, hvert
orð, & hvert atkvæði
var valið til að
tjá einvörðungu
hina ætluðu meiningu
& ekkert umfram hana.
Þetta ljóð tjáir ekkert
óskýrt eða torráðið.
Hér er ekkert
hulið. Hundrað
lesendur myndu allir
lesa ljóðið
nákvæmlega eins &
fá út úr því
sömu skilaboðin. Þetta
ljóð, eins og öll
góð ljóð, segir
sögu án krókaleiða
svo lesandinn þarf aldrei
að giska í eyðurnar. Þó á
stundum tjái það
biturð, reiði,
gremju, útlendingahræðslu
& vott af kynþáttahatri, er
ráðandi andrúmsloft þess
jákvætt. Það finnur
gleði jafnvel í
þessum fyrirlitlegu
augnablikum
lífsins sem
18
það deilir með
þér. Þetta ljóð
er fulltrúi vonarinnar
um ljóðlist
sem snýr ekki
baki sínu við
áhorfendum, sem
telur sig ekki
betri en lesandann,
sem hefur helgað sig
ljóðlistinni sem
vinsælli afþreyingu, eins og
flugdrekaflugi og fluguveiðum.
Þetta ljóð
tilheyrir engum
skóla, hlýðir engum
kreddum. Það fylgir
engri tísku. Það
segir bara það sem
það segir. Það er
ekta.
You are invited to:
an Opening Reception at
A.I.R. Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, #301
on Thursday, June 26, 6pm to 8pm
Shows on view from June 24 through July 19
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6 pm
A group show
with paintings by Susan Bee, Francie Shaw
and other gallery members
Wish You Were Here
a postcard exhibition
with Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein, Toni Simon, and many others
and a solo exhibition by Hanna Sandin
Gallery I: SCENE CHANGE is a group show of the gallery artists.
The artists are: Nancy Azara, Susan Bee, Liz Surbeck Biddle,
Daria Dorosh,
Regina Granne, Louise Kramer, Carolyn Martin, Louise McCagg,
JoAnne McFarland, Sylvia Netzer, Ann Pachner, Sheila Ross, Ann
Schaumburger,
Ursula Schneider, Francie Shaw, Barbara Siegel, Elisabeth Munro
Smith,
Joan Snitzer, Alice Steinhardt, Nancy Storrow, Haejin Yoon.
Gallery II: WISH YOU WERE HERE
is an annual postcard benefit exhibition including original
works by over 400 artists.
The 4” x 6” artworks are created by hundreds of contemporary
artists. Each postcard will be priced at $40.
The show will feature work by three prominent artists: a
series of small drawings by Tom Otterness, a print by Carolee Schneemann,
and a painting by Joan Snyder. These works will be available
through silent auction. The bidding will begin on June
26th and end on July 19th at 6 pm. To place a bid visit the gallery
or contact Kat Griefen, Director, at 212-255-6651, kgriefen@airgallery.org
Fiona Templeton's Medead 1,
2, & 3 in NY
June 27 (preview), 28, 29 at 2:30
at Fort Jay, Governor's Island
Free and free ferry
Ferries
leave Battery Maritime Building, 11 South Street (west of Staten
Island Ferry) - subways R, W to Whitehall, 1 to South Ferry.
The performance lasts about an hour and a half and moves around
the fort. Take 2 pm ferry or earlier (hourly) - return on 4:30
ferry or later. Or spend the day - first ferry out 10 am,
last ferry back 7 pm. Dress for the weather. Bring water. Directed by Fiona Templeton, with
Drew Cortese, Robert Kya-Hill, Clarinda MacLow, Dawn Saito,
Peter Sciscioli,
Stephanie Silver, Andrew Zimmerman, supported by Katie Brown
and others.
more info: home @ therelatioship.org
*
University at Maine, Orono
National Poetry Foundation
Poetry of the 1970s conference full schedule
The fear and the hum are one.
Monuments of show gumming the works
Until the weather grows tired of the people
And the people grow tired of the dance. Jamais, jamais, jamais, again.
The measure of the town against a dampening sky
Cobbling together six million tunes
Into more than the tones tattoo
Or their scrambled mosaic forecloses.
And if the fume and the hope
Are one? My monkey, from ’49
Steps as silent as those songs
Along the cratered dark
Where Jews do Jewish things
No one pretends to understand
Or are they pilgrims on this night
When the fear and the hum are one?
OPENNED
the London reading series
has just made available
videos of
the reading I did on
May 14, 2008
with
Maggie O'Sullivan
& also an earlier reading by Sean Bonney Steaming video here.
Or download .mov files: O'Sullivan // Bernstein
WON’T YOU GIVE UP THIS POEM
TO SOMEONE WHO NEEDS IT?
Remember what I told you about purgatory?
Limbo? How all that’s happening now is just
this waiting around till the big cheese makes up
her mind about you? She makes you the way
you are and then decides if it panned out; for
every ten half-baked cookies there’s a gem
&, you know, just maybe you’re one of those.
Then there’s those take her name in vain—
whaddya call them?, the religious moralists;
she don’t much cotton to them, not when
they try to take away a woman’s right to choose
or bad-mouth folks almost as queer as she is.
Well, everyone makes mistakes. That’s what
purgatory’s for. Sometimes it happens that
while you wait you see what’s what—start
accepting you’re in a long queue for God
only knows what. And neither of you has
any idea what the hell the matter is or what
to do about it.
If poetry is the scholar’s art, then Allen Fisher remakes
scholarship
in the spirit of poetic inquiry. In all his work, Fisher has
committed himself to a precarious
openness toward knowledge. Leans moves from an exploration
of language
as the material of information to an emergent lyricism of facticity
as
n-dimensional space. Leans is a masterful work in the
project of undoing mastery.
author photo: courtesy Salt Publishing link | 06-10-08
Emma Bee Bernstein & Nona Willis-Aronowitz
are working on the GIRLdrive book for Seal Press.
In the meantime, they send this update:
We wanted to let you know that we have
been making some major changes to our blog, GIRLDRIVE. Check
out the posts in the last few weeks--feel free to comment, forward,
write about us, you know the drill. We are now posting
3 times a week:
Mondays are in the traditional GIRLDRIVE format:
a short profile of an interviewee. Wednesdays are "Mid-Week Memo":
covering specific topics and projects that we are involved in.
Examples: women and the arts, mentoring teenage girls, intergenerational
conversations, and more juicy tidbits from the feminist frontier ...
Weekends are "Overheard
in Chicago": we post overhead musings
from friends and random people we run into in bars, cars, restaurants,
and on the streets.
Tina Darragh
We were in a bar somewhere in Baltimore after my i.e. reading
with Rod. The bar was noisy and dark but I found a small red
alcove to ask Tina about her red housing.. November 18, 2006 (mp4, 51
seconds, 10 mb)
Portraits
Fourth Series Rod Smith
Nicole Brossard
Douglas Messerli
Peter Middleton
Norman Fischer
Tina Darragh
5. "An Incident in the Usual Daydream . . ." (Silliman, Bernstein,
DiPalma) (8:45): MP3text
6. "And / much clouds spun" (Bernstein, DiPalma, Andrews, Silliman,
McCaffery) (16:13): MP3text
(note: Steve McCaffery does not read on this recording)
My reading at
the West End Upper
West Side, Manhattan March
12, 1978
1.
Epigraphs for "Stray Straws and Straw Men" (from Content's
Dream): mp3
2. "of a sort" (unpublished): mp3
3. Resistance (from Senses of Responsibility): mp3
4. Nudge (from Shade) mp3 5. "So
really not visit a ..." (from Controlling
Interests): mp3
6. Hotel Empire (from Poetic Justice): mp3
7. eLecTrIc (from Poetic Justice): mp3
8. Kiff-Kiff (from Shade): mp3
9. Matters of Policy (from Controlling Interests): mp3
Complete reading: mp3
My
reading
at the Grand Piano
(San Francisco)
February 20,
1979 with Barrett Watten
(whose reading will be posted soon on PennSound)
1. Introduction (3:10): MP3
2. "The Italian Border of the Alps" (from Controlling Interests)
(10:20): MP3
3. "Poem" (from Shade) (2:33): MP3
4. "To Which I Never Wanted" (from Senses of Responsibility)
(1:55): MP3
5. "For ------" (from Shade (9:50): MP3
6. "Soul Under" (from Shade) (2:50: MP3
7. "As Is the Trees by Their Very Roots Had Hold of Us" (from Senses
of Responsibility) (3:14): MP3
8. "Matters of Policy" (from Controlling Interests) (12:25): MP3
complete reading (46:29):MP3
(recording courtesy of Ron Silliman)
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=EP=O=E=T=R=Y: a
loose affiliation of unlike individuals.
