=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 1994 10:56:54 +1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Roberts Mark <M.Roberts@UNSW.EDU.AU>
Subject: Harmony/Anarchy
>8. Somewhere near Pittsburgh is a small town called Harmony; it
> began in a utopian gesture sometime near the middle of the
> 19th century. I turned toward my Dodge Dart toward it one
> day in I think it was 1973, but when I arrived it was a dim
> steeltown suburb black with oil and soot of the rivers that
> mingle thereabouts to (at the time) carry away what was not
> wanted in making the steel. I'm trying to remember whether
> I've ever looked at a map and seen a town called Rhyme.
>
>tom mandel
In Victoria Australia there is a town called Anarchy (and North Anarchy).
I've always thought that it would be a good place to edit a poetry mag
from.
I've never driven through Anarchy. A lot of my friends talk about going
there but somehow they never seem to make it!!!
Mark Roberts Ph. 02 385 3631
SIS Project Officer Fax 02 662 4835
Student Information & Systems Office
University of NSW
Australia
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 1994 20:50:09 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Anthologies
re: Marjorie Perloff's pertinent post on head-counts & quotas,
"There are two kinds of pianists. Homosexual
pianists and bad pianists."
Vladimir Horowitz
tom mandel
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 1994 19:27:29 -0700
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From: Marjorie Perloff <perloff@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Anthologies
Tom Mandel has a good point. Don Allen was "lucky"--lucky too in his
particular moment. d In 1958, most poetry was rigidly codified and
uniform in the Hall, Simpson, Rosenthal volumes etc. and then there
began to be a really marked counterculture and s{ that became the New
American Poetry. But since then, there's been a lot of gamesmanshi{
{and concern to be Newer than New without thinking why? and for what?
The best thing an anthology can do is to put work out there that{_ the
readers in question others { r
epi;
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 1994 19:29:12 -0700
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Marjorie Perloff <perloff@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Anthologies
something happened to the computer for last message so please{ignore.
Anyway, I just want to sy
dp
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 1994 19:33:44 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Marjorie Perloff <perloff@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Anthologies
The last note goofed so just to conclude. The best thing the anthology
can do is to put work, unfamiliar as yet, out to those who would profit
from familiarity with it. I've learned a lot about French poetry, for
instance, from some of the anthologies put out by Roubaud, Hocquard,et
al. Ditto about Italian poetry from the Gruoop 93 (Gruppo 93) pub-
lications. Facts are especially useful--like, who, what, where?
{
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 1994 23:32:41 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Marc Nasdor <ABOHC@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Subject: Re: Yau's Review
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 29 Jul 1994 12:43:17 EDT from
<ST001515@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Steve--
I'll reply in reverse:
1. Re: crumbling of the priesthoods. I was only referring to art & academy
priesthoods, which are considerably less of a threat than the one Rushdie
is dealing with.
2. Re: credentials. Was I unclear? I agree with your response, and the tie-in
regarding the question of competence. I thought what I posted was in line
with your answer. (Unfortunately, I mistakenly discarded a copy of my post;
my mother had a minor stroke and I had to rush down to Baltimore.) :-(
3. Re: middle-class honkies. Let me clarify. I meant to say that the middle
class participates fully in that dominance. After all, a dictator, for
example, does not *personally* pull the trigger on each and every victim.
It is important to talk about complicity and responsibility. As far as the
avant-garde is concerned, if you begin in the 19th Century, your conclusions
would be as you state. I think, with respect to the arts, that some power
relationships *have* changed, unless hip-hop culture isn't avant-garde
enough for you. And further, to whose avant-garde do you refer? You assume
a static paradigm. In places like Baltimore (my home town), artists have
expended large amounts of energy crushing the boundaries of their own
community. There's little or no funding, so artists aren't trying to screw
each other as much. I would consider the "alternative" arts communities in
cities like Baltimore or Cleveland to be much healthier than those in
places like New York. The former cities are in such dire economic straits
that artists quickly find common ground.
Marc
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 00:37:15 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nick Lawrence <V121NQND@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: further & additional
further murmurings on the subject of anthologies
our gut reaction--we of the counter-counter-counterhegemonic--to the recent
slew of post-New American Poetry anthologies seems to be one of queasiness, as
if it were all somehow not a good sign; our understanding being as Steve points
out that institutional culture's certifications of competencies will coagulate
as canons--canons to the right of us, but never canons to the left of us; &
that the debate over inclusion and representation, however necessary, leaves
the primary legitimizing mechanism unquestioned
but what *are* the uses of anthologies? in the case of Allen's, it's been
suggested, not simply to introduce a body of work to a wider readership, but
also the diverse forms of (social) life implicated in & by that work--not
diverse enough, as it turned out, to present an approximation of "what America
looks like," but
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 01:33:37 -0400
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nick Lawrence <V121NQND@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
(contd)
to suggest at least more of what America *sounds* like than was currently
available. As a sourcebook, Allen's collection seemed able to do what so few
anthologies manage--that is, defeat the authoritative guardianship of its own
frame and actively instigate the reader to follow up on the still-unfolding
projects provisionally mapped out within its pages; first-stop reference rather
than only-stop textbook or monument
and it seems difficult to envision the girls and boys of Tulsa, OK fingering the
pages of any of the recent crop of books & placing checkmarks next to their
favored authors for future research--though one shouldn't disallow this
possibility
So: if we distance ourselves from the various models of purely "subjective"
garland-gathering, grimly inclusive compendiums, slackly conceived thematic
clusterings or transparently legitimizing continuity-narratives, can we
nonetheless find a further use for the anthology form? What might it be? Steve
Evans mentioned the possibility of an anthology explicitly addressing the
connections between avant-garde poetries and oppositional social movements, &
I'd be curious to hear more about that (poetry only? prose excerpts? one
ponders the spectacle of a Pound Canto followed by the transcript of a Father
Coughlin radio broadcast--oppositional cutting several ways)
Can, then, the form renew attention to its social placing as well as to its own
formal determinations?
Proposals?
Nick
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Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 12:03:23 EDT
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jed <RASULAJ@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA>
In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 2 Aug 1994 01:33:37 -0400 from
<V121NQND@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Nick Lawrence's reference to the Allen anthology as "first-stop reference rathe
r than final stop monument" points up the current perplexity in which it *has*
become monumentalized. It clearly did function, for years if not decades, as a
first stop, a research tool (Allen's bibliography--and how many anthologists
even offer such a thing?--included dozens of magazines, names of the editors,
span of run, and location, and concluded with addresses of fifteen publishers).
Allen's inclusion of a whole section of statements on poetics defied the look
of generic purity for which so many editors strive--although it's important to
note that the most important precedent setting anthology from the other end of
that decade, John Ciardi's "Mid-Century American Poets" (1950), included essays
on poetics by *each* of the selected poets. Finally, Allen's mapping of poets
into five clusters (which Messerli attempts to replicate with, I think, much
incoherence) advances the sense of potential internal dissension. As a table
of contents it evokes, to use Nate Mackey's wonderful title, a "discrepant
engagement." Every anthology has its discrepancies, but they're invariably
attributable to the editor's taste rather than, as Allen provided for, the
divergent working conditions/poetics/practices of communities of poets.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 20:06:52 EDT
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From: kat <KLINDBE@CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU>
In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 2 Aug 1994 12:03:23 EDT from
<RASULAJ@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA>
Yes, the ALlen anthology did what we needed. It seems that many current
books, anthologies not alone, fail to think of simple utility. Students
and fellow travellers--is such a distinction is to be made--should be
helped toward further research and other more lively exploration. Anyway,
just a thought. By the way, I didn't understand the texture of comments
on credentials. When did credentials ever get to be--or float--above
the market, either at the stage of evaluation or transaction? And,
perhaps because the protocols aren't as FIXED as for, say, AMA, or NRA,
poetry and criticism are particularly "market sensitive."
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 23:20:10 EDT
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Marc Nasdor <ABOHC@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Subject: Re: further & additional
In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 2 Aug 1994 00:37:15 -0400 from
<V121NQND@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Nick--
I'm not sure that *poets* are what America looks like.
--Marc Nasdor
abohc@cunyvm.cuny.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 09:09:49 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: anthologorrhia
Is there nothing to stem the tide of rhetorical questions posing
as poetics?
"So: if we distance ourselves from the various models of purely "subjective"
garland-gathering, grimly inclusive compendiums, slackly conceived thematic
clusterings or transparently legitimizing continuity-narratives, can we..."
No, we cannot distance ourselves from what we are within. A master
metaphor of subject matter with our royal selves outside it in
consideration is at once useless and apparently the sole operative
in the discourse on this net. Geez...
And .... an anthology explicitly addressing the
connections between avant-garde poetries and oppositional social movements"
..is not an anthology but an essay or the syllabus for a course
on the canon we would prefer (to the left of us, of course -- for 200
years now -- nor do I disagree), i.e. another example of what I referred
to in my post the other day as "substitution". Thinking by substitution.
An old story told in the advertising/marketing industry (I'm sorry if
my reference materials do not meet appropriate credentialar traditions)
may shed some light on what Brecht did *not* mean by "plumpe Denken"
(crude thinking):
a man walks into a bar and says to the bartender, give
me a johny walker. Would that be a johny walker red or
johny walker black, the bartender replies. Now, our
protoganist thinks for a long moment. "Oh hell, he says,
give me a chivas."
c'mon. cut thru it (thru to it).
tom mandel
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 13:03:48 EDT
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Comments: Converted from PROFS to RFC822 format by PUMP V2.2X
From: Alan Golding <ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU>
Subject: Twentieth-Century Literature Conference
Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville
Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
A little break from anthologies and their discontents: namely, some conference
information that y'all, as we (they?) say in Kentucky, might be interested in.
Every year, last weekend in February, the University of Louisville hosts a
national conference on twentieth-century lit. (broadly defined--the program
includes theory papers, film, etc.) A number of you have attended in the past,
of course, and know all about it. Anyway, here's the dope on the 1995
conference:
Conference dates are Feb. 23-25, 1995. Submission deadline is Oct. 3, 1994. We
consider critical and creative submissions (that charged term . . .). Critical
submissions should consist of 2 copies of a readable-in-20-minutes paper, a
250-word abstract, brief bio, and cover sheet with address, phone number(s),
affiliation. Creative work submitted should be suitable for a 20-minute
reading and can consist of published or unpublished work. The structure is
that of your standard academic conference: typically, three papers on a panel,
with time for discussion. Creative "sessions" usually feature three short
readings. You can submit in both categories, critical and creative. We also
consider pre-organized panels, in case any of you want to get together on
something; in such cases, panelists should follow the guidelines for
individual submissions, since papers are reviewed individually.
The conference features two keynote speakers, and often some further special
presentations or readings. In recent years, speakers/readers have included
Susan Howe, David Antin, Marjorie Perloff, Jerry McGann, Clayton Eshleman, Ed
Dorn, Louise Gluck, Alicia Ostriker, W. S. Merwin, Robert Scholes, Neil
Lazarus, Hortense Spillers, Sherley Anne Williams, Jane Gallop, Frank
Lentricchia, Michael Burkard, Susan Jeffords, Tess Gallagher.
Any further info., including a handy-dandy nicely printed call for papers, can
be gotten from Harriette Seiler, Conference Director, Department of Languages,
University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292. Tel. 502-852-6686; FAX
502-852-8885.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 15:15:15 CST6CDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Hank Lazer <HLAZER@AS.UA.EDU>
Organization: Arts and Sciences Dean's Office
Subject: Re: Twentieth-Century Literature Conference
Alan-- just got your e-mail about the 20th C. Lit conference.
Perhaps I can cook something up & attend/present.
Also, just got the official word from Northwestern University Press
(a few moments ago) that my book (of essays, called Opposing
Poetries) has been accepted. The press board met last week &
approved publication. Now, as you know, it's on to corrections,
revisions, getting the damned thing out at last. Thought you'd be
interested. (Though I suspect that you've looked over the manuscript
I sent them....?)
Pank
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Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 16:32:29 EDT
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Comments: Converted from PROFS to RFC822 format by PUMP V2.2X
From: Alan Golding <ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU>
Subject: Re: Twentieth-Century Literature Conference
In-Reply-To: note of 08/03/94 16:19
Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville
Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
Great news about the book--congratulations! I confidently expect it to be one
of the best in a long time. Actually I wasn't a reader. Marjorie had suggested
to Northwestern (she told me) that they contact me, but they never did--so you
have the approval of genuinely outside readers. (Marjorie and Lynn Keller were
mine, which is a little "in-house," I suppose, but the Press wanted to use the
readers who had originally approved the prospectus. And Marjorie is always
usefully tough, even with her friends--one of her many intellectual virtues.)
It'd be great if you could get up to the conference. Remember that if you want
to cook up a panel with some other folks, that's always a possibility. As is,
of course, your poetry. I hope Ron and Kent do come through with a chapbook,
but as I've probably said before, I wouldn't hold my breath.
What did you end up including in the book? Maybe you could stick a table of
contents in the mail if you get a chance.
Alan
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 16:54:54 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Converted from PROFS to RFC822 format by PUMP V2.2X
From: Alan Golding <ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU>
Subject: Free-floating mail
Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville
Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
Sorry you all just got burdened with what I thought was, or tried to make
into, a personal note to Hank Lazer. That pesky "reply" function got me again.
One day I'll figure this shit out. Of course, now you're burdened with this .
. .
I wonder if the debates over the privacy issues that e-mail raises factor in
the unpredictable results of just plain old incompetence . . .
Alan Golding
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 16:18:58 CST6CDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: HLAZER@AS.UA.EDU
Organization: Arts and Sciences Dean's Office
Subject: Re: e-mail
My apologies to readers for my error in sending "private" mail to
everyone. Ah, the hazards of e-mail...
I have been interested in the anthology debates and am in the midst
of formulating some thoughts as I do a review/essay on Hoover,
Messerli, and Lauter (Heath & other Am Lit anthologies). I'll share
these jottings as they get father along.
I just returned from a few days at Harvard, mainly doing
administrative work and checking into the Harvard Summer Dance
Program. It was my first trip to Boston, so, of course, I checked
out the allegedly wonderful bookstores. I stayed in a dorm just down
the block from the Grolier and from the Harvard Bookstore. Everyone
told me how wonderful they are. They're right about the Italian food
in North End, wrong about the bookstores. I was shocked. Nothing by
Bernstein, Hejinian, Susan Howe, etc. Harvard Bookstore has next to
its poetry section a quote from Ishmael Reed about how in American
Literature there is not a mainstream but many streams etc. But what
they stocked was strictly mainstream. Given the association of folks
such as Bernstein, Hejinian, and Howe with Harvard, I was genuinely
taken aback. I ended up having a long talk with one of the book-
order people in the bookstore, and I left them a list of books,
poets, distributors. You may wish to snicker at my naivete, but in
other areas--philosophy, theory, art--the bookstore did have some
range in selections. In poetry, though, the line drawn in the sand
is deep. As most of you know, such is not the case in plenty of
bookstores we can name in San Francisco, Milwaukee, Washington D.C.,
Berkeley, (even in Tuscaloosa). Leaves me wondering how such control
can be so "perfectly" managed in Cambridge in poetry? I've come to
expect such "control" in the chain bookstores....
