=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996 22:24:36 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Peter Quartermain <quarterm@UNIXG.UBC.CA>
Subject: Re: british women poets
There's an astonishing number of really good women poets around. To the list
of British and Commonwealth women poets alreadty listed by Maria Charles
Daniel Rod John Keith and others, let me add:
Catherine Walsh is Irish, and as Keith hinted, would be deeply insulted by
being called British;
among Brits not mentioned yet (but let me too add a plug for Maggie
O'Sullivan,. Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, Denise Riley) Bridget Penney,
Caroline Bergvall, Frances Presley, Harriet Tarlo, Grace Lake, Vittoria
Vaughan, Maggie Helwig (Canadian, living in London), Helen Macdonald and
Jennifer Chalmers; if you want to step back a little in time don't forget
writers like Veronica Forrest-Thomson or even Frances Horovitz... . . In
Canada there's -- in more or less random order -- besides the much neglected
Phyllis Webb already mentioned, M. Nourbese Philip, Catriona Strang, Melissa
Wolsak, Sharon Thesen, Daphne Marlatt, Karen Mac Cormack, Lola Lemire
Tostevin, Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Julia Steele, Hilary Peach, and
Karlyn Koh.
The list goes on and on -- there's gazillions of others, all so-called
"experimental." Alternative might be a better word. I don't know the
Scottish and Welsh scene at all, someone should chip in here -- maybe Romana
Huk? Eck Finlay if he's around? (As soon as I send this I'll no doubt think
of lots of others).
Good reading!
At 01:57 PM 6/28/96 -0400, Steve wrote:
>A friend of mine is looking for suggestions of British or Commonwealth
>women poets of the 20thC to teach in an upcoming course, and i was rather
>embarassed at how few names i cld summon off the top o' the noggin. Any
>suggestions, for my own edification, and my friend's?
>
>thanks, steve
>
>
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Peter Quartermain
128 East 23rd Avenue
Vancouver
B.C.
Canada V5V 1X2
Voice and fax: 604 876 8061
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996 22:30:44 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Jacquee la Mousse
In-Reply-To: <199607010406.AAA04655@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
I was ASSIGNED by Loss to report back from Orono on the subject of race &
ethnicity -- I didn't get a chance to ask if he meant that I was to
review the gathered complexions or the complexities of the papers, or if
perhaps I was to examine the demographics of Orono itself -- as if that
were not enough confusion, our email system has been returning everything
I've attempted to post on this or any other subject ever since I sent in
that execrable poem --
but I'll see what I can get in before the whole shebang (and are there
any hebangs?) collapses again -- if interrupted, there will be a part two --
"Of the approximately 231 papers delivered at this conference, about 14
were devoted to the writings of minority poets." This observation was
part of my introduction to a panel on Langston Hughes and Bob Kaufman.
This sentence was also singled out by Robert von Hallberg at the
beginning of a five minute long denunciation of the panel which exhausted
the discussion time remaining for the session. In the course of his
comments, Robert accused the panelists, including me, of "doing the
sociology thing," which is reductive, of lending ourselves to identity
politics. He said that what should be done instead is close readings of
interesting poets, but that the poets discussed here weren't worth that
sort of close reading because they were "bad" poets.
Now . . . this is a pretty old hat to those of us who have been studying
issues of race and ethnicity in literature longer than two weeks -- But
what I want first to mention is that, repeating strategies of the oldest
of new critics, these comments required a complete decontextualization
(and an evasion of close reading, I might add) of what had in fact been
presented. In the interests of saving time, I will only use the example
of my opening remarks. The numbers that I noted were offered in response
to repeated accusations from many quarters (I used the example of Carol
Iannone) to the effect that academic critics had in recent years entirely
abandoned "true" critical criteria and were instead simply promoting
authors on the basis of an "ethnic agenda." I introduced my numbers with
the remark: "Let's see how the ethnic agenda is doing." My point was to
offer a simple refutation. The large number of critics gathered at Orono
had in fact produced a remarkably small number of papers concerning
minority authors. Iy looks to me as if the profession is some distance
still from being dominated by an ethnic agenda. This point is truly
sociological, but hardly pointless. (Might add that at least two of us
there on the panel have devoted considerable efforts to criticisms of
identity politics.)
At any rate, I could say much more on this topic, but that's not what I
was asked to do -- so --
The first day included a panel on Stephen Jonas, Melvin Tolson and
Russell Atkins, where could be heard (gasp) close readings of truly
interesting black poets. Mark Scroggins advanced an interesting view of
the ever-problematic Jonas, Keith Leonard (one among a stream of Stanford
presenters -- Stanford and Buffallo seem to be the hotbeds of poetry
criticism now) set up parameters for thinking about Tolson that were
later fleshed out in Lorenzo Thomas's talk, and I spoke about the
critical theories of poet Russell Atkins (check your library for his old
selected from Cleveland State, about the only easily available volume)
On Friday morning I discovered the amazing discussions of O'Hara and race
that were already in progress at the conference. Ben Friedlander
followed some intriguing wrinkles (already mentioned on this list by
others) and Steve Evans followed with exactly the type of scholarly and
philosophically informed exploration that some of us have been hoping for
for years -- Steve has done what any good Pound scholar would do --
finding himself in a poem to the "French Negro Poets," Steve went and
read them (now there's a novel approach folks --) also reading the
requisite Sartre etc. -- Steve's paper asks questions about the
ideologies of race and their relationships to poetics that have long
needed looking into --
The one question I left with (there wasn't time to ask it) is why so many
white critics think that desegregating the sex act is a politically
radical move -- Tell that one to Walter White --
ooops, have to relinquish the keyboard -- will be back in about 24 hours
with rest of my homework assignment --
bottom line is that there were great papers all around on these topics,
though there were few of them -- and there really might have been at
least one African-American or Asian-American or Latino or American Inian
poet reading poems, huh???
but back with the GOOD stuff in 24 hrs --
love to all,
aldon
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 13:58:17 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael Faherty <mfaherty@DMU.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: British Women Poets
It's always fascinated me that poets, like comedians, don't seem to
travel very well and that, by all appearances, very few contemporary
British poets are known in the States and, likewise, only a handful of
young American poets are read here.
As far as contemporary women writers go, I would second the
recommendations of Carol Ann Duffy, Pauline Stainer and Sujata Bhatt.
Bhatt, by the way, actually grew up in the States and attended the Iowa
Writers Workshop, where she met her German husband and moved back home to
Bremen with him, but she's still often listed as a "British" poet.
I would also suggest that Helen Dunmore, Lavinia Greenlaw, Kathleen
Jamie, Liz Lochhead, Sarah Maguire, Paula Meehan, Grace Nichols and,
especially, Jo Shapcott are worth a look. And for Irish writers, of
course, you can't miss Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and
Medbh McGuckian.
If I were putting a course together, I would use the France anthology
since it includes many of the above and more.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 09:21:36 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Bruce Andrews
Anyone have an e-mail address for Bruce Andrews?
thanks,
Burt Kimmelman
kimmelman@admin.njit.edu
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:32:22 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: R I Caddel <R.I.Caddel@DURHAM.AC.UK>
Subject: brit.wom.po's
In-Reply-To: <199607010405.FAA01231@hermes.dur.ac.uk>
Blimey, you go away for a wet weekend and a whole discussion about the
british poetry scene zips past you. This is to endorse John Matthias'
plug for OUT OF EVERYWHERE (Reality Street Editions, 1996) and the
individual plugs for Maggie O'Sullivan, Elaine Randell, Catherine Walsh
(Irish), Michelle Leggott (NZ), and add special mention for Wendy Mulford
and Geraldine Monk (both in OOE) and add Caroline Bergvall, Carlyle Reedy
(also both in OOE) and Harriet Tarlo (forthcoming in Talisman, amongst
others).
RC
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 09:53:16 -0500
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: O the glassy towns are
Which four poems by O'Hara are you (is someone) saving? I am a speculator
and would like all the rest, thank you. Please send to:
Jordan Davis
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 09:11:38 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Jacquee la Mousse, ono etc
as long as we're complaining now about our recent love fest, let me say that at
this conference i saw something i didn't like --a coupla times, senior,
well-established, famous folks excoriating or picking on grad students who were
giving their first papers in public. after one such instance i put my arm
around louis simpson, took him aside and sd look, louie (for some reason this
conference, or maybe it was the sabbatical, being out of the hierarchic loop for
a year, has made me less fearful) this kid is never gonna get a job, he's just a
student in some third rate graduate program, give him a break. he was
reasonably contrite, and hoped he hadnt been too harsh (unlike r von h, he
hadn't been). also, two other plenary speakers whispered loudly and passed notes
throughout most of lorenzo thomas's talk, right there in the front row. he kept
looking over at them but they didn't stop until they decided he was actually
saying something (about 3/4 of the way thru). i was embarrassed, cuz these were
ladies i expected more from. also, at banquet, ml rosenthal started baiting us
younger scholars on "what is 'discourse analysis' anyway and what does it do
other than state the obbvious in unnecessarily convoluted terms?" but then he
apologized. i never use that phrase discourse analysis anyway and neither to my
knowledge did any of the other folks (all women) there either.
as for lisa amber philips' comments on feminist turf-establishing, there was
something very retro about the conference, as i sd in my earlier post. i myself
had fun with it because i felt accepted by the male elite, and kinda basked in
it, but let's not get carried away with nostalgia for an earlier era when white
males could attack accomplished, intelligent women as symbols of the
establishment, with no consciousness of their own gender privilege. lisa, you
know nothing about what that woman who made the comment about another comment's
being "contemptible" has been through professionally, personally, etc, what her
struggles with sexism in the academy have been, how these social dynamics have
affected her health, her standard of living, her life chances, etc. I don't
know where you're at in your career, but i myself never took sexism seriously as
something that affected my material well-being (of course i was aware of
paternalism and the occasional patronizing comment from a male professor, but i
just ascribed that to his stupidity, and it didn't affect my life) until i
entered the workforce. as a student i was very protected. now, i routinely see
my white male colleagues get outrageous raises for --not mediocre, but --NO
scholarly accomplishment, i see white guys with no publications deciding who
does and doesnt get raises, fellowships, jobs, etc ...it's the lowpaid and
overworked women in my dept who get offers frm elsewhere for endowed chairs,
huge salary increases, reduced teaching loads, invitations to give seminars at
harvard etc, while at home its the white guys who've never written a word past
their disserations 30 years ago who make sure these women don't get a break, and
who promote those in their own image. i never would have believed it was that
blatant. i know i sound maternalistic myself now, pulling the rank of "older
and wiser," and i apologize for that. i could be totally off in my assumptions
about where you're coming from. and i know it's not academically "rigorous" (to
invoke a word i'm not too fond of) to suggest that knowing the larger context of
a particular utterance may nuance our reception of it --that is, a biographical
understanding of why this woman said what she did may take it out of the realm
of facile post/feminist theorizing and give it some substance. so, i'm sorry if
i'm intervening from left field. nonetheless, i think one of the things that
made the conference so good, in spite of our complaints, was the relative
openness and acceptance. paradoxically, in light of the strictly retro
demographics. perhpas, and i hope not, this was due to the relatively
homogenous population --that is, social differences were underrepresented, so
there was less overt tension and conflict...? if so, and its possible, i can
easily relate to how diana trilling must have felt seduced by being a token in
the white male literary establishment --i had a great time BECAUSE i wasn't
really a threat...?xo, md
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 10:41:52 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: John High email
Does anyone have an email address for poet/translator John High?
I have his street address. Please backchannel - thanks - Henry Gould
Henry_Gould@brown.edu
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 12:49:35 EDT
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ward Tietz <100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: Re: Paul Zelevansky
Thanks Charles for the overview of Paul Zelevansky's work. Yours is far more
detailed and cohesive than anything I could have done.
To pick up on this idea of the glyph, I think it's the narrative use of glyphs
that perhaps sets Zelevansky's work apart, for me anyway. It's true Schwerner
uses a very different system of support for his glyphs and the effects are in
many ways more conventionally literary, but I would say in contrast that
Zelevansky's use of them is probably more synthetic and sustained in terms of
their function with text.
What interests me especially about Zelevansky's work is the development of an
iconic/symbolic narrative that begins, in time, to function very much in a
literary way. How this occurs is difficult to articulate, but in my experience
it seemed to be a result of a slow but steady accumulation, a re-cognition of
the material that was very analogous to learning how to read. This can be done
by means of images, but I think the entire process is enhanced by the use of
glyphs.
The useful thing, I think, about a glyph is that it functions very differently
from an image or a mark. It's iconic, in C. S. Peirce's use of the term, in the
sense that it is a sign that refers by way of similarity back to its referent,
but it is also symbolic, and in that sense its use as a sign is similar to text.
I've begun to think about forms of this sort as investigating a certain
"presentational" potential of literary form, in contrast to more conventional
discursive form, but I still haven't worked it all out. In any case I think
Zelevansky's books are some of the most ambitious and successful examples of
hybrid literary form in book format of the last 20 years or so.
There's a new piece of Zelevansky's, by the way, in Chain 3, vol. 1.
Ward Tietz
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 13:01:17 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.MUOHIO.EDU>
Subject: Re: Zelevansky
In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 30 Jun 1996 06:33:47 -0700 from
<rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
I'm wondering if you have time, Ron, to say a little more about what it is that
you like about Ken Irby's work within the line. Examples would help. I don't
know the work except by reputation; KI seems to me far more disappeared than
Tarn or Enslin et. al.
Keith Tuma
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 10:11:36 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Carll <sjcarll@SLIP.NET>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
At 04:12 PM 6/30/96 -0500, Jordan wrote:
>Hi. What's the unconscious?
Federal regulations require this label when the product contains less than
4% caffeine.
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
``````````````````````````````````````````````
Steve Carll sjcarll@slip.net
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow
of nothingness, mooing
down the bones.
~~Galway Kinnell
``````````````````````````````````````````````
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 10:42:03 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Jacquee la Mousse, ono etc
This is Dodie Bellamy speaking.
Maria,
One thing you didn't point out in your last post was that the Orono
conference had much more to offer to women than acceptance by a male elite
that we could kind of "bask in." Rachel Blau du Plessis' and Joan
Retallack's talks were *the* best moments of the conference for me.
Rachel's talk reminded me that if it weren't for women like Rachel who
promoted a specifically female approach to post-modernism, I wouldn't
exist. I also found it great to just watch Margorie Perloff, her energy,
her awesome confidence.
I think you should do a bit of deconstruction on your post--in your
complaints about the conference the men are treated as troublesome boys who
do things out of line, but--usually with your guidance--apologize and get
their shit together. The only unredeemable characters in your post are the
covertly racist female plenary speakers in the front row. Funny, I was in
the third row (sitting next to Rachel, who was quiet as a mouse) and I
didn't hear any loud whisperings. What female plenary speakers are left?
Margorie Perloff? Alicia Ostriker? Couldn't these female plenary speakers
be considered a *female* elite whose acceptance a young scholar would want
to bask in?
One thing that stuck me about Lisa Amber Phillips' presence at the
conference was how clearly she liked women and how much time she spent
talking with other women--rather than chasing "testosterone," as you put it
in an earlier post. There should more to feminism than demanding
materialistic equality.
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 10:43:16 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Race 'round Orono II
In-Reply-To: <199606250409.AAA23735@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
well, where were we --
Wednesday evening Robert von Hallberg delivered an interesting talk on
Robert Hayden -- The talk began and ended with, of all things, a
sociological argument, to the effect that "we should" learn to reread
poets who have made certain types of arguments for universality, and I
would have to agree -- Not much point in making universal rejections of
such readings, is there? While von Hallberg seemed to gloss over the
specificity of address in Hayden's poem about certain eveangelical types
(Daddy Grace, Father Divine, etc.), he presented a good overview of
Hayden's long poem "Middle Passage." (By the way, why do people believe
that "Those Winter Sunday's has no ref. to race? This is not von
Hallberg's argument, but was raised here recently) -- I believe the
reading of "Middle Passage" must be part of a longer and more detailed
analysis, but this was a good introduction to the important issues in the
poem for an audience that might not have been all that familiar with the
text.
I'm afraid I missed the papers on Audre Lorde and Gwendolyn Brooks, but
perhaps somebody else on the list heard them & can fill us in? Lorde
needs to be seen in the fuller context of the avant garde set she was
part of in her early years; and Brooks was perfect for a conference at
which Louis Simpson appeared. Simpson, for those of you who have not
read ALL his reviews, authored a notrious review of Brooks back in the
day in which he opined that until she could write poetry without making
"us" aware that she is a "Negro" she will never be an important poet --
Saturday included the panel I have already mentioned -- Joe Lockard gave
a quick summary of his attempts to lay out a parallel between the
racialized social space of 50s America and the racialized space of
literary anthologizing, criticism, etc., using the reception of Hughes as
an example -- John Millet gave a reading of Hughes's blues lyrics as a
form of "projective" community, and Maria Damon, working around a fine
reading of Bob Kaufman's "Bagel Shop Jazz," broadened our understandings
of the Beat orbits -- if you haven't already read her "Beat Occlusions"
essay in the Whitney Beat catalogue, that's a good place to start to pick
up Maria's direction --
and that was pretty much it -- no papers, for example, on Chicano poets,
though Tino Villanueva's landmark antho. appears in the 50s --
but want to mention too Marjorie Perloff's talk -- As Michael Davidson
had started us off by examining the trope of containment as it extended
from foreigh policy throughout American culture, Marjorie's paper touched
in one respect on issues of race and containment -- I can't go into it
all here,,, but in the expectation of this paper's one day appearing in
print, let me mention that she offered a brilliant reading of the
differing ideologies and aesthetics in two widely circulated collections
of photographs -- the infamous "Family of Man" exhibit (the book of which
was given even to me as a birthday present still in print in the next
decade -- and Robert Frank's (name right?) collection of American photos
published by Grove press -- Professor Perloff, now semiretired but hardly
slowing down, "read" individual photos as well as the reception of the
volumes as context against which to read Ginsberg, O'Hara and that ole
gem "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World" -- This kind of paper is
really exciting to me -- not an attempt to read the cultural past as a
transparently available and stable entity, but looking at, how else to
say it, what everyone was then looking at, as a means of deepening our
discussions of the, hate to say it, poems themselves -- One of the best
fast tours of "AStep Away from Them" that I've heard --
(off the track, but another question -- has any O'Hara critic EVER
bothered to read the contemporaneous accounts of the night the police
beat up Miles Davis, which episode figures in a lunch poem? This was a
major topic in all the black newspapers of the day -- One of the speakers
on O'Hara panel No. IV commented that there's nothing wrong with thinking
of O'Hara as a poet of surfaces so long as we recognize those surfaces as
quicksand -- this poem, I think, offers a good example of that --)
so, in the end there wasn't all that much discussion of race among the
papers, but what did appear was worth attending to -- next time, perhaps,
we could expect conference notices to go, early, to MELUS, African
American Review, Callaloo, CLA Journal, ethnic studies programs, etc.???
and despite what Chris said here a few days ago, and despite my dread of
the coming rush of anthologies on the construction of whiteness, I still
think that "critics who are regarded as white people" still need to lead
a struggle, among "white" people," against racilaist ideology, but there
I go being sociological again --
forgive me, love to all,
aldon
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 11:08:06 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: last days and time
In-Reply-To: <199606250409.AAA23735@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
got shoved off system before I could insert my final paragraph on the
final keynote at Orono -- so here, quickly, before I'm shoved again
The final hangers-around at Orono were privileged to hear a quite good
presentation by Lorenzo Thomas on Melvin B. Tolson's major 50s work,
_Libretto for the Republic of Liberia_. Thomas did an excellent job of
building on the works of earlier Tolson scholars (Farnsworth, Robinson,
Woodson, Pinson, Berube, etc) and adding new details to our understanding
of Tolson's relationships to his sources -- Particularly useful, though
brief due to time constraints, was Thomas's look at the changes Tolson
made in his poem between the time a part of it appeared in _Poetry_
(where Williams saw it, to great effect!) and the time of hte book
appearance of the poem -- thanks to the great audience response to
Thomas's talk, it appears that the Natinal Poetry Foundation will
probably see to it that at least some of Tolson's out-of-print work is
again made available --
Now that's the kind of reader response I like to encourage --
see y'all
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:19:54 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: I'll iterate
Put down the gun.
Yesterday afternoon two new books of poetry came out. Joe Elliott, sultan
of Situations Press, brought _Sea Lyrics_ by Lisa Jarnot and _Western Love_
by Bill Luoma in bulk to Biblios where he semi-secretly presides as master
of puppets. These are very good books which will only increase in value.
Readers of the poetics list may remember a few mentions of _Sea Lyrics_
around last February when Jarnot read at the Ichor Gallery. It was referred
to then as 'something about California.' Also there was a brief mention of
Luoma's _Western Love_ in connection with his reading at Ruthless Grip in
Washington. Yesterday Luoma read the book in its entirety to a cheerful and
noshing crowd. I enjoyed it significantly more than I did the first time I
heard parts of it, there in Washington, sitting directly in front of my
grandmother. It is a loping study of double intention and rewired
vocabulary, with the good natured sexual hijinks familiar to readers of
Luoma's love poems in The Impercipient and the Poetry Project Newsletter.
When will there be a big perfect bound book of Bill's poems? There was a
big perfect bound book of Lisa's poems on the table, too. _Some Other Kind
of Mission_, a Burning Deck book, contains much of the collaged and looped
work Jarnot published in Lingo and other places, and the exciting static of
it suggests the purity of first feedback, you know, rock and roll, not that
rock and roll ordinarily has anything to do with poetics, but it ought to,
not that depressing rockist fetishization of the stage, the band line up,
but getting the noise to do the work too. I suppose a good cellist would
argue a different necessity of noise: overtone. Well there's that in _Sea
Lyrics_ which is curiously more like a studio album than the perfect book,
handsome typography by Joe, and god I hope I'm not embarrassing the authors
who are after all reading the list. Probably I will be able to get some
copies to offer to the readers of the list for not too much sometime soon.
So yes in a way this should be read as a movie minute produced by Buena
Vista.
Who was there. A clean shaven Drew Gardner (who looked for a second just
like Tim Griffin! imagine), Lewis Warsh, Juliana Spahr and Charles, Rob
Fitterman and Kim Rosenfield, Marcella Durand and Rich, Kevin Davies,
Deirdre Kovac, Garrett Kalleberg and Heather Ramsdell, Douglass Rothschild,
the Mitch Highfill, Mark Cheney, Joe and Leo of course, Sophie Warsh, and
Max Warsh, geez, I'm leaving out a lot of people. Drew is playing at the
Knitting Factory on the 9th of July. Poetry's sort of quieting down for the
summer, bang.
Jordan
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 11:07:04 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Tristan D. Saldana" <hbeng175@DEWEY.CSUN.EDU>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
In-Reply-To: <199606302025.UAA05978@fraser.sfu.ca>
On Sun, 30 Jun 1996, Carl Lynden Peters wrote:
> > Hi. What's the unconscious?
> >
> > Jordan
>
>
> jordan, -- what eliot was so afraid of
>
> c.
And what he so effectively demonstrated in his poetry . . .
Tristan
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:16:32 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Henry Gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: unconscious
Jordan Davis asks, what's the unconscious?
While perusing a moldy volume of pharaonic lore I discovered the following
glyph, partially effaced, found tattooed in t-bird ink on an indentation
in Tuthankhamen's ritually bashed-in skull:
!! @ ~~~~~ ## $ % $ ~~~~~ !!!
Roughly translated from the Akkadian (or is it Rebokkian?):
"The Divine Simulacrum rules the Right Hand;
The Unconscious Trace rules the Left Hand;
You, O Pharaoh, must be a Switch Hitter;
Live Forever in the Hereafter... O [effaced]"
- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 15:20:57 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: Re: unconscious geography
Henry, funny, wrote:
>"The Divine Simulacrum rules the Right Hand;
>The Unconscious Trace rules the Left Hand;
>You, O Pharaoh, must be a Switch Hitter;
>Live Forever in the Hereafter... O [effaced]"
Which I think gets to it. Why is half the brain marked X? (Half my brain
anyway. And keep your smart remarks to yourself, as they say at the state
line of Rhode Island on a t-shirt a camp mate wore once ten summers ago.)
'new world' or 'terra incognita.' is this so much imperialism of the
unknown
J
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 15:12:41 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Bouchard <Daniel_Bouchard@HMCO.COM>
Subject: books, books, books
Bill Luoma,
You said, in reference to new books by yourself and Lisa Jarnot, that ordering
info. was forthcoming. I may have missed it. Could you post it again?
daniel_bouchard@hmco.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 15:44:41 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Henry Gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: unconscious geography
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 1 Jul 1996 15:20:57 -0500 from <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
On Mon, 1 Jul 1996 15:20:57 -0500 Jordan Davis said:
>
>>"The Divine Simulacrum rules the Right Hand;
>>The Unconscious Trace rules the Left Hand;
>>You, O Pharaoh, must be a Switch Hitter;
>>Live Forever in the Hereafter... O [effaced]"
>
>Which I think gets to it. Why is half the brain marked X? (Half my brain
>anyway. And keep your smart remarks to yourself, as they say at the state
>line of Rhode Island on a t-shirt a camp mate wore once ten summers ago.)
>'new world' or 'terra incognita.' is this so much imperialism of the
>unknown
If I might add a brief scholarly addendum to this presentation: I
adhere to the school of Hermann Nautical of Liebfraumilch Univ., who
interprets this "glyph" in a strictly political sense. If "Pharaoh",
in the regal sense of Person, looks to the "Right", politically, she
finds a "simulacrum" of the divine - those traditional orders of the
Good she is enjoined to obey. If Pharaoh looks to the "Left", politically,
she finds the upwelling trace of the repressed, to which she is enjoined
to submit. They are, in a sense, mirror images. Both demand obedience
of the Person to a higher (or lower) authority. Where, then, in
Chaadevian terms, is moral freedom? Where is - the po commodified
Person? She or he flourishes in a realm of freely chosen commitment
to... the glyph.... the [effaced]... if indeed shuhee exuhists...
- Heinricvh Gcvld
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 16:19:31 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Mary Hilton <mhilton@TIA.ORG>
Subject: "The Haunted Baronet" by Mark Wallace (ad)
Now available from primitive publications -- "The Haunted Baronet," by
Mark Wallace, inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu#s ghost story of the same
title. According to Wallace, "The seventeen poems here are a way of
taking the vocabulary of #The Haunted Baronet# and seeing what it says
now." The result is stunning, mysterious, and haunting in its own right.
primitive publications produces approximately six chapbooks a year,
focusing on present-day writing based on historical text, language or
subject. Cost of one chapbook is $4.00, or $20.00 for six. All checks
may be made payable to Mary Hilton and mailed to:
primitive publications
c/o M. Hilton
1706 U Street, NW, #102
Washington, DC 20009
Inquiries, or requests to be included on the mailing list, may be e-mailed to
mhilton@tia.org
Thank you.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 12:45:38 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: unconscious
Jordan
How bout Eryque's version of "what is the unconscious"
of course, what i've got in mind isn't really in mind yet as the
weather conditions in albany and economic conditions in my pocket
are ripe for aviating
riper than an faux (foh) ode to joy in Philly,
David Baratier
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:42:07 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: filch <filch@POBOX.COM>
Subject: Peeing
Studies have shown the incidence of peeing in pools to be larger,
by far, among members of the adult male population.
Subsequent studies will show whether this figure can be broken
down by race, socioeconomic status, and/or sexual orientation.
If you would be interested in participating in such a study
please contact me at your earliest convenience.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 17:06:42 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Maria Damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Jacquee la Mousse, ono etc
ok dodie. there were wonderful women-generated moments; i too loved rachel's
talk, esp the alphabet device, and retallack as well. i guess i was trying to
be self-critical cuz i had such a good time --thanks for calling me on my
puritanical side. who other than louis simpson did i chastise? are you
referring to barry? i didn't chastise him but told him what i thought. i didn't
convert him or bring him into the fold. we had a conversation. sorry if i sound
self-serving. i didn't, nor did anyone else i saw, chase testosterone. i
enjoyed male attention. perhaps i shd be less self-disclosing. the comment was
intended not to cast aspersions on the men present, most of whom i like and
admire a great deal and have been inspired by, but to question my own sexual
politics. as for materialistic equality, i agree that there should be more to
feminism, but it would certainly be an obvious place to begin. as for the
thomas/tolson whisperers, why should i not feel uncomfortable and critical. i
was so not because they were women but because i liked them and they were doing
something i didn't like.
the truth is, i know the woman who made the comment on diana trilling and i felt
the need to come to her defense.
md
In message <v01520d00adfd4912da0a@[205.134.228.68]> UB Poetics discussion group
writes:
> This is Dodie Bellamy speaking.
>
> Maria,
>
> One thing you didn't point out in your last post was that the Orono
> conference had much more to offer to women than acceptance by a male elite
> that we could kind of "bask in." Rachel Blau du Plessis' and Joan
> Retallack's talks were *the* best moments of the conference for me.
> Rachel's talk reminded me that if it weren't for women like Rachel who
> promoted a specifically female approach to post-modernism, I wouldn't
> exist. I also found it great to just watch Margorie Perloff, her energy,
> her awesome confidence.
>
> I think you should do a bit of deconstruction on your post--in your
> complaints about the conference the men are treated as troublesome boys who
> do things out of line, but--usually with your guidance--apologize and get
> their shit together. The only unredeemable characters in your post are the
> covertly racist female plenary speakers in the front row. Funny, I was in
> the third row (sitting next to Rachel, who was quiet as a mouse) and I
> didn't hear any loud whisperings. What female plenary speakers are left?
> Margorie Perloff? Alicia Ostriker? Couldn't these female plenary speakers
> be considered a *female* elite whose acceptance a young scholar would want
> to bask in?
>
> One thing that stuck me about Lisa Amber Phillips' presence at the
> conference was how clearly she liked women and how much time she spent
> talking with other women--rather than chasing "testosterone," as you put it
> in an earlier post. There should more to feminism than demanding
> materialistic equality.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 15:53:26 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Jacquee la Mousse, ono etc
Okay, Maria, thanks for listening and not chewing me out. To add a note of
compassion, I for one certainly would never be able to survive the hell of
academic politics--and I think any woman with the strength to make it in
that world deserves--I don't know what: admiration? Awe? But I'm
sympathetic to Lisa Amber Philips' complaints. These blanket statements
about what White Middle Class Women do and do not know are highly
problematic. Also statements about young women. There are lots of young
women poets (many of them black, asian, and lesbian) on the scene here in
San Francisco, and, from what I've seen, they have a wide range of response
to the question of whether or not they're oppressed as women in our
"post"-feminist era. I'm particularly close to my intern who's 27, and her
frustration over the position of women in the young hip world she operates
in is a frequent topic of discussion-- particularly in terms of her acting
out her sexual desires.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 18:53:20 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ken Edwards <100344.2546@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: British Women Poets
I'm a little late responding to this, as I've only just downloaded several days'
worth of digests, but...
_Out of Everywhere_, the anthology John Matthias mentioned, is published by
Reality Street Editions, the press I run in conjunction with Wendy Mulford. I've
mentioned it several times before on this list. Among the thirty contributors
there are eight who are UK-based: Maggie O'Sullivan (who edited the book), Wendy
herself, who also contributes an afterword, Caroline Bergvall, Paula Claire,
Grace Lake, Geraldine Monk, Carlyle Reedy and Denise Riley. Another contributor,
Fiona Templeton, is Scottish but has lived in New York for the past few years.
The 21 others are American and Canadian.
The book has been out since March in the UK, is a 256pp paperback and costs 9
pounds. Until recently I was under the impression that copies would be available
by now at SPD, and at Marginal Distribution in Canada. However, I have been
badly let down by people who promised to ship them over; it transpires that
Marginal will only now be receiving copies and the copies which SPD should have
had weeks ago have apparently still not arrived; I shall be following this up
urgently. (I'm sorry: I'm in an "if you want anything done you've got to do it
yourself" mood.)
I know many people are eagerly awaiting copies. Please be patient, I'll sort
this out soon.
Those who are going to the University of New Hampshire shindig in
August/September will get a chance to hear some of the above in person: Maggie,
Wendy, Denise. Also Catherine Walsh, who's Irish, not in the anthology but very
good. I shall be coming over too, as well as a number of other like-minded poets
of the male persuasion.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 19:19:15 +0000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: cris cheek <cris@SLANG.DEMON.CO.UK>
Subject: Re: British Women Poets
Hi, seconding the multiple branch listings of - and then
beginning to ask questions as to the increasingly inclusive lists of
'British Women Poets' cropping up here. The borders of 'nationality' and of
'poetry' are inscribed by processes of dis/emi/nation (to use a Bhabha-ish
breakdown), and as has already been mentioned in this context Catherine
Walsh would be unhappy being described as British. So, the subject
immediately becomes more complex. I'd list Fiona Templeton, who's been
mostly in Stateside for best part of 15 years, who's 'English' and whose
'You - The City' is in my view a major piece of work. Then there are Paige
Mitchell and Carlyle Reedy, both U.S. born but living here for the past 25
and more - both very engaging writers. Keith Tuma's placing of Mina Loy
in his list is equally problematic under such origins and migrations and
exiles and
Is this proposed course on women poets . or is there a
more focussed agenda? (yes, there are a couple of terrible puns there).
There are very many women poets among these islands,
thankfully, and I can see the advocacy for a course presenting a range of
such practices.
There's a considered distance between Carol Ann Duffy (for example) and
Maggie O'Sullivan though. I'd echo cheers for Reality Street's 'Out of
Everywhere' anthology, edited by O'Sullivan and the Linda France collection
from Bloodaxe.
Then I'd teach specific books, and this isn't meant to be an inclusive list
(I've also tried, as much as possible, to limit the number of presses you
might need to contact to get a fair collection together) :
Jean 'Binta' Breeze - ('Riddym Ravings', in 'The New British Poetry'
anthology and from Race Today)
Caroline Bergvall - ('Strange Passage', Equipage - 'Eclats', forthcoming
Sound & language)
Catherine Walsh - ('Pitch', Pig Press)
Grace Lake - ('Viola Tricolor', Equipage)
Elaine Randell - ('Beyond All Other', Pig Press)
Merle Collins - ('Rotten Pomerack', Virago)
Frances Horowitz - ('Snow Light, Water Light', Bloodaxe)
Geraldine Monk - ('Interregnum', Creation Press - 'Quaquaversals',
Writers Forum)
Fiona Templeton - ('You - The City' - Roof Books)
Elaine Feinstein - (Selected Poems' - Carcanet)
Jackie Kay - ('The Adoption Papers', Bloodaxe)
Maggie O'Sullivan - ('Unofficial Word', Galloping Dog - 'In The House
of the Shaman', Reality Street')
Denise Riley - ('Mop Mop Georgette', Reality Street)
Jo Shapcott - ('Electroplating the Baby', Bloodaxe)
Maighread Medbh - ('The Making of A Pagan', Blackstaff Press)
finally a note on Madge Heron. Gab, I haven't seen her for about 18 years,
since I heard her read in various motley company's with bill bissett and
Bob Cobbing. She was a riotous presence, and I too hope she's well
somewhere.
love and love
cris
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 23:33:15 +0000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: John Cayley <cayley@SHADOOF.DEMON.CO.UK>
Subject: Engaged Issue Four - the tinned issue
Comments: To: wr-eye-tings@sfu.ca
NOW AVAILABLE - ENGAGED Issue Four - the tinned issue.
Issue Four is dedicated to Pop and Found art.
The featured work of ten artists and the additional content, which includes
seven ounces of potential poetry, are sealed within a standard supermarket
tin.
Artists featured in # 4:
Patricia Collins - Fragile
Andrea Draper - Pickled Madonnas
Alberto Duman - Seduced Item
Maria Fusco - Questionnaire
Medium Sliced - Mobile Phone
Michael Leigh - Curious Thing
Stewart Life - Easy
Alyson Morgan - Untitled
Norman Sherfield - Mona Lisa
Kate Smith - Chilli Lid
and more.
"a magazine like no other, and not even like itself" - Creative Review
"Tip for the top" - Time Out
ENGAGED is an arts magazine that aims to be experimental, challenging
conventional ideas about publishing. Each issue appears in a different
medium in an attempt to let artists publish work in the way it was intended
to be experienced.
FUTURE ISSUES
Issue Five - video issue for film-makers and animators
Issue Six - radio issue for poets, musicians, sound-artists...
Issue Seven - Comic/Cartoon strip issue
All work welcomed. SAE for return of work.
Work published in ENGAGED is selected on merit and the magazine works
towards equal opportunities for all artists.
FEED BACK
1.Do you have any suggestions regarding a medium in which you think ENGAGED
should publish?
2.Would you like to place a free ad. with a view to initiating a
collaboration with another artist/writer etc.?
3.Do you have any suggestions of new outlets for ENGAGED?
ENGAGED is available on subscription
PRICE: UK-Ten Pounds, Europe-Thirteen Pounds, World-Fifteen Pounds (all
include p&p).
Please make cheques payable to ENGAGED MAGAZINE, and if paying from abroad
then please make out a cheque for the equivalent amount in your currency.
or from selected bookstores:
Dillons, Long Acre, London
Tate Gallery , London
ICA, The Mall, London
Serpentine, Hyde Pk, London
Arnolfini, Narrow Key, Bristol
Ormeau Baths, Belfast
Collective Gallery, Edinburgh
CCA, Glasgow
Zone Gallery, Newcastle
Athenium, Amsterdam
and others
This issue has been funded by London Arts Board
ENGAGED, 334a Kennington Road, London, SE11 4LD
rachel@engaged.demon.co.uk
0171 735 3123
ENGAGED Issue Three is still available from the ENGAGED address
It is published on cross platform CD ROM and features:
"well-wrought and funny" Esquire
ART - ARTISTS
COLLAGES - a collaborative piece by Oona Campbell and Paul Ramsay who
combine random sound and image to create an unfixed, living collage.
GEOFF STOCKER's animations - pure, abstract, computer generated art.
KATH MOONAN - seven stills taken from 'Prime site', a campaign that set out
to question the politics driving the development of mass media
communication.
S.O.S - by Tony Patrickson, uses sound, film and animation to create an
impression of a world in which technological developments lead to an
emotionally barren existence
SKIN - by Carl Stevenson, a responsive and sensual piece dealing with
corporeality in a medium that is, by its nature, virtual.
SELBSTPORTRAIT - by Claudia Herbst - four animations centred around the
female body, giving abstract impressions of form and identity.
BOOK UNBOUND - by John Cayley - an interactive textual/poetic work - 'when
you open "Book Unbound" you will change it irreversibly.'(This is available
only on Mac Platform)
A PORTRAIT OF PERSONALITY - by Katie Waters - a lively animation comically
portraying various aspects of the personality of the artist. This piece has
an introduction written by Martha Ladley of Real World Studios.
ICY-ICY - by Ronald Fraser Munro - a series that sets off imagery against
poetry creating a striking and disturbing piece of work.
THIS WORLD - by Martha Aitchison - a still in which text is built up, layer
upon layer, to create a pictorial account of the language.
IN ADDITION
A FEATURE ON STRIKE, a fine arts project based in London.
AN INTERVIEW with featured artists Paul Ramsay and Oona Campbell.
THE LONELY ARTS COLUMN, artists advertise for others to collaborate with.
A GRAFFITI CUBICLE where readers are encourage to get involved and pick up
a spray can.
LETTERS AND OTHER MESSAGES
EXHIBITION DATES
All this can be found within the virtual walls of a three-d rendered public
lavatory.
PRICE: UK-Ten Pounds, Europe-Thirteen Pounds, World-Fifteen Pounds (all
include p&p)
Please make cheques payable to ENGAGED MAGAZINE, and if paying from abroad
them please make out a cheque for the equivalent amount in your currency.
(if you have already subscribed, for fifteen pounds, the difference will be
sent out with this issue)
This issue was funded by The Arts Council of England, Cimex and PDO
ENGAGED, 334a Kennington Road, London, SE11 4LD
rachel@engaged.demon.co.uk
0171 735 3123
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 20:43:13 -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: Postmortems on Orono (Perloff)
To All,
Marjorie Perloff was kind enough to send an Orono report for the
online book. I wanted to share this in advance with the list!
My thanks to Marjorie,
Loss
---
>
>Postmortems on Orono:
>
>In some ways, this conference was not as exciting for me as the 30s one a
>few years back because we're in many ways still "in" the fifties and so
>they're harder to assess and it was painful to have appraisals like Louis
>Martz's that assumed nothing had changed in forty years and we could still
>talk about the giant breakthrough of FOR THE UNION DEAD for chrissake.
>
>The highlight (for me) was the attention now paid to Frank O'Hara, our new
>hero, as it were. It's been 20 years since I wrote my O'Hara book; in the
>midseventies, I was reprimanded by Don Allen and others for referring to
>Joe LeSueur as O'Hara's "lover"; the correct word then was "friend." As
>for race issues--so fascinating at this conference, especially Steve
>Evans's and Ben Friedlander's analyses--in the seventies, it was all one
>could do to get people to accept that these texts were passable as poems,
>much less discuss O'Hara on race. So I was delighted to hear these talks
>and delighted that the 50s are no longer considered "The Age of Olson" as
>they once were....
>
>I wish there had been more time for discussion--so many issues were simply
>left HANGING. After each and every talk I had dozens of questions as I'm
>sure we all did and so for future reference, I think it would be great to
>forget having keynoters at all and have fewer sessions, each with an hour
>of built in discussion. That's how you learn, I think.
>
>Again, poetry readings shouldn't be sandwiched in at 10.30 PM as a sort of
>afterthought. Either have them or not but if so, give them some
>prominence.
>
>A larger question I've discussed with Burt is the diversity issue. Are
>all poets of the 50s of equal interest? Do we make choices and have a
>point of view? Does anyone get to give readings just because he/she wrote
>poetry during the fifties? It can be argued either way but I did feel
>that to have Jerry Rothenberg's account of the making of POEMS FOR THE
>MILLENIUM followed by Louis Martz's talk which implied that the issues
>Jerry was discussing didn't so much as exist created a strange empty
>space. Burt's argument is that this diversity of points of view is
>valuable. I'd be curious to know how others felt about this.
>
>All in all, despite the horrible weather, awful food, lousy facilities and
>problems getting back and forth for those of us at the Bangor Inn, I
>thought it was a fabulous time, including the fabled argument I had with
>Barrett Watten at the latenight cash bar. We've got to keep arguing and
>not be too polite. That means not being so hyperpolite to dead poets
>either. Or in making even Allen Ginsberg a prophet.
>
>Finally: Kevin's fashion report was WONDERFUL. I was one of the few
>people present who knows Star Black well--she's a really old friend via
>Paul Monette and Roger Horwitz. Kevin's right: she absolutely won the
>fashion award and was also like a breath of fresh air in this sometimes
>hyperacademicized world. Star makes a living as a professional
>photographer; has covered lots of stories and made artist's books; she's
>now writing more poetry and is passionate about it. It was also great to
>have Geoff O'Brien, another non-academic, really fine writer around. And
>I loved Star's responses to
>things--you should get her to write them up.
>
>Ciao!
>
>Marjorie
>
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 22:14:43 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Evans <Steven_Evans@BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: chapbook 2 (North, Robinson, Ngai)
Editor Beth Anderson has brought out another beautifully
designed chapbook in her fledgling reference: press series.
The idea behind this terrific series is to bring together
work by three poets who are at different stages in their
careers, from just emerging to firmly established.
re: chapbook 2 publishes new poems by Charles North, Elizabeth
Robinson, and Sianne Ngai. There is also a striking cover
drawing by artist Renee Anderson.
Some of you no doubt saw re: chapbook 1 (1995), featuring
Keith Waldrop, Jennifer Moxley, and Angela Littwin, also
with a graphic by Renee Anderson.
This is an editorial project worth keeping up with!
Make out a check for $5.00 to
BETH ANDERSON
and mail it to
reference: press
154 Doyle Avenue
Providence RI 02906
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 22:20:11 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Evans <Steven_Evans@BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Robert Kocik/Andrew Levy Reading
For those of you in or near or willing to drive
like wild to get to Providence, this Bastille
Day's eve...
Don't miss
Robert Kocik and Andrew Levy
on Saturday, 13 July at 8 p.m.
at the wonderful new loft space
of Patrick Phillips, 320 Lafayette Street
on the Providence / Pawtucket line
Both these writers are newly returned to the New York area
after extended sojourns, Kocik in Paris and Levy in Chicago.
Both are poets engaged in prodigious poetic and epistemological
projects, recent glimpses of which can be caught in Kocik's
AUKSO (GAIN)--published as OBJECT 4 (Spring/Summer 1995)--and
Levy's CURVE (O Books 1994).
Come for the poetry, stay for the poetics (party).
More information, including directions, backchannel
or call (401) 274-1306
r i a t n m u
a t s u o o o s
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 19:36:28 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: haunted
This is Dodie.
At 4:19 PM 7/1/96, Mary Hilton wrote:
>Now available from primitive publications -- "The Haunted Baronet," by
>Mark Wallace, inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu#s ghost story of the same
>title. According to Wallace, "The seventeen poems here are a way of
>taking the vocabulary of #The Haunted Baronet# and seeing what it says
>now." The result is stunning, mysterious, and haunting in its own right.
This just came in the mail today. It looks luscious. Just yesterday Kevin
was pondering the world's enduring interest in ghost stories--due to our
channel-surfing late the night before and landing on a schlocky ghost movie
staring the ever-talent-free Allie Sheedey (or however you spell her name).
Le Fanu has never been a favorite of mine, but he will always hold a warm
place in my heart due to the Hammer Studios "adaptations" and
re-adaptations and re-adaptations of his Carmilla story--cleverly in each
remake they simply re-arrange the letters in Carmilla--and voila Mircalla
emerges from the grave! Oh those bare-breasted lascivious vampire women--I
can never get enough of them.
Recently I read a collection of ghost stories by Edith Wharton and was
delighted to see how many of Wharton's ghosts write letters. (The
handwriting of ghosts is very faint). A writer writing about ghosts who
write--does anybody smell a psycho-drama here?
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 14:36:29 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Mark Roberts <M.Roberts@ISU.USYD.EDU.AU>
Subject: AWOL: Poetry Stand at the Australian Book Fair (forwarded)
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 07:02:17 +1000
>To: awol@ozemail.com.au
>From: awol@ozemail.com.au (awol)
>Subject: AWOL: Poetry Stand at the Australian Book Fair
>
>Poetry Stand at the Australian Book Fair
>
>This year The Poetry Stand will, for the first time, appear at the
>Australian Book Fair (4-7 July, Darling Harbour Sydney). The Poetry Stand
>represents a world first initiative. This co-operative adventure will place
>emphasis on poetry and independent poetry publishers from NSW. The venture
>has been sponsored by the NSW Ministry for the Arts.
>
>The Poetry Stand will provide a showcase for poetry and highlight the
>quality and diversity of poetry published in NSW. It highlights the
>significance of poetry in a growing market and will bring poetry more
>attention from distributors, librarians, educators, curriculum advisers and
>the general public.
>
>As a special event one of Australia's brightest poets, Adam Aitken, will be
>launching his new book IN ONE HOUSE (A&R in association with Paper Bark
>Press).
>
>Publishers and organisations taking part include A&R in association with
>Paper Bark Press, AWOL, Hale & Iremonger, Five Islands Press, Heat, Hobo,
>Scarp, Southerly and many others
>
>For further details contact Heather Cam at Hale & Iremonger ph (02) 565
>1955 or email the Poets Union Inc at poetinc@ozemail.com.au.
>
>
>AWOL
>Australian Writing On Line
>awol@ozemail.com.au
>http://www.ozemail.com.au/~awol
>PO Box 333 Concord NSW 2137 Australia
>Phone 61 2 7475667
>Fax 61 2 7472802
>
__________________________________
Mark Roberts
Student Systems Project Officer
Information Systems
University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia
M.Roberts@isu.usyd.edu.au
PH:(02)351 5066
FAX:(02)351 5081
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 22:43:02 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: my stack
William Northcutt, you had a good idea. Here's what I've been reading.
1. Bitter Blue by Jeremy Reed. Incidentally, thanks to all who
backchannel me with info on Reed, especially Pierre Joris, Ira Lightman,
Joel Lewis, Romana Huk, and Ken Edwards.
2. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.
3. Autotoxaemia by Latif Harris. About six weeks ago Eddy Berrigan
was looking for a job here in San Francisco and told me he went into this
one store & the owner gave him a test, and it turned out it was the
"questionnaire" Jack Spicer asked his students to fill out to apply to his
1957 "Magic" Workshop (it's printed in the back of the "Collected Books" of
Spicer). Following up I went into the store and demanded to see the owner.
That's how I met Latif Harris, and he gave me one of his books. Turns out
he is the missing witness I've been seeking for all these years, the man
who drove Jack Spicer to his last poetry reading at the Berkeley Conference
(1965) and had the nerve to bundle him up in the car with the man JS hated,
Lew Welch. P.S., good book! PSS>, Eddy did not get the job!
4. The Green Mile, by Stephen King. One of Steve's best.
5. Abigail Child, "Scatter Matrix." Thanks to the people at Segue for
sending this to me (or was it to Small Press Traffic????)
6. "Heart of the Breath," by Jim Brodey. I'm supposed to write a
review of this one, and it is so long. (Quite a bargain.)
7. "The Prince, the Showgirl and Me," by Colin Clark. At age 19
Colin Clark was the 3rd assistant director on the set of the
Olivier/Marilyn Monroe film "The Prince and the Showgirl." This is his
diary of the period.
8. "Sunshine Muse," by Peter Plagens (1974). Out of date by lots, but
an interesting art history of California during the Cold War. Who was it
recommended this book to me as a good place to get more information about
Jay De Feo, the San Francisco painter whose life I am dramatizing as we
speak?
9. From Outlaw to Classic, by Alan Golding. I have read this book
before, but I wanted to read it again to see if I have anything to add to
Golding's Laws of Canon Formation.
10. Angry Women in Rock, ed. Andrea Juno, this is the first book of a
new press formed by one of the editors of the defunct ReSEARCH.
11. Learned and Leaved: a Tribute to Rosalie Moore-Moore was one of the
Bay Area activist poets, like Lawrence Hart, whose death a few months ago
inspired a bit of discussion here on this list. These Activist people
really had a program, didn't they? A program, and a destiny. Alan
Golding, how do they fit in to your ideas about Canon Formation?
--Kevin Killian
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 22:58:47 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: James Brook <jbrook@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: my stack, 2
New to the list, old to books, I confess to reading the following in fits,
starts, and restarts (thanks to Kevin Killian for inspiring me to click Reply):
Apollinaire, Lettres a Lou (one side of the correspondence--only a few of her
letters survive--rich in poetry, emotion, and naughty bits)
Jens August Schade, People Meet and Sweet Music Fills the Heart
(a great lyrical novel by a Danish poet woefully undertranslated into English--
there's only a small book of poems from Curbstone; this novel was translated for
Dell in 1969 because it served as the basis for what appears to be a cheesey
Dano-Porno flick of the era: it's compared to I Am Curious)
The indexing chapter in the Chicago Manual of Style (with snooze alarm)
Tom Raworth, Clean & Well Lit (which includes a lovely song to dedicated to Franco
Beltrametti)
Henri Lefebvre, La Somme et le reste (autobiographical/philosophical/poetical
reflections published in 1959)
A pile of books on San Francisco and California (research for a book on what we
around here call The City, a place susceptible to smug alerts)
Please direct all questions about indexing elsewhere. . . .
Regards from afar,
James Brook
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 18:45:47 +1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Salmon <dpsalmon@IHUG.CO.NZ>
Subject: Not a stack
Jumping on the reading list band wagon - these are what I'm bogged down in
at present.
Alastair Campbell 'Sidewinder'Never read his fiction before & i am quite
enjoying it as a late night book. He is a Cook Island/New Zealand Poet/novelist.
Judith Binney 'Redemption Songs' Biography of Te Kooti (bloody hard work but
it pays off)
J C Beaglehole 'The Life of Captain James Cook'
Hugh Kenner 'The Pound Era'
Conrad 'Nigger of the Narcissus'
From the Other Side of the Century (Bought through poetics - at last a way
to supplement limited choice auckland bookshops.
Beekeeping books & Japanese history.
& 2 books by Lowell Thomas 'The Sea Devil' & 'Raiders of the Deep' for a
poetry project.
In the Penguin 60's Classics - for the next time i am stuck in a cafe
without a paer or company Henry James' 'The Lesson of the Master'
For light relief in all the non-fiction i just finished Mao II -Don de Lilo
& American Tabloid - James Ellroy, don't think I'll be visiting either of
them again - still better than sitting through Tarantino or Oliver Stone movies.
& Listening to the Iliad on talking book on long drives in the car.
Daniel.
Daniel Salmon
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 08:10:25 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: chapbook 2 (North, Robinson, Ngai)
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 1 Jul 1996 22:14:43 -0400 from
<Steven_Evans@BROWN.EDU>
On Mon, 1 Jul 1996 22:14:43 -0400 Steve Evans said:
>Editor Beth Anderson has brought out another beautifully
>designed chapbook in her fledgling reference: press series.
Speaking of Beth Anderson: she'll be reading with Keith Waldrop at
Native Gallery in Providence on August 15th, time to be announced
(probably around 8 pm). Native Gallery is a new big space at
367 Charles St. Sponsored by the Poetry Mission. - Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 08:46:09 -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: Re: my stack
At 10:43 PM 7/1/96 +0100, you wrote:
Kevin, your annotations are just woooooooooooooonderful! -- Loss
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 03:55:34 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Irby's ear
Keith,
The best way I know to demonstrate Irby's ear is by example. These are
the opening lines (first section) of "Heredom," the first poem in
Orexis (Station Hill, 1981):
lobe of opalescent glass
broken in the irreplaceable lampshade
out of the shoulder, the corridor
down the street the kids from junior high
come by in t-shirts for the warmth of February
pigeons overhead
stamp and cry in their sleep
gathered, the branch of acacia
fused through the green swirled
Egyptian thorn milk waters
raised, itself, of the lost and gathered body of mastery
or all the highschool years again, unslept, review the annual faces
[over and over
till they run green in the movies after the eyes are closed
and still as distant as they were in person
the society of the ordinary
highschool days, never left, will it?
against the society of the widow's son, those
who on the elephant's back
be freed?
the generation of mourning doves' cries
is from twilight in the mind
releasing and attracting us
------------------------------------------
I hope your screen reader doesn't muck with the line breaks (I had to
insert one "[" myself).
Just following the progression of the 'l's 'o's 's's etc from the first
two lines makes me dizzy with pleasure, noticing how "lampshade" sets
up "stamp" later, all the way to the contrast in the final line between
the liquid consonants of "releasing" versus the hard "tt" and "ct" in
"attracting" (not even wanting to make a case, though I think there's
one to be made, for the way that line mimics the cooing and feather
settling sound of doves). I don't think anybody's done a better job
than Kenneth at understanding how Olson used to the caesura in his
breath defined line (and these lines seem to me not an instance of the
projective in that simplistic organic metaphor, but rather each is a
construct). I find "gathered, the branch of acacia" to be breathtaking
in how that comma works. I've been reading the poem maybe twice a year
now for 15 years and it never gets old.
You are right about Kenneth having been disappeared likewise. A little
like Enslin, it has had to do with the fact that sometime around 1980
or so little magazines that sought to carry forward some sense of the
Olsonian project just stopped cold, combined with Kenneth's return to
Lawrence, KS, to take care of his mother (the widow of the above poem)
during her last years and his own very reticent nature about putting
his work forward. I spoke with him last about two years ago, when the
veterans of the Free Speech Movement were searching out folks who had
been active in the FSM at Berkeley in 1964 and Lowell Levant, a
Berkeley poet of those years and friend of Irby's (and now a truck
driver out of Union City), was on the list. Kenneth said he'd seen and
talked to Ronald Johnson just once since his own return to Kansas, so
it would appear that Kansas is a state one can indeed get lost in (Mr.
Dole, please follow suit).
Station Hill/Tansy did a big collection of the late '70s poems, Call
Steps: Plains, Camps, Statioins, Consistories, in 1992. Orexis is
reprinted there. It's probably still available from SPD and I recommend
it heartily.
Further note to the Oronians: it is very intriguing seeing the comments
about, in particular, the talks given by Steve Evans and Ben
Friedlander, but for the life of me, I cannot divine from any of the
comments what was actually *said.*
(And Von Hallberg pulled that same stunt at an Oppen conference at UC
San Diego about 10 years ago, declaring Oppen to be a "tedious" poet
with onerous politics on a panel.)
Ron Silliman
rsillima@ix.netcom.com
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 10:13:00 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" <pritchpa@SILVERPLUME.IIX.COM>
Subject: Re: my stack
Comments: To: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Patrick Pritchett here:
Capital idea. My own list includes the following; which are being read in no
particular order, or rather with Dr. Johnson's notion in mind of "read what
you like:"
1. Descent of Alette - Alice Notley (Penguin)
2. The Human Abstract - Elizabeth Willis (Penguin)
3. The Green Lake Is Awake - Joseph Ceravolo (Coffee House). Many thanks to
Joel Lewis and others who initiated discussion of Mr. C. and led me to him.
He's marvelous!
4. Call Steps - Ken Irby (Station Hill). Met Ken recently here in Boulder.
Very nice man. The work is pure delight.
5. Moon Palace - Paul Auster (Penguin)
6. A House White With Sorrow - Jennifer Heath (Rodent Press). Great new
novel on Afghanistan.
7. The Cold of Poetry - Lyn Hejinian (Sun & Moon)
8. On The Name - Derrida (Stanford UP)
9. A History of the Arab Peoples - Albert Hourani (Belknap Harvard)
10. Skywatch - A book on clouds, storms, weather...
11. Ice Time - Re: climatology
12. The Kabbalah Unveiled - S.L. MacGregor Matthews (sic)
----------
From: Kevin Killian
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS
Subject: my stack
Date: Tuesday, July 02, 1996 12:47AM
<<File Attachment: HEADERS.TXT>>
William Northcutt, you had a good idea. Here's what I've been reading.
1. Bitter Blue by Jeremy Reed. Incidentally, thanks to all who
backchannel me with info on Reed, especially Pierre Joris, Ira Lightman,
Joel Lewis, Romana Huk, and Ken Edwards.
2. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James.
3. Autotoxaemia by Latif Harris. About six weeks ago Eddy Berrigan
was looking for a job here in San Francisco and told me he went into this
one store & the owner gave him a test, and it turned out it was the
"questionnaire" Jack Spicer asked his students to fill out to apply to his
1957 "Magic" Workshop (it's printed in the back of the "Collected Books" of
Spicer). Following up I went into the store and demanded to see the owner.
That's how I met Latif Harris, and he gave me one of his books. Turns out
he is the missing witness I've been seeking for all these years, the man
who drove Jack Spicer to his last poetry reading at the Berkeley Conference
(1965) and had the nerve to bundle him up in the car with the man JS hated,
Lew Welch. P.S., good book! PSS>, Eddy did not get the job!
4. The Green Mile, by Stephen King. One of Steve's best.
5. Abigail Child, "Scatter Matrix." Thanks to the people at Segue for
sending this to me (or was it to Small Press Traffic????)
6. "Heart of the Breath," by Jim Brodey. I'm supposed to write a
review of this one, and it is so long. (Quite a bargain.)
7. "The Prince, the Showgirl and Me," by Colin Clark. At age 19
Colin Clark was the 3rd assistant director on the set of the
Olivier/Marilyn Monroe film "The Prince and the Showgirl." This is his
diary of the period.
8. "Sunshine Muse," by Peter Plagens (1974). Out of date by lots, but
an interesting art history of California during the Cold War. Who was it
recommended this book to me as a good place to get more information about
Jay De Feo, the San Francisco painter whose life I am dramatizing as we
speak?
9. From Outlaw to Classic, by Alan Golding. I have read this book
before, but I wanted to read it again to see if I have anything to add to
Golding's Laws of Canon Formation.
10. Angry Women in Rock, ed. Andrea Juno, this is the first book of a
new press formed by one of the editors of the defunct ReSEARCH.
11. Learned and Leaved: a Tribute to Rosalie Moore-Moore was one of the
Bay Area activist poets, like Lawrence Hart, whose death a few months ago
inspired a bit of discussion here on this list. These Activist people
really had a program, didn't they? A program, and a destiny. Alan
Golding, how do they fit in to your ideas about Canon Formation?
--Kevin Killian
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 11:36:39 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: orno for pyros (aside
Aldon mentioned that Marjorie "offered a brilliant reading of the
differing ideologies and aesthetics in two widely circulated
collections of photographs -- the infamous "Family of Man" exhibit and
Robert Frank's collection of American photos published by Grove press
-- Professor Perloff, "read" individual photos as well as the
reception of the volumes as context against which to read Ginsberg,
O'Hara and that ole gem "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World" --
This kind of paper is really exciting to me -- not an attempt to read
the cultural past as a transparently available and stable entity, but
looking at, how else to say it, what everyone was then looking at, as
a means of deepening our discussions of the, hate to say it, poems
themselves --"
There are various books of poetry by Simon Perchik that brilliantly
"read" these same exact photo's into poems which might be of interest.
The Snowcat Poems (1981) work on Robert Frank's photos. The Gandolf
Poems (1986) (and the book after, I forget the name) do a superb
translation of the "Family of Man" set. The wild thing is the
translation itself, how the punctuation is used as a codification
process without direct (as Frye would say "radical" or copular)
metaphor but rather a connatative associtional value that Perchik
builds throughout each poem to guide a readers understanding of the
culmative affective utilization of the punctuation. For some reason,
few folks seems aware of his work with constructing an intricate set
(through series) of "unit values" for various typographical signs,
"Family of Man" works,or even of his connection with Blackburn in the
late 40's. I can get more publisher info if anyone is interested.
Be well.
David Baratier
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 12:18:25 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Edward Foster <EFOSTER@VAXC.STEVENS-TECH.EDU>
Subject: NEW DOUG OLIVER BOOK
New from Talisman:
Douglas Oliver's *Selected Poems*
ISBN: 1-883689-38-4, $10.50
Visa/Mastercard orders: 1-800-243-0138
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 12:20:22 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Edward Foster <EFOSTER@VAXC.STEVENS-TECH.EDU>
Subject: NEW LESLIE SCALAPINO BOOK
New from Talisman:
Leslie Scalapino's *Green and Black: Selected Writings*
ISBN: 1-883689-36-8, $10.50
Visa/Mastercard: 1-800-243-0138
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 12:22:12 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Edward Foster <EFOSTER@VAXC.STEVENS-TECH.EDU>
Subject: NEW GEOFFREY O'BRIEN BOOK
New from Talisman:
Geoffrey O'Brien's *Floating City: Selected Poems*
ISBN: 1-883689-38-4, $10.50
Visa/Mastercard orders: 1-800-243-0138
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 12:52:56 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.MUOHIO.EDU>
Subject: Re: Irby's ear
In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 2 Jul 1996 03:55:34 -0700 from
<rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
A public thanks to Ron Silliman for the example of and commentary on Ken Irby's
work. I'm sometimes surprised that we don't get more of this on the list, what
with all the poets subscribed. More micro-analysis of technique, that is. It's
one way to make the disappeared reappear. One test of value in a poetic mode
is its possibilities for refinement and extension, no? I'm thinking of Basil
Bunting's remarks about Pound having provided a box of tools, making it
possible to go on, and not by simple mimicry or imitation. Similarly, I'm
thinking right now about the ways it might be possible to speak of "the new
sentence" in Harryette Mullen's _Muse & Drudge_, what it means that she's
crossed the new sentence with idioms and stanzas derived from the blues, r&b,
etc, forced thoughtfulness about the stanza as unit back onto formal practices
identified and explored by RS and others (if I'm right about this). (The
stanza/strophe of Toner or Xing is not at all Mullen's, it seems to me.)
Anyway, I for one would be grateful for more discussion of technique--and
thanks again to Ron.
Keith Tuma
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 14:11:02 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: Quartermain, Cage, Beckett
Dear Peter Quartermain:
Thanks very much for your interesting query about Cage and
Beckett from several days ago. I'm only on e-mail about twice a week, so
I'm sorry I couldn't get back to you sooner. In that particular post of
mine that you quote, I think I was using the word "limitations" exactly
as Charles Smith suggests I was (thanks, Charles), that is simply the
unavoidable fact of having a consciousness that can imagine a limited
number of concerns, etc. Olson's quote has always seemed important to
me--in my own new Haunted Baronet chapbook I echo it, somewhat more
darkly as befits the contents of the chapbook, as "The form of
limitations is history." But I agree with you, also, that "limitations"
is a problematic word if understood in other ways--often, the
"limitations" of a writer turn out, in critical work, simply to be the
extent to which the poet is not doing what the evaluator wishes the poet
was doing, i.e. the "limitations" are just as likely to be that of the
critical evaluator as they are that of the work itself. In that sense I
greatly enjoyed Louis Cabri's remark about bringing poetry to theory,
rather than the other way around--that poetic practice can often enact a
scathing criticism of the "limits" of literary theory is something that
is often missed. But I still believe in the value of critical response,
however limited most such responses turn out to be, and I take also your
point that such critical response might find the word "limitations" to be
itself limiting. Perhaps I would say that it would be better to talk
about the "problems" (or "issues," perhaps) that a given writer creates in
the mind of a reader, with the recognition that both the critic and the
poet (and they can be one and the same!) speak from the perspective of
their own "limits" in the Olsonian sense.
If I were to talk about the "problems" that Cage's work present for me, I
think I would focus right now on the issue of what might be called "the
dark side" in Cage's work. It's possible to argue that Cage is one of the
most "optimistic" artists of the 20th century, yet what exactly would one
mean by such an argument? Simply that from the perspective of his
Buddhism, "worry" is a transitory, ego-ridden phenonmena. But is that
really where Cage would land on such a problem? I don't think so, really.
Rod Smith, who knew Cage and is certainly more of an expert on his work
than I am, has often told me about Cage's reticence to talk about the
"darkest" periods of his life, such as the 1940s, and I wonder about the
significance of that possible "resistance" to darkness. According also to
Rod, Cage did not like Beckett's work, because it was too relentlessly
"dark." Yet I think the surface "optimism" of Cage's work is
deceiving--one has only to think of Cage's almost total rejection of
western music to recognize how much of the world he disliked--hated
even--and how
vehemently he hated it. It turns out that Cage's surface "acceptance" of
any phenomena (any noise as music, etc) turns out to include a rejection
of western cultural hierarchies in every conceivable guise, which means
quite literally that he must have loathed almost everything around him,
however "quietly" or "gently" (two cliched phrases about Cage that I
can't stand--the man's work seems amazingly fierce and insistent,
frankly). Indeed some things that he rejected perhaps seem insufficiently
considered--is it in SILENCE that he speaks against jazz as simply
repeating the same foreground/background (melody/harmony) as western
classical structures (I don't have books here with me, and I certainly
haven't read everything he might have said about jazz)? In any case, even
if his rejections seem in most cases valid to me, it's hard to imagine
that a
man who has spent so much time throwing off the burden of his whole
culture does not understand what having a "dark side" would be. I'm
tempted to echo Robert Duncan here and say "I prefer to take my John Cage
dark."
When it comes to Beckett, the problem his work most presents for
me is the same problem that the work of William Burroughs presented for
me when I was writing my dissertation on it--how is one to read the
relation between the fictional world created in the books and the world
outside it that we all know to exist? Too many critics of Burroughs
simply wanted to reduce his work to a representational description of
human life, and then to dismiss it on the grounds that it was exaggerated
(i.e. how does one take the Burroughs phrase "communication must become
total before we can stop it"? literally? some other way?). A social
realist critic like Lukacs would have read Beckett simply as the decadent
expression of a "subjectivity," whereas Adorno, perhaps, would have seen
in Beckett a series of social symptoms created by class consciousness,
i.e. would have seen Beckett as successful on the grounds of his social
criticism. But what's the truth of this really? That is, do we really
read Beckett as social critic, or as limited subjectivity? Do we read the
circular frustration his texts enact as existentialist comment on human
absurdity irrespective of any social context? I think it's
possible to say that all these things are legitimate possibilities
arising from Beckett's work, and that all of them are potentially
valuable, and that, finally, the genius of Beckett's work is the
multiplicity of context to which it is responsive.
Another "problem" I find interesting in the work of both writers is the
extent to which a dominant paradigm does or does not control the work
which they produced. There is some level of theoretical sameness to all
of what Cage does, and all of what Beckett does--their work, like say
Wallace Stevens, seems to operate on modulations within dominant
paradigms, whereas someone like Gertrude Stein seems much more
comfortable operating in multiple paradigms. I think Cage has a
greater level of multiple approaches than Beckett--he's both a musician
and poet, so there's at least two approaches there at the very least
(though Beckett wrote fiction and plays, etc).
But I wonder the extent to which their artistic goals remain similar
accross pieces, and the extent to which they differ, and the extent to
which achieving such similarity or difference across a lifetime of
production reveals to us the "limits" (Olsonian sense again) of various
creative minds. Not a question I could possibly answer here.
But all this is more or less off the top of my head, as e-mail
encourages, and perhaps has gone on too long already.
Mark Wallace
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 15:51:22 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steven Howard Shoemaker <ss6r@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: British Women Poets
In-Reply-To: <960701225319_100344.2546_EHQ35-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Ken
Edwards" at Jul 1, 96 06:53:20 pm
Just back in town after a long weekend and it will take me a while to
catch up, but many thanks for all those fab suggestions. I've forwarded
them all to my friend and she's wishing she had a whole course to devote
to the subject rather than the lit intro. she'll be teaching. I wldn't
be surprised if those intriguing names and titles eventually drive one of
use to teach such a course. Oh, and at the risk of "boosterism" (Yo Keith),
i can't resist relaying how impressed my friend has been w/ the knowledge
and enthusiasm present in this forum. A similar call went out to the
ModBrit list (more academic, and also, by default, fiction-oriented) and
garnered pretty much no result at all. I've been thinking about the
dangers of easy "consensus" Keith wrote about, but still, for myself,
finding a lot of breadth and variety under the "alternative" umbrella when
it comes to questions of who and what people are reading.
steve
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 14:21:33 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Jacquee la Mousse, ono etc
okay, dodie, all points well taken. it's true, all generalizations are kind of
odious (except for blanket staements about minnesota; actually, now that i'm
back, one day at a time it's not terrible). i for my part admire anyone who has
the presence of mind to live outside of institutional life...i cd never, for
example, run a small business although i'd love to, say, do a cafe/bookstore or
something. if i weren't an academic i'd probably be on disability or otherwise
scraping by on govt benificence (sp?). can't deal w/ too many unknowns, too
much responsibility, etc.
In message <v01520d00adfd9339a523@[205.134.228.103]> UB Poetics discussion
group writes:
> Okay, Maria, thanks for listening and not chewing me out. To add a note of
> compassion, I for one certainly would never be able to survive the hell of
> academic politics--and I think any woman with the strength to make it in
> that world deserves--I don't know what: admiration? Awe? But I'm
> sympathetic to Lisa Amber Philips' complaints. These blanket statements
> about what White Middle Class Women do and do not know are highly
> problematic. Also statements about young women. There are lots of young
> women poets (many of them black, asian, and lesbian) on the scene here in
> San Francisco, and, from what I've seen, they have a wide range of response
> to the question of whether or not they're oppressed as women in our
> "post"-feminist era. I'm particularly close to my intern who's 27, and her
> frustration over the position of women in the young hip world she operates
> in is a frequent topic of discussion-- particularly in terms of her acting
> out her sexual desires.
>
> Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 16:28:43 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steven Howard Shoemaker <ss6r@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Enslin
In-Reply-To: <199606301333.GAA16922@dfw-ix9.ix.netcom.com> from "Ron Silliman"
at Jun 30, 96 06:33:47 am
Ron Silliman wrote:
I'll be on the lookout, as it were, for New Sharon's Prospect, which I
don't know. And I agree that Enslin's neglect has much to do with his
decision not to "hustle" his work. In fact, he seems almost a limit case
in that regard, and interesting as such. From what I've seen his life
in small town on the Maine coast is an impressively Thoreauvian one.
Gathers mussels, clams and other fruits de mer, feasts on veggies from his
meticulously tended garden, and pays very little attention to the
mechanisms of literary fame.
But I have to say my experience of reading Enlin's longer
work differs from Ron's. I'm about 350 pages into the 2 vol. *Ranger*
without yet marking its "fading" into an excessively "restricted
range of possibility."
That book wld be difficult to excerpt here for exemplary purposes, and
I don't have time to type out a section from the "Autumnal Rime"
sequence I mentioned earlier (but wld refer everyone to the Enslin number
of Talisman). So I'll have to content myself w/ one of the small domestic
poems from Music in the Key of C. (Behind the title is Schoenberg's
remark that there is much good music still to be composed in that key.)
Where?
Buy I'll not take you home
unless we have been somewhere
or met and asked each other
where? There is the chance
that something like this happens
every day on streets impossible
in clutter where? the faceless
angels intersect suppose they do
and where the home is
bound to labyrinth so many threads
an asking noise of traffic desperate
to cease and darkens lightens
as a voice that sharpens
through it where?
To my ear at least this is very fine, and quite precise "musically," for
lack of a better word (Enslin was trained as a composer). And since
Ron mentions Irby's caesurae, I might point here to Enslin's use of
an Oppen-derived "gap syntax" that I've tried to reproduce here (the
exact spacing, that is) as far as my editing program will permit.
steve
>
> Re the disappearance, to whatever degree, of Enslin (please spell that
> name right), Tarn, Schwerner et al, I would think this is a sign that,
> say, Sulfur and its predecessor Caterpillar have not had the lasting
> impact on the scene that its editor imagines. All of these are
> interesting poets, but their relation to Olson et al is at some
> distance (Armand really is part of the scene around NYC that originally
> led to Caterpillar--he, Antin, Rothenberg, Kelly et al either "too
> young" or too non-projective to get into the Allen anthology). In the
> case of Tarn and Enslin, they've lived at some distance from those key
> urban centers and really don't hustle their work as much as they might.
>
> Nathaniel was in Hoboken the other week for the big Russ/American thang
> and looked and sounded fine. His work with Grossman/Cape Goliard, which
> originally brought out the Mayan Letters, Mayakovsky's How are Verse
> Made, the first English translations of Victor Segalen and Nazim
> Hikmet, LZ's "A" 22/23, Henri Lefebvre's Dialectical Materialism, was
> one of the most intensely great editing projects of the past 40 years.
> It's impact is still vibrating through the culture.
>
> My favorite Enslin book is an early one: New Sharon's Prospect and
> Journals. The long poems seemed too much to me to be exercises on the
> line, fine for a hundred pages, but ultimately fading into a restricted
> range of possibility. For pure studies of the ear, my own preference
> has been, say, for Ken Irby, whose work does so much WITHIN the
> individual line.
>
> All best,
>
> Ron
>
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 17:14:14 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steven Howard Shoemaker <ss6r@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Enslin
In-Reply-To: <199607022028.QAA76788@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU> from "Steven
Howard Shoemaker" at Jul 2, 96 04:28:43 pm
Dammit! I just did the same thing to Ron Silliman that I did to Burt K.
another time. *I* wrote the stuff below, not Ron. His post is quoted
after the "Steve" signoff. Sorry for the tangle.
steve
>
> Ron Silliman wrote:
>
> I'll be on the lookout, as it were, for New Sharon's Prospect, which I
> don't know. And I agree that Enslin's neglect has much to do with his
> decision not to "hustle" his work. In fact, he seems almost a limit case
> in that regard, and interesting as such. From what I've seen his life
> in small town on the Maine coast is an impressively Thoreauvian one.
> Gathers mussels, clams and other fruits de mer, feasts on veggies from his
> meticulously tended garden, and pays very little attention to the
> mechanisms of literary fame.
>
> But I have to say my experience of reading Enlin's longer
> work differs from Ron's. I'm about 350 pages into the 2 vol. *Ranger*
> without yet marking its "fading" into an excessively "restricted
> range of possibility."
>
> That book wld be difficult to excerpt here for exemplary purposes, and
> I don't have time to type out a section from the "Autumnal Rime"
> sequence I mentioned earlier (but wld refer everyone to the Enslin number
> of Talisman). So I'll have to content myself w/ one of the small domestic
> poems from Music in the Key of C. (Behind the title is Schoenberg's
> remark that there is much good music still to be composed in that key.)
>
>
> Where?
>
> Buy I'll not take you home
> unless we have been somewhere
> or met and asked each other
> where? There is the chance
> that something like this happens
> every day on streets impossible
> in clutter where? the faceless
> angels intersect suppose they do
> and where the home is
> bound to labyrinth so many threads
> an asking noise of traffic desperate
> to cease and darkens lightens
> as a voice that sharpens
> through it where?
>
>
> To my ear at least this is very fine, and quite precise "musically," for
> lack of a better word (Enslin was trained as a composer). And since
> Ron mentions Irby's caesurae, I might point here to Enslin's use of
> an Oppen-derived "gap syntax" that I've tried to reproduce here (the
> exact spacing, that is) as far as my editing program will permit.
>
> steve
>
>
> >
> > Re the disappearance, to whatever degree, of Enslin (please spell that
> > name right), Tarn, Schwerner et al, I would think this is a sign that,
> > say, Sulfur and its predecessor Caterpillar have not had the lasting
> > impact on the scene that its editor imagines. All of these are
> > interesting poets, but their relation to Olson et al is at some
> > distance (Armand really is part of the scene around NYC that originally
> > led to Caterpillar--he, Antin, Rothenberg, Kelly et al either "too
> > young" or too non-projective to get into the Allen anthology). In the
> > case of Tarn and Enslin, they've lived at some distance from those key
> > urban centers and really don't hustle their work as much as they might.
> >
> > Nathaniel was in Hoboken the other week for the big Russ/American thang
> > and looked and sounded fine. His work with Grossman/Cape Goliard, which
> > originally brought out the Mayan Letters, Mayakovsky's How are Verse
> > Made, the first English translations of Victor Segalen and Nazim
> > Hikmet, LZ's "A" 22/23, Henri Lefebvre's Dialectical Materialism, was
> > one of the most intensely great editing projects of the past 40 years.
> > It's impact is still vibrating through the culture.
> >
> > My favorite Enslin book is an early one: New Sharon's Prospect and
> > Journals. The long poems seemed too much to me to be exercises on the
> > line, fine for a hundred pages, but ultimately fading into a restricted
> > range of possibility. For pure studies of the ear, my own preference
> > has been, say, for Ken Irby, whose work does so much WITHIN the
> > individual line.
> >
> > All best,
> >
> > Ron
> >
>
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 17:07:42 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: perloff-watten
i for one heard nothing about an impolite, engaged argument between perloff and
watten. please recap, somebody, as it evidently concerns poetry and poetix.
bests, maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 14:38:00 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Don Cheney <Don_Cheney@UCSDLIBRARY.UCSD.EDU>
Subject: and i thought my translations were out at third base
I found a tiny book titled, "Modismos - Familiar English-Spanish
Expressions" by Mrs. Anness & Mr. Boughton published in Mexico w/no
publishing date (my guess is 1950's -- so probably 1961!).
Anyway, I love the English expressions that are used, such as:
"This cigar smells like a ten-center."
or
"I'd like to lick the stuffing out of him."
but the translation for
"He stormed around mad at everything and everybody."
as
"Parecio que habia fumado marihuana.
"Estaba engrifado."
makes me believe that it was published in the 50's and makes me wonder
if the authors were Monty Python fans.
Don "Dinsdale" Cheney
dcheney@ucsd.edu
(i didn't use diacritical marks as i didn't know how everybody's
email browsers would handle them)
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 19:45:17 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: and i thought my translations were out at third base
such are landmines fr raw poetic ore... i recently found a copy
ov "200 Colourful Expressions in English Language" by Sr. Miriam
Azode (Onaivi Publishing, Nigeria), with such jems as:
"I never saw him as a _shrinking velvet_"
"The big row he had with Udo's family _unearthed the skeleton
in the cupboard_"
"I invented that statement _to save_ his force"
"If they do not _take time by the forelock_, they will miss their luck"
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 03:07:23 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Ben Friedlander email address?
Does anyone have a current email address for Ben Friedlander (Ben, are
you reading this?)? The one I had bounced back as "user unknown."
Thanks,
Ron
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 21:13:23 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nada Gordon <nada@GOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Ben Friedlander email address?
>Does anyone have a current email address for Ben Friedlander (Ben, are
>you reading this?)? The one I had bounced back as "user unknown."
>
>Thanks,
>
>Ron
You can try this one: V080L3NP@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu. It worked sometime
around last Hannukah.
:-) Nada (Gordon)
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 20:24:03 +0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Schuchat <schuchat@ARC.ARC.ORG.TW>
Subject: Re: my stack
In-Reply-To: <01I6LDXDFJH69898HY@iix.com>
1. CONINGSBY, Benjamin Disraeli
2. ST.PETERSBURG, CRUCIBLE OF CULTURAL REVOLUTION, Katerina Clark
3. TRANSBLUENCY, Jones/Baraka
4. IN MEMORY OF MY THEORIES, Rod Smith
5. WALT WHITMAN'S AMERICA, David S. Reynolds
6. NEGOTIATING COOPERATION: THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA 1969-1989,
Robert Ross
7. CLOSE TO ME & CLOSER...(THE LANGUAGE OF HEAVEN) and DESAMERE, Alice
Notley
8. MAO & MATISSE, Ed Friedman
9. PRONTO, Elmore Leonard
10. DISCOURSES OF THE VANISHING, Marilyn Ivy (modern Japanese culture,
pub by U of Chicago)
also, for those of you with access to libraries that would have it, I
very strongly recommend Michelle Yeh's article THE "CULT OF POETRY" IN
CONTEMPORARY CHINA which you can find in THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES 55,
no 1. (FEbruary 1996), an excellent account of what is going on
"post-Misty school."
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 09:27:48 -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: Re: Friedlander email + Note
Actually, that address should be:
v080l3np@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu
Note also: the UB machines have been spittin vinegar lately (I believe
that's the technical term for malfunctioning nodes). Sometimes they will say
things don't exist just because they're messed up. (This also occurs in
other discourses.) Often it's good to try a couple of times over a few days
if you're having trouble getting to the EPC or otherwise accessing our
gleaming towers of silicon.
---
At 09:13 PM 7/3/96 +0900, you wrote:
>>Does anyone have a current email address for Ben Friedlander (Ben, are
>>you reading this?)? The one I had bounced back as "user unknown."
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>Ron
>
>You can try this one: V080L3NP@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu. It worked sometime
>around last Hannukah.
>
>:-) Nada (Gordon)
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 14:54:19 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Quartermain, Cage, Beckett, Severity
Mark Wallace wrote:
"It turns out that Cage's surface "acceptance" of
any phenomena (any noise as music, etc) turns out to include a rejection
of western cultural hierarchies in every conceivable guise, which means
quite literally that he must have loathed almost everything around him,
however "quietly" or "gently"..."
Well, loathe, is much too strong I think. Cage loved Satie, & thought highly
of Mozart, particularly Don Giovani. He listened to Bach & Beehtoven a great
deal in his teens & twenties, & studied with Schoenberg. Seems more
appropriate to me to say that at a certain point he just didn't need that
tradition anymore, or only _very_ selectively. It just wasn't useful to him,
& that in part accounts for the usefulness of his work to so many, I think.
He was forced on occasion, or very often, to address it of course. There's
that great story he told of the African prince that saw a program of music
from Bach to Wagner, & when asked what he thought of the concert he replied
"very nice, but why did they keep playing the same tune over and over."
But on another note, in the spirit of Peter Q's "limiatations" question--
somebody, maybe it was George Bowering, used the term "severe avant-garde" in
a post, I believe comparing Beckett to Cage-- the implication being Beckett
wasn't, Cage was. Not to get stuck on that particular comparison, but just to
put the question to the list-- whatsa "severe avant-garde" anywho? Cld be the
basis for a new movement-- _Expurgationism_? Also, if anyone would volunteer
a close reading of Charles B's "An Afternoon on the Jetee" from _Arras 3_
(does anyone have a tape?). . . I would be
quite
curious . . .