As part of a panel at the University of Arizona conference
on
"Conceptual Poetry & Its Others"
I presented
this powerpoint presentation
(1.6 mb)
(no sound and the slide show will run on its own embedded timings)
Kenneth Goldsmith reports on the conference at The Poetry Foundation
(note I will be reading "Recantorium" on Friday, June 6, 6:30pm
in New York at the Center for Book Arts)
Caroline Bergvall
"My Chaucer"
with Mario Diaz de Leon
Tuesday, June 10, 7:30pm
Dia Arts--Tuesdays on the Terrace
outdoor program (weather dependent)
The Hispanic Society of
America
Free-Reservations recommended
212-293-5583
Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets in New York City.
(#1 train to 157th St)
FLASH UPDATE:
Due to the chance of rain, tonight’s Tuesdays on the Terrace performance by Caroline Bergvall
with Mario Diaz de León will take place inside the main gallery of the Hispanic Society of America.
____________
Ghosts: Andrew Zawacki on
Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract
in The Boston Review
We are writing to solicit you for contribution to an anthology
of poetry dedicated to all those who died from or survived the
tragic Sichuan Earthquake.
This earthquake, also known as
the Wenchuan Earthquake, was the most tragic catastrophe since
the 1976
Tangshan
earthquake in
China
. As of May 27, official figures state that 67,183 are confirmed
dead, and 360,058 injured, with 20,790 listed as missing. The
earthquake left about 4.8 million people homeless. Hundreds of
aftershocks continue to bring about more pain, terror and damage.
With too many lives lost and so much pain still tormenting the
living, this earthquake has turned out to be not only a disaster
to Chinese people but a catastrophe facing all the human beings.
International efforts have been
made for rescue and relief, and now more joint endeavors of people
all over the world are expected for reconstruction, both material
and spiritual. And poetry is one of the best ways to offer spiritual
relief and psychological care to those who are living and suffering
after the uncontrolled tragedy as well as expressing our awe
of Nature and love for life. Let’s pray for both the departed
and the living in poems. Let’s weave all our blessings
and prayer into a beautiful anthology of poetry to honor, and
mourn, the victims of the tragedy. Thus this anthology is not
only for those who are closely concerned with the earthquake,
but for all, over the world, who have been touched by it. Its significance
lies not only in its poetic art, but in its expressions of solidarity.
In order to have this anthology
of poetry come out as soon as possible, we expect you to send
us the poems by June 25, 2008. All the contributions will be
reviewed and selected for publication by a group of poets and
scholars of the world, and those unpublished poems will be posted
at our websites. Since this anthology is a nonprofit project,
the contributors will get no pay for their poem(s) except two
copies of the book.
Please be kind enough to forward
our solicitation to your friends.
Best wishes,
Nie
Zhenzhao (Email: niezhenzhao--at--163.com)
Chief Editor and Professor, Foreign
Literature Studies,
CentralChinaNormalUniversity (CCNU)
Vice President,
ChinaNationalAcademy
of Foreign Literature
Vice President, Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics
(CAAP)
Luo
Lianggong (Email: flschina--at--yahoo.com.cn)
Professor and Assistant Editor-in-chief, Foreign
Literature Studies, CCNU
Executive Director, Chinese/American
Association for Poetry and Poetics (CAAP)
A.I.R. Gallery
Friday, May 23rd
@ 7 pm
511 W 25th St. suite 301
NYC
for the reading of
POETRY NOIR
readers will be
Charles Bernstein
Lee Ann Brown
Miles Champion
Tom Devaney
Erica Hunt
Susan Howe
Bob Perelman
Reading (26:30): MP3 from Periplum and other poems (1987-1992)
Thirty Sentences for No One
Periplum from Artificial Heart (1998)
Another day on the Pilgrimage
Tous les Matins du Monde from Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003)
Plain Song
Beginning With a Phrase from Simone Weil
from The Outernationale (2007)
The Quest
The Outernationale
Untitled Amherst Specter
Protest Song
A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me
Close Listening Engineer: Jeannie
Hooper
Additional technical support: Michael Hennessy.
————————————————————————
Peter Middleton
Peter was on his way back from Creeley Buffalo conference, which
I had missed because of the devastating snow storm in Buffalo
that weekend. The first time I met with Peter in New York was
in the early 1990s. I remember going to the Riverside Park playground
and while Emma played in the sandbox we chatted on about his
entirely informative book The Inward Gaze: Masculinity & Subjectivity
in Modern Culture. October 16, 2006 (mp4,
38 seconds, 7.5 mb)
from the publisher’s information:
This book considers the development of the lyric form in recent
American poetry of the past three decades. By concentrating on
the writing of three poets associated with language writing,
Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer and Lyn Hejinian, the discussion
considers the attempts of contemporary poetry to problematise
the identification of the lyric as a static model of subjectivity.
Central considerations motivating the discussion are: How do
contemporary lyric poets negotiate the propositions posed by
postmodern thought? What reading of lyricism can one formulate
once the self is displaced from centre stage and an 'experience'
of language takes its place? The book proposes that an aesthetic
of error enables us to approach the reconfiguration of the lyric
in recent innovative poetry. Drawing from elements of modernist
poetic practice, psychoanalytic theory, language philosophy and
critical theory this book pursues methods for understanding the
demands placed upon the reader of contemporary poetry.
Contents:
Language Writing and the Lyric
Error, Malapropisms, 'Ideolects' and 'Knowing' a Language
in Charles Bernstein's Dark City and Rough Trades
Whose Language: Charles Bernstein Reading Cavell, Reading
Wittgenstein
Michael Palmer's Lyric and 'Nobody's Voice'
Ungrammaticalities and Intertextuality in Michael Palmer's Sun and Letters
to Zanzotto
Erring in Lyn Hejinian's Poetry of the 1980s - 'There is
no one correct path': Lyn Hejinian's Prepoetics
brings together in one book Charles Bernstein's libretti for Blind Witness News, The Subject, and The Lenny Paschen
Show written for composer Ben Yarmolinsky in the early 1990s. Bernstein & Yarmolinsky
will perform sections of the operas along with Deborah Karpel, soprano | Nathan Resika, bass | Silvie
Jensen, mezzo-soprano discounted advance copies of the books will be on sale Medicine Show
549 West 52nd St. (between 10th and 11th Ave.), New York
$5 admission
Reservations requested to ensure seating: 212-262-4216 This program is funded by the New York State Council on the
Arts, a state agency.