Again, apologies for private mail publicly blared....
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 1994 09:21:18 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Joe Amato <jamato@UX1.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail
In-Reply-To: <199408041240.AA05115@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> from "HLAZER@as.ua.edu"
at Aug 3, 94 04:18:44 pm
hank, they wouldn't have poetry selection, but the odd thing is that
the tower records/video in back bay is where you'd have found, say,
the entire semiotext(e)/autonomedia line, along with the beats,
certain strands of evidently more 'hip' critical/literary work
(virilio, ballard, etc.)...
quite a scene, right next to the grunge and such, surely SOME sorta
comment on the times...
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 1994 11:50:00 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: tiger barb / clown loach? <KWTUMA@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail
In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 3 Aug 1994 16:18:58 CST6CDT from
<HLAZER@AS.UA.EDU>
Oh to be a tenured prof swimming heroically in the shallows, upstream against
the controlled flow of the army bored of engineers. A veritable burr in the
panopticon!
Is "mainstream" a convenience or a dead metaphor perpetuating our posturing?
If there is a "mainstream" it's in the middle of the river, carries not just
sludge and muck but also good driftwood, and moves and changes fast. Rowboats
and weak paddles aren't very effective there. Human voices wake us or we
drown. Human voices wake us and we drown. As Woody Guthrie says, both sides
of the river we drown just the same.
Blathering...lathering...acid bath
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 1994 15:05:55 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: MARK WALLACE <V212XHM3@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: Re: Submission
What thrills me about Alan Golding's recent piece "Submission"
in relation to the recent discussion of anthologies
and other power games, in poetry and otherwise,
is the implication of how much is never discussed,
even by those who may be critical of such practices,
of the complicated manuevers by which power decisions
are often made.
Even critiques of power tend to frame themselves
in terms of what constitutes "acceptable" public debate--
issues like class, race, representation
are acceptable to talk about,
things like personal animosity, gossip, many others,
are usually left alone,
I guess in the name of privacy,
but the problem of power decisions
is that they like to be made in private.
So, does the frame in which critiques of power
tend to limit themselves
also tend to limit potential understanding
of how those decisions are actually made?
Do such critiques therefore further the fiction
that "public" debate exists,
when in fact the very rules by which such debate is limited,
in most contexts,
mean that often no one except those who made the decisions
has any access to how they went down?
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 1994 18:24:23 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: mainstream
"and it's ever-present everywhere
and it's everpresent every-ware
warm love
warn love
yes it's evry present everware"
Van Morrison
on Hardnose the Highway
Of course, tsking at the Cambridge bookstores, Hank Lazer, whom
I now presume cavalierly to speak for and interpret as you see, was
expressing what many-a-one, alonesome in a new town, might feel -- a
longing for familiarity and the sense that in some related way her
human mark was here already. A welcome. Like you get here.
tom
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 1994 23:26:20 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Resent-From: Marc Nasdor <ABOHC@CUNYVM>
Comments: Originally-From: HLAZER@AS.UA.EDU
From: Marc Nasdor <ABOHC@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Organization: Arts and Sciences Dean's Office
Subject: Re: e-mail
Hank Lazer writes:
> Leaves me wondering how such control
> can be so "perfectly" managed in Cambridge in poetry? I've come to
> expect such "control" in the chain bookstores....
I would propose that one cannot have it both ways, to criticize the academy
and then expect it to offer its support. Just because there happen to be a few
enlightened poets and scholars in a few literature departments doesn't mean the
literary world has somehow reoriented itself. In fact, the protectors of
"official verse culture" never disappeared, never stopped treating as anathema
the "language" writers, NY School, beat writing, etc. So it doesn't surprise me
that one might find individuals with the aforementioned attitudes among those
responsible for stocking Boston's poetry stacks.
Marc Nasdor
abohc@cynuvm.cuny.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 10:27:34 GMT-0BST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Peter Larkin <LYAAZ@LIBRIS.LIB.WARWICK.AC.UK>
Organization: UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK LIBRARY
Subject: Puffery
Prest Roots Press (Kenilworth UK.)
The following titles can be ordered in dollars via: Paul Green,83B
London Road, Peterborough, PE2 9BS UK (making cheques out to "Paul
Green"). They will then be shipped to you direct from the publisher.
Prest Roots Press was begun in 1987 to bring together
innovatory British poetry and fine (not "crafty") hot-metal printing
techniques at prices for readers rather than collectors. More
recently, a subseries called "Prest Roots 2" has been launched on
offset for readers who have no hope of being anything other, though
the texts still remain quite collectable. The main series still
continues, though its delays are finer than ever.
Letterpress Series:
Thomas A Clark Dwellings and Habitations 1 871237 10 6 $12.00
J.H. Prynne Word Order 1989 1 871237 04 1 $15.00
Paul Green Comparative Daimon 1990 1 871237 05 X $13.50
D.S. Marriott Airs and Ligatures 1990 1 871237 07 6
Peter Larkin Pastoral Advert 1988 1 871237 02 5 $15.00
Peter Larkin Scarce Norm Scarcer Mean 1992 1 871237 08 4 $15.00
Simon Lewty Cradles of the New 1994 1 871237 12 2 $19.50
Alain Delahaye (Trans Anthony Barnett) The Lost One 1 871237 03 3
$15.00
Peter Riley Sea Watches 1990 1 871237 $15.00
Prest Roots 2 (Offset)
Peter Larkin Additional Trees 1992 1 871237 09 2 $6.00
Simon Smith Night Shift 1994 1 871237 11 4 $6.00
John Wilkinson Chalone 1994 1 871237 13 0 $9.00
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 11:19:28 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael <MCAMP00@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail
In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 4 Aug 1994 11:50:00 EST from
<KWTUMA@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU>
In response to the tiger barb's deconstruction of the tired "mainstream"
metaphor, I say:
Ditto...with a little less acid.
Or, to quote Hank Williams, "If I jumped in a river, I'd probably drown."
Reporting from the mainstream of America--Georgetown, Kentucky--where even
an "official verse culture" sounds promising...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Campbell
Dept. of English
Georgetown College
Georgetown, KY 40324
(502) 863-8090
mcamp00@ukcc.uky.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 11:34:34 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael <MCAMP00@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail
In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 4 Aug 1994 23:26:20 EDT from <ABOHC@CUNYVM>
Marc Nasdor writes:
"I would propose that one cannot have it both ways, to criticize the academy
and then expect it to offer its support."
To which I respond:
Why not? As far as I can tell, the strategy has worked pretty damn well
for quite a few poets and "schools" of poetry. If I can pick up books
by David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe and Michael Palmer at the
University of Kentucky bookstore--as I did a few weeks back--what does
it matter that Harvard--in many ways the "official verse culture" incarnate--
fails to stock certain "out of the mainstream" poets? I should be so
marginalized.
Stagnantly yours...
Michael Campbell
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 12:23:28 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jorge Guitart <MLLJORGE@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: Re: e-mail
harvard bookstore
carries the nothing that is
happening
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 12:09:27 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Marjorie Perloff <perloff@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail
Re: the Harvard controversy. It's been my experience that the tonier
the university, the less likely it is to have any interest in poetry,
art, etc etc. that isn't absolutely mainstream. It goes with the
territory and Hank is quite right. I think of John Cage who was a hero
in places like Knoxville College but scorned at Yale and Harvard. it
shows little has changed.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 19:43:11 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: kat <KLINDBE@CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 5 Aug 1994 12:09:27 -0700 from
<perloff@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
ditto on the eccentricity of poetry to power-lunch universities.
Just a note and query, though.
How about Grolier Bookshop? It's been a time since I was there, but
Louisa Solano, who does have to survive in the tight confines of
course lists, did make an effort to keep some books up. What's
the current verdict?
Also, poetry happens in places and ways that escape our grasp. It
might even be the case that poetry that we know not to advance the art,
craft, idea that we'd like has a positive function. The one Holy and
Apostolic Canon, represented by representatives at Harvard, etc., should
not inspire us to erect counters that simply serve the same exclusionary
function. I say this badly and with too much wind, but what I mean is
that, like those bad paintings in houses across USA that became WCW's
metphor for his metaphorics, poetry of the street, church, classroom,
and computer has place. Perhaps idling by the shore of poluted rivers.
From Detroit, where one has the confluence of many streams, hello.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 22:13:58 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Mn Center For Book Arts <mcba@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: bookstores & the lack thereof
X-To: UB Poetics discussion group
<POETICS%UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU@vm1.spcs.umn.edu>
In-Reply-To: (null)
I am somewhat surprised at any naivete regarding bookstores. I have
thought for a long time that there might be four or five in the whole
country which have a varied selection of poetry which would include small
presses to any but a marginal degree and would include innovative (OK,
that's as misguided & loaded a word as mainstream) work at all. I was, in
fact, pleased & knocked off my feet when I moved to Minneapolis a year ago
and found that Hungry Mind Bookstore in Saint Paul actually had Chax Press
books (several of them). Still, to my mind that bookstore has its own
limitations. My measure in poetry is certainly Woodland Pattern in
Milwaukee, which is, I believe, unequalled. Yet I applaud all those who
are trying in this area. I am surprised & pleased to find from the
correspondence on this forum that I may have to add the University of
Kentucky bookstore to my short list. Maybe there is a chance . . .
reading & wandering the aisles,
charles alexander
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 1994 23:31:40 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael Campbell <MCAMP00@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
Subject: Re: bookstores & the lack thereof
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 5 Aug 1994 22:13:58 -0500 from
<mcba@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Sorry, I wasn't recommending the University of Kentucky bookstore for any
"short list"--it's selection is spotty at best. I was just pointing out--
as everyone is all too aware, I'm sure--that what bookstores stock is
often unpredictable and that Harvard's "mainstream" bias is hardly
surprising.
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 1994 23:11:53 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jed <RASULAJ@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA>
Subject: Re: e-mail
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 5 Aug 1994 19:43:11 EDT from
<KLINDBE@CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU>
The Harvard Coop's choice in books is not to be marveled at--it's just another
big bookstore that's gone the way of nearly all university bookstores: it sells
books as a front for more lucrative merchandise (coffee mugs, beer steins,
pretzel dishes, sweatshirts, even a sizeable CD & tape section); and its select
ion of poetry is exactly what you'll find in any commercial outlet that stocks
its shelves by way of the nearest jobber (wholesale).
What *is* disturbing in
Cambridge is that the Grolier, which really did use to be a place to score
fetchingly reclusive small press (& often out of print) items, seems to have
been converted almost entirely to the trade publishing/university press matrix.
I discovered this when I went back in 1991 (after not having been around the
Cambridge area in six or seven years), later thought it might've been an
anomaly, so when I was there last summer checked again: both times found
*nothing* on the shelves by _______ (you name it: nobody from "In the American
Tree," for starters--well, maybe "The Nonconformist's Memorial" was in there
last year, since Grolier does get New Directions...)
--but how to take this?
Does it mean an establishment shutout? Or might it rather be that the post-New
American Poetry/Language poetry nexus so efficiently developed its own means
of production & distribution during the 1980s that it doesn't need the support
of Grolier & other "poetry" bookstores?
--Jed Rasula
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 1994 21:09:30 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Hannah <dhannah@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: clown barb et al.
as the wag muttered / re: his position as he saw it /
"i'm in the eddies of the gush" /
familiar?
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 1994 12:47:46 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Don Byrd <djb85@CSC.ALBANY.EDU>
Subject: Poetry & book stores
In-Reply-To: <9408070328.AA00483@sarah.albany.edu> from "Jed" at Aug 6,
94 11:11:53 pm
When Barnes & Nobles and Border's put stores into Albany,
the store that passed for our "literary" store folded. It had a
small gallery, made space for readings, performances, and so forth.
It was a pleasant community place (and three blocks from my house).
The owner of that store once told me that the poetry
section produced more browsers and fewer buyers than any other
section of the store. People would stop by the poetry books,
read a poem or two, and go on to Literary Criticism, Women's
Studies, etc.
The sad fact is that B&N's and Border's have _better_
poetry sections than the old Boulevard Book Store. They have better
facilities for readings, etc. (And they give teachers 20%-25% discounts.)
The problem is that, if books are not available from their distributor,
they tell you that they are out of print. Thus, all small press
books and many university press books are 'o.p.'
In one way this should be cause for considerable celebration.
Serious poetry has disappeared from consumer culture.
It is interesting that this should happen at precisely the
time books seem to be having a great resurgence. The two new
bookstores in Albany are wildly successful. They are open until
11 p.m., everyday. I have had to stand in line at the check-out
at 10:30 on sunday night.
B&N is marketing itself as a pick-up place: full page ad
in the local paper with bombshell beauty in horn-rim glasses reading
Nietzsche (shelves of books in background), "I met the nicest
person in philosophy! (Nietzsche or CEO in training?)
There is a rumor that they are having a single's night, but I
have not been able to confirm this.
In all honesty, how much poetry do the subscribers to
this list buy? Most of the poetry I read is given to me. Much of
the poetry that is most important to me is first given to me in
xerox.... I would guess that no more than 5% of the money I spend
on books is spent on poetry.
Don Byrd
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 1994 21:32:04 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: keith tuma <KWTUMA@MIAMIU.ACS.MUOHIO.EDU>
Subject: Re: clown barb et al.
In-Reply-To: Message of Sat, 6 Aug 1994 21:09:30 -0500 from
<dhannah@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
Marjorie is right that, historically, the so-called elite institutions have
been slower to respond to so-called innovation in the arts, though I'm not sure
that this applies across all institutions and "disciplines." The provinces
have always wanted and had to work harder to seem to be "up to speed," which is
one thing that marks them as "provincial." And Jed is right that the failure
of many bookstores to stock alternative and small press titles--there are some
exceptions I know of, in Portland, Chicago, New York, etc.--must be understood
not just as a cause for but also as a result of the small success of lp and
other groups in creating alternative networks (SPD of course, but listservs
like this have potential). But the tiger barb never wanted this to be a chat
about bookstores; that "flaming" was rather directed at the posturing which so
often is a rhetorical strategy in the self-appointed avant-garde, and sometimes
is worse than that, resulting in delusions of grandeur. We are not
"enlightened," for instance, just because we read, teach, or write on language
poetry or whatever. We've just signed on to one aesthetic (politics, etc.)
among many. To use a word like "mainstream" casually--or, worse, as
if it means something as undefined and unexplored as it usually is --is just
to pose or to assert some (illusory) power. Perhaps it also forges community--
one uses the caricature and joins the club, as it were. Now, no one wants to
deny that there is a whole lot of terrible work being published by "big"
(really just "bigger") houses and promoted at Iowa or whatever. But there are
also talented writers among the so-called "mainstream," many of whom are
completely ignored by the alternative scene, which prefers to create bogeymen.