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 15:21:08 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: pee pee
In-Reply-To: <199607020406.AAA12104@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
well now we seem to have hit a "low" --
look "filch" -- your survey wd either have to rely upon self-reporting,
in which case it's useless, ot on direct observation, in which case that
must have been you that was kicked out of the pool for peeking at people
peeing -- surely we can come up with a better satire than this --
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 15:28:04 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Irby Matters
In-Reply-To: <199607020406.AAA12104@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Keith -- you might look for the Station Hill volume _Call Steps_, copies
of which may still float about -- I suspect the Tansy Irbys are long gone
-- Did you know that his brother is an important translator of Spanish
works? particularly of Jose Lezama Lima's fantastic Cuban novel _Paraiso_
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 15:51:41 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Perchik
In-Reply-To: <199607030404.AAA19336@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
David -- I had been aware of that via the old Perchik _Selected_; but the
book as a whole had left a bad feeling in me that kept mt from returning
to it -- Now, I'd like to take a look at the fuller sequences (the Frank
series in the selected appears to be less than half the sequence?) Will
give Simon a second try on your advice --
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 00:37:31 MDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Louis Cabri <ldmcabri@ACS.UCALGARY.CA>
Subject: Re: my stack
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960703201337.17569E-100000@arc>; from "Schuchat"
at Jul 3, 1996 8:24 pm
some hits of bed/floor/deskside reading over the last indefinite
while - at 1pm & 4am; caffeinated, ginsenged or cigared; from
usedbookstore purchases to gifts & library loans; all 100-watt
bulbed; in no special order
1. Primitivism and Decadence by Yvor Winters, where I found "The
Experimental School in American Poetry," a descriptive catalogue
of literary devices & to me a very uncanny read - templating a poetics
which seems to haunt the logos of discursive prose itself. That,
next to Artifice of Absorption, is boondoggling - & recommended
for formal change fetishists & their detractors. What other
catalogues are out there?
2. Laura Riding's The World and Ourselves (1938). She leaves
Spain in the nick of Franco's razor & writes, i guess from
England, a "personal letter" circulated by meanderment to 400
people, asking how should those she singularily terms "inside
people" respond to the changes in the world of "the outside"?
"International affairs are too much with us, they are eating into
our personal lives and labours...." The book collects 100
responses into an extraorganized format - divided into a section
of responses by women and a section by men, then two further
sections, "the realistic approach" and the approach "beginning
from the inside." Riding provides allover narrative that further
strings each leter to her own. Much of her narrative responds to
the letters, and explains - wen required - her use of terms like
"inside." Is this a protoypical version of the poetics survey?
3. George Bowering's early seventies poetry sequence, At War With
the US, loaned from friend & returned else I'd quote some
contusional lines. Chequer le livre out, taberwit!
4. Torque #4 (Spring 1996), ed. Elizabeth Fodaski. 21 E Second St
#12, NYC 10003. We're talkin' propellant - at torque 4, the
blade's curve is d-base .25 & the windcut jigs the meters but
good, so you reach "Fifi La Labial Nana Fofana" in about four
minutes. Leather bag not supplied.
5. Dick Gregory's first book, of one-liners & short para
sequences, From the Back of the Bus, published & intro by... Hugh
Hefner, that would be in 62. I had to pack this in a box a few
days ago, but it's got some great lines & black&white photos on
race matters (Little Rock figures prominantly) - who says the
"groundlessness" of permanent irony can only display glibness,
despair & cynicism?
6. The Cool Crazy Committed World of the Sixties: 21 Television
Interviews from The Pierre Berton Show, 1966. Journalist Berton
is an icon of Cdn cultural nationalism, & WASP - so he
interviewsd all that is Not He, for an audience comforted by a
then wellfunded public broadcaster. Apparently the last interview
w/ Malcolm X. Interview with "Mrs Ian Fleming." Interview with "a
single parent," "a gate crasher" (over 26 Beatles concerts), etc,
& w/ Lenny Bruce, Phil Specter... only in Canada, eh?
7. A book by James Campbell on Montreal abstract painter Claude
Toussignant. Professional art critic "doing the professional,"
and swings his hardy boy sloop into Michael Fried's dramascope,
then to litcrit harbour for a poke in the weeds of what T
Eagleton tried to satirize in 1986 as RLM - the Reader's
Liberation Movement. Campbell until now has mostly written
monographs for gallery shows of artists like Barnett Newman and
Ron Martin.
8. Collected writings of another (same gen) Montreal abstract
painter, Guido Molinari, who has mostly gone it alone as they say
("I am a UFO & loving it"), though at one time, in wake of a
preponderant influence of Automatism on the Montreal scene,
associated himself by signature with a selfdeclared NeoPlasticist
manifesto. He has various phases. He painted a series blindfolded
in the early 50s.
9. Derrida's The SelfPortrait and Other Ruins. Exhibition
catalogue of 17-19 c. French paintings/drawings of/on blind
subjects, which he curated for the Louvre, plus booklength essay.
One more argument I suppose, this time perceptual, for the
impossibility of pure "identity." The perceptual geometry holding
together artist, canvas, mirror or subject, and viewer, is such
that the artist cannot literally see, D argues, the action of
painting, even, and especially, a selfportrait. There's a
blindness at the "origin" of the act of drawing.
10. Essays in Felix Guattari's Molecular Revolution, an early
book. Seems that in one sentence from 1966 he sums up Fredric
Jameson's entire generalist's project in The Political Unconscious, and
moreover in the specific context of a description of French
labour history in this century: "It is the revolutionary
vanguard's failure to understand the unconscious processes that
emerge as socioeconomic determinisms that has left the working
class defenceless in the face of capitalism's modern mechanisms
of alienation" (p. 199).
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 03:01:35 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: More addresses
Thanks to Gordon & Loss for their help in getting in touch w/ Ben.
I need two additional addresses for folks whose missives bounced back
this past week:
John Byrum
Joel Kuszai
Email and snail mail needed.
--------------------------------------------
Simon,
Since the Valley Forge area is not awash with Asian Studies
(unreconstructed xenophobia is the local mode), can you sketch out what
Michelle Yeh says in that article on the cult of poetry? I'd love to
know and I'll bet I'm not alone,
All best,
Ron
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 10:46:53 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Golumbia <dgolumbi@SAS.UPENN.EDU>
Subject: Skoal Chaw
In-Reply-To: <9607040637.AA30644@acs5.acs.ucalgary.ca> from "Louis Cabri" at
Jul 4, 96 00:37:31 am
In case anybody's (remotely) (still) interested, there's a far beter
response to the Sokal thing than Ross's (& to media response to Sokal),
by ST co-editor Bruce Robbins, in July 8/21 edition of IN THESE TIMES (&,
mild self-promo, two letters in defense of cultural studies, one by yrs
truly, the other, a really nice missive by Phil Goldstein, with Tom Frank
response). "In Defense of Cultural Studies" runs the banner across the
top of front cover. I'm surprised, but glad, to find out the Jim
Weinstein is willing to listen to those of us who find it worth
defending.
--
dgolumbi@sas.upenn.edu
David Golumbia
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 12:20:11 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Smith <CharSSmith@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Ronald Johnson Broadside (ad)
Joel,
I wd like one of the unsigned RJ braodsides for $10.00.
Charles Smith
2135 Irvin Way
Sacramento, CA 95822
(916)454-3375
thanks
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 16:19:37 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christina Fairbank Chirot <tinac@CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: Re: comments on women today and oppression
In-Reply-To: <199607010145.VAA04030@toast.ai.mit.edu>
On Sun, 30 Jun 1996, Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest wrote:
> re ms. phillip's dismay about a conference attendee's comments that
> women today do not realize that they are oppressed and that white
> middle class women are the last to realize they are oppressed, i can
> very easily see much that might have motivated those comments and
> agree. i have seen entirely too many anti-feminist slings recently,
> as if one is being somehow radical and brave to trash all those dingy
> feminists. and i can easily, only too easily imagine losing my temper
> if i thought i heard yet another pseudo-daring slam on feminists.
>
> people have been slamming feminists for hundreds of years -- white
> master-owners; male husbands enjoying such privileges as beating a
> wife with anything smaller than the circumfrance of their thumb, being
> the only one in the partnership who can own or inherit land, being the
> only partner who have a bank account or vote; men who can vote, own
> land, have a bank account, work at any number of professions while
> women cannot; men being asked to desist from disenfranchising women;
> academics (male and female) who profess, as dale spender has pointedly
> put it, that "you don't have to read women's literature to know it
> isn't any good" in her book on sexism in literature; academics who
> refuse to hire women in tenure track positions; academics who
> consistently give lower marks and bad reviews to work by women, while
> giving accolades to work of comparable quality by men; etcetera,
> etcetera. it isn't, after all, so very new to slam feminists and
> those who do so certainly aren't the sort of company i would like to
> keep. perhaps mr. howe meant nothing disrespectful toward women. but
> with the comments as reported, i have only too many painful
> experiences which lead me to agree.
>
> in other words, i can't say how many times i have heard some younger
> woman tell me, often with a placating smile (as if being, publically,
> a "good girl"), that SHE is certainly not oppressed and doesn't feel
> women are oppressed anymore. she tells me this while she is typing,
> filing, and scurrying away at a shit job for lower pay than men her
> age and ability. she has also, often, just told me about the job(s)
> she left because she was sexually harrassed, the boyfriend she lives
> with who expects her to wash all the dishes, do the laundry, cook, and
> clean, the same boyfriend who has perhaps just left her for a younger
> prettier woman. she leaves work to paint one more painting that will
> not get exhibited in a museum because although over half of the people
> in art classes are women, less than a tenth of exhibited or reviewed
> artists are women (and this situation exists for women writers, in
> large measure as well -- have you ever noticed how in anonymous entry
> contests, the winners are half or over half women, but in contests
> where names are used, 1/5 to 1/3 of the winners are women?). and we
> watch while a black or latino woman cleans the building around us and
> tells us, if we ask, how she was an accountant at home, or how her
> husband doesn't let her go home alone so she will have to stay here
> and wait for him, or one of us in the room struggles to hide the
> bruises from being beaten by an abusive partner while the residents of
> rooms on all sides of us shut their ears since "he's her boyfriend" so
> that makes it all right.
>
> i am sick of hearing that women are not oppressed. i am sick of
> hearing the very feminists whose damned hard work has gotten women the
> right to vote, to hold about 3/4 more sorts of jobs than they used to,
> the right to start a bank account without their husband's signature to
> give them permission, and so on and so on jeered at, disowned, and
> dismissed as they take on yet another painful, difficult battle for
> the very women who will not stand with them, yet benefit by their
> labor.
>
> from this ground, such seeds as the comments you report seem only too
> understandable.
>
> and while i'm on my soapbox, i have found myself distanced and pained
> by the numerous readings listed with no women writers, by the numerous
> lists of admired writers with at best only one woman for every eight
> men, and by the books and book lists with almost no women. the thread
> on british women poets has been, to say the least, a delight and i'd
> love to see more of the same.
>
> women write too.
> e
>
YES, YES, YES! And you've only mentioned a bit of the daily
pressure/oppression. Backlash is pervasive. "Chicks" is not chic.
Reviews of the Orono conference manifest underrepresentation of women
there, as elsewhere. Here's an other woman's voice supporting y/our
position.
T in a c.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 09:45:32 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Teaching women poets
I'd like to pick up an old thread. Teachability is closely linked
with publicationability. New Zealand with a population of 3,600,000
does not support publication of quertzblatz writing except in minute
quantities. There is a "mainstream" of writing which fares better,
though the rate of publication does not match that for U.S. writing.
There are few magazines. Sustaining anything in that way for the kind
of quertzblatz interests of many people on this list is damn near
impossible. Attempts to get public money for it have not proved
successful lately. The only magazine at present serving this interest
is in some trouble financially and that is a xerox magazine stapled
through, no cover, edited by Alan Loney and called A Brief
Description of the Whole World. He also edited Parallax for 3 issues
in the early 80's. This was the successor to a short-lived magazine
edited by Graham Lindsay "Morepork". In the early 80's there were two
xerox magazines, AND and SPLASH, neither lasted long. Meanwhile the
mainstream carries on happily enough.
Singling out Michele Leggott as teachable woman NZ poet is
just fine. Good luck to her. But I must point out that there are
perhaps more challenging poets who are not going to be teachable
because they do not get books in print and because they do not
necessarily appear in anthologies. A reader of the magazines I've
named will know what I mean.
Can we rely on the "teaching" of Michele Leggott knowing
anything of this context? I guess the answer is a very big NO. In
which case that teaching, probably unintentionally,,or even, with the
very best of intentions, tends to be an "outside" interference in the
canon, which can make the situation for those poets who NEVER
fit the mainstream magazines at all, more difficult.
This is not meant to indicate any kind of dislike of
Michele or of her writing, far from it. But before a liberal-minded
extension includes that which is available, to suit its liberality,
it should be very careful about the effect it can have within the
immediate environment within which availability has occurred.
In short, I would trust this kind of foraging around for
names to put into a plausible list of "representative" NZ women
poets for a U.S.college course, only where the library resources
could establish that context I've referred to, e.g Buffalo, where
most of the magazine material is available.
Best
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 10:10:15 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Poetics List <poetics@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Welcome Message
Rev. 5-16-95
____________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the Poetics List
&
The Electronic Poetry Center
sponsored by The Poetics Program, Department of English, Faculty of Art &
Letters, of the State University of New York, Buffalo
____________________________________________________________________
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc
____________________________________________________________________
_______Contents___________
1. About the Poetics List
2. Subscriptions
3. Who's Subscribed
4. Digest Option
5. When you'll be away
6. The Electronic Poetry Center (EPC)
7. Poetics Archives at EPC
8. Publishers & Editors Read This!
[This document was prepared by Charles Bernstein (bernstei@acsu.buffalo.
edu) and Loss Pequen~o Glazier (lolpoet@acsu.buffalo.edu).]
____________________________________________________________________
1. About the Poetics List
Please note that this is a private list and information about the list
should not be posted to other lists or directories of lists. The idea is
to keep the list to those with specific rather than general interests, and
also to keep the scale of the list small and the volume manageable.
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The "list owner" of Poetics is Charles Bernstein: contact me for further
information. As of May, Joel Kuszai is working with me to administer the
list. For subscription information contact us at POETICS@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU
____________________________________________________________________
2. Subscriptions
The list has open subscriptions. You can subscribe (sub) or
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____________________________________________________________________
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To see who is subscribed to Poetics, send an e-mail message to
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____________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________________________
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Do not leave your Poetics subscription "active" if you are going to be away
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set poetics nomail
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When you return you can check or download missed postings from the Poetics
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____________________________________________________________________
6. What is the Electronic Poetry Center?
our URL is
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc
The mission of this World-Wide Web based electronic poetry center is to
serve as a hypertextual gateway to the extraordinary range of activity in
formally innovative writing in the United States and the world. The Center
provides access to the burgeoning number of electronic resources in the new
poetries including RIF/T and other electronic poetry journals, the POETICS
List archives, an AUTHOR library of electronic poetic texts, and direct
connections to numerous related electronic
RESOURCES. The Center also provides information about contemporary print
little magazines and SMALL PRESSES engaged in poetry and poetics. And we
have an extensive collection of soundfiles of poets' reading their work, as
well as the archive of LINEbreak, the radio interview series.
The EPC is directed by Loss Pequen~o Glazier.
____________________________________________________________________
7. Poetics Archives via EPC
Go to the EPC and select Poetics from the opening screen. Follow the
links to Poetics Archives. You may browse the archives by month and
year or search them for specific information. Your interface will
allow you to print or download any of these files.
Or set your browser to go directly to:
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/poetics/archive
____________________________________________________________________
8. Publishers & Editors Read This!
PUBLISHERS & EDITORS: Our listings of poetry and poetics information is open
and available to you. We are trying to make access to printed publications
as easy as possible to our users and ENCOURAGE you to participate! Send a
list of your press/publications to
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program, and Mac or PC on disk.) Send an e-mail message to the address above
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desirable
Send us extended information on new publications (including any back cover copy
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Initially, you might want to send short anouncements of new publications
directly to the Poetics list as subscribers do not always (or ever) check the
EPC; in your message please include full information for ordering. If you have
a fuller listing at EPC, you might also mention that in any Poetics posts.
Some announcements circulated through Poetics and the EPC have received a
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and we are glad to facilitate information about interesting publications.
____________________________________________________________________
END OF POETICS LIST WELCOME
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 10:56:35 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Joel Kuszai <kuszai@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: e-mail address
sorry to blast this over the public channel
but my address is now
kuszai@acsu.buffalo.edu
I've been off the list for a couple weeks and have been spying it in a
digest form.
At some point I'll post my maine response and also some more junk mail
about Meow Press summer publications.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 13:30:41 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: rod smith and john cage
Hey Rod:
Thanks for the clarification on my earlier remarks relative to
John Cage and his feelings towards the musical traditions he leaves
behind. But your post leaves me with a question I'd like to hear more
from you about. When you say that "at a certain point, Cage simply didn't
need that tradition anymore" (I'm paraphrasing), are you implying that he
left it behind without antagonism, just decided it could be ignored? Or,
if he continued to have reactions towards it, what were the nature of
those reactions? Loathe is, I can see, probably too strong. But what, from
your understanding, would be the proper way to characterize his feelings
towards the tradition he leaves behind? There's something about your post
that seems almost to be characterizing his reaction as strangely
unemotional--i.e., oh there it is, I don't need that, it really doesn't
bother me and let's talk about something else. That seems to me a little
bit hard to believe--you're trained in a whole tradition, work in it for
many years, and then one day decide it's not significant, and leave it
without much feeling either way? I'm just curious as to whether you could
try to characterize more fully his reaction to what he left behind.
mark
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 13:45:48 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: ghost stories
Dear Dodie (and whoever else):
Ever read anything by the 19th century British ghost story writer
Mrs. Riddell? After seeing bits and pieces of her work, I finally tracked
down two weeks ago a complete collection of her ghost stories that had been
published
by Dover about twenty years ago, and has long been out of print. She
wrote several supernatural novels also--the one I'm most familiar with is
THE UNINHABITED HOUSE, which I also read in a Dover edition now out of
print. Her stories are not always fully developed--she wrote too fast,
for money, according to E.F. Bleier--but they have some genuinely
frightening moments, and she does quite a good job with character. A real
strangeness runs through the best of what she does.
Sheridan Le Fanu's novels are almost all long out of print, with the
exception of UNCLE SILAS and two collections of his stories, all still in
print I think from Dover. There's a 1977 hardback series from Arno that
republished all of his novels, many their first re-publication since they
originally appeared in the 1860s and 70s. The Arno can be hard to find,
but interlibrary loan will usually pick them up somewhere.
I myself spent several days one summer at the Library of Congress tracking
down
the original serial publications of Le Fanu's novels in various British
periodicals, including the Dublin Magazine which Le Fanu himself ran for
many years. I even discovered several stories from the 1840s that had
never been republished since their original serialization, including
several early versions of stories he would later turn into novels. My own
sense has always been that of all the British ghost story writers, Le
Fanu's novels are most in tune to the economic realities of 19th century
British life. His characterizations of women are certainly often
problematic, tending towards views of them as sweet and moral but fairly
helpless, although there are significant exceptions, like the struggle
between strong mother and daughter characters in THE ROSE AND THE KEY,
which also features one of the scariest 19th century descriptions of an
insane asylum that I'm aware of.
mark
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 12:54:10 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: felicitous misprisions
along the lines of shrinking velvets,
the liner notes to Alemayehu Eshete("the james brown of ethiopia")'s Addis Ababa
album refers to his heart-rendering ballads. render my heart like butter, baby,
and i'll lard you with poems.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 15:22:01 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Resent-From: Keith Tuma <KWTUMA@miamiu.muohio.edu>
Comments: Originally-From: von6@midway.uchicago.edu (robert von hallberg)
From: Keith Tuma <KWTUMA@MIAMIU.MUOHIO.EDU>
Subject: Orono
Several days ago I forwarded to Robert von Hallberg the comments made about
his comments in Orono. I did so because I think it's important that people be
allowed to respond to the charges made against them in what is after all a
public forum, however circumscribed. I now forward von Hallberg's response to
Aldon, having been asked to do so.
I expect that conversation will ensue. Unfortunately, I'm leaving for the
East Coast for a week on Sunday, and thus will be unable either to participate
or to forward messages. Perhaps someone might take care of the latter for me.
best to all,
Keith Tuma
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>To: anielsen@email.sjsu.edu
>From: von6@midway.uchicago.edu (robert von hallberg)
>Subject: Orono
>Cc:
>Bcc:
>X-Attachments:
>
>5 July 1996 Friday.
>
>Dear Aldon,
>
> Keith Tuma was good enough to forward to me your remarks about my
contribution to your Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman session at Orono; I might
otherwise not have known of your representation of what I said to that
gathering. I want to reply first to you directly, then I will post this so
that others can consider the matter further, if they wish.
>
> Why is it that after all the rhetorical and intellectual training that
people like you and I receive, we tend so often to want to reduce
intellectual differences until our opponents seem wholly negligible? I have
felt this pull in my own writing, and friends have stopped me and reminded
me that the issues that divide people are not ridiculous, that it is
important to get right what our adversaries are advocating or claiming. And
of course I recognize this pull in your representation of my remarks at your
Hughes/Kaufman panel.
> 1. I did not claim that Hughes and Kaufman are "bad" poets, as you
allege. This is simply a factual error on your part. I claimed instead
that our job as literary scholars is to sort out the best writings of the
poets we claim are being wrongly neglected and present them along with
principled evaluative arguments to such audiences as the one gathered at
Orono.
> 2. This relates to your quotation of my saying in an accusatory manner
that you and the other panelists were "doing the sociology thing." My
objection is not at all to the use of sociology or sociological analysis in
literary history or criticism; my own work is heavily indebted--as is clear
to my readers--to the work of sociologists of American intellectuals, and my
most recent book is a sociology-of-art study of East German intellectuals.
My objection was then explicitly to simplistic sociology. The example I
gave in Orono, you will recall, was not your remark about the number of
papers on minority poets, but instead the listing by the first presenter,
whose name is not before me now, of the various postwar anthologies and the
tabulation of the number of African American poets included: "One" or "none"
were the scores repeated a number of times. This sort of sociological
analysis is limited because it does not get beyond the obvious point that is
not in contention: that African American writers have consistently been
poorly represented in mainstream anthologies. I think the word I used to
characterize this analysis was "simple." I said that as an intellectual
endeavor, this sort of analysis is superficial and not worth doing.
> Once one observes, before an audience of teachers and scholars of
contemporary poetry, that African American poets are not being discussed
enough in conferences, not being published often enough in anthologies,
etc., one should go on to the next step: the making of an argument for the
teaching, study, or appreciation of particular poems by particular poets.
If one does not take that step, one implies that the teaching, study, or
appreciation of one African American poet is as desirable as the teaching,
study, or appreciation of another. That is, one is refusing to take the
poets with full seriousness by not examining their best work in detail.
And, yes, at this point I do feel that identity politics misleads literary
critics into thinking that any form of commentary on underrepresented poets
is itself a good thing and often even a sufficient thing. These poets
existed; they were rarely published in mainstream anthologies; document
their existence in the future--this is an elementary sort of literary
critical project. The training that we have as literary scholars and
critics enables us to go much further in the intellectual analysis of
poetry. Why should we be timid about subjecting poems by Hughes, for
example, to the most rigorous critical scrutiny of which we are capable?
> 3. One answer that is commonly given to this question is that the
methods of critical analysis that are commonly used to scrutinize poems by
Eliot, say, or Pound, or Moore, will not get at the full achievement of
African American poets. That may be the case. If so, we need to know
exactly where it is so, at what point in analysis the critical categories
fail to serve the poets well. That is very interesting and worth knowing in
detail, through patient analysis. Once we see just where the critical
categories come up empty we can begin to define alternative categories that
will serve the poetry better and we can theorize the significance of these
categories.
> I did claim, apropos of your misrepresentation of my statements (cited
above as item #1) that the poems quoted by Hughes in the first paper were
not on the face of things impressive, and that the analysis presented there
did not take them beyond the face of things.
> I will relate an anecdote here. Later in the day, after your session,
another conferee told me that I just did not understand Hughes. She told me
that her husband and she had known him and came to learn of his craftiness.
Her husband once remarked to Hughes that he would love to hear Hughes talk
about the blues, because he was sure that Hughes would have a different
understanding of them than he did (being white). Hughes said, yes, they
would have to have that talk, and that maybe they could talk about Schubert
at the same time, because Hughes would like to know the white man's
understanding of Schubert too. The woman telling me the story said that she
wasn't sure her husband took the point of the rebuke right away. Then she
told me that what I failed to understand about Hughes was that he was
writing for an uneducated, large [black] urban audience, and that of course
poems addressed to such an audience would not sound impressive to me. Her
point was that Hughes was crafty, knew what he was doing, etc. I asked her
if she didn't see any similarity between her claim about Hughes writing
simply for simple folk and her husband's presumption that black people have
a distinct, circumscribed view of music. She saw no resemblance there. But
I think that she and her husband were condescending to Hughes in both
instances. Not to subject Hughes's poetry to close analysis and developed
evaluative argumentation is to refuse to give him as an artist just what we
are trained to give to the work of Eliot, Pound, Wilbur, Lowell, Bishop,
Moore, et al.
> 4. After you misrepresent me by alleging that I said Hughes and Kaufman
were "bad poets," you say: "Now ... this is pretty old hat to those of us
who have been studying issues of race and ethnicity in literature longer
than two weeks."
> Let me say forthrightly here what I said to you in Orono: I benefited
from your book on intertextuality and race, esp. (as I told you) from your
discussion of Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage." You have been working for
years on race and ethnicity, and my paper on Hayden at the conference is the
very beginning of my effort now to write about African American poetry, as I
mentioned. I am a novice, maybe even an interloper, in your field, and I
respect the feelings that are expressed by your remark about the two weeks.
You are a professional in this area and you are entitled to feel a somewhat
proprietary sense toward this academic specialty, African American poetry.
> My own view is that outsiders sometimes manage to bring something
distinctive and unsettling to academic specialties. For this reason, I
repeatedly argue that the writing of poet-critics is of special value to us
now that literary scholarship has become thoroughly dominated by academic
criticism and interpretation, and I hope that my engagement as an American
with East German literary and intellectual culture will be off the beaten
track of the straight disciplines that have custodial and proprietary claims
to the study of East German literature and culture.
> But it is not the case that my advocacy of evaluative argument and close
analysis of particular poems is properly characterized as the "strategies of
the oldest of new critics," as you claim. The authority of New Criticism
has been discredited, but not all close analysis and not all sustained
evaluative argument have been discredited at the same time. I am not
advocating that the arguments for the poets you admire be conducted by New
Critical criteria--analysis of irony, tone, imagery, etc. My claim is
rather that advocates of poets excluded from anthologies need to put on the
table the evidence of poetic achievement and argue, in whatever terms work
best for those poems, for the understanding and evaluation of those poems.
Not to do this when an audience is gathered that can make a difference to
the dissemination of such poets seems to me intellectually timid.
>
> Yours,
>
> Robert von
Hallberg
>
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 15:11:50 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Another ethnic group
If one were so foolish as to try to describe contemporary Native American
poetries briefly, what would that description be, and what names would be
attached?
No, I'm not giving a course, and do have other sources (Haskell Indian
Nations University is down the road a short piece), but I'm curious what
members of this list would say.
Thanks.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 16:20:45 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gwyn McVay <gmcvay1@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: felicitous misprisions
In-Reply-To: <31dd56c136af012@mhub2.tc.umn.edu>
If they haven't changed the dessert menu at the Westin William Penn in
Pittsburgh, see it; it was obviously compiled by a non-native speaker,
and is chock full of inexplicabilities. The banana something I ordered
was described as being "attacked by a banana liquoir." In the heading to
"cappuccino mousse," someone had struck an accidental carriage return, so
it now read:
Cappucci
no mousse
which may be a found pome?
Gwyn
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 15:54:27 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono
hi keith! did you also let aldon know you were going to forward his remarks? it
is not at all clear to me that this list is a "public" one, and i have had the
experience of having a formal grievance brought against me by members of another
list i made reference to on poetix, believing that, tho this is to be sure a
conversation, it is a "private" conversation. this is not a rebuke but a
reminder --to all, in fact --that there is some uncertainty about exactly what
the boundaries of the list in fact are. i guess it's good to assume, as you do,
that anything CAN be made public, and that anyone can reach our files thru EPC
after all, anyway.
i'll respond to von h at some length later. as i've said, i have had very good
interactions with him and consider him a warm, supportive colleague, but i see
sometimes the adoption of a persona --the LIBERAL conscience of "what we do"
--and the invocation of categories many of us have come to dismiss (he would
argue that we're throwing the baby out w/ the proverbial bathwater) --can be
startling. he has, tho, written one of the best (and first) of what i would
consider cultural studies/poetry texts around, choosing to argue --again, not an
argument i make, but a worthy one --that poetry has played a very centrist role
in consolidating the American empire. that he does not go on to criticise this
role is where i part with him, but i think it important that someone is making
an argument different from the common assumption that poetry is necessarily a
vanguard discourse. his and my work could be seen in point-counterpoint
dialogue, in fact, and i think it matters a lot who it is we choose to study to
buttress our respective positions. i do not, for example, think that
qualitative evaluation is why we study poetry, or that we should only teach what
is the "best." the kaufman poem i discussed ("bagel shop jazz") has, to be
sure, some real clinkers in in ("doomed to see their coffee dreams/ Crushed on
the floors of time" --for example --i like coffee dreams but anything "of time"
sounds soupy to me) but it illustrates a "scene" that is rich, complex, and
sociologically compelling to me, which is why i wrote about it.
i agree that listing anthologies and saying how many Black poets were or weren't
included is not sufficient as analysis, but i also don't think it can be said
often enough as a starting point. i have seen some essays on hughes, for
example, that don't attend to his social location and his circumstances, that
completely fall flat and end up sounding very bad-faith and just plain
inaccurate; for example, rather than looking on his importation of popular Black
culture into print-"Poetry" as an intellectual/aesthetic achievement, it was
seen as an example how skillfully he "marketed" himself. the critic was
clearly trying to get beyond what s/he considered a simplistic boosterish
analysis, but the result was, to my mind, disastrous. i think it is possible to
be both analytically sophisticated AND advocacy-oriented, as Aldon's, CLR
James's, Stuart Hall's, and George Lipsitz's work show. I think also the
o'hara/race sessions instanciated this blend of skillful critique/analysis and
sympathy.
i do think that marjorie has a point about getting rid of plenary sessions,
because it sets up a class system, so that Bob can give what he himself
describes as a "neophyte" effort at a plenary, while Aldon, to whose work he
graciously describes himself as indebted, is in the position of appearing to
take on a "heavy" from the sidelines, as it were.
well i guess I have responded to Bob's post here/now after all.
In message <199607051829.NAA17860@midway.uchicago.edu> UB Poetics discussion
group writes:
> Several days ago I forwarded to Robert von Hallberg the comments made about
> his comments in Orono. I did so because I think it's important that people
> be
> allowed to respond to the charges made against them in what is after all a
> public forum, however circumscribed. I now forward von Hallberg's response
> to
> Aldon, having been asked to do so.
>
> I expect that conversation will ensue. Unfortunately, I'm leaving for the
> East Coast for a week on Sunday, and thus will be unable either to
> participate
> or to forward messages. Perhaps someone might take care of the latter for
> me.
>
> best to all,
> Keith Tuma
> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> >To: anielsen@email.sjsu.edu
> >From: von6@midway.uchicago.edu (robert von hallberg)
> >Subject: Orono
> >Cc:
> >Bcc:
> >X-Attachments:
> >
> >5 July 1996 Friday.
> >
> >Dear Aldon,
> >
> > Keith Tuma was good enough to forward to me your remarks about my
> contribution to your Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman session at Orono; I might
> otherwise not have known of your representation of what I said to that
> gathering. I want to reply first to you directly, then I will post this so
> that others can consider the matter further, if they wish.
> >
> > Why is it that after all the rhetorical and intellectual training that
> people like you and I receive, we tend so often to want to reduce
> intellectual differences until our opponents seem wholly negligible? I have
> felt this pull in my own writing, and friends have stopped me and reminded
> me that the issues that divide people are not ridiculous, that it is
> important to get right what our adversaries are advocating or claiming. And
> of course I recognize this pull in your representation of my remarks at your
> Hughes/Kaufman panel.
> > 1. I did not claim that Hughes and Kaufman are "bad" poets, as you
> allege. This is simply a factual error on your part. I claimed instead
> that our job as literary scholars is to sort out the best writings of the
> poets we claim are being wrongly neglected and present them along with
> principled evaluative arguments to such audiences as the one gathered at
> Orono.
> > 2. This relates to your quotation of my saying in an accusatory manner
> that you and the other panelists were "doing the sociology thing." My
> objection is not at all to the use of sociology or sociological analysis in
> literary history or criticism; my own work is heavily indebted--as is clear
> to my readers--to the work of sociologists of American intellectuals, and my
> most recent book is a sociology-of-art study of East German intellectuals.
> My objection was then explicitly to simplistic sociology. The example I
> gave in Orono, you will recall, was not your remark about the number of
> papers on minority poets, but instead the listing by the first presenter,
> whose name is not before me now, of the various postwar anthologies and the
> tabulation of the number of African American poets included: "One" or "none"
> were the scores repeated a number of times. This sort of sociological
> analysis is limited because it does not get beyond the obvious point that is
> not in contention: that African American writers have consistently been
> poorly represented in mainstream anthologies. I think the word I used to
> characterize this analysis was "simple." I said that as an intellectual
> endeavor, this sort of analysis is superficial and not worth doing.
> > Once one observes, before an audience of teachers and scholars of
> contemporary poetry, that African American poets are not being discussed
> enough in conferences, not being published often enough in anthologies,
> etc., one should go on to the next step: the making of an argument for the
> teaching, study, or appreciation of particular poems by particular poets.
> If one does not take that step, one implies that the teaching, study, or
> appreciation of one African American poet is as desirable as the teaching,
> study, or appreciation of another. That is, one is refusing to take the
> poets with full seriousness by not examining their best work in detail.
> And, yes, at this point I do feel that identity politics misleads literary
> critics into thinking that any form of commentary on underrepresented poets
> is itself a good thing and often even a sufficient thing. These poets
> existed; they were rarely published in mainstream anthologies; document
> their existence in the future--this is an elementary sort of literary
> critical project. The training that we have as literary scholars and
> critics enables us to go much further in the intellectual analysis of
> poetry. Why should we be timid about subjecting poems by Hughes, for
> example, to the most rigorous critical scrutiny of which we are capable?
> > 3. One answer that is commonly given to this question is that the
> methods of critical analysis that are commonly used to scrutinize poems by
> Eliot, say, or Pound, or Moore, will not get at the full achievement of
> African American poets. That may be the case. If so, we need to know
> exactly where it is so, at what point in analysis the critical categories
> fail to serve the poets well. That is very interesting and worth knowing in
> detail, through patient analysis. Once we see just where the critical
> categories come up empty we can begin to define alternative categories that
> will serve the poetry better and we can theorize the significance of these
> categories.
> > I did claim, apropos of your misrepresentation of my statements (cited
> above as item #1) that the poems quoted by Hughes in the first paper were
> not on the face of things impressive, and that the analysis presented there
> did not take them beyond the face of things.
> > I will relate an anecdote here. Later in the day, after your session,
> another conferee told me that I just did not understand Hughes. She told me
> that her husband and she had known him and came to learn of his craftiness.
> Her husband once remarked to Hughes that he would love to hear Hughes talk
> about the blues, because he was sure that Hughes would have a different
> understanding of them than he did (being white). Hughes said, yes, they
> would have to have that talk, and that maybe they could talk about Schubert
> at the same time, because Hughes would like to know the white man's
> understanding of Schubert too. The woman telling me the story said that she
> wasn't sure her husband took the point of the rebuke right away. Then she
> told me that what I failed to understand about Hughes was that he was
> writing for an uneducated, large [black] urban audience, and that of course
> poems addressed to such an audience would not sound impressive to me. Her
> point was that Hughes was crafty, knew what he was doing, etc. I asked her
> if she didn't see any similarity between her claim about Hughes writing
> simply for simple folk and her husband's presumption that black people have
> a distinct, circumscribed view of music. She saw no resemblance there. But
> I think that she and her husband were condescending to Hughes in both
> instances. Not to subject Hughes's poetry to close analysis and developed
> evaluative argumentation is to refuse to give him as an artist just what we
> are trained to give to the work of Eliot, Pound, Wilbur, Lowell, Bishop,
> Moore, et al.
> > 4. After you misrepresent me by alleging that I said Hughes and Kaufman
> were "bad poets," you say: "Now ... this is pretty old hat to those of us
> who have been studying issues of race and ethnicity in literature longer
> than two weeks."
> > Let me say forthrightly here what I said to you in Orono: I benefited
> from your book on intertextuality and race, esp. (as I told you) from your
> discussion of Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage." You have been working for
> years on race and ethnicity, and my paper on Hayden at the conference is the
> very beginning of my effort now to write about African American poetry, as I
> mentioned. I am a novice, maybe even an interloper, in your field, and I
> respect the feelings that are expressed by your remark about the two weeks.
> You are a professional in this area and you are entitled to feel a somewhat
> proprietary sense toward this academic specialty, African American poetry.
> > My own view is that outsiders sometimes manage to bring something
> distinctive and unsettling to academic specialties. For this reason, I
> repeatedly argue that the writing of poet-critics is of special value to us
> now that literary scholarship has become thoroughly dominated by academic
> criticism and interpretation, and I hope that my engagement as an American
> with East German literary and intellectual culture will be off the beaten
> track of the straight disciplines that have custodial and proprietary claims
> to the study of East German literature and culture.
> > But it is not the case that my advocacy of evaluative argument and close
> analysis of particular poems is properly characterized as the "strategies of
> the oldest of new critics," as you claim. The authority of New Criticism
> has been discredited, but not all close analysis and not all sustained
> evaluative argument have been discredited at the same time. I am not
> advocating that the arguments for the poets you admire be conducted by New
> Critical criteria--analysis of irony, tone, imagery, etc. My claim is
> rather that advocates of poets excluded from anthologies need to put on the
> table the evidence of poetic achievement and argue, in whatever terms work
> best for those poems, for the understanding and evaluation of those poems.
> Not to do this when an audience is gathered that can make a difference to
> the dissemination of such poets seems to me intellectually timid.
> >
> > Yours,
> >
> > Robert von
> Hallberg
> >
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 17:43:04 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.MUOHIO.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 5 Jul 1996 15:54:27 -0500 from
<damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
No, Maria, I hadn't asked Aldon if I might forward his comments. This is
perhaps a lapse in list ethics on my part--if so, I apologize. Like many on
this list, I've learned from Aldon, had useful exchanges private and otherwise
with him, find him one of the best, friendliest folks in po-biz. So, sorry,
Aldon, if you mind. But I expected that the exchange would be productive, and
surely wouldn't send just any remark or a remark by just anybody (somebody I
didn't or wouldn't necessarily expect to be willing to take on a particular
conversation) to a person not a part of the list. And I would never send on
a remark of the sort you allude to re your own situation. I know von Hallberg
well-enough to know that he would respond to Aldon's commentary in a manner
which would raise questions. What happened to you is regretful.
Nevertheless, I do think that some clarification of the parameters of our
conversation here is needed--or perhaps I've missed them. The EPC archives
are of course available to all interested computer users, and increasingly
comments made on poetics are cited in various print venues. (A poetics note
of mine, for instance, is cited in Jed Rasula's book; and I have no problem
with that, though I was not asked for permission and I'm betting neither was
the listowner.) I guess I take it that "private" applies first and foremost
to the matter of informing people of the existence of this list. And that
there, as elsewhere, some common sense and taste must factor into the
decision to "spread the word." Beyond that I'm not sure how this list can be
altogether private, but if i'm missing something I'll be happy to be clued in.
all best,
keith
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 16:16:58 PDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: William Marsh - 3809183 <wmarsh@NUNIC.NU.EDU>
Subject: Re: stochastic
I'm hunting down references to the term "stochastic" and wonder if anyone
out there has come across it recently, especially in specific reference to
writing/poetics. I came across it myself in an essay by Alan Davies, who
evidently got it from Gregory Bateson's _Mind and Nature_ -- a stochastic
sequence is one which "combines a random component with a selective
process so that only certain outcomes of the random are allowed to
endure."
Has anyone seen the term defined/applied more extensively?
Appreciate the help.
Bill Marsh
wmarsh@nunic.nu.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 17:55:44 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Re: stochastic
In the mid & late sixties, the composers Iannis Xenakis & James Tenney used
the term stochastic to describe works in which they set up a range of
parameters about pitch, rhythm, relative density, etc. and then allowed a
computer program to select the details. In this way they could control the
overall texture of a piece, while allowing various random processes to fill
in the details.
The term stochastic comes from a Greek root that has (I think) something to
do with arrows or archery. The model here is that an archer tries to get a
bull's eye each time, and over time, depending on the archer's skill, most
arrows will be near the center of a target, but the actual trajectory &
landing point of any specific arrow is not as clearly defined.
I don't know if either Tenney or Xenakis coined the expression, or if it
had previous use in the fields of mathematics, cybernetics, etc.
Bests
H
>I'm hunting down references to the term "stochastic" and wonder if anyone
>out there has come across it recently, especially in specific reference to
>writing/poetics. I came across it myself in an essay by Alan Davies, who
>evidently got it from Gregory Bateson's _Mind and Nature_ -- a stochastic
>sequence is one which "combines a random component with a selective
>process so that only certain outcomes of the random are allowed to
>endure."
>
>Has anyone seen the term defined/applied more extensively?
>
>Appreciate the help.
>
>Bill Marsh
>wmarsh@nunic.nu.edu
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 20:59:58 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christina Fairbank Chirot <tinac@CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: Re: stochastic
In-Reply-To: <v02130502ae035c7bf259@[192.0.2.1]>
According to the OED, stochastic comes from the Greek, means "to
aim at a mark, guess". "Pertaining to conjecture"
The following from Ilya Prigine and Isabelle Stenger's Order Out
of Chaos makes a conjunction of poetics with the stochastic--and if
one thinks in terms of the relation of cave paintings, rock art and
heiroglyphs to poetics in terms of "objects" and "sounds"and "images"
in/out of time is most useful:
It is hard to avoid the impression that the distinction between
what exists in time, what is irreversible, and, on the other hand, what
is outside of time, what is eternal, is at the origin of human symbolic
activity. Indeed, one aspect of the transformation of a natural object,
a stone, to an object of art is closely related to our impact on matter.
Artistic activity breaks the temporal symmetry of the object. It leaves
a mark that translates our temporal dissymmetry into the temporal
dissymmetry of the object. Out of the reversible, nearly cyclic noise
level in which we live arises music that is both stochastic and
time-oriented (312).
Highly recommend this book & appreciate connection made to music
in previous note--
dave baptiste chirot
(susan howe: "articulation of sound forms in time"--from
schoenberg--but improvisation in Free jazz--check out New York
Contemporary Five lps--Archie Shepp and Don Cherry--way to approach
understanding chance in relation to form can be quite different when
thought of in terms of collective improvisation--and so of "harmony of
the spheres"--in relation to "chaos")(Don Cherry wrote "Relativity Suite")
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 23:23:47 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: Stochastics
Stochastic Languages
A stochastic language is a collection of strings
with a probability distribution defined on the set of
strings...
For a stochastic language it is required that the
sum of weights for all strings equals 1, making p a
probability function. Stochastic languages with
strings which has no upper limit on their length
constitute a special situation since the strings
will have a very small weight...
For infinite languages it is not feasible to check
whether the sum of probabilities equals one, simply
by adding the weights, since there will always
be strings of greater length representing a small part
of the total probability mass. In such a situation
it is required to obtain a model for the generation
process and perform a test equivalent to evaluate
its behaviour in the limit as the processing time
goes to infinity...
Stochastic languages are typically specified by
a stochastic automaton or a stochastic grammar. For
a given stochastic language there is a one-to-one
correspondence between the strings accepted by
the automaton and the strings generated by the
grammar meaning that both models can
accept/generate the same strings with identical
probabilities. Any string in a language can be
modelled correctly concerning its syntactic structure
by the corresponding automata/grammar but
probabilities might be assigned to a string in
such a way that none of the models can reproduce
strings with the correct probability...
Theorem: There are stochastic languages for which
no stochastic grammar or stochastic automata
can reproduce the correct probability for all the
individual strings in the language.
There are several explanations for this. As stated
[through the pumping lemmas loops...] the
derivation process can result in strings differing
from each other only on the number of repetitions
of a substring. The probabilities of such strings
will be dependent on each other, and they therefore
cannot take any arbitrarily probability. Furthermore
a string is the result of a sequence of derivation
steps, each with a predefined fixed probability.
Therefore the probabilities assigned to generated
strings, come from a discrete set of probabilities,
and this fact can conflict with the fact that a string
... can be assigned any value...
Due to the inference mechanism creating the
grammar the problem... is of no
real concern when using stochastic languages
for syntactic pattern recognition, and most other
applications. The grammar is typically inferred
from a finite set of learning samples, in such a way
that it is capable of generating a set of strings of
greater cardinality (possible countable infinite)
having identical syntactic structure. In such a
situation it is not relevant to maintain the exact
probability of individual strings in the learning samples.
after Jesper Gravgaard Jensen
for automaton read "poet"
for grammar read "poetics"
for string read "poem"
for stochastic language read "canon"
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 23:20:33 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono
In message <POETICS%96070518120988@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU> UB Poetics discussion
group writes:
> No, Maria, I hadn't asked Aldon if I might forward his comments. This is
> perhaps a lapse in list ethics on my part--if so, I apologize. Like many on
> this list, I've learned from Aldon, had useful exchanges private and
>...etc
okay keith, cool. good points all. i didn't realize we cd be cited in books
w/out our permission. i'll have to start watching my tongue, my back, my mind
and my fingers.
bests, maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 23:28:20 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: stochastic
i heard the term "stochastic"" used by Julie Patton in her intro to her and
Janice Loeb (sp?)'s performance at the Bob Kaufman celebration at the st mark's
poetry projecct in april. she gave me the impression that there was an element
of sound involved --what you mention below applied specifically to combining
sounds. she and janice l read a kaufman poem --sang it, improvised it, playing
off each other, simultaneously AND alternating. it was quite wonderfl and i
wrote down the word "stochastic" as a result.--md
In message <199607052316.QAA29757@nunic.nu.edu> UB Poetics discussion group
writes:
> I'm hunting down references to the term "stochastic" and wonder if anyone
> out there has come across it recently, especially in specific reference to
> writing/poetics. I came across it myself in an essay by Alan Davies, who
> evidently got it from Gregory Bateson's _Mind and Nature_ -- a stochastic
> sequence is one which "combines a random component with a selective
> process so that only certain outcomes of the random are allowed to
> endure."
>
> Has anyone seen the term defined/applied more extensively?
>
> Appreciate the help.
>
> Bill Marsh
> wmarsh@nunic.nu.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 22:33:48 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "filch@pobox.com" <filch@POBOX.COM>
Subject: agitprop
defined / applied
combines a random component with a selective
process so that only certain outcomes of the random are allowed to
endure
stochastic
a mark that translates our temporal dissymmetry into the temporal
dissymmetry of the object
(possible countable infinite)
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 08:40:28 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Paul Naylor <PKNAYLOR@MSUVX2.MEMPHIS.EDU>
Subject: The Disappeared
SEND
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
This is a somewhat late response to the comments about the "disappearance" of
Irby, Enslin, and Tarn. For those interested in their recent work, you should
check out Lee Chapman's journal, _First Intensity_. All three of those writers
serve as editorial correspondents (along with Michael Boughn, Patrick Doud,
Forrest Gander, John Moritz, Joe Napora, Susan Smith Nash, and Spencer Selby).
Subscriptions are $17 for two issues, and you can contact Lee at P.O. Box
140713, Staten Island, New York, 10314-0713.
While I'm in the plugging mode, the new issue of _River City_ is out and about.
The special topic this time is "The Caribbean: South of the South." Contents
include a beautiful address by Kamau Brathwaite, "Note(s) on Caribbean
Cosmology," new poems and an interview with M. Nourbese Philip, Wilson Harris'
"Apprenticeship to the Furies," Aldon Nielsen on C.L.R. James, a section on
women poets in the Caribbean. Also, Nathaniel Mackey on Miles Davis, and poems
and fiction by Hank Lazer, Aldon Nielsen, Omar Castaneda, Claire Harris (a
stunning long poem entitled "WOEMAN WOMB PRISONED"), etc. _River City_ sells
for $7 per issue or $12 for two. Make checks out to The University of Memphis
and send to:
_River City_
Department of English
463 Patterson Bldg.
The University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152
I'd also like to announce that our next issue, Winter 1997, will focus on the
topic of Engendering Culture; submissions on that topic -- whether poetry,
fiction, critical writing -- can be sent to the same address.
Paul Naylor
SEND
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 10:21:27 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: New Magazine
I have been sent a really lovely and rich magazine called "Object Lesson."
How to describe it? It is multi-media pre-electronic: art and all kinds of
verse (multi-textual I guess) including many insets of smaller "books" and
envelopes full of all kinds of juicy things.
The editor, Joshua Beckman, was put on to me by Alex Cigale, and some of
you may know his terrific magazine Synaesthetic (based on the found art/poem
concept). Beckman writes about his planned next issue:
"the next issue will include essays on poetry machines. Everyting from
Bob Brown's *Readies* to personal essays on typewriters and tape recorders
[yes, believe or not, folks, Beckman does not have e-mail and one might
guess from this above remark that he might not own a computer--but i urge
you not to be put off by this!]. The idea being to awaken the notions of mechanics that are embedded in the creation of poetry and to broaden the definition of
what a machine can be, especially to a writer. I want to have the essays on
everything from 'the corporate machine' to 'the influencing machine', so
that the idea of the typewriter and the author end up too confused to untangle.
At the same time, I hope to have work that simply praises the different tools
of the trade and inspires a curiosity towards the reader's poetry and poetry
machines."
Now, I would think that if you of, say, the Chris Funkhauserian persuasion,
then you might want to think about sending Beckman something anyway.
Send to:
Joshua Saul Beckman, Editor
OBJECT LESSON
630 Wickenden St.
Providence, RI 02903
(401) 453 - 5146
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 09:43:22 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Another ethnic group
>If one were so foolish as to try to describe contemporary Native American
>poetries briefly, what would that description be, and what names would be
>attached?
>
>No, I'm not giving a course, and do have other sources (Haskell Indian
>Nations University is down the road a short piece), but I'm curious what
>members of this list would say.
Mostly I wouldn't be so foolish. But one thing I would be careful about is
that adjective "contemporary." For me, it would have to include works from
the oral tradition, which are still living, therefore "contemporary." And
many of these works are subject to contemporary variations. Too often
(although I think this has changed somewhat in the last couple of decades)
the oral traditions have been treated as past, as relics. In many cultures
they are decidedly not so. Some of the primary work in this regard has been
done by Larry Evers through the Sun Tracks series at the University of
Arizona Press, and to my mind some of the very best of that is the work with
Yaqui oral traditions Evers has done in collaboration with Felipe S. Molina,
himself a Yaqui singer.
But this is just one part of a huge story.
good luck,
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 10:08:37 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono
ok, i guess i have to add something here, grinch-like, that is *not*
intended primarily as a rebuke to anybody per se, but is essentially a
comment about how this list stuff works:
i don't like it that keith had to forward comments to the list from robert
von hallberg... that is, i'm sure keith was willing to do so, and it's a
settled issue as i see it at the level of propriety... but i'm talking
instead about relative visibilities, and about how lists work... and my
carp here has to do, for one, with why robert von hallberg (and others who
occupy a visible, even 'senior' position in our profession) are generally
not to be found in these regions...
sure, we on poetics enjoy the presence of some folks who are
well-known---kudos to these latter for their willingness to mix it up (i
won't name names for fear of not naming all the names)... but for some
years now, i've noticed the online absence of some of the better-known
academics, all of whom have done quite well in print, many of whom are
continually referenced in online discussion... that is, part of the
explanation has always seemed to me to have to do with why bother? logic...
or i don't have the time logic b/c i'm already getting published in print
logic... or the real debate is over there logic so (again) why bother?
logic...
things are changing, to be sure... yet i'd still argue this absence is felt...
in short: though there is, as has been discussed, nothing at all wrong
with forwarding comments hither & thither (with due allowance made for
variations between public and private and permissions pertaining thereto),
i would nonetheless like to go on record here (and anybody who wishes to,
btw, can quote anything i say anywhere, but please do let me know if you do
so) as saying that we need not only more access for folks without access,
but we need our senior folks, or at least our more visible folks, to take
the plunge...
to wit: i'd like to think that robert von hallberg is now subbed to
poetics... and if he doesn't know how to, i'd like to think he's asking
somebody... b/c i don't think his outsider-insider status (at this moment,
anyway, wrt this list) is a good place from which to enter into discussion
with this network community, or one of its members...
he can of course, like all of us, unsub at any time... but it's fair to ask
him, and others, to sub to the list if they'd like to be part of the
discussion (assuming they have the technical capabilities to do so)...
otherwise, i'm left feeling as though i'm 'witnessing' an exchange w/o
really being invited to contribute to same (which is decidedly *not* what
lurking is about, either), with one participant offering tidbits from over
yonder someplace while he goes about his 'real' business... which is, i
understand, not at all intended, but which is nonetheless one effect this
sort of forwarding/distancing can produce... and since most on this list
know just how talky i can be, most will understand me when i say that i'm
feeling a bit uncomfortable at the moment...
best,
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 14:15:12 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ward Tietz <100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: A Humument
Does anybody know of any criticism written on Tom Phillips' "A Humument"?
Thanks,
Ward Tietz
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 11:47:48 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Re: A Humument
Comments: cc: 100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM
Ward Tietz writes:
>Does anybody know of any criticism written on Tom Phillips' "A Humument"?
There was a very good special issue of the Canadian magazine Open Letters
entitled "Between Poetry & Painting" that focused on Joe Tilson, Ian Tyson,
& Tom Phillips. It was fourth series, #1&2, Summer 1978. This includes
lots of good stuff: an interview by Kevin Powers (who interviewed each of
the featured artists) & articles by Phillips, composer Gavin Bryars, David
Bindman, Nicholas Zurbrugg, David Bindman, & others.
There's also a piece in Heather McHugh's book of essays Broken English
about the work.
I'd love to know of any other things people know about too.
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 15:15:34 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steven Howard Shoemaker <ss6r@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: age of speleological reproduction
In-Reply-To: <v02130502ae035c7bf259@[192.0.2.1]> from "Herb Levy" at Jul 5,
96 05:55:44 pm
I've just read an account in the latest Discover about some tablets that
have just been found in caves near Beijing. Apparently, around 605 A.D.
a Buddhist monk named Jingwan decided that the only way to save the
the Buddhist scriptures from hostile Chinese emperors was to chisel them
in stone. Over generations, the monks of the Yunju monastery carried out
the project, bringing it to completion a millenium later, around 1644,
having used 14,278 tablets. They hid the tablets in nine caves, and only
the locals knew about them until recently, when a farmer showed them to
Josef Guter, a German China specialist. Guter says: "The most important
aspect of this discovery is that we have on stone the whole canon of
Buddhism in 35 million Chinese characters written over 1,039, and that it
has survived WW II and the Cultural Revolution. Its study will be in the
hands of generations of men and women in many disciplines of cultural
history."
What a textual project! Fascinating to me along many lines, one of them
being that it is probably the ultimate example of the potential for
atom-based textual preservation--making words as *solid* as possible. At
at the other extreme, one might undertake the bit-based strategem of
digitizing a text and then *distributing* it as widely or carefully as
possible, making it nearly immaterial but pervasive? And actually, that
question is directly relevant: what will happen to the texts now?
Paradoxically, as soon as they are discovered, as soon as they have readers,
they are endangered... steve
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 15:22:48 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steven Howard Shoemaker <ss6r@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: stochastic
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960705202812.26135A-100000@alpha2.csd.uwm.edu>
from "Christina Fairbank Chirot" at Jul 5, 96 08:59:58 pm
Strangely, when i made my post about speleological reproduction, I hadn't
yet read Christina's post below. Interesting synchronicity.
I wonder if Clayton Eshleman has his tickets booked for Beijing yet?
steve
>
> According to the OED, stochastic comes from the Greek, means "to
> aim at a mark, guess". "Pertaining to conjecture"
> The following from Ilya Prigine and Isabelle Stenger's Order Out
> of Chaos makes a conjunction of poetics with the stochastic--and if
> one thinks in terms of the relation of cave paintings, rock art and
> heiroglyphs to poetics in terms of "objects" and "sounds"and "images"
> in/out of time is most useful:
> It is hard to avoid the impression that the distinction between
> what exists in time, what is irreversible, and, on the other hand, what
> is outside of time, what is eternal, is at the origin of human symbolic
> activity. Indeed, one aspect of the transformation of a natural object,
> a stone, to an object of art is closely related to our impact on matter.
> Artistic activity breaks the temporal symmetry of the object. It leaves
> a mark that translates our temporal dissymmetry into the temporal
> dissymmetry of the object. Out of the reversible, nearly cyclic noise
> level in which we live arises music that is both stochastic and
> time-oriented (312).
> Highly recommend this book & appreciate connection made to music
> in previous note--
> dave baptiste chirot
> (susan howe: "articulation of sound forms in time"--from
> schoenberg--but improvisation in Free jazz--check out New York
> Contemporary Five lps--Archie Shepp and Don Cherry--way to approach
> understanding chance in relation to form can be quite different when
> thought of in terms of collective improvisation--and so of "harmony of
> the spheres"--in relation to "chaos")(Don Cherry wrote "Relativity Suite")
>
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 16:25:42 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: A Humument
I would also be interested in the answer to this. I once curated an
exhibition at Minnesota Center for Book Arts in which some of the original
page/paintings of A Humument were included, borrowed from the Ruth & Marvin
Sackner Archive for Concrete & Experimental Poetry. Perhaps Ruth or Marvin
Sackner would know the answer, but I don't think either is on this list. I
will forward the question to a book arts list and see if it stirs up any
answers there.
charles
>Ward Tietz writes:
>
>>Does anybody know of any criticism written on Tom Phillips' "A Humument"?
>
>There was a very good special issue of the Canadian magazine Open Letters
>entitled "Between Poetry & Painting" that focused on Joe Tilson, Ian Tyson,
>& Tom Phillips. It was fourth series, #1&2, Summer 1978. This includes
>lots of good stuff: an interview by Kevin Powers (who interviewed each of
>the featured artists) & articles by Phillips, composer Gavin Bryars, David
>Bindman, Nicholas Zurbrugg, David Bindman, & others.
>
>There's also a piece in Heather McHugh's book of essays Broken English
>about the work.
>
>I'd love to know of any other things people know about too.
>
>
>
>Herb Levy
>herb@eskimo.com
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 16:39:19 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: journal praise
Seeing the interest in criticism of Tom Phillips's, and thinking of works in
which literature becomes physical (visual & otherwise) made me want to put
in a word of praise for the new issue of Chain (vol. 3, part 1, I believe).
There are many genre- & some gender-bending works, and enough of works which
extend the literary into an other space (conceptual, visual, etc.) as to not
make of such works "the exception." It's the first journal in a long time
(despite several other fine ones) I have read cover to cover and continually
been amazed by. Already I find myself planning activities or works or
publication projects partly influenced by works therein.
Thanks very much to Juliana Spahr & Jena Osman for the fine editorial work.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 16:00:59 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: James Brook <jbrook@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: jakob van hoddis?
Anyone know of translations of the poems and other writings by Jakob
Van Hoddis, an early German Expressionist? Or articles about him, especially
with biographical information? The only thing I've found in English is a
brief entry in Twentieth-Century German Verse edited by Patrick Bridgewater
(Penguin 1968) and two poems.
Thanks,
James Brook
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 18:39:43 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michelle Roberts <meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU>
Subject: Re: post language poetry, post modernist poetry, fakes
Comments: To: Ira Lightman <I.Lightman@UEA.AC.UK>
In-Reply-To: <ECS9606131111A@smtp.uea.ac.uk>
This is me being a bumb bunny, but could any one offer me a quick
definition of "the new sentence'? I read it a post on this thread and
would like to get a grip on the concept.
Any hints appreciated,
Meaghan
Meaghan Roberts
Ph.D. Candidate - Ethics and Literature
The University of Texas at Dallas
Meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 14:49:02 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Ougarit (fwd)
Thought someone must be interested in seeing this. Gab.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Ce courrier que j'ai recopi=E9 int=E9gralement =E9tait joint au premier exe=
mplaire
de la revue Ougarit =E9dit=E9e en Palestine et que je vous laisse d=E9couvr=
ir :
Madame, monsieur,
Nous avons le plaisir de vous pr=E9senter la revue lit=E9raire et artistiqu=
e
'Ougarit', r=E9alis=E9e par un groupe de jeunes artistes de diff=E9rentes
disciplines (litt=E9rature, arts graphiques, cin=E9ma, th=E9atre, musique) =
et
publi=E9e =E0 Ramallah (Palestine).
Pourquoi cette revue? Tout d'abord parceque nous sommes convaincus qu'il es=
t
essentiel aujourd'hui de cr=E9er un espace pour un dialogue artistique
interdisciplinaire, un lieu d'=E9change o=F9 puissent se rencontrer et
confronter les nouveaux courants et les nouvelles visions artistiques et
intellectuelles =E0 l'oeuvre dans la soci=E9t=E9 palestinienne.
En effet, les nouvelles r=E9alit=E9s que nous vivons actuellement ont ammen=
=E9 un
boulversement des anciennes cartes intellectuelles et mentales qui, en se
redistribuant et se red=E9finissant, c=E8dent la place =E0 de nouvelles car=
tes, =E0
de nouveaux horizons. Cette p=E9riode "troubl=E9e" est en m=EAme temps le f=
oyer
d'un bouillonnement culturel et artistique dont t=E9moigne l'=E9mergence, d=
ans
diff=E9rents domaines, d'oeuvres de grande qualit=E9, m=EAme si certainesen=
sont
encore =E0 un stade "exp=E9rimental".
Aussi sentons-nous l'urgence de cr=E9er un/ des forum/s pour que ces nouvel=
les
visions en mouvement puissent se rencontrer, se rassembler, mais aussi =EAt=
re
fertilis=E9es par un plus grand contact avec des courants qui se d=E9velopp=
ent =E0
l'=E9tranger et desquels nous avons si longtemps =E9t=E9s coup=E9s.
C'est pourquoi le comit=E9 de r=E9daction, compos=E9 de jeunes artistes imp=
liqu=E9s
activement dans la cr=E9ation d'une nouvelle culture palestinienne, esp=E8r=
e par
cet envoi initier un =E9change fructueux avec ceux qui, d'une rive =E0 l'au=
tre
de la m=E9diterran=E9e, ainsi que dans d'autres r=E9gions du Monde, souhait=
ent
entamer un dialogue culturel autour de leur vision de l'art, de sa place et
de son r=F4le. Nous serons heureux d'accueillir les articles, travaux
litt=E9raires, recherches etc... d'intellectuels d=E9sireux d'apporter leur
contribution en partageant une vision novatrice.
Nous esp=E9rons une =E9dition semestrielle, la pr=E9sentation en sera am=E9=
lior=E9e,
la forme actuelle (en particulier l'absence de table des mati=E8res et le
d=E9sordre de certains textes) n'=E9tant certes pas due =E0 notre volont=E9=
e mais
aux cons=E9quences du bouclage impos=E9 aux territoires palestinniens penda=
nt la
p=E9riode de son impressio.
En vous souhaitant une bonne lecture, nous vous prions d'agr=E9er Madame,
Monsieur, l'expression de nos sentiments chaleureux.
Le comit=E9 de r=E9daction.
Ougarit
c/o Hussein BARGHOUTHI
Cultural Studies Department
Bir Zeit University
P.O.BOX 14 - Bir Zeit
Palestine
fax : (972 2) 995 78 10 ou (972 2) 995 76 56
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 21:53:00 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tenney Nathanson <tenney@AZSTARNET.COM>
Subject: Chain unchained?
>Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 16:39:19 -0500
>From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
>Subject: journal praise
>
>Seeing the interest in criticism of Tom Phillips's, and thinking of works in
>which literature becomes physical (visual & otherwise) made me want to put
>in a word of praise for the new issue of Chain (vol. 3, part 1, I believe).
>There are many genre- & some gender-bending works, and enough of works which
>extend the literary into an other space (conceptual, visual, etc.) as to not
>make of such works "the exception." It's the first journal in a long time
>(despite several other fine ones) I have read cover to cover and continually
>been amazed by. Already I find myself planning activities or works or
>publication projects partly influenced by works therein.
>
>Thanks very much to Juliana Spahr & Jena Osman for the fine editorial work.
>
>charles
could Juliana or someone post an order-from address for this issue? Plus
how-to (email? snailmail? etc)
hi Charles!
get ready, it's HOT here!
Tenney
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 22:18:23 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: here's another fine mess . . .
In-Reply-To: <199607060409.AAA18852@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Keith did not ask my permission to forward my report to Robert, nor do I
feel in any way that permission was required. But now some slippage has
happened that does bother me. As you will note at the beginning of
Robert's message, addressed to me, he says that he is sending it directly
to me prior to posting elsewhere. I believed that this meant we were to
have some discussion between ourselves. I posted a quick response to
Robert and requested that, should he decide to place his message in a
public place, my response go along with it and thqat I be informed where
it went. I also offered to continue the discussion in private.
It may be that Keith misunderstood the timing and forwarded the post too
soon, or it could be that what I took to be a direct post to me was
already posted in public. I will copy this to Robert in hopes of getting
an answer.
When I get a chance I will also forward my initial response to this
list. In the meantime I want to point out a few things that I think bear
rather directly on Robert's reasonable sounding message.
There is a tape recording of the panel to which Robert responded. The
tape is available to Robert on his request. I do not believe that I in
fact have misrepresented his comments at the panel (though perhaps
"tirade" was a little strong on my part) and there are any number of
people on the list who were also at the session and may recall the
conversation.
Here is one example. In Robert's message, after complaining that I have
misrepresented his comments, he writes: "My objection is not at all to
the use of sociology or sociological analysis un literary history or
criticism . . ." In his recorded comments he said, "When we do the
sociology thing it comes out real simple." I will leave it to you to
decide which of us has represented the facts of the discussion more
accurately.
This is important to me because, you may recall, one of my complaints
about Robert's commentary was that he had decontextualized the papers to
which he was responding. In this way he wound up, in response to a paper
that argued that poets had been excluded BECAUSE of their racial identity
from anthologies etc., stating that the paper argued for including poets
based upon their representation of identity formations.
I will confess to having been angered, and I will cop to having gone a
bit overboard in my subsequent comments about sociology. However, the
fact that a good portion of Robert's message responds to arguments that
were not made by me, and that were not part of my original post, should
prompt a certain caution here.
And that is not a Freudian typo up there -- Robert said "in" not "un"
literary . . .
As I said, I will forward this to Robert, and I will post here the
reponse I sent to him that has not accompanied his message. After that
it's pretty much up to Robert if there is any more on this subject --
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 22:35:22 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono (fwd)
Here is my response to Robert's message, made before I knew that his
message was already on the poetics list. Only note I would add here is
that it was Don Wellman who first raises the issue of performative
criteria, not Hank Lazer -- Hank raised the issue as a question as we
were standing around the podium afterwards --
Have now also read Joe Amato's note on this -- I know that Joe is out of
town now, but I want everybody else to feel perfectly free to jump in on
the issues involved -- Since Robert felt that I had misrepresented his
remarks, I thought it important first of all to state that I had reviewed
his remarks carefully -- I am now more than ready to move on to possibly
useful discussions of some of the other issues raised in this episode --
And by the way, if anybody on the list whose paper or comments I
described in my report feels I have been inaacurate about anything, let
me hear about it --
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 11:02:24 -0700 (PDT)
From: Aldon L. Nielsen <anielsen@athens>
To: robert von hallberg <von6@midway.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: Orono
I will respond at greater length later (am on my way to family meetings
at the moment) but here are a few VERY quick comments --
First of all, I would be careful about stating that I have misrepresented
your remarks. (excuse the oddness of that sentence please; I, of course,
would not have made the remarks) You did in fact include a reference to
my opening comments about the number of papers at the beginning of your
commentary. Perhaps you did not notice the tape recorder that was on the
table in front of you. I responded directly to that comment as I felt I
could appropriately speak of that which had been directed to my own
remarks. If it becomes necessary in the course of public discussions, I
will ask your permission to post a transcription of the commentary and
will supply you with a copy of the tape. The remark about "badness" is
off the tape. As we discussed these issues after the panel broke up, you
did in fact say to me that the poems discussed were "bad poems." You
will perhaps remember that I told you I would not argue with you then and
there over the particular qualities of the poems cited for the simple
reason that, in the case of "Montage," I didn't happen to like the poem
all that much anyway. My arguments with you were not so much about the
value of individual poems as about your mode of address (and the amount
of the time it took.)
Now for a few quick matters that are more important to me, but have less
to do with what one or the other of us actually did or did not say.
(Again, I will gladly supply you with the tape if you wish to be certain
about quotations.)
It is true that some people argue that a different mode of critique is
required for poems such as "Montage," and I would agree with you that IF
that is the case, then we should get down to the business of laying out
what we think such an aesthetic might entail. However, please recall
that I made no such argument to you on the day in question. Hank Lazer
and, I believe, Jerome Rothenberg made a few comments on the need for a
"performative" mode of critique as we were standing around debating
afterwards. But as we go on with ouur own disucssions, please bear in
mind that this is not an argument that I make. I believe that
"performative" modes of critique are appropriate for forms of
performance. I think it condescending to argue that Hughes has to be
read by some other criteria of performance (when we're talking about
poems on the page at least) than, say, Hayden.
When I refer in my posts to strategies of the old New critics, I am not
speaking of their techniques of close reading, which I continue to use.
I was speaking of the strategies used to dismiss black poets in the 403,
50s and 60s. In my other telegraphic reports of Orono (Did Keith in fact
send you all of it, or just the part about that panel?) I mentioned an
infamous review of Brooks by Simpson. Better examples might be Tate's
various responses to African-American poets. What I was getting at in my
all too short hand (and perhaps even short sighted) way was that a
thorough and close reading of the history of American criticism of
African-American poets turns up numerous instances of this same set of
remarks being directed to similar panels and critical efforts. I in fact
not only welcome close readings of black poets, I produce them from time
to time. Mu complaint about your complaint was that you seemed to be
ruling out other efforts that I feel are worthwhile and needed --
For example, if I agreed with what you said about the first paper (and I
have much to dislike about that paper on entirely other grounds) I would
be hard pressed to see much use in Alan Goldings work on anthologies,
work that I find useful. If we did not make such arguments, the Heath
and Norton would probably not have changed much at all. I believe they
have not changed enough, and so I continue to make such arguments.
The word "interloper" does not in any way represent my view. I do indeed
believe that any field of criticism is likely to benefit from
interventions from well-informed critics who have worked primarily in
other fields. I'm not sure what the term "outside" would even mean in
this context. BUT, I have to admit amazement at part of our post-session
(and therefore post-tape) exchange. When we were discussing the fact
that numerous conferences, articles, books etc. were devoted to precisely
the sorts of readings you called for, you indicated to me that you did
not read journals such as _CLA_, _Callaloo_, _AAR_ etc., because, as you
put it, you "can't be an expert in every field." Now, I hardly expect
such expertise from anybody, including myself, but I found that a
renarkable statement to come from somebody who had just delivered a
keynote address on Robert Hayden. I wouldn;t put too much weight on this
part of our exchange, as it's not part of the issues you have raised in
your post to me, but I am trying to communicate something to you about
how certain of your remarks must sound to people, perhaps without your
meaning to sound objectionable.
(by the way, I am away from my office for an extended period, and the
machine I am using does not allow me to back up and correct typographical
errors. I am no typist, so please be forgiving of oddities of spelling,
punctuation, spacing etc.)
Again, there is much else we could argue about. (For instance, the
phrase "sociology thing" is yours, not mine. -- And I remain puzzled by
your remarks about the importance (or lack thereof) of looking at Pound's
contacts with black culture (doesn't all that Frobenious weigh on your
mind for something?)
It's probably never a good thing to put too much weight upon post-panel
discussions. The reason that I tape panels I am a part of is that I hope
to get suggestions for further research, new abgles to explore, etc.
What angered me that day (and I suppose I am still a bit angry about it)
is that you did not ask a question, nor did you offer your comments in a
way directed specifically to elements of the papers that might help their
authors (or even me) to improve the work in hand. You did tell the panel
that they were being reductive, that they were lending themselves to
identity politics, etc. If I might take a cue from your own comments, I
think you would be far more likely to achieve the result you seem to have
aimed at by engaging directly with an element of the readings about which
one might argue prodcutively. I suspect that any of us who present a
paper of 20 minutes on such topics (or even an address of 40 minutes?)
might accurately be accused of being reductive. On the other hand, I do
not believe it truly is reductive to examine the history of race and
anthologizing or race & criticism -- You appeared to me to go past
arguing that the papers had failed in a specific way in the tasks they
had undertaken to argue that the tasks they had undertaken shouldn't be
undertaken. If I am misreading you on that point, I'm ready to be set
straight.
I hope you will remember too that as we left the room I said to you that
I felt comfortable having such an argument with you because I thought we
could listen to one another (perhaps even mishear one another) and still
get somewhere -- whereas I feel there is simply no point in my having
such an argument with Louis Simpson. I do not mean by this that I
believe you will eventually see things my way, but that I have much to
learn from arguing these points with you.
But, as I keep telling my graduate students, we have to look at the same
text before we can argue about our interpretations of it.
I am responding directly to you, in private, to the extent that any email
is private. If you decide to post your message to me in any public
place, please post this with it and let me know where it went. I have
much more to say if we are going to debate in public. I have more to
say, but perhaps in a happier tone, if we discuss this between ourselves.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 02:26:26 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Christopher K. Whipple" <cwhip@WEST.NET>
Subject: poetry performance
I am hoping for some help from this group.
I am putting together a season of performed poetry.
The premise is that there is a superabundance of miraculous poetry out
there; but for some reason it's not read publicly. My idea is to have
trained actors read this great poetry. Who better to bring out the
pacing, movement, and prosodic effects of these taught language dramas?
The performances will fall somewhere between reading and theater. The
season will be a four part sequence of themes, running 1) Soviet Poetry;
2)Poets of WWI; 3) Victorian Dramatic Monologues, and 4) Contemporary
Poetry.
I am going to use public (coffee house) readings as a
rehearsal/development process for the fully staged perfomances.
I'm most interested in getting help on the WWI poets right now. The
poets I have so far are Wilfred Owen (of course), Seigfreid Sassoon, Ivor
Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, e.e. cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Rupert Brooke,
Edward Thomas and David Jones. Am I missing anyone? Can anyone lead me
to some lesser known poets I might otherwise overlook (or lesser known
poems from established poets not usually associated with this theme)?
Does anyone have any ideas on why coffee house readings are so often lame
and depressing; why do these horrible people have a monopoly on the
espresso circuit, while so much that is delicious is abandoned to a
half-life in academia?
Does anyone have any ideas on how poetry can be successfully performed?
Has anyone seen examples, even failed ones?
I look forward to your responses.
Chris Whipple
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 03:39:52 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert J Wilson <rwilson@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Covering Cherub
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960706215904.28984B-100000@athens>
There's a critical concept/category from Blake that I think is still
useful in trying to negotiate the blocked vision and pseudo-pluralism of
the US poetry scene, even as worked out in the tender terrain of those
panels in Maine-- it's called the Covering Cherub, which I take to be a
figure for occluded vision pretending to be open to the past and future,
pretending to be benignly liberal and political, pretending to do cultural
critique while, at the same time (as in the New Yorker poem, or, for that
matter, the poems in Nation or New Republic) bracketing out nine-tenths of
social reality and twenty two thousand five hundred and sixty six
alternative visions and voices and "outside" (Spicer on Mag Verse genres)
languages. The Covering Cherub sits in some middle class heaven, in an
Englsh Department of the soul, and he can talk about Language Poetry and
AfroAmerican poetics and shaman poets an pidgin poets, he (or she can edit
an anthology for Harvard UP too) just makes it possible that what Gramsci
called (doing cultural studies in prison for his vision) "good sense" will
never break through the "common sense" of ideological sonambulence and
formalist reifications and "the big lie of the personal voice." But
Covering Cherubs should be heard on language poet panels too, and they
should get on poetry lists too and talk and talk and talk the talk, this
is called 'cheery American poetry' and that is why, still, 'creativity
takes place along a line of flight.' and I want out from that 'dialogue.'
Regards to Joe Amato for blasting through so much of the American
bullshit, it is an American as apple pie and critical inquiry,
Rob Wilson
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 10:15:38 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: Chain unchained?
i'll second earlier enthusiasms for Chain--i'm lookin forward to pt 2...
Chain
107 14th St.
Buffalo NY 14213
$10 for 1 issue, $18 for 2
checks to UB Foundation...
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 16:15:29 BST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Peter Nicholls <P.A.Nicholls@SUSSEX.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: oppen
Dear Peter: just wondering whether there is any news from California
about Objectivist Nexus....Will you be coming to the UK this summer?
Let me know if you are. All best wishes, Peter.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 10:29:05 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono
Joe,
I understand your frustration, but I don't want to see our possibilotoe
possibilities of discourse circumscribed. We're in a wierd techno-leap
moment and maybe that accounts in part at least for why people
like van hallberg aren't on our list; maybe we should draft a letter
to newt gingrich to send some of those lap tops he promised to all the
inner city kids of america to senior profs, that is, along with a
subsciption to the net.
burt
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 12:11:08 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono
burt, yeah... my little rant has been brewing for a while, b/c it's become
obvious to me over time how specific discourses operate with personnel in
absentia, as it were... i mean to say that, while it's arguable that online
exchange is not for all tastes, it's not arguable that such exchange
(nevermind electronic publication) is becoming a vital part of academic
communities, esp. b/c it presents possibilities for academics to learn from
non-academics, for both groups to learn from one another---not least, to
learn how to speak to one another... interestingly, too, there's also the
little-big question of what "counts" in academic circles as professional
service, and as you suggest, sometimes the old guard, or the new old guard
(pardon moi), is culpable on the count of not taking this stuff too
seriously... perhaps due to sheer lack of electronic exposure (academics
can be so very anemic), perhaps b/c things can be so comfy post-tenure...
not a blanket statement---there are plenty of tenured, visible,
full-blooded folks on this list who for me are the exception proves the
rule...
anyway, mebbe i only imagine (as i just posted to another list member
backchannel) mebbe i only imagine a certain nonchalance when a legible name
begins speaking from the margins, as it were, or from above... as much as i
wish to behave w/o rancor, i just get steamed-up a bit when i sense that
sort of intrusion (besides, it's hot and humid today in chicago)... and i
mean this w/o finger-pointing at keith, and really by way of saying to
robert von hallberg, a bit unfairly---
HELLOOOOO---YOU OUT THERE YET, ROBERT???--c'mon into the pool and join the
fun!... you may get splashed a bit, either way...
all best,
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 15:00:11 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: oppen
I guess I must have missed something. Peter, could you say more about
California and the Objectivist Nexus?
Burt
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 16:24:03 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steven Howard Shoemaker <ss6r@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960706222400.28984C-100000@athens> from "Aldon L.
Nielsen" at Jul 6, 96 10:35:22 pm
Aldon's recent reference to Tate's and Pound's views of African-Americans
moves me to put forward an odd bit of business I've been somewhat puzzled
lately. In a review of Pound's How to Read published in Poetry, Tate
uses a racially and ethnically charged image to make a point about what
he sees as Pound's shortcomings. The review acknowledges Pound as
someon who "understands, as no other living man...the craftsmanship of
verse," but also points to a "logical confusion of his [Pound's] intellect
when it is not performing the task which is specifically his own, that
task being poetry." (So far, this is an argument that seems to have
some merit.) From there Tate takes extended exception to a comment of
Pound's to the effect that when one is studying great inventors (like
Newton or Dante) one shld be allowed to extract the gist of their
discoveries without being bothered about "laundry bills" (i.e. an
unnecessary clutter of biographical data). Tate sees poetry not as a
science, with inventions and discoveries, but as a craft. As such, "It
is the product of innumerable factors--of the relations among language,
church and society, between fathers and mothers, butchers and bakers,
between the poet and what society thinks of him." Accordingly: "the
laundry bills of Dante should be zealously studied, by somebody like Mr.
Pound who would know why he is studying them."
So what we have is a plea for an historically informed understanding of
poetry and the poet's role in society. Not all that far from the the
Oppens' criticism that Pound wld have been better off if he had spent
some time in a factory before developing a theory of economics. But
then comes Tate's final criticism of Pound: "Finally, I should like to
intimate that Pound's own laundry bills might be studied with profit, for
they are fuddling his logic. They would make an interesting collection,
beginning with Idaho and Indiana, and ending up with the banks of the
Susquehanna and the 'banks o' Italie.' There is Mr. Pound sitting in his
heap of miscellaneous laundry bills, so confused outside the moment of his
craft (which is the most lucid of our time), that he thinks the laundry
bills did the washing: what Mr. Pound needs is just an ordinary Irish
or colored washerwoman. To look an honest African wench in the face is
better than a column of figures, and a fine cure for the belief that a
poet can get along without having any laundry done at all.
As I see it, Tate is suggesting that what an appropriate historical
grounding (i.e. looking an honest African wench in the face) will tell
you is the absolute necessity of the current forms of racial and
political oppression (somebody's gotta do the laundry and it's not gonna
be Tate). The analysis is like the Oppens', but with an exactly opposed
political valence. Also interesting because I have been trying to
think about Pound's racism, but what happens here is that Tate's own form
of racism seems (in Tate's reading) to cancel out Pound's. For Tate,
Pound is a "dyed-in-the-wool revolutionist" who wld abolish the social
hierarchies.
So that's my reading, but the problem is that I don't know much at all
about Tate and his other expressions of his views on race. Can anyone
(perhaps Aldon) give me some more context here?
Sorry this is so long,
steve
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 15:55:06 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
In message <199607072024.QAA72926@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU> UB Poetics
discussion group writes:
>...
> So that's my reading, but the problem is that I don't know much at all
> about Tate and his other expressions of his views on race. Can anyone
> (perhaps Aldon) give me some more context here?
>
> Sorry this is so long,
> steve
walter kalaidjian has an extended analysis of the "New Critics" and Agrarian
poets and critics on race. it's in a book forthcoming i think from michigan?
edited by Stephen Watt and someone else??? and entitled something like
"Marketing Modernisms." if you can't find that book, i'm sure walt will share
his essay w/ you; he's in the the english dept at emory.
bests, maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 15:58:13 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
.
> So that's my reading, but the problem is that I don't know much at all
> about Tate and his other expressions of his views on race. Can anyone
> (perhaps Aldon) give me some more context here?
>
> Sorry this is so long,
> steve
ps. tate taught in the dept i now teach in, and he is known to have been rather
retro in the fifties by his then colleagues. i've heard him thus characterized
by leo marx, who was in the american studies program, who sd that, much as these
english dept new-critics were admirable intellectual colleagues and congenial
conversants, "I suspect that were the subject to have turned to politics we
would have had little to say to each other." folks like marx lived in terror of
the mccarthyite shadow, while folks like tate WERE that shadow.--md
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 16:01:27 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
In message <199607072024.QAA72926@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU> UB Poetics
discussion group writes:
>...
> So that's my reading, but the problem is that I don't know much at all
> about Tate and his other expressions of his views on race. Can anyone
> (perhaps Aldon) give me some more context here?
>
> Sorry this is so long,
> steve
3rd installment:
i think that while tate and others were embarrassed by pound's fanaticism, which
they saw as indecorous, basically they shared, if not his outright fascism which
was, after all, unpatriotic, a horror of Jews, Blacks and other Others who could
not quite conform to their standards of rational --enlightenment --humanity.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 18:18:45 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steven Howard Shoemaker <ss6r@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
In-Reply-To: <31e025a638dd002@mhub0.tc.umn.edu> from "maria damon" at Jul 7,
96 04:01:27 pm
Thanks for responding Maria. I'm trying right now to apply some of your
insights from the Stein chapter in *the dark end of the street* to a
reading of a piece of "Yiddish" doggerel that was Pound's contribution to
*An "Objectivists" Anthology. Trying to think about what happens when
an "in-between language" is staked out for use by a representative of
the white, male, gentile modernist establishment rather by a member of
the "minority" culture...
steve
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 15:53:17 PDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jerry Rothenberg <jrothenb@CARLA.UCSD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Covering Cherub
For Rob Wilson, if it's of any interest.
In the second issue of SULFUR (1981, altho it doesn't seem to me that long
ago) I had an attack piece vis a vis Harold Bloom called "The Critic As
Exterminating Angel" -- at the end of which I go into a few pages about the
Covering Cherub ("who in one tradition may be the Exterminating Angel
himself, the [Hebrew] Malakh ha-Mavat" and who "guards the Tree of Life &
blocks the return of fallen man to Paradise.") Bloom writes on this in
considerably more detail and I'm in fact turning it on him, polemically, for
reasons explained in the essay. Eshleman, who was editing Sulfur then as
now, was very good on this matter, although I don't know off hand where -- if
anywhere -- he has it in writing.