* Blind
Witness can be ordered now
prepublication
direct from Factory School
N 49 15.832 - W 123 05.921
:::::: POSITIONS COLLOQUIUM ::::::
AUGUST 19 - 24, 2008
VIVO Media Arts Centre
1965 Main Street
Vancouver, BC (Coast Salish Territory)
CANADA
invited participants include
|
Rita Wong | Tyrone Williams | Darren Wershler-Henry | Mark Wallace
| Aaron Vidaver | Rodrigo Toscano | Catriona Strang | Brian Kim
Stefans | Juliana Spahr | Rod Smith | Colin Smith | Kaia Sand
| Lisa Robertson | Judy Radul | Sianne Ngai | Dorothy Trujillo
Lusk | Kevin Killian | Reg Johanson | Robert Fitterman | Roger
Farr | Laura Elrick | Stacy Doris | Jeff Derksen | Michael Davidson
| Louis Cabri | Clint Burnhan | Jules Boykoff | Dodie Bellamy
|
newly commissioned works
readings + talks + panels + performances
the KOOTENAY SCHOOL of WRITING
with VIVO Media Arts Centre
for details
thematics statements
and registration information
please visit http://www.kswnet.org/
“Admito que a beleza me
inala, mas não que eu inale a beleza.” – Felix
Bernstein “Minha falta de nada.” – o gênio
na confeitaria
Um homem negro esperando num ponto
de ônibus
A mulher branca sentada num banco
Um filipino comendo batata
Um garoto mexicano colocando sapatos
Um hindu ocultando-se num iglu
Uma garota gorda de bata azul
Uma senhora católica de chinó
A mãe chinesa cruzando a ponte
Um afegão pastando pastrami
Um provinciano passeando na península
Um garoto eurasiano ao celular
Um árabe de sombrinha
Um sulista decolando a mochila
Um milanês detonando um gse
Um bárbaro de boina
Um libanês numa limusine
Um judeu regando petúnias
Um iugoslavo num enforcamento
Um menino sunita num patinete
Um nativo da Flórida subindo uma fonte
Um beatnik escrevendo um limerick
Uma caucasiana sonhando ao acaso
Uma criança porriquenha flutuando num balão
Um tipo indígena no topo de um triciclo
Um armênio remando até a América
Um irlandês com uma foice
Um bangladeshiano balbuciando perguntas
Um trabalhador amassando barro
Um esqueitista japonês consertando um ciborgue
O marinheiro de Myanmar mirando seu reboque
Um cara de Idaho pegando sol
A garota de Quinnipiac com fala triste e lenta
Um baleeiro arapaho acertando por um triz
Um anoréxico com uma cor inesquecível
Um adolescente muçulmano escrevendo em terza rima
Um encanador escocês comendo por quilo
Um garoto gay num barco xadrez
Um homem vermelho com uma bola verde
Um marinheiro disléxico com uma dor de verdade
Um avião inglês com destino à Irlanda
Um banqueiro budista caindo ao chão
Um ex-interno curioso na debulhadora
Um sargento hispânico de olho num casaco creme
Um alfaite drogado dragando a sopa
Um pivete massai mascando goma
Um infante sefardita no convés de shuffleboard
Um mongol imitando Napoleão
Um rapaz anarquista de olhar enviesado
Um mineiro de Riga dançando break com a polícia
A menina pobre comendo torta de maçã com tubaína
Um camarada sudanês com um carrinho amarelo
Um ateu com uma paixão por broches
Um nativo das Bahamas em marcha para uma trama
Um iraniano gago no fog azul e dourado
Um sonâmbulo falante ensaiando Gipsy
Uma criança homossexual num táxi
A matrona Wicca nadando em Pritt
Um procrastinador moraviano praticando jiu-jítsu
Um sírio swami no Lago Oragami
Um cavalheiro galante num volteio sincero
Um jovem de cor admirando um tostador
Um designer dinamarquês num banquete
Um montenegrino tomando excedrin
Um dervixe de Washington pingando dodecaedros
Um decano de Denver rezando rebelde
Um garçom balinense queimando fumo
Um iraquiano contemplando um haraquiri
Um ojibwa apertando um botão na Transiberiana
Um soldado devastado saltando da balaustrada
Um patriota decadente apanhando um bagre
Um professor agoráfobo monitorado por tacógrafo
Uma feminista numa cadeira de balanço
Um cozinheiro birmanês de meias soquetes
Um adolescente se metendo num colchão de ar
Um defensor do aborto recitando rimas
Um finlandês com cara de cachorro polindo um Volvo
Um malinense com malas revistadas
Um advogado pentecostal correndo em seu foyer
Um comunista vestindo um avental cinza
Uma canadense com um anel no nariz
A moça medúsea namorando um namarino
Um idiota num closet
A mágica moura em sua cozinha
Um soldado acabado com um vendedor antipático
Um veterano diletante implantando estantes
Uma socialite num imbroglio de rotina
Um ciclista vendendo vespas
Um bebê de um ano embolsando a grana
Um garoto encapuzado comendo queijo cheddar
Um tiozão lambe-botas usando tutu
A morena perseguindo uú trem
Um argentino dançando na cabeça de um alfinete
Uma pensionista sardenta instalando um Laplink
Um australopitequinho careteando no porão
Um piá nicaraguense com um pito picaresco
Um marrano nocauteado na lona
Um abissínio abstêmio
Um balofo de sorriso despecuniado
Um amigo texano com a face hirta de terror
Uma votação perdida na floresta
Uma alma dilapidada bebendo rum
Um pistoleiro com coração de papel
Uma dona em Shockwave sacando uma bola de hóquei
Um bebê em Percalux enrolando o chachachá
Um banqueiro pós-colonial comendo ameixas
Um sueco desastrado cuspindo balas
Uma haitiana embruxuleada em férias involuntárias
Um oncologista persa parado em zona azul
Um flautista franco-peruano tomando Pernod
Um conquistador do Idaho com a infinita capacidade de causar
dor
Um pedicuro mongol num jantar americano
Um paulistano traindo um nova-iorquino
Um homem branco sentado num banco
A mulher negra esperando o ônibus
EYEWEAR
Todd Swift has posted and introduced
"One More for the Road"
one of the poesm of "World on Fire"
in Girly Man on the occasion of the paperback edition
Reading: MP3
Willis reads a retrospective selection of her poetry..
In conversation with Charles Bernstein: MP3
Willis talks about the influence of Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites
and J.M.W. Turner, as well as discussing the relation of
artifice and sincerity.
Elizabeth Willis's most recent collection of poems, Meteoric
Flowers, was published by Wesleyan in 2006. Her other books
include Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003) and The Human
Abstract (Penguin,1995). An edited volume on Lorine
Niedecker is presently in production. Willis teaches literature
and creative writing at Wesleyan.
Writing the New at New College: A Celebration of Innovative
Writing Sarasota, Florida
May 1-3, 2008
Hamilton Classroom Teaching Auditorium (HCL 8) and Cook Hall
FREE
Thursday, May 1 @ 7pm HCL 8: Charles Bernstein, Talking Poetics,
With reception to follow in Cook Hall
Friday, May 2 @ 7pm HCL 8: Reading by Catherine Daly Friday
Saturday, May 3 @ 3:30 in Cook Hall: Student Poetry Reading
Saturday, May 3 @ 7pm HCL 8: Charles Bernstein: "The Attack
of the Difficult Poems: Poetry Reading and Performance"
PennSound is pleased to announce
selections from Henry
Hills Emma's Dilemma
(1997-2004)
including "King Richard" (portrait of Richard Foreman)
& "Nervous Ken" (portrait of Ken Jacobs)
plus the sections serialized on this web log, & including
"Maybe (or, In Pursuit of Parker Posey)" with Emma Bee Bernstein
Girly
Man
New in paper Reviews $15
Support independent boosktores.
Order from Rod Smith at Bridge Street Books.
There are two ways to order: 1. E-mail your order to <rod
/at/ bridgestreetbooks.com> with your address & they will
bill you with the books. or 2. via credit card-- call 202 965
5200 or e-mail w/ yr add, order, card #, & expiration
date & they will send a receipt with the books.
Close
Listening readings and conversations at WPS1.Org
New York
April 3, 2008 courtesy PennSound Reading from Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and
Selected (24:32): MP3
In conversation with Charles
Bernstein (29:15): MP3
The University of Sussex's School
of Humanities
in conjunction with the Centre for Modernist Studies
announces the following conference
scheduled for Friday the 16th and Saturday the 17th of
May 2008:
[I will post more detailed info as available. This is the preliminary
announcement and subject to change.]
Long
Poems ::: Major Forms
Plenary
Speakers
Charles
Bernstein (U Penn)
Rachel
Blau DuPlessis (Temple)
Simon
Jarvis (Cambridge)
Ron
Bush (Oxford)
Tony
Lopez (Plymouth)
Peter
Middleton (Southampton)
The
'long poem' has been traditionally conceived of as the principal
means by which poets confront political and aesthetic problems
through sustained investigations. Beyond this general outline,
or indeed perhaps because of it, there is little consensus as
to either what the long poem is, or what it might be uniquely
capable of. In 'The Poetic Principle,' Edgar Allen Poe went so
far as to assert that "a long poem does not exist" since "the
ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic
under the sun, is a nullity." Years later, and seeking to resolve
the technical and affective dilemmas that Poe identified, Charles
Olson prescribed a 'projective verse' that he purported might
carry "much larger material than it has carried in our language
since the Elizabethans." He thought Pound's Cantos exemplified
the beginnings of such poetry, displaying a methodology capable
of solving "problems of larger content and of larger forms." This
conference seeks to address the contemporary relevance of the
long poem: how has it evolved, what standing does it currently
hold, and who are now its readers? As both a poetic and a critical
concept, the 'long poem' presents poets with the difficulty of
articulating what Pound called "a compound of freedom and order" that "hangs
between chaos on the one side and mechanics on the other." We
hope this conference will provide a forum for the consideration
of ways in which comprehensive, often formally complex and expansive
poems may respond, or fail to respond, to certain "obligations
toward the difficult whole," and to explore what these obligations
might now entail for both poets and their readers. We therefore
welcome proposals for presentations addressing aesthetic, formal,
generic, compositional and literary-historical questions the
'long poem' brings into particular focus.