This seems to me particularly true of the academic poetry critics and scholars.
Look at journals like ALH or Contemporary Lit or American Literature over the
last few years. Count the essays on lp, or on the lineage lp would construct
for itself (Zukofsky, Oppen, Stein, etc.) For that matter count the number of
lp writers now publishing with major academic presses or employed by good
universities. This is not a bad thing, it seems to me-quite the contrary--
but it does indicate that we must be careful about blunt, self-serving
caricatures. Am I supposed to believe that would-be lp poet number 709 is
more interesting than--oh I don't know, Thom Gunn or Jim Powell or Roy Fisher--
just because he or she is proud to announce one way or another that he or she
is not stylistically or (sub)professionally a part of "that" world? When will
the so-called avant-garde crawl down off its antiquated donkey and begin
thinking about and writing about poets as individuals? There is considerably
more sophistication out there than we're sometimes led to believe. And the
old binaries--"mainstream" and "alternative," you name them--no longer obtain,
or , rather, they are transparently falsifying rhetoric without careful
delineation and definition. bernadette mayer says in a recent interview that
"it's important to like all kinds of poetry" (more on this is the next Sulfur)
and--while I am not willing to go that far, want to be able to say instead
"all good poetry"--she has a point. Moreover, she indicates one way out of
the corner the self-styled avant-garde is perpetually in danger of painting
itself into. That is, one can forge alliances that cross traditional
boundaries. If the so-called "mainstream" ignores you, don't ignore it,
and don't be predictable in your response to its products.
i could go on, but it's indescribably boring for me to go on in this mode of
discourse when I said it all better by "flaming." My gratitute to those
who have responded with a little flair, a little panache.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 1994 21:52:53 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Mn Center For Book Arts <mcba@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail
X-To: UB Poetics discussion group
<POETICS%UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU@vm1.spcs.umn.edu>
In-Reply-To: (null)
Jed, I seem to remember getting a message from the Grolier Book Shop
sometime in the 1980's, probably the mid-80's but perhaps even a year or
two earlier than that, as a producer of small press (even hand printed,
limited edition) books that they once bought, that they were beginning to
get their books only from distributors (my assumption was that they were
streamlining the business & not giving particular attention to presses any
more), & perhaps that the main distributor for small press was going to be
Inland Books (although my memory is fuzzy on this). As you may know,
though, this would mean they would lose 90 or better % of small press lit
books they were getting, & certainly almost all that would be far from the
MFA programs' A List. I don't think I've had an order from Grolier since
then, but the question would be a good one for Steve Dickison at Small
Press Distribution or James Sherry of Segue Distribution (which is missed).
all best,
charles alexander
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 1994 10:10:41 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Joe Amato <jamato@UX1.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
Subject: clown barb et. al...
keith, just a friendly amendment to what you've writ, with which i am in
essential agreement...
the "mainstream," i think, whatever one means by same, however
multifarious, however much a straw---entity, is nevertheless a pretty
cranked up media scene, in terms of money and distribution etc, relative
to, say, benjamin's day... and i cite benjamin simply because he makes his
way into so much 'mainstream' criticism these days...
by which i mean to say that there are nasty aesthetic connotations to
'mainstream' with which i might concur, but that in general i think of this
category more in economic-demographic, as opposed to aesthetic, terms...
anything can make its way there, good bad what have you... but if one
*plays* to it, well---could result in garbage, aesthetically speaking, i
dunno, mebbe not...
if you get my drift...
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 1994 16:59:01 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael Boughn <mboughn@EPAS.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Re: clown barb et al.
Yes, Keith. I don t know who (where) you are out there, but thanks for
the swift shot of sanity. It seems we expend (waste) far to much energy
policing the purity of the empire(s) of the same, often out of sheer ego-
terrorism. Too bad, because poetry often winds up as a cheap accessory
in career maneuvers. Another option, or additional mode (to your
proposal for a more universal general attention) is more focus on the local
in all it s breadth and depth. This is something Diane Di Prima always
used to organize when she came through Buffalo--some event where
everyone, across the board, got together and read to each other. The
surprises were wonderful. (Remember that, Jorge?) I know this is not
possible in every physical locality as it is in a place like Buffalo which has
a large base of diverse writers, but perhaps it has as much to do with a
different attention, a different vision (say, intent) as it does with topos. A
lot of the war footing we find ourselves occupied with has to do with
ghostly residues of other people s old, left over wars. (Gee, what else is
new?) Like, wow, it must have been so cool to have a real enemy you
could hate to pieces while bonding like crazy with your buddy over a
Lucky Strike in a foxhole. Ah well. Perhaps, sad to say, there is no longer
any other use for poetry than maneuvering to be in position to eventually
get your own Gap ad: (blank) wore khakis during the great, avant-
guarde poetry anthology wars of 94 against the Mainstream. Hey, a
hundred grand is nothing to shake a stick at. Or is it?
Best,
Mike
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 1994 17:34:28 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Watts <cwatts@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Poetry & book stores
In-Reply-To: <199408071656.JAA27578@whistler.sfu.ca> from "Don Byrd" at Aug 7,
94 12:47:46 pm
People familiar with Lisa Robertson's Proprioception Books, 432 Homer, in
Vancouver will be dismayed to hear that as of August 27th, this
wonderful bookstore is no longer a place in space. Lisa will,
however, continue to sell poetry books on line (if you're interested,
contact Lisa at (604) 681-8199 before August 27th; I don't have an
e-mail address for her). This year, Vancouver will have lost both of
the bookshops that have paid particular attention to the writing and
reading of poetry over the past decade: Proprioception Books and Renee
Rodin's R2B2 Books on West 4th Avenue. Both have folded because their
revenue wasn't enough to meet expenses, despite a loyal but, alas, too
small following. It's been a hard year for writing and the arts in
Vancouver: the death of Roy Kiyooka in January and the death of Warren
Tallman in July, and the demise of the two bookshops which have
supported poetry most in Vancouver. Who will take their places?
Charles Watts
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 14:16:32 +1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Philip Mead <philip_mead@MUWAYF.UNIMELB.EDU.AU>
Subject: poetics discussion list
2:18 PM DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH 11/8/94
THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
poetics discussion list
Hi - my name is Philip Mead and I was wondering if I could sign up for the
poetics discussion list I hear you have at Buffalo. I teach poetry and
poetics here at the University of Melbourne and am one of the co-editors of
the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 11:42:57 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Loss Glazier <lolpoet@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Question re: _For Love_
For a paper I am writing, I find myself a little puzzled by the fact
that, according to my information, Robert Creeley's _For Love_ (1962)
sold 47,000 copies. The puzzlement occurs for this reason: is that
not an _extraordinary_ number of copies for a poetry book to sell?
This leads me to wonder what social or other factors might have been
at work in the early 60s that would contribute to a poetry book
selling such a large number of copies. (I mean, this would be an
astonishing number for any of our books to sell today, no?) I feel,
though, that I may be overlooking some obvious circumstances or making
some obvious blunder in wondering about this fact. I would be
grateful if anyone could suggest what I may not be considering or some
reference to production factors at the time that I may be overlooking.
Thanks,
Loss
---------------------------------------------------------------
Loss Glazier
lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 16:55:13 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Marjorie Perloff <perloff@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Question re: _For Love_
For Loss Glazier: Creeley has always been a popular poet, a best seller
in Germany--people think he's accessible (though he really isn't
accessible in the way people think). Then, too, it's a book of
Love Poems so that appeals to the average reader even though again,
they're not really love poems. But most important: in the early
60s there weren't so many outlets--there weren't endless small press
books and so there was a limited set of books and those might then actually
sell. Look into the numbers and you'll see what I mean. Bob von Hallberg's
first chapter in his book on Contemp Poetry is good for this.
Best wishes, Marjorie Perloff
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 1994 15:46:01 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jed Rasula <RASULAJ@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA>
Subject: Re: Question re: _For Love_
In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 11 Aug 1994 11:42:57 -0400 from
<lolpoet@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Does that figure about 47,000 copies of *For Love* having sold derive from Robe
rt von Hallberg's book? (I think he provides figures for Dorn sales too, which
are also impressive). My sense is that that's the figure of total sales over a
good number of years--in the case of Creeley, Scribner's kept that book in prin
t in that form for, I would guess, nearly twnety years. But ask Bob, surely he'
d know if anybody would.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 1994 10:37:44 GMT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Folan, Bernie" <folan@SAGELTD.CO.UK>
How can I join this list?
Sorry. I don't have the subscription details.
SUBSCRIBE BERNIE FOLAN
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 1994 19:11:38 CST6CDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: HLAZER@AS.UA.EDU
Organization: Arts and Sciences Dean's Office
Subject: Re: Question re: _For Love_
X-To: Jed Rasula <RASULAJ@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA>
Jed & others...
regarding sales figures. check out sales for Plath's ARIEL. I
recall years ago reading that that one (also from the early 60s) sold
well over 100,000 copies. (and then there's Ginsberg's Howl ...)
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 01:15:25 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Evans <ST001515@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: plumpe Denken
Though I've been prevented by a crammed schedule from
actively participating here in the past couple of weeks,
I wonder if I could take advantage of the recent lull
to backtrack a little.
Following what I thought was a brilliant, if acidic,
posting on anthologies on July 31, Tom Mandel wrote a
response--more or less to Nick Lawrence, I gather--on
3 August that said:
"No, we cannot distance ourselves from what we are
within. A master metaphor of subject matter with our
royal selves outside it in consideration is at once
useless and apparently the sole operative in this dis-
course on the net. Geez..."
To the extent that Tom is sharply ("crudely"?) rebuking
theoreticism, I agree. On the other hand, I think the
point invokes a spectre of total absorption that is quite
as false as the glib distantiation it means to discredit.
Our engagements, with poetic practice, with institutions,
with traditions, are more loosely woven than that--or so
it is in my experience; and so the majority of postings
I've read on this list--including the recent admonitions
against caricaturing oneself or one's imagined antagonists
by Keith Tuma / tiger barb--indicate.
It is the porousness of practice that opens poetry to
poetics, that permits posing counterfactual questions in
rotten conditions (how could this condition not be rotten?),
and allows most working people, including graduate students
and professors, to quit their jobs several times a day,
with or without notifying the boss.
But more important than my opinion here is a simple question:
what *should* we be doing, Tom? What would "cut it" ("cut
thru to it") in your mind?
It goes without saying that this list has never come near to
exhausting the potential it presents us, though it also goes
without saying that we've been sticking--for no material reason
that I can discern--with a model of "substitution" (of one
"topic" for another, e.g.) when the logic of multiplication
seems built into the very form of the forum.
To put it "plumpe": there aren't any legs, so belief in the dog
is superfluous.
On a somewhat different tack: I'm still thinking about Don Byrd's
claim that "serious poetry has disappeared from consumer culture,"
and about whether to celebrate or not. I suppose the recent def-
ences of the mainstream indicate that at least some people on the
list do not agree, but I'd be interested to read further responses.
Finally, and to no specific purpose, from Robin Blaser's "Even on
Sunday,"
so to be reminded once again of Puddin'head Wilson: _It was wonderul
to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it_
_this unified mankind_--for that's who's there, quantity or lump, at the
end of a materialist's or an idealist's history--_conveived_, Mayer writes,
_as a homogenized humanity. Woe to outsiders_
so that was it, was it? an _Enlightenment that promised equality to men and
women, including homosexuals_! an age in the hole, running three
centuries, surely allows one to say, "Listen, you assholes, a _metaphysical
washout_ means you've lost your topsoil"
Plumpe!
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 13:09:00 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Clint Burnham <clint.burnham@CANREM.COM>
Organization: CRS Online (Toronto, Ontario)
Subject: plumpe Denken
In-Reply-To: <9408150659.AA16103@portnoy.canrem.com>
This is partly following Steve Evans comments on Brechtian thinking, and
also apropos of the comments on bookstores disappearing from those
peculiar hell-holes, American college towns.
Rebukes against theoreticism always seem to be misplaced, 'cause quite
often those of us who feel fairly much against overly abstract and
non-political formalism are still really part of the culture
(generation?) of people educated in the 1980s (say, in North America &
Europe, but given the dissemination of post-colonial theory, almost
anywhere) that was and is intractably theoretical.
Re Don Byrd's "potry disappearing from consumer culture," I'd be very
sad if that happened, but maybe I don't think of them as being very
separate. I mean, unless we're talking about precious little handprinted
books you can only find in ten places on the planet, poetry as I
understand the term is a part of consumer culture even as it sometimes
offers critiques and works thru what all these things mean. Quite often,
it seems to me, those who pose themselves against consumer culture just
mean the more *apparently* commodified worlds of mass culture. (& not,
then, the "consumer culture" of farmhouses, expensive cheese, and thick,
handmade sweaters.)
& given that the overdeveloped worlds are increasingly societies of
information production and management, education is in some ways the
ultimate consumer product: producing discerning (if not "cerned")
consumers of culture, ideology, etc.
Nothing like fucking up your unemployment claim to cheer up the day,
hunh?
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 16:15:12 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nick Lawrence <V121NQND@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken
Well, after Tom's exasperated boogie I thought I'd let the matter drop, even if
on my toes. But Steve's post reminds me that sitting out the dance is not what
this list is meant to be about. Another bout, then, for health's sake.
"No, we cannot distance ourselves from what we are within." But Internal
Distanciation is my middle name! I've got the ID card to prove it. I'd be lost
without it . . .
And on "thinking by substitution": if poets have to relinquish *that* pleasure,
then we're truly out to sea without a paddle (so not to speak). Or is drowning
in the puddle on which we float our crumpled paper boats our punishment/reward
for getting lost in thought?
But I know Tom wasn't thinking *about* metaphor. And Steve seems to refer to
something else again when he suggests multiplication rather than substitution
as the mode by which discussions might more fruitfully be conducted on the list.
Indeed most live lists have multiple threads running simultaneously, with
participants switching among the various discussions as they see fit. But with
only 108 or so subscribers, what can one reasonably expect.