In that context, I think, Covering Cherubs are much more foreboding than
what you're suggesting -- what I thought of at the time as that which "not
only keeps the poet from the paradise of poetry but from a natural relation-
ship to all those poets who inhabit it." I pin the label on Bloom in that
one, tho there's clearly more to it than that.
Jerome Rothenberg
jrothenb@carla.ucsd.edu
ps. If you're in Hawaii when I get there in September, maybe we can meet
& talk about this & related matters.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 11:34:06 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: poetry performance
Hi Christopher Whipple. Response to your notion abt actors. Distaste
for actors reading poetry for me goes with the felt difference
between stand-ups and actors. "Stand-ups can't act" is a way of
noticing that stand-ups do not seem to know they are assuming
a role (even though, of course, they are). Actors always assume
roles. Rather than actors you want really good poet-readers. Last
year I had the pleasure of hearing Robert Creeley reading Williams et
al. You want something like that: no putting on a special voice or
tone, no change from Creeley-voice reading Creeley that I could
identify, but a real intelligent sense of what the text was doing at
any point. That was really engrossing. To turn up the volume, to turn
up the decor, to turn up the video-presentation, may do something for
people who don't actually like poetry, but there is a danger in that of a
deceptive kind of substitution. I guess I feel the poetry is damaged,
more or less seriously by what you are thinking of.
best
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 14:07:28 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Ougarit (suite) (english/french) (fwd)
More on this mag. Gab.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 08:01:45 -1000
From: J-C Helary <helary@micronet.fr>
Reply-To: bad@eng.hss.cmu.edu
To: Multiple recipients of <bad@eng.hss.cmu.edu>
Subject: Ougarit (suite) (english/french)
Happy to see that although I posted in french, some people replied. It make=
s
me wonder about (so called ?) progressists on a moderated news group
criticizing a french contributor who complained because his french posts
were never sent. It was about cultural imperialism. He was replied (more or
less) that it was really a joke that french criticize anglo-saxons for
cultural imperialism and anyway, english was a lingua franca on this ng and
throughout usenet so he would just have to cope with it...
Good to see it's not like this here.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
for GDGoodman (sap@TANK.RGS.UKY.EDU) :
I'll try to make a summary of my previous post.
I'm working in a book shop specialized in the arab world, in Paris, an we
received last week the first issue of a palestinian art magazine edited in
Ramallah, in the occupied territories. I just decided to reproduce their
presentation letter with their fax number so that interested people could
get in touch with them. They don't seem to have Internet access (like most
people on the world...).
The magazine is supposed to become an interdisciplinary art forum (which
probably sounds quite pompous on our side of the world but might mean
different things there), a place were they can share new visions and be in
touch with currents developed abroad from which they had been cut off for a
long time. They say that the troubled times they live are the source of a
cultural and artistic renewal that leads to high quality creations.
This letter, and the joined issue is supposed to be a bridge across
mediterranee (?) to places beyond. They hope to be able to publish this
magazine twice a year, depending on local conditions.
En vous souhaitant une bonne lecture, nous vous prions d'agr=E9er Madame,
Monsieur, l'expression de nos sentiments chaleureux. (sincerly yours,)
Le comit=E9 de r=E9daction.
Ougarit
c/o Hussein BARGHOUTHI
Cultural Studies Department
Bir Zeit University
P.O.BOX 14 - Bir Zeit
Palestine
fax : (972 2) 995 78 10 ou (972 2) 995 76 56
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
for Neil (lingvoj@lds.co.uk (esperanto))
Je m'appelle Jean-Christophe, Jean-Claude c'est mon p=E8re mais je ne crois
pas que tu le connaisse.
La revue est bilingue, une partie fran=E7aise, une partie arabe. Je n'ai pa=
s
pris le temps de la lire (je ne connais pas encore assez bien l'arabe pour
commenter la deuxi=E8me partie anyway).
Je suis mal plac=E9 pour parler de la langue des colons mais il me semble q=
ue
toutes les langues majeures (du point de vue de la quantit=E9 de locuteurs)=
le
sont parcequ'elles ont =E9t=E9 la langue d'un peuple en position de sup=E9r=
iorit=E9
=E0 un moment de l'histoire. Donc on peut considerer une langue comme un m=
=E9dia
privil=E9gi=E9 dans une aire culturelle donn=E9e.
A toi de choisir ton public.
Quant =E0 leur utilisation du Fran=E7ais, je ne trouve pas =E7a bizarre vu
"l'importance" qu'a eu la France dans cette r=E9gion =E0 une certaine =E9po=
que.
Peut-=EAtre que leur niveau de conscience n'est pas encore parvenu =E0 la
critique de l'imp=E9rialisme culturel... Mais je pense que le multilinguism=
e
est quelque chose d'autre que =E7a (I mean l'absence de critique de
l'imp=E9rialisme culturel).
Le multilinguisme est une situation 'normale', c'est la standardisation
unilingue qui ne l'est pas (IMHO).
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
Amicalement,
Jean-Christophe.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
=09=09Stand up, all victims of oppression
=09=09For the tyrants fear your might
=09=09Don't cling so hard to your possessions
=09=09For you have nothing, if you have no rights
=09=09Let racist ignorance be ended
=09=09For respect makes empires fall
=09=09Freedom is merely privilege extended
=09=09Unless enjoyed by one and all
=09=09So come brothers and sisters
=09=09For the struggle carries on
=09=09The Internationale
=09=09Unites the world in song
=09=09So comrades come rally
=09=09For this is the time and place
=09=09The internationale ideal
=09=09Unites the human race
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 14:25:31 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
In-Reply-To: <31DF82C2.24A2@west.net>
nHi Christopher. My question is where are the women? Mina Loy began
publishing around 1914. And other _Others_ folks. And and and.. gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 19:26:02 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Subtext Readings for July & August, solicitation for Fall readers
I don't think that the last two Subtext readings curated by Nico Vassilakis
have been posted yet, so here they are:
July 18th
Noemie Maxwell & (from Vancouver) Lisa Robertson (followed by a short,
uncurated performance by visiting composer Ellen Fullman)
August 15th
Bryant Mason & (from Oregon) F A Nettelbeck (who will perform some
collaborations with Seattle-area composer/performer Wayne Horvitz)
All readings start at 7:30 pm on the third Thursday of each month, at the
Speakeasy Cafe, in Seattle's Belltown district.
See you there.
If any writers on the list know that they'll be in the Northwest this fall,
please let me know via e-mail (address below). There's still some spaces
available.
Bests
Herb
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 20:15:11 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Listpersonship
This will sort of be all over the place, but I got piqued by the
discussion about von Hallberg's participation(and by extension, of
others in a similar position).
My personal guess with regards to Bob not belonging to this (or any
other) list is simply that he imagines himself as having better things
to do with his time/energy. Ultimately, I think it falls outside our
own ability to judge another's intentions. It's like suggesting that,
say, Bruce Andrews is politically incorrect because he doesn't choose
to own a computer.
There is also a certain hubris in suggesting that this list, as
distinct from CAP-L, Wr-eye-tings, The Sixties, the Derrida, Deleuze,
Baudrillard, Fluxus, High Tech Marketing or any other list is or is not
at the center of the information universe.
But beyond those two very big caveats, the question is not a bad one.
There is a very distinct phenomenon on many campuses of people, some of
them "senior critical" or even directly poetry heavyweights, who do not
participate in whatever avenues the scene in their vicinity takes. I
recall being amazed that James E.B. Breslin, a favorite professor of
mine at Cal, who could speak passionately about post-WW poetry and
sympathetically read a wide range of it, never seemed to think to
actually attend a poetry reading in Berkeley, let alone San Francisco.
It was as if there was a total disconnect. Similarly, students and
faculty at Stanford (with the notable exception of Marjorie Perloff)
seem to find San Francisco impossibly far away. And I've met one person
connected with the Stanford writing scene for over a decade who claims
(facetiously?) never to have physically laid eyes on Gilbert
Sorrentino. I suspect the examples with regards to NYC are at least as
mind boggling.
It is, as I think everyone of us knows all too well, very possible for
people to be "professionally engaged" with contemporary literature
without ever connecting to it as an active social phenomenon, something
going on in their town. Sometimes that's just a reclusive personality
(hermetic types from Anne-Marie Albiach to Karl Young are legion). I
once knew a poet, someone who published several books in the 1970s,
edited a magazine and published a few terrific books of other peoples,
who hated to meet writers, because they were never the perfect beings
he envisioned from their poems. I've also known others who had a
seriously ill child, partner or parent, who were equally removed.
But what may be situational or neurotic can also be utilized cynically,
and I think that was the question being suggested by someone like Bob
having to have his inputs "forwarded" to the list. It suggests both
that he's not so out of touch as to not know about its existence, but
somehow too something (fill in your paranoia here) to be bothered to
participate directly.
Of course, the day this list becomes the transparent medium of all
poetry (or even of all post-New American poetry), it will be far too
unwieldy to have any further value. It's value consists precisely
through the work of people who do participate. And, frankly, it matters
much more what somebody who actively participates on this list thinks
than it does some distant critic who's not clued in. Why not badger
Fred Jameson? Or Andrew Ross? Or, or, or?
How does von Hallberg's response, detailed and serious as it was (I
can't tell if Aldon misrepresented him or not, although knowing the two
of them I'm inclined to buy Nielson's account), differ from, say,
Catherine Stimpson saying in the NY Times on the day that the MacArthur
Foundation (whose fellowship process she directs) awarded a grant to
Richard Howard that the fellowships were being given to those who are
"pushing the envelope"? von Hallberg at least knows what the issues
are.
It seems to me that a much closer and more tangible form of "passive
aggressive" relation to any list like this one (including this one)
comes from those people who function as "pure lurkers," who actively
want to get some of the value produced by this collective mind (to use
Marc Andreeson's definition of the internet) without wanting to
contribute themselves. This one-way relationship falls somewhere
between pure consumption and parasitism proper. If I were feeling
intemperate (and I have my moments), I'd be inclined to suggest a rule
on the order of deleting anyone who doesn't contribute to the
discussion, say, once per month.
Now that's a modest proposal...
Ron Silliman
rsillima@ix.netcom.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 00:28:43 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: JOEL LEWIS <104047.2175@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
memorey is hazy.... but Tate does write the intro to Melvin Tolson's Libretto
for the Republic of Liberia (??) in th 50's, remember the intro as serving as
the official New Crit blessing on the African_american Modernist.
Joel Lewis
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 23:24:14 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate
In-Reply-To: <199607080404.AAA26600@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
By all means read Walter's essay, and tell him to send me a copy!
meanwhile, read Tate in I"ll Take My Stand, his novel, The Fathers, his
collected poetry reviews, his bio. of Stonewall Jackson, the intro. to
Tolson that Lorenzo spoke about so effectively at the Maine conference --
AND it wdn't hurt to read the poems again --
I've been away from studying Tate too long to know what's been done just
recently -- so fill me in, via the list, on anything further you come
across --
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 08:30:24 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jonathan A Levin <jal17@COLUMBIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
In-Reply-To: <31e024290ecf004@mhub1.tc.umn.edu>
Just a footnote to Maria Damon's first note--
Marketing Modernisms (I think that title is correct) is forthcoming from
Michigan, and is edited by Stephen Watt and Kevin
J.H. Dettmar. I know the editors just received final proofs, so maybe the
book will appear later this year.
Jonathan Levin
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 03:13:41 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert J Wilson <rwilson@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: Covering Cherub
In-Reply-To: <9607072253.AA20805@carla.UCSD.EDU>
Dear Jerry Rothenberg,
Thanks for the return of the uncanny Covering Cherub as a critical
cateogry/weapon to be used against those who would depoliticize and/or
monopolize the sublime of vision in a narrow, lyric solipsism kind of way
(HB). And one can only appreciate and applaud the detailed and painstaking
and broadhearted way you have fought to keep this 'return to paradise'
open to diverse traditions and contenders that the northeast hegemony has
never heard of reckoning. All I meant, in this devious context of
American liberalist poetics, that a third and mediating level (the state
and its ideological agents, complicit, unconscious, sleepwalking and
otherwise) has to be thought through, because when somebody tells me
(arguing on a large scale, absorbing diverse poets left and write) that
American poets work 'to consolidate empire at home and abroad' etc, then I
day, let us blast that Covering Cherub out of the line of vision so that a
non-imperialist poetics and a more trenchantly politicized vision of what
trans/US poetics could and should be-- to invite such people as 'keynote'
speakers at Orono or otherwise seems to me a derelection of duty and
vision. When you know the details on what books, projects, essays etc
such people have deviously rejected "anonymously," then I say let us take
those people out and off the scene so that some poetic deep thinking can
begin "In the Middle of [Reified] Modernism in the Middle of [Late]
Capitalism on the Outskirts of New York [Chicago]." I am tired of crossing
a desert of dead vision even if it means, for me or for some, that in
visionary terms I can 'enter the paradise of Blakean heaven." That such
people read and appropriate all the emergent energies of counter-poetics
makes it all the more devious and urgent to get some agon going by which
to overturn the temples of the moneylenders and their market-friendly
babble.
And of course I look forward to your visit to Hawaii where you can enter
into the Tinfish/Bamboo Ridge/redflea indigenous poetics of the local in
some helpful way. The president of HLAC (Hawaii Lit Arts Council),
Gabriel Welford, urged me to send you some essays and works on and around
local/Pacific poetics, and I just remembered I will do so. The Covering
Cherub is out here too, and it may (at times) be me. take care, Rob Wilson
On Sun, 7 Jul 1996, Jerry Rothenberg wrote:
> For Rob Wilson, if it's of any interest.
>
> In the second issue of SULFUR (1981, altho it doesn't seem to me that long
> ago) I had an attack piece vis a vis Harold Bloom called "The Critic As
> Exterminating Angel" -- at the end of which I go into a few pages about the
> Covering Cherub ("who in one tradition may be the Exterminating Angel
> himself, the [Hebrew] Malakh ha-Mavat" and who "guards the Tree of Life &
> blocks the return of fallen man to Paradise.") Bloom writes on this in
> considerably more detail and I'm in fact turning it on him, polemically, for
> reasons explained in the essay. Eshleman, who was editing Sulfur then as
> now, was very good on this matter, although I don't know off hand where -- if
> anywhere -- he has it in writing.
>
> In that context, I think, Covering Cherubs are much more foreboding than
> what you're suggesting -- what I thought of at the time as that which "not
> only keeps the poet from the paradise of poetry but from a natural relation-
> ship to all those poets who inhabit it." I pin the label on Bloom in that
> one, tho there's clearly more to it than that.
>
> Jerome Rothenberg
> jrothenb@carla.ucsd.edu
>
> ps. If you're in Hawaii when I get there in September, maybe we can meet
> & talk about this & related matters.
>
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 09:24:44 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Dean Taciuch <dtaciuch@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
I agree with Tony Green's position on actors performing the poetry--best to
have other poets reading the works. The readers need to be concerned with
the medium itself--the language. I don't think actors generally would do
this--their concern would be with the meaning, the emotions, of the poem.
The temptation would be, I think, to render "dramatic" readings of the
poems, which would damage them in the same way as using, say "dramatic"
lighting to make sure the audience "got the point." In Joan Retallack's
recent book of interviews with John Cage, Cage had a similar problem with
using Julliard musicians to perform his compositions--they try to emote,
rather than allowing the music to occur. Same with the poetry, I
think--actors would tend to force meanings out, rather than allowing them
to occur in the langauge.
Dean Taciuch
dtaciuch@gmu.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 09:44:41 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gwyn McVay <gmcvay1@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
In-Reply-To: <199607072218.SAA63254@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU>
Steve, in the same vein, what about Berryman's Henry Pussycat?
On Sun, 7 Jul 1996, Steven Howard Shoemaker wrote:
> Thanks for responding Maria. I'm trying right now to apply some of your
> insights from the Stein chapter in *the dark end of the street* to a
> reading of a piece of "Yiddish" doggerel that was Pound's contribution to
> *An "Objectivists" Anthology. Trying to think about what happens when
> an "in-between language" is staked out for use by a representative of
> the white, male, gentile modernist establishment rather by a member of
> the "minority" culture...
>
> steve
>
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 08:47:35 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
steve: fascinating! could you send me that piece by pound. i shudder to think
what the objectivists made of this. it seems that in this case, you are dealing
with something more charged than a "white male gentile modernist" but someone
who dedicated much of his life and risked his national standing to participate
in the war on the Jews,,, in other words, a confirmed anti-Semite of the
unsubtle kind.--md
In message <199607072218.SAA63254@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU> UB Poetics
discussion group writes:
> Thanks for responding Maria. I'm trying right now to apply some of your
> insights from the Stein chapter in *the dark end of the street* to a
> reading of a piece of "Yiddish" doggerel that was Pound's contribution to
> *An "Objectivists" Anthology. Trying to think about what happens when
> an "in-between language" is staked out for use by a representative of
> the white, male, gentile modernist establishment rather by a member of
> the "minority" culture...
>
> steve
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 10:05:16 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Henry Gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 8 Jul 1996 09:44:41 -0400 from
<gmcvay1@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
On Mon, 8 Jul 1996 09:44:41 -0400 Gwyn McVay said:
>Steve, in the same vein, what about Berryman's Henry Pussycat?
See Miao Filene's monograph, "Catty Gossip, Anemic Cad : Berryman's
Pseudo-Animalism in _The Dream Songs_", Manx University & Veterinarian
Institute Press, 1995. A good critique of Berryman's uncrritical
presumtive style, employing an analysis of his use of CATalepsis
and DOGberryisms in ahistorical and super-humanist frames (or,
as she calls them, "c-oops"). - Henry Gould >..<
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 09:23:56 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
ron, yo, i'm over here man...
hey: i can only imagine, again, what subject position someone is writing
from who feels free to have his post forwarded (this latter construction
the most lenient i can manage) to a list of some 400 plus folks, many or
most of whom he doesn't know... i would never, never do this mself, and
i've been hanging around online for some time now, here and there... which
means either (1) robert von hallberg has no working knowledge of list
communities, and doesn't see this as a cheeky move or (2) he really doesn't
care if this is seen as a cheeky move... let's be nice and go with (1)...
which feeds my hunches about how senior folks in our profession, on the
avg., have a print-based sense of themselves... i won't get into all of the
various twists and turns of this latter assertion at this point... but von
hallberg clearly has a critical rep. at stake, yes, and all's i'm asking
that he do is subscribe to poetics formally to address what he takes as a
challenge to same from aldon...
as to whether we can talk "about" anybody who's not on this list: well as
you say, this ain't the center of the poetics world or anything... but
again, me talking about, say, andrew ross is not quite the same thing as me
talking about robert von hallberg... i mean, look at the dynamic that's
developed: from now on, any time i write "robert von hallberg" i feel his
absent presence... mebbe it's just me, but it's like i'm talking at once
behind and in front of his back... and I DON'T KNOW THE MAN, and this is
not my way... and this all b/c he stuck only his Big toe into the pool to
test its temperature, as it were... whereas ross hasn't done so, except to
the extent that his *public* post about the sokal affair (thankfully) ended
up here (and if you wanna know what i think about ross's little stunt, just
ask and i'll send you a 45kb draft of a piece i'm finishing up for _ebr_ on
why the sokal situation shoulda been electronic from the get-go)...
so intentions and such aside, fact is that this list dynamic has been
altered for me wrt
r-o-b-e-r-t v-o-n h-a-l-l-b-e-r-g... and i expect for a few others anyway...
now, as to "pure lurkers": ain't really no such thing, is there?... i
mean, this presumes that there are some folks who will *never* leave lurk
mode... granted, there may be many who rarely do... but at least we can
imagine them, say, *listening* to some of what's being espoused by mouthier
types like you and me and _____(i assume they're not merely processing the
messages into oblivion)... and listening is worth something, ron... now as
i see it we should be working, all of us, to try to pull more folks out of
lurk, make for more comfortable regions hereabouts... and it happens:
there have been a number of folks who've waited quite some time, by their
own accounts, to enter into the public discussion (i suspect in fact your
remarks may provoke same, as i'm sure you're aware)... and this takes time,
and it's time that allows these spaces to mutate, to register, say,
different sorts of conversational possibilities---which is to say different
gendering, different cultural potentials, and such like... so your "modest
proposal" (setting aside how easy it would be to defeat same functionally)
gives exceedingly short-shrift to the possibility of helping this space
accommodate---if not all tastes, predispositions, what have you---at least
a somewhat broader range of interests and motivations than you and i and
_____ can hope to represent...
and again, i'm preaching to the choir now---you know this already...
ok?... just so's we're talking *to* each other, yknow...
peace//
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 10:42:34 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
Ron,
I agree with you except for your suggestion that each list member have to
say SOMETHING to the list at least once a month; then there'd be a lot
of meaningless chatter, I fear, which demeans all the good talk that often
also takes place. No, the list is fine as it is, terribly unfair at times,
perhaps, but also incredibly free (or at least as free as we want to be
since we may be worried about having what we say on the list repeated
elsewhere; of course, again (as I said the other day--and this is no
news to you but I'll say it anyway here), we're in a techno-warp and
questions about copy righting, patenting, authored (single and multiple)
and authorless texts (even linearity?) are not to be resolved easily.
I know I'm saying the obvious here but perhaps it needs saying and
then maybe we can all move on to other matters?
Burt
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 12:24:47 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steven Howard Shoemaker <ss6r@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tate/Pound/African-Americans
In-Reply-To: <31e11177628b246@mhub1.tc.umn.edu> from "maria damon" at Jul 8,
96 08:47:35 am
Maria,
Yes, I treat him as a "confirmed anti-Semite" throughout, and have already
written about his anti-Semitism and how it affects his relations with
Zukofsky in a piece that will be in the collection on Zuk edited by
Scroggins, and due out anytime, i guess, from U of Alabama Press (any word,
Mark?). What makes things complicated is that, unlike an anti-Semite like
Eliot (whose public pronouncements are actually much less virulent), here
is Pound in the early '30s working with all these Jews! And, as Casillo
shows and I am seeing as well, there is a thread of admiration, and
competition, running thru the anti-Semitism. The point is not that this
admiration mitigates the anti-Semitism but that it is weirdly part of it...
and that ties into Pound's need to "try on" the Yiddish...
steve
Maria wrote:
>
> steve: fascinating! could you send me that piece by pound. i shudder to think
> what the objectivists made of this. it seems that in this case, you are dealing
> with something more charged than a "white male gentile modernist" but someone
> who dedicated much of his life and risked his national standing to participate
> in the war on the Jews,,, in other words, a confirmed anti-Semite of the
> unsubtle kind.--md
>
> In message <199607072218.SAA63254@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU> UB Poetics
> discussion group writes:
> > Thanks for responding Maria. I'm trying right now to apply some of your
> > insights from the Stein chapter in *the dark end of the street* to a
> > reading of a piece of "Yiddish" doggerel that was Pound's contribution to
> > *An "Objectivists" Anthology. Trying to think about what happens when
> > an "in-between language" is staked out for use by a representative of
> > the white, male, gentile modernist establishment rather by a member of
> > the "minority" culture...
> >
> > steve
>
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 13:01:18 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
Ron wrote:
>If I were feeling
intemperate (and I have my moments), I'd be inclined to >suggest a rule
on the order of deleting anyone who doesn't contribute >to the
discussion, say, once per month.
Ron, do we really want that many posts! My mailbox is always already stuffed.
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 12:19:58 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship/aldon/rvh
i'm somewhat struck by how a discussion about race, sociology and literary
criticism has turned into a discussion of list etiquette. this is indeed one of
the problems i think rob wilson touches on in his scathing "covering cherub"
posts. volatile issues of materialist criticism get watered down into an
internicene critique of our own teensy weensy little hierarchy of poetry-critics
this not to say that any one remark about list-politics and academic politics
is trivial or ill-directed, but the cumulative effect of what draws discussion
and what dies in silence is noteworthy. likewise, chris s's query last week
about erotics and race, or aldon's challenge to the view that interracial sex is
politicallly radical both got no pick-up.
md
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 10:36:45 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christopher Filkins <filch@POBOX.COM>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
Dean & Tony's positions are misinformed. An actor emotes or doesn't emote
according to the direction they receive. There is a reason why we have
directors after all. The virtue of actors is their ability to chameleon
anyone who comes their way. Do not slam actors as emoting fools when they
can do so much more.
Christopher Filkins
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 13:43:10 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: and john cage and car sickness
In response to Mark's post of a few days ago. I think Cage's relationship to
"the western tradition" was complex & highly contextual. & of course he could
get angry on occasion. The maddest I ever saw him was at a concert at the
Philips Collection, the pianist had chosen the program to be performed, which
included Ives, Crumb, Cage, &, I believe he had wanted to play a longish
piece by Liszt (clue, clue) which was turned down, or maybe he did play it,
don't remember. Any case he played one of Cage's pieces from the fifties very
badly. The pianist told us he had only read the score the day before. At the
intermission he said to the curator, in a very congenial manner, "thank the
pianist for me, and ask him never to play my music again" and we left.
By the time I knew him, his work, & that of many artists he felt kinship
with, was internationally acclaimed.
So his energy was consumed by doing the work rather than railing against a
tradition. Also, I'm not sure it's accurate to say he left the or a
tradition-- rather that he & others played a part in changing it.
Rod
--------------------------------------------
Mark Wallace wrote:
Hey Rod:
Thanks for the clarification on my earlier remarks relative to
John Cage and his feelings towards the musical traditions he leaves
behind. But your post leaves me with a question I'd like to hear more
from you about. When you say that "at a certain point, Cage simply didn't
need that tradition anymore" (I'm paraphrasing), are you implying that he
left it behind without antagonism, just decided it could be ignored? Or,
if he continued to have reactions towards it, what were the nature of
those reactions? Loathe is, I can see, probably too strong. But what, from
your understanding, would be the proper way to characterize his feelings
towards the tradition he leaves behind? There's something about your post
that seems almost to be characterizing his reaction as strangely
unemotional--i.e., oh there it is, I don't need that, it really doesn't
bother me and let's talk about something else. That seems to me a little
bit hard to believe--you're trained in a whole tradition, work in it for
many years, and then one day decide it's not significant, and leave it
without much feeling either way? I'm just curious as to whether you could
try to characterize more fully his reaction to what he left behind.
mark
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 13:45:29 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "c.g. guertin" <cguertin@JULIAN.UWO.CA>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
In-Reply-To: <960708130117_151178550@emout08.mail.aol.com>
Lurker equals/does not equal listener? Is this a 'bad' moral equation?
Silence is evil or simply undesirable?
cg
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 13:10:37 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship/aldon/rvh
but maria, isn't this just IT?... i mean isn't it exactly the case,
*exactly*---that list politics, intentionally or otherwise, reflect the
ongoing silencing of Other politics?... ergo attending to list politics,
however one (which is to say, e.g., me) goes about same, is not merely an
exercise in formal maneuvers, but a very (forgive me) *real* attempt not to
be dismissive of such political undercurrents?... isn't it the case that
issues of 'race, sociology and literary criticism' are over there (and
where else could there be but print?) *and* over here?... i mean, if
there's a there there, is there no here here?...
best,
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 11:20:58 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: James Brook <jbrook@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
A case study of actors performing poetry:
Last fall in Paris I had the opportunity of hearing Bei Dao read at the new
Maison de la Poesie at the recently renovated Theatre Moliere, sponsored by
Covering Cherub Enterprises. Admission was 50 francs--about $10--which seemed a
little high. But we had to pay twice: the young woman at the counter wanted to
know whether we had "reservations." No, we didn't. She made a big show of consulting
her list, shaking her head, and making discouraging sounds--before turning back
to us and declaring that she *might* be able to get us in. We paid, got tickets,
and were ushered to our numbered seats in the half-empty theater.
Exactly on time the curtain(!) was raised to reveal the backlit silhouettes of
five people seated on stage: an actor (Michael Lonsdale), a presenter, a critic,
an interpreter (not Bei Dao's translator), and, off to the side, the poet himself.
I guess they were all getting paid out of the ticket price. . . .
At least there was no dramatic music. . . .
The presenter presented in a vaguely presentational way. The actor moved up to
the podium and gave his idea of a "poetic" delivery of the French translation
of a short poem. Bei Dao was asked to read it in Chinese. And then the critic
jumped in and harassed the poet with a series of profound questions in the form
of retarded little essays about "the difficulty" of Bei Dao's poetry and its
"problematic condensation." These stupid remarks were interpreted for
an annoyed-looking Bei Dao, who replied brusquely to the effect that poetry
tended to be "difficult" and "condensed." And so on for two hours.
In the course of the evening we heard no more than a dozen poems--massacred
by the actor, whose dramatic and strictly-from-wardrobe-romantic air
contrasted sharply with Bei Dao's seriousness and intensity. But it was the critic
who really monopolized the stage--the large mouth in a small frame couldn't
contain itself. But of course the French have a horror of poetry, a horror expressed
in curious ways: they elevate it into a spectacle for the culturati, they
encapsulate it as part of "the national heritage," and they carefully wrap it in
criticism. They prefer the package to the contents. Like so many people.
Progressing a few months in time while digressing just a little in topic, I
should also report on another "performance" at the Maison de la Poesie at the
Theatre Moliere sponsored by Songs of Experience et Cie: Michel Deguy in
Conversation with Jacques Derrida. This event was billed as a meeting between
Poetry and Philosophy. I assure you that Philosophy won the match. Michel Deguy
began by introducing himself and his "friend Jacques" and outlining their program:
to engage in a dialogue on the reciprocal relations between their disciplines.
Ever courteous and by his own admission a little unprepared for the occasion,
Deguy asked Derrida to go first. Deguy was surprised to see Derrida pull a sheaf
of papers several inches thick from his briefcase and begin reading--and reading
and reading and reading and reading. In fact, Derrida read for almost an hour
straight as he went through all the problems posed by the first words of
one of Deguy's poems, which was written in the form of a love letter addressed
to "Ma chair" [My flesh] instead of the more usual "Ma chere" [My dear]. There
was no attempt at dialogue; Deguy was never questioned or given an opening.
He just sat there in evident discomfort and astonishment, crossing and uncrossing
his legs, unsure of where to put his hands. . . . I don't think that Derrida
noticed the other obvious pun: "Ma chaire" [My pulpit, rostrum, university
position]. When Derrida finally relented, Deguy said he didn't at all know how to
reply to such a demonstration and so he finished the evening by reading a few
unrelated journal entries and taking a few even less related questions from the
audience.
Now, do I have to stress that my remarks are not an "attack" on actors,
critics, or philosophers? They have their uses. But what I saw at these two events
was a hatred for poetry that masqueraded as a love for poetry, a love
that wished to consume its object, to become its object, to take
the place of its object (Freudian references intended).
Your reporter,
James Brook
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 12:19:07 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship/aldon/rvh
At 12:19 PM 7/8/96, maria damon wrote:
>i'm somewhat struck by how a discussion about race, sociology and literary
>criticism has turned into a discussion of list etiquette. this is indeed
>one of
>the problems i think rob wilson touches on in his scathing "covering cherub"
>posts. volatile issues of materialist criticism get watered down into an
>internicene critique of our own teensy weensy little hierarchy of
>poetry-critics
Poetry-critics? Am I naive in my assumption that the poetics list was at
least originally intended as a place for the discussion of poetics by
*poets*?
> this not to say that any one remark about list-politics and academic politics
>is trivial or ill-directed, but the cumulative effect of what draws discussion
>and what dies in silence is noteworthy. likewise, chris s's query last week
>about erotics and race, or aldon's challenge to the view that interracial
>sex is
>politicallly radical both got no pick-up.
Again, this is a *poetics* list. I'm sorry, but I find this
holier-than-though attitude of your post very offensive, this accusing of
400 people of racism because no once picked up on threads that *you* found
important.
Dodie Bellamy
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 15:06:26 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Elisabeth W. Joyce" <EJOYCE@EDINBORO.EDU>
Subject: in defense of parasites
In Defense of Parasites
As a silent lurker on this list, I find a need to respond to Ron
Silliman's remarks about lurkers as parasites. Yes, I am a
parasite, but not in the sense that I want to kill the list, to
suck out of it all of its essences. Instead, I think of myself in
terms of the food which the list offers me and which I digest in
thoughtful silence. I recall scoffing at silent members of
classes in graduate school, thinking that they were not
effectively immersed in their pursuits, but
in retrospect perhaps
I misjudged them. I am not on the cutting edge of the field, nor
will I ever be, but I am deeply invested in it and in what it
means to me. I teach a heavy load of courses and have two small
children. I live in relative isolation. The poetics list is a
lifeline for me, composed of active intellectuals engaged in
response to social and political effects on literature (poetry!).
I payattention to what you say; I am learning here. I sift through
your endless reams of material fo
r the more often than not
superlative assessments of awide range of topics. I am inspired
by your reading lists. I am even moved by you (to
tears even) as when you eulogized Larry Eigner, bringing
in his life, his personality, and as always, his poetry. I am a
reasonably active scholar, but I can't speak right now--perhaps
later when my life is less strapped--but this doesn't mean that
parasites are a negative force on this list. Rather, I would
suggest, we are an everpresent supportive force, tha
t audience
which poetry often fears it lacks.
Lisa Joyce (ejoyce@edinboro.edu)
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 14:21:25 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
>Hi Christopher Whipple. Response to your notion abt actors. Distaste
>for actors reading poetry for me goes with the felt difference
>between stand-ups and actors. "Stand-ups can't act" is a way of
> noticing that stand-ups do not seem to know they are assuming
> a role (even though, of course, they are). Actors always assume
> roles. Rather than actors you want really good poet-readers. Last
>year I had the pleasure of hearing Robert Creeley reading Williams et
>al.
Amen. There was also the radio reading of Whitman with the Prairie Home
Companion guy, the Deliverance guy (is my memory correct?) and Allen
Ginsberg. The first two were self-conscious and silly, but AG's reading
was tremendously illuminating. He *inhabited* Whitman's line is if it were
his true home (why not? since it is). No change (to parallel Tony Green)
from AG reading AG, but, as Tony put it, "a real intelligent sense of what
the text was doing at any point."
Worth finding if anyone knows how to find it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 14:55:14 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: Chapbook Contest
Pavement Saw Press 1996/1997 chapbook contest
$500 and 25 copies of the winning chapbook will be awarded for the
finest collection of poetry received. The judge will be announced in
an upcoming issue of AWP and Poet's and Writer's. Submit up to 32
pages of poetry. Include a cover letter with your name, address, phone
number, poem titles, publication credits, and a brief biography. Do
not enclude your name anywhere on the manuscript. Entry fee: $7. Make
all checks payable to _Pavement Saw Press_. All entries must be
postmarked by December 20, 1996, for consideration in this year's
contest. Each entrant will receive a copy of the winning chapbook
provided a 6 1/2 by 9 1/2 SASE with $1.01 in postage is included. All
manuscripts will be recycled. Send all entries to:
Pavement Saw Press
Chapbook Contest
7 James Street
Scotia, NY 12302
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
About last years winner:
Pavement Saw Press
proudly announces the winner of our 1995-1996 chapbook award:
Permutations of the Gallery
by Joshua McKinney
Poems from this collection first appeared in publications such as the
Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Situation, Santa Barbara Review,
and Willow Springs.
Publication, a prize of five hundred dollars and ten percent of the book
run are awarded to the winner of the annual prize. *Permutations of the
Gallery* was selected by Naton Leslie as the 1996 winner of the Pavement
Saw Poetry Chapbook Award.
About the book:
Permutations of the Gallery is an ambitious collection, even if recklessly
so. Joshua McKinney's poems struggle against the confines of syntax and
literal sense, in order to arrive at a uniquely clear grasp of the truces
we must maintain with time and spacial existence. To attempt to paraphrase
these knotty and paradoxical poems would be akin to stating that Wallace
Stevens wrote about the weather. Don't search for narrative threads here,
poems about Queen Anne's Lace or cicadas, or paeans for our humdrum,
domestic lives. And don't expect to read this book once.
Naton Leslie
Joshua McKinney knows that philosophy is not an abstract matter, nor in
anyway separate from our everyday lives. His poems show that to engage the
world intimately, we need to _think_ it in the most particular ways. In
*Permutations of the Gallery* family friends, nature, and a troubling
social world are not givens, but rather questions by which we explore the
twisting, disruptive, estatic, sometimes even annihilating terms of our
existence.
Mark Wallace
A poetry held taut, that revels in economy and clarity, is filled with
insights and syntactical compassion. I highly recommend *Permutations of
the Gallery*.
Simon Perchik
Published in a limited edition of 250 copies, perfect bound, 6 by 9 size
Price $5.00, includes postage & handling. Checks payable to:
Pavement Saw Press
7 James Street
Scotia, NY 12302
Thanks
dave.baratier@mosby.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 15:15:54 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Henry Gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: in defense of parasites
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 8 Jul 1996 15:06:26 -0500 from
<EJOYCE@EDINBORO.EDU>
Lurkers win my admiration for their self control. Now as I was saying about
Charles S. Peirce...
Perhaps John Milton's classic SONNET (yall hear that? I said S*O*n*n*e*t)
is appropriate here:
Thine e-air, Lord, doth buzz with eerie speed
Postings innumerable from fair and noir;
Oft over snail mail doth thine angels soar,
Froward to advance, or staunch impede
Eelecteronic eels athwart thy deep--
Yea, over hill and dale and chip and bleep
They fling their witty bits, or, bootless, weep;
Thus many a mungy wolf turn eep-eep sheep.
Yet I, gone blind from staring at yon screen,
Will not despair, nor call o'duty shirk;
These keys annoy not I; my fingers keen
Tap yet, yon delphic "Ode on a String Bean".
- Technohysterical, tis true - and yet - 'twill work!
They also serve, who only sit and lurk.
- Henry "Johnny B. Milt" Gould
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 15:44:44 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Dean Taciuch <dtaciuch@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
>Dean & Tony's positions are misinformed.
Not speaking for Tony Green, but I may in fact be uninformed rather than
misinformed (I'm not actor, never studied acting, etc). But it is the
actor's "abilty to chameleon" that may be the problem. I'm not saying they
are "emoting fools"; the question is one of focus--an actor looks for a
character to get into. Yes, actors have directors--but poets don't, you
see. Would an actor assume the character of the poet whose work is being
read? That misses the point, doesn't it? So would, I fear, any attempt to
"act" a poem out--it places the focus elsewhere (on character, emotion,
story) rather than on the language. It shows, I think, a distrust of the
audience as well--the idea that poetry needs to be a bit predigested (by
the actor or director), already worked out so that the masses can more
easily absorb it. So I'm not knocking actors--but performing poetry is not
acting. . .
Dean Taciuch
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 14:49:59 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship/aldon/rvh
In message <199607081810.NAA16677@charlie.cns.iit.edu> joe a writes:
> but maria, isn't this just IT?... i mean isn't it exactly the case,
> *exactly*---that list politics, intentionally or otherwise, reflect the
> ongoing silencing of Other politics?... ergo attending to list politics,
> however one (which is to say, e.g., me) goes about same, is not merely an
> exercise in formal maneuvers, but a very (forgive me) *real* attempt not to
> be dismissive of such political undercurrents?... isn't it the case that
> issues of 'race, sociology and literary criticism' are over there (and
> where else could there be but print?) *and* over here?... i mean, if
> there's a there there, is there no here here?...
>
>
With all due respect, joe, for your politics and the sophistication thereof, no,
i don't think the discussion of whether or not bob von hallberg signs onto
POETIX is the same as a discussion of how to do responsible, anti-racist
scholarship in poetry and poetics. I was hoping for a discussion of the latter,
not the former.
so, how DO we respond, in our scholarship, to the challenges posed by both Bob
and Aldon in their point counterpoint, regardless of who is quoting whom more
accurately?
md
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:02:17 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
>... a modest proposal
that wouldnt be a Litterary ILLusion, would it? there, my post fr
th month, and only 8 days into it...
lbd
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:03:45 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: Re: Perchik
Aldon
Perchik's selected poems have a number of textual problems which lead
me to recommend the originals, if possible. The poems are manically
compressed onto the page space in such a fashion that renders them
either inadequately represented (through the loss of a readers eye) or
unfathomable without extensive page flipping. The editors of this
series decided to clump the work together as close as possible,
instead of the full-page-per-poem demands of a syntax driven syndoche.
Be well.
David Baratier
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
David -- I had been aware of that via the old Perchik _Selected_; but
the book as a whole had left a bad feeling in me that kept mt from
returning to it -- Now, I'd like to take a look at the fuller
sequences (the Frank series in the selected appears to be less than
half the sequence?) Will give Simon a second try on your advice --
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 15:51:37 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship/aldon/rvh
In message <v01520d00ae069d8574ae@[205.134.228.153]> UB Poetics discussion
group writes:
> At 12:19 PM 7/8/96, maria damon wrote:
> >i'm somewhat struck by how a discussion about race, sociology and literary
> >criticism has turned into a discussion of list etiquette. this is indeed
> >one of
> >the problems i think rob wilson touches on in his scathing "covering cherub"
> >posts. volatile issues of materialist criticism get watered down into an
> >internicene critique of our own teensy weensy little hierarchy of
> >poetry-critics
>
> Poetry-critics? Am I naive in my assumption that the poetics list was at
> least originally intended as a place for the discussion of poetics by
> *poets*?
>
> > this not to say that any one remark about list-politics and academic
> > politics
> >is trivial or ill-directed, but the cumulative effect of what draws
> discussion
> >and what dies in silence is noteworthy. likewise, chris s's query last week
> >about erotics and race, or aldon's challenge to the view that interracial
> >sex is
> >politicallly radical both got no pick-up.
>
> Again, this is a *poetics* list. I'm sorry, but I find this
> holier-than-though attitude of your post very offensive, this accusing of
> 400 people of racism because no once picked up on threads that *you* found
> important.
>
> Dodie Bellamy
i'm puzzled. this is the second time since the conference that you've come down
on me for holier than thouness; both times, i've felt misrepresented in the way
you characterize my posts. i have not accused anyone of racism, nor in general
would i, since i find that kind of personal judgement to be counterproductive
and not too meaningful. i'm saying i was disappointed at the way the discussion
went. in my reference to poetry-critics, i was referring specifically to the
discussion of robert von hallberg's presence and/or absence on the list and what
it means. he is a critic rather than a poet; aldon too is a subject in this
discussion, and it is true that he is a poet, but it was his work as a critic
that was being discussed. i think "senior scholars" is the term joe used.
bests, md
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 11:09:01 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: in defense of parasites
In-Reply-To: <01I6U1UDYPK28WW1EA@edinboro.edu>
Just wanted to thank Elizabeth Joyce for her heartfelt message about
lurking. Me too, small kids, lots of work and lots of learning. Also
occasional bleeps. Ron, you can't have meant US!! :-) What sort of
creature were you thinking of? gab.
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 11:10:30 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Ekphrastic Poetry by Women (9/15/96; NEMLA 4/4-4/5) (fwd)
North East Modern Language Association
April 4-5, 1997
Philadelphia, PA
Session: Image and Text
Topic: Ekphrastic Poetry by Women
There has been considerable interest recently in the genre
of ekphrastic poetry, that is, in A.J. Heffernan's useful phrase,
poems which are "verbal representations of visual representations."
W.J.T. Mitchell has discussed the tendency of poems in the
ekphrastic tradition to treat the image as a "female other." The
genre, he writes, "tends to describe an object of visual pleasure
and fascination from a masculine perspective, often to an audience
understood to be masculine as well." Somewhat offhandedly, he con-
tinues: "All this would look quite different, of course, if my
emphasis had been on ekphrastic poetry by women." The session seeks
papers which put the emphasis exaclty there, papers which discuss
poetry in which the speaking and seeing subject of the text is a
woman. Can a "female gaze" be characterized? What does it mean
when a woman is in the position of viewer, respondent, "envoicer,"
maker of the poetic meaning. How do ekphrastic poems written by
women complicate current theories of ekphrasis? Other critical
questions that arise in this context: why this painting, and why
now? What does it reveal about the poet's temperament, her
character, her situation in time and place? what does it reveal
about her sense of self as artist, her aesthetic, political and
moral position vis-a-vis her chosen painter? Papers are invited
about all historical periods.
Prospective panelists need not be members of NEMLA to submit a
proposal; but selected panelists must be members of NEMLA by
November 1, 1996 in order to have their names included in the
convention program.
Send a brief abstract of your paper, postmarked no later
than September 15, 1996 to the following address or email.
Selected panelists will be notified no later than October 15,991
1996.
Sara Lundquist
Department of English
University of Toledo
Toledo, OH 43606
email: SLUNDQU@uoft02.utoledo.edu
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 15:31:00 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" <pritchpa@SILVERPLUME.IIX.COM>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
Comments: To: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
I would just add that the moment anyone "stands up" in front of someone else
to speak that moment "becomes" theatrical and those who ignore this do so at
their (and their audience's) peril. Actors can enhance a text; they can
also make a hash of it. The key (as someone mentioned) is the presence of a
director.
All of this begs the question, Is the poet always and necessarily the best
reader of his/her own work? Usually, yes. But not always. I've heard some
real botches, generally from people with a very poor notion of the intrinsic
theatricality of even the most perfunctory spoken exchange. To assume that
just standing there and "telling the truth" as James Cagney once described
acting can result in readings that are painfully bad in their naivete. And
also very powerful.
I think readings are both theatrical and anti-theatrical. That is, the
encounter between the reader and the audience creates ipso facto a
theatrical experience, but one which is anti-theatrical in that it forces
our attention away from the expectations usually aroused by the idea of a
performance.
Valery said the best way to read a poem is very plainly and without any
adornment. Well, yes and no.
Patrick Pritchett
----------
From: Judy Roitman
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS
Subject: Re: poetry performance
Date: Monday, July 08, 1996 2:57PM
<<File Attachment: HEADERS.TXT>>
>Hi Christopher Whipple. Response to your notion abt actors. Distaste
>for actors reading poetry for me goes with the felt difference
>between stand-ups and actors. "Stand-ups can't act" is a way of
> noticing that stand-ups do not seem to know they are assuming
> a role (even though, of course, they are). Actors always assume
> roles. Rather than actors you want really good poet-readers. Last
>year I had the pleasure of hearing Robert Creeley reading Williams et
>al.
Amen. There was also the radio reading of Whitman with the Prairie Home
Companion guy, the Deliverance guy (is my memory correct?) and Allen
Ginsberg. The first two were self-conscious and silly, but AG's reading
was tremendously illuminating. He *inhabited* Whitman's line is if it were
his true home (why not? since it is). No change (to parallel Tony Green)
from AG reading AG, but, as Tony put it, "a real intelligent sense of what
the text was doing at any point."
Worth finding if anyone knows how to find it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner,
1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:26:27 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship/aldon/rvh
maria, listen: let me set my own record straight here, or gay, or
whatever, and w/o any rancor (really!): i find a certain degree of
discomfort---aside from my intentionally (there i go again ron, shit!)
provocative remarks addressed 'at' my neighbor, robert von hallberg---who,
as i say, i've never met, but who teaches right down the street from me---i
find a certain degree of discomfort in debating 'about' the
point-counterpoint discussion twixt aldon and robert, w/o robert being
t/here...
you wanna know what i think?... for one, i found robert von hallberg's
remarks to be---
but you see, whereas i might backchannel my response to you and others with
whom i feel a certain affinity---friendship, trust---and have over time
owing to our online interaction, to go public with my opines given robert's
'entrance' on this list just doesn't feel right to me, i can't help it...
this is a feeling i get, and i think it's justified... and so i'm stuck
with examining why i feel so, and how this is a function of how this list
discussion works...
and of course, were robert to make a formal entrance, i think you know me
well enough to know that i wouldn't be shy about agreeing or disagreeing
etc...
that said, i think i can offer this much as a relative rule-of-thumb from
my pov: i tend to measure comments that have to do with minority and
ethnic textual representation in terms of how well these latter play to my
idea of good pedagogy, and good curricula... i mean to say that, aside from
issues of canonicity per se, there are issues here having to do with WHO
the students are who are being taught, of what their needs are, of where
they're coming from, and of what we think we should be teaching them and
how this plays off against their needs...
maria, just imagine what i think of certain comments made wrt this latter
tendency of mine to measure same against pedagogy and curricula...
best,
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 17:30:15 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: performance & poetry: "measure carefully, can be toxic"
i don't think it is a matter of actor/non-actor/poet reading as it is
the way the poetry is read, the experience of the reader with poetry
reading and audience, the dynamics of the situation.
i have heard more than anyone's share of poets reading badly. one all
too common and painful scenario is the Dramatic Reader. acting and
dramatic reading is, as one might expect, a highly skilled art, not to
be embarked upon by the extravagantly undertalented. too often, a new
writer will write a shaky melodramatic paraphrase of all the shaky
melodramatic works written since the dawn of time. the ethos of
reading for such work is an earnest, admonitory expression, lots of
william shatner pauses, and a speeded-up pace whose only virtue is
that it ends the exhibition more quickly. the melodramatic pauses and
sudden shreiked words, no doubt inserted at the urging of some
would-be instructor or other to "make it interesting," have all the
lethal quality of high school plays.
on the other hand, i have, myself, succumbed to the I Am A Poet Reading
Poetry style -- monotone, odd pronounciation, rhythm subsumed to a throaty
growl, eyes glued to the page. i don't know why i succumb to this; can
only guess that one sees it at enough respectable readings to make it the
default.
the finest readers i've heard -- grace paley, galway kinnel, adrienne
rich, martin espada, alicia ostriker, tim o'brien and larry heineman
(prose), maxine kumin, carolyn forche, [doubtless more but i want to
get on with this] -- tend to 1) read very slowly; poetry is
compressed, tight, and requires much more work to parse, so if it is
read too fast, it deconstructs into a blur of nothing; 2) seem, as
larry heinemann has put it, to "see/hear/feel" the images as they read
them. in other words, as the reader reads, they too are experiencing
the writing. it lingers where a listener needs time to hear, speeds
up where a listener is eager to hear more; 3) have enough confidence in
the material not to need to jazz it up with shatnerian excesses (ala
flannery o'connor quote in someone's signature ~ 'i've had as much of
this pleasure as i can stand').
one reading comes to mind particularly -- martin espada reading with a
jazz band. it sounds as if it would be horrible and i wasn't expecting
much but it was one of the most extraordinary experiences of poetry i've
ever had. martin has a deep basso voice, flexible, burred, resonant. he
waited, took in the rhythm of the jazz peice, then entered combining rhythm
of poem and rhythm of music. paused. listened. let the music make itself
part of the sound in a compelling way.
if i were putting together a collection of performed work, i'd listen
for non-hoakey readings (dylan thomas' "child's christmas in wales" is
a gorgeous antithesis of hoakey -- really lovely, resonant, hypnotic).
and only use people i'd heard reading the peice. no room for
surprises. and emphasize slowness, respect and tenderness for the
words rather than efforts to make them more exciting.
for WWI poets, MUST BE SLOW. poems are extraordinary stories, and if not
paused over, heard, then becomes a jumble of rhymes.
also, i don't see any women writers in there and i also wish i did.
norton anthology of literature by women, as well as magazines of the
time, are good source material. i've always wanted to hear more of
how women of that time experienced WWI. i had a teacher in high
school who lost her two shining older brothers, her lover, her cousins
-- an entire generation of british men were wiped out in that ghastly
mess. she went to germany after wwII to the camps, part of her
committment after WWI to not glorifying military, and translated for
DP's. of camps, she has said only "i'll never forget the smell as i
went through the gate that first day. never." and first women nurses
were going over with nightingale in wwI. i think there must be some
extrardinary women's writing from them.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 16:54:00 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: performance & poetry: "measure carefully, can be toxic"
>i don't think it is a matter of actor/non-actor/poet reading as it is
>the way the poetry is read, the experience of the reader with poetry
>reading and audience, the dynamics of the situation.
absolutely. And more, too, a kind of tuning, reader to what is read to
audience. For often so much depends on this syllable with that, move to a
particular kind of liquid consonant, or fricative, and echoing that two or
three lines later with something else which one wants to be heard but which
one doesn't want to stress too much. this is attention to the language at
hand, having possibly nothing to do with "character." Yet there is also a
personality projected in a reading. Lyn Hejinian does it very well; Mei-mei
Berssenbrugge is extraordinary; Leslie Scalapino is captivating. And others.
I like to think that great work is easy to read well -- it actually helps
the reader. But still it may require some unusual attentions. Attentions
which may not be at all easy for any actor, and which the writer may embody
differently on different occasions, to more or less success.
Glad to hear of the success of a Martin Espada reading -- I heard him a
couple of times early on, when he was a student, and then it seemed
over-dramatized to the point that I didn't want to listen. But then bp
Nichol's readings/sound poetry performances were extremely animated, and
they are about the best I have ever heard.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 17:28:29 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: performance & poetry: "measure carefully, can be toxic"
>i'd listen
>for non-hoakey readings (dylan thomas' "child's christmas in wales" is
>a gorgeous antithesis of hoakey
Interesting. That reading *defines* hokey for me.
My husband (Stan Lombardo) recently gave a selected reading from his
forthcoming translation of the Iliad (publ: Hackett), working with a
director and a percussionist. It was great, and I'm a very tough critic of
Stan's readings. The director definitely did something good. But he was
working with a poet, not an actor, and was sympathetic to the difference.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 12:28:48 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: think of meeee!
Going for an interview at a community college for a lit teaching job this
afternoon (my first serious interview) so please send blessings this way
at 3 p.m my time (3 hours behind SF), oh good people. gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 18:49:37 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Lisa Samuels <lsr3h@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: performance & poetry: "measure carefully, can be toxic"
In-Reply-To: <199607082130.RAA07792@toast.ai.mit.edu> from "Eliza McGrand- CVA
Guest" at Jul 8, 96 05:30:15 pm
for poetry performance: i still want to see someone
at least *begin* a reading from behind an opaque
black (or whatever) curtain
-or-
put an enormous mirror in front of the curtain so the
audience sees only itself for a while (small venue
and large mirror required)
-or/and-
position mirrors on either side of the stage so
the audience can see the poet from the sides only,
still behind the curtain
something along those lines
and for eliza mcgrand --
as for #3, i prefer the phrasing of a country song:
'I've enjoyed as much of this as I can stand'
my month's worth,
lisa samuels
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 10:58:23 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: wystan <w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland
Subject: Re: in defense of parasites
Comments: To: EJOYCE@EDINBORO.EDU
Dear lisa,
good work. you can stay on the list for another month.
seriously though, ron didn't mean it. i who never mean it could
add modest proposals of my own and so trivialise discussions of race,
sex and class even further... think up rules specific to specific
people. like if ron really loses his temper that's it, he's out. the
list citizenship of boomers debating the merits of beatles and stones is
already in question i understand ...
hope to hear from you more
wystan
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 15:02:56 +0000
Reply-To: creiner@crl.com
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christopher Reiner <creiner@CRL.COM>
Subject: Witz Announcement
Hi everyone,
Can this count as my once-a-month message?.....
WITZ: A Journal of Contemporary Poetics
Essays * Criticism * Reviews
NOW AVAILABLE
ISSUE 4.2 - SUMMER 1996
CONTENTS:
Towards A Free Multiplicity of Form
By Mark Wallace
"...In a free multiplicity of form, all forms of writing are
possibilities that may or may not lead to a particular form of
cultural life. In such circumstances, use of a poetic form does
not become the equivalent of a manifesto-like assertion of one's
values, but instead becomes a matter of exploration..."
-------------------------------
"'Our Words Were The Form We Entered':
Towards A Theory of the Net"
By Loss Pequeno Glazier
"...The cultural dimensions of technologies occur once they escape
their original definition, subsequently undertaking vast
production and reproduction of these alternative subjects. At
this point, the purpose of the technology no longer holds court.
Rather, control of its rapidly diversifying subjects becomes the
focus of attention..."
--------------------------------
ALSO:
CHRIS STROFFOLINO ON NYU POETRY TALKS
CRAG HILL ON bpNICHOL
STEPHEN ELLIS ON TOD THILLEMAN
40pp, 5" x 8-1/2"
Individual issues: $4 (US)
Subscriptions (3 issues, 1 year) $10
Institutional Subscriptions: $30 (3 issues)
Please make checks out to Christopher Reiner.
WITZ
12071 Woodbridge Street
Studio City, CA 91604
creiner@crl.com
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 11:28:56 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: wystan <w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland
Subject: Re: performance & poetry: "measure carefully, can be toxic"
Comments: To: elliza@AI.MIT.EDU
dear eliza,
i don't think poets read badly or well. (thinking back to the
post which kicked this off, everyone responded to the actor's do it
better bit, but what about Mr Whipple's abhorrence for coffee house
readings upon the preference was predicated? for myself coffeehouses, or
bars, disused churches, stinking holes in the wall ... are where I hear
poetry. Actors read poems on stages, in school assembly halls, well
appointed community centres... places i don't go. but where i really
want to read myself next is in this great indoor rock-climbing place)
poets have good days and bad days, but in my experience they read their
work as they mean it to be heard and if it doesn't sound good to you
then its poetry you don't like.
wystan
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 10:08:18 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Mark Roberts <M.Roberts@ISU.USYD.EDU.AU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
One of the advantages of being on this list is that it gives those of us
outside of the 'centre(s)' a chance to have some input etc. In many cases
we may not post for months, but one learn much from lurking and reading
about US or UK based discussions. While encouraging people to contribute to
the list is a good idea it could also be counter productive in driving away
those 'marginal' list members who occassionally may have something
important to say.....
anyway that's my 20c worth...and should keep me on the list for another
month!! :)
__________________________________
Mark Roberts
Student Systems Project Officer
Information Systems
University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia
M.Roberts@isu.usyd.edu.au
PH:(02)351 5066
FAX:(02)351 5081
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 21:13:48 -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: Server failures
If you have trouble retrieving files or otherwise accessing the EPC, please
keep trying intermittently. The hardware folks are having some problems with
the machines so things that are really there at the EPC sometimes give you
'do not exist' error messages. Hopefully, these problems will be resolved soon!
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 21:13:50 -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: Private List/Public Space
>okay keith, cool. good points all. i didn't realize we cd be cited in books
>w/out our permission. i'll have to start watching my tongue, my back, my mind
>and my fingers. bests, maria d
--------------------------------------------------------------------
My 'read' on how this list is private is that the attempt is to keep it
small in size. (A list in general is many things but most tend towards
enormous sizes, fantasy-tinged anonymity, and a climate where hit-and-run
incidents of spamming and flaming are considered, just like having a tv
blaring in the room, normal.)
I think the goal here is to aim for a size where we can know each other as
much as would be possible in a non-virtual world (if there could be that
many jobs in one place).
As for being cited, this is how I'd think of it. In contrast to
conversation, where one is rarely cited, a post to the list is like a post
on a bulletin board in the hallway. It is a comment made in public. Though
not considered 'formal' writing, I think some things get cited because the
informality that nurtures them also gives them a liveliness that says more
than is said elsewhere. (Well, ok. In addition, messages are also archived.)
And let's face it. In certain areas such as the discussion of new books and
reports on conferences (crucial nutrients for many of our interests!) the
print medium has long abandoned us. (As such we may be cited the way a
comment in a _good_ book review is occasionally cited) A list such as this
can be a 'journal' in a truer sense that 'The Journal of ...'.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 05:31:46 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: poetry enormance
And then there are those who post when they ought to be lurking
(And I don't mean Mr. Whipple).
Christopher K. Whipple typed:
> Does anyone have any ideas on why coffee house readings are so often lame
> and depressing; why do these horrible people have a monopoly on the
> espresso circuit, while so much that is delicious is abandoned to a
> half-life in academia?
XV. The coffee-house is not simply a generic site for poetry. It
carries with it overtones of beat-poetry, which, for the unimaginative,
conjure a kind of Fred Flinstone version of a "poetry scene":
pseudo-scat-singing, faux lyricism (doo-bee-doo-wah sound-patterns),
comic-book-Picasso pastiches of abstract verse ("that blue/...*now*"),
and even the notion that poetry ought to be autobiographical ("I
[lived/hated] [X kind of downtown] life and I [loved/despised] it.")
or preachy [I'm here to educate you by railing at the teachers I hate].
2. Careerism on the part of readers and organizers does much to kill the
encouragement of individual talent. Also: mere poetry, and thoughtful
performance, prove irrelevant to various cliques and clots of paradoxical
careerists who proffer bios instead of brio and lyrics instead of the lyric.
Careerism is an invitation to mediocrity; to paraphrase Cicero,
the insistence of those who shout is often a hindrance to
those who wish to listen.
c. There's altogether too much self-aggrandizement in much contemporary
poetry. Writers like Sapphire and Dael Orlandersmith are certainly worthy
of interest, but the entire slant of merely autobiographical writing
is responsible, I think, for providing even more impetus to the
profoundly self-congratulatory. It was his exasperation at the plethora of
musical cliches masquerading as emotion that led Stravinsky to say,
"Music doesn't have the power to express anything."
Also: when the writer is not vigilant, autobiographical detail
can become an excuse for narcissism. I tend to think that the trick of
autobiographical writing is *not* to be self-absorbed.
Iv. The dumbing of poetic audiences is also responsible for the blinding
tedium of many performances. Organizers have forgotten that poetry can
function on difficult levels and still communicate in the basic sense.
(Hindemith's Gebrauchmuzik is as common as it is chiseled.) Paradoxically,
it is often the populist and not the cryptographer who obscures poetic
meaning.
4. Many publicized poetic events are well-meaning attempts to assault high
culture that result, inevitably, in more mere low culture.
> Does anyone have any ideas on how poetry can be successfully performed?
> Has anyone seen examples, even failed ones?
I would like to see performances that combined music and words but didn't
overuse popular cadences or stress-patterns, such as Nyorican cadences ("I
saw/that/man, that/high-handed/Mosh-pit/religion of/lint/gone/lyric) I'd
like to see (or rather, hear) performances in which sound and poetry
are explored more closely, with textures as involved as those of chamber
music. I'd be also be interested in readings that excluded overt
autobiography.
More plays: the emergence of poetic theater, of plays in which, as in
absolute music, texture, modulation and other abstract elements, were the
primary source of tension and release rather than the narrative. I'd like
to see performances and plays in which devices like simultaneous monologue
and tergiversation functioned as dramatically as textured dynamics in
baroque Concerto Grossi.
with props to Annie & Jerry:
readikns ik iknu khk, thy enormoranges
ih? dhh, ips op/errant, scansion p'll ear-wheel
ego deeno quagnum eensy ernst
Al Iz Blesteraht,
Rob Hardin
(According to Cankerian analysis)
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 21:07:43 +1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Salmon <dpsalmon@IHUG.CO.NZ>
Subject: Re: Another ethnic group
At 09:43 AM 6/07/96 -0500, you wrote:
>>If one were so foolish as to try to describe contemporary Native American
>>poetries briefly, what would that description be, and what names would be
>>attached?
I was interested to read Charles response to this. Any such classification
is by nature 'reductivist' I realise this is an obvious response, but i am
interested as similar arguments have been going on here (on various levels)
in NZ about Maori & Pacific Island Poetry. It seems that classification by
ethnicity/race etc is at times even more meaningless than by geography - eg
as a focus/reason for an anthology, though on the other hand this is a
usefull 'tool' for facilitating getting other non-mainstream poets into
print. I guess a large point here is that classifications are often more by
POET than by POETRY. I could go into this more but am falling asleep at the
keys, and will very soon make less sense (having immensely enjoyed Wystan's
exhibition in Wellington this afternoon, then braved the emmissions of our
awakening antipodean volcano flying back to Auckland.)
Hope this is enough to keep my 'place' on the list.
Dan.
"The urge to silence penetrated every corner"
- Glen Simpson
>>
>>No, I'm not giving a course, and do have other sources (Haskell Indian
>>Nations University is down the road a short piece), but I'm curious what
>>members of this list would say.
>
>
>Mostly I wouldn't be so foolish. But one thing I would be careful about is
>that adjective "contemporary." For me, it would have to include works from
>the oral tradition, which are still living, therefore "contemporary." And
>many of these works are subject to contemporary variations. Too often
>(although I think this has changed somewhat in the last couple of decades)
>the oral traditions have been treated as past, as relics. In many cultures
>they are decidedly not so. Some of the primary work in this regard has been
>done by Larry Evers through the Sun Tracks series at the University of
>Arizona Press, and to my mind some of the very best of that is the work with
>Yaqui oral traditions Evers has done in collaboration with Felipe S. Molina,
>himself a Yaqui singer.
>
>But this is just one part of a huge story.
>
>good luck,
>
>charles
>
>
Daniel Salmon
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 04:48:25 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: paradigms in defense of parasites
To regard lurkers as parasites, I would have to long for a debate
that has no audience. I do not long, and have never longed, for
such a debate.
Sometimes it is more parasitic to react than it is to pause and
reflect. Who hasn't entered a conversation impulsively, only to
learn that the subject was not what it seemed, or to realize,
too late, that one has played Socrates in reverse; that one knew
little and spoke at gaseous length?
Yet sometimes the glitches and hiccups of impulse lead to discovery,
to investigations of error that lead to invention. That is why lurkers
and posters are almost of equal importance--even when either proves
novice (or renunciate).
One sometimes has time enough to post but not to reply to subsequent
posts. This might be another reason why lurkers choose silence
over expression.
(All of this is so general that I feel I'm paraphrasing
Dryden or Emerson, or possibly Napoleon Hill.)
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7
=46lame-wars, I think, are more appropriate to usenet than they are
to a discussion to which one is formally invited. They are also a
nuisance to the participants, because everything involved, including
piquant rebuttals, feels awful--even winning feels awful. I also regard
flames as mere ad hominem, i.e., admissions of defeat. Also: I live in NYC.
If I wished to participate in a violent argument, I could ask my local
policeman why he was arresting innocent people.
De facto anonymity, and uncredited citations, seem irreconcilable
paradoxes to me: both bind one participant while purporting to free
another.
On uncredited citations: I have long disagreed with Kathy Acker's
justification of all appropriation as anti-phallocentrism, as
sufficient justification for literary theft. It is one thing if
the writer is riffing on Dickens. But Kathy also appropriates from
unknown writers, in which case the justification proves meaningless.
One cannot riff on the reader's expectations if the "original" writer,
the one who is being riffed on, is unknown. Acker also argues that
the "original" writer is merely participating in a great authorless
work (figuratively, but not literally, I agree). Still, I've noticed
that Ms. Acker is careful to secure credit for her own efforts.
(Do I detect a certan inequity in her excuse?)
In such cases, I believe in giving credit to the original writer.
=46or that reason, and for many others, it always thrills and pleases
me to be able to quote an eloquent list, usenet or email writer by name.
If s/he wishes to be cited by handle, that's fine as well.
(As when usenet poster Brian Bulkowski said, of a manic depressive's
affair with a borderline personality: "He failed to fail, which was
a failure in itself.")
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7
Anyone who lurks might be a philosopher, and anyone who writes
memorably deserves recognition. These are not posited ultimatums
or dictums. These are merely my own tenets--for myself and for my
own conduct. I give credit for selfish reasons--the act is almost as
pleasurable as writing--and I listen to replenish depleted stock:
I listen because I love to write.
As such, I list my--tenets, anyone? (sorry)--with faux-Lisztian
flourishes--on y/our list of lists.
"hands
that wander as they list"--Joyce, _Chamber Music_
Al the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 23:09:36 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Peter Quartermain <quarterm@UNIXG.UBC.CA>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
I must say I'm inclined to agree with Tony -- actors tend, reading poetry in
performance (I don't mean in a theatre so much as on disk or on tape) to
draw attention to the singular voice of the speaker, and tend as a result to
close down possible meanings that a reader like Bob Creeley might well leave
open (and usually does). But there are nevertheless of course some amazing
and wonderful readings by actors -- witness Siobhan McKenna's reading of
Joyce, for instance. But it's worth remembering, too, that there are
distinct fashions in reading poetry aloud -- Dylan Thomas' readings (for
instance and especially from King Lear and The Duchess of Malfi --
CaedmonTC1158] always struck me as being over the top but) were extremely
popular (as these sorts of things go) in the late 50s and 60s (the
Shakespeare/Webster recording was made in 1952 but not released until 62)
and of course Thomas himself had an enormous influence not only on the fact
of reading poetry aloud but on the manner of doing so. One offshoot -- again
which enjoyed great popularity -- is the really quite astonishing and to my
ear utterly inappropriate and wrong-eared reading of Keats and Shelley by
Theodore Marcuse ("The Poetry of Keats and Shelley" Lexington 7505 -- I
don't know the date). Reading "Nightingale" Marcuse sounds very like Thomas
in the first stanza, but soon starts milking it for all possible dramatic
worth, sometimes prolonging not only a syllable but a consonant for as much
as two or three seconds (and believe me, that's a long time indeed) with
extreme pitch and volume shifts -- "F-a-a-a-a-a-de far away" in ever
increasing treble tremolo diminuendo, "and QUITE *FORGET*!!!" pretty loud
and vehement. Utterly absurd, utterly risible. But he played to packed
houses for a (happily brief) while.
But then, Thomas and Marcuse were playing to the house, and reading poems
familiar to the hearer. How would they have fared, I wonder, with a poem
unknown and possibly unperformed (in public, at any rate) before that one
occasion.
Basil Bunting used to say the only place to read poetry aloud was the pub.
I'm inclined to agree. The classroom is a loathsome thing, god wot, but it
too might be a place where people learn how to turn that inner silent voice
into the outward actual one, reading a poem. Better readings? worse readings?
Everything -- or so much at any rate -- depends on the circumstance, the
context, the poem.
At 11:34 AM 7/8/96 GMT+1200, Tony Green wrote:
>Hi Christopher Whipple. Response to your notion abt actors. Distaste
>for actors reading poetry for me goes with the felt difference
>between stand-ups and actors. "Stand-ups can't act" is a way of
> noticing that stand-ups do not seem to know they are assuming
> a role (even though, of course, they are). Actors always assume
> roles. Rather than actors you want really good poet-readers. Last
>year I had the pleasure of hearing Robert Creeley reading Williams et
>al. You want something like that: no putting on a special voice or
>tone, no change from Creeley-voice reading Creeley that I could
>identify, but a real intelligent sense of what the text was doing at
>any point. That was really engrossing. To turn up the volume, to turn
> up the decor, to turn up the video-presentation, may do something for
> people who don't actually like poetry, but there is a danger in that of a
>deceptive kind of substitution. I guess I feel the poetry is damaged,
>more or less seriously by what you are thinking of.
>
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Peter Quartermain
128 East 23rd Avenue
Vancouver
B.C.
Canada V5V 1X2
Voice and fax: 604 876 8061
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 23:09:33 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Peter Quartermain <quarterm@UNIXG.UBC.CA>
Subject: Re: oppen
Burt:
I'm not sure whether it's me or Peter Nicholls you had in mind, Burt, but
you didn't miss anything, actually. Peter Nicholls ooopsed in sending to the
List a message to me. So I might as well answer the question for everybody,
if they don't already know.
Over the last couple of years Rachel Blau DuPlessis and I have been
assembling an anthology of critical essays on Objectivist poetics, with a
fairly substantial Introduction which we drafted in April, entitled
_The_Objectivist_Nexus_. The book is not yet *quite* complete, but the
manuscript is currently under consideration.
Peter
At 03:00 PM 7/7/96 EST, you wrote:
>I guess I must have missed something. Peter, could you say more about
>California and the Objectivist Nexus?
>
>Burt [Kimmelman]
>
>
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Peter Quartermain
128 East 23rd Avenue
Vancouver
B.C.
Canada V5V 1X2
Voice and fax: 604 876 8061
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 22:38:04 -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: List wars
In-Reply-To: <199607090404.AAA08750@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Here's what strikes me as slightly absurd in the recent controversy re:
Aldon Nielsen and Bob von Hallberg and Bob's non-membership on this list
etc etc.
Lorenzo Thomas, a Live Black Poet and the only one present in Orono gave a
very interesting and moving talk about Melville Tolson. I knew almost
nothing about Tolson and I learned a lot, also from Keith Leonard's paper.
Lorenzo T is a fine poet but didn't get to give a poetry reading because
he only came the last day? I'm not sure why. At any rate, instead of
discussing this actual living poet-critic, we are now busy discussing the
following:
1) Who was right about the Nielsen panel, Aldon or Bob? I am very fond of
both and admire both very much; I wasn't there so I can't tell what really
happened but I suspect there was less difference of opinion than appeared
from Bob's and Aldon's letters.
2) Was it Ok for Keith Tuma to send on Aldon's remarks to a
non-list member?
3) Was Bob von H within his rights in responding to the List?
4) Should Bob join the list asap??
5) Should lurkers have to contribute to the list (as Ron suggested)?
and so on and so forth.
Thus it is that an important (to me) issue gets wholly lost in the
shuffle. And thus it is that instead of talking about the black poet who
was in our midst (Lorenzo)--as a poet, not just because he's black--we end
up, academic-style, arguing about what white men (Aldon and Bob) are
supposed to say about black poets.
The whole thing strikes me as wonderfully silly. As Dodie said, I thought
this was supposed to be a POETICS list. And what I want to know--since
Bob's paper, fine as it was, doesn't convince me of the case is: why
should I read Robert Hayden at all? I find his poems very boring and
status quo? Why should I read him rather than such "forgotten white
poets" as Archibald MacLeish or Babette Deutsch? Hadn't we better begin
with such questions?
Marjorie Perloff
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 22:28:46 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Perchik
In-Reply-To: <199607090404.AAA08750@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
David -- Thanks for that info -- I wish I had known some of that back
when I wrote that negative review of the book -- will make a habit in
future of comparing ANY selected I get for review to samples from the
original -- will be looking up those earlier books next time I have
library card
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 22:25:08 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: " . . . : . . . "
In-Reply-To: <199607090404.AAA08750@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Dodie -- whatever else Maria's post might have been doing, it didn't seem
to me to be accusing anyone of racism --
and despite my question, I don't suppose that if two interracial radicals
have sex with one another they are any less radical -- It's just that
there is, after all, quite a long history of reactionaries desegregating
the sex act, on their own terms --
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 22:01:45 +0000
Reply-To: jzitt@humansystems.com
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Authenticated sender is <jzitt@bga.com>
From: Joseph Zitt <jzitt@HUMANSYSTEMS.COM>
Organization: HumanSystems
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
Comments: To: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
On 7 Jul 96 at 20:15, Ron Silliman wrote:
> If I were feeling
> intemperate (and I have my moments), I'd be inclined to suggest a rule
> on the order of deleting anyone who doesn't contribute to the
> discussion, say, once per month.
Hmm... I'd much rather see those of us who have little to say remain
active listeners rather than speaking just to be heard. I'm a newbie
to poetics, and am learning a lot reading the list. When I have
something to say, I do so, but I try not to when I don't.
---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1----------
|||/ Joseph Zitt ==== jzitt@humansystems.com ===== Human Systems \|||
||/ Organizer, SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List \||
|/<A HREF="http://www.realtime.net/~jzitt/">Joe Zitt's Home Page</A>\|
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 19:43:25 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: James Brook <jbrook@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Re: Private List/Public Space
Loss, I appreciate your comments regarding keeping the list intimate--which
in this case means about 300 people, I believe. This does help promote productive
discussion and develop the bases of a critical public with common interests.
On the other hand, I'm uncomfortable with the idea that anything anyone writes
here is available for citation elsewhere. I feel that if a comment is citable, then
it must be a text--and subject to the same protections as any other text. No,
I'm not particularly invoking copyright protection--but I do think that the citer
should go ahead and ask the cited for permission. That's mere courtesy. Besides,
if we feel that our words are subject to such reuse, then there's bound to be
a chilling effect on discussion: fewer people willing to participate and the
remaining participants under greater constraint.
James Brook
Loss Glazier wrote:
>
> I think the goal here is to aim for a size where we can know each other as
> much as would be possible in a non-virtual world (if there could be that
> many jobs in one place).
>
> As for being cited, this is how I'd think of it. In contrast to
> conversation, where one is rarely cited, a post to the list is like a post
> on a bulletin board in the hallway. It is a comment made in public. Though
> not considered 'formal' writing, I think some things get cited because the
> informality that nurtures them also gives them a liveliness that says more
> than is said elsewhere. (Well, ok. In addition, messages are also archived.)
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 21:16:44 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship/aldon/rvh
In message <199607082126.QAA18119@charlie.cns.iit.edu> UB Poetics discussion
group writes:
> maria, listen: let me set my own record straight here, or gay, or
> whatever, and w/o any rancor (really!): i find a certain degree of
> discomfort---aside from my intentionally (there i go again ron, shit!)
> provocative remarks addressed 'at' my neighbor, robert von hallberg---who,
> as i say, i've never met, but who teaches right down the street from me---i
> find a certain degree of discomfort in debating 'about' the
> point-counterpoint discussion twixt aldon and robert, w/o robert being
> t/here...
>
> you wanna know what i think?... for one, i found robert von hallberg's
> remarks to be---
>
..etc
joe: listen, (no rancor detected in your comments, none intended in mine) it
makes perfect sense to me that you'd want someone to be present when his
comments were being discussed. i get it; it's ethical. it's just that i
thought some of the issues raised by aldon and robert were really interesting
--pedagogically (tho i hate that word), in terms of how we go about doing our
scholarship and presenting it, etc... and i was disappointed to see those go
unresponded to. for example, as i sd in my longish post, i don't consider my
primary responsibility to be canon-building; thus i don't weigh "merit" in terms
of modernist aesthetic values when i decide what to teach or write on. i do,
though, have definite tastes, which are, willy-nilly, shaped by those values
--heck, that's what i learned in school. the issue of what r von h considers
condescension is also interesting to me. i don't see "universality" per se --if
there is a per se --to be what writers should necessarily strive for (as few
"shoulds" as possible) and i don't think the criterion for great writing should
be its "universal" appeal. but there is a movement currently away from
particularism in favor of SOME kind of universalism, tho that is constantly in
tension with our sense of how vexed that term is. i've been interested to see
folks i wouldn't have expected come to some kind of appeal to "universalism" in
a way that would have been hard to imagine 15 years ago. at the same time,
people seem to be qualifying it: "Jewish universalism", "marxist universalism"
etc. I'm not sure quite what this means either, except that it announces the
point of view from which everything is universalized (i think). From what i
could gather of Bob's talk on Hayden, as well as his comments at the end of that
panel (i was there, and i remember hearing it as aldon reported, tho i was not
especially troubled by it --it just seemed like business as usual), he was not
interrogating the category of universalism, or inflecting it in any way that
moved it out of the vexed presumption-of-normative-values critical category; i'd
like him to be on the list so we could find out if he really means that pound,
eliot, etc set a standard other writers shd meet or if he means something
different --perhaps more like what blurbs on bookcovers of books by writers of
color appeal to the book's "universal appeal" --i.e. this is n't "just" an
African-American book, etc. Both uses of the term are problematic, but is this
really what he meant? I was touched by his reply because it was about ideas and
a desire to be understood; though as i have sd, we come from very different
places critically.
so, joe, what kinds of things do you consider when preparing to teach or write
"ethnic" or "Other" materials?
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 22:00:51 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Emily Lloyd <emilyl@EROLS.COM>
Subject: maria--/& performance
Maria--didn't find your post offensive at all & think that yes, which
threads do and don't get picked up merits observation, mention, critical
examination etc., & thank you for boldly calling attention to it. I myself
kept Chris S.'s post in my in-box for days, challenged & wanting to respond,
& eventually giving up because I just didn't feel qualified to. I've been
studying race and representation for years, & the more I study, the less
qualified I feel to speak. Mostly I got worried & a little nauseated at the
prospect of a predominantly-white-membered list discussing "race & erotics,"
esp. in the assertive and "I know what I'm talking about" voice many
conversations here seem to take, even as I also get worried & perhaps more
than a little nauseated at the prospect of same list skirting those issues.
This is why I didn't respond. I personally couldn't care less about whether
or not R V H signs on to the list, so I could post about it (although I
won't) all day. It is not because I didn't care about the issues raised in
CS's post that I didn't respond, but because I cared too much to respond
quickly & maybe at all. & yes I'm aware this might sound sappy or
irresponsible. But because I was worried & unsure how/if to proceed,
holding off the procession seemed most "responsible" at the time. I'm not
sure it was and--this sounds facetious but is meant sincerely--I'm sorry for
not knowing, not being sure. It may be that others felt similarly-- ? --emily
On performance--
Wystan, I can't agree that all poets read their work the way they mean it to
be heard. There's that nerves thing: some folks just can't read in front of
others. I've got a friend who, in front of a group: tongue death,
stuttering, accidental automatic reading of earlier drafts, self-corrections
in medias res, etc. It's painful to watch him--especially, I think, because
he *is* such an interesting poet--when he reads, you'd hardly know. On the
other hand, some poets who are great readers read not "as they mean [the
poem] to be heard," but as they mean it to be *read* (on the page, in the
reader's head)--meaning, the reading is captivating but it just ain't there
on the page. I know that when I began reading my live linebreaks were
rarely the same as my page linebreaks--I was so into the rhythm that when I
looked on the page I saw the one I was reading out loud, but *nobody* else
would. Since fixed, but always a challenge for me. That said, best of luck
in getting to read in the indoor rock-climbing place--that sounds
fabulous--& I wonder if fake cliffs cause echoes--
Eliza--I think it was you who brought up "poetry voice"---that monotone
thing so many seem to slip into? <laughing> I think I would rather hear
Sally Field read than someone afflicted with poetry voice, all misplaced
accents & drones. In less patient days, when that started to happen at
readings, I'd get up and read "I...am at a PO-e-TRY...READ-ING...and
ALL...of the PO-ETS...have FOUND...their VOICE...and it ALL..SOUNDS....like
THIS" etc. Like it wasn't enough to sit through Keanu Reeves playing
Siddhartha.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emily Lloyd emilyl@erols.com
"Emily said Emily said, Emily
is admittedly Emily." --G. Stein
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 21:23:20 -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: !Orono Online!
_50s in Orono: the Reviews_ an online 'book' collecting reviews and comments
upon the Orono conference will soon be announced as an active URL. If you
were at the conference and were thinking of posting your reactions, please
do so soon!
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 09:16:00 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
maria, emily, marjorie, all:
((((and sorry folks for the little tirade i initiated re rvh's forwarded
post (if in fact i initiated it) but i *did* say that it bugged me and i
was feeling "grinch-like" and so what the hell i said so---again and
again!))))
my primary problem as a white guy addressing at times black and latino/a
students is that, to put it as simply as possible, i don't come from where
they're coming from... i can generally relate along class-lines, given my
own history, but i don't feel the same urgencies or necessities to validate
my own racial or ethnic construction or gender construction (and
combinations of same)... and even when i do feel this pull as a poet, i
don't tend to come to it in the same terms... and this leads to all sortsa
problems in the classroom...
for example (and aldon, you've already heard some a this) i don't
particularly care for maya angelou's or niki giovanni's poetry... i prefer,
for lotsa reasons, ntozake shange's or erica hunt's or audre lorde's or
rita dove's or wanda coleman's (which is not to say that i whole-heartedly
embrace all work by these latter poets, either)... but maya angelou, for
example, is extremely popular with black women in my classes these days...
and she's popular in part, from what my students tell me, b/c her voice is
one that they can relate to (an easily accessible identity formation)...
and here i come with all of my [cough] c-c-c-critical sophistication,
talking about voice as a set of conventions, asking them (after folks like
patricia hill collins) what are they gonna DO with *their* voices once they
'find' them? etc... kinda pulling the rug out from under...
of course, one could argue that the answer here is to work teaching in
stages, developmentally... but for me this can all too often constitute
indoctrination in a given stage (read 'aesthetic')... and besides, work
that i like more, in order to appreciate it, already for me works at an
advanced stage... uhm---no, not 'advanced,' i take that back---just more
complex in the terms i indicate...
so what i then have to do is find a way to promote dialogue among my
students (and me at times)---which i think i'm never too good at, no matter
how hard i try, mebbe b/c i'm so wedded to my *own* dialogic or monologic
tendencies---to see if i can't get them to talk about the voice
complexities i believe need airing... but thing is, many times the majority
of the students are white students... so i end up at times trying to 'fill
in,' trying to provide some leverage for my black and latino/a students *as
a white guy*...
i'm sure you can see the problem here... christ i've been through it over
and over, and in my professional writing courses especially (which i teach
many more of than lit. or creative writing courses, and which i teach in
terms of institutional issues)... i'm lucky to have a mix of students in my
classes, teaching on an urban campus as i do... but this is itself
problematic to the extent that i don't have any humanities majors---all
science, business, engineering...
anyway, that's a start i s'pose... ysee, when it comes to who should be
canonized, and comments about owing it to---posterity?---to safeguard the
'quality' of work that's passed along, well---whose aesthetic is at (the)
stake here?... who passes what along to whom?... i too am culpable on the
count of simple 'liking' or 'valuing' that is no doubt rooted in an
aesthetic of whiteness... how, i'm not always certain, but i've no doubt
this is true... at the same time, *as a poet*, i've simply got to be able
to take my best guess at times as to work that doesn't, well, work!---incl.
my own...i mean, I CAN BE VERY OPINIONATED (understatement of the
month)... and even with peer review in a classroom, sooner or later an
instructor gets involved in questions of evaluation, and in any case i
evaluate all the damned time...
and whatever the thorniness of these problems, i can't quite imagine
entering into a discussion of who gets anthologized, say, w/o recognizing
that anthologies, for better and for worse, are classroom tools... and
anthologizing is one measure of canonicity... so for me the question of
'condescending' to such & such poets had better *begin* by considering who
speaks, and to whom... i think the various what's will tend to emerge with
greater clarity this way...
best,
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 09:37:56 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: " . . . : . . . "
aldon rites:
> and despite my question, I don't suppose that if two interracial radicals
> have sex with one another they are any less radical -- It's just that
> there is, after all, quite a long history of reactionaries desegregating
> the sex act, on their own terms --
okay, of course, i see. thanks for the clarification. still, i was thinking of
folks like o'hara, who in the fifties was having gay sex w/ black men...a double
taboo, though the taboo against miscegenation not so strong in his case since
the fear of same was mostly due to the purported horrors of having "mixed"
kids...i guess people can have radical practices (like gertrude stein) without
necessarily having politically radical consciousnesses...and the reverse as well
--etc....maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 09:40:01 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: poetry enormance
>Christopher K. Whipple typed:
>
>> Does anyone have any ideas on why coffee house readings are so often lame
>> and depressing; why do these horrible people have a monopoly on the
>> espresso circuit, while so much that is delicious is abandoned to a
>> half-life in academia?