On August 8, 2007, China launched a publicity campaign proclaiming “We
Are Ready” to host the Olympic Games in August 2008. We,
the undersigned members of PEN American Center, are writing to
ask you to show the world that China is in fact ready—not
just to stage the Olympics, but to acknowledge, protect, and
celebrate the full rights of its citizens.
PEN believes there are currently 38 writers and journalists imprisoned
in China for exercising their right to speak and write freely,
as guaranteed under Chinese and international law. We are concerned
that, despite official pledges to respect essential rights in
this Olympic year, Chinese authorities continue to harass and
detain writers in violation of their right to freedom of expression.
In order to fulfill the promises China made in securing the Olympic
Games, and to ensure that the rights of our colleagues are fully
protected in your country, we therefore urge you to:
• facilitate the immediate and unconditional release of
all writers and journalists currently imprisoned and end the
practice of detaining, harassing, and censoring writers and journalists
in China
• abide by China’s pledge that “there will be
no restrictions on media reporting and movement of journalists
up to and including the Olympic Games”; and
• end internet censorship and reform laws that are used
to imprison writers and journalists and suppress the free exchange
of information and ideas on the internet.
ROUNDTABLE RESPONDENTS
Charles Alexander, CHAX Press, Tucson; Laynie Browne, UA Poetry
Center; Graca Capinha, University of Coimbra, Portugal; Barbara
Cole, SUNY, Buffalo; Wystan Curnow, University of Auckland, New
Zealand; Michael Farrell, University of Melbourne, Australia;
Jesper Olsson, OEI Magazine, Sweden; Vanessa Place, Les Figues
Press, Los Angeles; Brian Reed, University of Washington, Seattle;
Linda Reinfeld, Rochester Institute of Technology; Marie Smart,
University of Southern California; Jonathan Stalling, University
of Oklahoma
THURSDAY, MAY 29
4 p.m. – READING with COLE SWENSEN, CHARLES BERNSTEIN,
CHRISTIAN BÖK
7 p.m. – KEYNOTE ADDRESS with MARJORIE PERLOFF FRIDAY, MAY 30
9 a.m. - Poetry Rules!: The Concept of Poetry with Charles Bernstein
10:15 a.m. - Black Conceptual Poetics: Examples for Crafting
with Tracie Morris
1 p.m. - Panel Discussion with featured poets moderated by TENNEY
NATHANSON
3 p.m. - Forms of Social Engagement with Caroline Bergvall
4:15 p.m. - ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
5:30 p.m. - Uncreative Writing Workshop with Kenneth Goldsmith
8 p.m. - READING with CRAIG DWORKIN, PETER GIZZI, SUSAN HOWE SATURDAY, MAY 31
9 a.m. - The Visible World: Writing the Visual Arts with Cole
Swensen
10:15 a.m. - Poetics of Assemblage with Peter Gizzi
1 p.m. - Two Dots over a Vowel with Christian Bök
2:15 p.m. - ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
4 p.m. - Class Session with Susan Howe
5:15 p.m. - The Politics of Conceptual Writing with Craig Dworkin
8 p.m. - READING with KENNETH GOLDSMITH, CAROLINE BERGVALL, TRACIE
MORRIS
---------
Brooklyn Museum, March 30, 2008 "Beyond the Waves; Feminist Artists Talk Across Generations"
Kat Griefen | Susan Bee | Mira Schor
| Emma Bee Bernstein | Carolee Schneemann | Brynna Tucker
Conceptual Interview In
Response to Some Questions from the University of Arizona Poetry
Center in Advance of the Conceptual Poetry & Its Others Symposium
Much of your work suspends or
refuses the privilege to any one reading. That's
true of poetry generally, of poetry as a genre.
Can you speak about this tendency against the exclusive,
and whether or not this choice is aesthetic, political, personal
or any combination of the three? I'd
say it's more a condition of language than a choice. Though of
course you can fight against the conditions of language all you
like, or work with them, as I prefer to do.
Depending on the meaning of it.
The idea of meaning being "exclusive" strikes
me as troubling on an aesthetic, political, and personal basis.
But then trouble is my business.
This approach to writing/readership as an extension of Barthes’ concept
of the“death of the author”has accumulated quite
a history and tradition in its own right. It
seems odd to me to attribute this "approach" (if that
is what it is) to Roland Barthes but in Writing Degree Zero, a
favorite book of mine, Barthes does make the distinction between
the readerly text and the one you are gesturing toward in your
questions, the writerly text.
The author dies. The author’s
work is born.
Some suggest, therefore, that
it can no longer be considered avant-garde. I
hope so. But then you'd have to explain why so much of what celebrates
itself as official verse culture hasn’t gotten the news.
Remember that scene in Rosemary's Baby in which Mia Farrow’s
in the waiting room reading the issue of Time with Nietzche's "God
is dead" on the cover?
News travels slowly in some sectors
of the pluriverse.
Speculate about whether or not this is so, or whether or
not it is important.
This
is so & so is this
But neither is important.
That is theirs
& near’s not here
But
neither is important.
Never twill, never twine
Nor peep nor bleat nor pipe.
Neither’s important.
How do you see the evolution
of this “tradition” as it might be surfacing today? I'm
plunging under the surface as an organized evasion procedure.
What is conceptual poetry? Poetry
pregnant with thought.
What is not poetry? The
absence of conception had itself to be conceived.
Norman Fischer
Norman sat out on the bench in front of Pecan on Franklin, just
before walking west to the Clocktower to tape Close Listening.
We met up with Alan Davies, whose Close Listening shows I was
taping right before Norman’s. After the recording session
we wandered over to Excllent Dumpling for lunch, where we sat
next to Lynne Stewart. I’d just seen Paul Chan’s
film about Stewart, in which she talks about poetry and reads
from Blake. We were eating in the shadows of the criminal court
building in which she had been unjustly sentenced to jail. I
was glad to meet her and express my appreciation for her work
and concern for the price she might have to pay for defending
freedom. Meanwhile, our small band of poets – Alan, Norman,
and me – made our way over to the Chelsea to see Norman’s
son Noah’s new show. January 5, 2007 (mp4,
28 seconds, 5.7 mb)
Special "Poetics" discount for Richard Foreman’s
DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND!
St. Mark's Church, New York
$18 tickets with the code word "poetics" when reserved over the
phone or web.
Call 212-352-3101 or visit http://www.ontological.com to
arrange.
Offer good for shows through March 30. My
comments on this show were posted previously.
+++++++++++
PennSound has been making available the
LINE readings from the Drawing Center in New York
& Danny Snelson, our intrepid contributing editor, has been
edting some of the reading, creating PennSound's trademark singles.
Also included in the new batch is a reading I did with Rod Smiith
and Nada Gordan in 2002. I mostly read from my new book of that
moment, With Strings January 15, 2002
introduction by Lytle
Shaw (3:26): MP3 Rod
Smith (20:47): MP3
Nada Gordon (27:38): MP3 Charles
Bernstein (33:41): MP3
Sunday, March 30, 2008 3:00 - 5:00 PM "Beyond
the Waves; Feminist Artists Talk Across Generations" a panel
Susan Bee
Emma Bee Bernstein
Mira Schor
Carolee Schneemann,
Brynna Tucker
at
The Sackler Center for Feminist Art Brooklyn Museum, New York
Free & Open to Public (With Museum Entry Fee) -
Tuesday, April 8, 3:00-9:00pm The Shape of Disclosure: George Oppen Centennial Symposium
On the occasion of George Oppen's centennial and the publication
of his Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, poets and
scholars gather to honor the life and work of this spare, powerful
and original poet.
Co-sponsored by Poets House, Tribeca Performing Arts Center at
BMCC and University of California Press. Funded in part by the
New York Council for the Humanities.
3:00pm Panel: Biographical-Historical Continuum
Moderated by Michael Heller
Featuring Stephen Cope on Oppen's diaries and journals, Norman
Finkelstein on the late poems, Eric Hoffman on Oppen's political
identity and Kristin Prevallet on Oppen's response to World War
II.
5:00pm Panel: Literary-Philosophical Spectrum
Moderated by Thom Donovan
Featuring Romana Huk on Oppen's relationship to metaphysics and
Judeo-Christian philosophy, Burt Kimmelman on Oppen and Heidegger,
Peter O'Leary on Whitman's influence on Oppen and John Taggart
on Oppen's poetry as "a process of thought."