When the horse itself informs you that it's dead, even the most enthusiastic
driver will hesitate, whip in hand; but at the risk of simply adding to the
available stock of ennui I'll point out that the anthology discussion, such as
it was, began with a consideration (including much worthy griping) of the recent
batch of (non)experimental anthologies. It seemed time to reconsider the form
and purpose of the thing, to question what it might (& thus may) do. Here's an
example: suppose I am thinking, marveling really, about the inescapability of
race matters in the poetry of Frank O'Hara, how consistent and unremarked-on
this aspect of his work is, how rare, even unprecedented it is among white
American poets (of which I'm one--primary context not academic here, though it
could be). It may occur to me that the best way to explore this phenomenon
is to compile a selection of such work, see where it goes. The result won't be
an essay or a syllabus, though it shares with the essay an exploratory as well
as a critical motive; nor will it be an anthology of my favorite flowers. I may
or may not end up doing this selection, but it presents itself as possibility--
and I'll always strenuously defend the legitimacy of tarrying in the realm of
the subjunctive. "Can we get some air in here?" goes the cry.
More loose threads: I wonder if the plashless disappearance of Mark Wallace's
questions re the privacy of power was the result of bored dismissal or silent
acknowledgement of their aptness? I didn't see the Alan Sondheim piece MW
referred to, but such speculations seem closer to home (the road we're on)
than even the railing against standardized critique.
A last example of thinking by substitution:
The concept of "legislator" must inevitably be identified with the
concept of "poet." Since all people are "poetical beings," all are
also "legislators." But distinctions will have to be made. "Legislator"
has a precise juridical and official meaning--i.e. it means those
persons who are empowered by the law to enact laws. But it can have
other meanings too.
--A. Gramsci
Nick
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 17:50:21 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken
Steve,
Of course, when I wrote
"A master metaphor of subject matter with our
royal selves outside it in consideration is at once
useless and apparently the sole operative in this dis-
course on the net"
I didn't mean that this was the *only* place
such a metaphor was at work -- viz, in the same posting my characterization of
the community of poets as an absolute monarchy where everyone is the monarch.
But, don't imagine me to be "rebuking theoreticism," not much of a labor nor,
however pervasive self-imagined theory has become, not really news neither. I
was talking about experience, which is a social phenomenon, and
thinking/writing which is a social phenomenon as well.
It is a theological task to point out error, and I am a theologian. Of course,
one starts with oneself, "telling myself what to do" Kit Robinson calls
speaking of the practice in his own writing. Yet, I won't share that with you;
instead I'll take Steve Evans to task, despite that his response to my posting
makes me happy, i.e. he brings up real issues.
The issue of embeddedness has nothing to do with that of identification, i.e.
with one's impression of oneself. Steve writes,
"Our engagements, with poetic practice, with institutions,
with traditions, are more loosely woven...or so it is in my experience"
as if this constituted some kind of response. But, Steve it is exactly not the
ex-post-(counter)facto working of your individual mind we wish to find, that
condition is in fact exactly where my critique was aimed. There's the subject
matter, and here I am saying what I believe I can resume about "it" out of "my
experience" (the whole problem lies in those words, doesn't it: "my
experience," for how long has that phrase been in use in our language I wonder;
not long, I bet).
I'll cite 3 treatments of embeddedness which I think bear on this issue, only
one of them from a point of view much in common (i.e. like arrows pointing at
each other and about to strike), and I'll leave out what might be the most
interesting one to discuss i.e. Jonah.
First of course, the cave. From within the cave we cannot know the cave. How
did we get out to where we can know it? Such an enormous epistemology erected
on that site, namely Plato's philosophy and the thousands of years of
decorative additions. Is it the seventh letter, but by now that is commonly
thought a forgery, of P that so distantly extends the metaphors of fire to find
a way to create a fire other than that which casts up shadows for us to see, a
fire that touches us first, sparks mind to move beyond. I don't find it
convincing, however profound.
Spinoza, his arrow point my bullseye since ever I was polysyllabic, in a letter
somewhere evokes the stone falling in space, felled by a gravity more universal
than any can comprehend, but sensing its own motion, feeling free. He is
thinking along that long contact of freedom and necessity, so much thought
(i.e. scholasticism) and so little felt.
Finally (and this I may have cited to the list before), in the preface to the
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant speaks of a bird soaring effortfully, its wings
pushing through heavy air, as it thinks how much more easily it would fly how
high it'd rise, if that heavy substance were banished. The bird cannot think
the absence of air.
the porousness of practice ... opens poetry to poetics
No. Practice is not porous, poetry is a witness aiming at uniqueness and
exclusivity, the difficulty of whose communication is in the difficulty of the
material, i.e. the material act, the practice. Quasi-theoretical terms like
porousness/porosity do not help, for porousness is a determinate state too, as
fully determinate as opacity, just different. It opens no gap (except between
the way things are and what we can allow ourselves to admit of them, i.e. "that
steel wall is porous;" the gap between what is true and what is not).
most working people, including graduate students
and professors... quit their jobs several times a day,
with or without notifying the boss.
That's not true, or rather, the difference between telling your boss and not
telling your boss is the difference between doing it and just being alienated.
Anyone can be alienated; all of literature from the romantics forward presents
a pleasant how-to manual. If you have the impression of having quit your job,
well... you also "could play dead.../as a means of flirting." (Rae Armantrout)
The world of the individual mind begins when you have an individual mind, when
you have "quit your job." The social world begins when you have made effective
commitments and it operates among those commitments. You'll never have a
loosely woven engagement with anything except so's you imagine the better not
to come to consciousness. What's gramsci say? "pessimism of the intellect,
optimism of the will." These things are not opposites, but deeply connected
like the two sides of a coin pile ou face, the sides of the coin Cary Grant
flips in the closing scene of "Only Angels Have Wings." A great film on this
very subject, as it happens. Once, when I was young miserable alienated, living
in Paris and seeing 3-5 movies a day, that one saved my life -- along with
Hawks' other equally great "Rio Bravo."
Please don't imagine that I'm changing the subject. Or that you are either.
Maybe I will write about Jonah one day soon.
tom mandel
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 1994 19:14:05 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Marc Nasdor <ABOHC@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 15 Aug 1994 13:09:00 -0400 from
<clint.burnham@CANREM.COM>
Re: Clint Burnham's comments.
Well, I suppose we could simply understand ourselves to be a *nicke market*
in the consumer culture. :-)
Marc Nasdor
abohc@cunyvm.cuny.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 05:55:27 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Mn Center For Book Arts <mcba@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: consuming that poetry soup
X-To: UB Poetics discussion group
<POETICS%UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU@vm1.spcs.umn.edu>
In-Reply-To: (null)
No, you won't find much in the way of poetry at the mall. You also won't
find much in the way of poetry at your local university bookstore. And
many of us won't find what we want of it at the university library,
either. (maybe that's one reason some of us have chosen not to be at
universities, but that's a much more complicated question & beside the
point).
But yes, it's a part of consumer culture, even if it sells one copy, maybe
if it sells zero copies. It is produced within our culture, which is one
of consumers. Anti-consumer practices are subsumed within the consumer
culture just as anti-intellectual stances are rather common within
intellectual circles.
But the flip side to bookstores not carrying poetry is the combination of
a lack of knowledge about marketing and a lack of a marketing budget among
the few presses still publishing poetry. How many presses take out ads
beyond the ones in the back of literary magazines which are also not
finding their way into bookstores? How many presses put out catalogues
with regularity & send them out widely? How many presses know about the
requirements for reviews in Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and other
publications which serve librarians & bookstore owners? If you look at
presses which get their books with regularity into lots of bookstores,
including the chains, my somewhat informed guess is that they have
marketing budgets which equal or exceed their production budgets. If they
are nonprofit presses (there are a handful of such with budgets over half
a million), they likely have someone on staff who spends a lot more time
fundraising than editing or designing. They have to be able to produce
books in editions of 2500 (minimum) with regularity (four a year, possibly
more) in order to attract distributors which have sales representatives
which actually go into bookstores and talk to bookstore managers
face-to-face, convincing them to carry the books.
I'm not criticizing the presses. It's somewhere between impossible &
extremely difficult to do the work to get to a budget the size which
allows any marketing & distribution strategies which work. But it's simply
true that without it we won't see the books in the bookstores. I even have
a hard time critizing the bookstores. I know they work with extremely
small profit margins & simply can't afford to give shelf space to books
that don't sell well (meaning that marketing to the bookstores is only one
step; there's a public out there, too).
These are only a few reasons why the disappearance of small press
distributors like Bookslinger & Segue in the last few years is so
devastating. They weren't solving the problem, but they were contributing
to the ability to get books to readers.
It might be as useful for users of this forum to talk to people at
bookstores you frequent, write them letters, help them find the books you
would buy there, and otherwise convince them that they can carry such
books & customers like you will support them.
As one who produces books (& not just precious handprinted ones), I can't
celebrate a condition in which those books can't reach more than a hundred
or so readers.
Sorry to introduce such a mundane note into this often more theoretical forum.
charles alexander
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 20:07:23 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jed <RASULAJ@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA>
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 15 Aug 1994 17:50:21 -0400 from
<tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Re Tom Mandel's skepticism about the presumed primacy of "experience" I have a
useful qualification from Gayatri Spivak (who I find almost unreadabily self-
indulgent, BUT): "...we are attempting not merely to enlarge the canon with a
countercanon but to dethrone canonical *method*: not only in literary criticism
but in social production; the axiom that something called concrete experience
is the last instance." (OUTSIDE IN THE TEACHING MACHINE, p. 276) Think about
how often--at conferences, discussions after readings, even casual conversation
--the energy, or the energetic anxiety, of the situation gets dispelled in the
brandishing of an Experience Trump: "my" experience, the sanctimonious untouch-
able. The canonical experience.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 11:41:14 +1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Roberts Mark <M.Roberts@UNSW.EDU.AU>
Subject: Re: POETRY
Thought people might be interested in the following exchange which has been
taking place on the Discussions about Literature list
>Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 09:59:39 +1000
>To:Discussions about Literature <LITERARY@BITNIC.EDUCOM.EDU>
>From:M.Roberts@unsw.EDU.AU
>Subject:Re: POETRY
>
>>In Message Mon, 15 Aug 1994 18:08:20 -0500,
>> "ALAN C. REESE" <S72UREE@TOWSONVX.bitnet> writes:
>>
>>>Anyone sample the new CD "Poetry in Motion" which includes text, readings,
>>>and interviews with Tom Waits, Gary Snyder, allen Ginsberg, Wm Burroughs,
>>>Charles Bukowski & others?
>>>I see it is being offered in the Quality Paperback Book Club and wonder if
>>>it's worth the price tag.
>>>Thanks
>>
>>Another CD with poetry on it is called -Sahara Blue-. David Sylvian's voice is
>>on it and Rimbaud provided the texts. It's absolutely beautiful!
>>Ineke Winnips
>>C.M.Winnips@stud.let.ruu.nl
>
>
>
>A Melbourne based magazine 'Going Down Swinging' released a CD of the late
>performance poet Jas Duke with its 1993 issue. If anyone is interested I could
>look up the GDS address and post it.
>
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 23:06:04 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Bernstein <BERNSTEI@UBVMS.BITNET>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: mundanity
Following up on Charles Alexander's "mundane" note, I thought a
recent rather mundane, and introductory, essay of mine on
alternative presses might, at this point, be of some interest to
some of you. The essay is called "Provisional Institutions:
Alternative Presses and Poetic Innovation". (I have sent copies
of slightly earlier versions to some people on this list
already). It's about 15 ms pages and I am posting it as a
separate file for those who might want to take a look.
A local note: Buffalo's own Talking Leaves books continues to be
the model of the independent bookstore. John Walsh and his
virtually collective staff (I suspect this primarily means that
John is the last to be paid) have an incredible commitment to new
poetry books, as well as just about anything else in book format
I have found myself interested in during the past years. You can
pick up more information browsing the shelves of Talking Leaves
than in possibly any classroom in the US (my own, needless to
say, included). In fact, it strikes me that John knows more
about books than just about anyone I know (he also does a great
reggae show on the community radio station every Saturday night).
Not only that, but ... Talking Leaves brings the poets books to
every local reading we do, stocking the books at the store for
months before and after the poet's visit.
One useful turn of events is that SPD, with its essential list of
mostly U.S., but also Canadian and UK books, now takes VISA,
which makes ordering considerably easier for people from outside
the U.S. As I say in my essay, on-line booksellers, like Grist
and Lisa Robertson's anticipated reformation of Proprioception,
and poetry information servives like Taproot and the UB's
Electronic Poetry Center suggest necessary new directions -- not,
I'd note, "progress" but rather innovations necessary just to
keep up with the changing environment. So it is no surprise that
some of the people involved in these new formats are a part of
this electronic discussion group.
--This is Charles Bernstein transmitting direct to your screen
from just outside the village of Swan Lake in the Town of Bethel,
County of Sullivan, State of New York
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 23:07:57 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Bernstein <BERNSTEI@UBVMS.BITNET>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: Provisional Institutions (long post/essay)
Charles Bernstein
Provisional Institutions: Alternative Presses and Poetic Innovation
In our period, they say there is free speech.
They say there is no penalty for poets,
There is no penalty for writing poems.
They say this. This is the penalty.
-- Muriel Rukeyser, "In Our Time", The Speed of Darkness
Imagine that all the nationally circulated magazines and all the trade presses
and all the university presses in the United States stopped publishing or
reviewing poetry. New poetry in the United States would hardly feel the blow.
But not because contemporary poetry is marginal to the culture. Quite the
contrary, it is these publishing institutions that have made themselves
marginal to our cultural life in poetry. As it is, the poetry publishing and
reviewing practices of these major media institutions do a disservice to new
poetry by their sins of commission as much as omission -- that is, pretending
to cover what they actually cover up; as if you could bury poetry alive. In
consistently acknowledging only the blandest of contemporary verse practices,
these institutions provide the perfect alibi for their evasion of poetry; for
if what is published and reviewed by these institutions is the best that
poetry has to offer, then, indeed, there would be little reason to attend to
poetry, except for those looking for a last remnant of a genteel society
verse, where, for example, the editor of The New York Times Book Review can
swoon over watered-down Dante on her way to late-night suppers with wealthy
lovers of the idea of verse, as she gushed in an article last spring.
Poetry, reduced to souvenirs of what was once supposed to be prestige goods,
quickly gets sliced for overaccessorizing, at least if the stuff actually
talks back. If poetry has largely disappeared from the national media,
nostalgia for poetry, and the lives of troubled poets, has a secure place.
One of the cliches of the intellectual- and artist-bashing so
fashionable in our leading journals of opinion is that there are no more
"public intellectuals." The truth of the matter is that writing of great
breadth and depth, and of enormous significance for the public, flourishes,
but that the dominant media institutions -- commercial television and radio,
the trade presses, and the nationally circulated magazines (including the
culturally upscale periodicals) -- have blacklisted this material.