I think this is overstating the case. For example, a lot of good readings,
including by people on this list or talked about on this list, have taken
place in coffee houses & bars, such as the Ear Inn in NY. My guess is that
the ratio of "delicious" to "lame and depressing" in coffee houses & bars is
somewhere near the same ratio in publications, academic departments, or
anywhere. And I think there's a lot of work that's far from delicious which
also has a life or half-life in academia.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 10:37:54 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Mary Hilton <mhilton@TIA.ORG>
Subject: Submissions for "Political Diction"
In the spirit of July 4th (albeit 5 days late), submissions are now being
accepted for "Political Diction 96," a magazine devoted to the electoral
process, politics, government, and most specifically to the election year
1996. A multi-partisan magazine distributed each election year, it is
hoped that "PD" will allow various views and thoughts about the
democratic process to be expressed.
Innovative essays, poetry, short stories and visual art are welcome.
Submission deadline is August 15, and the mag will be distributed in
Sept/Oct. Please send to:
Political Diction 96 c/o Mary Hilton
1706 U Street, NW, #102
Washington, DC 20009
or send e-mail inquiries to mhilton@tia.org
Thanks!
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 10:05:27 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
joe: thanks for your considered reply. i myself tend not to teach stuff i don't
feel i can get behind. once or twice i've taught adrienne rich and audre lorde
--which was interesting for the class but boring for me, and problematic,
because i don't want to be put in a role that could be construed as
anti-feminist, but i also need to feel free to criticise work that doesn't
excite me, tho i can appreciate its skill. sometimes, with rich, w/ undergrads,
i take the opportunity to talk about the academic tradition and how someone can
be part of it, trying to break out, and succeeding in some ways, but being
reinscribed in it...that usually works --to talk about "radical politics" v.
"radical style" etc. i don't know, joe, if there is a "white aesthetic" --that
term seems to encode something more? i.e. new critical? modernist? etc.
bests, md
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 09:42:17 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
thank you, marjorie, this is exactly what i was trying to point out.--maria d
In message <Pine.SUN.3.94.960708222457.20735C-100000@elaine30.Stanford.EDU> UB
Poetics discussion group writes:
> Here's what strikes me as slightly absurd in the recent controversy re:
> Aldon Nielsen and Bob von Hallberg and Bob's non-membership on this list
> etc etc.
> Lorenzo Thomas, a Live Black Poet and the only one present in Orono gave a
> very interesting and moving talk about Melville Tolson. I knew almost
> nothing about Tolson and I learned a lot, also from Keith Leonard's paper.
> Lorenzo T is a fine poet but didn't get to give a poetry reading because
> he only came the last day? I'm not sure why. At any rate, instead of
> discussing this actual living poet-critic, we are now busy discussing the
> following:
> 1) Who was right about the Nielsen panel, Aldon or Bob? I am very fond of
> both and admire both very much; I wasn't there so I can't tell what really
> happened but I suspect there was less difference of opinion than appeared
> from Bob's and Aldon's letters.
> 2) Was it Ok for Keith Tuma to send on Aldon's remarks to a
> non-list member?
> 3) Was Bob von H within his rights in responding to the List?
> 4) Should Bob join the list asap??
> 5) Should lurkers have to contribute to the list (as Ron suggested)?
>
> and so on and so forth.
> Thus it is that an important (to me) issue gets wholly lost in the
> shuffle. And thus it is that instead of talking about the black poet who
> was in our midst (Lorenzo)--as a poet, not just because he's black--we end
> up, academic-style, arguing about what white men (Aldon and Bob) are
> supposed to say about black poets.
>
> The whole thing strikes me as wonderfully silly. As Dodie said, I thought
> this was supposed to be a POETICS list. And what I want to know--since
> Bob's paper, fine as it was, doesn't convince me of the case is: why
> should I read Robert Hayden at all? I find his poems very boring and
> status quo? Why should I read him rather than such "forgotten white
> poets" as Archibald MacLeish or Babette Deutsch? Hadn't we better begin
> with such questions?
> Marjorie Perloff
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 09:52:20 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: maria--/& performance
emily rites:
> Maria--didn't find your post offensive at all & think that yes, which
> threads do and don't get picked up merits observation, mention, critical
> examination etc., & thank you for boldly calling attention to it. I myself
> kept Chris S.'s post in my in-box for days, challenged & wanting to respond,
> & eventually giving up because I just didn't feel qualified to. I've been
> studying race and representation for years, & the more I study, the less
> qualified I feel to speak. Mostly I got worried & a little nauseated at the
> prospect of a predominantly-white-membered list discussing "race & erotics,"
> esp. in the assertive and "I know what I'm talking about" voice many
> conversations here seem to take, even as I also get worried & perhaps more
> than a little nauseated at the prospect of same list skirting those issues.
> This is why I didn't respond. I personally couldn't care less about whether
> or not R V H signs on to the list, so I could post about it (although I
> won't) all day. It is not because I didn't care about the issues raised in
> CS's post that I didn't respond, but because I cared too much to respond
> quickly & maybe at all. & yes I'm aware this might sound sappy or
> irresponsible. But because I was worried & unsure how/if to proceed,
> holding off the procession seemed most "responsible" at the time. I'm not
> sure it was and--this sounds facetious but is meant sincerely--I'm sorry for
> not knowing, not being sure. It may be that others felt similarly-- ?
> --emily
yes, i see; e-mail is indeed a hard medium in which to have serious sustained
inquiries about matters that require a lot of thought. this is certainly true;
i often find myself fading out just when a big juicy issue that i really care
about comes up, as if, as you say, i'm aware that the medium is working against
me and a kind of pre-emptive weariness sets in. and no, you don't sound sappy
and irresponsible in the least (to me), and yes, the prospect of mostly white
folks holding forth confidently on the subject of race and eros is indeed a bit
peculiar. but... i learned a lot from aldon's 4-line post clarifying his
statement about un-radical desegregations of the sex act,that i wouldn't have
learned if i'd just let it go. it was hard for me to ask for that
clarification, cuz i had that inertia-feeling: "do i really want to open up this
can o' words?" but i'm glad i did. i most emphatically did not mean to call
anyone on the carpet --i really dislike this ad hominem/feminam stuff --but to
point out, as marjorie has since, the way charged issues often get watered down.
i think you may be right tht it's a function of the medium.--xo, md
>
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 10:31:29 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: " . . . : . . . "
about this question of radical-ness (i got four days left hereabouts and
then i'm away from my machine for three weeks, so i may as well post like
hell): anecdotally speaking, some of the more radical poets i've known
have led conservative lives---i'll let 'conservative' stand for mainstream
living arrangements (by which i don't quite mean values), and i mean by
'conservative' at least as conservative as mine---whereas i can think of a
few formal poets i've known who've been all over the charts in terms of how
they've lived... i mean, i don't see any necessary connection, necessarily,
twixt radical writing and radical living, though i do at times see
connections... and i suppose necessity here is a function of what community
one is a part of... so i guess what this means for biographically or
culturally-based work is that it's best not to assume from the get-go such
correspondences by way of 'explanation'?... love to hear more here...
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 08:42:13 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: List, person, ship
Mr Silliman's proposal does not adequately address the pernicious issue of
the lurker slime on this e-mail list.
Requiring a single post per month from each list member would likely result
in cutesy, off-topic messages about the weather (it's been warm & sunny
here in Seattle, but there are early morning clouds today) or irrelevant
"me-too" posts in ongoing threads. As several people have already noted,
this will result in too much empty traffic, further allowing the vampiric
lurkers in our midst to stay on for another month of reading the collected
wisdom of others at no cost to themselves.
To actively combat these lurker vermin, we must require full participation
by all list members in every current thread. After all, it is really not
too much to ask that list members participate in the activities of the
group.
To start with, we could allow brief (less than a hundred words) responses
to be made within forty-eight hours of the intiation of any new topic.
However, to achieve the goal of total active participation, we would have
to move quickly toward the more reasonable requirement that all list
members respond within one hour to each post to the list (including their
own) with a closely reasoned 250-500 word statement. To make it easier to
follow the advanced discourse that would likely result under this new
system, each list member would also have to provide a shorter abstract of
their arguments.
This simple change in policy would most certainly cut down on the number of
non-participating lurker scum on poetics list and we would soon arrive at
the kind of total and immediate participatory democracy that one usually
sees in only a few of the more progressive-thinking Usenet newsgroups.
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 10:49:47 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: The University of Alabama
Subject: Re: List wars
Marjorie asked why should she/we read Hayden, stating that she was
unconvinced by Robt's plenary session paper. I have been reading
Hayden rather carefully for about ten years, and my argument may
overlap with a slightly different question: why teach Hayden's
poetry. I suppose in some ways I read and enjoy Hayden for reasons
similar to the pleasure I take in re-reading Robert Frost--there is a
subtle but serious self-criticism in their work, an undermining and
ironizing, in Hayden's case a beautiful use of an occasional odd word
in the poem (to my ear, similar to such a gesture in Oppen's work,
though Robt's paper gave me a different and convincing way of hearing
the indulgence in that savored single word in Hayden's poetry).
Marjorie might even enjoy looking at Hayden's last poem, "American
Journal," which, on the page, looks remarkably like David Antin's
talk-poems. I teach Hayden in contemporary poetry classes, in part,
for reasons that Robt discussed--to complicate and question certain
assumptions about ethnic identity and to counteract a tendency to
state what "the" African-American poet says etc. I generally teach
Hayden (Collected Poems) along with a big unit on Baraka (I had been
using The LeRoi Jones/Amirir Baraka Reader), discussing the many
different positions taken by Baraka on Afro-centrism and on
socialism, and putting Hayden's universalist pronouncements (which I
read as somewhat in conflict with his actual poetic practice, reading
that universalism as a "wish" rather than an actuality), then moving
to considerations of gender as well in Audre Lorde's poetry and
essays. In all three cases, I am making use of essays and poetry and
interviews, trying to consider all these expressions as part of a
single thinking, as part of a cultural critique, as part of a poet's
activity as an intellectual. Also, I live and teach in Alabama, and
Hayden's poems often push us into important and local considerations,
including the complex intersections of Native American and African
American culture here.
Before Marjorie (or Robt) or others accuse me of offering merely
sociological reasons for reading Hayden, let me add that I consider
his poetry GOOD. Which poems? Here's a partial list--The Diver,
Electrical Storm, The Rabbi, "Night, Death, Mississippi," "Incense of
the Lucky Virgin," The Whipping, Those Winter Sundays, Middle
Passage, and I'm only on page 48 of the collected. Hayden, to my
ear, has an extraordinary ear, writes beautiful sounding poems. In
little snippets, as in "so sibling innuendoes all aver--" or "His
pain/ our anguish and anodyne" or in entire poems. I also admire the
complex and shifting sympathies of Hayden's poems--something which
Robt argued for as well.
I don't think that my own enthusiasm for Hayden (and for Baraka and
Lorde) will necessarily persuade others. I can vouch for the fact
that re-reading Hayden's poetry over a number of years has been a
pleasant experience, a re-reading that has re-paid the sustained
attention. At any rate, on the way to the office, such are my quick
notes to Marjorie (and others) about Hayden.
A quick note too on the exchange between Aldon and Robert. I was
there. Yes, I did argue for seeking and articulating different modes
of reading, interpreting, evaluating in relation to Hughes (whose
early poetry can be read and appreciated in a way that is not
merely an analysis of "themes" when juxtaposed with some
of the blues recordings he was listening to). (By the way, Hughes'
"Theme for English B" raises interesting questions about ethnic
identity vs. universalism in poetry....) It seemed to me that Robt
came on a bit insulting and heavy-handed, though that was not, I
think, his intention. Ultimately, I heard him arguing for a
different balance (than he heard in this one panel) between
sociological perspectives and close
reading. He wanted more of the latter, as a means to defend or
articulate the value and excellence of particular poems. Aldon
explained that there
were other panels (including the one done by him, Mark Scroggins, and
Stephen Leonard, which I also attended, and which was excellent and
informative and DID involve close readings of specific poems) that did
precisely that, and that Robert should
consider attending the CLA if he really wanted more information and
to connect with what scholarship was being done. To my ears, some of
the tension in their exchange has to do with issues of professional
stature and the politics of the profession. Robert was ignorant of
the CLA & indicated that he only attended (or mostly?) conferences
where he was invited to speak. Aldon suggested that if Robt really
was developing an interest in AFrican American poetries that he
should attend CLA conferences and join the CLA. I drifted away from
the conversation at that point, trying to ask Aldon and Robt to
continue to talk to one another. I know and like both of them, and
believe that a sustained conversation between both would be of value.
De-lurked, and having said enough for July & August both,
Hank Lazer
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 09:03:02 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Shaunanne Tangney <st@SCS.UNR.EDU>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
In-Reply-To: <01I6U4LPLVYI8ZE1ZZ@iix.com>
On Mon, 8 Jul 1996, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote:
> I would just add that the moment anyone "stands up" in front of someone else
> to speak that moment "becomes" theatrical and those who ignore this do so at
> their (and their audience's) peril. Actors can enhance a text; they can
> also make a hash of it. The key (as someone mentioned) is the presence of a
> director.
i have long argued that all art is ultimately performative because it
ultimately requires an audience to be "complete."
>
> All of this begs the question, Is the poet always and necessarily the best
> reader of his/her own work? Usually, yes. But not always. I've heard some
> real botches, generally from people with a very poor notion of the intrinsic
> theatricality of even the most perfunctory spoken exchange. To assume that
> just standing there and "telling the truth" as James Cagney once described
> acting can result in readings that are painfully bad in their naivete. And
> also very powerful.
even if all art is ultimately performative, it does not mean that all
artists are ultimately good performers. it takes practice, and an
attention to details other than those that went into the poem, and into
the writing of the poem.
> I think readings are both theatrical and anti-theatrical. That is, the
> encounter between the reader and the audience creates ipso facto a
> theatrical experience, but one which is anti-theatrical in that it forces
> our attention away from the expectations usually aroused by the idea of a
> performance.
i suspect this also depends quite a bit on the poem, the way the poet
wrote it. by this i mean that i tend to write more for the ear than the
eye, because i think poetry is, finally, and oral medium. but there are
many who would disagree with me, and so not write their poems with an ear
for performance.
best,
shaunanne
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 11:59:35 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Bouchard <Daniel_Bouchard@HMCO.COM>
Subject: Re: List wars
and so on and so forth.
Thus it is that an important (to me) issue gets wholly lost in the
shuffle. And thus it is that instead of talking about the black poet who
was in our midst (Lorenzo)--as a poet, not just because he's black--we end
up, academic-style, arguing about what white men (Aldon and Bob) are
supposed to say about black poets.
The whole thing strikes me as wonderfully silly. As Dodie said, I thought
this was supposed to be a POETICS list.
_______________________
Who can blame lurkers for keeping silent? ["vermin, scum, slime," says Herb
Levy referring to lurkers.]
I'm pleased that Ron's post prompted at least one person to write in and say
who she was, what she does, and why she's silent on the list. There's nothing
wrong with keeping quiet in a discussion. On the other hand, it's better to
type something in once in a while (even if you're unsure of yourself, or going
out on a limb. There's few instances of flaming here, if any, my perception of
the list over the past year has been one of general friendliness).
Here are some other Herb Levy gems:
"allowing the vampiric lurkers in our midst to stay on for another month of
reading the collected
wisdom of others at no cost to themselves."
"To actively combat these lurker vermin, we must require full participation"
"This simple change in policy would most certainly cut down on the number of
non-participating lurker scum on poetics list and we would soon arrive at
the kind of total and immediate participatory democracy"
Democracy for you, Herb, is an elimination of the "scum?" Can the unfortunates
help themselves if they (we) do not possess your "wisdom?" But I don't want to
dwell on your post, I'm sure you have some vitriol headed your way.
Something struck me about M. Perloff's post: the way the terms were set, as in
"the black poet in OUR midst." What does "our" refer to? The members of the
list who also attended the conference? I'm not clear as to whether Lorenzo's
attendance at Orono was important to you because he is a poet, or because he is
a black poet. Also, could you clarify "academic-style" as a form of argument
and maybe propose an alternative? I've seldom seen any other kind of argument
on this list (Lurkers, speak up!)
daniel_bouchard@hmco.com
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:00:31 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Fred Muratori <fmm1@CORNELL.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
Re:
>Democracy for you, Herb, is an elimination of the "scum?" Can the unfortunates
>help themselves if they (we) do not possess your "wisdom?" But I don't want to
>dwell on your post, I'm sure you have some vitriol headed your way.
>>
>daniel_bouchard@hmco.com
Damn, I knew I was too naive and culture-bound to subscribe to this list. I
thought Herb Levy's post was meant to be satiric. This means that now I'll
have to re-read everything I've ever read to correct all my earlier
mis-frissonings. Where will I find the time?
***********************
Fred Muratori "Certain themes are incurable."
(fmm1@cornell.edu)
Reference Services Division - Lyn Hejinian
Olin * Kroch * Uris Libraries
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
WWW: http://fmref.library.cornell.edu/spectra.html
***********************
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 11:59:42 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: List wars
>
>Who can blame lurkers for keeping silent? ["vermin, scum, slime," says Herb
>Levy referring to lurkers.]
>
>
>Here are some other Herb Levy gems:
>
> "allowing the vampiric lurkers in our midst to stay on for another month of
>reading the collected
>wisdom of others at no cost to themselves."
>"To actively combat these lurker vermin, we must require full participation"
>"This simple change in policy would most certainly cut down on the number of
>non-participating lurker scum on poetics list and we would soon arrive at
>the kind of total and immediate participatory democracy"
>
>Democracy for you, Herb, is an elimination of the "scum?" Can the unfortunates
>help themselves if they (we) do not possess your "wisdom?" But I don't want to
>dwell on your post, I'm sure you have some vitriol headed your way.
I know it's said that one can't read tone in email messages, but I had no
problem being absolutely convinced that Herb's post was tongue-in-cheek.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:16:26 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: amusing and depressing
Hey, who sent me that little golden book of lesser New York School poets?
It's amusing. Thanks. Is that really a reprint of some previous anthology?
I suppose silence is a topic. Ford Madox Ford writes about reading with
some surprise mid 19th c numbers of popular american periodicals filled
with letters to the editor not about the fine moral shadings of the tales
published in the magazines, but questions about the technique of short
story writing. Isn't it funny that none of the poets here talks much about
technique? Whatever that is. I guess I bring it up because I found it
amusing and depressing, as I usually find Ford. The satires on lurking and
on cross posting are also amusing and depressing. Bummer! And then I
remember Bill Luoma's injunction not to write without having some feeling
to send across, otherwise one produces a dull brown feeling in the reader.
Why is that. What is the emotional reading that obtains to even a torn
scrap of paper lying the street, that makes us accountable for the tone of
our writing in ways we spend all our grace to avoid acknowledging? Heh? Eh?
J
PS It was Ben Friedlander who wrote that, about it being all right to think
of O'Hara's poems as fascinated with surface, as long as one acknowledges
that the surface is quicksand..
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 12:26:53 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
yes, ditto on herb's tongue-in-cheeky-ness...
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:38:58 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: hen <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: think of meeee!
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 8 Jul 1996 12:28:48 -1000 from
<welford@HAWAII.EDU>
>Going for an interview at a community college for a lit teaching job this
>afternoon (my first serious interview) so please send blessings this way
>at 3 p.m my time (3 hours behind SF), oh good people. gab.
the vibes are with you. just emitted them - should be arriving gently
in Hawaii around that time. Aloha. - Henry
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:41:29 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: think of meeee!
In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:38:58 EDT from
<AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
SORRY FOLKS...hit the dern reply button. All of you now, focus those
stray vibes toward Hawaii. No Darren, that's not a volcano. - hg
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:18:56 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: Re: List wars
Dear owners of the list,
Do advertisements count?
David Baratier
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 10:59:06 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: List wars
At 10:00 PM 7/8/96, Emily Lloyd wrote:
>yes, which
>threads do and don't get picked up merits observation, mention, critical
>examination etc.
The is Dodie Bellamy.
On the surface, Emily, this sounds just great--but serveral issues come up
for me. First of all, this list is not going to change the world, it's a
bunch of mostly-white middle class people shooting the breeze. It's a
place of priviledge and leisure--the priviledge to have access to a
computer hook-up, the luxury of all this time to shoot the breeze. Let me
get this clear, I am not against anybody discussing race issues and/or
teaching--even though for us non-academics, issues of teaching are rather
boring--and academic approaches to literature and to poets themselves are
something many poets I speak with find problematic. For instance I do not
think M. Damon's erasure of poets in her original post was merely an
oversight--perhaps a Freudian slip? As Ron pointed out, for many academics
living breathing poets are not part of the picture. Furthermore--this
isn't the 50s, no one that I know of, and few (if any) people on this list
would challenge the need for representation of non-"white-middle-class"
writers wherever writers are represented.
But creating a hierarchy of what's acceptable or more acceptable on this
list is something I find highly problematic. It is that process of
hierarchization which excluded non-"white-middle-class" writers and women
from the literary canon in the first place. There is no god-given
hierarchy of importance. It is this mindframe, for instance that has often
disparaged conversation by women as "chatter." I have much difficulty when
white middle class liberals use the issues of "oppressed" groups to guilt
trip other white middle class liberals--and I think some of that has been
going on here. Let me give an example from outside the list. Several
years ago here in San Francisco there was a poet who became "engulfed" in
the Gulf War. He marched against the Gulf War, did performance art against
the Gulf War, wrote poems about the Gulf War, wore buttons. So, at least a
year after the Gulf War ended he gave a reading--of course it was all poems
about the Gulf War. During the course of the reading he took the
opportunity to brow beat the audience by saying we're all here listening to
poetry--but there was THE GULF WAR--in other words he posed himself as this
messianic figure concerned with human suffering, and the audience was cast
as a bunch of superficials listening to Poetry. I have problems with the
colonizing of another group's oppression and and wearing it as a badge. I
am skeptical when someone makes an academic career out of Bob Kaufman then
makes jokes about his "clunkers" on this list. This is not treating
Kaufman with the dignity he deserves.
To conclude, I think the Beatles and list politics are just as valid topics
of discussion here as anything else.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 12:49:35 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Paul Naylor <PKNAYLOR@MSUVX2.MEMPHIS.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
I'm with Charles on this one. I think Ron's allusion to Swift's "A Modest
Proposal" and Herb's allusion to Ron's allusion suggests that a satire is
coming or has come our way.
Paul Naylor
MAIL
SEND
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
SEND
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
>From: IN%"POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU" "UB Poetics discussion group" 9-JUL-1996 12:23:08.59
>Subj: RE: List wars
>
>>
>>Who can blame lurkers for keeping silent? ["vermin, scum, slime," says Herb
>>Levy referring to lurkers.]
>>
>
>>
>>Here are some other Herb Levy gems:
>>
>> "allowing the vampiric lurkers in our midst to stay on for another month of
>>reading the collected
>>wisdom of others at no cost to themselves."
>>"To actively combat these lurker vermin, we must require full participation"
>>"This simple change in policy would most certainly cut down on the number of
>>non-participating lurker scum on poetics list and we would soon arrive at
>>the kind of total and immediate participatory democracy"
>>
>>Democracy for you, Herb, is an elimination of the "scum?" Can the unfortunates
>>help themselves if they (we) do not possess your "wisdom?" But I don't want to
>>dwell on your post, I'm sure you have some vitriol headed your way.
>
>
>I know it's said that one can't read tone in email messages, but I had no
>problem being absolutely convinced that Herb's post was tongue-in-cheek.
>
>charles
SEND
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 09:41:00 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Don Cheney <Don_Cheney@UCSDLIBRARY.UCSD.EDU>
Subject: List wars: 100 Years, Star,...
while i don't consider my SELF a lurker on this list i also don't consider my
self a big time contributor. i do think that Herb's post that Daniel quotes is a
sort of hyperbole or maybe just a "hyper text" but i think he went out of his
way to make sure we all knew he was kidding. no?
don cheney
dcheney@ucsd.edu
Daniel Bouchard writes:
and so on and so forth.
Thus it is that an important (to me) issue gets wholly lost in the
shuffle. And thus it is that instead of talking about the black poet who
was in our midst (Lorenzo)--as a poet, not just because he's black--we end
up, academic-style, arguing about what white men (Aldon and Bob) are
supposed to say about black poets.
The whole thing strikes me as wonderfully silly. As Dodie said, I thought
this was supposed to be a POETICS list.
_______________________
Who can blame lurkers for keeping silent? ["vermin, scum, slime," says Herb
Levy referring to lurkers.]
I'm pleased that Ron's post prompted at least one person to write in and say
who she was, what she does, and why she's silent on the list. There's nothing
wrong with keeping quiet in a discussion. On the other hand, it's better to
type something in once in a while (even if you're unsure of yourself, or going
out on a limb. There's few instances of flaming here, if any, my perception of
the list over the past year has been one of general friendliness).
Here are some other Herb Levy gems:
"allowing the vampiric lurkers in our midst to stay on for another month of
reading the collected
wisdom of others at no cost to themselves."
"To actively combat these lurker vermin, we must require full participation"
"This simple change in policy would most certainly cut down on the number of
non-participating lurker scum on poetics list and we would soon arrive at
the kind of total and immediate participatory democracy"
Democracy for you, Herb, is an elimination of the "scum?" Can the unfortunates
help themselves if they (we) do not possess your "wisdom?" But I don't want to
dwell on your post, I'm sure you have some vitriol headed your way.
Something struck me about M. Perloff's post: the way the terms were set, as in
"the black poet in OUR midst." What does "our" refer to? The members of the
list who also attended the conference? I'm not clear as to whether Lorenzo's
attendance at Orono was important to you because he is a poet, or because he is
a black poet. Also, could you clarify "academic-style" as a form of argument
and maybe propose an alternative? I've seldom seen any other kind of argument
on this list (Lurkers, speak up!)
daniel_bouchard@hmco.com
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 14:07:31 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
This is the Contents and Introduction for the forthcoming anthology _Onward:
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics_ ed. Peter Baker, Peter Lang Pub., $28 pb,
440 pgs. due out Sept '96. Peter is off line traveling and asked me to send
it to the listwar. "The Rejection of Closure" is a revised and extended
version.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
Bernadette Mayer Twenty Questions about Form or New Forms / Poems
Lyn Hejinian The Rejection of Closure / Poems from The Cell
Charles Bernstein The Parts Are Greater than the Sum of the Whole
Rosmarie Waldrop Thinking of Follows / Inserting the Mirror
Harry Mathews Dormouse Poem
David Bergman Staying in the Lines
John Taggart Were You: Notes & A Poem for Michael Palmer
Rachel Blau DuPlessis On Drafts: A Memorandum of Understanding / Draft 11:
Schwa
C. D. Wright Provisional Remarks... / Op Ed / the box this comes in/
Poems from Tremble
Albert Cook Poetic Purposes / Syllabic Margin / Poems
II.
Robert Creeley Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It up Yourself? /
Nothing New / Four Days in Vermont
Stephen Rodefer Preface to Four Lectures / Prologue to Language Doubling /
Enclosure of Elk / The Library of Label / Poems
Clark Coolidge from Notebooks / Letters / Poems
Michael Palmer Active Boundaries / Autobiography / Far Away Near
Joan Retallack The Poethical Wager / AUTOBIOGRAPHIALITTERARIA II / The
Woman in the Chinese Room
Nicole Brossard Fluid Arguments
Carolyn Forche On Subjectivity / Poems
Bob Perelman Statement /The Marginalization of Poetry /
The Manchurian Candidate: A Remake
Barrett Watten Nonnarrative/History / Bad History I
John Ashbery PN Interview / Poems from Houseboat Days
poeanth.pb (Introduction)
Poetics is a vast, ancient, yet understudied field. Except, of course, for
poets. Yet many if not most poets would probably assent to the proposition
that one's poetics can be deduced from the poem. A statement on poetics
presents immediate difficulties within such an aesthetic, because it risks
being seen as ancillary to the production of the poem, and may, in fact,
misrepresent the implicit poetics in the poet's work. Given these risks,
many poets choose reticence as their primary mode of statement, with the
limit of reticence approaching silence, often accompanied by an attitude of
active disdain.
Belief in an implicit poetics can be seen to derive from an immanentist
theory of language, or the idea that words bear direct relation to what they
represent, even carrying a little bit of the essence of the thing in the
word. Such immanentist theories deriving from the religious tradition ("and
the word was with God and the word was God") drove William of Occam, in the
twelfth century, to propose the complete separation of word and referent, in
his philosophy of nominalism. Jacques Derrida is often thought to represent
such a nominalist viewpoint in his philosophy of deconstruction (see my
Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn). Ezra Pound's language theory is
explicitly immanentist, as when he instructs his Italian translator of The
Cantos: "Don't worry about the meaning of the poem. Translate accurately
line by line. The meaning is inherent in the material." Pound's poetics in
The Cantos thus demonstrates what I call (in Obdurate Brilliance) the "myth
of transparency," or the ideology of direct apprehension of the surrounding
context from the text of the poem. Without worrying too much (right now)
about the accuracy of labels, much of what is called mainstream poetry today
operates either knowingly, or usually unknowingly, out of this model of
transparency. Anthologies of poetics by mainstream poets are thus usually
concerned with craft and techniqueaehow the poem is put togetheraewhen the
poet is not discussing where he or she went on his/her last vacation or
MacArthur grant to gather material. The poem's meaning is either inherent in
the material (themes) or what it represents (nature). This view of poetics
as purely practical and personal both derives from and sustains the poetic
practice variously termed workshop or MFA verse, and can be found exemplified
in every issue of the AWP Chronicle.
In the past twenty-five or so years vibrant alternatives in the theory and
practice of poetry have risen out of the movement known as Language poetry.
Following the "radical modernism" of Stein, Zukofsky and others, in Charles
Bernstein's appellation, or what Marjorie Perloff has called "the other
tradition," this practice has as one explicit goal, quoting Zukofsky, "to
stop the gaze on words as things." By now, Language poetry has been around
long enough that, like deconstruction or Mt. Pinatubo, it no longer exists,
but its practitioners, many of them represented here, are still very active
and its effects, as John Ashbery indicates in his interview, may be even more
interesting than the initial productions of those associated with the
movement. Literary history (which H. R. Jauss terms "conceivably the worst
medium through which to display the historicity of literature") is already at
work deriving a genealogy to explain the transition between the "radical
modernism" of Stein, Zukofsky and others, and the Language poets. Materials
for such a genealogy are generously represented here in the selections by
John Ashbery and Robert Creeley, as well as those of Clark Coolidge and
Bernadette Mayer.
There is no raw material.
So Harry Mathews begins his contribution. Mathews, a member of the Ourvoir
de litterature potentielle, or OULIPO group, brings impeccable credentials to
his theorizing, or non-theorizing, of the production of the poem. As with
Lyn Hejinian's already-classic essay, "Against Closure" (revised and expanded
for publication here), Mathews' statement is a kind of manifesto, reminiscent
of the radical modernism of Andre Breton and early surrealism. Manifestos
are less concerned with explanation than with demonstration; they attempt not
to analyze, but rather to make manifest artistic practices and attitudes.
Looking at the materials assembled here, I have been struck that there are
two clear poles, or limits, or borders, to their expressive strategies. If
the manifesto is one such border, the other is collage. Some of these
collage assemblages, such as those of Charles Bernstein and Nicole Brossard,
were created or at least shaped explicitly for this collection. Others are
the results of collaborations between the poets and/or the editor and/or the
editor's friends, notably Rod Smith, Lee Ann Brown, and Peter Gizzi.
The relation of poetics to poetry always to some extent resists explanation.
Yet we are drawn to explore it as part of a life commitment to poetry, a
commitment those in the present volume recognize under the sign of necessity,
Beckett's "all that I can, more than I could." Each poet's approach also
necessarily involves questions of individual history and practice while
somehow managing to ground the communities of poets and artists actively
committed to the creative imagination. This volume emerges from these
multiple communities and hopefully will serve as a resource for those already
involved in the work and those yet to come.
Or, as Bernadette Mayer likes to say, "Onward."
Peter Baker
Washington D.C., 1996
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:39:43 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: poetry parfornir
>Christopher K. Whipple typed:
`Does anyone have any ideas on why coffee house readings are so
often lame and depressing; why do these horrible people have a
monopoly on the espresso circuit, while so much that is delicious
is abandoned to a half-life in academia?
The tension between the academic and the street (or spoken word)
poets have created the coffee-house lameness in most cities I've
lived in. The problem is two-fold: many academics believe that poetry
worth reading is to be institutionalized and therefore works outside
of this sphere are improperly crafted or have a lower unit value,
while many of the street poets believe that reading other's poems or
revising their own are both unecessary aspects of the craft. One of
the few reading series I have chanced upon with a full mixture and a
successful open mike, was sponsored by an independent bookstore in
Philly (now out of business) which actively sought out both
university and non-university readers willing to take smaller
(guaranteed) amounts of money. For this reason, plus the owner's
stable of consistent readers he supported, out of a crowd of twenty
readers, at least a fourth, and usually more, were excellent.
Does anyone have any ideas on how poetry can be successfully
performed?
Joy Harjo uses a slow reading style with bursts of animation and/or
inflection to add to the lyrical scenery. A good sample can be found on the
_Woman who fell from the sky_ cassette which accompanies the book. But a
more representative example (not so over produced and the like) can be
found on an earlier tape (I think it's called _Furious Light_.
Jack Gilbert is a contemporary master of silence. Of how silences can
be manipulated to fit the reading space for the most impact in
relation to the poem. His use of rhetorical questions followed by
long pauses fell entire audiences into thought, tense with answer.
One keeps waiting for an escape, the brilliance is his refusal to
withdral, to slacken the question.
Michelle Boisseau the length of her poems accumulate in an audiences
head in such a way as to bring the weight of the poem upon the ending.
For one who listens intently during the entire piece, the ending is a
miraculous articulation of associative values built upon throughout
the piece.
Be well
David Baratier
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:57:56 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Bouchard <Daniel_Bouchard@HMCO.COM>
Subject: Re(vision): List wars
So my server's getting drowned in messages to me saying "Herb Levy was just
kidding." Yeah sure, so was Jonathan Swift--
that murderous bastard! So I retract my previous post, and offer this revision
(this is what happens when you try and engage in
a discussion for fifteen second intervals during work).
I remain undaunted though. I don't "get" those Leslie Neilsen spoof movies
either.
daniel_bouchard@hmco.com
__________________________
Marjorie Perloff wrote:
and so on and so forth.
Thus it is that an important (to me) issue gets wholly lost in the
shuffle. And thus it is that instead of talking about the black poet who
was in our midst (Lorenzo)--as a poet, not just because he's black--we end
up, academic-style, arguing about what white men (Aldon and Bob) are
supposed to say about black poets.
The whole thing strikes me as wonderfully silly. As Dodie said, I thought
this was supposed to be a POETICS list.
_______________________
Who can blame lurkers for keeping silent?
I'm pleased that Ron's post prompted at least one person to write in and say
who she was, what she does, and why she's silent on the list. There's nothing
wrong with keeping quiet in a discussion. On the other hand, it's better to
type something in once in a while (even if you're unsure of yourself, or going
out on a limb. There's few instances of flaming here, if any, my perception of
the list over the past year has been one of general friendliness).
Something struck me about M. Perloff's post: the way the terms were set, as in
"the black poet in OUR midst." What does "our" refer to? The members of the
list who also attended the conference? I'm not clear as to whether Lorenzo's
attendance at Orono was important to you because he is a poet, or because he is
a black poet. Also, could you clarify "academic-style" as a form of argument
and maybe propose an alternative? I've seldom seen any other kind of argument
on this list (Lurkers, speak up!)
daniel_bouchard@hmco.com
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 14:00:47 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert A Harrison <Robert.A.Harrison@JCI.COM>
Subject: L. Thomas
Has anyone mentioned that Lorenzo is not only black, but Hispanic? He's
Panamanian-American, a non-native speaker of English. Haven't been able to
keep up with all the details of the conversation, I'm at work ... so if this
is old news, then...
I happened to be looking for his current address before this discussion
started. Does anyone have it?
Bob Harrison
Robert.A.Harrison@JCI.com
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 08:19:02 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: performance & poetry: "measure carefully, can be toxic"
In-Reply-To: <199607082249.SAA102990@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU>
Sounds like Edith Sitwell... gab.
On Mon, 8 Jul 1996, Lisa Samuels wrote:
> for poetry performance: i still want to see someone
> at least *begin* a reading from behind an opaque
> black (or whatever) curtain
> -or-
> put an enormous mirror in front of the curtain so the
> audience sees only itself for a while (small venue
> and large mirror required)
> -or/and-
> position mirrors on either side of the stage so
> the audience can see the poet from the sides only,
> still behind the curtain
>
> something along those lines
>
>
> and for eliza mcgrand --
> as for #3, i prefer the phrasing of a country song:
> 'I've enjoyed as much of this as I can stand'
>
>
> my month's worth,
>
> lisa samuels
>
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 08:29:41 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: thanks
In-Reply-To: <v01510103ae0817427edb@[129.78.181.65]>
to all for well wishes. All the traffic lights on the way there were
green, I made it in time, the committee smiled a lot. I had fun teaching
them for 10 minutes. Now, back to area exams... Don't stop wishing. You
guys are good. gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:34:52 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Maria Damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
dodie: this is the third time you have attacked my person, my character, and my
motives in a public conversation. what's going on? i have admired and
respected your work as a writer and editor and contributor to the list. you
know this. we have had a very warm (i thought) working relationship. now,
everytime i utter a sentence, it seems, i get targeted for being
holier-than-thou, careerist, making "freudian slips", etc -- my words are being
twisted around, caricatured, and then ridiculed, with unsavory motives ascribed
to these inaccurate representations. clearly something's up. if i have
offended you personally in any way (and your remarks seem clearly personally
directed), please let me know, back channel, how i have done so. This is
extremely painful to me and i would like it to stop
maria d.
In message <v01520d01ae07d1e76e81@[205.134.228.72]> UB Poetics discussion group
writes:
> At 10:00 PM 7/8/96, Emily Lloyd wrote:
> >yes, which
> >threads do and don't get picked up merits observation, mention, critical
> >examination etc.
>
> The is Dodie Bellamy.
>
> On the surface, Emily, this sounds just great--but serveral issues come up
> for me. First of all, this list is not going to change the world, it's a
> bunch of mostly-white middle class people shooting the breeze. It's a
> place of priviledge and leisure--the priviledge to have access to a
> computer hook-up, the luxury of all this time to shoot the breeze. Let me
> get this clear, I am not against anybody discussing race issues and/or
> teaching--even though for us non-academics, issues of teaching are rather
> boring--and academic approaches to literature and to poets themselves are
> something many poets I speak with find problematic. For instance I do not
> think M. Damon's erasure of poets in her original post was merely an
> oversight--perhaps a Freudian slip? As Ron pointed out, for many academics
> living breathing poets are not part of the picture. Furthermore--this
> isn't the 50s, no one that I know of, and few (if any) people on this list
> would challenge the need for representation of non-"white-middle-class"
> writers wherever writers are represented.
>
> But creating a hierarchy of what's acceptable or more acceptable on this
> list is something I find highly problematic. It is that process of
> hierarchization which excluded non-"white-middle-class" writers and women
> from the literary canon in the first place. There is no god-given
> hierarchy of importance. It is this mindframe, for instance that has often
> disparaged conversation by women as "chatter." I have much difficulty when
> white middle class liberals use the issues of "oppressed" groups to guilt
> trip other white middle class liberals--and I think some of that has been
> going on here. Let me give an example from outside the list. Several
> years ago here in San Francisco there was a poet who became "engulfed" in
> the Gulf War. He marched against the Gulf War, did performance art against
> the Gulf War, wrote poems about the Gulf War, wore buttons. So, at least a
> year after the Gulf War ended he gave a reading--of course it was all poems
> about the Gulf War. During the course of the reading he took the
> opportunity to brow beat the audience by saying we're all here listening to
> poetry--but there was THE GULF WAR--in other words he posed himself as this
> messianic figure concerned with human suffering, and the audience was cast
> as a bunch of superficials listening to Poetry. I have problems with the
> colonizing of another group's oppression and and wearing it as a badge. I
> am skeptical when someone makes an academic career out of Bob Kaufman then
> makes jokes about his "clunkers" on this list. This is not treating
> Kaufman with the dignity he deserves.
>
> To conclude, I think the Beatles and list politics are just as valid topics
> of discussion here as anything else.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 14:20:48 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christina Fairbank Chirot <tinac@CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: posters
interesting to scroll down the screen and read alternating
messages: "poetry performance"/"list wars".
Remember that poster, "What if they held a war and nobody came?"
Thanks to Bob Harrison for his message regarding Lorenzo Thomas.
Dave Baptiste Chirot
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 09:40:22 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: herb levy's scum
In-Reply-To: <199607091618.MAA01508@krypton.hmco.com>
Hey daniel, I have an eensy feeling herb's modest proposal was a little
tongue in cheek. But I'm looking forward to the 200-500 wd responses from
300 people with abstracts attached. I think we should all take this very
seriously wink wink nudge nudge gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 15:43:15 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kathrine Varnes <kvarnes@UDEL.EDU>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.93.960709085844.31185A-100000@pogonip.scs.unr.edu>
As far as I'm concerned, a good performance is a good interpretation, or
at least an interesting one. (The reverse is also true.) A bad
performance is one that has no interpretation, or at least not a complete
one. This re-states some of what folks have already said, except I'd
also add that what kills poetry for me (which is often what happens when
actors are reading) is when the reader has already decided what the
perfect reading is and tries to create it -- some static idea -- instead
of actively interpreting while reading. Better to be imperfect and lean
on the words.
Kathrine Varnes
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 15:47:32 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Emily Lloyd <emilyl@EROLS.COM>
Subject: Re: List wars
Ok, Dodie. I see your point clearly w/the example of the Gulf guy, although
I'm not sure that Maria's etc. posts were coming on in that way. Having
attended 2 of the most supposedly "leftist" and "activism-oriented"
undergrad schools I can think of, I'm all-too-aware of the kind of
unconstructive self-righteousness you describe, & tend to respond to
Gulf-guy types by holding out my hand, slapping it, and crying "bad little
activist." I just didn't read the post that way. And I pretty much agree
that there should be no "godgiven hierarchy of importance" as to what will
be discussed here (although perhaps that part of your post should be
addressed to Marjorie's last, and not Maria's?). I'd hope there was a place
for Beatles & teaching & race & list politics (after all, we're
"mostly-white middleclass people shooting the breeze"--we've got the time)
But I think the point was that there wasn't...certain issues were dropped
like potatoes, for whatever reason (and I admit, yes, to an interest/concern
in that reason). I'm not interested in falling into the "why are we talking
about this when we could/should be talking about THIS?" trap; on the other
hand, I think "why *aren't* we talking about this?" is a valid question. emily
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emily Lloyd emilyl@erols.com
"Emily said Emily said, Emily
is admittedly Emily." --G. Stein
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 15:48:33 -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: Orono papers & other authors
Comments: cc: Loss Glazier <lolpoet@conciliator.acsu.buffalo.edu>
--> An update on a topic that arose on this list. I've had a couple of
people offer to give me Orono papers so I will be making a small
number of papers a part of the online Orono book. If you have a paper
from the conference to put online, you are very much encouraged to get
in touch with me via individual e-mail.
--> For their home pages, I'd also be very interested in essays/works on:
Enslin
Ceravalo
Irby
Robert Creeley
Ray Federman
Steve McCaffery
Fiona Templeton
Cecilia Vicun~a
Lyn Hejinian
Barbara Guest
Bruce Andrews
Jackson Mac Low
Susan Howe
If you have writing on any of these authors you'd like to make
available online, please let me know.
--> I'm interested in putting papers about other authors online
also. So please let me know if you have other papers too!
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 15:52:17 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Kellogg <kellogg@ACPUB.DUKE.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
In-Reply-To: <649CA4011FF@as.ua.edu>
Marjorie has made an important point about the dominance in these here
threads of silly issues. She also points out that a lot of energy is
expended on peripherals when more important issues are staring us in the
face.
But I don't think it's easy to separate the central from the peripheral.
To wit:
On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, Hank Lazer wrote:
> Before Marjorie (or Robt) or others accuse me of offering merely
> sociological reasons for reading Hayden, let me add that I consider
> his poetry GOOD.
Now, why does Hank feel a need to say this? What the hell's the matter
with reading a poet for sociological reasons, or for reasons other than
that poet's value? Why the obvious debasement of "mere" sociology?
What's wrong with sociology? Bob von H stated the assumption explicitly,
somewhere in his response to Aldon, that the goal of scholarship should
be, more or less, to separate the wheat from the chaff. Marjorie in her
post assumes something similar, and now Hank has to make an obligatory nod
to that belief.
Well that's not MY goal, or not most of the time, and I don't see why it
should be. From the posts of those critics who are on this list, it seems
to me that the world (or at least the Net) is filled with people yakking
about why such-and-such a poet is good, and another is bad. The last
thing I want or need is another tastemaker. Save that, as Foucault might
say, for the police.
I'm not trying to exclude considerations of value. We have to evaluate
all the time anyway. But prior definitions of the proper job of the
critic or poet are a lot sillier than examinations of net-politics.
When people talk about "mere" sociology, or slag critics as somehow less
credible than poets (thank you Dodie), or talk about the proper role of
poetry, or criticism, or whatever, I get alternately bored or angry.
Mainly, though, I think that if sociology draws this much uncontested ire
and obvious anxiety, there must be something to it. A "pure" poetics
outside of sociology doesn't exist, and if it did I wouldn't want it.
Cheers,
David
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Kellogg Duke University
kellogg@acpub.duke.edu University Writing Program
(919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708
FAX (919) 684-6277
The time is at hand.
Take one another
and eat.
-- Thomas Kinsella
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 15:02:39 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono papers & other authors
loss --if our papers are being published somewhere, what are the print-copyright
politics of sending them also to you; wd it be seen as undercutting the
print-publisher's market? i don't wanna do anything "wrong."--md
In message <199607091948.PAA23742@conciliator.acsu.buffalo.edu> UB Poetics
discussion group writes:
> --> An update on a topic that arose on this list. I've had a couple of
> people offer to give me Orono papers so I will be making a small
> number of papers a part of the online Orono book. If you have a paper
> from the conference to put online, you are very much encouraged to get
> in touch with me via individual e-mail.
>
> --> For their home pages, I'd also be very interested in essays/works on:
> Enslin
> Ceravalo
> Irby
> Robert Creeley
> Ray Federman
> Steve McCaffery
> Fiona Templeton
> Cecilia Vicun~a
> Lyn Hejinian
> Barbara Guest
> Bruce Andrews
> Jackson Mac Low
> Susan Howe
> If you have writing on any of these authors you'd like to make
> available online, please let me know.
>
> --> I'm interested in putting papers about other authors online
> also. So please let me know if you have other papers too!
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:12:45 PDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jerry Rothenberg <jrothenb@CARLA.UCSD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Covering Cherub
Dear Rob Wilson --
Thanks for yours, & please feel free to send any essays/works etc. concerning
local & Pacific matters. We'll be arriving there on the 4th of September
& I understand from Gab Welford that there's a big Bamboo Ridge reading on
the 5th, so certainly we'll plan to get to that one. I have an interest in
all of that, so looking forward very much to this particular visit. Tell
me if you have any ideas or suggestions, and in the meantime
all good wishes
JERRY
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 20:41:13 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: maria--/& performance
emily writes:
> > I've been
> > studying race and representation for years, & the more I study, the less
> > Mostly I got worried & a little nauseated at the
> > prospect of a predominantly-white-membered list discussing "race & erotics"
> > esp. in the assertive and "I know what I'm talking about" voice
I can understand your frustration. But:
The best way to involve more women and people of color in this group
is to invite them here, don't you think? Why slam others for being white
or male, why transfer the abuse from patriarch to matriarch, why pass
racism back and forth, like any dysfunctional family? Let's involve
more voices, let's encourage more people to speak. But let's not
show disrespect for the voices that have spoken.
I'm not being contentious or smug. What I'm saying is difficult, not
easy. It would be easy to agree with you and to rail at the villain
I resemble. Yet I can't do that, because the supposition makes me
ethically *un*easy.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 19:33:49 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michelle Roberts <meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU>
Subject: Re: herb levy's scum
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.93.960709093852.11728C-100000@uhunix5>
(blush) see what happens when the unitiated go blabbing? Excuse me, Herb
-- you were kidding. Cool. Very funny, might have enjoyed the post, shucks.
Meaghan Roberts-Jones Our exchanges? An engendering
Ph.D. Candidate - Humanities-Lit.&Ideas through rare and always
The University of Texas at Dallas infinte fortune.
Meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU -- L. Irigaray
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 20:26:00 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: poetry parfornir
David Baratier typed:
> The tension between the academic and the street (or spoken word)
> poets have created the coffee-house lameness in most cities I've
> lived in. The problem is two-fold: many academics believe that poetry
> worth reading is to be institutionalized and therefore works outside
> of this sphere are improperly crafted or have a lower unit value,
> while many of the street poets believe that reading other's poems or
> revising their own are both unecessary aspects of the craft.
I cite this paragraph baldly because it is breathtakingly apt.
This is one of the deepest, most problematic schisms in NYC's
poetic mileau. It is also why brilliant autodidacts fall through
the cracks--only to be discovered generations later.
Nice one (as the singer in Speedway says).
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 19:23:53 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michelle Roberts <meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU>
Subject: Re: List, person, ship
In-Reply-To: <v02130500ae08245f5bcc@[192.0.2.1]>
As regards Herb's post on "lurker vermin:" Dude, I do seriously hope you
were kidding. Your system would require a life lived on line what with
the pace of discussion on this list. Some of us "vermin" are sincerely
listening, not ripping y'all's posts to use in our papers or poems, not
interested in damaging a valuable source of expansion for our our own sad
little minds -- and some of us are busy! I regret that you feel that way,
but your democracy sounds facsist, a little to Texas Christian Coalition
uspurps the REpublican party for me. But thanks for the in-put, we son't
mean to bug you.
Meaghan Roberts-Jones Our exchanges? An engendering
Ph.D. Candidate - Humanities-Lit.&Ideas through rare and always
The University of Texas at Dallas infinte fortune.
Meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU -- L. Irigaray
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 20:16:16 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Dean Taciuch <dtaciuch@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, Kathrine Varnes wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, a good performance is a good interpretation, or
> at least an interesting one. (The reverse is also true.)
. . .
> what kills poetry for me (which is often what happens when
> actors are reading) is when the reader has already decided what the
> perfect reading is and tries to create it -- some static idea -- instead
> of actively interpreting while reading. Better to be imperfect and lean
> on the words.
>
> Kathrine Varnes
>
OK, but how to offer an interpretation without having an interpretation
in mind? This is a serious question..I wonder this myself when
reading--do I try to express an ambiguous line break verbally (and how?)
or do I collapse the distinction, choose a reading, and present that?
I think the key is "static"--the performance should not be a single
thing, or at least not the same single thing to everyone.
Also, I don't mean to knock actors/acting. It certainly is possible
for an actor to give a good reading of a poem, just as it is obviously
possible for a poet to give a bad reading.
Dean Taciuch
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:13:35 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: wystan <w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland
Subject: Re: List wars
Comments: To: kellogg@ACPUB.DUKE.EDU
Dear David,
The matter with reading poetry for sociological reasons is the
kind of closure it applies to response/interpretation. Of course, if
culture=the real, then there's no validity to my objection, but I don't
happen to think it is. For you sociology subsumes poetics, for me
poetics subsumes sociology. But I agree with you, if there are lots of
people on the list who find sociology nauseating and don't say why, then
we should get a discussion going. So I've offered two, or is it one?
reason. Can we have some more? Does anyone recall the text of the Bruce
Nauman piece at the last DOCUMENTA which begins: Anthropology, sociology
....??
Wystan
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 18:03:23 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michelle Roberts <meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU>
Subject: Re: poetry performance
In-Reply-To: <31E1518A.58AF@ix.netcom.com>
> that wished to consume its object, to become its object, to take
> the place of its object (Freudian references intended).
James, that sounds more like Lacan. I wish we could get over him. And
I wish Derrida would quit demolishing people, and I wish poetry or poets
would defend themselves. Or at least quit ..... why is poetry on the
side of the feminine in dynamic?? Actually, I've read my Kristeva, so I
have an answer for that. pffft.
M>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:04:37 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bruce Malcolm <bmalcolm@NAGOYA-WU.AC.JP>
PLEASE HELP!
Date: 09 Jul 1996 07:43:47
Reply-To: Conference "reg.burma" <burmanet-l@igc.apc.org>
From: simon_billenness@cybercom.net
Subject: KEY SENATE BURMA VOTE: THURSDAY, JULY 11
To: Recipients of burmanet-l <burmanet-l@igc.apc.org>
X-Gateway: conf2mail@igc.apc.org
Precedence: bulk
Lines: 65
From: simon_billenness@cybercom.net (Simon Billenness)
Subject: KEY SENATE BURMA VOTE: THURSDAY, JULY 11
SENATE MAY VOTE ON BURMA SANCTIONS THURSDAY, JULY 11
BUMRA SANCTIONS UNDER THREAT! CALL YOUR SENATORS TODAY!
July 9, 1996
The news from Senator McConnell's office is that the Foreign Aid Bill,
containing an amendment section 569) by Senators McConnell and Moynihan
imposing economic sanctions on Burma, may come up for a vote on Thursday,
July 11.
Section 569 is under severe threat. One or more Senators will attempt to
remove the sanctions on Burma through a floor amendment.
It is vital that we each call our Senators and urge them to keep the
sanctions on Burma (section 569) in the Foreign Aid Bill.
CALL YOUR SENATORS TOLL-FREE AT (800) 972-3524
1. Ask for the staff person responsible for foreign policy issues.
2. Stress that you want your Senator to support the economic sanctions on
Burma contained in Section 569 of the Froeign Aid Bill.
3. Ask your friends, family and co-workers to call too.
MAKE SURE YOU CALL BY 5PM, WEDNESDAY, JULY 9!!
-----------------------
Simon Billenness
Franklin Research & Development
(617) 423 6655 x 225
(617) 482 6179 fax
simon_billenness@cybercom.net
----------------------------
SECTION 569 OF THE FOREIGN AID BILL & CURRENT TEXT OF THE "BURMA FREEDOM AND
DEMOCRACY ACT" (S.1511).
1. LIMITATION ON FUNDS FOR BURMA
2. Sec. 569. Until such time as the President determines
3. and certifies to the Committees on Appropriations that an
4. elected government of Burma has been allowed to take office,
5. the following sanctions shall be imposed on Burma:
6. (1) No national of the United States shall make
7. any investment in Burma;
8. (2) United States assistance to Burma is prohib-
9. ited;
10. (3) The Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct
11. the United States executive director of each inter-
12. national financial institution to vote against any
13. loan or other utilization of the funds of the respective
14. bank to or for Burma; and
15. (4) Except as required by Treaty obligations,
16. any Burmese national who formulates, implements,
17. or benefits from policies which hinder the transition
18. of Burma to a democratic country shall be ineligible
19. to receive a visa and shall be exclude from admission
20. to the United States.
DON'T DELAY! CALL TODAY!
bmalcolm@nagoya-wu.ac.jp
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 17:46:11 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michelle Roberts <meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.88.9607081313.C27078-0100000@panther.uwo.ca>
On Mon, 8 Jul 1996, c.g. guertin wrote:
> Lurker equals/does not equal listener? Is this a 'bad' moral equation?
> Silence is evil or simply undesirable?
>
> cg
>
Actually, Ron made some excellent points. Devoloving is no fun. And as
to the ethics and morality of lurking: 95% of the time I lurk on this
list because y'all are already a community, some it appears were before
the list existed, and I'm not going to shoot off my mouth and mess up the
party -- also, the level of thinking here is simply smore sophisitcated
than mine at present and y'all serve as a good model (for lots of
reasons, some contradictory) of what this little poet-critic could aspire
to. Combine those, and I'm quiet cuz I'm not silly. I know when I'm
being taught, that's all. And thanks for being good at what you do.
Yours in gazing,
m
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 17:32:50 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michelle Roberts <meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU>
Subject: Re: bumb bunny
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.94L.960708082443.24098A-100000@inibara.cc.columbia.edu>
Thanks all for the responses to my inquiry. It turns out that the essay
on teh new sentence was in file in my cabinet, and I'd read it four years
ago while getting my masters -- somehow, and don't take this personally,
Ron -- I just forgot it!! And I was reading lots of L-poetry at the
time. Sheez. Again thanks, I'll be re-reading now.
M
Meaghan Roberts-Jones Our exchanges? An engendering
Ph.D. Candidate - Humanities-Lit.&Ideas through rare and always
The University of Texas at Dallas infinte fortune.
Meaghan@UTDALLAS.EDU -- L. Irigaray
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 18:05:44 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Private List/Public Space
James (and Loss et al.),
I guess we should simply acknowledge that the list is as public as
potential citationers make it. If you give a talk somewhere, does every
scholar in the audience need to ask your permission before quoting/citing
you? Of course not. But a reader will understand the level of
formality of the discourse, and perhaps thereby its seriousness, when
the reader finds out that this was a talk you were giving and not, say,
a paper published in a button down refereed journal or whatever.
burt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 17:54:27 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Private List/Public Space
Loss,
yes, but how often do one's notes tacked onto a bulletin board get
taken down and shipped off to some archive; archiving (electronic or
otherwise) seems to legitimize the mere missives, no? And then they
get quoted perhaps, and so on.
Burt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 14:46:05 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bill Luoma/Vanstar <Bill_Luoma@VANSTAR.COM>
Subject: Re: tonight's HRs
Comments: To: LancerLeg <LancerLeg@aol.com>
Comments: cc: drothschild <drothschild@penguin.com>
C har,
I wanted biggio and there's no more permanent billy ripken.
so NL goes: chipper, hundley, larkin.
AL: knoblauch, anderson, carter.
with a wiff
To: bluoma @ vanstar.com @ VSMAIL
cc:
From: LancerLeg @ aol.com @ VSMAIL
Date: 07/09/96 05:32:42 PM PDT
Subject: tonight's HRs
National League: Bagwell, Ellis Burks, Biggio
American League: R.Alomar, Pudge Rodriguez, Buhner
pitch to maz ... gawn
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 11:07:15 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Collaborator on M.E.T. Lambert article, 19th c poet (fwd)
I am seeking possible collaborators for an article on 19th-c
American woman poet Mary Eliza (Perine) Tucker Lambert, whose
works are included in _Black Women's Poetry_ from the Oxford
UP series, the Schomburg Library of 19th-c Black Women Writers,
and excerpted in Cheryl Walker's anthology of 19th-c American
women poets. An important component of the article will be
reception of the poem in classrooms, so that any classroom
experience with her works would be a valuable asset for a
collaboration.
Janet Gray
jsgray@pucc.princeton.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 16:49:54 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: the guy and the gulf war
a year or so ago, the dance critic from the new yorker (arlene croce? i
know i am blanking on the name here) had an extraordinary essay on victim
art. she took an extreme position against it, refusing to attend bill t.
jones' latest dance peice, about death and dying, because she felt it was
a category she defined as "victim art" -- work written about hardship that
causes the creator to be evaluated as a victim, rather than as an artist.
her refusal to even go to the concert was extreme, certainly, and her
essay sparked much protest in artistic sectors. but the point was valid.
there is a tendency to evaluate art about hardship not as art but as a test
of audience compassion, liberalism, etc. your gulf-war fellow was just
another remove of this.
i am working on a book about domestic violence and it has been very difficult
for me to evaluate the writing, to decide whether it should be public or not.
i think putting victimhood out in writing, submitting the writing to forums
as writing, and then complaining, if it doesn't go over well, that the critics
are being as abusive as the initial source of hardship is, to say the least,
being a bad sport. but on the other hand, the source of a terrifying amount
of art (can't, for gods sake, we write/draw/sing/compose about anything but
pain i ask myself sometimes in frustration) IS pain. and art works can bring
the audience into a close understanding of what a hardship is, and does, as
very little else can.
all of this is old ground, covered by the new yorker essay and numerous
responses to it... and the gulf war poet is yet another wrinkle. do we
admire someone for at least caring about a painful issue and taking on the
burden of making art about it? on the other hand, to harangue an audience
for being an audience, instead of performing some undefined activist task,
seems absurd, almost sartre... when does a work become too personal and
too painful to be evaluated as art?
e
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 15:24:40 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Orono papers & other authors
Well now I feel embarassed having goofed with the reply button and passed on
a personal message to the list. Sorry to all.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 15:23:45 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Orono papers & other authors
Dear Maria:
Welcome back to town. I'm very swamped this week, but I'd love to see you
sometime soon. Perhaps next week, even on a weekday, you could come over to
our house for coffee/tea, meet my wife Cynthia, talk a bit? so very lovely
yes yes
And I'm sorry Dodie is giving you such a hard time. To these eyes it's not
apparent why she's giving you a hard time. I've always had a good time with
Dodie in email conversations, have met her a couple of times at San
Francisco readings I've given, but I don't know her very well.
Hope it passes.
love,
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:31:19 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: List wars
At 3:47 PM 7/9/96, Emily Lloyd wrote:
>But I think the point was that there wasn't...certain issues were dropped
>like potatoes, for whatever reason (and I admit, yes, to an interest/concern
>in that reason). I'm not interested in falling into the "why are we talking
>about this when we could/should be talking about THIS?" trap; on the other
>hand, I think "why *aren't* we talking about this?" is a valid question. emily
I agree with you Emily. But my point is that the "why are we talking about
this when we could/should be talking about THIS?" trap *was* evoked--and
that is what I was criticizing.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:21:47 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: List wars
Maria, you criticized a population I was a member of--the people on this
list. I was defending that population.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 01:24:40 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: amusing and depressing
J--
Who's in that lesser known NY poets anth. I've heared tell of its existence.
Howe bout a quick contents.
"war is other people"
--rrpfet
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 17:25:49 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: wystan <w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland
Subject: Re: Orono papers & other authors
Comments: To: chax@MTN.ORG
Dear Charles,
Was that a goof-on-purpose, or an honest-to-goodness-goof?
Wystan
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 17:41:27 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: wystan <w.curnow@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland
Subject: Re: List wars
Comments: To: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM
Dear Dodie,
I am sorry Charles is saying those things about you. (said in
a personal, feeling, tone of voice) But seriously, Ms. Bellamy despite
the fact unlike Mr. Alexander I don't know you at all, your motives
seem clear and above board to me.
I observe some kind of comprehensive confusion about 'the personal'
developing here. What's to be done?
Wystan.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 01:43:06 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Thomas Bell <trbell@USE.USIT.NET>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960709174046.2286M-100000@infoserv.utdallas.edu>
can i stay if i promise to close my ears?
tom
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 01:47:13 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: trolling for newbies
Ochre
yo
to obtain "exactitude" a
substituted herb splash he
devoted to from childhood atmospherization
I like it vertical
to infinity
Sokal's a landscapism
of the Cubist
overleaf
drop your right ear
in fault tone
imp carnivore
of the mechanical ample in us
by us
analogues
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 22:55:47 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: in which will be found what is set forth therein
In-Reply-To: <199607100408.AAA16200@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
-- thanks for identifying Ben Friedlander as the author of that wonderful
liner about the quickenbing sands of O'Hara's poems -- should have been
IDed in my post, but I didn't have a tape of that session!
--Bob, I have an address for Lorenzo somewhere in my apartment --
backchannel me next chance you get & I will try to find it in the
meantime --
--Loss -- want some pages on Lorenzo Thomas for that set of author
pages? can excerpt from forthcoming book if you want --
--DOOR PRIZE -- I will send a book (NOT by me!) to the first person who
identifies the author of these lines:
To a Captious Critic
Dear critic, who my lightness so deplores,
Would I might study to be prince of bores,
Right wisely would I rule that dull estate--
But, sir, I may not, till you abdicate.
--Mangled quote of the week --
I don't have the book with me, but here is an approximation of a poem by
Dudley Randall:
Black Poet / White Critic
A critic advised me
to use images that appeal
to the universal,
like a white unicorn.
_A white unicorn?_
--Hank: whenever you feel you have the time, I'd be interested in hearing
more of your take on "American Journal" -- That's a poem I've never been
able to enjoy, and I'd like to hear from somebody who has worked with it
more than I have -- I talked with Hayden any number of times about the
poem, but it seemed a stretch to me -- I always thought it was the
occasional poem he felt he had to write as Poetry Consultant -- but I
suspect there's more to it than that --
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 23:06:16 -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: List Wars
In-Reply-To: <199607100408.AAA16200@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Thanks, Hank, for that marvelous posting: I really learned a lot and you
really make me want to read more Hayden.
Daniel Bouchard asked me a few questions I want to answer. "In our midst"
meant literally there at Orono, at the conference. The fact that Lorenzo
is black (and also Hispanic as someone else has reminded me) is important
insofar as at this particular conference there was much interest
(naturally, given the time) in questions of race. More, interestingly,
than in gender at this point. So--this being the big topic of discussion
and of the argument between Aldon and Bob von H, I just meant that I was
surprised no one was even discussing Lorenzo's own poetry or even his talk
but was busy determining how to judge Langston Hughes. I said it badly,
but anyway...
As for David Kellogg's point that Marjorie is assuming that one can
separate the wheat from the chaff, an idea David rejects out of hand, I
want to say I plead guilty. Absolutely. If criticism doesn't at least in
part do that, what are we writing for? Moreover, David, you too separate
the wheat from the chaff. Everyone does everyone he/she makes a choice as
to what to read, what to teach, what to write about. Right now I'm
rereading MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, for me one of the great novels-ever.
It's very long. In the amount of time it takes to read Musil, I could
read all of Robert Hayden or, for that matter, Robert Frost, to whom Hank
compares Hayden. So whom to pick?
David, don't you think some critical methodologies are better than others?
Isn't that separating the wheat from the chaff? Why don't you base your
critical writing on F. R. Leavis? Or on Arthur Quiller-Couch? Don't you
believe certain articles you read in scholarly journals are better than
others? Why, then, can't we, heaven forbid, think some poets are better
than ours? Why is there so much discussion of O'Hara (or Baraka) on this
list and so little of Mark Strand? No value judgements involved?
The question, I think, is not whether or not we make value
judgments--because all of us do--but what we do with them? I agree with
the people who wrote in "What's wrong with sociological criteria?"
Nothing at all, as long as you know they're your criteria. But since no
one can read everything, we all make choices. So I was amused when Hank
said Robert Hayden was good in the way Robert Frost is good. In all my
years of teaching modern poetry, I've never yet taught Robert Frost. If I
have 10 weeks (a quarter at Stanford) or even 15 (a semester), there are
just poets I'd rather be teaching and I figure Frost gets taught enough
anyway. That doesn't mean my criteria should be yours. But I'm just
trying to say that if someone is going to convince me that X is worth a
lot of discussion, I want to know why. Aldon, who's a good friend, has
gone a long way in alerting me to African-American poets he feels are
especially interesting and he makes a case for those poets--but not just
for any poet who happens to be black. In fact, he's down on quite a few
of the above. Wheat from the chaff, why not??? No hard and fast binary
divisions of course. But how do you make actual practical choices??
Marjorie Perloff
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 00:51:26 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: List wars
At 6:41 PM 7/10/96, wystan wrote:
>Dear Dodie,
> I am sorry Charles is saying those things about you. (said in
>a personal, feeling, tone of voice) But seriously, Ms. Bellamy despite
>the fact unlike Mr. Alexander I don't know you at all, your motives
>seem clear and above board to me.
Wystan,
I'm fine with Charles.
> I observe some kind of comprehensive confusion about 'the personal'
>developing here. What's to be done?
I think the line between the personal and non-personal is always messy--and
I wouldn't want it any other way. I think I, at least, should move on to
new topics. If *I'm* getting tired of this one, I can only imagine what
the poor lurkers are going through.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 01:15:23 -0700
Reply-To: subq@halcyon.com
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tom Malone <subq@HALCYON.COM>
Subject: A Closer Reading
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 08:42:13 -0700
NOT FROM: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: List, person, ship
Mr Silliman's proposal does not adequately address the pernicious issue of
the Academic slime on this e-mail list.
Requiring a single, coherent post once per month from each Academic list
member would likely result in cutesy, off-topic messages about the Von H.
Affair or other irrelevant "me-too" posts ("I'm delivering a paper on The Canon
vs. More of the Same." "No way! Me too!!") in ongoing threads. As not enough
people have noted, this will result in too much Academic traffic, further
allowing the vampiric Academics in our midst to stay on for another month of
reading the collected wisdom of others.
To actively combat these Academic vermin, we must NOT require full
participation by all list members in every current thread. After all, is it really
too much to ask that Academic members refrain from participating in the
activities of the group.
To achieve the goal of total Non-Academic participation, we would have
to move quickly toward the more reasonable requirement that all Academic
members respond within one hour to each post to the list (including their own)
with a closely reasoned 250-500 word statement outlining the many ways
univerities perpetuate socio-economic distinctions of class. To make it easier
to follow the incoherent discourse that would likely result under this new
system, each Academic member would also have to provide a shorter abstract
of their denials.
This simple change in policy would most certainly cut down on the number of
Academic scum on poetics list and we would soon arrive at the kind of total and
immediate Revolution that one usually sees in only a few of the more
progressive-thinking Usenet newsgroups.
Tom Malone
subq@halcyon.com
As an aside: At the very least it is a misguided notion to say the poetics list is
private. ANYONE can (and do) read, download, and forward posts from the p-list
archive at the Poetics Website.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 21:51:31 +1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Salmon <dpsalmon@IHUG.CO.NZ>
Subject: Re: List, person, ship
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13a 13b 13c 14 15
At 08:42 AM 9/07/96 -0700, you wrote:
>To start with, we could allow brief (less than a hundred words) responses
>to be made within forty-eight hours of the intiation of any new topic.
>
>However, to achieve the goal of total active participation, we would have
>to move quickly toward the more reasonable requirement that all list
>members respond within one hour to each post to the list (including their
>own) with a closely reasoned 250-500 word statement. To make it easier to
>follow the advanced discourse that would likely result under this new
>system, each list member would also have to provide a shorter abstract of
>their arguments.
>
>This simple change in policy would most certainly cut down on the number of
>non-participating lurker scum on poetics list and we would soon arrive at
>the kind of total and immediate participatory democracy that one usually
>sees in only a few of the more progressive-thinking Usenet newsgroups.
>
>
>Herb Levy
>herb@eskimo.com
>
>
Daniel Salmon
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 19:58:59 +0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Schuchat <schuchat@ARC.ARC.ORG.TW>
Subject: Cult of poetry in China
---------- Forwarded message --------
Since Ron asks, here follows some precis and quotes from the Michelle Yeh
article in THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES which I had mentioned in an
earlier post.
My apologies for the length of this post, (its hard to do justice to a
30 page essay in an email) and also for my numerous typos, spelling
errors and transcription errors. I hope it is of interest.
The article deals with the "avant garde/experimental" poetry scene in
post-Mao China, which is unofficial though not necessarily "illegal."
"By 'cult of poetry' I am referring to the phenonemon and the concomitant
discourse in the 1980s and 1990s that bestows poetry with religious
significance and cultivates the image of the poet as the high priest of
poetry. The word cult has no exact equivalent in Chinese and is used
here as an approximate tanslation for 'worship' or chongbai with strong
religious connotations. The 'cult of poetry' thus denotes a religious
poetics that is based on the worship of poetry and that inspires a
religious-like devotion among poets."
The late 80s/90s generation of experimental Chinese poets, according to
Yeh, are alienated both from the traditional Communist orthodoxy and also
from the rising commodity/westernizing/pop culture environment around
them. Both of these options do not particularly value the poet or
poetry:
"Most of the avant-garde poets who choose to continue to write, however,
tend to be in the lower echelon of the current economic structure,
holding low-paying state-assigned jobs or no jobs at all."
A quote from poem by Zhou Lunyou, "A cofounder and editor of the
long-running Sichuan-based poetry journal Feifei, Zhou spent seven months
in a prison in Xichang before he wassentenced to three years in a labor
reform camp on Mount Emei for "counter-revolutionary incitement":
To prove through my writing: to be alive is important
What is food? What is Sarte?
The blows of commodities are more gentle, more direct than violence,
More cruel too, pushing the spirit toward total collapse."
"The image of the poet as someone who chooses a lfe of wandering and
poverty in order to follow the sacred calling of art, who rejects the
dehumanizing system and vulgar society with courage and defiance, finds a
vivid expression in the folllwong description of the poet Hei Dachun (b.
1960). Nicknamed "the Drunkard of Yuanmingyuan," Hei is a central figure
in a group of poets, artists and rock-and-roll singers who live a
bohemian life near the ruins of the leisure palace from China's last
dynasty: 'Much of his food and clothes are gifts from his friends. Seeing
his religious spirit of dedication, his friends feel that they
should do something for art. The worship of art and the eternal
need of humans for art makes him believe firmly in the art of
poetry which he engages in. He will not waste his energy and
life on things he dislikes just in order to lead a normal life;
therefore, he does not work, does not bow to the leadership,
does not sell his life which belongs to art. He'd rather drift
about, embrace death.'"
Yeh discusses several highly-publicized suicides among avant garde
Chinese poets, including Gu Cheng, who hung himself after murdering his
wife. She notes that "many reminiscenes and memorial essaysd that
appeared after the tragedy held a rather understanding, if not forgiving,
attitude toward Gu. Referring almost always to his precious poetic
talent and occassionally also to his previous attempts at suicide...they
tend to see in his a romantic genius beyond the laws of this world, who
consequently perhaps should not be judged in accordance with the "normal"
criteria of right and wrong."
Discussing the current Chinese avant gardes self-admitted forebears,
after several Chinese poets including the early 20th century modernist
Zhu Xiang, the pre-Han Qu Yuan and Tang dynasty's Li Bai (Li Po), she
notes that "some of the most frequently mentioned names in the poetry and
prose discussions are" Holderin, Rilke, Borges, Tsvetayeya, Mandelstam,
Rimbaud, Plath, Pasternak, Brodsky, Celan, Keats, Shelley and
Dante.....what the majority of the poets on the above list have in common
is personal tragedy."
"Perhaps a ready-made explanation for the 'cult of poetry' is this: it is
a response of poets to the spiritual vacumn in the wake of the Cultural
Revolution in the post-Mao era. In view of the destruction of
traditional Chinese values and mores, coupled with the widespread
disaffection amontg the intellectuals with the Communist party in the
post-Mao era, it is understandable how poets seek to redefine themselves
beyond the pale of official ideology. The "cult of poetry' represents a
search for an alternative value system, a new identity of the self in
contradistinction from, and in defiance of, that dictated by the Party."
"When the poet is held as more important than the poetry, death --
especially self-imposed death--becomes the ultimate poem, the poem to end
all poems."
"Whatis porobably most problematic about the overwhelming interest in the
poet rather than the poetry is its ambivalent relation to the mentality
underlying the culture of an earlier era -- the personality cult of Mao.
...The deification of poetry and the canonization of the poet reveal an
absolutist, Utopian frame of mind that at least implicitly excludes
other approaches to poetry both in theory and practice. Are alienation
and the sense of crisis the necessary driving force behind the creation
of poetry? Why is the poetry that emphasizes suffering and sacrifice
regarded nobler or better than the poetry that does not? Why does the
poet have to be perceived in heroic terms?"
"Throughout the dsicussion thus far I have used male personal pronouns
whenever I refer to Chinese avant-garde poets as a group. Rather than
committing a sexist oversight, I mean to make a point about another
significant aspect of the discourse of the "cult" ....few women poets can
be found actively participating or involved in the discourse [ofthe cult
of poetry]. It is true that a number of women poets have achieved a
national, even international reputation in post-Mao China, most notably
Shu Ting and Wang Xiaoni in the early 1980s and Zhai Yongming and Lu
Yimin since the mid-1980s. However, none of them have played a
significant role in the discourse of the cult..."
"In the final analysis, the ;cult of poetry' in post-mao China is a
paradox. It advocates creative freedom and individuality, however, in
elevating poetry to the status of a supreme religion, it imposes
arbitrary limits on poetry. It defies the official ideology, yet is
unable to escape entirely the absolutist, Utopian mentality in its
worship of the poet and deification of poetry. It resists and detests
consumerism, yet it is by no means immune from itself becoming a
commodity. When it is perceived by the outside world as "dissent
literature" in a totalitarian regime, Chinese avant-garde poetry can
easily be turned -- or some may say, has already been turned -- into a
commodity in the international (especially Western) cultural market.
These contradictions and pitfalls--artistic, ideological and
economic--point to the intrinsic limitations of the "cult of poetry," and
we can already see "anti-cult" reactions coming from various perspectives
in recent years..."
****
again, my apologies for lacunae etc.
It is not easy to do justice to a 30 page essay in this post,
especially one that presupposes some knowledge of recent Chinese history
and literature. Anyway, I hope the above quotes are interesting, and of
course, following up with the article itself from the Journalof Asian
STudies will give a better sense than my excerpts.
Ta ta
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:01:17 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 9 Jul 1996 14:07:31 -0400 from
<AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
On Tue, 9 Jul 1996 14:07:31 -0400 Rod Smith said:
>This is the Contents and Introduction for the forthcoming anthology _Onward:
>Contemporary Poetry and Poetics_ ed. Peter Baker, Peter Lang Pub., $28 pb,
>440 pgs. due out Sept '96. Peter is off line traveling and asked me to send
>it to the listwar. "The Rejection of Closure" is a revised and extended
>version.
Peter Baker's preview of the new anthology is interesting - is it just me, or
is there really a kind of response in his intro to some list discussions
(am I being too "immanentist"?). PB draws up a new genealogy specifically
contrasting Pound (the immanentist) with Zukofsky (the nominalist) and lining
up contemporary & language poets with Zukofsky. This is not really new
but it seems to take things from both the dreaded Blasing discussion from
months back & the Peirce harangue from weeks back, & turn them on their heads.
(Ie. the language poets, contra Blasing's pantheon, are the true purveyors
of the split between assumed reality & the word - in terms of Scholasticism!)
Here's what sounds familiar to me:
> Belief in an implicit poetics can be seen to derive from an immanentist
>theory of language, or the idea that words bear direct relation to what they
>represent, even carrying a little bit of the essence of the thing in the
>word. Such immanentist theories deriving from the religious tradition ("and
>the word was with God and the word was God") drove William of Occam, in the
>twelfth century, to propose the complete separation of word and referent, in
>his philosophy of nominalism. Jacques Derrida is often thought to represent
>such a nominalist viewpoint in his philosophy of deconstruction (see my
>Deconstruction and the Ethical Turn). Ezra Pound's language theory is
>explicitly immanentist, as when he instructs his Italian translator of The
>Cantos: "Don't worry about the meaning of the poem. Translate accurately
>line by line. The meaning is inherent in the material." Pound's poetics in
>The Cantos thus demonstrates what I call (in Obdurate Brilliance) the "myth
>of transparency," or the ideology of direct apprehension of the surrounding
>context from the text of the poem. Without worrying too much (right now)
I don't see how the concluding few sentences above follow logically. Pound's
saying the meaning is inherent in the material certainly does not "demonstrate"
a belief in language's transparency, though I'd grant that Pound certainly
did have a kind of idealist-realist faith in the access of poetry to
the real. Pound's statement above, though, that the meaning is inherent
in the material, would hold as true for Objectivism as for high modernism.
The differences, real or imagined, between the poetics of Pound and those
of the anthologized poets perhaps hinge less on their approaches to
language than on the status of meaning & belief. Language, as I see it,
though changing and evolving, is something of a constant in comparison
with the astonishing pressures of ideology, history & the zeitgeist on
culture's idea of what is artistically necessary or important. These
pressures, of course, influence trends in the philosophy of language
(exhibited clearly both in the Scholastics and in the above intro),
but poetry operates, hopefully, by digging toward the permanent
functions of language, which persist THROUGH the "zeitgeist".
- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:44:58 -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: Re: Private List/Public Space
Burt, Yes, true. But some of the great literary archives consist of just
these sorts of notes (and letters) that some kind soul just happened to
save... Loss
At 05:54 PM 7/9/96 EST, you wrote:
>Loss,
>
>yes, but how often do one's notes tacked onto a bulletin board get
>taken down and shipped off to some archive; archiving (electronic or
>otherwise) seems to legitimize the mere missives, no? And then they
>get quoted perhaps, and so on.
>
>Burt
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:45:00 -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: Re: Orono papers & other authors
At 03:02 PM 7/9/96 -0500, you wrote:
>loss --if our papers are being published somewhere, what are the
print-copyright
>politics of sending them also to you; wd it be seen as undercutting the
>print-publisher's market? i don't wanna do anything "wrong."--md
Maria,
If a piece will be published in print, it's courteous to ask the
publisher if it's ok if it's also available online. Some publishers are
barbaric enough to think of online space as a threat. (Of course, if the
online paper is a different version somehow, it makes it less of a threat!)*
If the publishers says no then maybe they'd let the piece go online say six
months after serial publication in print (tho not as timely, this might also
work).
I know people have valid reasons to prefer print publication, but if
making the ideas public is what writing is about, there are few (maybe no?)
journals that can circulate so widely. I know from handling the mail here
that these pieces are getting read. (Also the statistics reinforce this.)
(Studies I've seen actually show that online versions actually help
sales of print publications.)
But I think also of pedagogical uses. How many libraries don't have
subscriptions to most magazines I adore - and will students or others be
willing to use ILL (interlibrary loan) if it is even available via ILL, etc.
etc. I have people request permission to use EPC materials for courses and I
always say OK enthusiastically!
But I do of course understand that sometimes people just can't make
their work available.
Best, Loss
------------------
*In this case you might think of how your paper would be without certain
constraints. It can be longer. With some knowlege of html, you can have
color graphics/ illustrations, etc.)
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 09:06:07 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael Coffey <MCOFFEY@PW.CAHNERS.COM>
Subject: Re: Irby Matters -Reply
Comments: To: anielsen@email.SJSU.EDU
More on the availability of Ken Irby's work; last week Ron Silliman
enthusiastically parsed a section for Irby's Orexis, listfolk may recall.
Kenneth Irby, CALL STEPS: PLAINS, CAMPS, STATIONS,
CONSISTORIES, 154 pgs,
$12.95, ISBN 0-88268-090-0, Station Hill Press, in association with
Tansy
Press, Distributed to the trade by The Talman Company, but available
from
Small Press Distribution and other wholesalers. Direct from Station Hill,
Barrytown, NY 12507, $3.00 shipping & handling. (This volume contains
all of the long-poem Orexis)
OREXIS is still available for $10, ISBN 0-9930794-17-6. Same as above
(minus the Tansy association).
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 09:17:13 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gwyn McVay <gmcvay1@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Orono papers & other authors
In-Reply-To: <199607091948.PAA23742@conciliator.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Related to which--
The National Museum of Women in the Arts is currently devoting a whole
floor to an exhibit of 20th-century women artists, including Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha, whose "Passages/Paysages" is installed, and a new column/yarn
setup by Cecilia Vicu~na that is deeply moving to look at. The catalogue,
pleasantly enough, is well-researched, highly informative, and chocked
with bibliographical refs, so if you're going to be in DC, hit 12th and
New York, and go there, and see the concurrent artists' books exhibit
there too.