7:30pm George Oppen Centennial Reading
Stephen Cope, Thom Donovan, Norman Finkelstein, E. Tracy Grinnell,
Michael Heller, Erica Hunt, Burt Kimmelman, Geoffrey O'Brien,
Peter O'Leary, Kristin Prevallet, Hugh Seidman, Harvey Shapiro,
Stacy Szymaszek & John Taggart
George Oppen was born April 24, 1908 in New Rochelle, New York,
and died in San Francisco in 1984. Tribeca Performing
Arts Center
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
$10/Free to Students and Poets House Members
Audiences may attend individual events or the entire symposium
+++++++++++++++++++
Just got word about this book,
which I have not yet seen
Amy Evans and Shamoon Zamir, eds. The
Unruly Garden:
Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram: Letters and Essays (Peter Lang, 2007)
Last Sunday, The New York Times Book Review made an
error in citing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as Language, which
is the name of a different publication. Responding to a request
for a correction, the Times stated that the error was
deliberate “The Times's style, for better or worse, is
not to reproduce stylistic quirks in titles, so calling the magazine
Language, without the equal signs, is deliberate.” Since
both the equal signs and the capitalization of the title are
substantial and not “stylistic quirks,” the response
compounds the error. As does the Times printing of these
names in recent issues: “I ♥ Huckabees,” “E*Trade,” and “The
Ensemble π.” I wonder if HarperCollins would get the
same reply if their name was printed Harpercollins?
Robert Grenier
from
FOUR POEMS/JUNE 2004
(each image is from a spread of one sketchbook page;
the shadow line running through the middle of the image is the
gutter between the two pages)
_____
Over the past year Bob Grenier and I have worked on an email
conversation mostly about his hand-drawn poems.
John Tranter has published the exchange in Jacket 35 (which
is still being assembled).
Robert Grenier and Charles Bernstein
A Conversation
Robert Grenier’s
drawing poem print series 64 will be installed down one
long wall as part of a drawing show called “The Irony of
Flatness” opening 18 July 2008 at the Bury Art Gallery,
Moss Street, Bury, Lancashire, BL9 0DF, United Kingdom (phone
0161 253 5878). During the Opening festivities, RG will walk
about, sounding out & ‘interpreting’ (for & with
persons present) certain of the drawing poems in 64.
Giclée prints from Robert Grenier’s drawing poem
series 64 are available for purchase (as individual
prints and in cut and uncut sets of 2, 4, 6, and 8) from:
Greene Naftali Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, 8th Floor, New
York, NY 10001.
Contact Jay Sanders: jay[ât]greenenaftaligallery.com
or 212-463-7770.
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a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
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work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
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work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
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work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
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work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
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work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
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work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy all
work and no play makes jack a dull boy ALL WORK and NO play makes Jack
a DULL boy ALL work and NO play MAKES jack a DULL boy
Al
Filreis
on Close
Listening
recorded 3/5/08
Filreis talks about his new book -- Counter-Revolution of
the Word:
The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960
University of North Carolina Press
Al Filreis also hosts a podcast for PennSound and the Poetry Foundation
called "Poem
Talk"
Ron Silliman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & I were the guests a
few days ago
taping a future show about Rae Armantrout's "The Way"
Meanwhile, the latest PoemTalk (#4)
on Ginsberg singing Blake
is now up on PennSound: MP3.
Mike Hennessey writes about the show on his blog.
Here's my recording of Blake's "Grey Monk" MP3 / text
Chinese / American Association for Poetry and Poetics （ CAAP ） Founded
The Chinese/American Association for Poetry
and Poetics (CAAP), initiated by leading scholars including Marjorie
Perloff, Charles Bernstein and Nie Zhenzhao, was established
in January 2008 with its headquarters at Center for Programs
in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania, USA. This
is an international academic organization devoted to the study
of poetry and poetics, focusing on the scholarship and translation
of the international poetry, with special emphasis on the study
and translation of North American poetry in China and Chinese
poetry in North America, but also with a commitment to see North
American poetry and Chinese poetry in a global context. This
association will endeavor to introduce American and Western poetry
and poetics to China so as to produce new energy for Chinese
poetry and its study, and to introduce Chinese poetry and poetics
to America and the world. Attention will also be paid to the
scholarship and translation of philosophical approaches to poetry
and translation so as to promote the study of poetry and poetics
in the context of literary studies.
A non-profit organization, CAAP is composed
of scholars and poets of America, China and other parts of the
world. It is chaired by Marjorie Perloff, professor emerita at
Stanford University and former president of the Modern Language
Association of America and American Association of Comparative
Literature. Charles Bernstein, professor of University of Pennsylvania
and fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Nie
Zhenzhao, professor of Central China Normal University, vice
president of the China National Association of Foreign Literature
and chief editor of Foreign Literature Studies (FLS),
an AHCI source journal, serve as vice presidents. The current
association board is composed of the American and Chinese scholars
and poets (See below).
CAAP will follow its tenet and make every
effort to sponsor academic activities such as scholarly conferences,
exchanges of scholars, translation, and publication. All scholars
and poets who share the interests of this Association are warmly
welcome to join. The email address is caap2008@gmail.com.
President ： Marjorie
Perloff
Vice Presidents ： Nie Zhenzhao
[pictured above and below]
Charles
Bernstein
Executive director ： Luo Lianggong
Members of CAAP Board:
Dong, Hongchuan Sichuan International Studies University, China
Filreis, Al University of Pennsylvania, USA
Hu, Sishe Xi’an International Studies University, China
Huang, Yunte University of California at Santa Barbara, USA
Jiang, Hongxin Hunan Normal University, China
Li, Zhimin Guangzhou University, China
Lin, Tan New Jersey City University, USA
Liu, Jianjun Northeast Normal University, China
Luo, Lianggong Wuhan University of Technology, China
Luo, Yimin Southwest Normal University, China
Ma, Ming-Qian State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Ning, Yizhong Beijing Language and Culture University, China
Ou, Hong Sun Yat-sen University, China
Qian, Zhaoming University of New Orleans, USA
Saussy, Haun Yale University, USA
Schwartz, Leonard Evergreen College, USA
Slaymaker, Doug University of Kentucky, USA
Sun, Jian Fudan University, China
Twitchell, Jeff Overseas Family College, Singapore
Yang, Jincai Nanjing University, China
Yeh, Michelle University of California at Davis, USA
Yin, Qiping Zhejiang University, China
Yu, Tim University of Toronto, Canada
Zhang, Er Evergreen College, USA
I knew
About the split identity
Of the People's Poet—
Thebifacial nature of his poetry:
The racial ballad in the publicdomain
And the private poem in the modern vein.
—Melvin
Tolson,Harlem Gallery
Objectivist Blues
Scoring Speech in Second-Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics
Innovation
versus Assimilation in
Louis Zukofsky Charlie Patton Paul Robeson
Cole
Porter James Weldon Johnson W.C. Handy
Melvin Tolson Oscar Hammerstein II David Marriott
&&&&&
American Literary History
20th anniversary issue
Spring 2008
...........
Cole Porter's "How strange the change from major to minor" could
be the theme song of second-wave modernism, where minor keys
struck major chords. If Porter, in his songs, included the high
in the low, then Danny Kaye's and second waver Louis Armstrong's
rollicking version of the African-American spiritual "When the
Saints Go Marching In" in the 1959 movie, The Five Pennies,
is the ultimate anthem of such cultural miscegenation, here brought
to a crescendo by the Jewish Kaye singing side-by-side with Armstrong,
the icon of African-American classical music. (Kaye, born David
Daniel Kaminsky in 1913, is four years too young to be a full-fledged
second waver.) At one point, the younger Tin Pan Alley crooner
impersonates the classic jazz singer (including the famous handkerchief-on-mouth),
to which Armstrong remarks, in an aside, "Is this cat digging
me, face and all?" (see Figure 2). In this (Levinasian?) moment,
Kaye dialogically redefines by refining—yet without
redeeming—Al Jolson's blackface "Jazz Singer." Armstrong
and Kaye riff on popular figures of European classical music—"Chopin – solid
man ... Mozart – with the symphonies and operas
and all that jazz ... Rimsky – of coursikov ...
Ravel and Gustav Mahler – but don't forget Fats Waller ... put
Liszt on that list ... Haydn [pronounced Hidin' ]– well
let him come out! ... Khachaturian – gesundheit"—ending
the performance with an ecstatic dose of ideolectical, a.k.a.
scat, mayhem.
Who's gonna play on the day when the saints go marching in?" Armstrong
sings, envisioning a messianic, not to say apocalyptic, moment
of judgment and redemption in which Western high culture marches
into paradise side-by-side with jazz and Broadway. "I want to
be in that number": elect, but more profoundly, company.