Intellectuals and artists committed to the public interest exist in
substantial numbers. Their crime is not a lack of accessibility but a refusal
to submit to marketplace agendas: the reductive simplifications of
conventional forms of representation; the avoidance of formal and thematic
complexity; and the fashion ethos of measuring success by sales and value by
celebrity. The public sphere is constantly degraded by its conflation with
mass scale since public space is accessible principally through particular and
discrete locations.
Any of us teaching college will have ample proof of the frightening lack
of cultural information, both historical and contemporary, of even the most
searching of our new students. These individuals have been subjected to
cultural asphyxiation administered not only by the barrage of network
television or MTV, but also, more poignantly, by the self-appointed keepers of
the cultural flame, who are unwilling to provide powerful alternative
programming, prefer to promote, as a habit and a rule, a sanitized and
denatured version of contemporary art, debunking at every turn the new and
untried, the edgy or the cutting, the odd or unnerving; --that is those works
of contemporary culture that give it life. Could I possibly be saying that
the crisis of American culture is that there is inadequate support and distri-
bution of difficult and challenging new art? Does a tire tire without air, an
elephant blow its horn in the dark, a baby sigh when the glass door shatters
its face?
The paucity of public funding for the arts has done irreparable damage
to the body politic. Arts funding is as important as funding for public
education. It's time for our federal, state and local governments to consider
linking arts funding with education budgets: a percent for the arts! & if
that seems farfetched, it goes to show how far afield our educational
priorities are. Every dollar spent on the development and distribution of new
art will save thousands of dollars in lost cultural productivity over the next
fifty years.
At the community ("free") clinic I worked for in the early 1970s we sold T-
shirts that said, "Healthcare is for people not profit." Not that we were
ahead of our time. Times are just behind where they could be. Whenever I go
into a Barnes & Ignoble Superstore or Waldaltonsbooks (If we don't have it it
must be literature!), I'm reminded that our slogan for healthcare applies to
poetry too.
Does anybody wonder anymore what the effects will be of the
consolidation of publishing and book distribution companies into large
conglomerates? Let them read cake. This month's bestseller list contains
the perfect symbol for the current state of affairs as the two top slots are
occupied, in effect, by the publicity machines designed to promote "cultural
product". What sells, in this purest form of hype-omancy is the apparatus
of publicity itself: for here we have self-consuming artifacts par excellence
-- no external referent need apply. Meanwhile, in the upscale journals that
condescend to the truth bared by H. Stern and R. Limbaugh, no book has been
more attended to than a memoir by one of the originators of this phenomenon,
Willie Morris, formally editor of Harper's: for what better subject for
promotion than promotion?
There is a world outside this semblance of culture. In poetry, its
institutions go by the name of the small press and the reading series.
Along with small press magazines and books, poetry reading series are
the most vital site of poetic activity in North America. Readings provide a
crucial place for poets not only to read their new work, but also to meet with
each other and exchange ideas. Readings provide an intimately local grounding
for poetry and are commonly the basis for the many regional scenes and groups
and constellations that mark the vitality of the artform.
Despite the fundamental importance of readings in the creation of North
American poetry over the past forty years, very little attention has been
given to this medium either in the press or by scholars and critics. While
reading series are more concentrated in New York and the Bay area, many
American cities have long-running local reading series. The best source of
information about readings in New York City area is The New York City Poetry
Calendar, which has been publishing a monthly broadside of poetry events since
1977 (60 E. 4th St #21, New York, NY 10003). The calendar lists about 300
different readings each month, has a printrun of 7500 and a readership of well
over 10,000.
Poetry readings range from small bar and cafe and book store and
community center series, with audiences ranging from ten to a hundred to
poetry center readings that can draw from twenty to several hundred people.
Community reading series differ in several crucial ways from university-
sponsored series. These series often offer a forum for new and unpublished
local poets through "open mike" and scheduled readings. The organizers of
these series rarely receive any compensation for their work -- and often can
run a series for incredibly little money: the money from the door going to the
poets plus a few hundred dollars a year for publicity. State and local arts
agencies will sometimes provide such series up to a few thousand dollars for
featured readers, which allows for some out-of-town poets to get travel money
or a small fee of fifty to a few hundred dollars. Poets & Writers, Inc., is
particularly helpful in these contexts, providing matching money for poets's
fees. A community reading series can run a year of readings on less than many
institutions spend on a single cultural event or speaker. That effects the
spirit of the event. The atmosphere at a local reading series is often
charged and interactive. In contrast, university series often suffer from a
stifling formality. Unfortunately, English departments have been slow to
include and support local readings series in their areas -- despite the fact
that these series can often provide a lively point of entry into poetry for
students new to its forms and formats.
Despite the striking vitality of poetry readings, readings are never
reviewed in any of the nation's daily or weekly newspapers, even though these
papers routinely review theater and dance and art events whose scale is
comparable. I suspect the reason is that cultural editors, like most literary
critics and scholars, wrongly assume that the book is the only significant
site of a poet's work. Contemporary North American poetry is realized as
significantly in its performances in live readings as it is in its printed
forms. Critical response to contemporary poems that fail to account for its
performance are, for the most part, inadequate.
For the scholar, the audio archive of poet's performance has become as
fundamental as manuscripts, publication history, and letters; indeed, it is
equal in importance only to the published text. Yet studies of the
distinctive features of the poem-in-performance have been rare. In contrast,
the drift of much literary criticism of the past decade has been away from the
auditory and performative -- and therefore material -- aspects of the poem,
partly because of the prevalent notion, commonly attributed to Saussure, that
the sound structure of language is relatively arbitrary. In contrast,
cognitive linguists such as Reuven Tsur, following Roman Jakobson, have
recently emphasized research that demonstrates the expressiveness of sound
patterns, at the same time, the "phonotext" -- or acoustic dimension -- of the
poem has begun to receive some scholarly attention. This work, combined with
the range of new work on performance theory, suggest a crucial new direction
for literary studies.
The past thirty years has been a time of enormous growth of small press
publishers. According to a Loss Pequeno Glazier's statistics in Small Press:
An Annotated Guide, the number of magazines listed in Len Fulton's
International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses has gone from 250
mostly poetry magazines in 1965 to 700 in 1966 to 2,000 magazines in 140
categories in 1976 to 4,800 magazines in 1990, of which about 40 percent were
literary. The importance of the small press for poetry is not restricted to
any aesthetic or indeed to any segment of poets. According to a recent study
by Mary Briggs, independent noncommercial presses are the major source of
exposure for all poets, young and old, prize winning or not.
The staple of the independent literary press is the single-author poetry
collection. Douglas Messerli, publisher of Sun & Moon Press, a high-end small
press comparable to Black Sparrow, New Directions, and Dalkey Archives,
provided me with representative publication information for a 100-page poetry
collection:
Print-runs at Sun & Moon go from 1000 to 2000, depending, of course, on
likely sales. Messerli notes that print-runs of less than 1000 drive the unit
cost up too high and he encourages other literary presses to print a minimum
of 1000 copies if at all possible.
Sun & Moon titles are well-produced, perfectbound, and offset with full
color covers. The printing bill for this runs from $2600 to $4000 as you go
from 1000 to 2000 copies. Messerli estimates the cost of editing a 100-page
poetry book at $300: this covers all the work between the press receiving a
manuscript and sending it to a designer (including any copyeding and
proofreading that may be necessary as well as preparation of front and back
matter and cover copy). Typesetting is already a rarity for presses like Sun
& Moon, with authors expected to provide computer disks wherever possible.
Formatting these disks (converting them into type following specifications of
the book designer) can cost anywhere from $300 to $1000, one of those variable
labor costs typical of small press operations. The book designer will charge
about $500. The cover will cost an additional $100 for photographic
reproduction or permission fees or both. Publicity costs must also be
accounted for, even if, as at Sun & Moon, no advertising is involved.
Messerli estimates publicity costs at $1500, which covers the cost of
something like 100 free copies distributed to reviewers, postage and packing,
mailings and catalog pages, etc. The total cash outlay here, then, for 2000
copies, is around $6800. (For the sake of this discussion, overhead costs --
rent, salaries, office equipment, phone bills, etc -- are not included; such
costs typically are estimated at about 30 percent more than the cost of
production).
If all goes well, Sun & Moon will sell out of its print run in two
years. Let's say Sun & Moon prints 2000 copies of the book and charges $10
retail; let's also say all the books were sold. That makes a gross of
$20,000. Subtract from this a 50 percent wholesale discount (that is, most
bookstores will pay $5 for the book) and that leaves $10,000. Subtract from
this the 24 percent that Sun & Moon's distributor takes (and remember that
most small presses are too small to secure a distributor with a professional
sales force). That leaves $7600. Now last, but not to be totally forgotten,
especially since I am a Sun & Moon author, the poet's royalty; typically no
advance would be paid and the author would receive 10 percent of this last
figure, or $760. That leaves $6840 return to the publisher on a cash cost of
about $7000.
As James Sherry noted years ago in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: a piece of paper
with nothing on it has a definite economic value. If you print a poem on it,
this value is lost. Here we have a vivid example of what George Bataille has
called general economy, an economy of loss rather than accumulation. Poetry
is a negative -- or let's just say poetic -- economy.
But of course I've stacked the decks a bit. Many small presses will eat
a number of costs I've listed. Copyediting, proofreading and design costs may
be absorbed in the overhead if they are done by the editor-cum-publisher,
proofreader, publicity department, and shipper. Formatting and production are
commonly done on in-house computers. But these costs cannot be absorbed away
-- 600 dpi laser printers and late-night "poofreading" can cause some serious
malabsorption problems for which your gastroenterologist has no cure. Then
again, if a book generates enough of an audience to require reprinting, modest
profits are possible, allowing the publication of other, possibly less
popular, works.
The situation for the independent literary magazines is similar to
presses, and indeed many small presses started as little magazines. o.blek, a
beautifully produced magazine edited by Peter Gizzi and Connel McGrath, was
started on borrowed money in 1987. One thousand copies of the first 148-page
issue cost $1000 for typesetting, $2700 for the printing, and $400 for
postage. That cost has remained relatively consistent, although a switch to
desktop halved the typesetting cost. That first issue, with a cover price of
$5.50 (and with the distributor taking 55 percent), sold out in a year and a
half. After one year, o.blek had about 75 subscribers; after six years, that
number is 275 (a figure that does not include libraries, who mostly subscribe
through jobbers). o.blek's most ambitious publication (edited by Juliana
Spahr and Gizzi) is just out: 1500 copies of a two-volume set, 600 pages in
all, collecting poems and statements of poetics from mostly younger poets,
many of whom participated in the Writing from the New Coast Festival held at
the University at Buffalo last spring. Compare this to Sulfur, edited by
Clayton Eshleman, who reports that there were 1,000 copies printed of the
first issue in 1981 -- "maybe 50 subscribers at the time the issue was
published, with perhaps 300 to 400 going out to stores. Now, 2000 copies per
issue; around 700 subscribers, with 800 to 900 copies going to stores."
Of course, many small presses and magazines produce more modest
publications than Sun & Moon, Sulfur or o.blek. Indeed, the heart of the
small press movement is the supercheap magazine or chapbook, allowing just
about anyone to be a publisher or editor. In this world, marketplace values
are truly turned upsidedown, since many readers of the poetry small press feel
the more modest the production, the greater the integrity of the content.
There is no question than many of the best poetry magazines of the postwar
period have been produced by the cheapest available methods. In the 1950s,
the "mimeo revolution" showed up the stuffy pretensions of the established,
letterpress literary quarterlies, not only with their greater literary
imagination, but also with innovative designs and graphics. In 1965, 23
percent of little presses were mimeo, 31 percent offset, 46 percent
letterpress, according to Fulton's Directory. By 1973, offset had jumped to
69 percent, with letterpress at 18 percent, and mimeo only 13 percent. As
Loss Glazier notes, the mimeo in "the mimeo revolution" is more a metaphor for
inexpensive means of reproduction than a commitment to any one technology.
Indeed, poetry's use of technology often has a wryly aversive quality. For
example, as offset began to dominate the printing industry in the early 1970s,
letterpresses became very cheap to acquire, so that presses like Lyn
Hejinian's Tuumba and Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop's Burning Deck could produce
books with little other cash expense than paper costs and mailing, given the
editors willingness to spend hundreds of hours to handset every letter and
often enough handfeed each page.
In the metaphoric sense, then, the mimeo revolution is very much alive
in the 1990s, with some of the best poetry magazines today -- such as Abacus,
Witz, Mirage #4 (Periodical), The Impercipient, Interruptions, lower limit
speech, Letterbox, Situation, lyric& and Object -- consisting of little more
than a staple or two holding together from 16 to 60 sheets of paper that have
been xeroxed in editions of 50 or 100 or 150. Yet the new mimeo revolution
for poetry is surely electronic. Because the critical audience of poets,
mostly unaffiliated with academic institutions, does not yet have access to
the internet, attempts to create on-line poetry magazines remain preliminary.
& technical problems abound; computers actually make reading and writing
harder than previous technologies -- but it's just the difficulties that make
for poetic interest. Still, the potential is there and a few editors have
started to propose some basic formats for creating virtual uncommunities. In
1993, the first three electronic poetry magazines I know about were founded --
We Magazine, collectively edited in Santa Cruz, the Bay Area, New York City,
and Albany (c/o cf2785@albanyvms) -- which in its active periods sends out one
short poem per post to a list of subscribers; Grist, edited by John Fowler
(fowler@phantom.com), which has produced two full-length issues so far; and
Rift, edited by Ken Sherwood and Loss Glazier (e-poetry@ubvm), which produced
an ambitious array of material for its first issue a few months ago: the main
body of the magazine featuring poems by 16 poets (the equivalent of 50 pages),
plus a series of associated files of translations, poetics, a set of
variations on a poem, and a chapbook. Also online is Luigi-Bob Drake's, and
friends', Taproot Reviews (au462@cleveland.freenet.edu), an heroic effort to
review hundreds of small magazines and chapbooks committed to "experimental
language art & poetry." Experiments with poetry and poetics "listserve"
discussion groups have also begun, with Joe Amato's pioneering Nous Refuse
(Jamato@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu), but as yet the intriguing mix of newsletter, group
letter, and bulletin board has not yet found its place. It seems certain,
however, that the net will be a crucial site for the distribution of works of
poetry, especially out-of-print works, as well as for information on obtaining
books and magazines, and, I suspect, for long-term local, national and
international exchanges of ideas and work in progress.
The new computer technology -- both desktop publishing and electronic
publishing -- has radically altered the material, specifically visual,
presentation of text. No doubt a new aesthetic will emerge. But at this
point, the absence of visual aesthetics in the production of many desktop
magazines is discouraging. Simply having access to a laser printer does not
mean an editor has any idea how to design type. Ironically, many of the
typewriter and mimeo publications of the past thirty years were visually
richer than some of the more poorly designed desktop products. In the case of
e-space, editors have, as of now, little control over the visual appearance of
the text.