Gwyn
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 22:36:07 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nada Gordon <nada@GOL.COM>
Subject: poetry performance
Since readings are embodied voicings,
I'm happy to see readers who remember their bodies
instead of keeping most of their *ki* upwards of their necks
I also like to notice eye contact and verbal contact with the
audience, comprehension (grokking?) checking even a page poem can live
without a gloss but a read poem doesn't need to
When I read here it's true I have to rely on all kinds of gimmicks -- the
only real venue is a faux-British pub of mostly non-poets -- but I find if I
crawl on the floor, sing acappella and gaze into people's eyes
I can read the subtle stuff once I get the audience's attention
It's a far cry from the well-lit gallery spaces of my salad days, full of
folding chairs and captive fellow-writers, yet there's a feeling of
challenge here, albeit hoop-jumping
Tokyo is having a typhoon now after three days of solid rain. And how are you?
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 22:36:18 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nada Gordon <nada@GOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Listpersonship
'twas the voice of the flea, I heard it declare. . .
While it may be
true I
use this
list as a
kind of highbrow
entertainment,
it keeps
me away
from the quiz shows and
samurai
dramas
--nada
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 09:41:10 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
William of Ockham in the 12th century!?! Not by a long shot. COMPLETE
separation of word and object--hardly, and anyway this is a terrible over-
simplification, and I suspect this kind of sloppiness informs the the
Pound-Zuk split. Anyway, this is a big discussion and as many of us know
a long ongoing one, i guess. I do like what I see when I read about
"the status of meaning and belief" and, yes, NOW one can return to Ockham
for some help.
Pardon this perhaps non-sequiturial and willy-nilly grouchiness.
Burt
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 09:22:21 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: the guy and the gulf war
e, yr point about victimhood well-taken... it can be an aesthetic dilemma
if one is simply exhibiting pain... how to get around, or better, through
this?...
for one, i think what's necessary, and this pace dodie's hammering on the
white middleclass, is to pull apart some of these categories we rely on...
already there's humor on this list to suggest intervention in the seeming
rift between academic/non-academic... there may be more overlap here than
is customarily (publicly) allowed (in fact i'm sure there is)... and though
half the income-earners in this country are below $21k, you're called
"middleclass" at $30k, and you're called "middleclass" at $70k... you're
called middleclass if you own a four bedroom house, and you're called
middleclass if you rent a one bedroom apartment... you're called
middleclass if you're going to inherit property, and you're called
middleclass if you have no inheritance...
lotsa room here to debate about what "middleclass" means... one thing it
does not mean is that there's no grief or urgency or despair in this
so-defined group... class is shifty, b/c one can shift in and out of
different class structures... but speaking personally, my memories remain
intact, thank you... in any case, the point would be not to negate or
trivialize experience w/o first (somehow) coming to terms with what that
experience is... i can feel more for the poverty-stricken than for the
wealthy, sure, but this at the level of economic circumstance... and b/c of
who i am i might relate a lot more to the former (and sometimes err
accordingly)... but as an artist/poet, part of what i'm about is not
mistaking the truth of my experience for the truth of my art (however i
construe both sorts of truth)...
i wouldn't want, for example, to fall into that (current) marxist trap of
arguing against any discourse that isn't specifically needs-based, on the
grounds that non-needs-based discourse (if we could identify such a beast)
does not address global-economic realities or some such (and regarding
which rob wilson's cherub is a downright illuminating construction)...
also, i'm reminded of a line from a zappa tune, where he sez something like
"yknow something people? i'm not black but there's a whole lotta times i
wish i weren't white, either"... yeah, 'sixties liberal white guy,' but at
least i hear in this an inkling of an attempt (in a pop-cultural space) to
confront one's own advantage (if not quite privilege)---social/ontological
issues relating to skin color---from the inside... it's important to
examine racial discourse from the point of view of the other, but i'll
still hold to the value of addressing, each of us, our own position and
status in our institutional systems---and yeah, as a matter of fact, our
own complicity, without getting whiny about it... and i don't find that it
helps much to constantly defer to real anguish on another part of the
planet (though i'm all for recognizing real anguish on other parts of the
planet)...
there's always enough grief to go around... mebbe, to create meaningful art
that attends to our grief, mebbe we need to attend to the ways we tend to
categorize social experience???...
best,
joe
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 09:21:16 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
Comments: To: Multiple@maroon.tc.umn.edu, recipients@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
of@maroon.tc.umn.edu, list@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
POETICS@maroon.tc.umn.edu
db rites: I think I, at least, should move on to
> new topics. If *I'm* getting tired of this one, I can only imagine what
> the poor lurkers are going through.
>
hear hear.
md
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 09:59:07 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: List wars
Comments: To: Multiple@maroon.tc.umn.edu, recipients@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
of@maroon.tc.umn.edu, list@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
POETICS@maroon.tc.umn.edu
In message <v01520d00ae07ff2f56d8@[205.134.228.78]> UB Poetics discussion group
writes:
> Maria, you criticized a population I was a member of--the people on this
> list. I was defending that population.
>
> Dodie
It was not my intention to criticize a population of which i've been a very
happy, active part. I'm sorry for any distress I might have caused you or any
other individuals who felt as you did. in my view, inspired by rob wilson's
"covering cherub" posts (sorry if i'm quoting you out of context, rob, but this
is what i got from it), i made some observations about what seemed to me the
difficulty of discussing certain issues --primarily race -- on the list, and as
emily helped me to see, this is a difficult medium for volatile topics, in part
because the possibilities of misunderstanding are so high, as the recent
herb-levy-lurker flurry instanciated. i most emphatically was not, as others
have also pointed out, setting out to be an arbiter of pc-ness or list content.
i was not invoking any "shoulds," nor do i see myself as any kind of "expert" on
the topics i was calling attention to. this is the only list i'm on, and
perhaps it's unrealistic to think it can address all my intellectual community
needs; on the other hand, my larger project has to do precisely with bringing
cultural studies and poetry/poetics to bear on each other, and i'd like to feel
that i can explore this perspective on this list, rather than having to
compartmentalize (as the academy does) my intellectual life.
md
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 10:47:03 +5
Reply-To: ajm@acpub.duke.edu
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Authenticated sender is <ajm@popserv.acpub.duke.edu>
From: Andrew John Miller <ajm@ACPUB.DUKE.EDU>
Organization: Duke University
Subject: Value Judgments and Sociology (was Re: List wars)
David Kellog wrote (among many other things):
> From the posts of those critics who are on this list, it seems to
> me that the world (or at least the Net) is filled with people
> yakking about why such-and-such a poet is good, and another is bad.
> The last thing I want or need is another tastemaker. Save that,
> as Foucault might say, for the police. [...] A "pure" poetics
> outside of sociology doesn't exist, and if it did I wouldn't want
> it.
>
David:
I agree with the general tenor of your remarks. Poetic value is
contingent and contextual; it is circulated and produced under
conditions that are mediated by forces of the sort that we have been
taught to describe as social, economic, and/or cultural. I strongly
disagree, however, with your contention that an entity called
"sociology" forms an essential and necessary part of our understanding
of poetry and poetics.
Sociology is an academic discipline, one that has its own rules,
traditions, procedures, and sacred texts. Like most academic
disciplines, it is marked by a broad array of disagreements over its
basic aims and methods; even the question of what does or does not
qualify as "social" remains open to considerable debate. Those of
us who define ourselves as literary critics and scholars can derive
considerable benefit from reading the work of sociologists; we can
even, much of the time, make effective use of that work. So long,
however, as we continue to define ourselves--institutionally,
professionally, and/or personally--as literary critics and scholars,
we will be doing something that is not "sociology" in any precise or
specific sense. We will find ourselves compelled, moreover, to deal
with rules, traditions, procedures, and sacred texts that are
profoundly different from those favored by sociologists. Of course,
we can attempt to persuade our colleagues to think more like
sociologists--an enterprise in which you, among others, have enjoyed
at least some degree of success. I believe, however, that it would
be a serious mistake to proceed as if sociology somehow provided us
with a higher level discourse by means of which we could loftily
point out the errors of those (supposedly) primitive and
unenlightened colleagues who continue to approach literature in other
ways.
While I'm at it, I might as well confess that I see nothing wrong
with the production of value judgments, poetic or otherwise,
*provided* that those judgments are forthrightly presented as
judgments and are not cloaked in the aura of some pseudo-objective
theory of poetics, society, history, etc. For me, one of the most
helpful things about this list has been the opportunity to hear
intelligent and informed people describe their poetic likes and
dislikes. I personally feel that, if anything, there has not been
enough of this sort of discussion. I greatly appreciate it when
friends share with me their value judgments about wines, restaurants,
movies, music, and cars. Why should poetry be any different?
--Andrew John Miller
Department of English
Duke University
Durham NC 27701
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:32:23 -0700
Reply-To: Shaunanne Tangney <st@scs.unr.edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Shaunanne Tangney <st@SCS.UNR.EDU>
Subject: Re: Cult of poetry in China
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960710194948.5808E-100000@arc>
m/m schuchat--
i seem to have missed your earlier post--could you please send me the
issue/date of the journal of aisan studies to which you refer in yr post?
i am v. interested in chinese poetry--
thanks,
shaunanne
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:52:03 -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: Lorenzo Thomas
In-Reply-To: <199607100408.AAA16200@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
I owe Bob Harrison an apology. He's the one who alerted the list to the
fact that Thomas is Hispanic (Panamian-American) as well as black. I
referred to Harrison as "someone"--inexcusable but it happens sometimes
when the list gets as long as it got last night and when it comes as a
listserv and when it's midnight...
But herewith apologies to Bob!
Marjorie
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 11:54:53 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: sports and wine
Why value judgments about poetry are different from consumer judgments
about wine, food, cars, etc. Not as easy a question as it seems. How to
live. The development of a poetics runs parallel to the life one lives,
right? It's like a second allegedly intelligent childhood, you learn
things, it's like choosing (Wallace Stevens thought it _was_ choosing.. so
he went into business), but with this difference--you meet it. That is, the
car one drives, one's consumer profile, is at a remove from this. Which is
something like a soul, or a mind. This and that. Sports and wine.
Once more, from the top. A poetics can only be individuated from any other
poetics if it can manage to persist in its idiosyncratic diplomacies. These
may consist of: willful good nature, perverse sarcasm, topiary artifice,
technical foul, cranberry juice, ectopia broadband arsenio fallout, rodeo
maser, let's go, pinball. I like pinball, because of its simultaneously
centrality and diffuse irrelevance--its harmonization of chance and
teleology--I guess they used to call it peripeteia.
Also I like a cuvee from Cain vineyards in california, and I have a Jordan
chardonnay in my fridge.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:14:31 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: past tense mope dream
Oops! simultaneous.
Also, ain't no prize for persisting in your idiosyncratic diplomacy,
either, unless you're a painter and can sell x hundred near-identical
instances of said diplomacy, which is actually paint, and not language, and
not the same. Except that x thousand years later, people will say, oh yeah,
that kind of poetry. Got to be redundant to make it in poetry.
J
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:40:30 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
HG wrote:
>but poetry operates, hopefully, by digging toward the permanent
>functions of language, which persist THROUGH the "zeitgeist".
Henry, what does this mean? I see raising questions re Peter's distinctions,
but this seems even less explanatory-- a kind of social-constructivist
mysticism.
"Permanent functions of language"? What are we talking some kinda deep
structure metaphor? Seems we don't have a handle on these issues, which leads
many toward religiosity & others toward skepticism. I tend to prefer eastern
ideas, which, I think, rest in an acceptance of immanent transparencies-- to
torque the classification a bit. Rather than talking about Pound/Zuk perhaps
Peter should have talked about Pound/Wittgenstein.
The "meaning & belief" question reminds me of Carla Harryman's "Both belief
and denial throw existence into question." Perhaps the "schism," if there is
one, is at the level of practice-- between those that are self-reflexive
(Wittgenstein) & those that aren't. One cld talk about Olson's "from where
the poet got it over to the audience" (sic)-- someone taking what I would
call an eastern or Wittgensteinian approach wldn't trust that sort of
formulation, however many APR folks seem to see meaning operating in just
that way, i.e. as a package to be delivered.
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:52:26 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
P.S.-- yes, I know it wasn't that simple for Olson.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 11:58:30 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
>HG wrote:
>>but poetry operates, hopefully, by digging toward the permanent
>>functions of language, which persist THROUGH the "zeitgeist".
Rod Smith writes of "an eastern or Wittgensteinian approach" to language
and semantics.
Could you unpack that a little?
Related to this discussion is a new book, "The Spell of the Sensuous," by
David Abram. It's touted as a book on ecology from a phenomenological
perspective, but (but?) much of it is rooted in issues of language and also
in David's experience as a master sleight-of-hand magician hanging out with
shamans in traditional cultures. It's Poundian in more ways than one: the
alphabet is seen as distorting perception. Fun to read and I've been
looking for an excuse to tell you all about it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:42:47 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Henry Gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:40:30 -0400 from
<AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
On Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:40:30 -0400 Rod Smith said:
>HG wrote:
>>but poetry operates, hopefully, by digging toward the permanent
>>functions of language, which persist THROUGH the "zeitgeist".
>
>Henry, what does this mean? I see raising questions re Peter's distinctions,
>but this seems even less explanatory-- a kind of social-constructivist
>mysticism.
If it's mysticism, it's a kind of aesthetic idol-worship. It's a fascination
from a proto-Acmeist carpenter's perspective. What makes something built to
last? Why do some artworks still grip us while others seem hackneyed by
timebound blinders? It's language talking through the obsessions and
neuroses & sleepwalking and timeserving of an era - not denying it, but
mastering it & throwing light on it - and in the process gripping us with
real experience, on the scent of truth.
>
>The "meaning & belief" question reminds me of Carla Harryman's "Both belief
>and denial throw existence into question." Perhaps the "schism," if there is
>one, is at the level of practice-- between those that are self-reflexive
>(Wittgenstein) & those that aren't. One cld talk about Olson's "from where
>the poet got it over to the audience" (sic)-- someone taking what I would
>call an eastern or Wittgensteinian approach wldn't trust that sort of
>formulation, however many APR folks seem to see meaning operating in just
>that way, i.e. as a package to be delivered.
I think we're all roaring with hunger for those very packages, & that's
why packaged truth, & poetry, & anthologies, are so winning... What I
meant by the "status of meaning & belief" was the idea that the forces
shaping a historical era also pressure various groups' energy level &
sense of breakthrough - so that Pound's "epic quest" fulfills demands
and expectations in a truth-oddyssey at a level or in a way that
has dissipated or grown more obscure or latent at a later period (waiting
for the next explosion). Later on we invent our genealogies & ascribe
organized styles or differentiations.
- Henry Gould
"Classicism is revolution" - O. Mandelstam
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:11:02 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Value Judgments and Sociology (was Re: List wars)
Comments: To: ajm@acpub.duke.edu, Multiple@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
recipients@maroon.tc.umn.edu, of@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
list@maroon.tc.umn.edu, POETICS@maroon.tc.umn.edu
andrew miller wwrites a longish post on sociology that you've all seen;
andrew: i agree with you that the category "sociology" is a scientistic,
academic discipline and an ugly rubric under which to classify something as
broad as, say, "attention to social, biographical, historical context." i think
it's crucial not to, to use the language of one of the New Zealanders (tony
green? wystan?i've deleted the actual post, so can't quote specifically, sorry)
said, "subsume" "poetics" into/under "sociology" or vice versa --this is why a
project that would treat text and its surrounding environment as one continuous
--"ecological" system as it were --is dear to my heart. in order to talk to
people in my world, that is, the academy, i use the terms "poetics" and
"cultural studies", which shouldn't, but are, segregated and seen as mutually
inhospitable terrains of inquiry. i was thrilled to see, in the papers at
Orono, the degree to which this kind of treatment is becoming acceptable and
even respected, though there is still, in most cases, a leaning toward one or
the other poles of the false binary.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 09:53:22 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: two film reviews (fwd)
After the mention of interracial sex, I couldn't resist this forward.
gab.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 08:15:34 -1000
From: Julian Samuel <jjsamuel@aei.ca>
Reply-To: postcolonial@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Two Film Reviews
by
Julian Samuel
Bhaji on the Beach,
A film by Gurinder Chadha, 1994, 100 minutes
reviewed by Julian Samuel
Bhaji on the Beach is an energetic, race-and-sex-relations comedy that is a
must see for anyone who thinks that putting these issues-of-the epoch in the
mass media is a nice way to deal with the traumas plaguing South Asian women.
Community orientated films are a superb way to dramatize, confront, and to
come to terms with interracial sex and pregnancies, and other configurations
that are a source of endless trouble for South Asian parents who just can't
forget India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda etc.
Bhaji follows hot on the heels of but does not go beyond other "Black"
British masterpieces such as Hanif Kureshi's My Beautiful Laundrette, The
Bhudda of Suburbia; and Isaac Julien's gay landmark, Young Soul Rebels.
Bhaji's plot does not strain the imagination. Here's a part of it: a
Southall Black Sisters type South Asian community leader takes an
all-ages-all-classes group of South Asian women to Blackpool. In the old
days, before we all got to England and improved the English diet it was a
white holidaying spot. But UK immigration changed all that.
The insertion of these splendiferously dressed women on the beach include a
battered wife who during the trip makes up her mind to leave her husband
forever; a teenage couple who, one gets the impression, are sexually
involved; a shilvar kamees clad granny who is mechanical scripted in to
contrast old-world values with "English" ones. Chastity, obedience to Gods,
and a reverent respect for the family bread-winner are up for gentle
feminist review. The granny stereotype has to act shocked most of the time.
Boring. The biggest shock for her is the pregnancy of one of the young Asian
women by her black boyfriend. This dilemma is elegantly solved, as the rest
of the group drive back to town, with a tender lingering kiss during a
interracial sun-set. Thank god this scene will bother some Asians.
At Blackpool, sexually explorative members of the outing meet English
cowboys who work at a hot-dog stand. One of the women gets into a bit of
interracial necking, but before anything exciting happens her protective
about-to-de-cloak lesbian friend pulls her back into the virginal harem of
the Asian community.
The acting is earnest cardboard stereotyping au maximum. No one evolves,
everyone stays in the same charactival rut, and the story is as tense as
watching Rajiv Gandhi have tea and biscuits at a press conference on the
Tibet question. However, it is stereotyping with a huge difference: its
brown stereotyping.
Bhaji is more than mundane; check this for excellence: "I just needed you to
be there" says the pregnant woman. And there are hundreds of lines like
this. But even at that, Bhaji is saved by being more or less a first of its
kind, and it does not grind on inexorably. It is ultra light race-sensitive
entertainment, for the lily-livered.
Notwithstanding the simplistic editing -- there is not one unpredictable cut
-- this film is brilliant even if the South Asian in-jokes will pass over
the heads of both white Canadian tribes. British audiences, however, are hip
to all this post-colonial modernity, so they will get most of the culturally
anchored funnies.
Bhaji is better than most films made in Canada in the last five years.
Quebec films don't even come close, and of course, Quebec lives in mortal
fear of black actors, artists, intellectuals and directors and therefore
does not encourage them. Director Gurinder Chadha is lucky to have generous
film funders who take her so very seriously.
Imagine the National Film Board or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
putting bucks into such a film without getting utterly terrorized by the
racegender questions. Forget it. Canada will not catch-up, not even by the
time Hong Kong slips into Beijing control.
A warning: there are hectares of songs and dances: You can take the Asian
out of Asia but you can't take the Bollywood out of the Asian.
end Julian Samuel
Bandit Queen directed by Shekhar Kapur
reviewed by Julian Samuel
Bandit Queen is based on the true life story of a peasant woman who
established an earth-shattering reputation throughout India for having
fought against her oppressors.
Her story is tragic: a forced marriage to someone centuries older than her
-- she was about 10 at the time. After a few rapes she escapes her "husband"
and, a few years later joins a band of country-side highway men who engage
in various nasty activities. She is caught by rival forces and is raped by
scores of men. She escapes and the same thing happens: she is caught again,
raped, and again takes revenge. Finally, she politicizes the entire Indian
country-side and attempts to besiege Delhi capital of the "largest democracy
in the world." Well no not exactly: the filmmaker has made an exaggerated
and simplistic account of her life.
The real Bandit Queen (Poolan Devi) in fact wanted to stop the distribution
of this film because she thought that it did injustice to cause. She is
right: The film should have been pulled out of distribution not because it
did an injustice but because it is repetitive to the point of making the
viewer suicidal and as inelegant as Benazir Bhutto attempting to defuse the
civil war now raging in Karachi.
Her narrative is important for those who want to learn about political
struggles with the bazaar rituals of Mother India. However, this film is
maligantly marred by gun shots in every scene and screechy rape scene after
rape scene. You'll only be able to sit through it if you're a masochist or
if you've taken sleeping pills with your cholesterol loaded popcorn.
Julian Samuel
>
--- from list postcolonial@lists.village.virginia.edu ---
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 14:57:56 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert A Harrison <Robert.A.Harrison@JCI.COM>
Subject: onward: +
Thanks for the apology and the acknowledgment, Marjorie.
Glad to see there're a bunch of other threads going on now. Not to hold those
up, wanted to send the list a quote and a coupla references. Here's a quote
from one of Lorenzo Thomas' recent talks ("... first presented as part of
"Revolutionary Poetry: Directions for Further Investigation," the concluding
panel of the Poetry Project's 1994 Symposium,....")
from *Nothing Slow and Careful About It*
"In the past couple of days I think we've heard some very interesting and nice
rhetoric: the principle of "continual revolution"; a return to the '60s via a
"counterculture." Lots of individualistic and ethnocentric expressions. The
Yenan forum revisited. And so on and so forth. What bothers me is that much
of what we heard was flawed by unsystematic thinking and I think that might
have something to do with the fact that we're poets. Y'know, "We cool like
that we write like that we think like that." Anyway, I was suffering from all
the cybernetic stuff that I was hearing and I finally came down with something
like Dada overload........."
hmm
published in
The World #51
The Poetry Project
St. Mark's in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th St
NYC, NY 10003
Some of Lorenzo's early work is in "None of the Above," Michael Lally's
anthology, 1976.
There is also a "comprehensive collection" called "The Bathers." Published in
1981 by
I. Reed Books
isbn #0-918408-18-0
ok. ONWARD!! As the the subject says!
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:00:47 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
Hey Judy Roitman and anyone else interested in poetry/lang phil/ecology:
Abram's book sounds like territory covered by my colleague David Rothenberg'
s new journal Terra Nova; maybe someone would want to review "The Smell
of the Sensuous" for it. David can be reached at rothenberg@admin.njit.edu.
burt
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 14:47:28 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: peter quartermain
Peter Quartermain,
I've been trying to email you and have had my mail spit back to me.
could you let me know where you are and how to reach you?
thanks,
burt kimmelman
kimmelman@admin.njit.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 12:58:00 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" <pritchpa@SILVERPLUME.IIX.COM>
Comments: To: Dean Taciuch <dtaciuch@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Dean raises a good point. I think the way we must finally come to
understand "how to read a poem" to an audience is that, for most poets (and
most poems), a reading only constitutes 50% (or so, it varies, naturally) of
the poem's quiddity (gotta love that word!). For Shaunanne, it would seem to
constitute a greater percentage. Any reading is, of course, an
interpretation, i.e. it presents a particular profile of the poem at a
particular moment. If you go to the same play on two different nights, that
play will vary in minute particulars per performance. But it's still the
same text. Which implies that the poem itself, silent on the page, occupies
some kind of Platonic/Ur-dimension from which it "descends" when
invoked/pronounced by the speaker. A dubious notion, perhaps, but
intriguing.
As for how to get across ambiguous line breaks: maybe read the same line
more than once, each time differently to stress its multiple
weights/meanings/emphases...
Patrick Pritchett
----------
From: Dean Taciuch
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS
Date: Tuesday, July 09, 1996 11:39PM
<<File Attachment: HEADERS.TXT>>
On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, Kathrine Varnes wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, a good performance is a good interpretation, or
> at least an interesting one. (The reverse is also true.)
. . .
> what kills poetry for me (which is often what happens when
> actors are reading) is when the reader has already decided what the
> perfect reading is and tries to create it -- some static idea -- instead
> of actively interpreting while reading. Better to be imperfect and lean
> on the words.
>
> Kathrine Varnes
>
OK, but how to offer an interpretation without having an interpretation
in mind? This is a serious question..I wonder this myself when
reading--do I try to express an ambiguous line break verbally (and how?)
or do I collapse the distinction, choose a reading, and present that?
I think the key is "static"--the performance should not be a single
thing, or at least not the same single thing to everyone.
Also, I don't mean to knock actors/acting. It certainly is possible
for an actor to give a good reading of a poem, just as it is obviously
possible for a poet to give a bad reading.
Dean Taciuch
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 13:33:23 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
Well, an eastern or Wittgensteinian approach wld be a contextual approach--
an understanding of context as multiply & complexly constitutive. The
emphasis being not only on what we can "compute" but also upon
acknowledgement that any given context is more complexly constituted than one
can apprehend-- which is why intuition is such a powerful & real aspect of
our experience & also why it is so individualized.
Seems to me both Wittgenstein & aspects of buddhist & taoist thought share a
concern with pointing out limits of apprehension & *using them.* One cld also
talk about Duchamp in these terms.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 13:24:41 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: mis/guide
to the extent that we participate in the terms of someone else's
debate--the sumerians, the greeks, the cherokees, the democrats--we're
what, learning? except that information, poetic information, is located at
once in the capitol and the kitchen, we've been lured into 'the zone' and
we've been talking, we need these common terms, and that's it, that's all,
inscribe it and if you can 'say it without saying it', all the better, all
the best, save a lull, pause, take a breath. No stride like the strident,
eschew the received phrase, find file, hey. only music is information? J
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:22:53 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Value Judgments and Sociology (was Re: List wars)
Comments: To: ajm@acpub.duke.edu, Multiple@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
recipients@maroon.tc.umn.edu, of@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
list@maroon.tc.umn.edu, POETICS@maroon.tc.umn.edu
ps to my post to andrew miller --and david kellogg, indirectly -- on
"sociology":
i also like it when a "critical" text aspires to or achieves the poetic. that's
why i come back again and again to walter benjamin; not just cuz he's one of the
current gods of cult studs, but because he language and insights are so
inspired, so...well, poetic. no one could call his essay on some motifs in
Baudelaire "mere" sociology, though it has a strong component of social concern
and sociological observation. to me this is a kind of "texte ideal." (it
teaches great with o'hara's lunch poems, btw). susan stewart, who is "also" a
poet, is another writer/"critic" whose essays embody a lovely poesis of their
own.
others, y'all? rachel bdp's talk at orono was in that realm.
bests, maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 16:38:10 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: e-mail politics
Of course, since this poetics list involves more than one person, it will
be by definition "political"--that is, not only will different people be
on it for different reasons, but it's also quite possible that those
reasons will conflict, and that everybody here will not get along. Many
of us have different senses of what this poetics e-mail "virtual
community" should be--and indeed the word "community" is wholly
inadequate for the complexity of the environment itself. Perhaps
"network" would be better--although that implies something perhaps less
intimate than e-mail often is (and, among many other characteristics, I
think poetics e-mail does have an odd intimacy). Still, we don't all "get
along" here, and there are instances when we shouldn't get along.
It's interesting, for instance, that it might be easy to assume on this
list that people who primarily write poetry and people who primarily
write poetry criticism would get along--after all, it's theoretically
simple, at this point, to undermine any notion of the distinction as
absolute, i.e. each poem has a critical element, and (perhaps, but I'm
not convinced) each piece of criticism has some poetic element. So one
might think that the historical relation between poets and critics, often
antagonistic, would not be antagonistic here. But is that really the
case. While I agree with the person (help with names here please, I'm
getting so many messages) who said he's bored by "tastemakers," or by
people who dislike all poetry criticism by definitio, on the other hand
it's true that the cultural and institutional situations of poetry and
poetry criticism are NOT THE SAME, and in fact those differences can and
do lead to conflict. So what? Some level of conflict is good for
discussion--I applaud your (whoever) right to disagree with me. On the
other hand, if I think your wrong I'm going to say so.
All that fairness aside, though, I find myself inevitably siding with
poetry and poets, even as I know that poetry criticism is unavoidable
(and I right enough of it myself, even). So I sympathize with Dodie
Bellamy's recent frustration about this list. Here's what I'm
wondering--is this list equally divided between poets and poetry critics?
Does one group do more posting than another, and what does that say about
the POLITICAL dynamic of this list? I have some sympathy for Ron
Silliman's post too, although I have sympathy also for the ENGAGED
lurkers who spoke up in their own defense--I think what Ron was getting
at was something that a lot of poets feel, that is, that a lot of people
get to stand around pointing out our faults while never putting
themselves through the ringer of creating a poem.
So, here's my riddle. I'll bet if you said "poetry and poetry criticism"
have a fundamentally generative and symbiotic relation, a larger
proportion of those people who write criticism mainly would agree,
whereas a lesser number of people who mainly write poetry would agree. In
fact I bet it would make some poets actively annoyed. I'd love responses
to this riddle: is what I'm saying true, or not? If it is true, why?
I once referred to Anthony Easthope's POETRY AND DISCOURSE as "Poetry as
primitive culture" because it seemed to view poetry and poets as an odd
aberration that needed to be further studied by the sensible.
A truly active criticism engages its own fear of writing.
mark wallace
(please excuse--or celebrate!--any typos. I'm working on an old-fashioned
moden today)
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:45:06 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: First Intensity
Lee Chapman asked me to inform this list that the new address of First
Intensity is PO Box 665, Lawrence, KS 66044.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 16:51:13 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Kellogg <kellogg@ACPUB.DUKE.EDU>
Subject: Re: List Wars
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.94.960709224855.22200A-100000@elaine15.Stanford.EDU>
Marjorie,
Much of what you have said is all fine, and wonderful, but it DOES NOT
ADDRESS what I said. For example, I *never* said that one can't separate
the wheat from the chaff, but only that the *a priori* assumption that
that's what critics must do is a little silly. To take a point you've
made many times, it's like limiting poetry to the free-verse lyric.
Of course we all evaluate every time we make a choice (and, I would add,
every time we decide not to choose). I never said otherwise -- I would
argue that you're confusing a relativist stance with a subjective one.
The idea that a relativist stance on value precludes choice is a red
herring.
I've very happy that you're reading A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES; bully for
you.
But that experience doesn't answer at all the question of what to read,
much less what to teach. I imagine that your experience in teaching is
much like mine: my estimate of "the value" of work for me enters into a
rough equation that includes such things as the possible value of the work
for students, what I've taught recently, the points I'm trying to make in
the course, my mood, what I ate, and a couple hundred other factors. What
is "the value" of the work in such a context? How can I dare fix it? It
changes for me all the time. One way it changes is by reading this list,
and that's a "good" thing -- i.e., something I value.
Marjorie, I have no doubt you would object to someone who defined "the
role of the poet" up front; such roles usually, though not always, exclude
many of the folks you and I find most interesting. Yet you write that "If
criticism doesn't at least in part do that [separate the wheat from the
chaff], what are we writing for?" Imagine substituting "poetry for
"criticism" and some feature of much, but not all poetry for *separating
wheat from chaff*, and you'll see the nature of my objection. It's not to
evaluation -- it's to the installation of evaluation as the *telos* of
prose about poetry.
Cheers,
David
First addendum: I'd like to apologize for my loose use of the term
"sociological," for which Andrew Miller has rightly criticized me. The
fact that I was mainly *extending* the already loose use of the term as it
was thrown around on the list doesn't let me off the hook.
Second addendum, for Wystan: neither poetry nor the social subsumes the
other; but neither does either escape the other.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 17:18:44 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Kellogg <kellogg@ACPUB.DUKE.EDU>
Subject: Re: List Wars
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960710160503.28907B-100000@godzilla2.acpub.duke.edu>
As an addition to the debate, this from Ron Silliman's introduction to *In
the American Tree* (which I've been rereading having bought a new copy at
Orono after my first copy fell apart -- why is this book so poorly
bound?):
"It is now plain that any debate over who is, or is not, a better
writer, or what is, or is not, a more legitimate writing is, for
the most part, a surrogate social struggle. The more pertinent
questions are what is the community being addressed in the
writing, how does the writing participate in the constitution of
this audience, and so on." (xxi)
Since this thread really started with the question of race and community
at Orono and in the papers there, I thought this little passage might get
us back to more important matters.
Cheers,
David
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David Kellogg Duke University
kellogg@acpub.duke.edu University Writing Program
(919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708
FAX (919) 684-6277
The time is at hand.
Take one another
and eat.
-- Thomas Kinsella
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 17:34:59 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Kellogg <kellogg@ACPUB.DUKE.EDU>
Subject: Re: List Wars
A clarification of my last paragraph, which read:
Since this thread really started with the question of race and community
at Orono and in the papers there, I thought this little passage might get
us back to more important matters SUCH AS THESE.
Cheers,
David
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:29:48 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: why is "bad" poet a silly category,
but not "great" poet? (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:21:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: Aldon L. Nielsen <anielsen@athens>
To: robert von hallberg <von6@midway.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: why is "bad" poet a silly category, but not "great" poet?
Given my understanding of your procedure now, I will post this to the
Poetics list immediately after I post it to you.
I can appreciate your desire to have your views represented accurately in
public. However, I am startled by the divergence between even the
statements that you have posted in public. You now speak of "one"
factual discrepancy, and you select the one that is not on the tape. Go
back and read your first message to me. You do in fact claim more than
one misrepresentation.
In my last post about this I pointed to one of these. As you did in your
first message, you now make a distinction between worthwhile sociological
pproaches and "simplistic" approaches. That distinction is difficult to
locate in your original remarks. You said, and I will send the tape as
soon as I have duplicated it: "When we do the sociology thing it comes
out real simple."
Another example -- In your first message to me you state: "The example I
gave in Orono, you will recall, was not your own remark about the number
of papers on minority poets, but instead the listing by the first
presenter . . ." In fact, as you will hear on the tape, the very first
thing that you mention is the set of numbers I gave in my opening remarks.
Please compare your first message carefully to your second, and then
compare both to the tape when it arrives. Meanwhile, I will ask the
Poetics list members to note that while you raise a number of supposed
misrepresentations in your first message, you now say that you only raise
one factual question. Your own messages indicate that this is not the case.
Now, because the other remarks are not on the tape, I am willing to admit
the possibility of some misunderstanding. It may be that you did not
mean to include Kaufman in the remarks that you made at the podium, and
if that is so I am sorry to have misunderstood you. On the other hand,
since on that day you not only did not indicate any poem by Hughes that
you thought was good (I'm trying to follow through on your distinction
between a bad poet and a good, great, whatever poet who has authored
some, or many ,bad poems), I am not so sure I didn't hear you correctly.
You can clear this up for me now by letting me know which of these things
you did mean to convey to the four of us you were speaking to at that
moment. Do you believe that Hughes is simply the author of some bad
poems (the poems that were read & discussed in the papers I suppose), and
if so, what are the not so bad Hughes poems in your opinion?
Now, I do not have time to go into each and every matter you raise beyond
the remarks themseleves, though perhaps we can at a future meeting or in
future email exchanges when I'm not in the process of moving -- But
please keep in mind that one of my clearest objections to your remarks
was the divergence between what you said and what the presenters had in
fact presented. I began with your use of my numbers, because I felt that
I could speak with assurance about your response to my own words. Your
first message attempts to deny that you used this number as an example,
but goes on to make certain remarks about the percentage of papers on
minority poets. Here is what you said at the panel: "a bunch of white
people gather to have a conference and they want to talk mainly about
white people. What's the problem, if what we're doing here is talking
about literature as sociological reproduction and as identity formation?"
Some quick observations --
Talking about sociological reproduction and talking about identity
formation are not exactly the same thing --
I realize there is a danger in responding to any question as rhetorical
as your is, but I think there would be a problem even if what we were
doing was sociological reproduction and identity formation -- unless what
you mean really is that this would be a great way to find out how white
people keep themselves white? but I don't think that's what you had in
mind -- Please explain to me why this would not be a problem --
Elsewhere on the tape you say "When it's sociological it's real simple."
Now, as I think about your remarks as a whole, I find it difficult to
square them with what you've been saying, much more agreeably, in your
messages. Your conference remarks sya that when it's sociological it's
simple, and that when we do the sociology thing it comes out real
simple. And you ask why it's a problem, if we're doing sociological
reproduction, if a bunch of white peoplem at a conference choose to talk
about mostly white poets.
Now, this string of statements would seem to indicate that
a) doing sociological literary work comes out simple --
b) there's no problem, really, if white people doing sociology at a
literature conference want to talk about mostly white people
That would seem to indicate that the result will be a bunch of white
people doing sociology and being simplistic mostly about white poets --
I don't know about you, but that does not sound like an appealing
prospect to me --
Lastly, because I have to meet an estimator from Bekins, let me address
quickly your remarks on Pound --
I would certainly agree that, as you put it at Orono, Pound's other is
not my other (though you were looking at Joe as you said this). I would
also agree that attention, close attention, has to be paid to Pound's
constructions of Italian-America -- BUT, this evades a few important points.
a) Pound makes ref. to black people early, middle and late -
b) your remark, again, elides one of the points in the paper you are
dismissing -- While I would not agree that Pound's self-exile is a matter
of "white flight," the fact that his "other" was at times Italian is not
an objection to that claim. As Joe pointed out in his paper, many
powerful Americans, including any number of those making immigration
policy and testing "intelligence," did not think of Italians as white
people at the time in question. Joe is not saying that Italians and
African-Americans are the same -- he is, though, saying that Italian
immigrants were often part of that which whight flight flew from. To my
mind, this is another instance of your having mashed the papers you
didn't like into a shape that fit the remarks you wanted to make.
There is much more of this nature, but in sum
--your second message misrepresents the contents of your first message;
You did claim more than one factual misrepresentation, and you seem now
to have dropped those which are on the tape in favor of the one that is not
--I will here beofre the entire Poetics list admit that I cannot now be
sure that you meant to convey to me that Kaufman was a bad poet -- I will
even go so far as to add that you may indeed have meant only to tell me
that Hughes was the author, so far as you knew, of only bad poems, not
that he is a bad poet. Again, if I'm wrong here set me straight at once
--Please tell me why it would not be a problem, if we're doing
sociological reproduction, for white people to want to talk mainly about
white people -- You appear to have gone beyond a mere statistical note
here and addressed a matter of desire -- also, "mostly" could have been
51% as easily as the 94% you invoke -- this seems to admit of degrees, no?
and I suppose I should give at least one example of what I might consdier
a more direct critical engagement with Joe's paper -- Joe built many of
his comments around the absence of Hughes and Brooks from the Donald
Allen anthology -- I believe Hughes would fall outside the scope of
Allen's collection on the basis of the chronology he was working with,
and I believe that Brooks's aesthetics would make her a more likely
candidate for the Hall anthology than for Allen's -- In my own closing
remark I was gently suggesting that this line of inquiry might more
profitably look at the absence of poets who shared the aesthetics that
seemed to link the varied groups in Allen's volume -- and Hughes, as it
happens, did just that,
"ask your mama." pp 472-531
don't neglect the "liner notes"
here's some identity formation for you
"WHERE IS LOTTE LENYA
AND WHO IS MACK THE KNIFE
AND WAS PORGY EVER MARRIED
BEFORE TAKING BESS TO WIFE
AND WHY WOULD MAI (NOT MAY)
BECOME JEWISH
THE HARD
WAY?
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 17:49:39 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: sociopoetic poetry/lyrical critique
sorry if this is redundant, but my computer's doing annoying things that make it
hard for me to know if this was actually bounced back to me or got sent:
ps to my post to andrew miller --and david kellogg, indirectly -- on
"sociology":
i also like it when a "critical" text aspires to or achieves the poetic. that's
why i come back again and again to walter benjamin; not just cuz he's one of the
current gods of cult studs, but because he language and insights are so
inspired, so...well, poetic. no one could call his essay on some motifs in
Baudelaire "mere" sociology, though it has a strong component of social concern
and sociological observation. to me this is a kind of "texte ideal." (it
teaches great with o'hara's lunch poems, btw). susan stewart, who is "also" a
poet, is another writer/"critic" whose essays embody a lovely poesis of their
own.
others, y'all? rachel bdp's talk at orono was in that realm.
bests, maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:56:45 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: been there done that (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:54:00 -0700 (PDT)
From: Aldon L. Nielsen <anielsen@athens>
To: robert von hallberg <von6@midway.uchicago.edu>
Subject: been there done that
Turned out that was not the Bekins person yet -- so here's one more quick
note --
You say, with regard to the numbers that I cited, that it is not
surprising to learn that only 6% of the papers were on race or minority
writers -- Again, please look back at my report & listen to the tape -- I
did not include papers "about race" in the tabulation, for one thing.
(The percentage swells appreciably if we add in all those good O'Hara
presentations.) More significantly, you have once again elided the point
I made with those numbers, as you did at the conference. My point was
that if certain conservative critics are to be believed, this number
should surprise us very much indeed -- My point, therefore, was that thse
critics are not to be believed --
Secondly -- you remark that the demonstration of the influence of racism
in the construction of literary canons has been done cogently --
Quickly now, name five books for me on the subject of racism and canon
formation in the area of poetry --
More importantly (I suppose one could argue that the few articles,
comments, conference papers etc. that exist were so cogent that we don't
need whole books on the subject [at least in poetry studies]), to tell me
that the demonstration has been done cogently is not to tell me that it
need not be done again. In fact, had the job been done so cogently,
perhaps we should have been very surprised to find a percentage as low as
6% in 1996.
And further in this regard, the "sifting" you call for is going on -- The
fact that you do not agree with the critics you responded to about the
poems they discussed hardly suffices as proof that we are neglecting the
important work of calling attention to those really important poems out
there -- I'm not at all sure that "sifting" is my primary task as a
critic or an historian, but I will admit that I do my share of it --
to be as blunt as I can, and still be remotely logical, the fact that you
say the poems discussed in the first two papers were "bad," and you
appear to agree that you at least said that much, and the fact that you
said the first presenter didn't do anything very interesting with the
poems (you will recall this is when I broke in and said that you were
being insulting) is not a demonstration of either point. There clearly
was not time at the session for anybody to even attempt to convince you
otherwise, but you didn't seem even to feel that any demonstration was
required on your side.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 18:11:33 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail politics
mark wallace writes at some length abt poets/poetry critics you've all read it
and i cant excerpt meaningfully:
mark: interesting points. i know that poets often feel colonized by those of us
who write "about" poetry and i can understand why. that's one reason why the
"arbiter of taste" role is so not to my liking; on the other hand, one could
argue that for me to disavow this role is disingenuous: i.e. like it or not,
that's what i do.
one thing that's been marvelous about this list has been the opportunity to
meet, cyberly and personally, people who are practicing poets. i have felt, with
the exception of the last coupla days, extraordinarily welcome, to the degree
that i naively started to think that this world was less ugly and contentious
than the academy. what i have found on the list happily confounded the cliches
one hears on both sides. the poets here are extremely critically and
theoretically up to date and sophisticated, overturning the dumb academic
assumption that "creative" folks are blindly instinctual, "feeling rather than
thinking" etc. --the "poetry as primitive culture" model (nice phrase).
conversely, some critics are close-minded and scared, hostile to any
developments that threaten an earlier model of teaching/writing/thinking that
they learned. many of the critics here are also very supportive of poets,
contrary to their image as destroyers of spontaneity, joy and inventiveness.
both parties can play the aggrieved and under-appreciated, both parties can
claim importance. many people on the list are both poets and critics, and
publishers, and editors, and visual artists, etc. that's been manna from
heaven, for someone who daily faces a workplace that separates not only "crative
writing" from "language and literature", but "practical criticism" from
"theory," and has not taken my work seriously (because it was on Bob Kaufman
rather than Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare --boy do i feel vindicated with the
Beat Show and Cranial Guitar, despite my difficulties with the latter).
as for myself, i had no idea that this list was intended primarily for one or
the other group of writers --in fact, just a few days ago there was some flurry
because a prominent critic, bob von hallberg, was *not* on the list. i was
signed on to the list (with my permission of course) by charles bernstein whom i
met at a conference --predictably enough, he was a featured "creative" writer, I
was a "critic." and i've never felt unwelcome because of my status as
"primarily a critic" (though thanks to this list and some of its offshoots, i've
ventured into the waters of more unabashedly "creative" collaborative
enterprises) until recently. however, i don't think you're suggesting, mark,
that critics get off the list.
md
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 20:53:48 -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: EPC - Connecting
Some interesting stats just out re: EPC. Here's some contextualization:
Avg. transactions per day 1,347
or another way to look at it
2550 times the EPC's main home page ALONE was accessed in 9 days
(See end of message for most 'popular' menus hit)
Busiest time to access the EPC 7 pm EST
2nd busiest 1pm - 4pm EST (each hour tied for second busiest)
------------------------------------------------
Connections by country. Here is a ranked list of countries accessing the EPC:
3714: 28.72%: .edu (USA Educational)
2346: 17.94%: [unresolved numerical addresses]
2290: 20.93%: .com (Commercial, mainly USA)
2251: 15.24%: .net (Network)
258: 1.73%: .uk (United Kingdom)
226: 1.91%: .ca (Canada)
225: 1.72%: .org (Non-Profit Making Organisations)
186: 1.62%: .us (United States)
144: 1.23%: .au (Australia)
100: 0.82%: .jp (Japan)
71: 0.48%: .it (Italy)
70: 1.01%: .de (Germany)
70: 0.35%: .no (Norway)
67: 1.49%: .nz (New Zealand)
65: 0.64%: .fr (France)
49: 0.29%: .gov (USA Government)
44: 0.34%: .nl (Netherlands)
42: 0.30%: .dk (Denmark)
41: 0.47%: .fi (Finland)
39: 0.41%: .se (Sweden)
32: 0.28%: .ch (Switzerland)
31: 0.13%: .es (Spain)
27: 0.14%: .il (Israel)
26: 0.31%: .mil (USA Military)
23: 0.14%: .my (Malaysia)
21: 0.09%: .si (Slovenia)
20: 0.13%: .kr (South Korea)
20: 0.10%: .lu (Luxembourg)
18: 0.07%: .uy (Uruguay)
16: 0.14%: .br (Brazil)
14: 0.05%: .yu (Yugoslavia)
6: 0.04%: .pt (Portugal)
6: 0.05%: .za (South Africa)
5: 0.02%: .in (India)
4: 0.11%: .is (Iceland)
4: 0.12%: .sg (Singapore)
3: 0.09%: .cn (China)
2: 0.03%: .hk (Hong Kong)
2: 0.12%: .mx (Mexico)
1: 0.01%: .at (Austria)
1: 0.02%: .bh (Bahrain)
1: : .cl (Chile)
1: : .cz (Czech Republic)
1: 0.03%: .id (Indonesia)
1: 0.05%: .mt (Malta)
1: 0.01%: .pl (Poland)
1: 0.06%: .su (Former USSR)
1: : .tw (Taiwan)
------------------------------------------------
July most 'popular' menus EPC
2550: 4.09%: /epc/
395: 6.09%: /epc/authors/
242: 5.41%: /epc/images/authors/
230: 0.67%: /epc/poetics/
207: 0.74%: /epc/connects/
183: 9.98%: /epc/ezines/tree/
163: 7.33%: /epc/sound/
148: 0.96%: /epc/mags/
143: 0.93%: /epc/presses/
137: 0.86%: /epc/documents/
129: 2.61%: /epc/rift/rift05/
120: 2.14%: /epc/rift/rift04/
109: 2.70%: /epc/epclive/
101: 2.36%: /epc/rift/rift01/
93: 2.08%: /epc/authors/bernstein/visual/
85: 1.18%: /epc/rift/
85: 0.11%: /epc/ezines/treehome/
82: 0.83%: /epc/authors/bernstein/
77: 0.19%: /epc/forms/
69: 0.66%: /epc/ezines/diu/
67: 0.05%: /epc/poetics/archive/
66: 0.13%: /epc/ezines/tinfish/tinfish01/
65: 0.79%: /epc/authors/joris/
64: 0.43%: /epc/forms/poem/
63: 0.26%: /epc/display/
58: 0.25%: /epc/biblioteca/
57: 0.04%: /epc/ezines/treehome/tree01/
55: 1.58%: /epc/rift/rift02/
48: 0.86%: /epc/rift/rift03/
47: 0.98%: /epc/ezines/exper/
44: 1.05%: /epc/authors/funkhouser/
44: 0.14%: /epc/linebreak/
43: 0.52%: /epc/ezines/spt/
43: 0.35%: /epc/documents/obits/
40: 0.63%: /epc/ezines/we/
38: 0.02%: /epc/authors/glazier/e/e/
36: 0.56%: /epc/documents/reading/
35: 0.58%: /epc/ezines/tinfish/
------------------------------------------------
End of Stats
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 16:06:09 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert J Wilson <rwilson@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: Covering Cherub
Comments: To: Jerry Rothenberg <jrothenb@CARLA.UCSD.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <9607092012.AA01799@carla.UCSD.EDU>
--
Dear Jerry,
I am on the Big Island of Hawaii now, really a sublime and sacred space,
and suggest that you ask Gab and HLAC to send you here to give an "Outer
Island" reading-- thre is is bookstore in Kamuela that is willing to host
you and would be perfect. Have to run now Wills get back to you soon.
Rob Wilson
On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, Jerry Rothenberg wrote:
> Dear Rob Wilson --
>
> Thanks for yours, & please feel free to send any essays/works etc. concerning
> local & Pacific matters. We'll be arriving there on the 4th of September
> & I understand from Gab Welford that there's a big Bamboo Ridge reading on
> the 5th, so certainly we'll plan to get to that one. I have an interest in
> all of that, so looking forward very much to this particular visit. Tell
> me if you have any ideas or suggestions, and in the meantime
>
> all good wishes
>
> JERRY
>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 20:26:05 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: tonight's HRs
Ho ho, I just got back from a poetry festival in Cape Town, to find that my
fantasy team is in first place by 10 games!
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 23:25:29 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eryque Gleason <eryque@ACMENET.NET>
Subject: Re: maria--/& performance
Rob H writ:
>I can understand your frustration. But:
>
>The best way to involve more women and people of color in this group
>is to invite them here, don't you think? Why slam others for being white
>or male, why transfer the abuse from patriarch to matriarch,
yeah, but. well, first, i don't think that's quite what emily was getting
at, but that's a side issue right now (although maybe not to emily, and
apologies if this is redundant, there's quite a few more messages waiting
to be read. y'allses have been talkative lately!)
could someone explain to me why, more or less, any marginalized group of
people would want to come into an area that is quite clearly not theirs
(economically speaking), has been colonized so thouroughly as to be left
dead for all newcomers? makes me think of when my aunt and uncle (who are
loaded) invite me over for thanksgiving dinner. sure, it's a free meal but
they've not once let me even sit in the '63 corvette, the biggest kick of
the evening is playing fetch with the (highly groomed and pedigreed)
elkhound while we watch football on the nine hundred inch television.
getting back to campus was always more comforting than aunt rita's
carefully-planned soft lighting (i think because i knew that it was, in
some sense, mine). might have something to do with the fact that they try
to pull of a blue-collar persona, spending more money on plastic bags in a
week than i could spend on all of my groceries. though i gotta admit,
those new heavy duty zippers are kinda cool, kept the leftovers from
spilling.
>But let's not
>show disrespect for the voices that have spoken.
so: i don't think anyone is particulary knocking those that have spoken
because they spake, but what they have speaketh-ed.
happy summering!
eryque
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 20:28:59 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: List wars
>db rites:
What does this mean? Has something happened to Bromige? I have been off the
continent.
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 00:17:30 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Emily Lloyd <emilyl@EROLS.COM>
Subject: Re: maria--/& performance
Rob to me:
>>But let's not
>>show disrespect for the voices that have spoken.
Eryque to Rob:
>so: i don't think anyone is particulary knocking those that have spoken
>because they spake, but what they have speaketh-ed.
>
I was thinking more along the lines not of what they have speaketh but the
*ways* in which "they" (and I'll change that to "we," which is what I
mean/t) sometimes speak in discussion. I don't think of aggressive, "I know
what I'm talking about" speech as a masc.-gendered thing (though it's
popularly supposed to be--to which I say--men are from Mars; women are from
Venus; I'm from suburban Virginia). And in most cases, I don't have a
problem with this kind of speech & often engage in it myself. It's cool for
you (Rob) to be "I know what I'm talking about" about the Stones' sloppy
rhythm guitar, because, well--(I'm convinced) you do. But I'd get anxious
about a bunch of white folks arguing that adamantly about race & eros in the
absence of voices of color, I think, & that's all. I respect the fact that
that may still offend you & others. As for inviting people to join, see
Eryque's message--and thanks for that, Eq. emily. sigh.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emily Lloyd emilyl@erols.com
"Emily said Emily said, Emily
is admittedly Emily"--G. Stein
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 00:24:32 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Diane Marie Ward <dward@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Fwd: New Orleans Performer List (fwd)
White Fields Press & The Literary Renaissance and others are planning
another Poetry Feast - this time in New Orleans. Please find below an
incredible list of performing poets - a "poetic dream team." Ron Whitehead
has surpassed himself and the previous Rants with this itinerary.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Diane Ward
dward@acsu.buffalo.edu
State University of New York at Buffalo
THE AESTHETE'S LIST : http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~dward/
"I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith, Was Jones, Were you?" -- George Orwell written in 1935.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 23:54:10 -0400
From: RWhiteBone@aol.com
To: dianemarieward <dward@acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Subject: Fwd: New Orleans Performer List
---------------------
RANT for the renaissance, The Majic Bus, & TRIBE present VOICES WITHOUT
RESTRAINT 48-Hour Non-Stop Music & Poetry INSOMNIACATHON at The New Orleans
Contemporary Arts Center and The Howlin Wolf Club August 16-18
PERFORMERS:
Amiri Baraka (poet, NJ), David Amram (musician, NY), Diane di Prima (poet,
CA),
Ed Sanders (poet, NY), The Iguanas, Storeyville, E. Ethelbert Miller (poet,
D.C.), Willie Smith (poet, CA), WAMO (poet, TX), Robert Creeley (poet, NY),
Ramblin' Jack Elliott (musician, CA), Robert Palmer (writer), Nicole Blackman
(poet, NY), Hersch Silverman (poet, NJ) & Channel Nine (musicians, NY),
Douglas Brinkley (writer, LA), Steve Dalachinsky (poet, NY), Frank Messina &
Spoken Motion (poet/musicians, NY), Louis Bickett & The Cultural Mudding
Ritual (poet/artist, KY), Yusef Komunyakaa (poet), Richard Hell
(poet/musician, NY), Mark Reese (filmmaker: Premiere documentary on Jackie
Robinson), Chris Iovenko (filmmaker: Harry Crews documentary), MouthAlmighty
& Bob Holman's THE UNITED STATES OF POETRY (New Orleans Premiere), Chris
Felver (photographer/filmmaker, Premiere of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
documentary), The Amazing Chan Klan (pop, KY), The Black Pig Liberation Front
(multi-media band of future here now, NY), Grand Passion (new wave from
Northeast), Tyrone Cotton (blues), Susi Wood (KY mountain folk), Erik LaPrade
(poet, NY), Brian Foye (poet, writer/Founder Kerouac Festival, MA), John
Rechy (writer, CA), Andrei Codrescu (renaissance man, LA), Jay McInerney
(writer), William S. Burroughs II (live phone conversation), James Grauerholz
(writer, KA), Ron Seitz (poet/writer, AZ), Jim McCrary (poet, KA), Ron
Whitehead (poet/writer, KY), John Sinclair (poet/musician, LA), Dennis
Formento (poet/writer, LA), Eleven Eleven (guilt punk, KY), Sander Hicks
(playwright/publisher, NY), Soft Skull Press (NY), Little Molasses Theatre
Company (production of RAPID CITY, NY), Matt Kohn (poet/photographer, NY),
Kalamu Yasalaam (poet/musician, LA), Denis Mahoney (poet/musician, RI),
Arthur Pfister (poet, LA), Hozomeen Press (NYC, CT, RI), Pop rocket Records
(CT), Ring Tarigh (RI), White Fields Press (KY, TX), the literary renaissance
(KY), COMPOST Magazine (NY, MA), Ralph Adamo (poet, LA), W. Loran Smith
(poet, KY), Umar Aki Williams (poet, KY), rich Martin (poet/musician, CT),
Kent Fielding (poet, AK), Todd Colby (poet, NY), John Deer (low punk),
Anastosias Kozaitis (poet, NY), Kevin Gallagher (poet, NY), Casey Cyr (poet,
NY), Phil Paradis (poet, KY), Lori Turner (poet, KY), The New Orleans Poetry
Forum, MESECHABE (LA), SPLEEN (KY), GREENPEACE, Bops, Crack, Boom! Press
(KY), Al McLaughlin (OH), Jordan Green (poet, KY), Will Kotheimer
(poet/filmmaker, KY), Wendy-Charly Lemmon (poet, LA), Paul McDonald (poet,
KY), NEMO (poet, NY), Annie McClanahan (poet, KY), Mickey Hess (novelist,
KY), Michelle Fowler (poet, CO), Andrea Roney (poet, KY), Heather Kolf (poet,
KY), IMPALA SUPER (scruff punk), John Hagan (writer, KY), Mike Forman
(poet/musician, KY), Bruce Beroff (poet, KY), Jeff Eckman (poet, KY), Debi
Coombs (poet, KY), J.B. Wilson (poet, KY), Kevin Coombs (poet, KY), Rebekah
Reeves (poet, KY), Paul Levitch (poet, KY), Luke Buckman (poet, KY), Deirdre
Skaggs (poet, KY), Gui Stuart (poet, KY), Amanda Hammons (poet, KY), David
Minton (poet, KY), Kelly Render (blues & country musician, KY), Matthew
Osborn (poet, KY), Randall Keenan (poet), Jason Powell (poet, KY), Cotton
Seiler (poet, KA), Michael Leonard (writer, NY), Allison Bona (poet, KY),
Aaron May (poet, KY), Margie Nicoll (poet, MA), Marina Karides (poet, MA),
Danielle Legros Georges (poet, NY), John Ryan (poet, MA), Seth Cohen (poet,
KY), Chris Kubicek (poet, FL), Reverend Jayne Praxis (poet, KY), Kirstin
Ogden (poet, AK), Gene Simmons (poet, AK), Kevin Johnson (poet, LA), Lee Grue
(poet/musician, LA), TRIBE Performers, Dorothy Henriques (playwright, LA),
Paul Chasse (poet/moto-biker), LA), Dr. Ahmos Zu-Bolton, LA), Christine
Trimbo (poet, LA), David Rowe (poet, LA), Dr. Jerry McGuire (poet, LA), Anne
Marie (poet, LA), John Bigunet (poet, LA), Cynthia Hogue (poet, LA), Kerry
Poree (poet, LA), Barbara Lamont (poet/singer, LA), Nancy Harris (poet, LA),
Dell Hall (poet, LA), Ben Gunn (poet/musician, LA) Andrea Gereighty (poet,
LA), Bonnie Fastring (poet, LA), Nancy Cotton (poet, LA), Chris Champagne
(poet, LA), Stan Bemis (poet, LA), Rene Broussard (video artist, LA), Mada
Plummer (poet, LA), Keith Clatyon (vibraphonist, LA), Karen Celesan (poet,
LA), Robin Harris Thompson (singer/poet, LA), Kyla Thompsom (9 year old
singer/poet, LA), Samara Jones (11 year old poet, LA), Michael Clatyon,
Valentine Pierce (poet, LA), Kerry Poree (poet, LA), Quo Vadis Gex Breaux
(poet, LA), Ted Graham (musician, LA), Gina Ferrera (poet, LA), Robert Menuet
(poet, LA), Clara Connell (poet, LA), plus more to be added plus last minute
special guest appearances.
EVENT SPONSORS:
the literary renaissance, White Fields Press, The Eisenhower Center for
American Studies & the Majic Bus at University of New Orleans, TRIBE
Magazine, The New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, The Howlin Wolf Club,
EXQUISITE CORPSE Magazine, The City of New Orleans, The New Orleans Poetry
Forum.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 00:54:52 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: maria--/& performance
At 11:25 PM 7/10/96, Eryque Gleason is rumored to have typed:
> Rob H writ:
> >I can understand your frustration. But:
> >
> >The best way to involve more women and people of color in this group
> >is to invite them here, don't you think? Why slam others for being white
> >or male, why transfer the abuse from patriarch to matriarch,
I appreciate your civility, Eryque. I will try to respond in kind,
you ulcerous flounder-mount.
> yeah, but. well, first, i don't think that's quite what emily was getting
> at, but that's a side issue right now
Is it really a side-issue? Would it be a side-issue if I commented
on a plethora of "overly-aggressive" women in this list? What exactly
was she getting at such a necessitated this backhanded compliment?
I'm not criticizing anyone's intention here: I presume our motives
are good ones. But but but: This--
> > Mostly I got worried & a little nauseated at the
> > prospect of a predominantly-white-membered list discussing "race & erotics"
> > esp. in the assertive and "I know what I'm talking about" voice
--seems an unfortunate choice of words, not because the passage is horribly
offensive, but because it stoops to the stereotyping it denounces.
> could someone explain to me why, more or less, any marginalized group of
> people would want to come into an area that is quite clearly not theirs
> (economically speaking)
Marginally speaking, I'm a Jew (on my mother's side).
Consider me privileged if you dare, but in the words of Joe Woods,
"anti-semitism is the socialism of fools." Also: I'd mention my
sexual orientation, but I'm trying to finish my sandwich.
Economically speaking, when I was nine, my parents divorced
and my mother was left with nothing. At fourteen, I lived with a
prostitute and paid my own rent (though I still took lessons, and
practiced piano almost every evening). Even now, my yearly income
defines me squarely as lower class. Yet I don't feel I've stumbled
into anyone else's economic territory.
> has been colonized so thouroughly as to be left
> dead for all newcomers?
Since I myself am a newcomer who doesn't take said colonization for
granted, and since there seems to be space here for my voice, why
shouldn't there be equal space for newer voices?
> makes me think of when my aunt and uncle (who are
> loaded) invite me over for thanksgiving dinner. sure, it's a free meal but
> they've not once let me even sit in the '63 corvette, the biggest kick of
> the evening is playing fetch with the (highly groomed and pedigreed)
> elkhound while we watch football on the nine hundred inch television.
> getting back to campus was always more comforting than aunt rita's
> carefully-planned soft lighting (i think because i knew that it was, in
> some sense, mine). might have something to do with the fact that they try
> to pull of a blue-collar persona, spending more money on plastic bags in a
> week than i could spend on all of my groceries. though i gotta admit,
> those new heavy duty zippers are kinda cool, kept the leftovers from
> spilling.
And enclosed within those bags are the leftovers of the poor:
*their own cadavers*. (Raus! Raus! Kommen Sie schnell!)
(The author wishes to apologize for characterizing Germans as nazis
and morbid humor as indigenously German. Why? Because I care, Enryque.)
This is funny stuff, and I like your eye for ironies. But your
loaded-relative analogy posits a loaded economic disparity.
> >But let's not
> >show disrespect for the voices that have spoken.
>
> so: i don't think anyone is particulary knocking those that have spoken
> because they spake, but what they have speaketh-ed.
(Are you suggesting that I write like an Elizabethan? Then blame it on my
parents: Mom quoted Hamlet whenever I burned my eggs. When it comes to
archaisms, I invoke the Menendez defense.)
I can understand anyone's problem with the "I know what I'm talking about"
argument, when conclusions are untested and reasons unexplained. But if
white males are the only perpetrators of this crime, then eugenicists
have had the right idea all along.
Death to reductivism! (Wait a minute--was that reductive?)
> happy summering!
> eryque
Sumer is icumen in
or so they sing at breakfast inns
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 00:28:51 +0000
Reply-To: jzitt@humansystems.com
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Authenticated sender is <jzitt@bga.com>
From: Joseph Zitt <jzitt@HUMANSYSTEMS.COM>
Organization: HumanSystems
Subject: Re: the guy and the gulf war
Comments: To: Joe Amato <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
On 10 Jul 96 at 9:22, Joe Amato wrote:
> for one, i think what's necessary, and this pace dodie's hammering on the
> white middleclass, is to pull apart some of these categories we rely on...
The way I hear it (from lotsa nonrigorous eavesdropping), the
middleclass tend to be those whose incomes are in a range from
slightly below the speaker's to slightly above. It's kind of the way
that people think that "the Rich" who should be heavily taxed are
those who earn more than a little more than they do.
I've bounced ridiculously among economic brackets in recent years,
but have always felt middle class. But friends of mine who live in
hovels with intermittent electricity, as well as those who live in
mansions with lotsa household help think of themselves as
middleclass, too.
But this probably isn't news to anyone.
---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1----------
|||/ Joseph Zitt ==== jzitt@humansystems.com ===== Dallas, Texas \|||
||/ Question Authority, The == SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List \||
|/ http://www.realtime.net/~jzitt == <*> <*> == The Data Wranglers! \|
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 22:56:31 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: riposte
In-Reply-To: <199607110409.AAA15909@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
This time my response to Robert von Hallberg got to the poetics list
before his message -- This may mean that he has rejected my advice to
sign onto the list if he wants to continue the discussion in public, and
that he is waiting for Keith Tuma to return home to forward his message
-- who knows -- It will appear here some day I am sure --
and by the by -- just got a letter from David Bromige, who is just fine,
and I thought that was the abbrev. for decibels anyway --
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 23:42:21 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: the guy and the gulf war
Comments: To: jzitt@humansystems.com
At 1:28 AM 7/11/96, Joseph Zitt wrote:
>On 10 Jul 96 at 9:22, Joe Amato wrote:
>
>> for one, i think what's necessary, and this pace dodie's hammering on the
>> white middleclass, is to pull apart some of these categories we rely on...
>
>The way I hear it (from lotsa nonrigorous eavesdropping), the
>middleclass tend to be those whose incomes are in a range from
>slightly below the speaker's to slightly above. It's kind of the way
>that people think that "the Rich" who should be heavily taxed are
>those who earn more than a little more than they do.
>
>I've bounced ridiculously among economic brackets in recent years,
>but have always felt middle class. But friends of mine who live in
>hovels with intermittent electricity, as well as those who live in
>mansions with lotsa household help think of themselves as
>middleclass, too.
This is Dodie Bellamy speaking.
I think that you two Joes are equating class with money, which is, I think,
a rather narrow definition. I was raised in a background where not being
on welfare was social climbing. My father, who quit school in the 7th
grade, got into the carpenter's union and was very proud of never being on
welfare--unlike his sibblings. He made more money probably than either of
you two, but our family never approached being middle class--the middle
class was this alien world whose members we called Mr. and Mrs., but we
were called by our first names.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 09:50:34 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: R I Caddel <R.I.Caddel@DURHAM.AC.UK>
Subject: Invisible books
In-Reply-To: <199607110401.FAA13544@hermes.dur.ac.uk>
Ah - OK if I just mention a couple of new books? Call it my monthly shot=20
or whatever....
NEW FROM INVISIBLE BOOKS :
Bill Griffiths : Rousseau & The Wicked : =A35.50 : 0 9521256 3 3
=0914
=09A man in a silver suit.
=09A briefcase left in a minority-interest club.
=09And a cabal of business and government.
=09The agenda of a banana county.
=09Not lasses of lotional warm-flower skin
=09not wives of cracky chat / matrons
=09But a senate that kisses horses.
and here's one for the list:
=0929
=09What better disguise for evil
=09than sonnets?
=09How can you divide
=09without rhyme?
=09How can you obey
=09without art?
=09O be ready
=09there are some sick mysteries and mirages
=09in the sweetest story.
And Due Soon from Invisible Books:
Catherine Walsh : Idir Eatortha & Making Tents : =A35.50 : 0 9521256 4 1
Invisible Books are available direct from the publishers:
INVISIBLE BOOKS, BM INVISIBLE, LONDON WC1N 3XX
or from SPD
Thanks. Same place next month then?
Richard Caddel
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 04:33:46 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: The List
173 messages in three days? Boy, am I glad that I have the digest
option. Still, there are problems with it -- it makes it hard, for
example, to save just Simon's elegant synopsis of M. Yeh's article
(which I found fascinating and actually not too dissimilar a history
from what one might have expected in the old USSR circa 1980). One
problem is that in replying to a single message out of a large bundle,
one does tend to forget just who said what, so that leads to writing
"someone" when one should have written "Joe Amato," for example.
Nobody's written about Lorenzo Thomas as a Texas poet either. He is one
of literally hundreds of regionally dispersed (and from the perspective
of a "national scene" thus marginalized) poets doing great work in this
country.
I recall once seeing a great long poem of his in, of all places,
Monthly Review, tho I don't think that work is captured in The Bathers.
Does anybody out there in cyberspace have a copy from which they could
make me a xerox?
It was also a piece of his in Monthly Review, I think, that first
turned me onto the work of Frank Stanford.
And nobody's written yet about that other category of "vermin" (to use
Mr Levy's paradigm), writers working in the computer industry, of which
this list has many examples (some of them also in the pure lurker mode
too). I even saw the PR manager for the Bank of America on the
directory the last time I checked it on the EPC (Hi, Peter).
All of the lists that I'm on that have heavy academic participation are
quieter than the city of Paris during the month of July right now (viz.
the Cage list, which is taking its name "silence" too literally).
So, yes, I do want to note that I am aware that there are varieties of
lurking (I do a fair amount of it myself), the only kind of which I
find truly obnoxious being the ones who, when you talk to them in
person, complain about how "low level" the discourse here is. As if
their nonparticipation weren't one of the defining conditions of same!
But 173 messages in three days? Wowie zowie.
Ron Silliman
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 08:23:38 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail politics
In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 10 Jul 1996 16:38:10 -0400 from
<mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
On Wed, 10 Jul 1996 16:38:10 -0400 Mark Wallace said:
>
>So, here's my riddle. I'll bet if you said "poetry and poetry criticism"
>have a fundamentally generative and symbiotic relation, a larger
>proportion of those people who write criticism mainly would agree,
>whereas a lesser number of people who mainly write poetry would agree. In
>fact I bet it would make some poets actively annoyed. I'd love responses
>to this riddle: is what I'm saying true, or not? If it is true, why?
Poets & critics go together like firemen & insurance companies, like
doctors and lawyers, like big sister and the kid who tags along, like
whales & barnacles, like doctors and leeches, like leeches and fish,
like fish and lemons, like lemons and lawyers. Drive on.
Poets don't write, they are written. Critics are smitten; they write.
Poetry better be good enough for criticism; otherwise, it's just
criticism.
Critics live in the world created by poets and bequeath it to the little
baby barnacles of the future.
- Henry Gould (forthcoming in "Opie's Post Humors: the Nervous Tics of
An Aphorism" Peter Lang Press, 1997, $800. if you order early)
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 08:41:47 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 10 Jul 1996 13:33:23 -0400 from
<AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
On Wed, 10 Jul 1996 13:33:23 -0400 Rod Smith said:
>Well, an eastern or Wittgensteinian approach wld be a contextual approach--
>an understanding of context as multiply & complexly constitutive. The
>emphasis being not only on what we can "compute" but also upon
>acknowledgement that any given context is more complexly constituted than one
>can apprehend-- which is why intuition is such a powerful & real aspect of
>our experience & also why it is so individualized.
>
>Seems to me both Wittgenstein & aspects of buddhist & taoist thought share a
>concern with pointing out limits of apprehension & *using them.* One cld also
>talk about Duchamp in these terms.
My response is typically arrogant Western: yes, the context is there - so
what? What can you DO with it? The poem is made of choices - it's the spine
on which context attaches itself like a barnacle. Elena Shvarts (a St.
Petersburg westerner) said to me at the Hoboken conference: "Americans use
the poem to find out what they're going to say. That's why they don't
memorize & recite like the Russians." (this is a very rough adaptation
of what she said to me). Choices give the edge, the structure, the limit,
the character. At least in my imagination. It's the leap - even if
it's into the dark. - Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 09:08:26 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Larry Price <Lppl@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
What I find suggestive in this thread about poetics is all that, in it,
points toward the "problem" of poetic language. The bit Rod paraphrased from
Olson is of course relatively early. A much more accurate token of Olson's
practice would be the Black Chrysanthemum: that which exists through itself
is what is called meaning. But that which exists in and of itself isn't
necessarily going to be FOR itself or even for _an_ other. That is, as a term
it's going to exist outside language. But then I think it's clear there are
agencies by which one thing _becomes_ another thing. And why I agree with Rod
about transparency. That is, to posit language at all as _a_ thing (esp. one
outside the zeitgeist) DENIES it the agency which otherwise does get the fly
out of the flybottle - ie, poetic language as the transformation of one thing
into another thing, either one of which or both may exist OF it/themselves
but which, in the elision, the agency, casts forward for us - often the
feeling is _into us_ - the possibility that that meaning _would_ be. It's
that heuristic call forward of poetic language that tells me I no longer need
the eternal moods of the bleak wind to ground my agency. Rather it's the
swirling motion of that call forward - the adequacy of it and by implication
and in general poetic language - that I think I respond to in, say,
Dickinson, Villon, or Sappho, and not some iron ribbing in language.
Larry
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 09:27:49 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 11 Jul 1996 09:08:26 -0400 from <Lppl@AOL.COM>
On Thu, 11 Jul 1996 09:08:26 -0400 Larry Price said:
>agencies by which one thing _becomes_ another thing. And why I agree with Rod
>about transparency. That is, to posit language at all as _a_ thing (esp. one
>outside the zeitgeist) DENIES it the agency which otherwise does get the fly
>out of the flybottle - ie, poetic language as the transformation of one thing
>into another thing, either one of which or both may exist OF it/themselves
>but which, in the elision, the agency, casts forward for us - often the
>feeling is _into us_ - the possibility that that meaning _would_ be. It's
>that heuristic call forward of poetic language that tells me I no longer need
>the eternal moods of the bleak wind to ground my agency. Rather it's the
>swirling motion of that call forward - the adequacy of it and by implication
>and in general poetic language - that I think I respond to in, say,
>Dickinson, Villon, or Sappho, and not some iron ribbing in language.
This is very interesting and sounds like a transcription of, yes, here we
go again, Mandelstam's essay "Coversation about Dante" where he distinguishes
between the transformative impulse and the replaceable materials of
language. But I don't think I posited language as a thing or denied
it's agency or said it was outside the zeitgeist - I said it mastered
the zeitgeist by being free comprehension WITHIN the zeitgeist, and that
this activity of language is a kind of constant, an activity if you like,
within the changing pressures of history. - Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 09:58:09 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: Loesser NY sch pts
Rod-- it says Bibliophasia Reprint Service... epigram's from Lewis Warsh,
"...my life with each new drug starting anew...", toc reads as follows,
Dick Gallup, Larry Fagin, Charlie Vermont, Kit Robinson, Tom Veitch, Joe
Brainard, Stephen Rodefer, Joseph Ceravolo, Alice Notley, Lewis Warsh,
Maureen Owen, Hilton Obenzinger, Merrill Gilfillan, Alan Senauke, Harris
Schiff, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, Jamie MacInnis, Ted Greenwald, Bill
Berkson, Alan Bernheimer, Tony Towle, Simon Schuchat, Michael Brownstein,
John Godfrey, Robert Creeley, Peter Schjeldahl, Tom Clark, Michael-Sean
Lazarchuck, Jim Brodey.. 'it' is th little golden book of lesser ny school
poets.. J
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 08:24:14 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: Re[2]: List wars
testing
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 10:08:47 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Pierre Joris <joris@CSC.ALBANY.EDU>
Subject: George Orwell, informer (fwd)
& now for something completely different.... Pierre
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 11 Jul 96 02:48:37 EDT
From: John Whiting <100707.731@CompuServe.COM>
To: Forum KPFA <freekpfa@coco.ca.rop.edu>
Subject: George Orwell, informer
No apologies for this "off-topic" posting. Without indulging
in simplistic analogies, this revelation echoes endlessly
down the halls of KPFA's history - Orwell's essay on "Politics
and the English Language", for instance, was broadcast again
and again on Pacifica stations.
Perhaps the bottom line is Ezra Pound's plaintive cry,
"Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a
time."
John
#########################################################
The [London] Guardian July 11 1996
ORWELL OFFERED WRITERS' BLACKLIST TO ANTI-SOVIET PROPAGANDA
UNIT
Richard Norton-Taylor and Seumas Milne
GEORGE ORWELL, the socialist author, offered to provide a
secret Foreign Office propaganda unit linked to the
intelligence services with names of writers and journalists
he regarded as "crypto-communist" and "fellow-travellers"
who could not be trusted, documents released yesterday at
the Public Record Office reveal.
He made the offer in 1949, shortly before he died, to the
covert Information Research Department, which used well-
known writers and publishers - including Bertrand Russell,
Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler - to produce anti-
communist material during the cold war. Documents also show
that the IRD singled out articles from Tribune, the leftwing
but then anti-Soviet paper, to back up its hidden crusade.
In March 1949 an IRD official, Celia Kirwan, visited Orwell
at a sanatorium in Cranham, Gloucestershire, where he was
suffering from tuberculosis. "I discussed some aspects of
our work with him in great confidence," she told her
colleagues. "He was delighted to learn of them, and
expressed his wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of our
aims."
Although too ill to write himself, he gave the names of
potential contributors. Early the following month, Orwell
wrote to Kirwan offering to give her "a list of journalists
and writers who in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow-
travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted... "
He said his notebook with the names was at his home in
London. He insisted that the list was "strictly
confidential" since it would be libellous to call somebody a
"fellow-traveller."
The revelation is likely to shock many of Orwell's admirers,
for whom he is a 20th century radical icon. The files
released yesterday do not contain the list of names but a
card placed next to Orwell's letter to Kirwan says that a
document has been withheld by the Foreign Office.
Bernard Crick, Orwell's biographer, confirmed yesterday that
Orwell had kept a "notebook of suspects" containing 86
names. "Many were plausible, a few were far-fetched and
unlikely," he said. Michael Foot, a friend of Orwell's in
the 1930s and 1940s, said he found the letter "amazing".
"There's been a lot of argument about him deserting his
socialism at the end of his life. I don't think that's
true, but I'm very surprised he was dealing with the secret
services in any form."
The papers show that the IRD promoted the foreign language
publication of Animal Farm, Orwell's classic anti-communist
allegory. "The idea is particularly good for Arabic in view
of the fact that both pigs and dogs are unclean animals to
Muslims," noted an embassy official in Cairo.
The unit feared communism in Saudi Arabia, notably among oil
workers in Dhahran, the scene of last month's bombing of an
American base.
The IRD arranged the distribution of Tribune to British
missions abroad. Officials noted: "[It] combines the
resolute exposure of communism and its methods with the
consistent championship of those objectives which leftwing
sympathisers normally support".
They added: "Many articles in it can be effectively turned
to this department's purposes."
Documents show that the IRD was closely involved with the
Trades Union Congress, lobbied against unions supporting the
National Council for Civil Liberties, and played an active
role in splitting the international union movement in the
late 1940s.
A note from a senior IRD official in 1949 warned that the
NCCL (now renamed Liberty) was "heavily communist-penetrated
and is in fact... being used for little if nothing more than
attacking our colonial administration and policies at every
opportunity".
The "persuasion" was done through the TUC, where IRD's main
contact was Vic Feather, who later became general secretary.
###########################################################
This is the text of George Orwell's letter to Celia Kirwan
of Whitehall's secret Information Research Department.
"I DID suggest DARCY GILLY, (Manchester Guardian) didn't I?
There is also a man called CHOLLERTON (expert on the Moscow
trials) who cld be contacted through the Observer.
Cranham
6.4.49.
Dear Celia,
I haven't written earlier because I have really been rather
poorly, and I can't use the typewriter even now, so I hope
you will be able to cope with my handwriting.
I couldn't think of any more names to add to your possible
list of writers except FRANZ BORKENAU (the Observer would
know his address) whose name I think I gave you, and GLEB
STRUVE (he's at Pasadena in California at present), the
Russian translator and critic. Of course there are hordes
of Americans, whose names can be found in the (New York) New
Leader, the Jewish monthly paper "Commentary", and the
Partisan Review. I could also, if it is of any value, give
you a list of journalists and writers who in my opinion are
crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way
and should not be trusted as propagandists. But for that I
shall have to send for a notebook which I have at home, and
if I do give you such a list it is strictly confidential ...
Just one idea occurred to me for propaganda not abroad but
in this country. A friend of mine in Stockholm tells me
that as the Swedes didn't make films of their own one sees a
lot of German and Russian films, and some of the Russian
films, which of course would not normally reach this
country, are unbelievably scurrilous anti-British
propaganda. He referred especially to a historical film
about the Crimean war. As the Swedes can get hold of these
films I suppose we can; might it not be a good idea to have
showings of some of them in this country ...
I read the enclosed article with interest, but it seems to
me anti-religious rather than anti-semitic. For what my
opinion is worth, I don't think anti-anti-semitism is a
strong card to play in anti-Russian propaganda. The USSR
must in practice be somewhat anti-semitic, as it is opposed
both to Zionism within its own borders and on the other hand
to the liberalism and internationalism of the non-Zionist
Jews, but a polyglot state of that kind can never be
officially anti-semitic, in the Nazi manner, just as the
British Empire cannot. If you try to tie up Communism with
anti-semitism, it is always possible in reply to point to
people like Kaganovich or Anna Pauleer, also to the large
number of Jews in the Communist parties everywhere. I also
think it is bad policy to try to curry favour with your
enemies. The Zionists Jews everywhere hate us and regard
Britain as the enemy, more even than Germany. Of course
this is based on misunderstanding, but as long as it is so I
do not think we do ourselves any good by denouncing anti-
semitism in other nations.
I am sorry I can't write a better letter, but I really have
felt so lousy the last few days. Perhaps a bit later I'll
get some ideas.
With love,
George.'
END
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 10:13:45 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: W's fly, lppl's ground
Some problems with flies and bottles:
There may be sugar in the bottle.
It may be a Klein bottle.
That is, poetry is not _only_ a game with restrictive rules, but it can
productively be so. Or, someone accustomed to thinking of poetry writing as
rule-governed behavior would think of the 'call-forward' of language as a
rule-system that was claiming transcendence from rule-systems? Inspiration?
What film studies people call 'diogesis'?
Rules is obviously the wrong word.
Is calling it 'language' positing it as a 'thing'? Reification as
productive mistake. Normalization, enforcement, of productive mistakes as
tyranny?
More please about this 'calling-forward'.
Jordan
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 09:18:33 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: white rose
hey everyone, just saw the beat exhibit at the walker art center here in mpls.
i'd seeen it very briefly in nyc, but like it better in mpls (howz that for a
surprise! a pleasant one). i was especially touched by the way jay defeo's
white rose is lit --it has a radiance that seems to come from inside of it, that
makes it look as if its actually growing larger and breathing as one gazes --and
the short film of its removal from her sf apt (by --is it bruce conners?) almost
had me in tears. i think it's going west (ca) next, tho i'm not sure where.
sf? probly.
and get this, the African American special collections at the university's
library has the original typed ms of an unpublished bob kaufman poem,
"hospitalgram," now on display in the exhibit. wow. my very own institution
finally has something i can write home about. maybe this'll be a good year
after all.
optimistically yrs, md
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 10:12:12 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Onward: Contemporary etc.
Addendum to previous post: if you agree with Larry Price that language
is not so much a thing as the shadow of a transformative activity (this
is bad shorthand), the call or gesture of possible meaning, then perhaps
it's not language but poetry-making which is the "constant", persistent
thing pervading the "zeitgeist" - a bridge between the oracle and the prophet
to the demotic & mundane (Al Cook frames his recent book around this tandem).
Because, through conversation and constructive signalling, it REACHES the
timebound, it becomes the door for the prophetic - doesn't transcend just
the zeitgeist but ordinary Time itself (time in its tapeworm or metronome
aspect) - door into the carnival, liminal, mardigras, playground area.
- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 10:30:56 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Dean Taciuch <dtaciuch@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry
>P.S.-- yes, I know it wasn't that simple for Olson.
I'm working now on recasting the paper I read at Orono--it was on Olson and
Wittgenstein (and there was a short passage on Buddhist methods as well).
Anyway, yes, coming from a Wittgensteinian perspective, Olson's "stance"
runs into a limit:I had cast this in terms of language games--within a
particular game, one can try to "project" ("from where the poet got it,
over to, etc"). But once one leaves that game, there's the limit of common
usage. The example, for me, is Olson's vision or version of the Maya--as
much as he sets them up as models for the projective stance, they're not.
As much as he admires their way of being in the world, he can't be them.
And the language he uses to describe them (as "animals") reveals the limits
of the language (Western aesthetics) he has available to him, the language
game in which he is involved.
I want to explore the individual applications of this--to what extent do
these limits exist between individuals in the same language game?