Being in the number does not elevate the "other" but rather democratizes
the "high," brings the "high" and "low" (sacred and profane,
standard and aberrant) into the space of the people (demos),
the commons. Amidst the final scat, the singers exclaim to each
other, "Oh too high! Oh too low!," meaning the notes but also
the cultural referents. It is an exuberant moment not so much
for popular culture (in terms of which this is nothing special),
but for high culture.
Cultural miscegenation (the mixing
of types) is in dialecticalrelation to assimilation.
Miscegenation, insofar as it is markedby difference,
resists assimilation. But miscegenation is alsoassimilation
by means of absorption—call it the syncretic.Conceptualized
as a function, assimilation has as its utopianupper
limit Emersonian moral perfectionism, whose horizon isthe
new or invented, in the sense of emergent or not yet realized(possibly
not realizable). The dystopian lower limit is absorptioninto
the dominant culture without a trace of the constituentparts,
the fantasy of the total dissolution of otherness intothe
mirage of the preexisting—call it the final solutionby
other means. ...
Download Video Portrait file or click and play
in QT.
Nicole Brossard
Nicole came by and we mostly discussed prose poetry, for a class
she was going to teach. But then I asked her about the different
pronunciations of French in the Americas. November 8, 2006 (59
seconds, 11.4 mb
click to launch QT or download )
Betye Saar, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972)
is on view at
the must see
WACK!
Art and the Feminist Revolution
which features art from 1965-1980.
The show opened yesterday at PS1/MoMa in
New York.
Mira Schor makes an important intervention
about the generational focus, and feminist politics, of this
& related shows
in the new Brooklyn Rail: “I
am not now nor have I ever been…"
May 29-31, 2008 KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY MARJORIE PERLOFF with featured artists Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Craig Dworkin,
Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Susan Howe,
Tracie Morris, Cole Swensen
The recent publication of Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s
Anthology of Conceptual Poetry (based on the online Ubuweb Anthology
of Conceptual Writing) is only one sign of the recent interest
in the “tensions between materiality and concept” (Dworkin),
in a “new new formalism,” based on constraints, both
the Oulipo and Cagean variants, on citationality and found text,
on sound play, and visual device. Is such “non-expressivist” poetry
too extreme? Conceptual Poetry and Its Others brings together
a variety of leading poets to debate the issue.
REGISTRATION Early Registration (by 4/4/08) $80 general $45
student Registration (after 4/4/08) $105 general $60
student Mail-in
Registration Form
CALL FOR RESPONDENTS
If you wish to participate in a Roundtable on the subject of
Conceptual Poetry and Its Others, please send a letter of interest
outlining your qualifications and why you would like to participate.
Also include a curriculum vitae, résumé, or biographical
statement. Send these materials to Frances Sjoberg, Symposium
Roundtable, UA Poetry Center, 1508 E Helen St., Tucson, AZ 85721-0150
no later than March 4, 2008.
BREAKOUT SESSIONS with FEATURED WRITERS
Forms of Social Engagement
with
Caroline Bergvall
Poetry Rules!: The Concepts of Poetry
with
Charles Bernstein
The Politics of Conceptual Writing
with
Craig Dworkin
The Poetics of Assemblage
with
Peter Gizzi
Uncreative Writing Workshop
with
Kenneth Goldsmith
Black Conceptual Poetics: Examples for Crafting
with
Tracie Morris
The Visible World: Writing the Visual Arts
with
Cole Swensen
Plus additional sessions, panel discussions,
readings and roundtables
The
Nation
has just published my poem
"All the Whiskey in Heaven"
in its Valentine's Day issue
(dated March 3 but out on 2/14)
along with, in recent weeks,
reviews of Picabia, Creeley, Oppen and Ashbery
and poems by Eileen Myles, Joe Ceravolo, and Jack Spicer.
Peter Gizzi is the poetry editor &
John Palattella is Literary Editor.
+++++
Craig Dworkin & I will be reading
this Thursday Feb. 21 at 7pm
at Columbia University (New York). location: 413
Kent
'With the legalization of gay marriage,
faith has been violated and we've been forced to respond', says
Charles McVety, the president of Canada Christian College in
Toronto.1 Following the logic of McVety's statement
- quoted in a New York Times article on religious conservatives'
opposition to same-sex marriage in Canada - demonstrates well
why arguments from faith often appear to dispense with reasoned
debate. What the word 'faith' refers to in McVety's sentence
is unclear, or more precisely, it seems to refer both to Christians'
belief in God and to heterosexual marriage. With their differences
collapsed into the single word faith, the opposition to
same-sex marriage and the act of believing in the Christian God
become synonymous - they occupy the same cultural and intellectual
turf. A specific moral proposition that might otherwise be up
for debate is located inside a sphere that cannot be reasonably
contested, namely, the Divine. Christian conservatives are hardly
alone in holding some beliefs sacred, for on some level all religious
and secular philosophies begin with a prior commitment (even
if that prior commitment is a dedication to cultural pluralism
and open debate). What is remarkable about the above example
is how the sentence turns faith into a noun with demarcated borders
able to be 'violated'. Here faith becomes a specific conviction
held outside the reach of intellectual discussion; faith means
grasping the obvious, not negotiating the uncertain. McVety's
words are not, however, alone in their formulation of 'faith'.
They do not, for one, express a view of faith much different
than the one held within many secular, liberal worldviews where
faith equally stands in stark contrast to reasoned debate. As
Stanley Fish explains, 'For the modern liberal, beliefs are what
the mind scrutinizes and judges by rational criteria that are
themselves hostage to no belief in particular'.2 To
the liberal mind, any conviction, such as an opposition to same-sex
marriage, that does not put itself into doubt is antithetical
to intellectual investigation (Fish goes on to discuss, in part,
the 'belief system' of liberalism). The understanding that faith
and critical inquiry occupy different logical systems appears
to be one of only a few ideas that people of faith and modern
liberals can agree about. And yet, removing faith from the field
of critical inquiry runs counter to an older, perhaps even more
orthodox conception of faith.
In Summa Theologica, Aquinas,
following Augustine, writes, 'believing is giving assent to something
one is still thinking about. Strictly speaking, we think about
what we cannot yet fully see to be true. Believing means putting
faith in something, and this resembles knowing in giving firm
assent, but resembles doubting, suspecting and holding opinions
in having no finished vision of the truth'.3 For Aquinas,
God, as the object of faith, is not known with complete certainty.
He remains a mystery. But by involving oneself with God, by affirming
an understanding of him, Aquinas says that people come to know
God more fully, even as their vision of him continues to change.
In Aquinas's understanding, faith allows rather than hinders
critical inquiry. We do not arrive at our reasons for believing
one thing instead of another by way of objective observation
or intuition; our evidence is itself an interpretation and arrangement
of the cultural and literary texts at our disposal. Without a
finished 'vision of the truth', we study what we believe, refashioning
it as new events and ideas protrude into our deliberations.4 Holding
an idea in faith permits us to persistently develop our understanding
of those beliefs that are most crucial to us: faith is not a
noun, but a verb - it is something one does, not something one
possesses.
In the current moment when the language
of faith and the language of progressive politics or intellectual
sophistication are so often pitted against one another, Aquinas's
understanding of faith reminds us of a different intellectual
strategy, one that holds onto debate and critical inquiry and
still locates knowledge in the fluid, difficult-to-pin-down sphere
of uncertainty, conjecture, and association. Here, Aquinas's
faith, understood as a critical method, is well suited for answering
the questions that permeate our contemporary environment, questions
that speak to the anxieties of conservative Christians and secular
liberals alike: 'how can we live in a world without certainty;
on what can we ground understanding and knowledge?'
While the prospect might at first
appear unlikely, Aquinas's faithful method of critical inquiry
runs through much recent innovative poetry, in particular the
work of Charles Bernstein, whose faithfulness draws on the thinking
of Emerson, Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell, Bernstein's onetime
teacher. ... continued
Eleanor
Antin
"Constructing Helen"
from "Helen's Odyssey," 2007
chromogenic print (61 x 105 3/4 inches)
at Ronald
Feldman Gallery
which opened last night in New York
(closes March 15)
below: Eleanor Antin at the opening:
Meanwhile
Messerli is making available on-line
a number of entries from My
Year: 2007
----
& this just in from Steve Evans —
Dear Friends on the NPF,
Though we at the National Poetry Foundation have had to weather
a hard season of loss in these past few months, we are nevertheless
pressing ahead with plans for our summer conference on The Poetry
of the 1970s.