Distribution remains the most serious problem for the small press and one of
the least understood parts of the process. While larger independent presses
have distributors with sales representatives to visit bookstores, most small
presses must rely on mailing lists and informal contacts to circulate their
books and magazines.
Small Press Distribution (1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702) is
the most important source for alterative press titles published in the United
States. With the recent demise of over half-a-dozen alternative press
distributors, it is also the "sole remaining noncommercial literary book
distributor left in the entire country." SPD, which must take 55 percent of
the retail price of a book (bookstores will typically take 40 percent or more
of this), now distributes about 52,000 books a year, from over 350 presses,
with net sales of $360,000. Their quarterly catalogs and annual complete
catalogs are fundamental resources.
From 1980 to 1993, Segue Distributing published an annual catalog that
offered a curated selection of small press titles that could be ordered
through a central address. Segue, unlike most distributors, was able to
articulate an aesthetic commitment with its choices, as well as being able to
include presses and magazines too small to be handled by other distributors.
In addition, Segue included selections of small press books and magazines from
the UK, as well as New Zealand and Australia. Segue Distribution was
discontinued this year after losing its government grant support. I suspect
that in the future activities such as Segue's will best be handled through
electronic bulletin boards or similar formats.
One of Segue's most useful assets is its mailing list, which it makes
available to affiliated presses. The mailing list keeps track of a shifting
community of readers, with special attention to the local audience who wishes
to receive notices of readings as well as the national and international
audience who wishes to receive notices of book and magazine publications. I
say community because audience is too passive a term to describe this matrix
and because there is a tendency to speak of community when referring to a
small press readership or, especially, the local "scene" for a reading series
or a magazine. But I resist the term community as well, since it is more
accurate to think of constellations of active readers interested in exchange
but not necessarily collectivity.
While much distribution of poetry takes place in the mail, we all owe a
great debt to the few remaining independent bookstores that make an effort to
keep in stock a full range of poetry titles. There is no substitute for
flipping through new books and magazines in a bookstore, and such bookstores
themselves are crucial sites of whatever a poetry community might be.
We also owe a debt to those publications that are committed to reviewing
and discussing small press publications, since one of the most involving
aspects of the small press is the intensity of interchange that takes place in
reviews, letters, correspondence and conversation. This is what makes The
American Book Review so much livelier than The New York Review of Books. At
their best, reviews and essays in the alternative poetry press are less
concerned with evaluation than with interaction, participation and
partisanship; in this respect, the prose of the small presses offer a
refreshing alternative to the evaluative focus of newspaper and mainstream
magazine reviews as well as the often stifling framelock of academic
discourse. Indeed, the literary small press provides a forum not just for
innovation in poetry but equally for innovation in prose, in the process
demonstrating that a free press means giving writers stylistic freedom, not
simply the freedom to express their opinions in mandated forms.
The power of our alternative institutions of poetry is their commitment to
scales that allow for the flourishing of the artform, not the maximizing of
the audience; to production and presentation not publicity; to exploring the
known not manufacturing renown. These institutions continue, against all
odds, to find value in the local, the particular, the partisan, the committed,
the tiny, the peripheral, the unpopular, the eccentric, the difficult, the
complex, the homely; and in the formation and reformation, dissolution and
questioning, of imaginary or virtual or partial or unavowable communities
and/or uncommunities.
Such alternative institutions benefit not just from the support of their
readers and writers, but also from contributions from government, individuals,
and foundations. Recently, such large foundations as the Lila Wallace -
Readers Digest Fund have committed substantial funds to independent literary
presses, but they have done so in ways that are often destructive to the
culture of the institutions they propose to support. Rather than provide
funds to directly support the production of books and magazines, or, indeed,
editors or authors, such institutions insist on primarily funding
organizational expansion, for example, by providing money to hire new staff
for development, publicity, and management. While any money is welcome, the
infrastructural expansion mandated by these foundations -- defended in the
name
of stabilizing designated organizations -- makes the small press increasingly
dependent on ever larger infusions of money, in the process destroying the
financial flexibility that is the alternative press's greatest resource. By
pushing the presses they fund to emulate the structures of large non-profit
and for-profit institutions to which they stand in honorable structural
opposition, these foundations reveal all too nakedly their commitment to the
administration of culture rather than to the support of poetry.
Ironically, the negative economy of poetry is one of its greatest assets
for our culture in that it provides an alternative system of valuation to the
bureaucratic professionalism of the academy and to the commercialism of the
book industry and art world, not to mention the TV and movie industries. But
the value of the alternative institutions of poetry is not just that they do
not seek, or make, a profit. In that respect, they are no match for such
mainstream magazines as The New Yorker, which, despite a circulation that has
recently surged to 750,000, appears to be losing as much as $10 million a year
(that's something like $13 per subscriber) -- an amount that could finance a
good part of the annual cost of the alternative poetry presses and readings
and magazines. The New Yorker's parent company, S. I. Newhouse, is
apparently less concerned with profit than with cultural dominance --
legitimating the cultural product that forms the basis of its media empire;
for this exercise in hegemony, circulation and publicity are more important
than profit.
Literature is never indifferent to its institutions. A new literature
requires new institutions, and these institutions are as much a part of its
aesthetic as the literary works that they weave into the social fabric. The
resilience of the alternative institutions of poetry in the postwar years is
one of the most powerful instances we have of the creation of value amidst its
postmodern evasions. When you touch this press, you touch a person. In this
sense, the work of our innovative poetries is fundamentally one of social
work.
Notes
Presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association on Dec. 29,
1993, in Toronto.
1. Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, "Hell Night at the 92nd Street Y," in The New York
Times Book Review, 98:31 (May 9, 1993), p. 31. "For some" ("We lucky few" is
the last sentences of the article) "there was to be a post-poetry spread laid
on by Edwin Cohen (a businessman and patron of literature) back at his
apartment at the Dakota, a Danteesque menu announced in advance: roast
suckling stuffed pig stuffed with fruit, nuts, and cheese; Tuscan salami;
prosciotto and polenta, white beans with fennel."
2. "The budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, which has not changed
appreciably in the last 12 years, is smaller than the Department of Defense's
budget for its 102 military bands," according to an article in The New York
Times, 3/13/93, p. C13.
3. Rush H. Limbaugh 3d, See I Told You So (New York: Pocket Books, 1993) and
Howard Stern Private Parts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
4. Loss Pequeno Glazier, Small Press: An Annotated Guide (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. 2-3.
5. Mary Biggs, A Gift that Cannot Be Refused: The Writing and Publishing of
Contemporary American Poetry (Wesport, CT: Greenwoood Press, 1990); cited in
Glazier, p. 38.
6. Clayton Eshleman, letter to the author, 11 January 1994. Information on
Sun & Moon Press is based on an interview with Doulgas Messerli in November
1993; information on o.blek is based on an interview with Peter Gizzi in
December 1993.
7. Abacus, edited by Peter Ganick (181 Edgemont Avenue, Elmwood, CT 06110) is
the longest running of these magazines; in February, 1984, they published
their 80th issue, Cornered Stones Split Infinites by Rosmarie Waldrop. Witz,
edited by Chritopher Reiner (P.O. Box 1059, Penngrove, California 94951), is a
newsletter feauturing poetics, reviews, and listings of recent publications;
it is published three times a year in associaton with Avec, a magazine
comparable to Sulfur and o.blek. The other magazines mentioned feature new
poetry, often by younger or infrequently published poets: The Impercipient,
ed. Jennifer Moxley (61 East Manning Street, Providence, RI 02906); Letterbox,
ed. Scott Bentley (379 Latimer Place, Oakland, CA 94609); Mirage #4/
Period(ical), ed. Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy (1020 Minna, San Francisco,
CA 94103); Situtation, ed. Mark Wallace; object, ed. Kim Rosenfeld and Rob
Fitterman (229 Hudson Street #4, New York, NY 10013); lyric &, ed. Avery E. D.
Burns (P.O. Box 640531, San Francisco, CA 91640-0531); lower limit speech, ed.
A. L. Neilsen (1743 Butler Avenue #2; Los Angeles, CA 90025); Interruptions (a
magazine of collaborations), ed. Tom Beckett (131 North Pearl Street, Kent, OH
44240).
8. In Febrary 1994 Grist announced its first electronic book, Gleanings:
Uncollected Poems of the Fifties by David Ignatow, including many poems
"published here for the first time." Cost is $25 on diskette; the text is also
available online.
9. Letter, dated October 22, 1993, to affiliated publishers from Lisa
Domitrovich, Executive Director, SPD.
10. During much of this period, I worked as editor of the catalog.
11. Elizabeth Kolbert, "How Tina Brown Moves Magazines," in The New York
Timnes Magazine, Dec. 5, 1993, p. 87.
12. Publishing statistics are notoriously unreliable, especially when they
concern the amount publishers are willing to lose -- less to obtain cultural
legitimacy, I would say, than to establish cultural values. According to The
New York Times (3/2/94, p. C20), Harold M. Evans, the publisher of Random
House's adult trade division, told an audience at the PEN American Center that
"the 29 books he published that made it on to The New York Times's 1993 list
of Notable Books lost $680,000" and the eight books that "won awards from the
American Library Association lost a total of $370,000." Evans went on to say
that three of these books had advertising budgets of $71,000 to $87,000 each
and that these books lost from $60,000 to $300,000 each. Innovative works of
literature or criticism or scholarship that challenge the dominant cultural
values of institutions such as Random House are not the most likely candidates
to receive this type of support; yet without such subventions they stand
little chance of being reviewed or recommended in The New York Times, whose
reviews are closely correlated to its advertisers. The point is not that
official "high" culture, just as alternative-press poetry, requires subsidies;
but that a system of selection and support favors certain works over others;
it is this system of selection and promotion that allows the media
conglomorates to control cultural sectors that they have written off as
largely unprofitable. Note, however, that the content of the selections is
less important for this system of dominance than the system of selection and
promotion itself, since the alternative presses can never afford to lose as
much as these corporations.
It should be no surprise that it is neither the audience nor quality nor
accessibility that creates official literary product, nor that much of
official "high" culture is a loss leader. Advertising and promotion of
targeted "loss leaders" are evidently worth the price in influencing literary
and critical taste, specifically by fostering a cultural climate in which
genuinely profitable products may thrive.
The recent "fiction" issue of The New Yorker (June 27/July 4, 1994) is a
perfect example of how that magazine goes about promoting the idea that "Only
what sells has value and value is determined by the extent of the sales." The
issue included a "good cop" feature on a struggling "serious" fiction writer
that, while seeming to question the value system of commercial publishing,
actually reinforced its claim to exclusive value. Remarkably, the piece, and
indeed the whole magazine issue, systematically avoided any reference to
alternative and independent presses so as to better foster the illusion (not
to say comic notion) that the New York trade presses are the sole purveyors of
literature. The story on the "struggling" writer emphasized that he had been
praised by the Times (which, inevitably, is where the author of the profile
had first heard about his work, since that's where you hear about worthwhile
fiction) and had five books with HarperCollins that are neither (Si forbid!)
"inaccessible or highbrow". The problem seemed to be that he was shifting
from one New York trade press to another (a Disney affiliate) and that his
projected advance would be only $10,000 (nonetheless, considerably more than
most literary writers in this culture receive) (pp. 48-9). The New Yorker's
sell was so hard that the following "bad cop" article got right down to
business. It was devoted exclusively to promoting the preeminent cultural
value of the top ten books on the Times's best seller list: "They have a
better ear [than nonbestselling fiction] for what we say, or try to say, or
don't notice we're saying -- for the small ways in which the mind works and
stumbles" (p. 80); so eat your Wheaties, kids! "Wonder Bread helps build
bodies 12 ways" (& that wholewheat stuff doesn't taste as good either!) I
don't think "we" can say it any better than that.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 08:36:15 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken
It is not the primacy of experience that I treated skeptically, but the
concept of experience in use in that reference to primacy, and this not in
the service of anything like G. Spivak's attempt "to dethrone canonical
*method* in...social production" (leave aside the fact that the term
"social production" simply restates the "canonical method" as a "social"
event). If it could be dethroned, one might escape the skepticism, but
it is as inherent to mental processes as figure/ground or any of the
other pattern-matching, template-imposing schemata upon which our little
leaps rebound.
Experience is primary, but it is so not the way a prince is, but the
way the people are. However one feels convinced (daily, hourly) that
this quantity is debased (repeatedly), it is the only place from
which anything can emerge.
Perhaps we need to go back and read Howard Fast and the early Irwin
Shaw. James T. Farrell. Places where the partial could figure a whole,
or if you've seen the Hawks picture "Only Angels Have Wings", which I
so insisted on in my last post, you might view it against "Tarnished
Angels" another flying picture this time by the great Douglas Sirk
or perhaps someone would like to discuss the subject of mimesis? Has
anyone read Auerbach's last-published essay, "Philology & *Weltliteratur*"
which I think would provide the foundation for a telling critique of
the function of theory in literature. Interestingly, it was translated
by Edward Said, who may be said to grow entirely from one of Auerbach's
lobes.
tom mandel
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 09:28:00 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Clint Burnham <clint.burnham@CANREM.COM>
Organization: CRS Online (Toronto, Ontario)
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken
In-Reply-To: <9408171237.AA04336@portnoy.canrem.com>
Experience etc.
I'm not really sure what "experience" means when it is founded as some
base of thought; I think that the Spivak quote Jed cited was just
continuing Spivak's continuing skepticism about what she othertimes
calls the "native informant," or the tendency to take some narrated
"experience," in this case from a native or primitive "other," and treat
it as authentic, etc.
& I was also puzzled by Tom Mandel's comment that "the term `social
production' simply restates the `canonical method' as a `social' event."
Quickly, it seems that Spivak *there* was saying (I read that book from
the library a couple months ago, so I can't remember in any way the
context, so I'll go by the quotation) that truths are formed or produced
in what we call "the social," which means in history, in the current
collective situtations. (As Bernstein's interesting essay just posted
posited, the "ruling class" of American literature is obviously a
collective enterprise in how it protects its own against the threats
from we dweeby little xerox geeks: someone else on his panel at the MLA
tried to make the claim that there was no real canon [unwittingly
repeating Bernstein's "State of the Art" essay to different ends]
based on his experience as a reviewer for those NYC journals everyone
refers to by their initials); I lost track of my parentheses just now,
but surely the emphasis on experience in Mandel's post has to do with
seeking some ineffable individual basis for thought, cognition, poetry?
What if Kant had remarked that a bird flying in a flock wishes s/he were
alone and free.