"Limits / are what any of us / are inside of"
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 10:49:54 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Dean Taciuch <dtaciuch@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
>What I find suggestive in this thread about poetics is all that, in it,
>points toward the "problem" of poetic language. The bit Rod paraphrased from
>Olson is of course relatively early. A much more accurate token of Olson's
>practice would be the Black Chrysanthemum: that which exists through itself
>is what is called meaning. But that which exists in and of itself isn't
>necessarily going to be FOR itself or even for _an_ other. That is, as a term
>it's going to exist outside language.
Compare Wittgestein's formulation of meaning as "use." That keeps it
within the langauge, doesn't it? And does Olson's sense of the "only
absolute" as "this instant, in action" bring him closer to Wittgestein's
sense of meaning ("in action" -- "in use")? That is, that which exists in
and of itself within this instant, in action, would be use. I'm sure I'm
oversimplifying here; I mean, Olson doesn't simply collapse into
Wittgenstein. But can such an approach point out the limits of Olson's
stance (or of _any_ stance)?
Dean Taciuch
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 10:50:00 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Emily Lloyd <emilyl@EROLS.COM>
Subject: Re: maria/&performance
Rob Hardin--ok, one last time, because I couldn't tell if you'd read my
response to Eryque before you wrote your response to him--*nowhere* in my
post did I say "white male." Nowhere! When I say "white-membered," and you
assume white male, that's problematic (unless you thought that "member" was
used in the euphemistic anatomical sense). To read it as male when it isn't
specified that way is not to read it, but to have a knee-jerk reaction
(assuming I'd "bash" white males) or to be wildly male-centric. So, what's
on that sandwich? & please, no "look ma, I'm marginalized!" contests, ok?
Really reductionary. "I myself am a newcomer who doesn't take said
colonization for granted" reflects more on you (not a value judgment, there)
than on whether or not there's "colonization." over & over & out, emily
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emily Lloyd emilyl@erols.com
"Emily said Emily said, Emily
is admittedly Emily"--G. Stein
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 11:14:13 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: critics vs. poets (tag team round three)
Dear Maria:
Absolutely I would not suggest that poetry critics get off this
list--the presence of yourself, Marjorie Perloff, many others too
numerous to name make this list both more engaging and complex AND
intellectually frustrating, which for the most part is all to the good. I
guess my thinking has more to do with the social structures that
intersect with/underlie the roles of both poet and poetry critic. We'd
all like to think of ourselves as individuals, because we are, but it can
be much more difficult to recognize that we are also all moving inside a
very complex institutionalized social network that we simultaneously
critique and constitute, to various degrees (and even those people on
this list who don't work in colleges--and thankfully there are many of
them--have some relation to other kinds of institutionalization).
At the various colleges where I teach part-time, I would
absolutely love to have colleagues like yourself, that is, literary
theorists and critics who recognize not only that contemporary poetry is
a worthwhile endeavor, but even, frankly, that it exists. I don't want to
name names here, but at one college where I teach, the one critic who
knew anything about contemporary poetry was let go after several years
(funding, etc), and there are only several other people who have even
HEARD of language poetry, say. At another where I teach, I've become good
friends with an older scholar who studied with Yvor Winters, and has a
different sense of poetics entirely (he does, however, teach Ashbery and
O'Hara, say) and yet has come to like me because it seems to him that I'm
one of
the few people in the department who actually reads contemporary poetry
(there are some others, poets primarily but not exclusively). There are
certainly mainly good scholars at both schools, but poetry is simply not a
primary concern for many critics at the moment ANYWHERE, as you well know.
This
older scholar, for instance, is fond of complaining about someone else in
the department who once said to him, "But you know, we don't want to
privelege literature."
So I guess I would say that the problem is not the presence of
individuals like yourself, by any means, but rather a cultural
environment in which, increasingly, critics read other critics as if
those other critics were the only "field" of writing that matters much.
Clearly, inside such a situation, critics like yourself and Marjorie and
Peter Quartermain, etc, constitute a presence that can be only beneficial
to poets. On the other hand, the fact remains that inside an academic
context, only certain kinds of writing are allowed to be labelled
"critical." That, for instance, was one of the points behind the
collection I've mentioned on this list before, A POETICS OF CRITCISM,
edited by Juliana Spahr, Kristin Prevallet, Pam Rehm, and myself--in that
collection were a whole host of clearly "critical" essays which, because
of their non-standard form, simply can't be recognized as such in any
institutional context. Do their writers want such recognition? In some
cases yes, in some cases, probably no. But until a whole multiplicity of
writing processes are recognized as "critical," I think that even those
poets highly aware of criticism and literary theory will continue to have
skepticism not so much of individual critics, but of a whole
institutionalized system which valorizes the "dispassionate, objective"
observer at the expense of any other mode of critical engagement.
mark wallace
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 08:18:36 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bill Luoma/Vanstar <Bill_Luoma@VANSTAR.COM>
Subject: Poets, Critics, and Computrix
Ron,
The computer industry is really cool.
"The Regional Analyst may need to assist the Logistics Analyst with part
escalations and will seek the aid of the Logistics Analyst in the de-escalation
of the 'people' escalations."
Bill
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 08:28:25 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: James Brook <jbrook@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Re: George Orwell, informer (fwd)
Pierre, thanks for forwarding the disheartening news about George Orwell.
It's sad to hear that he aided--or attempted to aid--secret British anticommunist
propaganda and provided the names of "unreliable" people. On the other hand,
it's not shocking that he did so. At the end of the Second World War the independent
left was fragmented and disorganized, and Stalinism was triumphant. Many anti-
Stalinist leftists found it tempting to support Western liberal democracy against
what they considered the greater enemy--just as they had supported liberal
democracy against the Nazis. After all, it was the separate efforts of
the Nazis, supporting Franco, and the Communists, supporting the Spanish
Republic, that crushed all chances for a social revolution during the
Spanish Civil War, in which Orwell fought. (This story is told very well in
Ken Loach's recent film, Land and Freedom.) I think this is the context for
Orwell's turn--a turn parodied thirty years later by Octavio Paz, who came to see
the U.S. as a great friend in the struggle against what Reagan called "the
Evil Empire." (Speculating on personal motivation, I imagine that Orwell felt
desperate and isolated. But Paz? I don't know--was it stupidity and
opportunism? And then there's the question of the writers and poets who
remained true to their fascism and Stalinism; e.g., Pound and Neruda.)
--James Brook
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 08:48:50 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael Davidson <rdavidson@UCSD.EDU>
Subject: research stipends at ANP
The Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego is
offering small stipends (ca $500.00) to graduate students and scholars
interested in working in the archive. The funds can cover travel expenses or
lodging/per diem while in San Diego. The Archive, in addition to its
extensive collection of small press poetry monographs, magazines, broadsides
and tapes, owns the papers of a number of writers: George Oppen, Charles
Reznikoff, James Schuyler, Jerome Rothenberg, Joanne Kyger, Paul Blackburn,
Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Joe Brainard, Jackson MacLow, Clayton Eshleman,
John Taggart, David Bromige, editor, Donald Allen, United Artists Press. For
further information about the stipends, contact Lynda Claassen, Dept. of
Special Collections, University Library, University of California, San
Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 (619-534-2533).
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 12:32:32 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
Judy--
I'd like to hear more abt the Abrams book. Terence McKenna's an interesting
nut dealing a bit with similar issues. How, exactly, does "the alphabet
distort perception"
Henry--
we seem to be talking past each other. You wrote
"I think we're all roaring with hunger for those very packages, & that's
why packaged truth, & poetry, & anthologies, are so winning... "
in response to my "many APR folks seem to see meaning as a package to be
delivered."
I wasn't talking about commodification's pros or cons, at all. Nor was I
talking about mastering historical epics -- a truth package I'd just as soon
send back unopened thank you. I'm talking Wittgenstein & Tsong Khapa, you're
talking Hegel (which is cool) & Helen Vendler (which sucks) -- seems a little
hopeless, but maybe not.
Your question "Why do some artworks still grip us while others seem hackneyed
by
timebound blinders?" -- The key word in this sentence for me is "us." It
privileges the "masterpiece" over the "timebound." & who decides what's
hackneyed & on what basis is a question that matters. Is that "us" the
Zeitgeist you're talking? Is it some kinda Jungian thing, this Zeitgeist? Or
worse, some kinda ideologically unaware masquerade with power aplenty. This
seems the appeal of Jameson's totalizing in academia, the idea that "the era"
can be apprehended-- when such almost always turns out to be an exercise in
excluding/dismissing what don't fit the critic's lens cap. . . . I wouldn't
dismiss it, but. . . I would like to be able to.
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 11:45:32 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
>Well, an eastern or Wittgensteinian approach wld be a contextual approach--
>an understanding of context as multiply & complexly constitutive. The
>emphasis being not only on what we can "compute" but also upon
>acknowledgement that any given context is more complexly constituted than one
>can apprehend-- which is why intuition is such a powerful & real aspect of
>our experience & also why it is so individualized.
>
>Seems to me both Wittgenstein & aspects of buddhist & taoist thought share a
>concern with pointing out limits of apprehension & *using them.* One cld also
>talk about Duchamp in these terms.
Many thanks, Rod, for the clarification.
I would add, at least for Buddhist thought (and I think it's true for
Wittgenstein as well) that it is not only context, but that language
necessarily distorts/hides/distracts/etc., language as the great deceiver.
Was this implicit in your comments? No news here, but often forgotten. I
think this is what Wittgenstein means by his "fly out of the fly-bottle"
remark, but not being a Wittgenstein scholar am relying on intuition here.
Also, at least some Buddhist practices hold up the hope of direct
apprehension -- "limits of apprehension" are (themselves) delusions, cut
through them and BINGO there you be. But the categories used to describe
context are not relevant here, being, you should excuse the expression,
empty.
Cheers.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 12:34:09 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 11 Jul 1996 12:32:32 -0400 from
<AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
On Thu, 11 Jul 1996 12:32:32 -0400 Rod Smith said:
>we seem to be talking past each other. You wrote
>
>"I think we're all roaring with hunger for those very packages, & that's
>why packaged truth, & poetry, & anthologies, are so winning... "
>
>in response to my "many APR folks seem to see meaning as a package to be
>delivered."
>
>I wasn't talking about commodification's pros or cons, at all. Nor was I
>talking about mastering historical epics -- a truth package I'd just as soon
>send back unopened thank you. I'm talking Wittgenstein & Tsong Khapa, you're
>talking Hegel (which is cool) & Helen Vendler (which sucks) -- seems a little
>hopeless, but maybe not.
Now you do got me confused, Rod. Maybe I am missing the finer grain
(linguistics Wittgensteinian) of what you're saying, granted. But my
"roaring with hunger" comment does seem apropos to your making a distinction
between "APR folks" & us avant-garde Eastern folks. My response is
that absorbing ideas & hunches in bits & pieces small & large is
just a human trait.
As for historical epics - huh? When did I bring that in? Helen
Vendler? Wha?
>
>Your question "Why do some artworks still grip us while others seem hackneyed
>by
>timebound blinders?" -- The key word in this sentence for me is "us." It
>privileges the "masterpiece" over the "timebound." & who decides what's
>hackneyed & on what basis is a question that matters. Is that "us" the
>Zeitgeist you're talking? Is it some kinda Jungian thing, this Zeitgeist? Or
>worse, some kinda ideologically unaware masquerade with power aplenty. This
>seems the appeal of Jameson's totalizing in academia, the idea that "the era"
>can be apprehended-- when such almost always turns out to be an exercise in
>excluding/dismissing what don't fit the critic's lens cap. . . . I wouldn't
>dismiss it, but. . . I would like to be able to.
Let me quote from Hermann Nautical of Liebfraumilch Univ. again on this one:
"Der Zeitgeist, ja. Der Zeitgeist, vell let me zee. Ja. Vell. Iss ven
owl de multifuriowze aspektes uff de hysterical period, ja, ezpecially
in de art un kultur, exhibit ein kind uff unity of characterizticks und
exprezzions across de many many varied fielts uff endeavors. Unt let
me recomment to you unt to everyboody on de liszt a ferry interesting
book in dis regardt: "Terrible Honesty" by Ann Douglas, about 20s New
York in de US uff A."
- And let me just add to Prof. Nautical's comments the following:
you say the key word is "us". I assume you mean as in Goethe's famous
remark, "The enemy is us." Whut ah wuz tryin t'say wuz that the really
heavy-duty poetry, drama, prose, etc. has this primordial human
quality that conquers all the particular "us's" of a particular age -
those cussed us's that usually vaunt what is most timebound as the
"great works of the age". Of course in the suspicious academia of
today any expression of overly-strong emotion for past works of
art is regarded as hopelessly recherche, don't you think?
- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 10:50:29 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: door prize --
The first person to correctly identify Paul Laurence Dunbar as the author
of the poem "To a Captious Critic" is the incredibly well-read Alan
Golding -- who gets as his prize a lovely paperback volume of literary
criticism (just what he wants more of, no doubt) --
Watch this space for further contests -- keep reading those poems!
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 13:04:52 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: poecrititry
These battles between poets & critics seem to be forgetting that some of the
best critics are poets. Like Rachel Blau du Plessis & Charles Bernstein &
Ron Silliman & many others.
Personally I tend to read a lot more essays/criticism by "poets" than I do
by "scholars," but even stating this makes my stomach turn a bit, as if
assuming that these are necessarily separate camps. Are they? Why?
BUT I am not certain this fact is so recognized by the editors/sponsors of
such journals as PMLA, ELH, Contemporary Literature, & various others. I am
definitely speaking off the hip here, and without recent experience with
so-called scholarly journals, and would love to be corrected to find out
that, say, one of these journals would be as open to a critical piece
written by a non-university poet with no Ph.D., as, for example, a journal
like Chain is to an essay by Maria Damon or a poem by a lit professor with
full accreditation.
I hope I'm not adding flame to the fire, as I'd really rather heal the rifts
between poets & critics than extend them.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:38:26 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
Henry wrote: "As for historical epics - huh? When did I bring that in?
Helen
Vendler? Wha?"
On 7/10 Henry wrote:
"It's language talking through the obsessions and
neuroses & sleepwalking and timeserving of an era - not denying it, but
mastering it & throwing light on it"
also the term "zeitgeist" you used originally & since is defined as "the
spirit of the time." May be a little unfair to accuse you of Vendlerism but
confidence in the existence of a or the "zeitgeist" seems loaded with that
crap to me. This is not to deny historical processes-- but they are that, I
believe, processes, multiple, & only partially apprehendable. I like the
Goethe ("The enemy is us") but of course from many perspectives the enemy is
legitimately "them."
You said today: "Whut ah wuz tryin t'say wuz that the really
heavy-duty poetry, drama, prose, etc. has this primordial human
quality that conquers all the particular "us's" of a particular age"
This I don't believe. For me it is a matter of use-- I read Shakespeare or
Dickinson or Oppen not because they have "conquered" but because they are _of
use_. I prefer that construct to the idea that they have acheived some sort
of summation, & insist that what will be of use for one won't necessarily be
for another, or even for the same person at different times in their life.
"Its apparition is the mold of it"
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 11:48:48 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Thomas
I remember Lorenzo Thomas from the early sixties as a Long Island poet, I
think. There was one magazine that misprinted his name as Lorenzo Toomes.
Or is that somethin i didnt know about?
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: william marsh <wmarsh@NUNIC.NU.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail politics
Mark & others,
to offer one response to the "riddle" -- "I'll bet if you said 'poetry and
poetry criticism' have a fundamentally generative and symbiotic relation, a
larger proportion of those people who write criticism mainly would agree,
wheras a lesser number of people who mainly write poetry would agree." --
although i admit i'm not exactly sure how the discussion got to this end, it
seems odd to me that it has, since distinctions between so-called "poetic"
and "critical" writings, as you point out, have been effectively eradicated,
most profoundly by those poet/theorists (Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein,
among several others) whose work is very much concerned with blurring the
disinction.
my first impulse, for the sake of responding to your question, is to group
myself among those who "mainly write poetry", but i quickly stumble over
such a categorization due in most part to the fact that when i write, i do
so in such a 'critically' engaged manner that the distinction is fruitless
and, in my mind, wrongly put. i'd say that any thoughtful writing is
critical _and_ poetic by nature, moreso that the critical and poetic
"elements" of which you speak are twin directives in any thoughtful
engagement of language, and really shouldn't be posed diametrically.
elsewhere Mark writes that he finds himself "inevitably siding with poetry
and poets," even though he recognizes that "poetry criticism is
unavoidable." perhaps i misconstrue the body of writing he means to
identify by "poetry criticism," but in any event what could possibly
motivate a "side" taking of this kind? and to say that it's "unavoidable"
is almost as damning as to consider it "avoidable," since both suggest that
criticism is somehow painfully endured.
bill marsh
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:53:17 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
Judy wrote: "I would add, at least for Buddhist thought (and I think it's
true for
Wittgenstein as well) that it is not only context, but that language
necessarily distorts/hides/distracts/etc., language as the great deceiver."
Certainly this is true for certain of Zen, but not for the Mahayana school--
Tibetan Buddhism puts great emphais on book learnin'. & Zen is deeply textual
& verbal-- the emphasis on the koan etc.
& also J wrote: "at least some Buddhist practices hold up the hope of direct
apprehension -- "limits of apprehension" are (themselves) delusions, cut
through them and BINGO there you be."
Yes, the emphasis on the breakthrough-- which leads to that grt quote, can't
remember which teacher: "Now that I'm enlightened I'm as miserable as ever."
Reminds me of that great master George Bowering. . .
A favorite Wittgenstein quote, which Joan Retallack has in 4 or 5 different
languages scattered about her house:
"For what reply does one make to someone who says: 'I believe it merely
strikes you as if you knew that?'"
to which I addend in Aerial 5 David Tudor's "If you don't know why do you
ask?"
But wld like to hear from you more specifics on Abrams or your take on
language's distortions, is he arguing for a less absrtact iconicity?
--rrpfet
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:59:56 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: The High Points
To the keeper of the tone--please back up.
As one who has been hit by a broom,
I would ask the language not to explain itself
But http://www.pma.com
To adjust the valves, what about you?
In world overlap, get calm
And consider
That's the way, or how bout
Rod--what are the conditions on that use? Terms of rental? (Or, how to get
closer, to be more [perpetually] useful?) J
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 15:01:30 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Smith <CharSSmith@AOL.COM>
Subject: Ken Irby
I'd like thank Ron for the detailed & sympathetic analysis of Irby's
poem, which points the way toward the richness of sound patterns embedded
there. The music in Ken's poetry has always struck me as
extraordinary--carefully constructed & 'scored' on the page, insistent in its
certainties. Ron pointed to Ken's use & development of Olson's caesura,
noting that Irby's lines are seldom breath based. Irby's musicality derives
just as much from things he learned from Duncan, & even more I think, from
Bunting & Zukofsky. (When I mention Bunting, I'm thinking specifically of
the use of consonants Peter Quartermain demonstrates in his piece on Whitman,
Pound, Bunting.) But Zukofsky still seems to be the richest source Ken has
developed (maybe because Zukofsky has such rich musical resources to offer?).
From the sequence "Etudes", also from the book _Call Steps_:
call snow draw cold moon sawm
comb new leaver lean
so shadows dough
or take a look at "{requiem etudes 7 for Louis Zukofsky}" which closes
"Etudes." I'd also recommend to anyone who didn't see it, his review (it's
really more than that) of Michelle Leggott's _Reading Zukofsky's 80 Flowers_
that appeared in Sulfur a few years ago (& curiously has been his only
appearance in that magazine i believe, although he was a frequent contributor
to Caterpillar).
The reasons for the neglect of Ken's work seem complicated & have always
confused me. Part of it rests on his shoulders; he doesn't seek much
attention for himself. But _Call Steps_ received a remarkably quiet
reception; the only notices I'm aware of are a short, impressionistic piece
by Ben Friedlander that appeared in _Notus_, & a longer take by Stephen Ellis
in _Poetics Briefs_. (If anyone is aware of others, I'd appreciate hearing
about them.) His work was excluded from both the Hoover & Weinberger
anthologies; thankfully there is a good selection in the Messerli (including
the sequence "Heredom" Ron was writing about).
To subsume Irby's work as "carrying forward the Olsonian project" as Ron
did is to pigeonhole it & to give short shrift to its scope. I can't help
but think Ken was one of the casualties of the late 70's/early 80's poetry
wars; his work had some things in common w/ the emerging Language poetry & he
himself read it with interest, but never fell in step w/ the 'movement.'
Poems appeared in an early issue of Barry Watten's magazine, This, & Lyn
Hejinian published _Archipelago_ in the Tuumba series. But as the lines
became more fiercely drawn, people like Irby & Ron Johnson started to fade
from sight in that milieu. I'm really not in a position to know how much
that had to do with Ken & how much had to with the literary politics of that
time & am curious how others view this.
We are left now with _Call Steps_ as the most recent , readily available
book which collects work only through 1979!!!!! That leaves over 15 years of
writing out of circulation. As Paul Naylor noted, Lee Chapman has been
publishing recent work in _First Intensity_. Some poems also appeared in
_:that_ a few years ago. A chapbook of 11 poems was letterpress printed at
Naropa in 1994, _Antiphonal And Fall To Fall_ in an edition of 200 & has
never been distributed. If anyone is interested, I have the address & phone
number (as of last fall) of Patrick Tillery who printed it, and Ken himself
may still have some copies. BTW, although the Tansy _Catalpa_ is long gone
(& a candidate for a Sun & Moon classic?), John Moritz of Tansy was closing
the press & advertising copies of the 2nd edition of _To Max Douglas_ a year
or two ago, so they may still be around somewhere.
There are many writers today who consider Irby one of the important (&
most neglected!) poets of his generation. His engagement with the long line
is one of the more interesting & unique today. Where are the critics &
publishers?
I'll close this with a poem from _Antiphonal And Fall To Fall_:
Would you take the diaphany of ivory and of brightness to be behind the name,
and power,
and carry into the portraying and then into the writing by the way the ear
itches from the air
the elephant of interior grace and strength or the bear of insistent nub just
by the style itself and not by any subject of depiction
an elegy of cradle song for the mother, and that for the nations and for
history, and for the full orchestra
an extended fantasy in meditation for the father, solo, and of the touch
or would that be reversed, or would there be the elephant and bear of crossed
arms to wonder at
hanging not in what is made but in its air, swinging
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:52:20 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:38:26 -0400 from
<AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
On Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:38:26 -0400 Rod Smith said:
>Henry wrote: "As for historical epics - huh? When did I bring that in?
> Helen
>Vendler? Wha?"
>
>On 7/10 Henry wrote:
>"It's language talking through the obsessions and
>neuroses & sleepwalking and timeserving of an era - not denying it, but
>mastering it & throwing light on it"
Well, I guess that proves it. Heck, when you said "historical epics" I
thought you were talking about a genre of poetry or something! Shows
how wrong you can be. My mistake. Should have never used the term.
But wait a minute - didn't YOU use the term? Huh?
>
>also the term "zeitgeist" you used originally & since is defined as "the
>spirit of the time." May be a little unfair to accuse you of Vendlerism but
>confidence in the existence of a or the "zeitgeist" seems loaded with that
>crap to me. This is not to deny historical processes-- but they are that, I
>believe, processes, multiple, & only partially apprehendable. I like the
>Goethe ("The enemy is us") but of course from many perspectives the enemy is
>legitimately "them."
Vendlerism - is that like - retailing?
>
>You said today: "Whut ah wuz tryin t'say wuz that the really
>heavy-duty poetry, drama, prose, etc. has this primordial human
>quality that conquers all the particular "us's" of a particular age"
>
>This I don't believe. For me it is a matter of use-- I read Shakespeare or
>Dickinson or Oppen not because they have "conquered" but because they are _of
>use_. I prefer that construct to the idea that they have acheived some sort
>of summation, & insist that what will be of use for one won't necessarily be
>for another, or even for the same person at different times in their life.
Funny - I read the same people because they're totally useless. - Henry
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:13:02 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics
>Judy--
>I'd like to hear more abt the Abrams book. Terence McKenna's an interesting
>nut dealing a bit with similar issues. How, exactly, does "the alphabet
>distort perception"
>
David Abram is coming from a magician's/shaman's as well as a
phenomenologist's (sp? my spell-checker broke) perspective, so he sees
intimate connections (complex and not reductive, but essential,
connections) among language, meaning, the body, the world. He sees the
alphabet as breaking that connection, forcing the mind away from body
sensations/ground of experience, and into an abstract realm in which human
constructs mediate perception rather than perception creating human
constructs. Learning how to read essentially changes the nature of
consciousness. Having a dyslexic son, I'm not so sure that he isn't right.
He somewhat exempts the Hebrew alphabet from his general condemnation,
because it is still grounded in pictures -- aleph is an ox (do I remember
the icon correctly?) etc. and he has a long eloquent section towards the
end of his book on some of classical mystical uses of the Hebrew alphabet.
He does not claim total originality for these views, and acknowledges his
sources. Terrence McKenna may be one of these. And I am leaving out in
this discussion his real motivation, which is to provide a deep
philosophical justification for radical ecology. I think it's fair to say
that in his view it's a short step from the alphabet to the shopping mall.
Having a dyslexic son, I'm somewhat skeptical.
It was a conversation with David that triggered a major shift in my own
work, for which I am most grateful. "Interesting nut" yeah, well, not a
bad thing to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 10:50:20 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert A Harrison <Robert.A.Harrison@JCI.COM>
Subject: Re(2): maria--/& performance
eryque,
>could someone explain to me why, more or less, any marginalized group of
>people would want to come into an area that is quite clearly not theirs
>(economically speaking), has been colonized so thouroughly as to be left
>dead for all newcomers?
can't speak for anyone else of course, and not to paint a picture of myself as
being marginalized, those details incredibly complicated as they are for
anyone else, but ... a simple response an attempt to start at one might be
because the space belongs to no one else either.
does this space belong even to those who write to it the most? no
bob harrison
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 15:54:42 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Smith <CharSSmith@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: white rose
Maria,
Yes, the film about Jay deFeo's "White Rose" was done by Bruce Conner. I got
to see it in 1990 when Bruce showed it in conjunction w/ an exhibition at
trhe Natsoulas Gallery in Davis documenting the art & activities surrounding
the 6 Gallery. That exhibit followed on the heels of another one documenting
the King Ubu Gallery, run by Robert Duncan,Jess & Harry Jacobus, which had
earlier occupied the same space. Exhibition catalogues from both shows were
issued & are probably still available from:
Natsoulas Gallery
132 E Street
Davis, CA 95616
(916) 756-3938
Looking forward to seeing the Beat show when it comes out here.
all best,
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 14:54:40 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christina Fairbank Chirot <tinac@CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: re Irby reviews
Thanks to Charles Smith for his excellent message re Ken Irby's work. A
review of Call Steps by Edward Schelb appeared in Sulfur 36, and Schelb
quotes from Irby's comments on Lansing in the Talisman Lansing issue just
out.
To Max Douglas is available at Woodland Pattern Book Center here
in Milwaukee.
Here is their address and phone:
720 East Locust Street
Milwaukee, WI. 53212
(414) 263-5001
I'd highly recommend the book--3 long poems--one of which,
"Delius" has as theme music.
LISTEN--
dave baptiste chirot
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 15:27:08 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: The University of Alabama
Subject: Re: Aldon, Hayden, "American Journal"
Aldon wrote:
> --Hank: whenever you feel you have the time, I'd be interested in hearing
> more of your take on "American Journal" -- That's a poem I've never been
> able to enjoy, and I'd like to hear from somebody who has worked with it
> more than I have -- I talked with Hayden any number of times about the
> poem, but it seemed a stretch to me -- I always thought it was the
> occasional poem he felt he had to write as Poetry Consultant -- but I
> suspect there's more to it than that --
Aldon, and anyone else who's interested:
Thanks for alerting me to the fact that the poem was an occasional
composition. I was unaware. I had approached "American Journal" as
a slightly different take on Hayden's universalism. What interests
me in "AJ" is the sci fi construction that Hayden gives it (similar
to the various agent-observers in Doris Lessing's _Canopus in Argos_
series). Hayden begins, "here among them the americans this
baffling/ multi people." For me, Hayden's position as alien must
involve some self-criticism and some degree of self-mockery. He says
that his task is to "disguise myself in order to study them
unobserved/ in their varied pigmentations." So, Hayden's distance
from "them" (cf. Oppen in "Of Being Numerous"?) becomes exaggerated
in "AJ," and for me asks for some re-thinking of his strategies in
other poems, essays, and interviews to achieve a similar position
outside the conflicts and identities that both trouble and exalt him.
In "AJ" he calls "america as much a problem in metaphysics as/ it
is a nation." And I remain intrigued by Hayden's use of a
conversational mode (and spacing) in the poem. Did he ever tell you,
Aldon, why he put the poem on the page that way? I'd be interested.
Back to the poem--I'm also struck by the way that sensuality in "AJ"
(as in many of Hayden's other poems) constitutes a confusion and a
disturbance. In this poem, he does begin to give in:
confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to
the americans doubt i could exist among them for
long however psychic demands far too severe
much violence much that repels i am attracted
none the less their variousness their ingenuity
their elan vital and that some thing essence
quiddity i cannot penetrate or name
For me, this poem, by the extremism of its sci fi plot, brings out
tensions (of identity and repulsion) that are present throughout the
earlier poems (such as "The Whipping"). Perhaps on its own, not a
poem worth lots of attention, but as a last poem, of interest?
Hank
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 17:39:47 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of poetic
technique.
1. (Uttered in a nasal, pestering monotone):
Were Pound and Eliot poets or critics? What about Mathew Arnold?
Was Sir Walter Raleigh an explorer or a writer?
Is Charles Bernstein an *ip-ap-grrr-whing* or a critic?
What was like Campion, who wrote treatises on prosody?
What were Peacock and Shelley, who wrote long essays on poetics?
(Since many studious poets have written critical essays, and
some do so regularly, the dichotomy between critic and poet
strikes me as problematic.)
Are essays on poetics in a different category than other
critical/historical/linguistic essays on poetry? Did
Saintsbury address less practical poetic concerns than
William Empson and Yvor Winters? If not, is he a critic?
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7
2.
I've been trying to avoid critical jargon in my posts
to see if I could state critical ideas simply without being
overly simplistic. Sometimes I fail at this, I think. But I'm
interested in the idea of writing criticism that does not employ
undigested clumps of linguistic and critical jargon--of criticism
that is not imbedded with references to Derrida, and that still
manages to do its job without stooping to some imaginary audience.
You might well accuse me of attempting to do what is ultimately self-
defeating. ("Define 'critical jargon' as distinct from your own learned
vocabulary and system of refernces, Hardin.") I sometimes think so
myself. But I don't want to address academics specifically, and I
want to include people who write sophisticated poems without ever
thinking about deconstruction.
Everyone here has probably read Jameson, or at the very least Barthes
and _Structuralist Poetics_. But in many ways, I don't feel that
linguistics and semiotics adequately address the texture of a poem
as it was written by a specific poet who used idiosyncratic compositional
processes. (You might argue that exploding the myth of the individual
author is the point of decon, but I might have to answer, "that *was*
the point.")
It is useful, I think, for poets to try to understand the processes
that go into the making of a poem. I know that the processes I go
through are extremely technical, whether the form is "open" or
"closed."
BTW: both categories of poetry, "formal" and "open,"
become so arbitrary, so ironic, in this context, that in either
case, far more is going on than the mere breaking or reinstating of
broad poetic conventions. I don't mean to reitierate what we've already
discussed. But I want to point something out: This is not only a
decon observation, it is also a prosodic observation. And on a
prosodic level, "free" and "formalist" poetry do not strike me as
very different. The distinction seems an impediment, a cliche.
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7
3.
I keep looking for new essays on that adequately address
poetic construction. I found _In The American Tree_ quite useful,
and I'm very fond of _Content's Dream_. But I can't help noticing
that there are levels of prosodic technique (in Creeley, for example)
that Bernstein and Silliman seem to have learned from themselves but
do not address in these two important books. I'm not saying that
there has been a critical failure here: Silliman and Bernstein have
done what what they intended admirably. I'm only saying that I'd like to
address the musical aspect of Creeley's writing (or Irby's, for
that matter) as well as questions of voice or of readerly expectations.
I find it unsatisfying to hear that Irby has an exquisite ear
and then to hear no more on that exquisite subject.
The virtue of ancient modernist New Criticism was that it tried to
study the poem like a kind of layered cadaver--like a cadaver that minute
investigation could bring to life. What I miss in UB Poetics are
posts that investigate poetic language on a technical level. Too
often, our language seems to slide over the corpse without engaging it.
I'm also interested in how poets here think *as* they write,
in what processes they employ and in what decisions they make.
Most of my own compositional decisions have to do with:
*refining a progression of images, of disjunct evocations
(jarring formulations), or of surprises (I hope)(and yes,
I do know that this is partially decon at work);
*arcane, perhaps medieval formal processes (more on those later,
if anyone is interested) that mostly derive from musical composition
and early training in prosody (I think in terms of scansion, etc);
*the relationship between the sound and tone of a poem.
(I hesitate to get into this in greater depth because I'm not
certain that others share my interests, and because describing
my own work seems conspicuously narcissistic when nobody else
is committing the same shoe-gazing sin.)
Does anyone else here want to get down into the burial site
and discuss the texture of poetry? I'd love to know how the
rest of you read and write.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 18:00:14 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: oh
so then as off
a thing as we is
how--
as a co-op board would
go to meat
to me
to me
and there be a good
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 19:46:43 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: maria/&performance
Emily:
> Rob Hardin--ok, one last time, because I couldn't tell if you'd read my
> response to Eryque before you wrote your response to him
There is often a delay in receiving posts. I'd written my response hours
before both of our responses were forwarded to me by UB Poetics.
> --*nowhere* in my
> post did I say "white male." Nowhere! When I say "white-membered," and you
> assume white male, that's problematic (unless you thought that "member" was
> used in the euphemistic anatomical sense).
You've caught me on that one. My apologies, member. I stand corrected.
(However, your racial classification is no less suspect than the
gender classification that I wrongly attributed to you, honk honk.)
> To read it as male when it isn't
> specified that way is not to read it, but to have a knee-jerk reaction
> (assuming I'd "bash" white males) or to be wildly male-centric.
However, you haven't caught anyone here. A contextual mistake does
not imply a sexist motive. What I read was the context of arguments I'd
heard before, arguments in which the word "male" was used instead of member.
As I said above, that was my mistake. However, your conclusions about me
partake of what you would protest.
Just as it would be absurd for me to insist that you secretly "meant" male
in your post, so it is equally absurd of you to posit motives and emotional
twitches that are not evident in my response. If I'm going to be
wildly "male-centric," you'll need to lend me your bongos.
Also: saying that I'm "wildly male-centric" is as sexist
as it would be for me to say that you were hysterical.
> on that sandwich? & please, no "look ma, I'm marginalized!" contests, ok?
On the contrary: it was you who raised the subject of marginalization.
Enryque fleshed it out and initiated the contest with his complaint
of a lack of space for marginalized people. I merely responded by
pointing out that, by his definition, I am marginalized, yet I
find no evidence of the racial/economic suppresson of marginalized
groups on UB Poetics. Being vocal here isn't a question of privilege
(unless one addresses the economic considerations involved in being on
the internet ($400 for a passable computer, $85 for a modem, and $25 per
month for a SLIP account.). It is a question of whether or not people have
the courage to speak when they must and the self-control to restrain
themselves when they shouldn't. (In their terms, not mine.)
> "I myself am a newcomer who doesn't take said
> colonization for granted" reflects more on you (not a value judgment, there)
> than on whether or not there's "colonization."
Enryque's generalization about cultural colonization impacted on all
"marginalized" newcomers. I myself am a "marginalized" newcomer to whom
the generalization does not apply. Therefore it is the generalization that
is reductive and not my own example of its inconsistency.
By the way: suggesting that I reveal more about myself than about you
reveals more about you than it does about me, and I hope you will
write back to say that my statement about your statement reveals more
about my last statement than it does about your statement before that one,
and so on and so forth, ad infinitum and stir vigorously, whap that Sackbutt
and ring around the Rosicrucian.
(Ignore that outburst, E. I just felt like doing that.)
And by the bye (and I do mean bye (but not really)): My response to
Enryque and to you was mostly a joke! I don't recall saying anything
seriously derogatory about you, your argument or anything else. I even
said I presumed your intentions were good. (And just when I'd concluded
that humor was the best way to dispel the tension in a debate.)
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 19:56:33 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: critics vs. poets (tag team round three)
Hey Mark,
Is Charles Bernstein's *Artifice of Absorption* poetry, lit crit, crit theory,
or what?
Burt
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 20:12:35 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: trouble in river
that's the word.. debate!
which reminds me of a poem a ninth grader wrote:
Mickey Mouse turned 60 today.
He still looks as young as 60 years ago.
He's still the handsomest
mouse in show biz.
If only people could age
as well as him.
I bet he didn't have to
write while holding
his breath.
--Sarah Blonstein, School for the Physical City
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 19:18:24 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: critics vs. poets (tag team round three)
>Hey Mark,
>
>Is Charles Bernstein's *Artifice of Absorption* poetry, lit crit, crit theory,
>or what?
>
>Burt
Yes
(oh but i'm not mark)
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 17:35:04 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: filch <filch@POBOX.COM>
Subject: satire #2
<html><head><title>poets vs. critics</title><base
href="http://www.chronotope.com/epcone/"></head><body bgcolor="#ffffff"
link="#000000" alink="#000000" vlink="#000000"><blockquote><p>Studies have
shown the incidence of peeing in pools to be larger,<br>by far, among
members of the <a href="/artifice/dolt.html">adult male
population.</a></p><p>Subsequent <a href="/ee/">studies</a> will show
whether this figure can be broken<br>down by <a
href="/limited/space.html">race</a>, socioeconomic <a
href="/simply/stated.html">status</a>, and/or sexual <a
href="/cundarah/">orientation</a>.</p><p>If you would be interested in
participating in such a study<br>please <a
href="mailto:filch@chronotope.com">contact me</a> at your earliest
convenience.</p></blockquote></body><html>
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 17:50:59 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: critics vs. poets (tag team round three)
>>Hey Mark,
>>
>>Is Charles Bernstein's *Artifice of Absorption* poetry, lit crit, crit theory,
>>or what?
>>
>>Burt
>
>
>Yes
>
>(oh but i'm not mark)
[hell, neither am I!]
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 22:51:20 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Poetics List <poetics@UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: To a Captious Critic (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 12:57:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan Golding <ACGOLD01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU>
To: Poetics List <poetics@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>,
"Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@isc.sjsu.edu>
Subject: To a Captious Critic
Associate Professor of English, U. of Louisville
Phone: (502)-852-5918; e-mail: acgold01@ulkyvm.louisville.edu
Aldon--I'm posting this to the list and backchannel to you 'cause the list has
been rejecting my messages lately, for reasons not entirely (or even slightly)
clear to me.
Anyway: "To a Captious Critic" is by Paul Laurence Dunbar, right? Though at
first I'd mixed it up in my head with Cullen's "To Certain Critics"--worth a
second look in the context of the recent conversation on the list around the
race / universalism / sociology / etc. nexus, as Cullen's defense of his own
aspirations to universalism (which I've always taken to be ambivalent ones).
I'm guessing Cullen was a pretty important poet for Hayden, though you'd know
better than I.
Happy moving, if such is possible.
All best,
Alan
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 16:14:26 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: ANNC: Literature resource list and publication opportunity (fwd)
Thought this might be an opportunity for some to get word out. gab.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
New Resource Listing for Computer-Supported Writing About Literature
You're invited to contribute to a collaborative resource list for the
Epiphany Project, an Annenberg/CPB project developing resources for
educators. If we use sites or sources you suggest first, you will be
credited as a contributor both in the project publication, A Field Guide to
21st Century Writing, and on the Epiphany Project's Web site.
Please send me a list of your favorite resources on Computer-Supported
Writing About Literature. And don't hesitate to include your own, your
students', and your colleagues' work.
= E-mail your suggestions to me privately, Donna Reiss
<dreiss@norfolk.infi.net>, by July 23 (I'm the collector of resources
for this topic and will assemble and forward them to Judy Williamson,
project administrator)
= Give appropriate data about the source (for example, full bibliography
info about a book or article or film) and of course the URL if it's a web
site, the subscription info if it's a listserv.
= Include a sentence or two annotation just to let us know why the source is
notable.
= Don't forget to include info about yourself: your name and school as you
want them listed; what you do/teach/or whatever; your e-mail address; if
appropriate, your own home page address.
= Repost this invitation to other lists and individuals that you think would
be able to offer similar resource listings.
So what's Epiphany, anyway? See their sites through the home page:
http://mason2.gmu.edu/~jwillia9/epiphany.html
Or see what they did at their summer institute in Richmond:
http://www.vcu.edu/hasweb/eng/junebug/index.html
Looking forward to your suggestions--
Donna
===============================================================
Donna Reiss, Department of English, Tidewater Community College-Virginia Beach
1700 College Crescent, Virginia Beach, VA 23456 Phone: 757-427-7364 Fax:
757-427-7326 Internet:dreiss@norfolk.infi.net VCCSmail:tcreisd@tc.cc.va.us
WWW Home Page: http://www.infi.net/tcc/tcresourc/faculty/dreiss/dreiss.html
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 21:38:22 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: word, thing narrative.
The Dreary Familiar, That Story
... reading _Where I Stopped_, another of them
Odysseus came back from his war, tells the stories
to _Poetry_, to Namebrand Review. His father dies. They
print that because it's important -- his father,
the dying, the ironic glances and love each buries.
We never came back. We never went there.
War came when we were eleven and the uncle
stuck his fingers in our Down There, when
our father stopped kissing us and we stopped
wanting him to. When we weren't hidden
in childhood but were called out by hate
spewed from cars. It came in the dorm room
where we lay, still saying no as he rolled away
the rock that held down our assurance.
War came and it will never leave
and we will live in this everyday of it
without the luxury of sitting peacefully
under an olive tree and telling young men
in words printed in That Significant Review
because they don't signify, because the space
after Troy allows the reflection of the young mens'
jealousy, hope of glory and the father dying.
We will tell it, as we tell it, over and over,
in the knives and bruises and wrenching betrayals
of the eternally present story.
EMC
@copyright EMC, 1996
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 23:13:52 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: summer reruns (amphetamine use of the gods...)
or aporia use
or asymptote use
well, or the calculus, the consciousness of limits is
either, again, having a death waiting for us someplace
or finding what's _sufficient_ of which I'm suspicious
and often delighted, yes. but the recurring issue of
speed
which everybody seems to think was a boring movie
but I admired its structure at least as much as
I admired the structure of back to the future i, ii, iii
Keanu playing motionless for once was nice
rallies me and not because I hate futurism
rushing around crazily bores and flatters
and being all you can be has always sent me
to the refrigerator for halftime
so acknowledging "cognitive limits" is a
fairly beautiful part of talking to people
and I have no _need_ to take issue with
Bruce or Watten except that I miss that
necessary vulnerability I admire their
"speed" I worry where they're going so
fast though and what they step on
or in on their way now O'Hara in "easter"
or "hatred" although the first articulates
his position as alcoholic and the second
steals ruthlessly from Rimbaud and so
puts him way back on the poursuivre meter
is a model of speed with isolable frames
unlike the blurry stills we get from
more recent demons which may mean that
he wasn't going as fast I think it means
he had better form at any rate
I'd like to get out from under
this thinking of myself, ourselves
as in the parameters of the recent past
which has stridently claimed I think
to be patrolling the borders of sense
and nonsense when they are pace Larry
more like barrier islands
usually where the maps say but
not necessarily so I'm with that
wet meaning, Rod, but I wish for
a superhuman ordinary life
you know like the greeks said they had
it may have just been grade inflation
to keep the kids out of the Trojan war
but that constant praise made itself known
gratefully,
Jordan
(previously posted elsewhere)
(we all say the same things over and over anyway)
(goin' mahayana on your ass)
(tarantino = gingrich)
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 22:01:27 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: The Clarify Brothers
In-Reply-To: <199607120404.AAA27504@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Hank -- "American Journal" was not, in the usual sense, an occasional
poem -- What I meant was that i had always read it as the occasional poem
he felt called upon to write as our (for two years anyway) sort of
national poet -- meredith wrote a (much shorter) kind of national poem
during his time in the office -- and thanks for your comments on the
poem -- will give it a further look with that in mind
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 22:10:32 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Ur Irby and others
In-Reply-To: <199607120404.AAA27504@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Michael -- Now that's useful information -- With all my migrating
northward these past years I've never had the chance to use the UCSD
collection, and am now removing to another state -- will get in contact
with Special Collections about possible return visit --
On Irby -- There was a special Irby issue of, I think it was, Credences
many years ago that is well worth digging out and looking at again --
Ron -- If you can narrow down your Monthly Review memories to at least a
year or two, I will look for those pieces before I leave town and try to
xerox them for the both of us -- On the subject of Texas -- When I
introduced Lorenzo Thomas at Orono I repeated something a friend of his
had told him when Lorenzo decided to make the move to Houston permanent
-- the friend told him: "You won't be a southern poet, you'll be a
forgotten poet."
I am told, though, that there will be a book of Lorenzo Thomas poems in
Germnay later this year --
Filch -- THAT ONE had me rolling on the floor with laughter -- I needed
that --
AND NOW EVERYBODY --
Sterling Brown used to recite this as his example of a universal poem:
I
have
a
belly
ache
of course, this did not prevent critics from accusing him of simply
belly-aching
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 22:56:50 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: hidden Hayden
lest I leave everybody even more confused, let me add that Robert
Hayden's poem was occasional on at least one accasion -- It was read as
the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the University of Michigan in 1976. The cover
of the first edition of _American Journal_, (Effendi Press 1978) is
well worth looking at -- a sort of space collage with Hayden looking on --
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 01:45:19 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christina Fairbank Chirot <tinac@CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: Ken Irby
Besides the credences Irby issue Aldon Nielsen pointed out on
this list, Vort #3 Summer 1973 is an Irby/Bromige issue--has an
excellent interview and the poem 'Jesus" later collected in To Max
Douglas, as well as essays and reviews--including one on To Max Douglas
by Don Byrd. An interview with Irby is also in Lee Bartlett's Talking
Poetry (New Mexico Press, 1987).
SPD still has Orexis--for $4.50, as well as Call Steps.
Big Deal and Truck published Irby often if you have access to
them and arelooking.
I woke up hearing Delius
wondering why I'd forgotten
making the walk to paradise
("Delius")
dave baptiste chirot
PS:
thanks to Charles Smith for his comments, suggestions on finding Irby
texts--Charles mentioned Ronald Johnson--new Chicago Review has
interview, poetry, essays on Johnson--Vort had interview and comments
(can't recall the issue number--I think from '74) well worth checking out
in conjunction with Chicago review issue--
as Ark in its entirety available now from Guy Blaisdell's Living Batch Books.
Johnson's Radi Os--from Sand Dollar--seems to have resurfaced in some
places--"get it while you can"--
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 03:08:45 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christina Fairbank Chirot <tinac@CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: Ken Irby
Note: Glitch, not Big Deal (of ones I've seen)published Irby
(collected in Orexis.) Bezoar also. Truck also published Enslin. Niedecker
special issue #16 well worth a search.
dave baptiste chirot
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 08:06:54 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: hnry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
poetic technique.
In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 11 Jul 1996 17:39:47 -0400 from
<scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
On Thu, 11 Jul 1996 17:39:47 -0400 Carnography said:
>1. (Uttered in a nasal, pestering monotone):
>
>Were Pound and Eliot poets or critics? What about Mathew Arnold?
>
>Was Sir Walter Raleigh an explorer or a writer?
>
>Is Charles Bernstein an *ip-ap-grrr-whing* or a critic?
>
>What was like Campion, who wrote treatises on prosody?
>What were Peacock and Shelley, who wrote long essays on poetics?
>
>(Since many studious poets have written critical essays, and
>some do so regularly, the dichotomy between critic and poet
>strikes me as problematic.)
There are lots of cases of poet-critics, and every poet is a critic and
probably every good critic is something of a poet; but maybe what Mark
was getting at is the clashes in the arena when the center of the one
activity tangles with the other.
When the informed and weaponed reader-critic becomes the arbiter of
taste & the explainer of how who done what. Impossible not to cross
those lines.
>
>Does anyone else here want to get down into the burial site
>and discuss the texture of poetry? I'd love to know how the
>rest of you read and write.
Curiosity killed the carp. You're delving into two taboo areas: "secrets
of the craft", and "inspiration". I'm not criticizing, just commenting.
- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 09:05:05 -0400
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "k.a. hehir" <angelo@MUSTANG.UWO.CA>
Subject: the loveliest of all
In-Reply-To: <POETICS%96071208281761@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
dreamy
black unicorn
vision
the god of cult
studs
lurking lurking
nocturnal
eloquence
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 09:46:12 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "k.a. hehir" <angelo@MUSTANG.UWO.CA>
Subject: Pe: rformance
In-Reply-To: <POETICS%96071208281761@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
hello all,
i've been away for a spell and have just waded through 212 messages, so i
have a few short comments.
firstly- the second of the londonOnt poetry series takes place this
monday the 15,same place and time as before - carolyn guertin, mark
tovey, mike gallay, theresa smalec, kyla brown and curt moeller.
now i realise that most(well,practically all)of you can't make it but if
i may be allowed to use this announcement to respond to a thread.
the success of the first of the series three weeks ago was due to the
diversity of voices heard. at least 40 years seperated tthe some of the
8ight readers. the audience reflected the program - from graduate to
high school- and had a lot of fun. how is success measured? well, 70
people sat for almost three hours with a 30 min break, drank beer and
cider,clapped, laughed, were offended and asked when the next one was.
the combination of townies and university types in the crowd and ont the
boards leads me to make a comment about the poet/critic melee. most poets
started writing before they knew what poesis was or realised that one
could make a living as a literary coroner. one young poet commented to me
that the poets from the university had lost all sense of wonderment and
used allusion clinically rather than as an homage. i didn't really know
what to say. 10 years ago when i was eighteen i wrote this cinquain:
scholars
bumbling down corridors
bu bling down
the poets ha e set t
salvation by equation
black laughs
i'm not sure how far i've come now that i pay money to talk about rimbaud
in a classroom.
sorry, getting rambly on you and the text is starting to do it's own
thing. but i too often think that sometimes when the critics go out to
play the poets can only come along if the play net. well at least you can
have a smoke when the play is at the other end.
take care,
kevin
"i won't bore you with quotation"
David Bromige
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 09:50:44 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "k.a. hehir" <angelo@MUSTANG.UWO.CA>
Subject: Pe :rformance
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.88.9607120900.A12675-0100000@mustang-a.uwo.ca>
sorry the cinquain got juiced,
scholars
bumbling down corridors
the poets have set traps
no salvation by equation
black laughs
must go poster!
kevin
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 10:04:12 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Larry Price <Lppl@AOL.COM>
Subject: Onward
Dear Jordan, Dean, and Henry:
My response will be direct in some cases, glancing in others. Some of this
repeats another context, for which I apologize, but the things here are the
points to which my thought runs concerning this, for me, largely the issue of
the status of poetic language.
As much, Dean, as I'm intrigued by your enjambment of Wittgenstein and Olson,
I don't think I'd ever be satisfied with a definition of meaning that
accounts for it strictly in terms of language (nor for that matter, strictly
in terms outside of it). And I think it was that same discomfort that
elicited Wittgenstein's fly-bottle amulet. Which is to say, I've never been
comfortable with that formula, Meaning is Use. It seems to shine its light
only on the feet, finding there footprints leading back up the wall they've
just traversed. What I intend to say is: as a term, "use" can only be a
partial definition, albeit an important part. And it's true that it is "in"
language, but that still leaves me in the fly-bottle. Here I agree with Elena
Shvarts and Henry to this extent: I write to engender what isn't. To write
what I already know, my use/age, is simply to retrace the hermeneutical (or
equipmental) ring already implied in my terms and which those terms
determine.
But, Henry, that hardly points to context as a set of barnacles to be
mastered. As you yourself say, the writer is written. Here again, Olson with
his conic sections registers the potential of limits - outside those limits.
It's that intersection, call it elision of registers, that gives us most
powerfully the image of what stands beside those limits.
First of all, Henry, you seem to have posed various terms - language and
poetry most notably - AGAINST time. Which puzzles me, assuming as I do that
temporality fundamentally constitutes all the threads of and through which we
are written. And (what I really want to say) just as THEY are constitutive of
IT. So then the call forward, the heuristic limning I wrote of yesterday that
thinking is, recalls to me Tony Green's carefull attention some weeks ago to
the "never more than" in Creeley's formula. Nonetheless, I think the answer
to the NO NEW FORMS swamp is to reverse it: that is, I think form can
actually precede and illuminate the context and/or content, and in that
becomes new form (Olson's intersections). But, Henry, that hardly constitutes
"mastery." For example, I've been trying to come to an adequate reading of
Rod Smith's IN MEMORY OF MY THEORIES - a great book which I unreservedly
recommend - not because I particularly like Mr. Smith but because I
particularly like this book. One of the things I'm trying to understand is
how form functions in it. The book is all disjunction and yet the line holds,
remarkably tensile over and across such displacement of registers. Lexical
materials come from everywhere and despite my, the reader's, lack of
specificity as to what or how, the contexts come as well. That is, the world
is pulled up, across, into the form, such that the form is continuant AND
new, both in its discovery to me and in my availability to it.
And in thinking of availability, the "at home" registration of the
fundamental research thinking's call forward delivers, two more things occur
to me:
First, Santiage Ramon y Cajal's "neuron doctrine" - that nerve cells
communicate with others through contiguity rather than continuity - and all
the attendant neural machinery: receptors, adjustors, effectors,
transduction, afference, and my personal favorite, the Sodium-Potassium Pump
(as Rod said, Duchamp is useful in this context), moving as it does Na+
outward and K+ inward against their concentration gradients, thus maintaining
neural availability by setting the "membrane potential."
Second: Contingency, which as a term, has three implications:
1. The past is NOT the single, determining condition of the present. The past
could have been otherwise.
2. The present leaves the past behind in a state of indeterminateness (and
incompletion). Thus, the present stands alone in its temporality, as it were,
awaiting our operations.
and
3. The present AND the future are to be determined _in_ the contingent
present.
Thus Emerson: "No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply
experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back."
So that, if we conjoin the neuron doctrine and its string
place >> stimulus >> receptor >> adjustor >> effector >> history
with that three-headed dog of contingency, call me a mystifier hopelessly
enamored of water, but it begins to look like a poetics and a politics in
which poetic language is more than a limit case of the larger set, Language,
accounting for use, prospective, but at the same time thoroughly implicated
in all the strains of its temporality.
Sorry to have gone on at such length and I'm sure with too many unresolved
conflicts. Still, as writers (and I suppose this is my real argument with
you, Henry), I think it's important to determine the point at which the work
is effective: Is it effective in and of (as well for) itself AT the point at
which the text is enacted? Or must it await canonization. Obviously from the
above, I think that poetic language IS adequate in and of itself and is more
than decorative arrangements for the corridors of time.
Baldly: I live here.
lp
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 10:45:35 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 12 Jul 1996 10:04:12 -0400 from <Lppl@AOL.COM>
On Fri, 12 Jul 1996 10:04:12 -0400 Larry Price said:
>
>But, Henry, that hardly points to context as a set of barnacles to be
>mastered. As you yourself say, the writer is written. Here again, Olson with
I didn't say the context (barnacles) was to be mastered. I said it attaches
itself willy-nilly to the choices the writer makes. I was trying to
counterbalance Rod's "eastern" (and currently popular?) emphasis on the
complete multivalence of meaning, the supremacy of context.
>First of all, Henry, you seem to have posed various terms - language and
>poetry most notably - AGAINST time. Which puzzles me, assuming as I do that
>temporality fundamentally constitutes all the threads of and through which we
>are written. And (what I really want to say) just as THEY are constitutive of
My point was that language, and perhaps poetry-making in particular, breaks
through to a deeper strata of time, deeper than the ordinary "metronome
tapeworm" sense of time. The _pleroma_, the playground, the fulness of time.
Ripeness is all.
>
>Sorry to have gone on at such length and I'm sure with too many unresolved
>conflicts. Still, as writers (and I suppose this is my real argument with
>you, Henry), I think it's important to determine the point at which the work
>is effective: Is it effective in and of (as well for) itself AT the point at
>which the text is enacted? Or must it await canonization. Obviously from the
I can't understand why my very first post on this question, in which I
remarked a fascination on my part with artworks that "last", gets me
fingered as some kind of Vendlerian canonizer. Why do we immediately
jump into the academic "critical" framework? Do we think critics are
SO powerful? I'm talking about the lastingness which gets Shakespeare
played by mechanics in smalltown hotels in Connecticut in the 19th
century, or gets the Bible read, or gets Willa Cather read in spite of
all the critics. About works that transcend the popular/elite
dichotomy (the Blues is probably America's most powerful, intricate,
profound, and at the same time popular poetry). Your dichotomy about
the effectiveness of a work is a false one. Of course the work is effective
in an of itself in its own time - my point was that some works (and this
doesn't make them "better" - just strong) live beyond the present.
- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 08:39:22 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: white rose
Hello everyone, it's Kevin Killian. Maria, your post (and the post of
Charles Smith) about Jay de Feo inspired me to tell y'all a little bit
about my new play. When the Beat Culture show comes to SF, I hope all of
you who are in town for the opening can come to see my play, "Wet Paint"
which Bill Berkson has asked me to stage at the SF Art Institute. This
play will be the life of Jay De Feo.
Yes, I have rounded up an all-star cast to act out the different parts.
Phoebe Gloeckner will have the main part, Jay De Feo, a feminist artist
working in the heyday of the North Beach beat bohemia. Norma Cole will be
playing Kay De Feo, her unruly twin sister, who spoils Jay's life by
sneaking into her studio at night and adding yet more paint to her "Rose"
picture. Leslie Scalapino and Jonathan Hammer will be playing
representatives of Hallmark Cards, who have commissioned "The Rose" as a
tiny little cameo piece. They like everyone else are annoyed at how large
it's getting, and Jay really has no explanation. Rex Ray will be Bruce
Conner. Tosh Berman, you will be glad to know that your father, Wallace
Berman, will be portrayed on stage too. They were all part of the scene
for sure. Let's see what else happened. I called up Michael McClure and
asked him to play himself as a young man. He demurred, gee, I wonder why!
He said he was too overbooked, but sympathized with my dilemma-who on the
current scene is handsome, studly, sexy enough to play the young Michael
McClure? (Suggestions, please). I thought it would be a great coup de
theatre, all the characters would be standing around saying things like,
"Hey, what's Michael McClure been up to lately?" and then he (the real
Michael) would come out in those leather pants he invented. But alas,
someone else will have to fill those well-worn leathers.
I'm especially gald to announce that Rebecca Solnit will be acting in my
play. I hope you all know Solnit's book "Secret Exhibition: Six California
Artists of the Cold War," which is really a great book about De Feo, Jess,
Conner, W. Berman, George Herms and Wally Hedrick. She will be playing
Frida Kahlo, and Cliff Hengst will "be" Diego Rivera. Margaret Crane will
be Jay's psychiatrist, unconvinced that she really has a twin sister who is
ruining her life. Scott Hewicker will play Tuesday Weld, one of the outlaw
Hollywood crowd who made North Beach a kind of Hollywood North in the late
1950s, and D-L Alvarez will be the very young Janis Joplin, drawn to "The
Rose" as a kind of avatar of meaning of her own confused life. There will
be plenty of other parts too, so come on everybody, bring your bongos and
your collage vision of California junk/funk assemblage and buy a ticket
today, or be in it! Needless to say this will be yet another benefit for
Small Press Traffic! Thanks!
Kevin K.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 11:45:13 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jordan Davis <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
Subject: barnacle a (onward)
It's not a fair assumption that fashion is false. You miss a lot that way.
'deeper' 'beyond the present' 'profound' -- I want to say I know what you mean.
I think though we had different playgrounds. I too read Willa Cather, but
it's not that mysterious to me why I want to (or Sarah Orne Jewett, or
Milton, or T.S. Eliot, or Langston Hughes, or Turgenev). Is affection
mysterious? Is dancing? Is mystery mysterious? Nope. Is thinking
mysterious? Thinking is often foggy, but fog is not mysterious.
As they say in the song, 'let's be undecided.'
Jordan Davis
jdavis@panix.com
46 e 7 no 10 I believe
NYC 10003 Spumoni $1.00
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 -0700
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: william marsh <wmarsh@NUNIC.NU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
poetic technique.
At 05:39 PM 7/11/96 -0400, you wrote:
But in many ways, I don't feel that
>linguistics and semiotics adequately address the texture of a poem
>as it was written by a specific poet who used idiosyncratic compositional
>processes.
My question would be why would we ever expect linguistics and semiotics to
"adequately address the texture of a poem"? Linguistics and Semiotics
adequately (arguably) address language and meaning, and to the extent that
explorations of this type suggest avenues of inquiry when dealing with a
particular poem or poetry, they are useful -- in my mind enormously useful
-- without necessarily addressing the whole issue o writing. To get to the
texture of the poem, we read the poem, right? To get to the texture of
theory, read theory.
But what intrigues me about the "open" poetries of this and the last decade
is the extent to which they seem, to me at least, to share the interest and
perspective of ling/semio studies, so that distinctions of these kinds
(poetry vs. criticism/theory, etc) seem pointless. Language arts and
language philosophies share the same venue, as much of the work of the last
two decades demonstrates (the work not only of "poets" like Howe, Bernstein
and Silliman, but also of "critic/theorists" like M. Perloff (Howe,
Bernstein and Silliman!)). The way i see it, this suggests a practice in
contemporary poetics that goes beyond neat packages like "theoretical
poetry" or "poetic theory".
>
>Does anyone else here want to get down into the burial site
>and discuss the texture of poetry? I'd love to know how the
>rest of you read and write.
>
>
How 'bout if we discuss the poetry of texture, which might adequately
address the writing of poetry.
Bill Marsh
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 12:32:43 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: barnacle a (onward)
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 12 Jul 1996 11:45:13 -0500 from <jdavis@PANIX.COM>
On Fri, 12 Jul 1996 11:45:13 -0500 Jordan Davis said:
>It's not a fair assumption that fashion is false. You miss a lot that way.
>
>'deeper' 'beyond the present' 'profound' -- I want to say I know what you mean.
>
>I think though we had different playgrounds. I too read Willa Cather, but
>it's not that mysterious to me why I want to (or Sarah Orne Jewett, or
>Milton, or T.S. Eliot, or Langston Hughes, or Turgenev). Is affection
>mysterious? Is dancing? Is mystery mysterious? Nope. Is thinking
>mysterious? Thinking is often foggy, but fog is not mysterious.
>
>As they say in the song, 'let's be undecided.'
I agree with you, Jordan. What I said in my last post was that it was
a false dichotomy. But I still think that ONE measure of greatness
(a middle term between "strong" & "better") is continuing interest
& relevance, that lasts beyond the current fashion. The thing about
fashion is that it is ONLY current. That's the definition of fashion,
I'm not saying it's good or bad. And some academic poets (and I'm not
just talking Vendler or APR here) as well as other poets dig themselves
in very sophisticated ways into the present - fashion included. (The
current fad is: "let's be undecided"). Why does the world read Whitman
rather than James Russell Lowell? This seems to be a troubling
question, even for fashionable anti-canonizers and trendy outsiders.
The ironic thing about the American experience has been that
unfashionable truth: "The first shall be last, and the last first."
- Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 12:59:57 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
poetic technique.
okay Bill Marsh,
What DO you exactly mean by texture?
Burt
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 13:18:27 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: barnacle a (onward)
HG wrote:
>The
>current fad is: "let's be undecided"
well, I'm undecided whether this is true. Actually, this isn't that different
from the use of "zeitgeist" -- there is no one fashion any more than there's
one zeitgeist, eh? Go to a slam or a CK Williams class at Princeton and see
abt undecideability, you'll find a bit, but not what it wld mean here. & even
on this list what folks wld mean by or agree upon with reference to that term
is way up in the air, maybe over the wall in left-center.
One "fad" I'd like to see sucess for is the Philly Borders boycott.
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 13:46:06 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ward Tietz <100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward
Larry Price,
I haven't been following the exchange between you and Henry, Dean, Jordan and
Rod as much as I probably should have, but a few things came to mind after
reading your recent post.
I wonder if some of these issues wouldn't perhaps be better conceptualized as
textual phenomena rather than language phenomena, and I would apply that also, I
think, to your sense of poetic language, since it seems to me we are still very
much in the domain of discursive form.
With Wittgenstein it does certainly appear that his "language" games occur on
the level of language, but I think these may be textual as well. If they really
occurred on a level of language we should be able to translate them into other
non-discursive languages, quantitative or pictorial say, and this it seems we
can't quite do. They're too propositional, linear and cumulative.
I think this text / language distinction might carry over to some of your other
ideas, and also to Henry's idea of being "against time." Language, is seems to
me, is subject to an enormous range of presentational and performative contexts
and reformulations in ways that text isn't. Text also has a particular speed to
it and with that a certain temporal limit or paradigm. By comparison language
has a wider range and can get around some of these limitations, but this
capacity is finally quite a lot more, I think, than what text supports.
In general though, I think I agree with you, as long as poetic language doesn't
only mean poetic text.
Ward Tietz
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 13:25:25 -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 <amato@CHARLIE.CNS.IIT.EDU>
Subject: fyi...
so what do you folks make of the appended?...
(((love to continue on with dodie about how i think the term "middle class"
has sucked up what used to be called "working class," but---
i'll be away from my machine, my apt., and my creditors beginning
saturday... i know---i can hear (in my egocentric head) many of you already
('WHAT A RELIEF!')...
won't be back till approx. 1 august, hopefully a bit suntanned and
mountain-aerated... hope y'all have a nice summer (and winter for you folks
down-under!) in the meanwhile... and apologies for any unnecessary
mouthiness or presumption on my part of any but good intentions...
all best to *all*,
joe
---------------
>>From media@world.std.com Sun Jun 23 18:47:58 1996
>Received: from localhost by world.std.com (5.65c/Spike-2.0)
> id AA05055; Sun, 23 Jun 1996 14:47:58 -0400
>Date: Sun, 23 Jun 1996 14:47:58 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Steve Robinson <media@world.std.com>
>To: Steve Robinson <media@world.std.com>
>Subject: ON-LINE POETRY WORKSHOP
>Message-Id: <Pine.SGI.3.93.960623144635.4761A-100000@world.std.com>
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
>Status: RO
>X-Status:
>
>
>MEDIAWORKS is proud to offer an On-Line Poetry Writing Workshop
>with Hilda Raz!
>
>Hilda is editor of the quarterly literary journal PRAIRIE SCHOONER,
>poet, critic, and associate professor of English at the University
>of Nebraska-Lincoln.
>
>This unique On-Line Poetry Writing Workshop will take place over a
>three week period beginning on July 15. The workshop is for poets
>interested in reading contemporary poetry, and honing their poetry
>writing skills. Subjects include the tools of contemporary poetry,
>the writing process, voice, narrative, non-traditional forms, and
>collaboration -- with a strong emphasis on YOUR writing.
>
>The workshop will be limited to 12 people, and is being offered for
>$125. Each participant will be part of a private mailing list.
>Everything participants post to the list will be seen only by the
>other participants, Hilda, and the workshop moderator.
>
>Ideal participants in this workshop should have experience reading
>and writing contemporary poetry, have taken poetry writing classes
>at the college or senior high school level, or be adult poets who
>have experience writing in groups. People with a penchant for
>rhyming might better study with another poetry group.
>
>IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING IN THIS UNUSUAL POETRY
>WORKSHOP, PLEASE SEND AN E-MAIL MESSAGE TO:
>
>media@world.std.com
>
>We will contact you within a few hours to discuss the details.
>
>Hilda Raz's books include _What Is Good_ and _The Bone Dish_ and a
>new manuscript _Divine Honors_. Her poems have been published or
>are forthcoming in _Ploughshares_, _The Southern Review_, _Colorado
>Review_, _Hollins Critic_, _Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary
>American Nature Poetry_, _Literature and Medicine_, _Judaism_ and
>elsewhere. She is also a critic and writer of creative nonfiction.
>Her experience in teaching includes writing workshops at the Bread
>Loaf Writers Conference, the University of California/Chico,
>University of Tennessee, City University of New York at Brockport,
>Florida State University at Tallahassee, the University of
>Massachusetts-Boston, Hollins College, the University of Denver,
>the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and elsewhere.
>
>Since 1987, she has been editor of PRAIRIE SCHOONER, the venerable
>literary quarterly, now entering its 70th year of continuous
>publication. Contributors include winners of the Pulitzer, Nobel,
>MacArthur, NEA and other major grants and prizes, and have been
>Poets Laureate of the United States, as well as beginning and mid-
>career writers. PRAIRIE SCHOONER publishes poetry, fiction,
>creative nonfiction, and reviews.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 11:38:20 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: e-mail politics
At 4:00 PM 12/31/69, william marsh wrote:
>distinctions between so-called "poetic"
>and "critical" writings, as you point out, have been effectively eradicated,
>most profoundly by those poet/theorists (Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein,
>among several others) whose work is very much concerned with blurring the
>disinction.
I think we should pause here and give tribute to those who promoted this
blurring as a feminist project, particularly the editors/associate
editors/contributing editors of _HOW(ever)_. Such as Kathleen Fraser, Bev
Dahlen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Frances Jaffer, Susan Gevirtz, Carolyn
Burke, and Chris Tysh.
Dodie Bellamy
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 14:53:03 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Onward
Ward T. wrote:
>With Wittgenstein it does certainly appear that his "language" games occur
on
>the level of language, but I think these may be textual as well. If they
really
>occurred on a level of language we should be able to translate them into
other
>non-discursive languages, quantitative or pictorial say, and this it seems
we
>can't quite do. They're too propositional, linear and cumulative.
Not sure abt this, Witt did a lot of work in other areas, mathematics from
early on, pictorial: the famous figure ground bunny/duck. He investigated
vision & color extensively in _Remarks on Colour_ in similar terms to the
language-games. & _On Certainty_ as well as aspects of the Investigations
seems to me to move into areas of perception generally, not strictly
"language-games." Any case, my understanding of the term language-games is
that it is contextual, i.e. perceptual. Also, I generally don't find Witt
"linear" but definitely cumulative.
As Larry sd "I don't think I'd ever be satisfied with a definition of meaning
that
accounts for it strictly in terms of language (nor for that matter, strictly
in terms outside of it)." I think we don't know enough to adequately describe
these processes, which is perhaps why Derrida or cognitive science can seem
brilliant at times, & useless at others.
>In general though, I think I agree with you, as long as poetic language
doesn't
>only mean poetic text.
yup.
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 11:56:14 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Carll <sjcarll@SLIP.NET>
Subject: Re: barnacle a (onward)
At 11:45 AM 7/12/96 -0500, Jordan Davis wrote:
> Is affection
>mysterious? Is dancing? Is mystery mysterious? Nope. Is thinking
>mysterious? Thinking is often foggy, but fog is not mysterious.
Fog itself may not be mysterious, but fog grants mystery to what it touches,
a mystery that may not be dispelled by our knowing what it covers without
having to see it. Fog imparts this to thinking, and thinking to what is
thought.
**************************************
Steve Carll
sjcarll@slip.net
"So I start a revolution from my bed
'Cos you said the brains I had went to my head"
--Oasis
**************************************
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 15:06:41 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Onward
In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 12 Jul 1996 13:46:06 EDT from
<100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM>
On Fri, 12 Jul 1996 13:46:06 EDT Ward Tietz said:
>
>I think this text / language distinction might carry over to some of your other
>ideas, and also to Henry's idea of being "against time." Language, is seems to
>me, is subject to an enormous range of presentational and performative contexts
>and reformulations in ways that text isn't. Text also has a particular speed
>to
>it and with that a certain temporal limit or paradigm. By comparison language
>has a wider range and can get around some of these limitations, but this
>capacity is finally quite a lot more, I think, than what text supports.
Is text the dead letter, the poison cure, the marrow in them dead bones?
Bones gonna dance too - they come last. Right, Mr. Bones? - Henry
Hankovitch con guit
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 09:57:00 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: barnacle a (onward)
In-Reply-To: <960712131826_432858219@emout12.mail.aol.com>
On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, Rod Smith wrote:
> One "fad" I'd like to see sucess for is the Philly Borders boycott.
>
> Rod
>
Yes, and for those so inclined, there are boycotts in many other cities
too--and even boycotts you can start yourselves. gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 10:14:22 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: text/language
In-Reply-To: <POETICS%96071215150711@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
How can text and language be distinguished? I guess have to take a long
look at how the word "language" and "text" can and can't sensibly be used.
Otherwise into the foggy dew we go. gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 15:35:28 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: text/language
>How can text and language be distinguished? I guess have to take a long
>look at how the word "language" and "text" can and can't sensibly be used.
>Otherwise into the foggy dew we go. gab.
Isn't language much broader? It includes music & other sound-language,
visual languages of many kinds, all sorts of symbolic language other than
the ones which use letters & words; & usually text is grounded in those
letters & words, although I'd be glad to conceive of text more broadly, too.
Or, for example, dealing with book arts/artists' books, the text of the book
would be whatever language-text is presented therein, but the language of
the book would have to include all its other parts (visual, structural,
sometimes aural, etc.) as well. Books can (they don't always, or do they?)
make literature physical.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 14:14:07 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: filch <filch@POBOX.COM>
Subject: Re: barnacle a (onward)
Get yer boycotts, yer red hot boycotts! Get em while they last!
>Yes, and for those so inclined, there are boycotts in many other cities
>too--and even boycotts you can start yourselves. gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 16:11:51 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: white rose
Comments: To: Multiple@maroon.tc.umn.edu, recipients@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
of@maroon.tc.umn.edu, list@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
POETICS@maroon.tc.umn.edu
kk, yr play sounds wonderfully delicious. if it's playing between aug 27-sept
3, i'll look forward to taking it in.
md
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 15:49:34 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: text/language
>>How can text and language be distinguished? I guess have to take a long
>>look at how the word "language" and "text" can and can't sensibly be used.
>>Otherwise into the foggy dew we go. gab.
>
>Isn't language much broader? It includes music & other sound-language,
>visual languages of many kinds, all sorts of symbolic language other than
>the ones which use letters & words; & usually text is grounded in those
>letters & words, although I'd be glad to conceive of text more broadly, too.
>
>Or, for example, dealing with book arts/artists' books, the text of the book
>would be whatever language-text is presented therein, but the language of
>the book would have to include all its other parts (visual, structural,
>sometimes aural, etc.) as well. Books can (they don't always, or do they?)
>make literature physical.
>
>charles
Also depends, I think, on whether yr saying "langue" or "parole", eh?
I mean "text" means that which has been twisted into shape, like the
material in a rug.
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 16:11:06 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: british women poets
I would have thought that s0meone wd mention Mina Loy.
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 16:11:10 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: British Women Poets
Daphne Marlatt
Margaret Avison
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 16:13:46 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
>Hi. What's the unconscious?
>
>Jordan
I dont know what yr talking about.
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 16:23:41 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: my stack
1. _Stones_ by Chenjerai Hove. This was published around 1988 or 1989, but
it is still in print, and still current. Hove's second novel in English,
_Shadows_ is also very interesting, about people who ask fopr descriptions
of their loved ones who died in the war of independence in Zimbwabe, so
memory will live. His third novel in English is just out.
2, _Horns for Hondo_ by Lesego Rampolokeng. includes some of the best rap
you will ever hear. Lesego is a wonder in a live reading, and if you get
the chance to hear him, you'll be better able to read the poems on page.
3. _Guava Juice_ by Sandile Dikeni. If you dont know, you will be
interested to hear that "Guave Juice" is code for "Molotov cocktail" in the
Townships. You cant go to jail for saying "Guave" yet.
4 _Para que no me Olvides_ by Marcela Serrano. Her third novel, now in 9th
printing, to deal with life in the Pinochet and p[ost-Pinochet era.
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 18:36:24 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: british women poets
>I would have thought that s0meone wd mention Mina Loy.
someone did
& what about Canadian women poets writing in French, or is that too
complicated? & elsewhere in "the commonwealth" aren't their poets writing in
any number of languages, & what might their positions be with regard to
various conceptions of British poetry?
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 17:15:01 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: James Brook <jbrook@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Re: text/language
Gabrielle--
Unless one stretches the concept of "text" into very obscure shape,
there's no possibility of a text before the advent of writing.
Language is above all *spoken*--linguists tend to see writing systems
(which underlie texts) as secondary, derivative, and imperfect recordng
devices of the spoken language. Of course, once a language does
acquire a writing system, the written language begins to affect the
spoken language. The effects of writing were broadened and intensified
by printing--spelling, meanings, and usages becoming more fixed and
employment prospects for copy editors brightening. (Renaissance scholars
were employed by pubishers for this task. By the way, their efforts
at restoring Latin to its classical form helped kill off Latin as
a living, spoken language.)
James Brook
Gabrielle Welford wrote:
>
> How can text and language be distinguished? I guess have to take a long
> look at how the word "language" and "text" can and can't sensibly be used.
> Otherwise into the foggy dew we go. gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 20:42:55 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: text/language
George, Gab, et al.
"text, texture, textile"--Kenneth Burke. Long Western history of
text and skin and clothing and words via the Christian dispensation
(Christ is the word incarnate etc.) but of course it all goes back
much further. I'd love to know what the Eastern version of this is.
But I'm going on vacation now for a week, so maybe I'll catch up
when I get back and if I get to read the backlog stuff (I'm doing
the "nomail" set).
couldn't resist sticking my oar in the water though.
burt
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 20:48:44 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: text/language
James,
You couldn't be more wrong about "text"--it exists long before writing--
unless, of course, you are construing "text" in a modern sense.
But, again, if you wish to answer me personally on this, you'll have to
do it backchannel.
burt
kimmelman@admin.njit.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 20:53:07 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: nomail
I won't be reading Poetics mail for a week or so. i can be reached backchannel.
Thanks for your indulgence.
burt kimmelman
kimmelman@admin.njit.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 10:25:03 +0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Schuchat <schuchat@ARC.ARC.ORG.TW>
Subject: As for poets and critics
In-Reply-To: <POETICS%96071208281761@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Having been partially trained at one point as a literary critic, but
specifically as a literary critic of Chinese literature, I thought I'd
note a few observations:
both writing poetry and writing criticism proceed from mystery, or lack
of understanding. but with criticism the goal is understanding, lifting
the mystery, explanation.
when a poet writes criticism it isn't criticism, its documentation.
(except when the poet is writing as a professional critic)
criticism wants to be science, not journalism. poets generally don't
have a big problem with journalism, except when it doesn't act to their
advantage (bad reviews).
critics usually like philosophy more than rhetoric.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: william marsh <wmarsh@NUNIC.NU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
poetic technique.
>What DO you exactly mean by texture?
>Burt
>
>
Burt -- my intent in reversing the terms (poetry of texture as opposed to
texture of poetry) was to punctuate my point that we might be better off
talking about texture, materiality, shape, design (choose your term)
regardless of genre distinctions, rather than talking about a texture of
poetry as distinct from, say, a texture of criticism. (Especially when,
yeah, there's no established sense of what 'texture' is when applied to...)
Otherwise, to be honest, i'm not too fond of the word, which i had picked up
from the previous post.
Thanks for responding.
bmarsh
ps. does email have texture?!
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: william marsh <wmarsh@NUNIC.NU.EDU>
Subject: Re: e-mail politics
At 11:38 AM 7/12/96 +0100, you wrote:
>At 4:00 PM 12/31/69, william marsh wrote:
>
>>distinctions between so-called "poetic"
>>and "critical" writings, as you point out, have been effectively eradicated,
>>most profoundly by those poet/theorists (Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein,
>>among several others) whose work is very much concerned with blurring the
>>disinction.
>
>I think we should pause here and give tribute to those who promoted this
>blurring as a feminist project, particularly the editors/associate
>editors/contributing editors of _HOW(ever)_. Such as Kathleen Fraser, Bev
>Dahlen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Frances Jaffer, Susan Gevirtz, Carolyn
>Burke, and Chris Tysh.
>
>Dodie Bellamy
>
>
very good point.
also should point out that the current issue of Chain, which Charles
Alexander praised a few days ago, is dealing with 'genre-bending' in some
nifty ways.
bmarsh
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 22:41:40 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: travelin
Bigmouth Hankovitch is headin to Minneysota for a week (MN - the center of the
universe), and he's taking all his awful redundant ideas with him - but
keep talking - he'll be his old irascible self when he gets back (look -
he's starting to refer to himself as Checkers in the third person - that
proves it) - have fun everybody - net some keepers for me - Henry Gould
woof woof
Just packin up gettin ready to go...
Gonna leave you now
Goin anyhow
Know where I'm bound
I'm just packin up gettin ready...
to go
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 22:07:39 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Paul Naylor <PKNAYLOR@MSUVX2.MEMPHIS.EDU>
Subject: PUI
Well, I expect the List Police to pull me over after this one for Posting Under
The Influence, but, after a nasty trip to the dentist and, oh, a few glasses of
my favorite personal anesthetic, I feel some comments on this poet/critic thing
coming on. Seems like there's still a host/parasite hierarchy lurking around,
lo, these many years after the new criticism. I write both poetry and
criticism, as do so many on this list, and, although they do constitute
different forms of attention, I'd like to think I'm still taking notes in the
aviary when I do either. As someone who straddles both lines in my professional
life, I'm asking Santa for nothing but a big eraser for Christmas -- OK, that
and tenure.
Paul Naylor
SEND
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
SEND
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
in%"poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu"
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 22:33:17 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: text/language
burt k writes:
"text, texture, textile"--Kenneth Burke.
this is a conjunction that has fascinated me since i became a weaver at 14 (i
was already a writer). a few years ago a friend and i were planning to write
about this as a meditation on the ironies and complexities of "women's work" --i
had been struck by the way feminist lit critics have so often used textile
metaphors in ways that are intended to reclaim this pun as "women's work" --but
often they reveal, through their use of that metaphor, that they don't know the
basics of the craft they are using as metaphor ("broken tapestry" is the name of
one such text; what is a broken tapestry? another didn't understand the way
images are created in a woven tapestry, line of weft by line of weft, and was
trying to make a complex point about women's writing, sexual violation and
philomela or someone else where this lack of knowledge ended up mattering). not
that people have to know all the intricate mechanics of every technology they
allude to in creating word-texts, or that this is peculiar to feminist literary
critics (this just happens to be where we noticed it, since it was the kind of
stuff we were reading at the time), but there's a way that this combination
pointed, for us, to the ways in which artisanal work is often
sentimentalized/gendered in misleading ways. from there we got into stuff like:
wanting to get someone to write about actual women working in textile factories
and the LACK of artisanal glamor in those modes of production; the economy of
circles of women trading and recycling baby-clothes, free stores, etc --textile
"businesses" that subvert corporate economies; the ways in which creating text
IS like creating textile, despite the occasional clumsy or sentimental ways the
trope has been used;the ways in which intellectual labor IS "women's work"
because women do it, and doesn't need to be justified by hearkening to an
"ancient", socially-coded-feminine art.
at first we were going to edit a book, then we were going to collaborate on an
article; neither has materialized (so to speak). but i was just thinking about
it today and wondering if there was something useful i could "do" with these
fragments (like send them to Chain) when burt posted this line.
what *is* the burke reference?
md
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 22:36:03 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: PUI
Comments: To: Multiple@maroon.tc.umn.edu, recipients@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
of@maroon.tc.umn.edu, list@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
POETICS@maroon.tc.umn.edu
naylor rites:
> a big eraser for Christmas -- OK, that
> and tenure.
>
>
ok pau, tenure-vibes coming your way.--md
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 23:36:26 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
>ps. does email have texture?!
as in the structure, frm entymology, text/texture/textile
meaning a weaving ov words, & hence various "threads" ov email
discussion... tho the pessimist in me sees a looming shroud...
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 00:30:13 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: As for poets and critics
Simon--
There's an old reporters saying here in Washington --
"The purpose of journalism is to shoot the wounded." I have to say I find
that a little to accurate. As a poet, journalism means nothing, because
poetry
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 00:36:57 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: As for poets and critics
woops, here's what it was getting to be
>poets generally don't
>have a big problem with journalism, except when it doesn't act to their
>advantage (bad reviews).
Simon--
There's an old reporters saying here in Washington --
"The purpose of journalism is to shoot the wounded." I have to say I find
that a little too accurate. As a poet, journalism means nothing, because
poetry is almost entirely ignored by major press. & of course I'm being
overly rhetorical, most journalists are just shlubs like me, trying to get
by. It's all there in Chomsky etc.