We are very pleased to announce that Rae Armantrout, Nicole
Brossard, Clark Coolidge, Jayne Cortez, and Bernadette Mayer
have agreed to give plenary poetry readings. And we expect to
have more good news on that front in the coming days.
The Conference will take place June 11-15, 2008, here at the
University of Maine. It will be similar in shape and scope to
previous "decade" conferences, but will also feature
some innovations. For instance, we'll be collaborating for
the first time with both the UMaine Museum of Art and the Colby
College Museum of Art to bring the visual arts into the mix.
And we'll have a videographer on hand not just to document the
plenary proceedings, but also to do studio sessions intended
for future webcasting with the many poets (and poet-scholars)
who will be in attendance. We'll be making a more concerted use
of new media and web resources than in the past. And we expect
that a variety of NPF print publications will grow out of the
Conference as well. Naturally, a celebration of the lives
and accomplishments of Sylvester Pollet and Burton Hatlen is
being planned in conjunction with our traditional lobster banquet.
We invite paper and panel proposals on all aspects of poetic
practice in the Seventies. We also seek scholars and writers
who would be willing to serve as panel Chairs. Special registration
rates are available for graduate students, independent, and international
scholars.
We will begin considering proposals on February 15th. The
deadline for proposals is March 31, 2008. Proposals, along
with any queries about the proposal process, should be sent electronically
to
Steve Evans <Steven dot Evans at Maine dot Edu>
More information about the Conference is available at our
recently revamped website
The site is set up to facilitate on-line registration for
the Conference. As an incentive for early registration, we will
be offering discounts on NPF journal subscriptions and books.
On-campus accommodations are available at a reasonable rate
through the NPF. We'd also be happy to advise conference participants
as to other nearby lodging options and to offer tips on traveling
to and from the Bangor area.
We appreciate your help in spreading the word about this Conference
and hope you'll seriously consider joining us this summer in
Orono!
On behalf of the Conference Steering Committee consisting
of Carla Billitteri, Benjamin Friedlander, Jennifer Moxley, and
myself, all best wishes,
Leslie Scalapino IT'S GO IN HORIZONTAL Selected Poems
University of California Press
2008
Leslie Scalapino’s poems
probe politics, memory, perception, and desire,
creating hypnotically shifting coherences
that take us beyond any dislocating devices
into a realm of newly emerging consciousness.
This work, which defies categorization,
is essential for contemporary poetry.
Hank Lazer Lyric & Spirit
Selected Essays 1996-2006
Richmond, Calif.:: Omnidawn, 2007 just out & 1/2
price till end of March
In these lucid, engaging, and informative essays,
Hank Lazer enlists lyric and spirit in a project
of radical resistance
to the received in pursuit of intensification of the possible.
If Lazer calls for beauty, it is an unexpected beauty, earned
not given.
This is a compelling study of contemporary American poetic practice,
with special attention to Armantrout, Creeley, Fischer, Taggart,
Mackey, Zukofsky, Jabés, Duncan, and Schwerner, among
others,
in the context of a critical approach informed by two unlikely
soul mates,
Theodor Adorno and Thelonious Monk.
But one to listen to now
which we've had available for a while
is
Duncan eading at the San Francisco State University, June 18,
1959
Often I Am Permitted (2:00): MP3
I read this at the memorial tribute
to Duncan on October 9, 1988, at the Poetry Project of St. Mark's
Church:
Two Minutes for
Robert Duncan
It's funny to have
to be brief about Robert Duncan, since there is nothing brief
about his work or my responses to it.
There seems no limit
to the breadth and scope Duncan envisioned as a poet's project.
Because his endeavor so overwhelms any of the traditional ways
we have of defining poetic work – as, say, lyric poems
or critical essays – he continually provoked a re-examination
of the smallness of scale that characterizes the conception of
poetry of many of his more mainstream contemporaries. His research
and scholarly preoccupations, his insistence that linguistics
and the Dark, Saussure & gnosticism, are sources of the poetic
remain an important alternative to residual anti-intellectualism
and emotion-fetishizing of much contemporary verse. The fact
that Duncan's poetry remained controversial because it was thought
to be too intellectual or not plain-spoken enough has given encouragement
to at least two subsequent generations of poets, who have taken
off on his "permissions" while interpreting them in
wildly different ways.
For me, the heterodox
range of Duncan's sources has had impact even beyond any of his
specific enthusiasms. Anyone who has visited his house can attest
to the sheer exuberant fantasy and marvelous humor of Duncan
and Jess's transformations of these "sources" into
a home as rich with whimsy as accumulated knowledge. Duncan
inspires one not to accept the given narrative of cultural history
but to look to a multiplicity of hidden and suppressed and vilified
sources for myth‑shattering revelations about the past
and present. This insistence that poetic material is to be found
not only, or even primarily, in the hallowed texts of Literature
but also in those sources that are without authority is a foundation
of his consistently anti-authoritarian, liberatory politics and
poetics. It would be ironic if his own explorations and wanderings
are sanctified into a new curriculum of required study.
The first time I met
Robert Duncan, after a performance I did in San Francisco in
the mid-70s, he handed me a poem he had written while I was reading
and in response to my work. I've often thought about the generosity
of the gesture of entrusting me with his only copy of this poem,
which went so much beyond any friendly words he might have said
at the time.
Here is something
of what he wrote in the poem:
She appeared in a
shift
waiting for shifters. From one sentence to the other
a world is declared necessary. Time
has to count to be counted. In phrases.
In phase. In consequences. In place.
In this place I is an event without a hat.
I meanwhile mean my own hat.
What I does is natural
in a sentence referring to me me occurs.
Duncan 's last book, In
the Dark, will always be associated for many of us with the
news of his death. Thinking about that marvelously evocative
title – suggesting both the terrors of unknown and the
grace of fallibility – I kept hearing Lil Green (born,
like Duncan, in 1919) singing her bluesy "Romance in the
Dark," a sound transported from almost fifty years ago,
that seemed to meet this occasion with full force.
In the dark, it's just you and I
Not a sound, there’s not one sigh
Just the beat of my poor heart in the dark.
In the dark, in the dark, I get such a thrill
When he presses his fingertips upon my lips
And he begs me to please keep still in the dark.
But soon, this dance will be endin’
And you’re gonna be missed ….
Just let them dance, we're gonna find romance
In the dark, in the dark
Kate Valk, Kiki
Smith, Martha Wilson, Linda Yablonsky, Linda Chapman,
Deborah Thomas, Howie Seligman, Eve Biddle, Mary Smith, Ulla
Dydo
invite you to come
be our Valentines and celebrate the launch of
The Relationship
a performance
group directed by Fiona Templeton
with Janet Clancy, Sean Donovan, Anna Kohler, Robert Kya-Hill,
Clarinda MacLow, Peter Sciscioli, Tanya Selvaratnam, Valda Setterfield,
Stephanie Silver and more
Party on
February 8 th, 2008
7-10 pm
at The Performing Garage,
33 Wooster Street, New York City
Please
reserve in advance from Brown Paper Tickets (low-price, fair-trade)
1-800-838-3006 www.BrownPaperTickets.com/event/26692 (also, if available, at the door)
$50 per date For $150 you will be More Than a Friend
$500 makes you a Significant Other Amount of all tickets over $5 is a tax-deductible donation.
Evening
includes
-Hors d'oeuvres & drinks
-Introduction to The Relationship and rare glimpses of 30 years
of Fiona Templeton's work
-Screening of short films directed by Fiona Templeton, including
one shot by John
Jesurun in the Caucasus and Western Coast of Georgia, the birthplace
of the mythical
Medea, giving a view into the history of Fiona's "The Medead."
-Dan Kaufman (guitar) / Shelley Hirsch (vocals) / Shahzad Ismaily
percussion .
-Daria Fain (solo dance) with music by Kenta Nagai.
-Other seldom-seen appearances!
-Raffle of exclusive artifacts, manuscripts, signed books, drawings,
country weekend, free tax prep, acting lesson with Anna Kohler,
good times!
-Dancing with World DJ Poodlecannon of the Bulgarian Bar
-AND MORE
The Relationship
has a great program of work over the next few years and on
- come help make it happen.
-If you can't make it, please consider a donation - see our
website for details.
The Relationship
Performance and Arts Group, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) organization.
Richard
Deming Listening
on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008 Richard Deming's Listening on All Sides: Toward
an Emersonian Ethics of Reading is a beautifully written
book that approaches recent thinking about Emerson, especially
that of Stanley Cavell and Richard Poirer, from the point of
view of poetics rather than philosophy or literary theory. Deming's
study of what he calls "Emersonian modernism" includes refreshing
readings of Dickinson, Melville, Williams, and Stevens. The book
is both philosophically engaging and meticulously researched."