Aspects of Said's humanistic method may derive from Auerbach, As Aijaz
Ahmad pointed out in *In Theory*, but I don't think the old philologist
did much for the Palestinian people.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 12:39:04 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Joseph Conte <ENGCONTE@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: Re: mundanity
Everything that Charles Bernstein says of Talking Leaves bookstore
is true--the place is a community treasure, and many faculty choose
to order their coursebooks there instead of the capitalist UB
bookstore--except for the name of the proprietor and reggae-meister,
Jonathan Welch.
Charles, did you catch Melanie at the Woodstock reunion? I have
often felt a phenomenal bond with the Mud People.
Joseph Conte
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Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 17:47:49 EDT
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From: Steve Evans <ST001515@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: My recent experience with error
I appreciate the care with which Tom Mandel responded to my
assertions about the "porousness" of practice. As the narrator
of Melville's *Pierre* writes: "If to affirm, be to expand one's
isolated self; and if to deny, be to contract one's isolated self;
then to respond is a suspension of all isolation." An apt motto,
from a book that explores the dialectic between "identification"
and "embeddeness" in chilling detail.
In fact, I only remembered the above while searching for a passage
that complemented Tom's three examples, and caught something of the
texture of Tom's post in general. It is this paragraph, from the
chapter called "Some Philosophical Remarks":
From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is
quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and
bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific
in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does
not one whit enable him to change or better his condition.
For in tremendous extremeties human souls are like drown-
ing men; well enough they know there are in peril; well
enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless,
the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.
Tom's model of experience is apparently one in which we are drowning
always; the main exercise of mind, he implies, comes in disguising that
mortal fact: "You'll never have a loosely woven engagement with
anything except so's you imagine the better not to come to consciousness."
Let me counterpose a passage from Rosmarie Waldrop's *Lawn of the Excluded
Middle*:
Because we use the negative as if no explanation were needed
the void we cater to is, like anorexia, a ferment of halluc-
inations. Here, the bird's body equals the rhthym of wing-
beats which, frantic, disturb their own lack of origin, fear
of falling, indigeneous grey. Static electricity. Strobe
map. Gap gardening. (24; also in Messerli anth. 250)
As Waldrop's entire book shows, what Tom calls the "gap between
what is true and what is not"--the only gap he allows--actually
traps that engagement I was calling "loosely woven" in the ex-
cluded middle.
As for the assertion that "the social world begins when you have
made effective commitments and it operates among those commitments,"
I don't think Tom and I disagree either on the claim or on the
value placed on such *social,* as against "individual," commitments.
But my argument is that such commitments are not effectively sustained
on the model of total absorption. To pick up Rae's lines, if you
value flirting, playing dead as a way of flirting is an option. If
you value flirting, a certain tradition in poetry, and anti-capitalist
political and intellectual work, well, the commitments are porous
enough to admit of all three projects in time. (Though anti-capitalists
are on the whole inept flirts, there are exceptions.)
And, Tom, don't think I'm changing the subject.
As sidenote on the phrase, "in my experience." I despise the
use of the term as a conversation stopper, as do Jed and G.C. Spivak.
But having been taken to task for it, I still don't feel too rep-
entant (my apologies to the theologians). I think the ghost of the
public sphere that wanders the circuits of these lists is benign:
private people critically debating public interests test "their experiences"
in a social medium. And despite its recent vintage in geo-historical
terms, the category of "my experience" is an objective one in capitalist
social formations. Remember ideology is seldom *just* ideology.
There's so much else to respond to, not only in Tom's post but in
the extremely interesting message Charles Alexander posted, and
Charles Bernstein's article as well, but let one accident of attending
both to this list and to Messerli's anthology in the past two days
sufice.
Clint's noticing that "those who pose themselves against consumer
culture just mean the more *apparently* commodified worlds of
mass culture. (& not, then, the "consumer culture" of farmhouses,
expensive cheese, and thick, handmade sweaters)" finds a direct
echo in Robert Kelly's poem "Recessional," which I just read for
the first time in Messerli's volume:
Not much in this culture
left for me. I will arise
and go into the future,
to the country I take it
joggers are also trotting to
beyond the quiche and croissants
beyond the poignant resurrections
each commodity promises and fails.
I see a rough grey hill there
I am suddenly determined to climb
and set a pebble down to praise
all those who came before me
knowing no more than I do of the way. (238)
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Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 20:56:20 -0400
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From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken
re: Clint Burnham's post, yes of course I overstated Said's relation to
Auerbach -- although it was not in a "humanistic method" but a view of history
that I was locating the relationship, & I think one would have to discuss this
in the context of the Auerbach essay I referenced to take it any further -- I
was trying to raise an interest in A's work. (By the way, I'm delighted to hear
of A. Ahmad's mention of this relationship, and I'll be looking into *In
Theory* which I don't know).
As to
"What if Kant had remarked that a bird flying in a flock wishes
s/he were alone and free"
well? What if? I mean I would much appreciate to hear more on this subject. The
desire for solitude, so intense and ambiguous a force in Spinoza, does it
really come to formal expression in Kant (as, shortly thereafter, it surely
does in Kierkegaard's work)?
"the tendency to take some narrated "experience," in this case
from a native or primitive "other," and treat it as authentic..."
How does one get along in life, really? Is there any way to escape belief in,
commitment to, the reality of another's narrative frame? Do we exist in
relationships, and do these pre-exist the critical solitude (sorry, it's a
fiction, however useful) in which we make such claims as Clint is claiming
Spivak makes (and can we understand what C says unless we credit *that*
narrative frame?). What, on the other hand, is the very special, highly
constructed, altogether test-tube situation in which we critique this "tendency
to take..." ? Lets call it Situation A.
Where does poetry come from? Does it come from Situation A. Language poetry, to
take an example we all in varying degrees seem to know and care about, did it
come from Situation A? No thank you, it did not. And what of its force in a
human life, a reader's life, does this force come from Situation A? We see in
*Ketjak*, in *Oxota*, in *Agreement* that the author has refused commitment to
the authenticity of some witness or record (his/her own?)?, or is it to some
alternate way of expression that commitment is refused and this refusal is or
at least defines the work? These seem trivial burdens for a poet to carry who
knows the world she occupies fellow-citizened by Arnaut Daniel & Dante. That...
"truths are formed or produced in what we call "the social,"
which means in history, in the current collective situations"
is not news, not theory, just a menu-pick among truth-version-windows. A poet's
job is to figure out what such "current collective situations" are as roll in
our lives, to really figure that out.
Here are a few closing words, not mine but of Mandelstam:
An artist considers his world-view a tool and an instrument, like
a hammer in the hands of a stonemason, and his only reality is
the work of art itself.
Conscious sense, the Logos, is still taken erroneously... for
content. (It should instead be) considered on an equal footing
with the other elements of the word (as form)..., conscious sense
as creative material.
There is no equality nor competition, only the complicity of all
who conspire against emptiness and non-existence.
tom mandel
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Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 21:12:10 -0400
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From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: Re: My recent experience with error
Other than that I have no interest in "disguising" anything (but maybe
he meant to write "deguising"), I find Steve Evans post convincing in
every particular. Lets remember that this "drowning" is a social state,
the exact state of those creatures who from water took to air and,
drowning, moved on.
Those who came before can't know our praise; those to come,
are they more likely to? Only we seem to know the praise
we pause to give. Does this mean it is really ourselves
we are praising? No answer hides in the question; I really
wonder.
Rosemary's passage, which seems to be a meditation on Wittgenstein,
is brilliantly apposite (brilliant & beautiful itself). Let us
explain our denials, it seems to counsel itself.
tom mandel
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Date: Wed, 17 Aug 1994 22:27:37 -0500
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From: Mn Center For Book Arts <mcba@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: buy or bye poetry
X-To: UB Poetics discussion group
<POETICS%UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU@vm1.spcs.umn.edu>
In-Reply-To: (null)
Steve Evans has asked me to elaborate on what one might do to contest the
disappearance of poetry from "serious consumer culture," as someone put it
in an earlier post. I would hope the culture includes serious consumers of
poetry, and as Charles Bernstein so eloquently puts it in his long essay,
which he also delivered at the "Art & Language" symposium at Minnesota
Center for Book Arts in April of 1994, it does so include them (even
everyone on this list).
So, here are some more earthly suggestions, not earthly delights, at least
not in themselves.
This may come in two or more posts over the next several days. The first
one is mostly directed toward what you can do at bookstores. If your only
bookstore is Barnes & Noble, you may be lost. Managers of the chains,
unfortunately, have very little independence in what they are allowed to
carry. But you can ask them.
But here goes:
First, talk to your booksellers. Get to know them. Make requests
personally as well as through slips of paper called order forms. Encourage
them to obtain the specific books you want. If they are receptive, ask
them to carry representative work from presses you like. Let them know
that SPD will tailor orders specifically for a particular bookstore and
make it easy for the bookseller. But you have to persuade these
booksellers NOT ONLY that these are important books, but that, MORE
IMPORTANTLY, that, given a decent chance, they will sell.
Get your friends & people with similar ideas to do the same. Hearing it
from one voice will not move a bookseller. Hearing from five to ten might.
Hearing it from twenty will.
Then -- buy the books, & make sure those friends buy them, too. This will
make the bookseller very happy, perhaps even make her trust your future
recommendations. Tell your students to buy these books. Submit reviews to
your local paper, especially when there is a local connection -- but, hey,
the disappearance of poetry is a good story. You could even write about
that and about what you & some local cohorts are trying to do about it.
You may end up negotiating regular 10 to 15% discounts on these books for
members of a reading group or other association. But don't push for the
discount first. Despite how much you may detest consumer culture, please
help the booksellers make money by selling these books. It helps the books
survive.
Hold readings at the bookstore & let the bookseller make selling the books
a featured part of the readings. Have reading & discussion groups meet
there if this is at all possible.
If you achieve a good relationship with the bookseller, ask if you can
have 6 inches of shelf space in the store to create a "poetry books of the
month" corner. And, again, get people to buy these books.
If you teach at a university, or are a student, by all means do all this
(& anything more you can invent) at your university bookstore or local
store which serves the university community.
Also, if you teach -- USE small press books. In seminars on contemporary
writing, use several -- maybe even use small press books exclusively. In
large survey classes, use some small press books. Try to get the bookstore
to order directly from the small presses (stores pay no more, & the
presses are able to give a smaller discount than is required by
distributors or book "jobbers") or from SPD (which helps support the
entire field). It's ironic that I know several people teaching at major
universities, yet only twice in the last four years have i received, for
Chax Press books, orders for 40 or more books for a class. Every small
press, every day, is on the verge of disappearing. If they do, then we
won't have to worry about poetry books being in bookstores. There will be
no poetry books. In the fall of 1993, when the University of Toronto
bookstore ordered $1,000 worth of bp Nichol's ART FACTS from Chax, it
literally saved the press. Such orders, to the presses you care about,
should occur at least a few times every year. If you teach contemporary,
or even 20th Century writing, & don't use contemporary small press books
(& a variety of them, not just from the biggest of the small presses),
shame on you. You are contributing to the disappearance of poetry.
Why not teach a contemporary writing class which uses a book from Sun &
Moon, one from O Books, one from The Figures, one from Potes & Poets, one
from Chax, one from Roof? Why not use one or two of these books (& not
always from the same press) next time you teach a large survey class?
I read in an earlier post that Don Byrd doesn't buy poetry; people or
presses give it to him. He is then getting a marvelous service. I hope he
contributes money and time to the presses he cares about, and I hope he
teaches their books in his courses.
I remind myself now that I am addressing myself to a poetics list. I read
poetics & theory of various kinds & enjoy this reading. I also read a lot
of poetry. What are your reading habits? What are your buying habits? How
much money do you spend each year on books of poetics, criticism, and
theory? Consider spending an equal amount on poetry. It will help immensely.
And please don't go into your local bookstore, notice no innovative or
invigorating poetry on the shelves, and complain outside the walls of the
bookstore, without doing anything to try and change the situation.
Thank you for reading this.
Read poetry. Buy poetry.
Next time I'll try to convince to contribute to presses & literary
organizations.
By the way, I applaud Talking Leaves, as I do Woodland Pattern in
Milwaukee, Bick's Books in Washington, the bookstore at SPD in Berkeley,
and only a very few others I know about. But I've found some very good
books in The Bookstore in Lennox, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. I feel
like someone's had a good idea when I find even one fugitive and fine
poetry book on a bookstore's shelf.
And I am grateful to Charles Bernstein for bringing up the increasing role
being played by on-line bookstores and informational services.
Does the book on the shelf struggle for its pages to be open, resisting
the heavy air? Come to think of it, it used to keep me awake that a book
spends perhaps 99% of its life closed. Now I think that once it's been
opened, it is really never closed. There's a confusion of the physical
with another realm, yes?
charles alexander
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 1994 08:04:13 -0400
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From: Robert Creeley <CREELEY@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: Bookstores etc
Just to note a key bookstore for the southwest: Gus Blaisdell's
THE LIVING BATCH just off Central across from the u/. Not only
does this store have a ranging and specific collection of books
for sale, it also publishes them, eg, Gene Frumkin's recent col-
lection and (forthcoming) Ronald Johnson's ARK in toto. Gus also
has readings throughout the year--and serves as network for that
part of the country. Thus I had word of John Yau (who had read
there recently), and it's also the last time and place I had chance
to talk with Ed Abbey (we both were grad students at UNM in the
50s!). Anyhow, "community," "consellations," "collectives," it's
always hand to mouth or head or heart. Somebody's got to be there
for real.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 1994 13:16:35 -0400
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From: Loss Glazier <lolpoet@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Cite for woman as "muse"
I'd like to know anyone could recommend a (definitive/defining) source
that might provide me with a perspective on the question of the male
poet invoking woman as image of perfection, inspiration, "other."
That is, I've run across, in various places, allusions to the
colonial, etc. nature of this question but wondered where I might find
"the argument" (or arguments) (specifics?) re this "invocation" as
objectionable, sexist, Romanticism (romantic vs. Romanticism?),
commodifying (?) etc. Is the question one of "conquest" vs.
attention to the formal qualities of the writing? Are these mutually
exclusive?
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Date: Thu, 18 Aug 1994 17:50:36 -0400
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From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: Re: buy or bye poetry
...Bick's Books in Washington" alas is gone (or in its last few days).
Rod Smith, who filled Bicks' shelves, has moved on to Bridge St. Books
also in DC (Georgetown); but, we have nothing like Talking Leaves or
the even-more-azazing sounding Woodland Pattern (after all, TL is in a col
collegetown, or doesn't this make it a little easier?). Yet, we've got
a Borders, a Supercrown, heavens knows how many more; and Washington
sells more books per capita than any other city in the states (so they
say).
tom mandel
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Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 06:54:28 -0400
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From: Jorge Guitart <MLLJORGE@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: poetry guerrilla
give the gift of alternative poetry to a friend who reads mainstream poetry but
doesn't know better. I mean buy a book for him or her.
i did.