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 21:42:58 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Tristan D. Saldana" <hbeng175@DEWEY.CSUN.EDU>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
In-Reply-To: <v01530503ae0c8c9483c3@[142.58.126.19]>
On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, George Bowering wrote:
> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
> >
> >Jordan
>
> I dont know what yr talking about.
Nor do I, you.
Tristan
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 22:06:05 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Peter Quartermain <Quarterm@UNIXG.UBC.CA>
Subject: DON'T call me!
Hi, everybody. Sorry to bother you all, but this is the most efficient way I
can deal with this problem. Yesterday (11 July) my Eudora crashed in the
middle of downloading e-mail from the list, and I can no longer access my
incoming mail because the home computer won't accept my password. But for
some reason I can still send mail out -- or I can if you get to read this!
Since I shall be away in the Queen Charlotte Islands (boast! boast!) from 17
- 27, I will not get this fixed until the end of the month. So if anyone
needs to get hold of me or Meredith, you'll have to fax or use snail-mail
please. And you'd better assume I got nothing posted on 11 July, since I
only downloaded a handful of stuff. I'll post another general message around
1 August or so, assuming I get this bug fixed.
A dios.
Peter
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Peter Quartermain
128 East 23rd Avenue
Vancouver
B.C.
Canada V5V 1X2
Voice and fax: 604 876 8061
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 23:27:10 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Susan Clark <clarkd@SFU.CA>
Subject: Peter Quartermain call
******************************************************************
Forwarded message:
Here is a message forwarded to me by Angela Szeto
(aszeto@intergate.bc.ca) for the list.
good wishes out there,
Susan Clark
clarkd@sfu.ca
******************************************************************
> Date: Sun, 7 Jul 1996 16:11:46 -0700
> X-Sender: aszeto@pop.intergate.bc.ca
> To: clarkd@sfu.ca
> From: aszeto@intergate.bc.ca (Angela Szeto)
> Subject: Notice for PQ letters
>
> (ahem!)
>
> ATTENTION ALL STUDENTS OF PETER ALLAN QUARTERMAIN PAST AND PRESENT
> Peter Quartermain will be retiring in two years' time from his position at
> the University of British Columbia. A group of his students at UBC wish to
> nominate him for next year's Killam teaching prize as a long overdue gesture
> of institutional recognition. We need as many anecdotal letters as possible
> giving details of how wonderful a teacher Peter is. The letters need not be
> particularly long but they should avoid sounding wishy-washy and vague. If
> you can cite specific incidences of brilliance then that would be good but
> otherwise just try to write something that sounds conventionally credible.
> You should also include when Peter taught you and the course name (if
> applicable).
>
> Letters should be addressed to Dr. Herbert Rosengarten (the head of the
> English Department at UBC) and sent to the following address:
> 104-989 West 20th Avenue,
> Vancouver, British Columbia,
> V5Z 1Y4
>
> We would appreciate receiving the letters by September 1, 1996.
>
> If you have any questions, you can e-mail them to: aszeto@intergate.bc.ca
>
> Thanks everyone.
>
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 23:26:15 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: To Max Douglas
In-Reply-To: <199607130406.AAA15221@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
alongside the rereading of this wonderful book, I hope some will look up
Max Douglas's _Collected Poems_ (White Dot Press 1978), edited by
Christopher Weinert and Andrea Wyatt (has ANYBODY heard from Andrea
these past eight years or so???)
for those who don't already know, the "David" who appears in the first
lines of Irby's _To Max Douglas_ is David Bromige.
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Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 00:19:18 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: white rose
For those who have asked, Kevin's extravaganza about Jay De Feo will play
one night only, Wednesday, October 9, 8 p.m. at the San Francisco Art
Institute.
Another "official" announcement about it will be posted closer to the date.
Dodie Bellamy
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Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 03:20:11 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@PANIX.COM>
Subject: cath
Clara: thinking and loving, writing, the murmur of the world
Alan: heard in the hollow of its shell, close by
Tiffany: sounding through fathoms of conversations, these souls
Honey: who have lost their fathermothers, mewling and
Travis: pity! pity! those unborn, unbearable to this dimmed life
Joan: changing bodies and directions, changing moods and genders
Sandra: down where ripples no longer reflect surface striations,
Clara: languages, terms, obseqious semiologies
Alan: as if language conveyed meaning humped against the physical
Tiffany: which we hear in our everyday networking and speaking
Honey: against or within the abdominal terminal screen
Travis: ghosts! ghosts!
Joan: the swollen world of the murmur of the world, the ocean
Sandra: gone, this gone world, where this speaking forms the cap
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Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 03:21:09 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
poetic technique.
At 12:59 PM 7/12/96, Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT is rumored to have typed:
> okay Bill Marsh,
> What DO you exactly mean by texture?
> Burt
Burt:
It depends. What exactly do you mean when you say Bill Marsh?
Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 03:21:13 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
poetic technique.
hnry:
> There are lots of cases of poet-critics, and every poet is a critic and
> probably every good critic is something of a poet; but maybe what Mark
> was getting at is the clashes in the arena when the center of the one
> activity tangles with the other.
I suppose that's where our takes on writing are different: I revel in
the "tangle," in the unresolved dissonance, of an exalted activity
(poetic composition) sleeping with what is often dismissed as rational,
and parasitic (criticism). _Artifice of Absorption_ is an excellent
example of this, as are works like _The Duncaid_. One can also argue
that works like Kristeva's _Black Sun_, or De Quincey's and Pater's
criticism, obviously, are themselves poetic.
> When the informed and weaponed reader-critic becomes the arbiter of
> taste & the explainer of how who done what. Impossible not to cross
> those lines.
It isn't necessary to know whether or not "The Raven" was composed as
Poe claims it was. To some degree, the posthumous invention of elegant
recipes for the composition of pre-exisitng poems are like the imaginary
worlds in Ficciones: intricate confections, often delicious in and
of themselves.
> >Does anyone else here want to get down into the burial site
> >and discuss the texture of poetry? I'd love to know how the
> >rest of you read and write.
>
> Curiosity killed the carp. You're delving into two taboo areas: "secrets
> of the craft", and "inspiration". I'm not criticizing, just commenting.
Coleridge, Poe, Mallarme, Campion, Alan Davies--these poets never
killed their craft or inspiration by writing about them. I see this
in terms of classical music, perhaps, where *texture* and *form*--ie,
counterpoint, orchestration, registration, harmonic syntax, linear
syntax, units of phrases and their balance within larger units--constitute
the music's "meaning." In music, signification is a surface operation:
practically speaking, there are no metaphors.
I do respect a individual's reluctance to talk about unconsious activities.
When I was friends with Kathy Acker, she used to scream and cry when I
asked technical questions. Consequently, I saved my questons for writers
who were interested. People whose inspiration depends on a kind of divine
ignorance need not respond to my questions about technique.
Still, I find most compositional techniques fascinating, even when they
are arbitrary. I have already mentioned Roussel's _How I Wrote Certain of
My Books_. Even Keats's letters still fascinate me to this day.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 03:21:21 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
poetic technique.
william marsh typed:
> My question would be why would we ever expect linguistics and semiotics to
> "adequately address the texture of a poem"?
This was merely my polite way of saying that linguistics and semoitics do
not entirely address my interest (critically and practically) in poetry.
> Linguistics and Semiotics
> adequately (arguably) address language and meaning, and to the extent that
> explorations of this type suggest avenues of inquiry when dealing with a
> particular poem or poetry, they are useful -- in my mind enormously useful
> -- without necessarily addressing the whole issue o writing.
I don't disagree with you, for the most part. But L and S address language
and meaning within a context that is not always relevant to the systems
and conventions of poetic diction and devices. In _Seven Type of Ambiguity,
Empson tried to address poetic meaning as embodied in poetic technique;
in some ways, he came closer than Jameson to examining the question.
To get to the
> texture of the poem, we read the poem, right? To get to the texture of
> theory, read theory.
I disagree with you completely. Texture is as subject to critical
examination as anything else. In the case of poetry, it is often more
relevant to discuss assonance or sibilance than it is to discuss
borgeiose referents.
> But what intrigues me about the "open" poetries of this and the last decade
I did not suggest that "open" poetries were unworthy of discussion. If
anything, I suggested that these are as worthy of prosodic scrutiny as
"closed" or "formal" poetry: I suggested that the distinction hindered
more than it helped. If a line makes you stumble or feels sinuous,
nine times out of ten, the result is a measure of the poet's rhythmic
skill. Linguistics has little direct information to teach us about
rhythm. If the subject of prosodic rhythm were irrelevant, then Pound's
criticism would have been useless to Olsen, et al.
(Also: a line that makes you stumble is not necessarily bad. Much
language poetry intentionally makes you stumble: The Art of the
Rhythmic Non Sequitur, The Art of the Double-Take.)
> But what intrigues me about the "open" poetries of this and the last decade
> is the extent to which they seem, to me at least, to share the interest and
> perspective of ling/semio studies, so that distinctions of these kinds
> (poetry vs. criticism/theory, etc) seem pointless.
But I, too, am uninterested in such distinctions. I merely
pointed out that certain aspects of the poetry of the last three
decades, whatever its school or formal orientation, are inadequately
addressed by linguistics as currently practiced. I haven't seen a
synthesis of linguistics, semiotics, prosody and diction that addressed
what are for me the most exciting and visceral aspects of reading or
writing a poem.
The purpose here is not to dismiss linguistics. It is to get poets to
talk about how they write and read.
> Language arts and
> language philosophies share the same venue, as much of the work of the last
> two decades demonstrates (the work not only of "poets" like Howe, Bernstein
> and Silliman, but also of "critic/theorists" like M. Perloff (Howe,
> Bernstein and Silliman!)). The way i see it, this suggests a practice in
> contemporary poetics that goes beyond neat packages like "theoretical
> poetry" or "poetic theory".
I get the feeling you're speaking to some earlier poster in this
thread. I've read lots of Bernstein, Silliman, Davies, Palmer and
so on. I have been intrigued and interested by what they say. But
with all due respect, there are other ways to analyze language poetry
than the methods employed by their own critical writing. It seems
to me that what you're asking for is a very un-postmodern approach:
language poet purism.
> >Does anyone else here want to get down into the burial site
> >and discuss the texture of poetry? I'd love to know how the
> >rest of you read and write.
> >
> How 'bout if we discuss the poetry of texture, which might adequately
> address the writing of poetry.
That would be great, Bill. But I also want to address the texture
of the poetry itself. The patterns of assonance and alliteration
i Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes" will always thrill me (and Robert Gluck)
more than anything (however useful and astute) Kristeva ever wrote.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 03:21:28 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of
poetic technique.
Bill Marsh typed:
> Otherwise, to be honest, i'm not too fond of the word, which i had picked up
> from the previous post.
You find the word *texture* to be too vague, perhaps? Look again:
Texture: [L *textura*, fr. *textus*, pp. of *texere* to weave--more
at *technical*]
1.: something that is composed of closely interwoven elements.
2.a: The disposition or manner of union of the particles of a body or
substance.
3.a: A composite of the elements of prose or poetry <"All these
words...meet violently to form a *texture* immpressive and exciting."--John
Berryman.>
4.: A pattern of musical sound created by tones or lines sung together.
5.: a basic scheme or structure; overall structure.
--from Webster's *Third International Dictionary*
> my intent in reversing the terms (poetry of texture as opposed to
> texture of poetry) was to punctuate my point that we might be better off
> talking about texture, materiality, shape, design (choose your term)
> regardless of genre distinctions, rather than talking about a texture of
> poetry as distinct from, say, a texture of criticism.
Then I *was* correct. Your response to my post was actually a response
to some other post--since mine had already suggested that distinctions
between poetry and criticism were arbitary. However:
I never said anything about "a texture of poetry as distinct from,
say, a texture of criticism." I spoke only of wanting to read
new criticism that addresses the texture of poetic language.
> ps. does email have texture?!
Of course it does--especially *typographical* texture.
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 04:59:20 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: As for poets and critics
>
>both writing poetry and writing criticism proceed from mystery, or lack
>of understanding. but with criticism the goal is understanding, lifting
>the mystery, explanation.
Everything proceeds from mystery, pretty much ends there too. Isn't that the
human condition, never to "know" with completion?
But I still think a lot of good criticism (Kristeva has been mentioned in
this thread, & so has Keats, Olson, and I'd certainly add Walter Benjamin)
extends the mystery, perhaps even illuminates without necessary explaining.
>when a poet writes criticism it isn't criticism, its documentation.
>(except when the poet is writing as a professional critic)
This to me doesn't come close to explaining the poets named above, or many
essays by Pound, Woolf, Howe, Silliman, . . .
So could you explain this a little bit. Or are these cases of the poet
writing as professional critic??
>criticism wants to be science, not journalism. poets generally don't
>have a big problem with journalism, except when it doesn't act to their
>advantage (bad reviews).
Science Journalism Are these the only two choices?
>critics usually like philosophy more than rhetoric.
Many poets do, too. But then philosophy can be presented in rhetorical form,
too.
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 19:13:39 +0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Schuchat <schuchat@ARC.ARC.ORG.TW>
Subject: Re: As for poets and critics
In-Reply-To: <960713003656_433253073@emout08.mail.aol.com>
Rod, what I meant by journalism wasn't so much Bob Woodward's latest
revelations of the first lady's inner life, or even Jonathan Yardley's
fulminations, as the kind of criticism that Rexroth wrote, in columns for
the Saturday Review, San Francisco Examiner, the Nation, etc. Pound's
criticism is often the same kind of journalism. for that matter, while I
don't particularly appreciate James Fenton's poetry, I do take his
reportage as a poet's journalism. of course, what Chomsky is talking
about has more to do with why there is no Kenneth Rexroth writing in the
SF Examiner today. but equally, The Classics Revisited are probably
considered beneath contempt in the academy.
on another topic, wasn't Lorenzo Thomas the best American poet in Vietnam?
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 19:18:49 +0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Schuchat <schuchat@ARC.ARC.ORG.TW>
Subject: Re: As for poets and critics
In-Reply-To: <199607130959.EAA26156@freedom.mtn.org>
Charles,
Re "documentation" -- in many cases (Pound, Silliman, Howe, Bernstein,
etc), whatever else the poet is doing, the poet is also creating or
furthering a context in which his/her own work can be understood. does a
critic write the first book to make it possible for you to understand the
second book? (maybe Harold Bloom?)
what other options besides science and journalism are there?
literature?
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 04:39:20 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Joyce Conference
In keeping with our reportage of conferences, somebody sent me the
following from the Asian Wall St Urinal.
---------------------------------------------------------
Joycean scholarship bloomed in China this past week with the convening
of the First International Academic Conference on James Joyce in China.
While the five-day conference included Joyce scholars from the
United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and a representative from the
James Joyce Center in Dublin, its acknowledged, but humble star was
Chinese "Ulysses" translator Professor Jin Di.
Prof. Jin's involvement with Joyce began with a single chapter. After
Deng Xiaoping came to power and launched the era of opening and reform,
Joyce's works were freed from their classification as "poisonous
weeds." The editors at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, seeking
to compile an anthology of modern Western literature, approached Jin Di
and convinced him to translate one chapter of "Ulysses."
As anyone who has ever begun it can attest, just reading the novel from
beginning to end is a major accomplishment. Without access to Western
reference materials, translating the shortest chapter -- 12 pages --
took Professor Jin six months. Painful though it was, this effort
launched him on his own odyssey that took him to Yale, Oxford,
Notre Dame, the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and the
University of Virginia.
Encouraged by the Joyce scholars he encountered and supported by
university grants and publishing house advances, Prof. Jin devoted most
of the next 16 years to translating "Ulysses." Several of his
translated chapters were published in a prestigious Chinese literat ure
journal in the mid-1980s and a separate volume was released in 1987.
Volumes containing 12 translated chapters appeared in Taiwan in 1993
and in China in 1994.
However, in 1990 a professor named Xiao Qian began his own translation
of "Ulysses," in collaboration with his wife. Prof. Xiao finis hed
first, and it was his translation that drew the attention of the
international news media when it appeared last year. A controversy has
subsequently developed as to whether Prof. Xiao made unfair use of
Prof. Jin's published translations in crafting his own, and as to whose
translation is better.
The controversy is unfortunate, but more important is the availability
of "Ulysses" in Chinese; both translations have together been purchased
by several hundred thousand Chinese readers over the past two years.
Conference attendees gathered not to dwell on the cont roversy, but to
celebrate Joyce's genius, and Prof. Jin's accomplishment.
The conference opened with the reading of a letter from Irish President
Mary Robinson in which she praised Prof. Jin's "16-year labor of love
in bringing to one billion people the greatest work of twentieth
century literature." Mr. Joe Hayes, Ireland's amiable and learned
ambassador to China, then addressed the group, reminding them that
Chinese intellectuals saw early on in Ireland a link between
nationalism and literature which they themselves wished to establish.
At the close of the first day, Ambassador Hayes hosted a dinner
reception at his residence where conference participants were joined by
Beijing's Irish denizens. Besides facilitating scholarly contacts, the
reception also provided Beijing's Irish with an excuse for a party.
When the scholars had gone, coolers of Guinness suddenly appeared,
Irish music resounded through the residence's formal parlors, and the
gathering moved to the patio where the conversation progressed on to
more modern Irish concerns.
The conference moved on to Tianjin, where a full schedule of scholarly
presentations began, with simultaneous interpretation for the foreign
guests. Prof. Jin shared with the participants his views of "Ulysses"
and his philosophy of translation.
Simply put, Prof. Jin's goal in translating "Ulysses" was to achieve
what he terms "the closest possible approximation in total effect." In
other words, he wanted a Chinese reader of "Ulysses" to get the same
impression from reading his translation as an English reader would from
reading the original. This was a lofty goal, one that required making
creative adjustments so as to preserve the flavor of Joyce's prose.
Take, for instance, the palindromes interjected into a conversation by
a character named Lenehan. Says Lenehan, "Madam, I'm Adam. And Able was
I ere I saw Elba." Faithfully translated into Chinese, "Madam I'm Adam"
would read "Furen, wo shi Yadang." It would not be a palindrome and the
remark would likely strike a Chinese reader as a non sequitur. To keep
the palindromes intact, Prof. Jin changed their meanings. In his
translation, Lenehan says, "Furen a, Wo a renfu. Ren neng sheng tian
sheng neng ren." Literally translated back from the Chinese, the
palindrome now means, "Madam, I am somebody's husband. Man can beat
heaven beats able man." (Neng means both "can" and "able" in Chinese.)
Prof. Jin thus sacrificed the meaning of the palindrome so he could
convey to the Chinese reader the fact that Lenehan is a clown.
Not surprisingly, many of the Chinese scholars chose to discuss Prof.
Jin's translation, offering both praise and constructive criticism. A
Taiwan scholar argued provocatively that Prof. Jin's use of mainland
Chinese dialects to replicate English dialects -- like Shandong dialect
for Suffolk English -- made the translation too difficult for Taiwanese
readers. "Taiwan wants to assert its own linguistic uniqueness," she
stated, going on to suggest that there be separate translations for
Taiwanese and mainland Chinese readers.
Western scholars presented on such topics as "James Joyce and Irish
Cultural Rebirth" and "Ulysses in the Context of Modern Western
Thought." It was the first trip to China for all the Western
participants and their thrill at being here was matched only by their
Chinese counterparts' delight at being able to discuss James Joyce with
renowned experts. Like foreign businessmen who salivate over the China
market, the Western scholars made repeated reference to the fact that
1.2 billion more people are now able to read -- or at least buy -- the
"product" they are promoting, Joyce's greatest work.
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 10:10:35 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Joel Kuszai <kuszai@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Meow Press Reading in Toronto
MEOW PRESS READING / Book Launch
Featuring 3 New Meow Press books:
Michael Basinski, Heebee-Jeebies
Natalee Caple, The Price of Acorn
Wendy Kramer, Patinas
also out from Meow Press:
Meredith Quartermain, Terms of Sale
Lisa Robertson, The Descent
Idler Pub on Sunday July 21 at 8pm.
The reading is free.
The Idler Pub is located at 255 Davenport Rd. TORONTO
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 10:57:43 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Thomas M. Orange" <tmorange@BOSSHOG.ARTS.UWO.CA>
Subject: credences
In-Reply-To: <199607130406.AAA15221@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
listfolks:
whatever happened to credences? has it folded or did my library simply
drop its subscription?
tom orange
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 12:32:49 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: jms <jms@TIAC.NET>
Subject: order chain
Chain has a new main address:
215 Ashland Avenue
Buffalo, NY 14222
(this is Jena Osman's new address)
I also have a new Chain related address as of 8/1:
182 Elm Street
Albany, NY 12202
Chain can be easily ordered at the rate of
$18 for two issues or $10 for one issue
from Jena Osman or Juliana Spahr by e-mail (we will
bill you) or by mail (send check to UB Foundation).
josman@ascu.buffalo.edu
jms@tiac.com
Thanks for interest.
Juliana Spahr
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 12:32:09 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: McGuire Jerry L <jlm8047@USL.EDU>
Subject: poetry performance
It's a hoary argument between poets and actors over which in principle ought to
be the better interpreters of poetry. The reasons actors tend to assume they'll be
better--their training in voice, pacing, textual analysis, stage presence--can lead
to a kind of clinical frigidity that is just the opposite of the absorbed precision that
Elizabeth McGrand notes: "as larry heinemann has put it, [good readers]
'see/hear/feel' the images as they read them. in other words, as the reader
reads, they too are experiencing he writing." This is to say that even actors who
do a _good_ job of reading other people's poetry (and some actors, of course, write
and perform their own poems) work from a different set of public assumptions
from most poets who read their own. (And, as E.M. notes, plenty of us give
excruciating readings, with excesses and deficiencies enough to go around.)
The idea, of course, that actors couldn't possibly be good readers of poetry because
actors are natively stupid or inept at public presentation is pretty dim. I am _so_
pleased that no one here made it (in so many words).
And yes, no doubt Creeley is one of the greatest readers of Williams, and Ginsberg
is a hoot no matter what. But R.C. has been doing his aw-shucks just-plain-Bob
readings so long, and has brought them to such rarity of measure and pace and
intonation and persuasion--like any fine actor, he creates the illusion that
the words are arising within him as they're spoken, even while you know the
things are there on paper--that all his pals and fans (all of us, to be sure) find it
hard to keep in mind that he's doing an artful thing in artificial circumstances.
Would he do as good a job with Stevens, I wonder, or Donne, or Frost, or
Dickinson? He probably wouldn't want to.
Or, to take him off the hook, another problem the actor faces is that
his/her skills are designed for specific analysis and adaptation to whatever task
is at hand. Theatrical audiences regard this kind of performance when it's
successful--when the actor is transparent and transcends his or her immediate,
personal presence--as a high achievement. But poetry audiences are different
(and Christopher Whipple ought to be given credit for trying something to
subvert the preconceptions that separate these audiences), and they differ among
themselves pretty considerably--slam audiences, "dramatic reading" audiences,
workshop-auxilliary cafe series, culture-hero honors-college public viewings,
peer-review artfests, not to mention the best of all, the one where across the coffee
table or lying on the rug, one poet reads his/her latest poem to someone to whom
all this matters. Dean Taciuch thinks that what matters is "the language," and
worries that actors would be concerned with the emotions and meanings.
Elizabeth singles out a reading where Martin Espada puts his words and voice
in the service of collective improvization. Tony Green worries about a "danger"
in the kind of reading he supposes actors would do, and feels that "the poetry is
damaged" by it. It seems to me that if "poetry" can be "damaged" by the efforts of
a dedicated but incompetent assortment of readers, then (a) it's not worth saving,
and (b) it must already be damaged beyond help.
The real problem for Christopher Whipple's actors is one many poets are mostly
inclined to shrug off and fake--that of preparing oneself to do justice to a set of
poems quite different from one's immediate work. (Unless we have an "instinctive,"
"natural" gift for discovering the perfectly appropriate commonalities among all
"good" "poems" of any place/time/culture. Anyone buying that?) Like E.M. says,
the "throaty growl" reading has become so standardized--tougher for women,
perhaps, some of whom may in consequence be reduced at times to public
declarations of communal merger with their audiences that they don't perfectly
make a full-time part of their daily lives--that it does get pressed into service in
circumstances in which it appears (no longer just dull but) craven and silly.
At bottom I think the actors will fail and the audiences will stay split, because
what matters for making poetry come alive involves a manifestation of the
personal in the reading that all the actors' training tends to efface. A good poetry
reader is more like Schwartzenegger--always Arnold, no matter the role--than like
Streep. To achieve that with the kinds of poetry in question means finding
readers who will get not just to the language of those poems (an actor can do
that fine) and not just to his/her own personal/public performance mode (any
hack can do that, however bad it looks to others) but to a public living-out of
the specific energies that mades those specific poems come specifically into a
human world and matter. C. W. needs to find poet/readers who do this all
the time with their own work and who really believe in and love in a specific
way the works selected for presentation. A better system yet: find the willing
poets, and let them pick their own favorite works from those historical
moments that matter to them.
And to E. McGrand, thanks for that really lovely summary and analysis of so
many of the issues here--if you don't mind, I've got some friends I'd like to pass
it on to. And I'm with you all the way on Tim O'Brien, who certainly is one of the
finest readers on the planet--lots of poets could take some direction there.
Jerry McGuire
P.S. Does this satisfy the concerns of the Lurker Police?
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 13:36:51 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Sam Pereira <LITSAM@AOL.COM>
Subject: A Warning Re: The Decisiveness Of Glitches
This is in response to Peter Quartermain's notice of having difficulty
with Eudora. As I faxed Peter, and spoke to him via telephone this day, I
too have had a similar occurrence. My mail is unreadable. It begins to
download and then suddenly freezes and crashes my system.
While I tend to be a rather crafty middle aged poet, I never claimed to
be e-mail letter carrier of the year! I AM capable of reading your posts on
my AOL account, but it just seems so...so...non-literary there. :)
Anyway, pardon my rambling...I told Peter that I would post this as
warning to anyone out there having problems. You are not alone. And if you
have corrective measures, please, send them in this direction.
All the best,
Sam Pereira (LITSAM@aol.com and litsam.telis@telis.org)
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 19:42:43 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "William F. Walsh" <wwalsh@IOL.IE>
Subject: Re: A Warning Re: The Decisiveness Of Glitches
Don't know if this will be of any assistance to those encountering Eudora
problems in the US, as I'm across the water with Ireland on Line. However,
my system crashed at about 6PM yesterday (1PM east coast US time), in a
similar fashion to that described by Sam Pereira--started to download mail,
then froze and offered in explanation: "Error Transmitting Mail," or
something equally less than helpful. The folks at IOL had me adjust my
settings for POP Account from wwalsh @iol.ie to wwalsh@gpo.iol.ie. The
addition of "gpo" did the trick. Hope this helps.
Lurking in Dublin,
William Walsh
> This is in response to Peter Quartermain's notice of having difficulty
>with Eudora. As I faxed Peter, and spoke to him via telephone this day, I
>too have had a similar occurrence. My mail is unreadable. It begins to
>download and then suddenly freezes and crashes my system.
>
> While I tend to be a rather crafty middle aged poet, I never claimed to
>be e-mail letter carrier of the year! I AM capable of reading your posts on
>my AOL account, but it just seems so...so...non-literary there. :)
>
> Anyway, pardon my rambling...I told Peter that I would post this as
>warning to anyone out there having problems. You are not alone. And if you
>have corrective measures, please, send them in this direction.
>
> All the best,
>
> Sam Pereira (LITSAM@aol.com and litsam.telis@telis.org)
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 15:41:40 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: The Decisiveness Of Glitches: poss solution
Possible Solution:
Open your mail with a raw text editor (subh as BBEdit).
Then create a new inbox and save the old mailbox as a text,
which you'll then be able to open in Word.
Possible problem:
Your mailbox is probably too large too load.
Hope this helps you.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
temporary shut-in (Hurricane Urethra)
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 13:46:58 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: filch <filch@POBOX.COM>
Subject: Eudora
You might try making more memory available to the app. Eudora, as any
app., will crash if the total size of files it is dealing with are too
large for its buffer.
Good Luck.
> This is in response to Peter Quartermain's notice of having difficulty
>with Eudora. As I faxed Peter, and spoke to him via telephone this day, I
>too have had a similar occurrence. My mail is unreadable. It begins to
>download and then suddenly freezes and crashes my system.
>
> While I tend to be a rather crafty middle aged poet, I never claimed to
>be e-mail letter carrier of the year! I AM capable of reading your posts on
>my AOL account, but it just seems so...so...non-literary there. :)
>
> Anyway, pardon my rambling...I told Peter that I would post this as
>warning to anyone out there having problems. You are not alone. And if you
>have corrective measures, please, send them in this direction.
>
> All the best,
>
> Sam Pereira (LITSAM@aol.com and litsam.telis@telis.org)
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 16:27:50 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: robert von hallberg <von6@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>
Subject: Orono 2
>To: anielsen@email.sjsu.edu
>From: von6@midway.uchicago.edu (robert von hallberg)
>Subject: Orono 2
>Cc:
>Bcc:
>X-Attachments:
>
>Dear Aldon,
>
> I have your reply to my reply. I will post this on the Poetics board
after I send it to you. I appreciate the offer to keep our correspondence
private, but this all began with your discussion of my statements on the
Poetics board, and my intention now is simply to see to it that my views are
represented accurately.
> 1. I am glad that you tape-recorded the session. And I accept your
warning to me about being careful about denying that I said this or that.
However, the one statement that I accuse you of misrepresenting (item #1, in
my last letter) is, you say, "off the tape." So the tape seems not to
resolve the one matter of factual misrepresentation. I repeat now that I
did not say that Hughes and Kaufman are bad poets. However, I do not
question that I said that the poems cited in the first paper in particular,
or even in the first two papers, were bad poems. Since I advocated the
critical sifting of the poems of Hughes, I have no embarrassment about
admitting here that I use the phrase "bad poems." You say in your reply to
me, "you did in fact say to me that the poems discussed were 'bad poems.'"
I never denied saying such a thing, but you have now alleged two quite
different statements by me about "bad" this or that. The difference between
the two statements hypothesized, or remembered, matters significantly. As a
critic, the category of the "bad poem" is part of my discourse; whereas to
claim that Hughes (or Kaufman) is a "bad poet" would be to speak
dismissively of serious writers. (Thomas Hardy seems to me a great poet who
wrote an amazing number of bad poems, but he is properly assessed by his
successes, not his failures.) If you now agree with me that I did not say
that Hughes and Kaufman are bad poets, I would appreciate your saying so in
the same place where you alleged that I did say that silly thing.
> 2. You say in your reply that your objection to my criticism of the
sociological approach of the first paper in particular, but of your
introductory remarks too, is that I "[seem] to [rule] out other efforts
[than close reading] that I feel are worthwhile and needed."
> My objection was (I am repeating myself, because you have not met the
point of my reply [item #2 in my reply]) to "simplistic sociology," as I
termed it in my reply. It is not surprising to learn that only ca. 6% of
the papers at the Orono conference were on race or minority writers, and
similarly it is not surprising that many distinguished black writers were
excluded from most mainstream anthologies. Who would have suspected
otherwise? You cite Alan Golding's work, which I have treasured for many
years; I seem to be ruling out the utility of that sort of work. Not at
all. Alan's work gets at the not perfectly visible political impulses
behind anthologies; his work is very surprising. A tabulation of racist
exclusion from mainstream anthologies just isn't surprising now, in 1996.
We need to move on to the next phase, which I claimed is close analysis and
evaluative argument, because the demonstration of the influence of racism in
the construction of literary canons and histories has been done cogently.
This was my claim at the Orono conference.
> 3. You say in your reply that what angered you was that "you did not
ask a question, nor did you offer your comments in a way directed
specifically to elements of the papers that might help their authors (or
even me) to improve the work in hand. . . . Yo would be far more likely to
achieve the result you seem to have aimed at by engaging directly with an
element of the readings about which one might argue productively."
> This is a little complicated. I am sorry that I angered you, really.
You're right about the objective of my comments: they were not aimed at
improving the first two papers presented. I feel that another sort of work
should be done, viz. close evaluative argument of particular poems. I could
not, however, have engaged with "the readings," because no readings were
presented, by my lights. That is the point.
> Yes, I might have commented in such a way that I could have helped the
authors to write a more sophisticated sort of literary sociology. If I had
felt that they weere likely to develop those papers into surprising
sociological analysis, I might have done so. My judgment was that as
literary sociology these papers were best left alone.
> 4. You say that you remain puzzled by my comments about Pound and race.
My point was straightforward, and I hope that it is on your tape. I had
difficulty seeing the advantage of calling Pound and Eliot's moves to London
as "white flight." Furthermore, I claimed that if one wanted to meet
Pound's ideas about race, segregation, miscegenation, etc., one needed to
realize that the Other for him in his formative years and in the peak period
of his modernism (ca. 1909-1939, say) was not African American but Italian.
Pound lived in Philadelphia when Italians were the controversial new
immigrants. His parents did social work aimed at integrating Italians in
Philadelphia. Pound left the States to begin his career in Italy. He
devoted much of his literary critical efforts in London to advocating the
importance of an understanding of southern, Mediterranean literary and
intellectual culture. He retreated from London in 1920-21, then from Paris
before 1924, and stayed in Italy until he was transferred as a prisoner to
Washington in 1945. He was not in flight from the culture he knew in his
early American years as the butt racist jokes and bigotry. This is not to
say that he had no racist views about African Americans, only that a
convincing account of his thinking about race and racism must deal centrally
with his dealings with Italian culture. The racism of the post-1945 era is
negrophobic; the racism of the first years of the century in Philadelphia
was Italophobic. I felt that the attack on Pound as in flight from black
people was anachronistic.
> I think that I have dealt with the remaining areas of disagreement
between us that I could see in your reply. I have not commented on the
areas of agreement, though I was pleased to see that they exist. If I have
overlooked something, please let me know.
> I would of course like to have a copy of the tape.
>
> Yours, Robert von
Hallberg
>
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 16:33:39 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: robert von hallberg <von6@MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>
Subject: re orono 2
Several days ago I sent a reply to Aldon Nielsen entitled Orono 2. I have
now posted that here for others to read, if they wish. My replies are now
getting repetitious. Unless something new comes up in the replies of
Aldon's that I have not yet read, I will probably drop the matter, because I
can't imagine it being of any more interest to people.
One last little matter: I do, I do, read Callaloo. Am I on tape denying
that too, Aldon?
Bob
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 17:42:55 -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@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Pierre@50
hearyehereyehearyeherehehearyeherarhyehehyeheyheeeryeehearhearyeeeherere
////////////Fiftieth///////////////////
>>>>Birthday<<<<<
=======================Greetings>>>>>
^^^^^^^to^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Pierre Joris
***** born July 14, 1946 ****
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 07:33:24 +0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Schuchat <schuchat@ARC.ARC.ORG.TW>
Subject: Re: Joyce Conference
In-Reply-To: <199607131139.EAA10599@dfw-ix12.ix.netcom.com>
The Xiao Qian mentioned as author of the possibly plagarized translation
of Ulysses into Chinese is much better known as novelist/journalist than
professor. Among other things, he covered WWII in Europe for Chinese
papers. His autobiography, TRAVELLER WITHOUT A MAP, is available in
English, translated by Jeffrey Kinkley, I think from Stanford.
The idea of using of regional dialects in Chinese to approximate dialect
usage in European fiction is pretty old. One of Thomas Hardy's novels
was translated into Shanxi dialect, if I remember right. A separate
Taiwan translation would be like insisting that South Carolineans need
their own translation of Dostoevsky so that they can understand it read
aloud.
In any case, Jin's translation is the one easily available here in
Taipei. I am told by those who have read both that Jin's is the more
academic, Xiao's is a contribution to the development of Chinese prose.
But they no doubt have their own axes to grind.
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 18:04:49 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
>On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, George Bowering wrote:
>
>> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
>> >
>> >Jordan
>>
>> I dont know what yr talking about.
>
>Nor do I, you.
>
>Tristan
--Neither do I, I.
..........................
"The Moose stood in the yard."
--Daniel Pinkwater
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 20:21:47 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
>>On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, George Bowering wrote:
>>
>>> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
>>> >
>>> >Jordan
>>>
>>> I dont know what yr talking about.
>>
>>Nor do I, you.
>>
>>Tristan
>
>
>--Neither do I, I.
i do not i
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 18:35:58 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carl Lynden Peters <clpeters@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
In-Reply-To: <199607140121.UAA00128@freedom.mtn.org> from "Charles Alexander"
at Jul 13, 96 08:21:47 pm
>
> >>On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, George Bowering wrote:
> >>
> >>> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
> >>> >
> >>> >Jordan
> >>>
> >>> I dont know what yr talking about.
> >>
> >>Nor do I, you.
> >>
> >>Tristan
> >
> >
> >--Neither do I, I.
>
>
> i do not i
>
id, we're getting closer!
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 18:23:13 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: James Brook <jbrook@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Re: text/language
Gabrielle, Burt, Maria, George & Co.,
I realize that the dictionary definition of a word is not, well,
the last word. But it does mean something; and, in this case, the
OED gives some perspective on the word "text" that might dissuade
from a sudden plunge into "weaving" and wondering whether all the
world's a text. (In my opinion, one of the great mistakes of
structuralism was taking the model of Sausserean linguistics and
projecting it absolutely everywhere.)
In a way, though, I could see an argument for a kind of "reading"
that historically precedes writing and text; one that might
even have laid the foundation for the development of writing:
divination, the reading of natural signs to reveal hidden truths.
("Divine: To make out by supernatural or magical insight; hence, to
interpret, explain, make known. . . .") I think Walter Benjamin
speculates along these lines somewhere. . . .
Anyway, this is not to say that someone can't extend the meaning
of "text" to include all manner of objects. But to apply the word
to, say, the productions of oral cultures would, in my view,
obscure what distinguishes oral from literate cultures or, in our
impending case, postliterate cultures.
--James Brook
from The Shorter OED, 3rd ed.:
Text [note on the word's derivation from the French "texte," which
derives from the Latin "textus"--meaning "the style of literary works"
(Quintillian) and, in Medieval Latin, "the Gospel, written character"
--and, ultimately, from "texere" (weave)] 1. The wording of anything
written or printed; the structure formed by the words in their order;
the very words, phrases, and sentences as written. . . . 2. esp. The
very words and sentences as originally written. . . . 3. spec. The
very words and sentences of Holy Scrpture; hence, the Scriptures
themselves; also, any single book of the Scriptures. . . .
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 22:46:18 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: OrOno release 2.3
In-Reply-To: <199607140407.AAA08271@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Robert -- the tape is in the mail -- I didn't see a listing for you in
the MLA directory, so I mailed it to the Chicago address listed in
Modernism/Modernity. I enclosed what I hope will be my last letter on
this subject. I will not burden the other listmembers with it here.
I will, again, invite any who do care about this to read your first and
second messages on this post. It's not really true that they repeat; as
I pointed out last time, the claims change from one to the next.
As you well know, you did not say: "I don't read x, y, z." I named a
series of journals in which close readings of texts and notices of
conferences often appear. You replied that you cannot be an expert in
every field. Excuse me for not knowing that this reply did not apply to
each of the journals I had named. On the other hand, since you now tell
me that you do read _Callaloo_, your other responses with regard to
knowing about conferences having to do with African-American poetry are
even more inexplicable. (Though it is all too often the case that, as
with many journals, the notices appear too late.)
Your most recent note also clarifies much else. I was profoundly
troubled by your remark (which, as you will hear, is on the tape) that
very little had been heard at the panel about the poems. Now you
indicate that there were no close readings, or satisfactory readings, or
good uses of sociological approaches, in the first two papers, by your
lights. This clarification is sure to put everything in its proper
perspective. You have now made it clear that you had no intention of
offering anything of real use to the authors of these papers because you
didn't believe they were likely to profit from such a critique -- This,
still, does not explain how you reached the conclusion that arguments
opposing exclusion on the basis of identity formations were in fact
arguments assuming that poets should primarily represent identity formations.
I will gladly discuss with you any of the substantive issues regarding
race, poetics, representation, identity formation, literary histroy, etc.
that might arise from this episode. I will gladly listen to any further
explanations you may offer about what appears on the tape of your
remarks. I will not engage further in any discussions about anything
that is not on the tape. In your first meesage, as I pointed out last
time, you denied having used my opening remarks as an example. You can
now hear on the tape that my remarks were the first thing you mentioned.
In your first message you carefully explained what you really objected to
in certain sociological approaches to literature, without ever
acknowledgiing that this differed from what you had said after the panel,
and what you will now hear on the tape. Now that you know the tape
exists, you seem to have shifted to arguments about that which was not
recorded. I will not follow you into that thicket. If any of the other
people who were around the podium during that portion of the discussion
indicate to me that my memory has been in any way inaccurate, I will then
post that information here.
and that, as they say, is all she wrote. happy listening.
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 22:50:26 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Having now resigned from professional wrestling, I ask
In-Reply-To: <199607140407.AAA08271@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Can anyone on this list give me any information about a poet named Gloria
Tropp? She was active on the East Village scene in the arly sixties, and
was then married to poet Stephen Tropp -- I'm particularly interested in
tracking down any publications by this poet -- It's possible her name may
have changed since that time --
For that matter, does anyone know Stephen Tropp?
Is Dick Higgins still on this list, who might have encountered them ?
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 01:30:40 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: You May Already Have Won
In-Reply-To: <199607130406.AAA15221@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
This Week's Contest -- Prize goes to first person on the list to identify
the poem from which the following is excerpted -- and the poet --
You remember I said that Poe was three parts genius.
As to Whitman, can you think of an action more heinous
Than to write the same book every two or three years?
It's enough to reduce any author to tears
At the thought of this crime to the writing fraternity.
A monstrous, continual, delaying paternity.
Winner gets a copy of _The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth
Hopkins_ U of Illinois Press, 1996 -- ed. John Gruesser
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 08:42:53 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: text/language
In-Reply-To: <31E6EA85.6F52@ix.netcom.com>
On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, James Brook wrote:
> Unless one stretches the concept of "text" into very obscure shape,
> there's no possibility of a text before the advent of writing.
>
> Language is above all *spoken*--linguists tend to see writing systems
> (which underlie texts) as secondary, derivative, and imperfect recordng
> devices of the spoken language.
Yes, I think linguists probably do this. But I don't think we normally
make such a distinction, in everyday life, so to speak. Aren't poets and
all writers dealing with language? I would think Gertrude Stein was
playing with language. She produced texts out of her play with language.
The texts are written in language. I know we have (the royal academic we)
made a special word of "text" and probably also out of "language." So
texts are written langauge? gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 12:05:52 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
>>>On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, George Bowering wrote:
>>>
>>>> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
>>>> >
>>>> >Jordan
>>>>
>>>> I dont know what yr talking about.
>>>
>>>Nor do I, you.
>>>
>>>Tristan
>>
>>
>>--Neither do I, I.
>
>
>i do not i
--Oh, I'll bet you I from time to time.
..........................
"a vivid weightless bean"
--A. Hollo
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 12:09:18 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: text/language
Some people, when talking to me about text, use it in a sense resembling
the sense of "context,"-- i.e., the spoken or written word, say, in its
relationship with other words and things in the world into which it enters.
In that way, we might be said to be enacting a text all the time. It is a
nice notion, though I would tend not to entertain it all the time, because
I want to get things done, not just think about them.
..........................
"a vivid weightless bean"
--A. Hollo
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 15:50:37 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Mittenthal <RMUTTS@AOL.COM>
Subject: The Parasite Rules!
[As Herb Levy suggested, the following mess has been pre-Digested -- just the
way us parasites like it.]
Hey Ron Silliman--you've got it all wrong--parasites are all for noise--but
not for rules. In fact, thinking of M Serres, our very presence on the list
may be disruptive to what would otherwise be a much less complex system of
exchange.
Your successful email agit prop -- inviting all the parasites to table
(thereby bringing Eudora to her knees on computers across the globe--finally
a revolution!) -- reminds me of a long troubling _statement_ (??) from your
collaboration in Legend (p 71) w/Bruce Andrews.
BA (presumably?) posits: COMMODITY/PRACTICE : ECONOMICS/POLITICS
RS (presumably?) translates: any reader (this means YOU) who is not also a
writer is (by definition) a victim
Both your recent _parasite_ post and this 16yr old quote set up non-dynamic
binaries of writer and reader (or active and passive elist participants).
Impersonally, I crave those rare moments when I dont know if I'm reading or
being read -- a sort of intense suspension which occurs, e.g., when reading
certain Blanchot texts, Ballard's Crash, or gosh maybe Steven King (hi
Kevin!). But this doesn't make me a victim. In a weird way maybe this is
what a certain kind of writing (by dictation anyway) is all about. It's okay
to embrace the radical passivity posited by Agamben -- that is -- a passivity
which is not simply opposed to activity but passive in regard to itself --
submitting to itself as if to an external power. For some reason, this
always makes me think of Spicer. A passivity that produced an imaginary
which still captivates.
Anyway, here's hoping that yr agitating tongue was at least half in cheek.
Robert Mittenthal
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 13:23:41 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Beatle Bones and Smokin' Stones
> I've heard that one---the 60's started in 11-22-63 when kennedy died
> and "i wanna hold your hand" was released in u.k. and the fifties
> didn't start until 1955. but the difference between the fourties
> and the fifties is minor in comparison unless the fourties started
> BEFORE and/or at PEARL HARBOUR rather than when the boys came home
> and tvs. etc. pushed women back into domesticity becoming suburban
> and the car began ruining things.....
>
> and the 70's--b--1974. d 1979 (when jimmy carter decided to part his
> hair to the right rather than left?) or perhaps died when phil ochs
> did--i.e. when carter got elected ("oatmeal man" gil scott heron)
> but what were the 70s? the 80s were clearly the 80s all throughout
> and they spilled over into 1992--and thne there was that brief euphoria
> on the pumice of morons when GUITARS started dominating rock and roll
> again and visions of canadian style health car plans danced in the
> amerikan head.....brief, briefheart, cap n crunch....
---Dear Chris:
I noticed that your suggestions on the beginnings of decades are almost all
connected to things that happened in one country, the USA. Didnt they have
fifties and sixties and seventies in the rest of the world?
For instance, the idea that the forties started with Pearl Harbor. You
know, quite a few people were busy fighting fascism for some time before
the Yanks were finally dragged into the business. I'd say that the forties
started in Sept. 1939.
..........................
"a vivid weightless bean"
--A. Hollo
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 13:23:46 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
So Pierre Joris was conceived just after WW2 shut down in Europe.
Hmmmmm.
Is there something to be deduced from this?
Is Pierre the spirit of the new age?
..........................
"a vivid weightless bean"
--A. Hollo
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 16:28:33 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eryque Gleason <eryque@ACMENET.NET>
Subject: Re: Eudora
if these email problems haven't been resolved, and if someone could pass it
on to those in need: occassionally eudora will do odd things if it's got
too many messages in any one mailbox (sometimes the way this list moves,
leaving mail unchecked for a couple days might do it), eudora will
sometimes get a little uppity, doesn't like to work that hard. when i ran
into this problem i was able to fix it by creating new mailboxes and
transferring some of the mail to those, that way eudora only has to deal
with all that mail in smaller bundles.
also, if using eudora for macintosh, try trashing the eudora preferences
file. this forces the app to make a new set of preferences (though don't
empty the trash unless this works!) which usually cleans up minor problems.
if using eudora on a pc, might try re-installing it (uninstalling first,
if possible), but only after backing up the eudora directory.
happy eudoring!
eryque
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 14:40:10 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Sam <litsam@MAIL.TELIS.ORG>
Subject: Re: Eudora
Thanks to all who offered their expertise in the above matter. I found
that, for myself anyway, going into the mail via VT100 and clearing it out
that way freed up the system. All is well again...all those fabulous minds
hitting my mailbox in rural hell!
And, over the weekend, an offering to do a newspaper column
regularly...anything my heart desires...I am warning the readers in my first
born, that it may even include an occasional mention of POETRY. That ought
to scare the living bejeezus out of em, eh?
Thank you all for the prompt efforts. I could have tried contacting
tech support somewhere, but it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.
As always,
Sam
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 11:32:40 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: O sole cism
For Robert Drake's attention --
HEGEMONEY
As clear as a whistle the forces
Of nature are taking their tool
On mankind. I wouldn't say
A lack of inexperience.
No praise is too high enough for him. She turned
The canvas on the evil. The laugh
Was on the other foot.
[n.b. collected, not made up]
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 18:26:26 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Carll <sjcarll@SLIP.NET>
Subject: Re: Eudora
At 02:40 PM 7/14/96 -0700, Sam wrote:
> Thanks to all who offered their expertise in the above matter. I found
>that, for myself anyway, going into the mail via VT100 and clearing it out
>that way freed up the system. All is well again...all those fabulous minds
>hitting my mailbox in rural hell!
The same problem hit me three days in a row (Thu-Fri-Sat). I don't leave
more than a few messages in my mailbox, so that can be ruled out, and I
reinstalled Eudora twice. The common factor in all these occurrances was
that Eudora was downloading messages posted to this list from Bill Marsh (hi
Bill!) I telnetted into my shell account and used Elm to delete just Bill's
posts, and the rest downloaded into Eudora just fine. Whenever Eudora tried
to download one of Bill's, it crashed with an "application error: integer
divide by zero" (whatever that means.) I got the same error thereafter
trying to repair the "in" mailbox table of contents. I noticed when reading
the posts in Elm that all are dated December 31, regardless of when they
were actually sent. Otherwise, they're no different from any other e-mail
as far as I can see. I would think that something odd is happening to the
mail at Bill's end (either with his email program or his service provider)
that's configuring his mail in such a way that certain of our email programs
don't know how to deal with. Of course, the tech support guys I've talked
to in the last couple days aren't much help. One said, "You might try
downloading your email with Netscape." Which may or may not get around the
problem, but it doesn't really explain much about it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
sjcarll@slip.net
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym/
"In seed-
sense
the sea stars you out, innermost, forever."
--Paul Celan
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 11:00:52 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Akitoshi Nagahata <e43479a@NUCC.CC.NAGOYA-U.AC.JP>
Subject: Hisao Kanaseki
Last week one Japanese academic(?), Hisao Kanaseki, passed away. He taught
at different universities and wrote about American poetry extendedly,
though he didn't write in an academic style. His book on Gertrude Stein
(there are only two books written in Japanese on Stein), for example, was
written in a style that read like a parody of Julian Barnes (_Flaubert's
Parrot_). He translated Gary Snyder and Robert Bly, native American poetry
and Joseph Brodsky, but he also translated _Tender Buttons_ and wrote about
Ashbery and Mina Loy (both perhaps for the first time in Japanese), Cage
and the Beat as well. Many people who are now writing about American
poetry used to be his students and many poets, including Shuntaro Tanikawa,
were his friends. I myself didn't have the chance to study with him, but I
started to read Ashbery after I read his article in _Eigo Seinen_, and it
was fun to discuss Stein with him over cups of sake. He died of lung
cancer. He was 78.
Akitoshi Nagahata
email: e43479a@nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 14:10:44 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: critics vs. poets (tag team round three)
"Artifice of Absorption" is a text that can be read as, it itself
suggests v early on, as poetry or as this or that. So saying, it is
clear that "readings" are perspectives on a text, from a given
view-point, such as that which takes the text mainly on the level of
its philosophical argument, or mainly as a play of syntax, or syntax
and sound, or sound. Some perspectives are less usable than others,
as for instance reading the text as an instruction on how to build a
shed.
With representational arts like picture-making, the
texture that is in question here is the specifics of the graphic
materials and their manipulation so that a scene can be seen. The
absence of attention to the process by which one reads from this
texture to the picture and its contents is virtually absent from art
writing. This is a serious deficiency (and a matter I have been giving
my attention to for many many years). I believe that the equivalent
in writing is that between the words heard or read and the sense that
we have them make.
In all of the arts the crucial critical issue is
the understanding of the passage from the texture to the reading of
the text established by the know-how of the artist. That is what we
should probably recognise as the art that criticism concerns itself
with as fundamental. What is doleful is the large-scale absence from criticism
of this fundamental process of reading which underpins all other
contents. Criticism for the most part functions as if the given were
the contents, whereas it is the inert stuff of paint or words or
whatevers turning into contents that artist make happen.
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 23:46:10 +0000
Reply-To: jzitt@humansystems.com
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Authenticated sender is <jzitt@bga.com>
From: Joseph Zitt <jzitt@HUMANSYSTEMS.COM>
Organization: HumanSystems
Subject: Re: O sole cism
Comments: To: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
On 15 Jul 96 at 11:32, Tony Green wrote:
> As clear as a whistle the forces
> Of nature are taking their tool
> On mankind.
Is it just me, or did this sentence immediately play in other
people's heads to the tune of "I'm Called Little Buttercup"?
(I gotta replace these brainscape plugins !-] )
---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1----------
|||/ Joseph Zitt ==== jzitt@humansystems.com ===== Dallas, Texas \|||
||/ Question Authority, The == SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List \||
|/ http://www.realtime.net/~jzitt == <*> <*> == The Data Wranglers! \|
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 00:58:03 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: Hisao Kanaseki
Akitoshi:
From your description, Hisao Kanaseki's work sounds fascinating.
His style would seem to address certain problems with critical
language: immediacy and invention, for example. What was Mr.
Kanaseki's practice when it came to critical terminology--
spec., the idea that critics must use a limited repertoire
of academically accepted terms, ideas and interdisciplinary
approaches? I've found that, for all its seeming disregard
for the phallocentric engines of European history, and for the
so-called ivory towers of the academy, American letters seems
to revere a only limited number of critical approaches, most of
them derived from linguistics and semiotics (Lacan, Barthes, etc.).
>He died of lung cancer. He was 78.
My condolences to your and to your culture's loss. Are there any
translations of Kanaseki's books in English?
All the best,
Rob Hardin
PS: Are you familiar with the criticism of Takayuki Tasumi and Mari Kotani?
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 01:45:34 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: critics vs. poets (tag team round three)
Tony:
> In all of the arts the crucial critical issue is
> the understanding of the passage from the texture to the reading of
> the text established by the know-how of the artist. That is what we
> should probably recognise as the art that criticism concerns itself
> with as fundamental. What is doleful is the large-scale absence from criticism
> of this fundamental process of reading which underpins all other
> contents. Criticism for the most part functions as if the given were
> the contents, whereas it is the inert stuff of paint or words or
> whatevers turning into contents that artist make happen.
Thanks for addressing what I consider to be a fundamental deficiency
in the poetic discourse I find both here and in most English
departments across America. A case in point: The first thing one
notices about Mr. Watten's stanza-work, _Progress_, is its innovative,
idiosyncratic surface (style, diction, syntax, scansion, rhythm) and
the relentless subversion of figures of speech, conventional metaphors
and common syntactical grids. Yet the only place I've ever found an
accurate description of its technical properties was not in one of
the myriad of language poetry journals of the eighties, not
in a paper taught at Brown University or Cal Arts, but rather in
_The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics_. What does this say about
our critical interest in the texture of the writing itself?
Neither/Nor restored
To remark upon this dearth of critical attention is neither
to incite vitriol nor to invite mere silence from those who do
not share my interests: other modes of critical discourse need
not be usurped or ignored simply because I choose to write and
read technical analyses of the texture of poetic language.
I am still interested in hearing from other poets as to how
they approach what they write. I'd also like to read analyses
of the surfaces of poems. If ppoets are not comfortable using
what they perceive to be an accepted critical vocabulary, so
much the better.
Question: Melville is almost universally considered to have
been a wretched poet. But after a century of systematic trun-
cations, diminutions and elisions of the iambic line, does
Melville's dogerrel now yield a rhythmic richness that was
unavailale to more conventionally competent poets of his period?
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 22:39:28 -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: Akitoshi's note
In-Reply-To: <199607150408.AAA25967@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
I'm very sad to hear about Dr. Kanaseki. I had drinks with him in Tokyo a
couple of years ago and he gave me his beautiful translation (beautiful to
look at, I can't tell how good it is) of TENDER BUTTONS. He was a lovely
person, devoted to U.S. new poetries, had worked with Gary Snyder closely,
and so on. Will there be any sort of memorial?
Thanks, for passing on the news, Akitoshi! And hello from Los Angeles!
Hope all is well with you.
Marjorie
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 00:32:49 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Christopher K. Whipple" <cwhip@WEST.NET>
Subject: Thank you for your responses
I want to thank everyone who responded to my request for ideas and advise
concerning a project I'm doing. The project is a season of performed poetry
built around themes and using actors. The intelligently thought out
responses I received have become a real resource for me.
It seems the idea of using actors in order to deliver the poetry has touched
on a kind of fault line, at which notions of spontanaity versus rehearsal,
language versus interpretation, immediacy versus preconception, honesty
versus training, clash and grind against one another. Hopefully I will find
a way to harness the unstable energy underlying the merger of the two
traditions of theater and poetry--thank you for making me aware of it.
I would like to make my actors aware of the complexity of these issues, and
of the diversity opinions and even prejudices that may be waiting to receive
our work. I thought of putting exerpts from your responses on the web site
I created for this project (it's a kind of "conferencing zone" for my far
flung actors), but I cautiously went back and read the conditions of my
subscription to this newsgroup and found the following caveat:
"IMPORTANT: This list is confidential. You should not publicly mention its
existence, or forward copies of information you have obtained from it to
third parties."
I think that's pretty straightforward. I cannot duplicate and disperse your
responses. Which is really a good policy, after all.
But I do invite you to visit my web site at <a
href="http://www.west.net/~cwhip>Verseworks</a> and post your comments
directly via the site's "blackboard".
Thanks again, to Shananne Tangney, David Baratier, Lisa Samuels, Kathrine
Varnes, Rob Hardin, Peter Quartermain, Tony Green, Charles Alexander, Dean
Tariuch, James Brook, Christopher Filkins, Judy Roitman, Pat Pritchett,
Eliza McGrand, wystan, Nada Gordon and Michelle Roberts for your responses.
Christopher K. Whipple
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 03:08:29 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Two from Bowering, one for Rob
(1) "I noticed that your suggestions on the beginnings of decades are
almost all connected to things that happened in one country, the USA.
Didnt they have fifties and sixties and seventies in the rest of the
world?"
Sheesh. You probably don't date the founding of Canadian literature
from the day when Robin Blaser, George Stanley and Stan Persky moved to
British Columbia either....
(2) So Pierre Joris was conceived just after WW2 shut down in Europe.
>
>Hmmmmm.
>
>Is there something to be deduced from this?
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and I (both of whom will be turning 50 this
summer) once noted that there are a lot of "victory babies" in this
scene, and that they aren't all descended from the same army either.
(3)
Rob,
I always write with tongue posted firmly in cheek. Where else can one
get the most serious writing done?
All best,
Ron Silliman
rsillima@ix.netcom.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 08:45:58 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jonathan A Levin <jal17@COLUMBIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: text/language (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 15:16:21 -0600 (MDT)
From: Marisa Januzzi <maj6916@u.cc.utah.edu>
To: jal17@columbia.edu
Subject: Re: text/language (fwd)
Jon--
They apparently have not straightened out this problem-- can you forward
for me? Thanks..............
I still miss you. Will call to give the newsless update!
xx,M
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 15:09:50 -0600 (MDT)
From: Marisa Januzzi <maj6916@cor-oz>
To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Cc: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Re: text/language
On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, Gabrielle Welford wrote:
> How can text and language be distinguished? I guess have to take a long
> look at how the word "language" and "text" can and can't sensibly be used.
> Otherwise into the foggy dew we go. gab.
Text as score for linguistic performance? How's that? (Textual
editors make the distinction for pragmatic reasons...) Why do you ask?
___________
And here's my bedside exhibitionist booklist, and I guess my lurker dues:
1) Loy and more Loy-- Carolyn Burke's bio, and Roger Conover's edition of
the poems, are both out. It's a Loyfest. (And it may well happen, soon,
in Aspen... I'll keep y'all posted.)
2) Johnson's ARK. And all the cookbooks of his I've gotten hold of!
(Thanks again to Charles Alexander et al. for putting me in touch with
Living Batch)(My near neighbors right next door in New Mexico!!)
3) Dawn Powell-- MY HOME IS FAR AWAY, and the diaries. Funny, tart, and
totally unmistakably WRITTEN if not experimental.
4) And as if I am plugged in to poetics even when not, Notley (UNBORN
SECOND BABY book), the Niedecker TRUCK issue, and Larry Eigner (the Oyez
Selected, which I found in a remote poetry section of a bookstore which
is the house of this guy who, I discovered, translates Trakl)
5) Wasatch Winter Trails (for insomnia)
6) Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic book
and
7) lots of stuff for courses I've got to teach in the fall, including an
intro to lit theory for majors. If anyone's ever had a kind of theory or
poetics breakthrough/breakout/breakdown (or whatever!) enmeshed in a
text, I'd love to hear about it... I remember feeling those paradigms
shift as I struggled to read, and then finally DID read Derrida's "White
Mythology." You know the feeling: the blood carbonates, the long
workvistas open, the sleep goes... etc. And so what is teaching? i wonder
Bye for now-- Marisa
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 10:30:49 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Lisa Samuels <lsr3h@FARADAY.CLAS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of poetic
In-Reply-To: <v01540b03ae0b0fd6dd50@[204.74.3.74]> from "Carnography" at Jul
11, 96 05:39:47 pm
dear rob hardin,
in response to the last part of your 11 July post:
how one writes poems. for me the process is very
like a verbal string theory at work, or the physical
way i used to imagine string theory: under a
particular kind of emotional and intellectual pressure,
a phrase or title comes into my mind. like, say,
"Hyperplastic iconography buffers". i sit at the
computer fairly soon after that verbal occurrence
and begin to write. the form of the poem asserts
itself, usually, pretty quickly: either it wants space
and dislocation among its phrasal pieces, or it
wants a compression or intimacy. the pieces
themselves seem to feed out one from the other,
according to some distended story-like material
that floats around in the background of unreal
images, or according to a pattern of sound-connectives,
or according to a seemingly self-generating vision
of space and color for which it is necessary to
imagine words. or all three. this describes, to some
extent, a poetic trance, i realize, and tremendous
poetry gets written with a much higher degree of
compositional consciousness in the moment of the
writing. but not by me; or anyway not since i started
to write without worrying about whether i was making
sense. so i end up with work like these two samples,
(each is only the first section of two different poems,
and the spacing is not quite right here):
-------
(1) Iconoclastic relationship to suffering
there is no clean verso to crawl under, anyway nominal
crisp devolution into status angles, mine and yours
and the terminal pathos in between
wrecked integer of head modules, the ones we saw and
sawing, made wooden
in other
words
gone bad in their fidelity, construed according
shaped as armlessly as this one
for when the parachute falls, it's no descent at all
not kin, not dementia-held
but when I found it striking, you were
not in the air, not plugged in the outlets
entirely unlit schema
-------
and (2) The stupefaction of her clothes
Informal synaloepha: let's get dressed
upon the luminous imaginary bed
of idea's thetic absolute,
the migratory information spread around.
The form of crows, the wing of wings,
wholesome dilatory things, creeping through
rapt dreaming, adjust the head's
coarse irradiance, a search
to realign a steadiness
the lungs translate, the body glides
not as though time is a gift, not as if
one were made for it
-------
and so on. the slow pondering of the made poem
happens afterwards, not during, and revision is for me
a process of chipping away what seems redundant
or unnecessary pieces of word-wood, let's say, from
the primary sculpture, and sometimes in reimagining
how the spacing should go, whether to introduce more
air among the words, or less.
long enough.
yours,
lisa samuels
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 09:19:42 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: filch <filch@POBOX.COM>
Subject: Re: Beatle Bones and Smokin' Stones
Didnt they have
>fifties and sixties and seventies in the rest of the world?
Actually George, no, they did not.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 11:12:17 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Critics *vs.* poets? What I miss here are criticisms of poetic
Thanks, Lisa, for the description of the texture of your writing process. It
sounds, in its own way, like a personal adaptation (although not necessarily
consciously adapted at all) of Olson's sense of composition by field. I
particularly like the way you articulate the conscious process of
listening/writing/attending to the work as it comes, with some sense of the
revision as simply a further listening to what matters.
For me part of this process also involves materials. For example, in one
work in progress I am writing on some paper saved from being thrown away
somewhere. The sheets are 11 x 17 and I am writing on them by hand,
virtually filling the sheet from top to bottom, although there is no
constant left or right margin. But again, like you, as soon as I began, this
ragged completion of space seemed to be the demand of the materials,
including the writing as it emanates, the hand & pen in action, and the
paper as it exists. The primary revision is then enacted during the
translation from this medium to word processing file on the computer. At the
same time I'm working on something else considerably different, poems of
mid-length lines, 13 lines each, very orderly on the page, although that
order belying a consistency of invention throughout and a lack of
"finished-ness." These poems are composed at one sitting each at the
computer keyboard. But this work too is conditioned by the writing of the
first piece in this series, which actually predated the continuation by a
few months. What both of these distinct works share is a lack of interest in
completion, so that they both now have several installments and are at the
point where I am wondering if their form will change, if more complexity of
shaping will be part of the evolution, and if varying senses of completion
will begin to enter in.
thanks again for opening up this conversation.
charles
>a phrase or title comes into my mind. like, say,
>"Hyperplastic iconography buffers". i sit at the
>computer fairly soon after that verbal occurrence
>and begin to write. the form of the poem asserts
>itself, usually, pretty quickly: either it wants space
>and dislocation among its phrasal pieces, or it
>wants a compression or intimacy. the pieces
>themselves seem to feed out one from the other,
>according to some distended story-like material
>that floats around in the background of unreal
>images, or according to a pattern of sound-connectives,
>or according to a seemingly self-generating vision
>of space and color for which it is necessary to
>imagine words. or all three. this describes, to some
>extent, a poetic trance, i realize, and tremendous
>poetry gets written with a much higher degree of
>compositional consciousness in the moment of the
>writing. but not by me; or anyway not since i started
>to write without worrying about whether i was making
>sense. so i end up with work like these two samples,
>(each is only the first section of two different poems,
>and the spacing is not quite right here):
>and so on. the slow pondering of the made poem
>happens afterwards, not during, and revision is for me
>a process of chipping away what seems redundant
>or unnecessary pieces of word-wood, let's say, from
>the primary sculpture, and sometimes in reimagining
>how the spacing should go, whether to introduce more
>air among the words, or less.
>
>long enough.
>
>yours,
>
>lisa samuels
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 12:24:16 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: The High Points
Jordan wrote:
>Rod--what are the conditions on that use? Terms of >rental? (Or, how to get
closer, to be more [perpetually] useful?) J
Well J, let's just say I didn't want to depend on my painting for a living.
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 09:26:14 PDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jerry Rothenberg <jrothenb@CARLA.UCSD.EDU>
Subject: Re: Hisao Kanaseki
dear Akitoshi Nagahata --
I heard of Kanaseki's death from Ito Hiromi, who has been staying up the street
from us and with whom I had sent a fax to Kanaseki and had spoken to his wife
only the day before. It was thru Kanaseki that I came to know Hiromi and many
others in Japan, and we (my wife and I) were very much looking forward to
seeing him again this November. We knew each other from the time that he was
working on his book about (and of) American Indian poetry and he got in touch
with me through Dan MacLeod and possibly Gary Snyder. He was, as far as I
could tell, bound to no school or academic mode of criticism as such, but his
devotion to poetry and those who made it was very real and very moving. He
was an active and experimental (adventurous) reader and enthusiast, who must
have seen some kind of bridging as a primary function of his work as critic/
scholar. We felt very needed in his presence and feel immensely saddened
by his loss.
If there is to be any memorial or any way of contributing to a memorial,
please let me know.
Jerome Rothenberg
jrothenb@carla.ucsd.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 1995 09:32:34 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: filch <filch@POBOX.COM>
Subject: BookStore
(Thanks again to Charles Alexander et al. for putting me in touch with
Living Batch)(My near neighbors right next door in New Mexico!!)
Of course one of the best book stores around. Sorry to hear about the
death of the salt of the earth.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 11:49:45 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Wittgenstein
Rod Smith wrote
> Also, I generally don't find Witt
>"linear" but definitely cumulative.
>
How about simultaneous?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 12:13:56 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: tag teamsters local 354 (poet vs critic)
I got the feeling from these posts that the subject had shifted from
earlier discussions on "can a poet be a critic also?" into one about
how a mutual relationship can or does exist. And this is off the
subject a bit, but I'm tired of a bunch of whinny-ass "poets" telling
me about academia ruining writers. As if this was a situation unique
to employees of a university. This insider/outsider status a lot of
these folks are ego-tripping on is a large load, as an outsider why
does one claim the marginalia as a methodology to defeat the inner
sanctum(ie Here outside of the academic realm _our_ ideas are purer
because we are not in danger of being assimilated into the "university
sameness" of ideology, do not have free funding for our journal like
the academics who publish each other (ad infinitum), or do not have
our writing diluted through a desire for tenure). As if claiming the
outside gives a righteous stance of finger pointing. They did this to
us, give me sympathy, or one of them NEA funded pick-up trucks. Sorry
to drop the bomb, but my continual experience with the outside
non-academia has a similar and substantitive threat of ruining your
writing, bucko. None of this is to say the academics are off the hook
either, I could live without about a half-dozen of the I'm having
problems with tenure or I don't go to non-university sponsored
readings because the quality is suspect types of discussions. As if we
sit in the audience and say: there's one of them university critters
from the mansion on the hill, guess they wanted that yearly check-up
so they'd have some thing real to write about. As if anywhere is less
real than here. Hello, I'm a publisher and editor on the tenth floor
of a white tower in a creative corporate environment, therefore my
experience is more valid(as informed by the real world) but less
crafted (ie not academically supported). This is the foundation peg I
have been expected to lie in, come visit me and tack on your framework
joineries. I think the validity of the writing accomplished during a
particular period is a question whose answer lies in universal
determinates, where the natural human desire for comfort does not
simply equate to a particular writer's complacency and stability
occurs in what ever bastion it arrives.
Paul - erasist vibes coming your way--
Jordan - Suburbs present us with a negation of the present, a
landscape consumed by it's past and present.
Rod - If you don't know why do you ask? Still chewing.
Henry - Everyone does everyone. Recherche!!!!
Be well.
Davbid Baratier
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 13:57:42 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
GB wroted:
>Is Pierre the spirit of the new age?
This not to do with Pierre, but just to mention--
Anselm calls it "newage" pronounced with similar inflection as, yes, you
guessed it,
sewage.
R
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 14:58:43 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: poetry and criticism as the same
Dear Bill Marsh and others:
A quick thanks to Henry Gould and Charles Alexander for making
some valuable additions to my remarks about poets and critics, and to
you, Bill, and some others for asking me helpful questions.
Let me see if I can briefly answer your question.
Theoretically, and aesthetically, the difference between poetry
and poetry criticism can be easily and successfully collapsed.
Sociologically, except for a few avant garde publications, the
difference between poetry and poetry criticism is absolute. For proof of
this, please try to send one of your own, highly theoretical (and
successfully so) poems to a standard academic journal, or any magazine
that pays contributors, and tell them that it is criticism. Or, were you
working at a university, turn in your published collection of poems to a
tenure committee for evidence that you have been "critically active."
I pay attention to aesthetic and philosophical questions because
I enjoy them.
I pay attention to sociological problems because I have no choice.
Frankly, I'm still enough of a Marxist to believe that
sociological conditions determine artistic production--although the
weakness of much Marxist criticism has been its tendency to oversimply
what is meant by "determine." What that means is that I do not think
there are any purely "aesthetic" questions.
Thus, the fact that we can aesthetically collapse the distinction
between poetry and poetry criticism does not mean that anything of
sociological significance has changed, at least to any significant extent.
I do not really understand Robert van Halleburg in his recent
debate with Al Nielsen when he starts talking about "sociological"
readings of poems as separate from some other possibilities for reading
poems. I'm pretty much convinced there are ONLY sociological readings,
and that the whole history of "close reading" itself is based in social
phenomena. The difference is between readings that recognize their social
conditions, and those that are under the illusion that they transcend them.
The extent to which my poetry raises questions that can be
discussed as purely "aesthetic" rather than sociological is the extent to
which my poetry, or its readers, have failed to understand what is at stake.
mark wallace
(please excuse any typos over this long distance, semi-functional modem)
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 14:29:34 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
Comments: To: Multiple@maroon.tc.umn.edu, recipients@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
of@maroon.tc.umn.edu, list@maroon.tc.umn.edu,
POETICS@maroon.tc.umn.edu
In message <199607140135.BAA15585@beaufort.sfu.ca> UB Poetics discussion group
writes:
> >
> > >>On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, George Bowering wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
> > >>> >
> > >>> >Jordan
> > >>>
> > >>> I dont know what yr talking about.
> > >>
> > >>Nor do I, you.
> > >>
> > >>Tristan
> > >
> > >
> > >--Neither do I, I.
> >
> >
> > i do not i
> >
> id, we're getting closer!
super!
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 14:30:11 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: text/language
thanks for the "divination" stuff; i like that as a notion of "reading" --one
last quickie about weaving (sorry about the pomposity of my earlier post about
how i "became a weaver"..."writer"...) --one of the things that charms me about
weaving is the technical terms, which are childish and fun: "shuttle," "heddle,"
"treadle" (pronounced "treddle"), "raddle," "bobbin." can any of you linguists
shed light on why these terms might be the way they are? (backchannel wd be
cool, so as not to distract others with this sidelight)--md
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 14:30:19 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
yes indeed, happy birthday, hope yr out reveling in sun and joy, and here's to
another 50 just as fab.
md
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 09:51:13 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: critics vs. poets (tag team round three)
Rob Hardin: one more word (repeated ad lib) " doleful "
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 14:59:45 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Peter Quartermain <Quarterm@UNIXG.UBC.CA>
Subject: eudora crash
(Still sending, not receiving)
For those who need to know, and for Bill Marsh in especial:
EUDORA crashed because the server sending Bill Marsh's message dates his message
--wait for it!!!--
1969
instead of 1996.
This is known to Eudora (their technicians tell me) as a BAD DATE
for which you get the message "Application Error Integer Divide by Zero".
So I set my system up again, having had my server delete Bill Marsh's
messages, got going nicely, and dammit there was another one! The bad date
does not affect Winsock (which I use to interface) but does affect Netscape
and Eudora, on a PC486 (memory is no problem that i can see on my machine)
-- it has no effect on a MAC. Once again I have lost half my mail
(downloaded and then scrambled / garbled by a second wrong date -- origin
unknown: you again, Bill?))
In any case, I'm off-line till 1 August; I can however download (horribly,
and sort of) through Windows 3.1 Terminal (yuck) till I fix myself up again.
Madre dios!
Peter.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Peter Quartermain
128 East 23rd Avenue
Vancouver
B.C.
Canada V5V 1X2
Voice and fax: 604 876 8061
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:02:40 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: listwars&ironeey
Email is ironyless? dripdry?
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:52:18 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: summer?
Eryque: you know I've been reading horoscopes and they are all as
unfunny as anything I've ever met, can't find anything there for you,
but thanks for the good wishes for the summer, I love that since
it's middle of winter, and summer is half a year away. It's been raining
a lot and more to come and further south snow, polluted by volcanic
ash. It's a time when poets go up the wall. So have a good winter --
Eryque.
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 11:09:32 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
>>>On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, George Bowering wrote:
>>>
>>>> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
>>>> >
>>>> >Jordan
>>>>
>>>> I dont know what yr talking about.
>>>
>>>Nor do I, you.
>>>
>>>Tristan
>>
>>
>>--Neither do I, I.
>
>
>i do not i
--Oh, I'll bet you I from time to time.
-- no,no no, no, meaning yes
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:49:05 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Salmon <dpsalmon@IHUG.CO.NZ>
Subject: Re: Marsh
Hi all,
Exactly the same thing happened to me, ie "integer divide by 0"
i have swapped modems, deleted my entire c drive, been convinced it was a
hard ware problem and nerely bought more memory, spent about 3 days
trying to sort it out with my provider and the people i bought the
computer from, perhaps Bill Marsh could talk to his people before
continuing to mail.
It sounds as though its fucking a lot of people up, do others use pegasus
or something. A bit bloody frustrating really, Dan.
BTW using netscape to access it works today, but didn't when it first
happened.
Yours 'ludditedly'
Dan.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 18:45:00 PDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "trace s. ruggles" <tracer@SISC.COM>
Subject: Re: the texture of poetry
considered the world of texture
in a poem
listened to my body
went to the poetry room (as
opposed to the short story room)
heard the soundvoice who
doesn't exist with the audible (went
to the syntax room)
processed a line
of energy through
head neck chest abdomen crotch
then turned to edit as another
being
being
emptied space and filled space
one word as another
moves an
other wise simple page
i don't know exactly what i'm saying but this whole business
is so damn organic that the 'voice' that exists is something larger
than me and comes through me, filtered with the body, the
body as a resonance tool
and it all creates a tactile song apprehended but once and
remembered many times
how do we forget what we've done to make another?
-----
trace
(from the vermin lurkers...)
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 22:20:32 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Kweisi he calls me
In-Reply-To: <199607160405.AAA09857@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Won't have time after all to post that report on the Bob and Elizabeth
Dole book signing at Westwood Borders -- Just let me tell you it's not
true what they say about me "setting them up." Nor was that me in the
big cigarette suit -- Noticed, by the way, that Mr. Cigarette got more
requests for autographs than did Bob & Elizabeth -- But Mr. Cig. probably
has a larger constituency --
BUT THE REAL POINT OF THIS NOTE is to say that I'm going away for six
days -- will leave mail ON so as to receive any additional stabs at that
poem I posted here for the contest -- Several VERY good efforts so far
(and Alan Golding figured out by means of literary history that it could
not be the poet most people were guessing) -- Will check mail for first
correct answer when I get back & will then post the awful truth of that
poem -- (This is not a particularly tricky one, by the way -- This is a
poet you've all heard of)
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 19:31:31 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
In-Reply-To: <332077B4632@ccnov2.auckland.ac.nz>
> >>>> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
> >>>> >
> >>>> >Jordan
> >>>>
> >>>> I dont know what yr talking about.
> >>>
> >>>Nor do I, you.
> >>>
> >>>Tristan
> >>
> >>
> >>--Neither do I, I.
> >
> >
> >i do not i
>
> --Oh, I'll bet you I from time to time.
>
> -- no,no no, no, meaning yes
>
i yes i yes i you
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 1996 23:39:33 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: of the whole art/spam two generations
>> >>>> >Hi. What's the unconscious?
>> >>>> >
>> >>>> >Jordan
>> >>>>
>> >>>> I dont know what yr talking about.
>> >>>
>> >>>Nor do I, you.
>> >>>
>> >>>Tristan
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>--Neither do I, I.
>> >
>> >
>> >i do not i
>>
>> --Oh, I'll bet you I from time to time.
>>
>> -- no,no no, no, meaning yes
>>
> i yes i yes i you
:oh, yez, I ewes too
but no now, no I i's
..........................
"a vivid weightless bean"
--A. Hollo
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 11:12:07 +0000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: cris cheek <cris@SLANG.DEMON.CO.UK>
Subject: Carla Harryman and Barrett Watten
A Reading Performance by North American Language Writing Artists, Carla
Harryman and Barrett Watten. (part of this year's East International)
Date: Wednesday 17 July at 15.00
Venue: Riverside Lecture Theatre, Norwich School of Art and Design, St
Georges Street, Norwich (phone 01603 610561)
all are welcome and admission is Free
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 06:15:58 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: text/language
maria damon typed:
>(sorry about the pomposity of my earlier post about
> how i "became a weaver"..."writer"...)
What do you mean "pompous?" Your lack of pomposity was evident
(you weren't lecturing anybody), and you were far too informative
to be accused of self-absorption. Like any really good performance
poet (Dael Orlandersmith) will attest, autobiography is just a
mode. To confuse autobiography for narcissism is to mistake
the writer's approach for the quality of the writer's attention.
> --one of the things that charms me about weaving is the technical terms,
> which are childish and fun: "shuttle," "heddle," "treadle" (pronounced
> "treddle"), "raddle," "bobbin." can any of you linguists
> shed light on why these terms might be the way they are? (backchannel
"Linguists?" You don't need to be a linguist to study the
origins and sounds of words. Your weaver's lexicon sounds
far too fun.
> wd be cool, so as not to distract others with this sidelight)--md
Etymology isn't off-topic on a poetics list. The subject certainly
leaves me more interested than impatient.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 06:20:10 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: critics vs. poets (tag team round three)
Tony Green:
> Rob Hardin: one more word (repeated ad lib) " doleful "
And you'd like this ||:word:|| to be repeated in response to...Melville's
poetry?
=A7
Still thinking about Lisa, trace, and Charles's recent missives
concerning their real-time approaches to composition. It's a
pleasure to read people speaking about their work.
=A7
And no, my interest in fugitive theory doesn't mean I'm anti-academic.
It merely means that I'm researching other approaches to theory. So far
as I know, that knd of research was one of the primary critical activities
of many of the educated (but not always tenured) poets we discuss in UB
Poetics.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 07:47:10 -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@CHASS.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Bad news
The bad news here this a.m. is the announcement of the closing of
Coach House Press, much esteemed publishers of Robin Blaser, George
Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Thesen, and many many others, after
31 years due to the continuing implementation of knee-jerk neo-con
economics by the provincial and federal governments. Chalk up another
victory for the New York bankers.
Mike
mboughn@chass.utoronto.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 07:55:25 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@PANIX.COM>
Subject: Coach House
CH is closing? I can't believe this - the best editions of Nicole
Brossard in English... it's hard enough to get hold of Quebecois work in
translation outside Mtl.... Alan
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/
Canis caninam non est.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 08:37:22 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Bad news
this news is really sad. i'm sorry and mad. what next.--md
In message <199607161147.HAA20233@chass.utoronto.ca> UB Poetics discussion
group writes:
> The bad news here this a.m. is the announcement of the closing of
> Coach House Press, much esteemed publishers of Robin Blaser, George
> Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Thesen, and many many others, after
> 31 years due to the continuing implementation of knee-jerk neo-con
> economics by the provincial and federal governments. Chalk up another
> victory for the New York bankers.
>
> Mike
> mboughn@chass.utoronto.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:36:28 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Lisa Amber Phillips <LPHILLIPS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Coach House (re-post due to delivery failure)
From: IN%"postmaster@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU" "PMDF Mail Server" 16-JUL-1996 10:34:11.42
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Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:34:02 -0500 (EST)
From: LPHILLIPS@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU
Subject: Re: Coach House
To: poetics@uvbm.cc.buffalo.edu
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Mike, I'm interested in the details behind "the continuing implementation
of knee-jerk neo-con economics by the provincial and federal governments."
What, in your view, are the particulars of those kinds of economics? I
ask because in the last year, in conversation with one or two people who
publish poetry (at the moment I'm thinking of Sam Hamill of Copper
Canyon Press), I've gotten the distinct impression that there are a
great number of small presses out there who are in more danger than
usual of going under. I have also gotten the impression that, due to
the always-rising costs of publishing (especially the price of paper),
small presses have become increasingly dependent upon grants from
governmental arts institutions like NEH, which have of course recently
and drastically reduced funding due to their own decreased funding b
by Congress. Since small presses publish a very high percentage of the
contemporary poetry in this country--especially experimental work--then
I also get the impression that poetry itself is in some danger; not only
will the already-published works of poets like Robin Blaser and Sharon
Thesen fall out of print (which is tragic), but there will be fewer
places and opportunities for poets to publish as well (which is also
tragic).
The next question I want to ask (because I've been turning it over in the
back of my mind for some months now and would be interested in other
viewpoints) is: Is it possible for small presses of today to remove
themselves from live-or-die dependence upon the fickle funding of
governments, or avoid it altogether, or are publishing costs just too
high and returns on sales too small? And, are there any alternatives
to this situation to keep distributing the work of contemporary
writers (I know there are, but I want to hear suggestions from others,
as well as pro-and-con evaluations of those alternatives if there are
any). I'd especially be interested in hearing from those who are
currently publishing contemporary poets. Thanks.
Lisa Amber Phillips
lphillips@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
--Boundary (ID PxZB22RCVXxwGm025Ae1zw)--
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:45:24 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: BookStore
>(Thanks again to Charles Alexander et al. for putting me in touch with
>Living Batch)(My near neighbors right next door in New Mexico!!)
>
>
>Of course one of the best book stores around. Sorry to hear about the
>death of the salt of the earth.
And of course if you're looking for rare first editions, out of print
poetry, limited edition handmade books, etc., in Albuquerque, you have to
check out Passages, begun a few years ago by the incomparable David Abel
(some in New York will know David from the Bridge Bookstore several years
ago there). His email is dca@nmia.com
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:45:27 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: eudora crash
I'm sorry for everyone's Eudora problems. And while glad to see my friend
Bill Marsh's name here so much, I'm sorry it's in such a circumstance. I had
a feeling the problem might be with someone's internet service provider.