Matthew
G. Kirschenbaum Mechanisms:
New Media and the Forensic Imagination
Cambridge: MIT, 2008 Kirschenbaum’s study combines rigorous technical
detail with a solid grounding in literary studies and textual
and bibliographic scholarship. More than half of the book is
a highly technical study of digital “forensics,” something
of a cross between new criticism and CSI. Kirschenbaum
makes this (for me sometimes) arcane technical material vivid
and engaging. There is a rivetingly detailed section on how hard
it is to fully eradicate digital data, through which Kirschenbaum
sends up the received idea that digital data is more ephemeral
than, for example, printed books. (This insubstantial web note
may live into virtual eternity; it’s frightening.) There
is nothing as good as this book on the material nature of digital
encoding or inscription, from the point of view of the history
of verbal language recording systems and writing, indeed, of
textual transmission or, in Randall McLeod’s term, quoted
in one of Kirschenbaum’s essay, transformission.
In many ways Kirschenbaum is extending the work in textual and
bibliographic scholarship of Jerome McGann and others. Kirschenbaum’s
discussions of digital “versions” and their significance
is a good case in point.
Douglas Messerli
on Close
Listening
January 21, 2008
Program 1 — Reading (27:57): MP3
Program 2 — Interview (27:55): MP3
Program 3 — Reading & Interview (26:54): MP3
—————
Susan Howe
reading Saturday at the Segue series at the Bowery Poetry Club
in New York
————
A Celebration of Thing of Beauty:
New and
Selected Works by Jackson Mac Low
edited by Anne Tardos
Curated by Marshall Reese, at CUE Arts Foundation, January 18,
2008
1. Introduction by Marshall Reese (2:41): MP3
2. Anne Tardos (7:45): MP3
3. Mitch Highfill (2:04): MP3
4. Joan Retallack (4:58): MP3
5. Drew Gardner (4:43): MP3
6. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (5:19) MP3
7. Charles Bernstein (8:06): MP3
8. Katie Degentesh (3:56): MP3
9. Chris Mason with Marshall Reese (2:45): MP3
complete reading (42:47): MP3
new
on PennSound
——————
THE TWILIGHT
OF THE BUMS Raymond Federman & George Chambers
cartoons by T. Motle
Buffalo: Starcherone Books, 2008
Stan & Oliver. Frog & Toad, Bud & Lou, The Sunshine
Boys, Bill & Ted, Bouvard & Pécuchet - but most
of all Vladimir & Estragon - stand behind this book like
defrocked priests at an inquest. Old men rule!, at least in the
glimmer of a watery eye and inconstant heart.
New York, Dec. 22, 2007 – Darien
Credenza, the Executive Muckamuck of Amalgamated Writing Programs,
announced that a Morally Repugnant Poets-and-Theorists Exhibit
will be held at the organization's annual congress in New York.
The exhibit is the first of what is planned as a series of didactic
displays at Amalgamated’s popular annual gatherings.
Foreman provides one of the few out-of-body experiences in the
American theater. In this exquisite new work, probably the last
of his film/live-actor performance works, the actors present
in the theater play puppets to close-ups of actors (in Japan
and England) repeating ritual actions and lines. On screen, the
actors, sometimes blindfolded, repeating Foreman’s set
phrases, cross the divide between reality and the imaginary.
Their stumbling and their accented speech approximate the conditions
of poetry. Foreman’s work has always had a ceremonial dimension:
paradise without religion. Film is elegiac, live action a prop
for our projected aspirations. One hour of nonproductive time
in the service of utopia.
Tan Lin ambivalence is a novel with a logo
(Cambridge: Katalanche Press, 2007)
"Forgetting is more beautiful than any photograph."
Michael Kelleher Human Scale
(Buffalo: Blaze Vox, 2007)
Julie Ezelle Patton Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake (Brooklyn: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007)
A typographically exquisite excursion in and around Amiri Baraka’s
names.
Corrine Fitzpatrick on melody dispatch (a chapbook from
Goodbye Better, 2007)
Celebrate THING OF BEAUTY:
New and Selected Works
by Jackson Mac Low edited by Anne Tardos
University of California Press
with
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Joan Retallack, Katie Degentesh, Drew
Gardner
Mitch Highfill, Chris Mason , Charles Bernstein, Anne Tardos
Curated by Marshall Reese
Friday,
18 January 2008
From 6:30 - 8:00 pm
CUE
Art Foundation
511 West 25th Street, (Ground Floor)
10th / 11th Av, New York
———————— Ricard Foreman and Eric Bogosian in conversation
Monday, Feb 4, 7p.m.
Housing Works, 126 Crosby St., Manhattan
at lauch for Bad
Boy Nietzshe! and Other Plays Collects plays written and performed over the six years,
including Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty, Maria
del Bosco, Panic (How to Be Happy!), Bad Boy Nietzche!, Bad
Behavior and King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe.
Richard Foreman's new show opens January 17
——————————
John Perreault
talks about Hannah Weiner’s early street works
in connection with his “Off the Page” show (in formation)
and performs a 1968 flag code poem
followed by Carolee Schneemann
looking for Hannah's photo —
in part 2 of James Kalm’s video of excerpts from
the Poetry Project (St. Marks Church, NYC) celebration of the
publication of
Hannah Weiner’s Open House, ed. Patrick Durgin.
11/28/07
Douglas Messerli
Douglas grew up in Iowa, where New York was as close as his Broadway
musical LPs, which he collected even though he didn’t have
a record player. Sun & Moon, and now Green Integer, sales
reps meetings bring him to town a couple of times a year. Those
trips always give us a chance to spend an evening together, where
we talk of publishing, poetry, theater, the foibles of our legion
of mutual friends, and but mostly our own follies & foibles.
We end up laughing, even at the saddest things. December 10, 2006 (1
min., 16 sec., 5.1 mb)
Peter H. Hare, philosopher and educator, Distinguished Service
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo,
State University of New York, died peacefully in his sleep in
the early morning hours of Thursday, January 3, 2008 at his home
in Guilford, Connecticut. Born in New York City on March 12,
1935, son of the late Jane Perry and Michael Meredith Hare, Peter
is survived by his second wife, the poet Susan Howe, a brother
Michael, a sister Sarah, his son Clare, daughter Gwen, and grandchildren
Danielle and Monty, and numerous friends and students. His first
wife Daphne Hare preceded him in death in 1995.
While an undergraduate at Yale University,
Peter Hare began his life-long relationship with philosophy,
writing a thesis on Alfred North Whitehead as an exemplar of
multi-disciplinary integration. After graduating from Yale, he
earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University where he
wrote a dissertation on G. H. Mead’s metaphysics.
At the age of 36, Dr. Hare was appointed
Full Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department of the
State University of New York at Buffalo. His experience working
with a heterogeneous group of Marxists, logicians, linguists,
and Americanists inspired him to continue the work of bringing
together disparate strands of 20th century thought into a unified
vision of a modern philosophy department.
Through his own writings and teachings,
Hare left an indelible impact upon the history of American philosophy,
helping to draw the works of C.S. Peirce, G. H. Mead, William
James, A. N. Whitehead, and John Dewey into international centrality.
As a committed educator, editor, and participant in professional
organizations, he never ceased in the work of bringing together
disparate stands of philosophy, literature, poetry and art. He
was an accomplished photographer, and at his death he was at
work photographing the Central Park neighborhood of Buffalo for
a publication about the architecture of that area. Many of his
works hang on view at the Philosophy Department where he taught
for so many years.
Dr. Hare traveled widely in the
service of philosophy. Among other posts, he served as President
of the New York State Philosophy Association, the Society for
the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, and the William James Society. He was the recipient
of numerous awards and honors for distinguished contributions
to the understanding and development of the rich diversity of
the American tradition. Since the early 1970s he was co-editor
of the Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly
Journal in American Philosophy. He was editor or co-editor
of numerous volumes, and he was author of more than one hundred
articles in scholarly journals.
A man of abiding pragmatism, optimism,
kindness, enthusiasm, generosity and energy, Dr. Hare will be
remembered by students, philosophers, and people of every walk
of life, from Poland and Russia, to South America to Buffalo.
James Kalm’s video of excerpts
from the Poetry Project (St. Marks Church, NYC) celebration of
the publication of Hannah Weiner’s Open House, ed.
Patrick Durgin.
11/28/07
Part 3: Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein reading with me from Clairvoyant
Journal.
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Vol.
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