My choice was THE COLD OF POETRY, by Lyn Hejenian (Sun & Moon Press 1994) which
i recommend to everyone who wants to know what poetry is/can/should be.
i bought it at our stellar TALKING LEAVES.
incidentally i saw it at Borders in Mount Lebanon, Pa (a suburb of Pittsburgh)
a couple of days ago. it was my first visit to a Borders and it inclined me fav
orably
towards that outfit.
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Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 10:30:00 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Clint Burnham <clint.burnham@CANREM.COM>
Organization: CRS Online (Toronto, Ontario)
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken
In-Reply-To: <9408180056.AA14456@portnoy.canrem.com>
or: phat thots (to use some more jargon):
Tom Mandel responded carefully and generously to my rant, for which I'm
grateful. Certainly, I think if there is value in poetry, or in some
poetry, it lies in specificities of language and experience; the poetry
I value from the sixties, say, in either Canada, the U.S., or Britain,
seemed to puncture the rhetoric of a prevailing "popular" or at least
wide-spread poetry; in each of these countries that was different.
Raworth and Prynne don't seem to have the same stance on that rhetoric
(Raworth abandoned the high for the low? to put it grossly, whilst
Prynne tried to push the high & see how far it would go?), but their
work and of their contemporaries that I've read seemed to be a
formally-based attack on the class inflections of the angrymiddleagedmen
and the faber&penguin books. In Canada the work, say, of the TISH folk,
stealing from OlsonCreeleyDuncanetc, was in contradistinction to a form
still popular here, that of a populist-anecdotal vernacular that offers
"experience" as something which can be transmitted. (That enemy is still
with us, as I said, & can be said to constitute an official poetry, but
the postmodernists have had some success in the academy).
Sorry if this is turning into a mini-essay/shortpost.
I suppose the point of my fictitious Kant was to indicate I was/am
trying to find a poetry that comes out of the collective *not* either as
a timeworn lefty phrase nor as some chimera or utopia but with the same
rigour as Mandel's working through the philosophical (I'd love to have a
book called "Realism"):
"Light circles the other past" goes on and on and on ...
Clint
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Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 12:27:03 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Joseph Conte <ENGCONTE@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: Re: Cite for woman as "muse"
Loss:
I'm not sure when the invocation of a feminine muse became sexist
commodification, but the tradition of such invocation goes back to
classical literature: Menin aeide, Thea . . . Sing, Goddess the
wrath of Achilles. Id est, the figuration of the imagination in
the male poet was his feminine, divine, other. The trope is that
the song--anything but a "conquest"--is a gift of the muse to the
humble poet who would be nothing without her. Plato (I think it's
in the "Ion") mocks poets as incompetents and virtueless for being
only the passive receptacles of such divine (feminine) speech.
I'm not sure, really, when the invocation becomes objectionable--
or perhaps I'm missing the point of your inquiry. What's the
context?
Joseph Conte
PS: As a netiquette cavil, would posters to this list please
undersign their posts. It can be difficult to find the sender
in the header material.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 15:51:59 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jed Rasula <RASULAJ@QUCDN.QUEENSU.CA>
Subject: Re: Cite for woman as "muse"
In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 18 Aug 1994 13:16:35 -0400 from
<lolpoet@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Loss:
Like Joe Conte, I'm not quite clear which direction your query intends.
But I did think right away of a book by Lawrence Lipking, ABANDONED WOMEN AND
POETIC TRADITION (U. Chicago, 1988). I've been working for several years myself
on a seemingly interminable project called "Poetry's Voice-Over," which assesse
s various implications of poetic empowerment & primal scenes of such, as in
Hesiod's invocation of the Helikonian muses. One section of that is coming up
in the next issue of Sulfur ("Gendering the Muses"--it may be most pertinent
for what you're up to); an abridged version of the whole text is forthcoming
in Adalaide Morris's collection SOUND EFFECTS (U.North Carolina Press).
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 20:54:42 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Mn Center For Book Arts <mcba@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken & a reel
X-To: UB Poetics discussion group
<POETICS%UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU@vm1.spcs.umn.edu>
In-Reply-To: (null)
real ism
is em real?
charles (in memoriam bp)
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 1994 08:28:10 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Joe Amato <jamato@UX1.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
Subject: Re: Cite for woman as "muse"
In-Reply-To: <199408191700.AA27135@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> from "Joseph Conte" at
Aug 19, 94 12:26:49 pm
ah, can't resist... my favorite invocation being in byron's *don
juan*, beginning of canto iii:
>Hail, Muse! et cetera.---
joetomato
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Date: Sat, 20 Aug 1994 17:38:49 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tom Mandel <tmandel@UMD5.UMD.EDU>
Subject: Re: plumpe Denken & a reel
"The past is all that can be changed."
-- *Realism* / p.66
tom mandel
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 15:00:16 -0400
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From: Charles Bernstein <BERNSTEI@UBVMS.BITNET>
Organization: University at Buffalo
Subject: FROM: Joel Kuszai, "Re: poetry guerrilla" (rejected post)
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Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 13:40:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Joel Kuszai <V369T4KJ@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>
Subject: Re: poetry guerrilla
leave a book on a shelf at borders. Sign it "William Burroughs" or
"william shakespeare" or "fuck you"
I recently went back to Ann Arbor Borders for first time since they moved
to new biggun location (filling up what had been multi-level Jacobsen's
dept. store). And that bookstore, so unlike all the suburban sprawling Kmart
affected Borders, has succombed to the god-awful trend of CDs and Multimedia
and endless peripheral tourist action. I had counted on their extensive
(sure university-dominated) philosophy and literarycrit selections (their
poetry is all mainstream distributor-bought) for years as a small East Lansing
lad with no good local bookstores. I had anticipated this move for almost
a year thinking the increased space would help open up the turf. These bookstore
s--like even the New St. Marks, etc., refuse "spineless"chaffbooks because
they require "face-outs" to get noticed. My new trick is to take one of my
little chapbooks (Meow Press) and leave it hidden someplace in the poetry
section so somebody will chance upon it. I don't tell anyone and run away
as soon as I can so as to not get caught...
--Boundary (ID sKTkrmvl9vLD4Bx788Vzfg)--
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 09:09:42 +1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Roberts Mark <M.Roberts@UNSW.EDU.AU>
Subject: Re: FROM: Joel Kuszai, "Re: poetry guerrilla" (rejected post)
>--Boundary (ID sKTkrmvl9vLD4Bx788Vzfg)
>Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII
>
>Subj: Rejected posting to POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU
>
>Your message is being returned to you unprocessed because it looks like a
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>of the POETICS list. Please note that LISTSERV commands must ALWAYS be sent to
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>------------------------ Rejected message (37 lines) --------------------------
>Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 13:40:41 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Joel Kuszai <V369T4KJ@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>
>Subject: Re: poetry guerrilla
>
>
>
>leave a book on a shelf at borders. Sign it "William Burroughs" or
>"william shakespeare" or "fuck you"
>
>I recently went back to Ann Arbor Borders for first time since they moved
>to new biggun location (filling up what had been multi-level Jacobsen's
>dept. store). And that bookstore, so unlike all the suburban sprawling Kmart
>affected Borders, has succombed to the god-awful trend of CDs and Multimedia
>and endless peripheral tourist action. I had counted on their extensive
>(sure university-dominated) philosophy and literarycrit selections (their
>poetry is all mainstream distributor-bought) for years as a small East Lansing
>lad with no good local bookstores. I had anticipated this move for almost
>a year thinking the increased space would help open up the turf. These
>bookstore
> s--like even the New St. Marks, etc., refuse "spineless"chaffbooks because
>they require "face-outs" to get noticed. My new trick is to take one of my
>little chapbooks (Meow Press) and leave it hidden someplace in the poetry
>section so somebody will chance upon it. I don't tell anyone and run away
>as soon as I can so as to not get caught...
>
>
>--Boundary (ID sKTkrmvl9vLD4Bx788Vzfg)--
Small publishes will go to any extreme!! I know of many people who will
admit to stealing from major bookchains - but actually giving them books
and then running away so that you don't get caught (what will they charge
you with?).............
Oh well my press (Rochford Press) was once 'accused' on a writing program
on Australian national radio of being prepared "to beg borrow or steal" to
get books and litmags out. Which isn't so far from the truth.
I love the concept of 'poetry guerrillas'. Things (at least in Australia)
seem to have settled down so much over the last couple of years that it is
even getting difficult to get alternative and small press books into non
mainstream bookshops who would traditionally take them (or if they do take
them they will leave them under the desk and not display them - and then
complain that "new poetry doesn't sell"). Lets shake things up a
little/alot!!!!!
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 07:56:35 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Joe Amato <jamato@UX1.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
Subject: selected and collected poetry...
in the recent anthologies/small press vein: those interested might check
out this month's *american book review*... there's a piece by rochelle
ratner (who assigns poetry reviews for abr) about presumed problems
associated with prematurely issuing selected/collected volumes of poets'
work...
note this assertion: "The numbers might prove otherwise (a recent 'Poetry
Showcase' at Poets House in New York City had nearly 1000 books on display,
all published in 1993), but my own sense of the marketplace suggests that
poetry publishing is at a low ebb. And what are the more respected presses
publishing these days? *Selected poems*."
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 13:32:00 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Clint Burnham <clint.burnham@CANREM.COM>
Organization: CRS Online (Toronto, Ontario)
Subject: Poetry gorillas
In-Reply-To: <9408250743.AA19059@portnoy.canrem.com>
Magilla and otherwise
Reverse shoplifting has an honourable history here in Toronto, as well.
Some guys at York U in the mid-80s did a parody of university-published
student mags called "In4mation", complete with letraset-crazy pages &
really bad poetry & left it, with the price pencilled in the corner, at
the U bookstore.
One of the ways people here have circumvented bookstores for the past 10
years is the small press book fair, which, with little publicity in the
media (even the so-called alternative papers), once or twice a year
offers space for 50 or so local small presses (usually of the one person
in their basement apt. scenario, & some larger "literary" ones). Quite
successfull. But probably only possible in a city.
By the way, I sent a message to Luigi-Bob Drake's e-zine (Taproot
Review) in Cleveland and rec'd 42 single-spaced pages worth of chapbook
reviews, so check it out (the address was in Bernstein's essay from last
week: au462@cleveland.freenet.edu)
Clint Burnham
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 1994 09:09:22 +1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Roberts Mark <M.Roberts@UNSW.EDU.AU>
Subject: Re: poetry guerrilla
>Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 13:40:41 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Joel Kuszai <V369T4KJ@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>
>Subject: Re: poetry guerrilla
>
>
>
>leave a book on a shelf at borders. Sign it "William Burroughs" or
>"william shakespeare" or "fuck you"
>
>I recently went back to Ann Arbor Borders for first time since they moved
>to new biggun location (filling up what had been multi-level Jacobsen's
>dept. store). And that bookstore, so unlike all the suburban sprawling Kmart
>affected Borders, has succombed to the god-awful trend of CDs and Multimedia
>and endless peripheral tourist action. I had counted on their extensive
>(sure university-dominated) philosophy and literarycrit selections (their
>poetry is all mainstream distributor-bought) for years as a small East Lansing
>lad with no good local bookstores. I had anticipated this move for almost
>a year thinking the increased space would help open up the turf. These
>bookstore
> s--like even the New St. Marks, etc., refuse "spineless"chaffbooks because
>they require "face-outs" to get noticed. My new trick is to take one of my
>little chapbooks (Meow Press) and leave it hidden someplace in the poetry
>section so somebody will chance upon it. I don't tell anyone and run away
>as soon as I can so as to not get caught...
>
>
>--Boundary (ID sKTkrmvl9vLD4Bx788Vzfg)--
Small publishes will go to any extreme!! I know of many people who will
admit to stealing from major bookchains - but actually giving them books
and then running away so that you don't get caught (what will they charge
you with?).............
Oh well my press (Rochford Press) was once 'accused' on a writing program
on Australian national radio of being prepared "to beg borrow or steal" to
get books and litmags out. Which isn't so far from the truth.
I love the concept of 'poetry guerrillas'. Things (at least in Australia)
seem to have settled down so much over the last couple of years that it is
even getting difficult to get alternative and small press books into non
mainstream bookshops who would traditionally take them (or if they do take
them they will leave them under the desk and not display them - and then
complain that "new poetry doesn't sell"). Lets shake things up a
little/alot!!!!!
Mark Roberts Ph 02 385 3631
Student Information & Systems Office Fx 02 662 4835
University of New South Wales
Australia
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 20:27:33 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Converted from PROFS to RFC822 format by PUMP V2.2X
From: Alan Golding <ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU>
Subject: Cite for woman as "muse"
In-Reply-To: note of 08/18/94 13:18
Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville
Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
Loss--Re your question about the muse, there's some useful stuff in the first
chapter of Mary K. DeShazer's Inspiring Women: Reimagining the Muse (NY:
Pergamon, 1986)--that chapter essentially offers a historical overview of male
invocations of the muse and of the issues those invocations raise.
Alan Golding
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 1994 14:12:44 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: John Keeling <keeling@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: hello and update
In-Reply-To: <199408010235.TAA28157@leland.Stanford.EDU> from "Marjorie
Perloff" at Jul 31, 94 07:33:44 pm
Marjorie:
Just want to touch base with you. Hope all is well in LA.
CSU Summer Arts was fantastic and Robert and Susan were wonderful. I still
haven't received a compact disc of my multimedia project, but I expect it to
arrive very soon. I've managed to acquire many of the software programs we
learned this summer, as well as some more sophisticated multimedia-programming
packages, so I hope to keep working with the technology in the future. I hope,
and this may be naive, to develop projects in some of my courses this year--for
example, I already have the programming skills to put together something like
McGann's Rossetti Project.
This summer has been quite eventful. I started working with Plugged-In, a
volunteer organization that brings technology into low-income areas in East
Palo Alto, Redwood City, and Menlo Park. I also have started collaborating
with some artists from the CSU program on a documentary on the Winchester
mansion in San Jose. On the downside, my wife received some bad medical news,
and we were forced to move because of the increasingly violent drug traffic in
our old neighborhood. We relocated to Redwood City in August.
Look forward to getting the Quals behind me. Started reviewing a couple weeks
ago, much later start than I had planned, lets just say I took a Wordsworthian
approach to my preparation (thinking of how Wordsworth went hiking in the Alps
the summer before his university exams--my Simplon pass is the bridge from
Palo Alto to E Palo Alto).
Will fill you in on more details when you come to town. Is there anything I/we
need to do with regard to the independent study? no paperwork, etc.?
Sincerely,
John