But I'm puzzled about presumably all the systems, including my own, which
weren't affected at all. And mine is a PC, not a MAC, running Windows 3.11,
Eudora, Netscape, etc.
charles
>(Still sending, not receiving)
>
>For those who need to know, and for Bill Marsh in especial:
>
>EUDORA crashed because the server sending Bill Marsh's message dates his
message
>--wait for it!!!--
> 1969
>instead of 1996.
>This is known to Eudora (their technicians tell me) as a BAD DATE
>for which you get the message "Application Error Integer Divide by Zero".
>
>So I set my system up again, having had my server delete Bill Marsh's
>messages, got going nicely, and dammit there was another one! The bad date
>does not affect Winsock (which I use to interface) but does affect Netscape
>and Eudora, on a PC486 (memory is no problem that i can see on my machine)
>-- it has no effect on a MAC. Once again I have lost half my mail
>(downloaded and then scrambled / garbled by a second wrong date -- origin
>unknown: you again, Bill?))
>
>In any case, I'm off-line till 1 August; I can however download (horribly,
>and sort of) through Windows 3.1 Terminal (yuck) till I fix myself up again.
>
>Madre dios!
>
>Peter.
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
> Peter Quartermain
> 128 East 23rd Avenue
> Vancouver
> B.C.
> Canada V5V 1X2
> Voice and fax: 604 876 8061
>
> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:45:31 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Bad news
I ache at this announcement. Not only for Canada, but certainly one of the
world's great publishers of important, innovative literature over the last
few decades. They will be sorely missed.
Soon after beginning a press, in 1981, I visited Coach House for the first
time, and visited bp Nichol in Toronto. Both visits, for a variety of
reasons, were providential to the future of my work in writing and
publishing. Just over a year ago I visited the original Coach House site
again, having no idea it would be the last time. I still encourage all to go
there, at least to see the concrete poem etched in the concrete lane in the
back, now named bpNichol Lane. And perhaps Stan and others involved will
still find ways to make & publish books there, even if it's not Coach House.
One good thing come to an end. Bless it.
charles
>The bad news here this a.m. is the announcement of the closing of
>Coach House Press, much esteemed publishers of Robin Blaser, George
>Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Thesen, and many many others, after
>31 years due to the continuing implementation of knee-jerk neo-con
>economics by the provincial and federal governments. Chalk up another
>victory for the New York bankers.
>
>Mike
>mboughn@chass.utoronto.ca
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 10:45:34 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: press survival
>
>Mike, I'm interested in the details behind "the continuing implementation
>of knee-jerk neo-con economics by the provincial and federal governments."
>What, in your view, are the particulars of those kinds of economics?
There is certainly a relationship between conservative politics and the
de-funding of the arts in America, and probably in Canada, although I know
much less about that. And the more limited funding tends, in my view, to go
to the most established presses publishing the most commercially
palatable/successful literature. Although even those presses are struggling
more than usual (but it would be wrong to deny that it has always in this
century and probably before been a struggle to publish literature of
practically any kind). In addition, with national funding cutbacks there
were many hopes that more funds could be leveraged in state legislatures to
replace lost federal dollars for the arts. For the most part, in most
states, the opposite may be happening. States are saying they can't & won't
replace the federal dollars, and in many cases are cutting back their own
dollars. Most states are as politically conservate as the federal
government, if not moreso, and this absolutely effects arts funding.
>I ask because in the last year, in conversation with one or two people who
>publish poetry (at the moment I'm thinking of Sam Hamill of Copper
>Canyon Press), I've gotten the distinct impression that there are a
>great number of small presses out there who are in more danger than
>usual of going under.
Yes, they are. See above.
> I have also gotten the impression that, due to
>the always-rising costs of publishing (especially the price of paper),
>small presses have become increasingly dependent upon grants from
>governmental arts institutions like NEH, which have of course recently
>and drastically reduced funding due to their own decreased funding b
>by Congress.
Paper costs are actually descending once again, and I am not finding it
considerably more expensive to publish books this year than five or six
years ago. But I am finding it more difficult to find dollars to pay the
costs, and somewhat more difficult to distribute & sell books, although this
is somewhat offset by the advantage of having been at it now for several
years, and the audience-building that the ongoing activity achieves.
The NEH almost never funds small presses, unless the activity is
specifically scholarly. The NEA has consistently funded a small number of
presses, although the record with regard to more experimental/innovative
poetries has been spotty.
>Since small presses publish a very high percentage of the
>contemporary poetry in this country--especially experimental work--then
>I also get the impression that poetry itself is in some danger; not only
>will the already-published works of poets like Robin Blaser and Sharon
>Thesen fall out of print (which is tragic), but there will be fewer
>places and opportunities for poets to publish as well (which is also
>tragic).
This is not so clear to me. There seem to be more journals popping up each
year, although they are not necessarily long-lived. Also, the possibilities
of electronic publishing and distribution have barely been tapped. And the
presses which perhaps have the best chance of survival are the micro-presses
publishing chapbooks off the desktop and keeping expenses at the minimum. I
think this is all good news, and we may have to lose some of our
hierarchical ideas about what constitutes an important book (looks of book,
whether or not we find it in many bookstores or in creative independent
channels, etc.)
>The next question I want to ask (because I've been turning it over in the
>back of my mind for some months now and would be interested in other
>viewpoints) is: Is it possible for small presses of today to remove
>themselves from live-or-die dependence upon the fickle funding of
>governments, or avoid it altogether, or are publishing costs just too
>high and returns on sales too small?
There are some presses which do so. The answers here are as multiple as the
presses. A recent article in Publishers Weekly (perhaps a couple of months
ago) was by the director of The Permanent Press and discussed that press's
ability to keep afloat, not as a nonprofit organization. I would certainly
not encourage new presses beginning now to go the nonprofit corporation
route, at least not without some deep thought and research about it. On the
other hand, I don't think I'd yet encourage those who already have that
status and have learned how to work with it, to throw it out the window. But
no doubt about it, presses are going to have to be creative in developing
survival strategies.
> And, are there any alternatives
>to this situation to keep distributing the work of contemporary
>writers (I know there are, but I want to hear suggestions from others,
>as well as pro-and-con evaluations of those alternatives if there are
>any). I'd especially be interested in hearing from those who are
>currently publishing contemporary poets. Thanks.
I certainly would like to hear other ideas about this as well. Thanks to
Lisa Amber Phillips for bringing it up.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 11:50:09 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: press survival
>... we may have to lose some of our
>hierarchical ideas about what constitutes an important book (looks of book,
>whether or not we find it in many bookstores or in creative independent
>channels, etc.)
>
But combined with the dominance of B&N & Borders, and the resulting
difficulties of independent bookstores, how will these creative independent
channels flourish, and how will people find them?
This is a serious question. There is (always -- the natural course of
things) too much of an insider/outsider situation, and a whole school of
writing going samizdat will make things worse.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:20:44 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: Coach House (re-post due to delivery failure)
Lisa Amber Phillips typed:
> The next question I want to ask (because I've been turning it over in the
> back of my mind for some months now and would be interested in other
> viewpoints) is: Is it possible for small presses of today to remove
> themselves from live-or-die dependence upon the fickle funding of
> governments, or avoid it altogether, or are publishing costs just too
> high and returns on sales too small?
My fellow editors and I at _Sensitive Skin_ have been wondering exactly
the same thing. It is easy enough for us to sink dough into an issue of
the magazine when we've each got lots of freelance work (see 89-92).
But when we're coasting financially, like we are now, there is absolutely
nowhere to turn. For two years, we've tried for grants without success.
In our current unpublished issue, we've got original work by Luc Sante
and Lynne Tillman, an unpublished interview with William Burroughs conducted
by Ginsburg, and photographs by Richard Kern. None of this work is
particularly difficult (except, subtly, for Lynne's), yet no one has
given us the financial time of day. Not to be able to find the backing
to publish a Burroughs issue in 1996 seems tragic if not downright
mystifying.
My strategy in editing SS and other magazines has always been to
use names to attract readers, but to concentrate on promoting
writers who are relatively obscure. If we can't find the funding
to publish Burroughs, then how will we publish the diffcult writing
that people ought to know? Autonomedia has faced similar problems;
Prof. Doug Rice has been publishing his magazine _Nobodaddies_,
out of his own pocket. Are the arts to follow a kind of economic
arch form? Have we reverted from the financial independence of
Beethoven to the patrons of Haydn and Mozart? And if so, what
literate millionaire is going to understand the writing of, say,
Rae Armantrout? I've just been speaking to the heir to Prentice-Hall;
let's just say that he is interested in reportage and despises the
entire notion of literature, of fiction and poetry, on principle.
I wouldn't trust him to write a literate sentence, let alone to
value important or difficult work.
Defunding, I think, is partly at fault for the dumbing of readings
that people complain about in UB Poetics. Lowest common denominators
begin to look good to artists who are fighting for economic survival.
What we're dealing with, of course, is financial censorship. A kind
of _On the Waterfront_ close-out of artists who don't reflect the
Deaf, Dumb & Dumber values of the culture.
It's odd, how _Skin_ eds have begun to look at publishing in terms
of escape from financial famine. Just get to Germany, we've been
thinking. Get the magazine to Europe and tap our resources there.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:33:41 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: BookStore
Charles Alexander typed:
> And of course if you're looking for rare first editions, out of print
> poetry, limited edition handmade books, etc., in Albuquerque, you have to
> check out Passages, begun a few years ago by the incomparable David Abel
> (some in New York will know David from the Bridge Bookstore several years
> ago there). His email is dca@nmia.com
Thanks, Charles. David's bookstore, The Bridge, was the only one of its kind
in NYC: no one else was interested promoting in difficult poetry and prose.
The Bridge was only bookstore here to face-out the entire Sun & Moon catalog,
the only place where you might enter into a conversation about Clark Coolidge,
to have a book-signing party for Robert Pinget. You should have seen how
moved Pinget was by David's interest.
The Poetry Project was always interested in a kind of interdisciplinary
pop culture strategy that I don't find particularly useful as a writer.
David was our resident monk, our interlocutor. We miss him sorely.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
PS: Segue and other presses are certainly based in NYC. But so far as I know,
The Bridge was and remains the only cross-plat poetry *bookstore* of the late
eighties. Anselm Hollo, David Rattray and Keith Waldrop in beautifully
dissonant succession.
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:35:16 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: experiments and identities
For anyone interested in the recently ongoing thread about experimental
poetries and identity politics, Harryette Mullin's piece "Poetry and
Identity" in the new West Coast Line is really a must read. Well argued,
precise, and right there.
But as I was reading it last night, I also saw this new commercial for
Colgate toothpaste, whose main character is an African American woman
poet who uses Colgate and recites her poetry on stage, the key line being
"Free. Free to be me." Has anyone else seen this?
I wanted to quote another choice bit from the new West Coast line. I
think it applies to all sorts of contexts other than the one for which it
is perfectly well-suited. In this piece by Jessica Johnson, Sam ("a
smallish Cub Scout of indeterminant gender") knocks at the door of a
house where there is a party hosted by Judith Butler, with Monique Wittig
as one of the guests. Sam doesn't know whether to "become a Girl Guide or
a Boy Scout." Here's how the scene ends:
"But what am I supposed to do right this minute?" asked Sam. "I
can't stay in your kitchen forever. I have to go out and play on a team."
"You could alternate teams, for maximum effect," suggested Judith
Butler.
"Or you could simply forget about being a scout. Deny teams. In
my case, I find it necessary to suppress them. That is the point of view
of the lesbian," said Monique Wittig.
"I've been meaning to talk to you about that," said Judith Butler.
And that started a debate. This gave Sam the opportunity to take
a muffin from the counter, and slip quietly out the back door.
mark wallace
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 14:26:57 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: readings in Washington, D.C.
We may have some openings for poetry readings here in D.C., so if
there's anyone who is interested in that possibility, please contact me
at this e-mail address. Unfortunately, we don't have any travel money to
offer at this time, but we can always offer an informed and committed
audience.
But please, no requests for readings around the time of MLA in
late December. Things here will be very hectic then. We're hoping to put
something together at that time, and more information will be posted as
it becomes available.
Mark Wallace
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:23:49 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: press survival
>>... we may have to lose some of our
>>hierarchical ideas about what constitutes an important book (looks of book,
>>whether or not we find it in many bookstores or in creative independent
>>channels, etc.)
>>
>
>
>But combined with the dominance of B&N & Borders, and the resulting
>difficulties of independent bookstores, how will these creative independent
>channels flourish, and how will people find them?
>
>This is a serious question. There is (always -- the natural course of
>things) too much of an insider/outsider situation, and a whole school of
>writing going samizdat will make things worse.
Perhaps you are right, and I don't have the answers about how the creative
channels will flourish. But in the last year Chax Press has sold more books
through this Poetics list than it ever has through any single source other
than specific book distributors like SPD. More through Poetics than through
library jobbers like Baker & Taylor. So that indicates to me that, while it
may be samizdat, the potential for the actual number of readers to grow
through such channels may be great.
Look forward to another Chax sales announcement very soon (within the next
week) for a new book by Tom Mandel, Prospect of Release, and for a couple of
previous handmade books (by Nathaniel Mackey & Gil Ott). This is a sale
prior to our return move to Tucson, Arizona, which will take place before
the end of August.
And I will extend a thank you right here to the terrific participants on
this poetics list who have supported Chax Press and other presses as well,
and for the ongoing conversation of which it is a pleasure to be a part.
And here's possibly a devil's advocate thought, concerning the demise of
Coach House. That is, part of my experience with the institutionalization
and bureaucratization of nonprofit arts and publishing since I've been in
the Twin Cities has only reinforced my feelings that many institutions live
past their richest artistic periods as they achieve stabilization. Often
such stabilization means doing work which is more fundable and which can
demonstrate reaching larger audiences. Certainly art & literature needs
those audiences, and those audience needs deserve to be met. But I still
feel that not every (& possibly not even most) arts organizations and
activities need to live on in perpetuity (or close) & that it's perfectly
fine to serve a dedicated mission for any period of time from a few days to
several years and then simply stop, for whatever reasons. Some of my
favorite presses and magazines historically (The Objectivist Press, Black
Sun Press, HOW(ever), etc.) were not particularly long-lived. In comparison,
Coach House lived a long and very productive life. I think I'd rather
celebrate its glory than bemoan its passing.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 11:44:28 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Re: Bad news
It is obviously very sad news that Coach House is going under, and I agree
with much of what people have said (& no doubt will continue to say) about
the problems of distribution, marketing, and selling new, experrimental
poetry to an audience of people who aren't on this e-mail list; etc. But
distribution for avant garde work has always sucked, finding that audience
(one person at a time) has always been a pain in the ass, & grants have
rarely, if ever, been enough to support a project of the scale of Coach
House.
Historically, how many small presses have lasted thirty years or more? How
many small presses from the mid-Sixties are still going strong? (For that
matter, how many adventurous, experimental, or whatever non-profit arts
organizations in any field have lasted this long?)
In the US, I can think of City Lights, New Directions & Black Sparrow
(which may not be quite that old), but these seem to have survived because
they have reprint rights for books used in college & university courses or
some other works that have guaranteed sales (is Bukowski on the syllabus
anywhere?). (& yes, I do know that New Directions started with a wad of
family money, but the continued survival of ND as a business is at least as
related to the number of copies of books by Pound, WCW, HD, Duncan, &
others that are sold to students yearly.)
I'm not trying to minimize the impact that the loss of Coach House will
have: It is (& I'm consciously using the present tense here) clearly THE
major press for new poetry in Canada, they have a great backlist, they know
what work is important to publish and have been able to find ways to get it
out there.
Still, I'm not sure that the forces at work here are simply the current
economic state of the Corporate/State. We're not talking best sellers
here. Small presses, & arts organizations in general, which last more than
thirty years have developed some kind of financial stability (whether it's
market share, donor base, or stylish t-shirts & gimme caps) that has been,
unfortunately, all too often unrelated to artistic merit.
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:45:51 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: press haus
The rising cost of paper has occurred for a very simple reason: it is
bought on the futures market, in the same way one might reserve oil
now (through purchase) which will not be freed up for the buyer until
one yuear from the purchase date. Large publishing houses are buying
up millions of pounds of paper in this advance method, making smaller
lots of paper for purchase scarce. While I'm glad that this period of
scarcity seems to have lightened, I do keep in mind the fact of the
almost decimation of independent films in the mid-seventies through
this same kind of process (competing with the major studios for film
purchase).
As a publisher who does not depend on grants at all, I find the recent
lack of NEA and other funds in the US for literary publications to be
a excellent opportunity for our journal. Publications which have
outlived their life-expectancy through government monetary support
will finally have wake-up and-- SURPRISE!-- pay attention to what
their re-formed public constituency of readers is looking for. They
will have to _build_ a community of writers and readers instead of
assuming there is one nebulously floating in some provincial area.
Many journals will fold, lacking the aptitude to adapt to this new
found circumstance, and many will lament the occurrance in the same
way that newspapers lament the closing of an independant bookstore
without ever having run a positve write-up of that same store when in
business.
Distribution is in a horrible state. When Charles mentioned that
people need to change their thinking on what constitutes a publication
to also include xerox staple-bound books (such as Tom Beckett's
Interruptions book of work by Fielding Dawson) or smaller free-bound
publications (with an envelope as binding, such as the old Hanging
Loose issues, or the one we are doing by Robert Grenier) or e-mail/web
sites as publications. But what I think is as important is re-tooling
the ideologies of the consumer towards a willingness to purchase
products through direct-to-publisher mail order methods. Unless
piggy-backing onto a larger organization, small press publishers have
a difficult time finding a distributor. And if a press purely
publishes work which is not perfect bound, none of the major
distributors will carry the product. Period.
Be well.
David Baratier
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 14:14:02 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Coach House (re-post due to delivery failure)
lisa amber philips writes:
>
>... I've gotten the distinct impression that there are a
> great number of small presses out there who are in more danger than
> usual of going under...
> The next question I want to ask (because I've been turning it over in the
> back of my mind for some months now and would be interested in other
> viewpoints) is: Is it possible for small presses of today to remove
> themselves from live-or-die dependence upon the fickle funding of
> governments, or avoid it altogether, or are publishing costs just too
> high and returns on sales too small? ...
>
>
i know some presses (coffee house, arte publico, etc.,) have gone non-profit as
a way of becoming eligible for lots of private foundation money like lila
wallace reader's digest, lannan foundation, etc. the trouble is, many small
presses are basically the vision of one or two people, and when going non-profit
they have to have a board of directors, staff, etc. and there can be some
uncomfortableness, basically, in shifting to a more corporate model of
operation.
md
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 12:33:01 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: press survival
At 1:23 PM 7/16/96, Charles Alexander wrote:
>And here's possibly a devil's advocate thought, concerning the demise of
>Coach House. That is, part of my experience with the institutionalization
>and bureaucratization of nonprofit arts and publishing since I've been in
>the Twin Cities has only reinforced my feelings that many institutions live
>past their richest artistic periods as they achieve stabilization. Often
>such stabilization means doing work which is more fundable and which can
>demonstrate reaching larger audiences. Certainly art & literature needs
>those audiences, and those audience needs deserve to be met.
Charles,
I'm sure you've written grants and are aware how hard it is to write grants
for the desperately-need funding a nonprofit needs--how difficult it is to
keep true to the mission of the org and yet please the whims of funders.
Increasingly on grant applications I'm seeing, audience development seems
to be a bigger and bigger focus--sometimes it seems the actual programming
is an after-thought. Putting on experimental poetry readings for a bunch
of over-served snobs (which is what I think my programming would look like
to many funders) is not going to be seen as audience development, even
though SPT's audiences are quite large by poetry standards. Looking at
grant applications I often think, "Now how can I sneak in an intelligent
project." It's not easy. Sometimes it seems that literature has it worse
than other arts. It's not all that rare to see interesting projects in
visual arts funded, but for literature it's heart-strings projects all the
way. I was a judge for one artist in residency program, and consistently
there was a high intellectual standard for visual arts, whereas when I
tried to get an award for a white male experimental poet I practically got
laughed out of the room. Recently SPT got to the second round for one of
those grants that cycle through disciplines--the year before, visual arts
was the category, and I was impressed with some of the awards. But the
literature awards the year we applied were gruesome. When I read them to
our graphic designer, he said they sounded like topics for the Rickie Lake
Show.
Just needed to bitch.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 16:40:31 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Smith <CharSSmith@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: press survival
In a message dated 96-07-16 12:02:59 EDT, Charles Alexander writes:
<< I would certainly
not encourage new presses beginning now to go the nonprofit corporation
route, at least not without some deep thought and research about it. >>
Charles, would you amplify on this?
& deep regrets at the passing of Coach House
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 16:46:17 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: BookStore
Dear Rob
Thanks for your moving tribute to David Abel & The Bridge. I'll forward it
to David who I am certain will be his usual gracious self, very glad to be
appreciated in such a way. And I hope to see him in about a month in
Albuquerque, and hopefully give a report sometime after that to this list.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 12:44:14 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Language in Contemporary American Poetry (9/15; NEMLA) (fwd)
Call for Papers:
Panel for 1997 Northeast Modern Language Association Convention,
Philadelphia, PA.
Notes Toward "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction": Language in Contemporary
American Poetry
Postmodern theory, ideas that have dominated academic circles for the past
three decades, has again come under heavy negative criticism, rending fresh
philosophical "rifts" in universities worldwide. This backlash, harboring
academia's desire to re-affirm its identity in the face of theory that renders
our pursuit for meaning meaningless, exemplifies the perpetual modern dilemma
(and our endless quest to solve it) that both artists and humans in general
confront: justification for the creation of art (and literary criticism);
validation of one's self in an indeterminate world.
Traditionally, American poets have attempted to come to terms with this
paradox and situate our collective thought on this always fluctuating issue; I
wish to review, in this panel, where contemporary poetry currently finds
itself with regards to the use of language and the making of meaning. Working
in a medium that has been declared "slippery," unable to convey fixed meaning,
American poets may (or may not) need to look beyond the postmodern
inconceivable notions of meaning, guaranteeing their place in society as an
artist and an individual. In order to satisfy the contradictory desires for
absolute meaning and a multiplicity of meaning generated by our use of
language in a diverse, pluralistic society, where the fragmentary nature of our
culture contributes to the "slipperiness" of language, contemporary poets
appear to attempt to sustain simultaneously the interplay and interdependency
of the possibilities of language as metaphor explaining some "truth" and
language as fragmentation, the making of many meanings.
My goal for this panel is to assess how "well" contemporary poets are
dealing with our paradox of language, a paradox that begs for unification of
the idea of existentialism with the reality of communal life and a balancing
between truth and absurdity. It would be worthwhile to observe how concerned
our poets are with the notion that there is no meaning in a medium in which
they create something of permanence; how close do they reflect/reveal the
thought behind the postmodern rebellion (outlined above); what, if anything, do
our contemporary American poets, traditionally our spokespeople, our seers,
predict for what lies ahead for language-using humans beyond our postmodern age.
Deadline for abstracts or papers is September 15, 1996.
Papers should be limited to ten double-spaced pages
(an absolute maximum of 20 minutes).
All panel participants must be members of NEMLA by November 1, 1996.
Please send abstracts or papers to:
John R. Woznicki
Dept. Of English
Lehigh University
35 Sayre Drive
Bethlehem, PA. 18015
If you have any questions, feel free to e-mail at: jrw2@lehigh.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 12:56:16 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: text/language
In-Reply-To: <199607122035.PAA18604@freedom.mtn.org>
I know I've flaked on this discussion because here I am supposed to be
studying away. Wanted to say a few things, though.
On Fri, 12 Jul 1996, Charles Alexander wrote:
> >How can text and language be distinguished? I guess have to take a long
> >look at how the word "language" and "text" can and can't sensibly be used.
> >Otherwise into the foggy dew we go. gab.
>
> Isn't language much broader? It includes music & other sound-language,
> visual languages of many kinds, all sorts of symbolic language other than
> the ones which use letters & words; & usually text is grounded in those
> letters & words, although I'd be glad to conceive of text more broadly, too.
>
Yes. I think what I was trying to get at is just that--pushing our way
around the interstices of teh meanings of words like "langauge" and
"text" until we can see what we can or can't say with them, rather than
making arbitrary decisions about what we are going to accept or not as far
as meaning goes.
> Or, for example, dealing with book arts/artists' books, the text of the book
> would be whatever language-text is presented therein, but the language of
> the book would have to include all its other parts (visual, structural,
> sometimes aural, etc.) as well. Books can (they don't always, or do they?)
> make literature physical.
Isn't it amazing? Then we have to start looking/pushing at the edges or
inbetweennesses of what "physical" can mean. And "literature." Mkae
language physical? But isn't it always? If physical means to do with
bodies. Could there be a way of conceiving of langauge that wasn't
physical? Is thinking physical? Hmmmm. That's a nice one. I guess we
can say it is and we can say it isn't. It hums between perhaps. So text
can be langauge, but language doesn't need to be text. Certe. Unless we
do one of those overboard things and say anything that can be read is text
(read my lips), as I suppose some people do. My life as text. My life as
language? Pushing it, huh? gab.
> > charles >
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 17:02:13 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: BookStore
Speaking of which, for years and years I was looking for Charyn's
_Eisenhower, my Eisenhower_ and never found it in a bookstore; but last
February on a cold night in Ottawa, I got it from the amazing collector Rod
Anstee. I have him a copy of Ted Joans's first book.
For almost as many years now I have been looking for Markson's _Going Down_
Meanwhile looking for somewhere to sell old _Trobars_ and the like.
..........................
"Lifting belly is so kind."
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 17:14:50 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: press survival
Sometimes it seems that literature has it worse
>than other arts. It's not all that rare to see interesting projects in
>visual arts funded, but for literature it's heart-strings projects all the
>way. I was a judge for one artist in residency program, and consistently
>there was a high intellectual standard for visual arts, whereas when I
>tried to get an award for a white male experimental poet I practically got
>laughed out of the room. Recently SPT got to the second round for one of
>those grants that cycle through disciplines--the year before, visual arts
>was the category, and I was impressed with some of the awards. But the
>literature awards the year we applied were gruesome. When I read them to
>our graphic designer, he said they sounded like topics for the Rickie Lake
>Show.
I dont know who Rickie lake is, but I have a feeling that Dodie is right
about the comparison between visual and writing grants. I was on a recent
grant-giving panel, and it tried to be as fair as possible, but you know?
the stuff with content and the stuff with current ethnocorrectness too
eaSILY seen, etc. (My sentence got screwed by the 33rd ringing of doorbells
and phones in the past hour.
Anyway, sure you complain a lot, Dodie, but one would rather hear you
complain than hear Louis Simpson complain, eh?
..........................
"Lifting belly is so kind."
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 17:38:31 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
Hey, Pierre!
As soon as you turn fifty you get hairs growing out of your ears and around
your nipples, and you get a few long hairs in your eyebrows. Neat.
..........................
"Lifting belly is so kind."
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 21:51:15 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "c.g. guertin" <cguertin@JULIAN.UWO.CA>
Subject: Re: Bad news/Coach House
Comments: cc: Steve McCaffery <mccaffer@enterprise.ca>
In-Reply-To: <v02130500ae1185ffd63b@[192.0.2.1]>
I am shocked and terribly saddened to hear the news of Coach House's
impending demise.
Coach House has a 30 year history of financial woes to be sure, having
constantly lived on the verge of bankruptcy and having been chronically
underfunded. The ramifactions of this for Canadian poetry and
experimental writing are immeasurable. I cannot imagine the devastation
that this will bring to the Canadian literary community and to
teachers and professors of Canadian lit across the country as well.
Authors who have all or some of their backlist with Coach House include
Robin Blaser, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt (whose new novel was
supposed to be published this fall), Phyllis Webb, Sharon Thesen, Michael
Ondaatje, bpNichol, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Nicole Brossard, Steve
McCaffery, and Gail Scott.
As a former publicist for Coach House, I know how important the press has
been for writers with its unique position in this country as a writer's
press. Its focus has shifted and changed many times, but it has survived
so long because it remained adaptable *and* stayed on the cutting edge.
Coach House has had that rare talent to turn literary works into
bestsellers as well as continuing to win award after award for its list.
These are sad times indeed when a mere pittance (as far as the governments
are concerned) could save the press, but when arts funding has no value
in the eyes of the different levels of government.
Arts organizations are always prime targets in times of fiscal restraint.
How do we fight back?
Carolyn Guertin
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 20:51:40 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: press survival
>In a message dated 96-07-16 12:02:59 EDT, Charles Alexander writes:
>
><< I would certainly
> not encourage new presses beginning now to go the nonprofit corporation
> route, at least not without some deep thought and research about it. >>
>
>Charles, would you amplify on this?
Just a little, I will.
I think, first of all, that when I began making/publishing books in about
1981, and then when I incorporated Chax in 1985, there was the sense that an
individual could set up a nonprofit organization and rather easily become
eligible for grants from government & foundation sources without following
some corporate model or becoming professionalized in the way Dodie (I think
it was Dodie) described. As competition for such dollars has increased I
think that avoiding such corporate models (which are highly rewarded by
funders, which attract rather powerful & corporate board members, etc.) is
increasingly difficult. So, first of all, think about the hoops one has to
jump through, or how terribly hard one must work to not jump through such
hoops (& what the consequences of either jumping or not jumping might be) --
before one goes that nonprofit route.
Also, given the scarcity of dollars particularly for the sorts of work that
seems to attract a lot of people on this list, it may be incumbent on a
press to do other sorts of work to raise money. For example, if one has
design skills, sell design services. Or if one is moved to make the most of
some publishing opportunity and publish something outside the realm of
fundable projects, say for example a hot cookbook or whatever, to actually
generate good income -- that may be very difficult to do as a nonprofit
organization, but rather easy as a for profit organization. And if one goes
the "for profit" route, organizes as a sole proprietorship, chances are
there won't be a lot of money made & there won't be much of a tax bite, in
fact it's quite possible that all kinds of expenses will be deductible. This
nation rewards entrepreneurship more than it rewards nonprofit arts
enterprises (but yes of course there is such a thing as nonprofit
entrepreneurship, but I'm not certain how easy that is for extremely small
organizations, and by extremely small I probably mean anything with a budget
of less than $75,000 or so a year -- even organizations with a half million
dollar budget find it really difficult to mount the kinds of promotions and
other activities necessary to make things like museum shops succeed).
But these are just two of the things to think about, and they don't go at
all into an investigation of specific tax laws or legal niceties. Just that
I have a general notion now that it's extremely difficult to succeed as a
small nonprofit publishing organization, perhaps with no visible benefits
over a small "for profit" publishing company. Plus you might consistently
find hands tied and forms aplenty. I even heard the head of one of the
largest arts-funding foundations here criticize small presses in the area as
having bad cases of what he called "founder-itis," meaning the founders of
the presses couldn't get beyond their own personal visions enough to be able
to create successful, stable (and ostensibly somehow less personal)
organizations. Now if that's the kind of press one wants to create, then by
all means go nonprofit.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 19:14:14 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: press survival
At 3:21 PM 7/16/96, Judy Roitman wrote:
>Dodie, I thought that only happened in Kansas.
Actually, a project involving Toto would probably have a good chance of
getting funded.
db
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 00:57:57 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Thomas M. Orange" <tmorange@BOSSHOG.ARTS.UWO.CA>
Subject: Bad News
In-Reply-To: <9607170424.AA23096@bosshog.arts.uwo.ca>
Mike Boughn:
Why is Couch House's demise "another victory for the New York bankers?"
Tom
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 23:46:15 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tenney Nathanson <tenney@AZSTARNET.COM>
Subject: Mullen piece?
>Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 13:35:16 -0400
>From: Mark Wallace <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
>Subject: experiments and identities
>
>For anyone interested in the recently ongoing thread about experimental
>poetries and identity politics, Harryette Mullin's piece "Poetry and
>Identity" in the new West Coast Line is really a must read. Well argued,
>precise, and right there.
Mark--
do you have an address handy for West Coast Line, or order info of any kind?
or does anyone?
I'm getting ready to add /Muse & Drudge/ to the reading list for my fall
u.g. contemporary poetry class, and am getting nervous....
are you on the list Gil (or Harryette?)?
thanks for any help
Tenney
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 09:10:10 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: Mullen piece?
West Coast Line
2027 East Academic Annex
Simon Fraser Univ.
Burnaby BC V5A 1S6 canada
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 10:07:57 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gwyn McVay <gmcvay1@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
In-Reply-To: <v0153050aae11e6556885@[142.58.125.3]>
George, does that mean the birthday boy will be achieving eyebrows like
Czeslaw Milosz's?
Gwyn
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 09:24:12 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Opening of the San Francisco Center for the Book
I thought some people, particularly those in the Bay Area and those
interested in "the art of the book and the visible word," would be
interested in this announcement, so I'm forwarding it. Sometimes good news
comes, too.
charles
>Return-Path: owner-book_arts-l@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
>Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 01:00:25 -0700
>Reply-To: "The Book Arts: binding, typography, collecting"
> <BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
>Sender: "The Book Arts: binding, typography, collecting"
> <BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
>From: Mary Katherine Austin <mka@ARCHIVE.ORG>
>Subject: Opening of the San Francisco Center for the Book
>To: Multiple recipients of list BOOK_ARTS-L
> <BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
>X-UIDL: 67ad917c988c930a7ddb1ade31b2b429
>
>The San Francisco Center for the Book celebrates its opening on Tuesday,
>July 30, from 5 to 9 p.m. , at 300 De Haro Street, between 16th and 17th
>Streets. The opening will be a great opportunity to meet members of the
>book arts community and to learn about upcoming events, exhibitions, and
>classes at The Center.
>
>The San Francisco Center for the Book is a newly-formed arts organization
>devoted to exploring the art of the book and the visible word.
>Centrally-located at the foot of Potrero Hill, The Center has set up a
>stylish public facility that will house the activities and studio practice
>of the growing book arts community. Drawing upon the creative talents and
>expertise of members of Bay Area book arts organizations, The Center offers
>a wide range of workshop classes in bookmaking such as experimental
>printmaking and book structures, as well as exhibitions, special events, a
>resource library. The Center also intends to facilitate interdisciplinary
>collaboration of artists exploring the book format.
>
>The three founding directors staff The San Francisco Center for the Book:
>Mary Austin, Kathleen Burch, and Susan Landauer. The Center also houses
>the activities of The Pacific Center for the Book Arts and The Hand
>Bookbinders of California, two lively Bay Area book arts organizations.
>
>Starting with the local expression of the Arts & Crafts movement a century
>ago, some of the world's most creative book artists have worked in the Bay
>Area. Their diverse arts have decorated Berkeley coffee house menus, lined
>the bookshelves of the Bohemian Club, or been given away in The Haight.
>During the seventies, the practice and perception of book arts began to
>move from "craft" to "fine art," as museums began to mount major
>exhibitions, and as the prices of the works mounted as well. Current
>interest in the book arts has never been higher, perhaps due to the visual
>stimulation of changing publishing technologies. To book artists, "the
>death of the book" really means a transformation of its form, and a way for
>all of us to re-examine reading, sequence, and content.
>
>Publicity photos available. For more information, call Mary Austin or
>Kathleen Burch at 415-565-0545.
>
># # #
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 10:55:33 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Bouchard <Daniel_Bouchard@HMCO.COM>
Subject: Boston reading
Gerritt Lansing and Ken Irby will be reading Sunday, July 21 from 3-5 p.m. at
T.T. the Bears in Central Square, Cambridge. John Wieners will introduce the
readers.
Come early for the poetry, stay late for the poetry.
daniel_bouchard@hmco.com
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 10:29:09 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: r h y m m s by Robert Grenier
Pavement Saw Press
is taking advance orders for our newest publication
which is a selection of poems
from _r h y m m s_ by Robert Grenier.
The 12 pages are reproduced
in a loose leaf, arrangeable,
four color reproduction format,
on acid-free paper, with a handpress
printed envelope for containment.
There will be a limited edition of 110 copies made
of which 10 are signed and numbered. The pre-press
cost for the unsigned copies of this edition will be $20,
including p & h.
Libraries and instiutions are also welcome to inquire
Reserve one now. Copies will be distributed in 6 to 8 weeks.
Pavement Saw Press
7 James Street
Scotia, NY 12302
An informative article which elaborates the intricacies of Grenier's
complete project of _r h y m m s_ can be found in Witz, Spring 1996.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 11:53:12 -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@CHASS.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Re: Bad News
Dear Thomas Orange:
I know this not a politcal discussion group, so I'll try to keep my
rant short.
Last year, our social democratic government was defeated, partly
because of its own inexperience and occasional stupidity, but largely
because of the economic fallout from free trade and the manipulation of
bond interest rates by said bankers who weren't crazy about having a
bunch of socialists in power and weren't shy about letting people know
it.
The current gang of goofs we've got running things is more to their
liking: a golf-pro for premier, a highschool dropout for education
minister, a used car salesman in charge of rapid transit, etc etc. You
guys probably thought nobody could outdo having a grade B actor with
Alzheimer's for president. What we lack in quality, we try to make up
for in sheer quantity.
Last month the golf-pro was down in NY kissing bankers' ass left right
and center, showing his credentials: revocation of equity legislation,
the dismantling of inexpensive public education, protection of the
"rights" of scabs, the use of the provincial riot squad to kick the
shit out of striking workers, the sell-off of conservation areas and
parks, oh yeah, and a promise to corporations to undo any environmental
legislation they found unduly restrictive of their business practices.
As he told the bankers, "Ontario is open for business." I could come
up with an obscene translation of that idea (an old cartoon by Paul
Krastner comes immediately to mind), but I'll spare you. Needless to
say, they loved it, and showered him with promises of lower interest
rates.
Here's the same golf-pro on Coach House, from this morning's Globe:
Ontario Premier Mike Harris said yesterday that Coach House
Press went under not because the province cut its grants to
the publisher but because "they can't compete in the
marketplace."
Harris told reporters before a meeting of the inner cabinet
that the fact the comapny blames the province for its demise
"probably speaks to their management capabilities."
Last year, the Ontario government cut its grant to the
publisher by 74% and a loan guarantee by the Ontario
Development Corp. will not be renewed when it expires in
October.
etc. etc.
I don't think any particular banker was out to get Coach House. I
don't even think the golf-pro was, largely because he's never heard of
them before, and in fact, hasn't read a book since high school. But
this idea of "competition in the market place" as the _summa summarum_
of human potentiality and the determining fact of existence guarantees
us only an utterly degraded world.
Best,
Mike
mboughn@chass.utoronto.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 11:59:23 -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@CHASS.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: New H.D. Stories
For those on this list interested in the work of H.D., I'm pleased to
announce the publication of 2 short children's stories by her on the
H.D. Home Page. These stories were first published in Sunday School
magazines around 1910, and have never been seen since. I discovered
them several years ago when I was working on the H.D. Bibliography.
Heather Hawkins has been generous enough to edit them and post them to
the home page.
The address is: http://www.well.com/user/heddy/hdstor.html
Mike
mboughn@chass.utoronto.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 11:13:41 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: chax books number two
This is the second of three messages with special offerings from Chax Press.
Please do not post any replies to the Poetics List. Rather respond with
orders to
Chax Press
Box 19178
Minneapolis, MN 55419-0178
or respond with questions to chax@mtn.org, or call at 612-721-6063
Because Chax Press is moving in one month, we are taking only orders by mail
accompanied by a check to Chax Press, and this particular offer is only
available if your order makes its way to us by August 6. And just in case
you are worried about tracking us down, our Tucson address will be 101 W.
Sixth Street, Tucson, AZ 85701, but we will not be at that address until
about August 30. And mail will be forwarded from the Minneapolis address as
well.
ANNOUNCING:
Three of Ten, by Hank Lazer,
including three sequences: H's Journal, Negation, & Displayspace
168 pages
cover image by Jess
ISBN 0-925904-18-X
Retail Price: $14
Price to Poetics List & whoever else may see this message and order prior to
August 6, 1996: $8.00, including shipping/handling
Available in October 1996. Respondents to this order by August 6, 1996 will
receive the first copies.
Here is an excerpt from the opening of Three of Ten. The works in this book
make creative use of a number of source materials which are noted in the
book's notes.
From H's Journal, Number 1:
1 In a show of independence for which no crowing is called for, I went home
to spend my fortieth birthday with my parents and my sister, for I have
settled deliberately at some distance, knowing that to go home bestirs the
confused marrow of one=92s imagined autonomy.
2 As said in a friend=92s words: =93you do that again, & I=92ll beat the dog=
out
of you.=94
3A distrust of feelings transcendental is itself a bracing tonic.
4 Product of its given day, each sentence a citizen in full.
5 =93Like cuttlefish we conceal ourselves, we darken the atmosphere in which
we move; we are not transparent.=94
6 =93=92Life in the Words=92 suggests much of the geniuine significance of=
the
book to Thoreau: it was life and self re-created and revised in words, and
he lived in the words he had created.=94
7 Redundant wonder =97 the learned arpeggio of an appreciative, sensitive
observer =97 amounts to a truncated intellect and failure to recognize the
place of rhetoric in governing written (and thus constructed) expression.
______________________________________
Thank you in advance for your orders.
charles alexander
chax press
box 19178
minneapolis, mn 55419-0178
612-721-6063
chax@mtn.org
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 11:13:35 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: chax books number one
This is the first of three messages with special offerings from Chax Press.
Please do not post any replies to the Poetics List. Rather respond with
orders to
Chax Press
Box 19178
Minneapolis, MN 55419-0178
or respond with questions to chax@mtn.org, or call at 612-721-6063
Because Chax Press is moving in one month, we are taking only orders by mail
accompanied by a check to Chax Press, and to insure you have books mailed to
you before our move, you should get them in to us by August 6. And just in
case you are worried about tracking us down, our Tucson address will be 101
W. Sixth Street, Tucson, AZ 85701, but we will not be at that address until
about August 30. And mail will be forwarded from the Minneapolis address as
well.
ANNOUNCING:
Prospect of Release, by Tom Mandel
ISBN 0-925904-11-2
Retail Price: $12.95
Price to Poetics List & whoever else may see this message and order prior to
August 6, 1996: $8.00, including shipping/handling
Available in 1 week
Ron Silliman writes of this book:
Memento mori: sonnets.=20
These 50 poems, 700 lines (neither number divisible by three), confront
self, other, identity, loss, history, language and meaning through the most
concrete instance we have of what the poststructuralists call =93an absent
presence=94 =97 the death of a parent. This loss of apparent meaning (who=
gave
you your name?) doubles (this father arrived by marriage, already a rhyme
for the dead blood kin that came before), invoking tradition, transmission,
instruction. Ritual (the sonnet, the ceremonies of grief) kaleidoscopes
through its own echoes. =93Do not speak these / words, but repeat them.=94
=93Ghosts, all of them,=94 as Spicer said, though here it is Paul Celan=92s
Shakespeare (of all possible bards) who thrusts the blade from behind the
curtain:
The knife comes out clean; the cake
is done. Why does time pass? Because one
observes a rule. Why wear clothes? To model
a soul in paradise, clothed in its days.
These are the most intensely felt poems I have ever read."
And here are the first two poems of the series:
That one is conscious and not know why
like cleaved rock or two that never joined
eyes blue in life become brown coals
silent as the Kodak into which they stare
from the rear of a backyard family gathering.
Brothers-in-law caper in the foreground.
Seasons, months, weeks, moments flatten
against the horizon, forgotten. To whom
now do I belong? An infinity of numbers
whose factor is three. I saw it was
a volume. At sea when I met him, light
poured in unrecalled, he offered no answers
to the questions I asked whose answers
were obvious, and I did not know why.
Of the ten things made at twilight
the greatest was =91speech-act.=92 Think
of the orator moving in memory=92s rooms.
Imagination speaks, a matter of meaning,
internal volumes. It was like him to
know me. Articulate in perplexity, like
all bodies in a state of erratic motion
unless compelled to uniform motion or rest
by a mental law that unfolds phenomena
in time, words as it were want to live
their =91truth until the heavens.=92 Thorough,
transparent, opaque, coded (undecoded),
tragedy studies us to divine our terms
of meaning. It is no absolute entity.
______________________________________
Thank you in advance for your orders.
charles alexander
chax press
box 19178
minneapolis, mn 55419-0178
612-721-6063
chax@mtn.org
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 11:13:46 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: chax press books number three
This is the third of three messages with special offerings from Chax Press.
Please do not post any replies to the Poetics List. Rather respond with
orders to
Chax Press
Box 19178
Minneapolis, MN 55419-0178
or respond with questions to chax@mtn.org, or call at 612-721-6063
Because Chax Press is moving in one month, we are taking only orders by mail
accompanied by a check to Chax Press, and to insure you have books mailed to
you before our move, you should get them in to us by August 6. And just in
case you are worried about tracking us down, our Tucson address will be 101
W. Sixth Street, Tucson, AZ 85701, but we will not be at that address until
about August 30. And mail will be forwarded from the Minneapolis address as
well.
ANNOUNCING:
A special offer on two deluxe handmade, letterpress books.
OUTLANTISH, by Nathaniel Mackey
This book was published in late 1992. Recently we have bound a few copies
which were not released at that time, although they still make up part of
the 100 copies in the edition. Just one dozen copies are available at this
time. The original price of the book was $110. To members of the Poetics
List these dozen copies are now available for $40 each.
Outlantish contains "mu" fourth part through eleventh part. Its epigraphs
read " . . . a myth is not merely a word spoken; it is a re-utterance or
pre-utterance, it is a focus of emotion. . . . Possibly the first muthos was
simply the interjectional utterance mu . . ." (Jane Harrison); and " . . . a
continent of feeling beyond our feeling . . . " (Robert Duncan).
The book measures 11 & 3/4 inches high by 6 inches wide. It is letterpress
printed on Mohawk letterpress paper with covers letterpress printed (title
is printed blind or without ink, thereby debossed into the cover) on Cross
Pointe Genesis recycled paper. The binding is a variation of the lang-stitch
method, with threads sewn and visible through the spine. Sheets of Japanese
Fuji Unryu paper in a soft brownish-grey with neutral-colored fibers visible
in it, are wrapped around the first and last signature of the book to offer
a dramatic and sensual break in the reading of the text, and in a sense
extending the outside of the book to the inside. Mackey's text is
accompanied by three collage illustrations by Tucson Arizona artist Sonia
Telesco. One of these illustrations is printed on a double-page sheet so
that the halves of the illustration are separated by four pages of text. The
illustrations make no attempt to conventionally "illustrate" the text
(something we're not that fond of at Chax), rather are the result of the
artist's response to that text in her own way -- collaboration rather than
accompaniment.
WHEEL, by Gil Ott
Wheel was also originally published in 1992, and only a dozen or so copies
remain available.
The original price was $38. It is available to Poetics List members at this
time for $20.
Both text and linoleum block prints in the book are by Gil Ott. The book
measures 7.5 inches wide by 8 inches high. It is printed letterpress all in
black, text and block prints on Mohawk paper with one smaller-sized leaf of
Frankfurt paper sewn in. The cover of the book is made of handmade paper
made by Tom Leech at the San Miguel Paper Workshop in Colorado Springs and
is a beautiful burnt orange color. The unusual cover is intentionally
undersized, becoming a cover which does not entirely cover, leaving the
inside of the book visible to the outside, enacting a kind of ongoing wheel
in its engagement, physically, of book with world.
An excerpt from WHEEL:
sheet to the line, perspective
in that book
any instant
bound
wind rise or fall
where to begin, or end. A breath describes another passage, that
tugs. Or "point of view." Without us, it has no
______________________________________
Thank you in advance for your orders.
charles alexander
chax press
box 19178
minneapolis, mn 55419-0178
612-721-6063
chax@mtn.org
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 11:50:51 MDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Louis Cabri <ldmcabri@ACS.UCALGARY.CA>
Subject: my slack
In-Reply-To: <199607171553.LAA14843@chass.utoronto.ca>; from "Michael Boughn"
at Jul 17, 1996 11:53 am
1. 756 posts & finally here now to record that my fascination
remains, 2hrs later, with Ron Silliman's "modest proposal." It
really is a bit of subtle cunning, once its angles are displayed
in a sunny logic. I fully agree to implementat it - and
will volunteer to delete my own too-infrequent posts even before
they hit the screens: saving people the trouble. And will save my
finger - constantly worrying over the delete key - for pleasure-
seeking/-giving pursuits instead. Bliss!
2. Wal here's a mess, shows am not reading poetry
to feed a horse at the moment. The machines are hungrier right nu.
3. "Agency" seems to be where the friction lies
between sociological and speculative/formal approaches.... (But
when exactly was this concept rescucitated from the social
sciences? Pardon my ignorance, I don't know - was it Bourdieu
when he "did" Flaubert? ...Paul Smith
critiques postruc theories of the "subject" with it - in
Discerning the Subject 1988. It's there in a 1987 Barrett Watten
essay on Louis Zukofsky and Bruce Andrews, as Bourdieu's
"habitus." That essay is peculiar and telling of the problems
encountered when one tries to argue-for/examine formally
innovative poetry in terms of "agency." There's that longwinded
book by Charles Altieri, Subjective Agency, 1994, which doesn't
talk about poetry, but provides a sketch of various
positions on "agency," from constructionist to essentialist, in a
footnote. Steve Knapp, from an unabashedly liberal individualism,
negotiates agency through Wimsatt's concrete universal to come up
with the astonishing formula that "the self is a formalist," thus
literary interest provides best analogue of what it is like to be
an "agent in general" (Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-
Formalism) - yep. Maybe "agency" was under different guise - the
authorial persona, biographical studies - before.
4. Or as Steve McCaffery has informally said it, a fold of
identity onto ontology. As a formulation for "agency," this is
witnessed in the problems of representational politics in poetry,
which Harryette Mullen describes in the essay in new West Coast
Line mentioned previously. (Incidentally, there's a collaborative
interview with her that appears in next BOO Magazine, transcribed
from various responses she gave to questions after her talk and
reading here in Calgary. - Qs by Jeff Derksen, S McCaffery, Fred
Wah, Nicole Markotic, Cheryl Teelucksingh, the transcriber &
others.)
5. Some reading found here at the house I'm "sitting": Journal of
the Charles Olson Archive, including O's record of a 3-wk
swordfish-hunting trip in '36 (they found them in trees); plans
for a long poem then entitled "West," where he's explicit about
the "Western box" he was wanting out from - although the last &
first time I ever met R Creeley he denied Olson had ever used
that term; worthy notes by student worthies, including Clark
Coolidge and Pauline Butling, of O's Vancouver '63 seminars; O
notes for an incomplete essay on "totality" as the sort of
ultimate reach of an "individual" ("single intelligence") an
essay which helps in reading the recent O archive retrieval
"Culture and Revolution" in A flex of the M, #2.
6. Wlad Godzich's The Culture of Literacy. "[A]ny tendency to
abstract general statement is a greased slide" - E.P. But Godzich
has interesting things to say about the strange movements of
theory down the halls of social mirrors through these years.
He remarks there's no history yet done (or is there?)
on historical formation of the concept of agency.
7. Some of Lenin's pieces (e.g. in Pravda) for Jn-Sept 1917,
months during the crisis when the slogan "All power to the
soviets!" had to be rescinded due to increasing counter-
revolutionarism.
8. Chapter 4 in Thousand Plateaus on "order-words"
(slogans would be example: they cite Lenin's, above)
9. Agenda 4:2 1965 (London, ed. William Cookson), special for
Pound's boiday. Anecdote from John Wieners on Pound at Spoleto
poetry fest that year, together in company of Olson... "We saw
LeRoi Jones' Dutchman, and asking him after, what he thought of
the play, Pound said, 'Tremendous', to Charles going up the
stairs." Foto of that fest prolly the one of Pound that is in
Behind the State Capitol - beside the piece on Olson?
10. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Ernesto
Laclau. Intrinsic to social antagonism is a constitutive outside.
Take this list, for example, the Von Hall flare, or last summer,
the Alfred Corn. "Von Hall" as The Actuality. His symbolic
presence is enough for me. It bothers me to have the symbolic
action of this listserv used as if it were an actual boundary
(which is to say, as if the symbolic - boundary or no - were not
actual enough). To belabour a point others have already made, this
listserv's boundary is not really actual, in the sense that, if I
have the interest (poetic & financial) I can meet you whoever
"you" are tomorrow if we so choose (of course, we had to have met
Charles Bernstein somehow to begin with, etc etc).
-Louis
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 11:29:05 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: william marsh <wmarsh@NUNIC.NU.EDU>
Subject: Re: "Marsh"crash/sorries
Dear all -- especially all those burdened by the "error":
First, apologies. I was astonished to learn that the Eudora problems were
traceable back to little-ol me. I just recently bought a new system, and it
seems the people who installed my OS entered 2096 in the date column.
Being, as of 1996, something of a systems dummie, I didn't bother to check
it, didn't even think of it, I guess under the foolish assumption that
something as rudimentary as a date would be the least of my worries as I
learned to navigate this beast. Now I see the error of that assumption.
So, to any who lost time, sleep or (gosh) even money to this glich, I'm
truly sorry. And genuinely flabbergasted, I have to add, that the
repurcussions would stretch so far and wide. The date has of course been
changed, and I hope (but could never be certain) that the problem fixed.
All best,
Bill Marsh
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 12:41:33 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
>George, does that mean the birthday boy will be achieving eyebrows like
>Czeslaw Milosz's?
>
>Gwyn
I hope so. Pierre is pretty cute; but shaggy eyebrows would make his
irresistible.
I hope he doesnt develop that other thing that happens to men that are 50.
They often buy convertibles and sports cars. That would take away from the
eyebrows entirely.
..........................
"Lifting belly is so kind."
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 15:28:19 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: Vanguard
Thinking about the "Toward a multiplictiy of form" essay of Mark W in
Witz, and remembering a riotous panel at AWP in Pittsburgh on "what
constitutes the avant guarde," re-focussed my attention toward the
prevailing ignorance among many of the "avant-garde" practicioners and
followers regarding the issue of traditional forms. As any critique
has to include oneself, or ones lay of the land, I keep running into
this situation where someone asks "why did you place it in this form?"
and I find myself metrically decomposing --say-- Hopkins, receiving a
nod of understanding, then a subsequent accusation which parlays and
reifies the individuals ignorance of the sonnet(or in this case the
curtal). It's as if the revolution of Stevens (through most would call
it WCW's) has led to a generalist assumptive visual form, that is to
say one which is based on visual similarities sans awareness of the
metrical composite. I've expressed in earlier posts my concerns with
(and avoidance of) upholding the "I'm a card carrying member of the
avant-guarde" position, but what about the appropriation of the
avante-garde into the institutions they were in opposition with a mere
20 years ago (ie have the instituitions really changed enough to
warrant the absorption) or has the linguistic codifification of the
word avante-guarde turned into another marketing terminology through
repetitive use.
Be well
David Baratier
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 15:36:49 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
George, would owning a mansion detract from or enhance the eyebrow
effect?
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 15:58:19 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: MAXINE CHERNOFF <maxpaul@SFSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Bad news
In-Reply-To: <v02130500ae1185ffd63b@[192.0.2.1]>
Dear Herb, Dodie, etc.,
Itis obviously thecase that nowhere in the arts as they are now funded by
government grants is aesthetic difference, complexity, depth, what have
you, taken as a serious value. Having recently served on several such
panels, local and national, I was depressed but not surprised at how
grossly evaluations were made ("This magazine has 12 women and 7 men--
the editors must be very progressive!" etc.). When New American Writing
still lived in Chicago and used to apply for Illinois grants, people
would ask in panel review, "Why do they publish John Ashbery? Is he so
important?" (not to mention the rest of our contributors who were far
less recognizable.) Anyway, we decided to come out once yearly and to
never write grants again.
As for presses that survive, they seem to somehow gain institutional
credibility-- you mean you're not dead yet? Hey, let's give you a
grant. But getting to that point is extremely painful. When we were
still applying for grants, we were told to "build a board," etc. No one
seemed to care about our publicatiuon itself in the money world.
As for New Directions, it was Herman Hesse and Tennessee Williams that
finally stabilized them and allowed them to grow.
MaXINE cHERNOFF
On Tue, 16 Jul 1996, Herb Levy wrote:
> It is obviously very sad news that Coach House is going under, and I agree
> with much of what people have said (& no doubt will continue to say) about
> the problems of distribution, marketing, and selling new, experrimental
> poetry to an audience of people who aren't on this e-mail list; etc. But
> distribution for avant garde work has always sucked, finding that audience
> (one person at a time) has always been a pain in the ass, & grants have
> rarely, if ever, been enough to support a project of the scale of Coach
> House.
>
> Historically, how many small presses have lasted thirty years or more? How
> many small presses from the mid-Sixties are still going strong? (For that
> matter, how many adventurous, experimental, or whatever non-profit arts
> organizations in any field have lasted this long?)
>
> In the US, I can think of City Lights, New Directions & Black Sparrow
> (which may not be quite that old), but these seem to have survived because
> they have reprint rights for books used in college & university courses or
> some other works that have guaranteed sales (is Bukowski on the syllabus
> anywhere?). (& yes, I do know that New Directions started with a wad of
> family money, but the continued survival of ND as a business is at least as
> related to the number of copies of books by Pound, WCW, HD, Duncan, &
> others that are sold to students yearly.)
>
> I'm not trying to minimize the impact that the loss of Coach House will
> have: It is (& I'm consciously using the present tense here) clearly THE
> major press for new poetry in Canada, they have a great backlist, they know
> what work is important to publish and have been able to find ways to get it
> out there.
>
> Still, I'm not sure that the forces at work here are simply the current
> economic state of the Corporate/State. We're not talking best sellers
> here. Small presses, & arts organizations in general, which last more than
> thirty years have developed some kind of financial stability (whether it's
> market share, donor base, or stylish t-shirts & gimme caps) that has been,
> unfortunately, all too often unrelated to artistic merit.
>
>
>
> Herb Levy
> herb@eskimo.com
>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 17:00:24 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Carll <sjcarll@SLIP.NET>
Subject: Re: "Marsh"crash/sorries
Hey Bill:
My program handled your last message with no problem. I think we're in the
clear!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
sjcarll@slip.net
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym/
In seed-
sense
the sea stars you out, innermost, forever.
--Paul Celan
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 19:18:24 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Bad news and good
having served on the board of directors of a high-profile, "small" literary
press that went non-profit, i can attest to the seemingly endless time we spent
at meetings trying to think of rich influential people to be on the board
compared to the milli-seconds spent talking about books. (i stepped down from
the board cuz i ended up not really pulling my weight; i didn't know any rich
influential folks in the area).
good news:
michael bibby's book, Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Resistance, and Poetry in the
Viet Nam Era, is out from Rutgers UP, in their perspectives on the '60s series.
it's a good example of the poetry/cultural studies nexus i keep yammering about
on the list, esp the chapter on GI Resistance Poetry.
bests, maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 17:47:15 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Bad news
At 3:58 PM 7/17/96, MAXINE CHERNOFF wrote:
>Dear Herb, Dodie, etc.,
>
>Itis obviously thecase that nowhere in the arts as they are now funded by
>government grants is aesthetic difference, complexity, depth, what have
>you, taken as a serious value.
This is Dodie. I just returned from the first of a two day arts
administration seminar. Learned helpful tips like forming partnerships
with non-arts organizations, such as joining forces with a save-the-swans
group and putting on a production of Swan Lake and getting a corporate
sponsor--that way the corporate sponsor gets to fund an arts org and an
environmental org at the same time! Perhaps we could put on a Virgina
Woolf festival with a save-the-wolves organization?
Also, learned that corporate funding is more and more about point of
purchase advertising. A great example given was somebody put on some even
and got Pepsi to hang advertisements for their event on Pepsi bottles, and
for each six-pack of Pepsi purchased you get a dollar off admission to the
event!
Government grants were basically jumped over--just many suggestions to get
the bucks from other places.
Oh, oh =8A
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 17:52:46 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: press survival
At 5:14 PM 7/16/96, George Bowering wrote:
>I dont know who Rickie lake is.
Rickie (and I don't know if I'm spelling her name right) hosts one of those
low-rent rip-offs Oprah--you know, talks shows where people cry and yell at
one another about their perverse living situations/problems. Rickie was
discovered by John Waters, played Divine's daughter in one of his movies.
Waters hired her because she was a fat girl who could dance. But now that
she's a talk show queen she's svelt.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 17:54:17 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: press survival
Rickie (and I don't know if I'm spelling her name right) hosts one of those
low-rent rip-offs Oprah
That should be:
Rickie (and I don't know if I'm spelling her name right) hosts one of those
low-rent rip-offs OF Oprah
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 21:35:30 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: New Perelman, Loys, Jarnot etc @ Bridge Street
Here's another list of the latest.
1. _Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy_ by Carolyn Burke, FSG, $35. "Mina
was more absorbed in efforts to earn a living that spring than in her
friends' antics."
2. _Scatter Matrix_ by Abigail Child, Roof, $9.95.
"plecta pitchflower / coincide with pitched midi / an impulse / literally
naive"
3. _Powers & Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order_ by
Noam Chomsky, South End, $16. "The reason for this rather implausible
assumption is that we do not know that it is wrong."
4. _Merchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits from Poverty_ ed.
Michael Hudson, Common Courage, $14.95. "I couldn't see how anyone could
claim otherwise," he said repeatedly throughout his testimony.
5. _Some Other Kind of Mission_ by Lisa Jarnot, Burning Deck, $11. Lisa's
long-awaited excellent tome. Here comes the Brooklyn Renaissance.
6. _Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe_ by Tan Lin, Sun & Moon, $10.95. "This end dupes
/ this dead fun."
7. _The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems_ by Mina Loy, FSG, $22. "A vagabond in
delirium / aping the rise and fall // of ocean / of inhalation / of coition."
8. _Selected Declarations of Dependence_ by Harry Mathews, Sun & Moon,
$10.95. With terrific art by Alex Katz. "Every drug has its day"
9. _The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and
Literary History_ by Bob Perelman, Princeton, $15.95. "Making the sentence
the basic unit of composition separates the writer from three widely held
positions."
10. _Charles Ives: A Life with Music_ by Jan Swafford, Norton, $30. "To
assume that business is a material process, and only that, is to undervalue
the average mind and heart." --Ives, not Swafford
11. _Twentienth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology_ edited
by Stephen Tapscott, Texas, $24.95. Big 8 1/2 x 10" 400 page book. Variety of
translators, some I'd trust, some I certainly wouldn't, but the spanish is
there, so cool. "palabras que son flores que son frutos que son actos."
Poetics folks receive free shipping on orders of more than $20. Free shipping
+ 10% discount on orders of more than $30. There are two ways to order.
1. E-mail your order to aerialedge@aol.com with your address & we will bill
you with the books. or 2. via credit card-- you may call us at 202 965 5200
or e-mail aerialedge@aol.com w/ yr add, order, & card # & we will send a
receipt with the books. We have to charge some shipping on orders outside of
the US.
Bridge Street Books, 2814 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Wahsington, DC 20007.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 22:04:38 -0300
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gjoseph Farrah <gjfarrah@MAGELLAN.CLOUDNET.COM>
Subject: monthly posting
That the level reflects the night somewhat
has become a fact to build with
estimation of this content overthrown
with thunder of craftsmen started it
no longer willing to levitate with that pleasure
what becomes fixated with duration
or a simultaneous excavation of memory
wherein history as currency disappears into itself
and that is the problem again
moments churning above the apparent links
george f
(another vermin lurker)
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 21:48:47 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Bad news and good
>having served on the board of directors of a high-profile, "small" literary
>press that went non-profit, i can attest to the seemingly endless time we spent
>at meetings trying to think of rich influential people to be on the board
>compared to the milli-seconds spent talking about books. (i stepped down from
>the board cuz i ended up not really pulling my weight; i didn't know any rich
>influential folks in the area).
I think I know which press you're talking about, and it's actually one of
the largest "small" literary presses, or at least one of the largest
nonprofit literary presses, in the country -- and it says something that
even one like that can not attract such people on the board.
But I spent time with an organization which had certain people on the board
with considerable financial capability and influence. And while those people
tended to be fairly generous, they were not really willing to use their
influence actively and often, and in general to do the intense work
nonprofit fundraising requires. Even after I was sent to The Fundraising
School at their request, I returned to find them unwilling to put what I was
sent to learn into practice. I'd rather have a committed and active board,
willing to work hard for the organization, using whatever limited resources
& influence they may have.
And with regard to time spent talking about books or not talking about
books, I don't think it has to be that way, but it's a struggle to keep a
board educated and interested. And sometimes can be downright
confrontational. After one board retreat session about innovative writing, a
board member responded that ideas presented by Sheila Murphy were "a menace
to art." But I don't mind having those discussions. I do, however, believe
in a division of responsibilities between board and staff. It's the staff's
responsibility to develop vision, determine programs and carry them out. It
is the board's responsibility, though, to try and understand the vision and
why those programs exist -- and the staff's responsibility to make sure the
board does understand those things. But the vision itself is generally the
one of an executive director or artistic director (or whoever else they
choose to ask to become involved), and not that of the board, whose role is
concerned with hiring the executive (executive hires everyone else),
longterm policy, financial planning & stability (including lots of
fundraising to achieve it). In smaller organizations it's generally the
founder who becomes the executive director and invites/appoints a board of
directors, and from that point on the board works on such things as
financial stability and long-term policies. And it is true that such
organizations have a board which may feel they have less stake in what
happens, because they did not hire the person with the vision.
Still, I don't think all of this precludes art or even risk-taking art. But
it can significantly complicate the picture.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 22:47:31 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: monthly posting
g farrah writes:
> That the level reflects the night somewhat
>
> has become a fact to build with
>
> estimation of this content overthrown
>
> with thunder of craftsmen started it
>
>
>
> no longer willing to levitate with that pleasure
>
> what becomes fixated with duration
>
> or a simultaneous excavation of memory
>
> wherein history as currency disappears into itself
>
> and that is the problem again
>
> moments churning above the apparent links
>
>
>
> george f
> (another vermin lurker)
nice job, you verm you.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 01:54:30 -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: Re: eudora crash
No Eudora crash here either.
Did the possessors of the crash copies have the latest versions?
Did they contact the "publisher"?
Any details appreciated
since these are not just words
but writing.
---
At 10:45 AM 7/16/96 -0500, you wrote:
>I'm sorry for everyone's Eudora problems. And while glad to see my friend
>Bill Marsh's name here so much, I'm sorry it's in such a circumstance. I had
>a feeling the problem might be with someone's internet service provider.
>
>But I'm puzzled about presumably all the systems, including my own, which
>weren't affected at all. And mine is a PC, not a MAC, running Windows 3.11,
>Eudora, Netscape, etc.
>
>charles
>
>
>
>>(Still sending, not receiving)
>>
>>For those who need to know, and for Bill Marsh in especial:
>>
>>EUDORA crashed because the server sending Bill Marsh's message dates his
>message
>>--wait for it!!!--
>> 1969
>>instead of 1996.
>>This is known to Eudora (their technicians tell me) as a BAD DATE
>>for which you get the message "Application Error Integer Divide by Zero".
>>
>>So I set my system up again, having had my server delete Bill Marsh's
>>messages, got going nicely, and dammit there was another one! The bad date
>>does not affect Winsock (which I use to interface) but does affect Netscape
>>and Eudora, on a PC486 (memory is no problem that i can see on my machine)
>>-- it has no effect on a MAC. Once again I have lost half my mail
>>(downloaded and then scrambled / garbled by a second wrong date -- origin
>>unknown: you again, Bill?))
>>
>>In any case, I'm off-line till 1 August; I can however download (horribly,
>>and sort of) through Windows 3.1 Terminal (yuck) till I fix myself up again.
>>
>>Madre dios!
>>
>>Peter.
>> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>> Peter Quartermain
>> 128 East 23rd Avenue
>> Vancouver
>> B.C.
>> Canada V5V 1X2
>> Voice and fax: 604 876 8061
>>
>> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
>>
>>
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 23:10:26 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Carll <sjcarll@SLIP.NET>
Subject: Antenym 10 publication and celebration
Comments: To: Lppl@aol.com, Maz881@aol.com, daviesk@is4.nyu.edu,
Daniel_Bouchard@hmco.com, drothschild@penguin.com, jdavis@panix.com,
jms@tiac.net, maj6916@u.cc.utah.edu, AERIALEDGE@aol.com,
jarnot@pipeline.com, 6500dtpt@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu,
mmscott@gsbpop.uchicago.edu, eric_skiles@sedgus.com,
mbates@s3.sonnet.com, ovenman@slip.net, basex@slip.net,
basinski@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu, ninthlab@aol.com, israfel@uci.edu,
kristinb@wired.com, hgburrus@msn.com, chadwick@crl.com,
cah@sonic.net, adam_cornford@newcollege.edu,
davisles@ncgate.newcollege.edu, billder@fluxion.com,
cyanosis@slip.net, geconomou@aardvark.ucs.ucknor.edu,
jasfoley@aol.com, gfoust@osf1.gmu.edu, peter_gizzi@macmail.ucsc.edu,
golumbia@sas.upenn.edu, olmsted@crl.com,
cynthia.huntington@mac.dartmouth.edu, andrew_joron@sfbayguardian.com,
juxta43781@aol.com, zorlook@aol.com, tlovell@mercury.sfsu.edu,
dmelt@ccnet.com, murphym@earthlink.com, smithnash@aol.com,
semurphy@azlink.com, el500005@brownvm.brown.edu,
jnoble@ccvm.sunysb.edu, ortiz@uclink.berkeley.edu,
dapowell@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu, raphael@aracnet.com,
kit_robinson@peoplesoft.com, schutzl@ceb.ucop.edu, selby@slip.net,
75477.2255@compuserve.com, ashurin@mercury.sfsu.edu,
cstolle@indiana.edu, lisas@ncgate.newcollege.com,
102573.414@compuserve.com, tomt@ch1.ch.pdx.edu, jrlw@west.net,
veguardo@aol.com, tubesox@sirius.com, rmorey@baaqmd.gov,
vrgnamgnta@aol.com, sara_omeara@bridge.com,
wwilcox@smtpgmgw.ossa.hq.nasa.gov, wr-eye-tings@sfu.ca
(Apologies for any cross-posting; I can't remember who's signed up on what)
Announcing the appearance (and accompanying celebration) of
_Antenym_ 10:
THE CELEBRATION
takes place on Sunday August 4th at 3:00 p.m. at Canessa Park Gallery (708
Montgomery St. @ Columbus) in San Francisco and will feature Edmund
Berrigan, Chris Daniels, Karen Garman, Elizabeth Robinson (all confirmed)
and possibly Jonathan Hayes and Tina Rotenberg as well (not yet confirmed).
Admission is a mere $5.00.
THE MAGAZINE
features work from the above PLUS:
Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro, Jacques Debrot, Amy Garrett, Bob Heman,
John Lowther, William Marsh, Fred Muratori, Joseph Noble, John Olson, Dan
Raphael, Jesse Taylor-York, Tod Thilleman and Mark Wallace, all lovingly
crafted for your eyes by Kristin Burkart. It's available for $2 if you come
to the celebration; otherwise it's $3 plus $1.50 postage. 1-year
subscriptions available for $13.50, payable to Steve Carll (he's the editor)
at 106 Fair Oaks St. #3, S.F., CA 94110-2951. For more info call (415)
824-5883, or e-mail me: <sjcarll@slip.net>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
sjcarll@slip.net
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym/
In seed-
sense
the sea stars you out, innermost, forever.
--Paul Celan
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 23:18:35 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Steve Carll <sjcarll@SLIP.NET>
Subject: Re: eudora crash
At 01:54 AM 7/18/96 -0400, you wrote:
>No Eudora crash here either.
>Did the possessors of the crash copies have the latest versions?
>Did they contact the "publisher"?
I have the 16-bit version of 2.2, the latest as far as I know. Mine's
freeware, so I don't have access to technical support. But it is curious.
You'd think whoever programmed the thing would've anticipated and thought of
a way to handle something like a bad date. Bad dates are supposed to give
you gas, not program crashes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
sjcarll@slip.net
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym/
In seed-
sense
the sea stars you out, innermost, forever.
--Paul Celan
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 10:24:05 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "GRAHAM W. FOUST" <gfoust@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Proles vs. the Pulitzer
In-Reply-To: <199607180405.AAA19061@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Reprinted (sans permission, but hey, it's the people's paper) from
the People's Weekly World, the official newsweekly of the Communist Party
USA.
INCOHERENT "POETIC" BABBLE GETS THE PULITZER
The recent Pulitzer Prize award for poetry went to Jori [sic] Graham
who teaches poetry at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of
Iowa in Iowa City.
After reading about the award and reading one of her "poems" within
the story in the _Des Moines Register_, I was curious enough to get
two of her books from the library. My suspicions were right. Her
"poetry" consists of long streams of incoherent babbling. I find it
hard to believe that any publisher would accept her work. It is
especially hard to believe that she merits a Pulitzer Prize.
Today while thinking of the above subject, I wrote the enclosed
off-the-cuff "Contro-Verse" to add to my new collection called
_The Pink Pitchfork (verses for the peasantry)_. The subject of elitist
awards deserves some sort of mention in PWW.
Pulitzer Prize "Poetry"
Did you ever try to read it?
Try to read heavy disjointed muck?
Try to savor the elitist rambling?
Well, I assure you, you'll get stuck.
Jori Graham wrote the last one.
Her flow of words wear on and on.
Long strings of words bump meaning out,
like when a poor thing's sanity is gone.
Take a peek at Jori's twisted "verses".
But, I warn you: do it quick.
Cuz if you linger too long,
The glop might make you sick.
--Charlotte Walker, PWW, 7/13/96
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 10:23:01 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert A Harrison <Robert.A.Harrison@JCI.COM>
Subject: Re(2): eudora crash
there's such a thing as the year 2000 problem, caused by bad date management.
its been a hot topic in the programming community, and now here it is on
poetics.
attached are some descriptions of the problem, etc.
bob harrison
~~~
from http://www.cai.com/products/ca2000/disc2000.htm#challenge
The Challenge Of The New Millennium
January 1, 2000. The dawn of the new millennium strikes fear in the hearts of
Information Systems professionals. And for good reason. If no action is taken,
the crippling effect of disabled enterprise systems will be devastating. As
this
inescapable deadline approaches, some crucial questions must be addressed. Are
all your systems ready for the Year 2000? Will your applications continue to
process date information accurately? Or will they collapse on or before
January 1, 2000?
Information Systems professionals who have yet to address this issue will find
that time is quickly running out. Consider the fact that every line of code
must be scrutinized to ensure Year 2000 compliance. For many enterprises,
that's 50 to 100 million lines of code to be inspected at an estimated cost of
$0.50 to $1.00 per line--a substantial expense not accounted for in most
enterprise budgets. Consider too, that a Year 2000 initiative typically
requires many person-years to complete. For example, a company with 20 million
lines of code or 5,000 to 10,000 programs that require modification would face
costs of $10 to $20 million for a manual conversion process and 24
person-years to complete. This is just to keep the existing systems in
production and includes no provision for new enhancements or new technology of
any sort. The time, cost and effort involved in a Year 2000 initiative is
further exacerbated by a lack of adequate documentation for the complex
program logic of existing systems, the absence of the original programmers,
and the challenges inherent in managing a project of this scope and magnitude.
As time runs out, the millennium date change will likely become your primary
IS concern. After all, it has the potential of derailing all your other IS
initiatives and significantly impacting the competitiveness of your
enterprise. What can you do to
ensure that your Year 2000 initiative is thorough, cost-effective and
efficient?
and from http://www.bozemanlegg.com/year2000.html
To put it simply, the Year 2000 Problem stems from the fact that most software
programs were written using the date format: MM/DD/YY. As you can see, there
is
no way the computer can distinguish between the 20th and the 21st centuries.
This
is a major problem for the thousands of companies that rely on computers for
their everyday business.
It was estimated that 20 percent of business applications would fail because
of
invalid date computations in 1995, according to the Gartner Group. Without
corrective measures, this number is estimated to increase to more than 90
percent
by 1999, potentially resulting in interruptions of service due to errors in
mission-critical systems. Application failure includes programs ending
abnormally,
or worse, returning incorrect results to the trusting user.
Who will be affected?
Just about every business that uses computers, especially those in data and
date
intensive industries, such as finance, insurance, and retailing.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 11:03:06 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Golumbia <dgolumbi@SAS.UPENN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Proles vs. the Pulitzer
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960718100605.28447A-100000@osf1.gmu.edu> from
"GRAHAM W. FOUST" at Jul 18, 96 10:24:05 am
Dear Frenz,
Found this on other list and stole it to repeat since it's relevance to
list overwhelping, obvious:
I AM INCOHERENT AND WIN PULITZER
Dear Sir or Madam,
The recent Pulitzer Prize award for poetry went to me.
I write incoherently and lack ability to understand.
Dateline.
After re-reading the award and reading one of my "poems" within
my book called _Des Moines Register_, I was curious.
Suspicious. Historically, "poetry" consists of long streams of
incoherent babbling. I find it a publisher. I accept my work. It is
especially hard to believe that I have won a Pulitzer Prize.
Today while writing the off-the-cuff "Contro-Verse" to add
to my Pulitzer Prize, the subject of my elitist understanding
of my own work and life occurred to me, and I realize now desrves
mention in Weekly World News.
Here is the poem of mine which won the Pulitzer Prize:
HOW TO WIN PULITZER PRIZE BY DRAWING
HUCK, OUR FRIENDLY RABBIT
by WEEKLY WORLD NEWS COLUMNIST
Try to read heavy disjointed muck --
Charlotte Walker, WWW, 7/13/96
Did you ever try to read it?
Did you ever try to read it?
Well, I assure you, you'll get the Pulitzer
Prize. I wrote it and I did.
Now I savor the elitist rambling.
My flow is words, wearing on and on.
Jori Graham wrote the last one.
Whos next, Galway Kinnell?
Whos next, William Stafford?
Whos next, Richard James?
Whos next, X. J. Kennedy?
Im like a poor thing. My sanity is gone.
Long strings of words bump meaning out.
This is result of winning Pulitzer Prize
For writing incoherent verse like mine.
I do it quick.
I rip off Jori Grahams versus
I rip off Johnny Rotten -- yeah, great.
I cut off my finger.
I win Pulitzer Prize.
Thank you very much.
--
dgolumbi@sas.upenn.edu
David Golumbia
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 11:35:00 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Brigham Taylor <BTaylor@BROOKLYN.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: Poetry Funding
This is in response to Dodie's account of an arts grants board's attitudes
toward literature in general and poetry in particular. Why is it that people
who can be very sophisticated regarding innovations in visual art, music,
etc. are so reactionary when it comes to poetry? I wonder if it's that
unless people have a specific interest in poetry, its marginal status in the
world of the arts leads many perhaps well intentioned people to regard it as
a means to an end. They consider its value to be in the "exthpression of
perthonal feelingth" and therefore its function becomes principally
theraputic (we can thank Mrs. Sexton's shrink for this). Therefore an
individual can "let out emotionth" and become happy and balanced. Or on a
collective level, it becomes a means of "sharing your feelingth," a means of
achieving multicultural understanding. Of course the unspoken and unexamined
assumption behind such a position is that poetry is not valuable as living
art forms, that the great poems have already been written, and there is no
reason to take it seriously. But even if we acknowledge the validity of
everyone's experience of the world, it does not follow that all formal
expressions of this experience are of equal value. No matter how worthy the
political, theraputic or educational goal might be, to regard the chief
function of any art form as a means of achieving that goal serves only to
devalue and and limit the potential of that art form.
A mini manifesto for my first post.... lurker no more!
Brigham Taylor
btaylor@brooklyn.cuny.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 11:45:57 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Jewish women artists
Please spread the word about this.
Thanks,
charles
>Return-Path: owner-book_arts-l@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
>Date: Wed, 17 Jul 1996 23:47:35 -0700
>Reply-To: "The Book Arts: binding, typography, collecting"
> <BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
>Sender: "The Book Arts: binding, typography, collecting"
> <BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
>From: "Judith A. Hoffberg" <umbrella@IX.NETCOM.COM>
>Subject: Jewish women artists
>To: Multiple recipients of list BOOK_ARTS-L
> <BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
>X-UIDL: 7f500e393d7deab9797846b8e44dc5c9
>
>To women book artists:
>
>I am making a proposal for a museum exhibition of Jewish Women Artists who
>make books. I am seeking them in North America and in the rest of the
>world. If you are, or know a Jewish woman artist who is making artist books
>or who has made artist books in the past or who might even attempt to make a
>special book for the exhibition, please have them contact me. I want to see
>who will respond to this call. I would not mind if anyone posted this on
>another Listserv, since I am in the process of leaving for New York City for
>a week. So--spread the word and let me see if there are identifiable
>artists in this category--enough beyond my own list to create a fascinating
>show called Women of the Book.
>
>Judith
>Judith A. Hoffberg
>Umbrella/Umbrella Editions
>P.O. Box 3640
>Santa Monica, CA 90408
>(310)399-1146/fax:399-5070
>umbrella@ix.netcom.com
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 13:53:54 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ken Norris <Ken_Norris@VOYAGER.UMERES.MAINE.EDU>
Organization: University of Maine
Subject: Somewhere Across the Border #3
The third issue of SOMEWHERE ACROSS THE BORDER, a Canadian Interactive
Poetry Magazine, is currently available for viewing at
www.letelier.com/sab/sab.html
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 07:39:42 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: Carla Harryman and Barrett Watten
"North American Language Writing Artists". Haven't seen that one before, but quite
like that as a Brit way of advertising C.H. & B.W. best
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 07:59:17 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: poetry performance
Chris Whipple, please re-read what i wrote. It's not saying what you think
it is saying. Nothing to do with emoting. best
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 17:06:40 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bill Luoma <Maz881@AOL.COM>
Subject: growlie
We're getting more than one and a half times
the science we originally anticipated.
We're getting more science each orbit
and are able to accept larger programs.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 14:38:37 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
> George, would owning a mansion detract from or enhance the eyebrow
> effect?
It would depend on whether the mansion has eyebrow windows, my wife's
favourite kind of windows.
Come to think of it, Pierre is one of my wife's favourite men.
Hmmm.
..........................
"Lifting belly is so kind."
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 14:38:45 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: press survival
Dodie,
Thanks for the information on Rickie Lake. No relation to Veronica Lake, I
guess. Sigh. Veronica Lake. It was she who first made me think of the
possibility of manipulating parts of my own body so that I might somehow
respond to the inchoate thrill Ms Lake's visage seemed to emanate, if that
is possible. I take it that R. Lake does not have that effect, except maybe
on strange people such as, maybe, David Bromige. That's just a speculation,
mind you. I have never discussed TV with David. But we did have martinis at
a soccer game together last sunday.
I am so damned ignorant about some parts of popular culture, and
knowledgeable about others. 5 years ago I knew all about Marvel Comics and
the World Wrestling federation, but I didnt recognize the name of the
fashion guru-ess people were mentioninbg on this list last year, the one
who apparently teaches people to make cocktail dresses out of old popsicle
sticks.
I do know who Divine was, though.
..........................
"Lifting belly is so kind."
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 14:38:48 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Bad news
> Perhaps we could put on a Virgina
>Woolf festival with a save-the-wolves organization?
>Dodie.
How about a Virginia Woolf festival with a save-the-river organization?
..........................
"Lifting belly is so kind."
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 17:51:37 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gwyn McVay <gmcvay1@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
In-Reply-To: <v01530505ae145c2fb2a6@[142.58.125.7]>
George,
OK, I'll bite: what is an eyebrow window?
Keep dem European smoothies away from da wife.
Gwyn
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 18:08:08 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
this problem about poetry being regarded as "principally therapeutic"
(from Brigham Taylor's message) is at the heart of the victim art
controversy i mentioned on earlier posting.
on the one hand, writing, especially poetry, is for many fueled by
internal emotional jihads and hurricanes. also writing has a long
history as force for social change, especially when an issue is
placed within a personal narrative. on the other hand, emotional
flux does not, as such, automatically make a writer, either in that
one having it will be a writer or that one writing must have it.
ditto issues needing social change.
perhaps dodie's gulf war fellow might be considered an example of the
latter -- fellow feeling in need of a cause to be credible.
what is the place of a writer with a personal issue/cause for social
change? my personal feeling is that one needs to be very, very wary
of falling into the trap of letting one's victimhood, neediness,
social credentials be used, or considered to, or overwhelm the art.
re: b. taylor's message, though we swipe at what sexton's work is
sometimes used to justify, and though new unsavory biographical
tidbits continue to come out almost hourly, her work still stands on
its own incredible power and brilliance. consider a more extreme case
-- lillian hellman. here we have someone whose "autobiographical"
work is coming into increasing question even as her biographical
details emerge as increasingly despicable. the autobiographical
works, seen as complete fiction, are fascinating, books about how we'd
LIKE to think art and writing and writers are... but CAN they be seen
as complete fiction? can we ever divorce the text from its supposed
biographical context? think of cellini... [probably even better
example of this but he comes to mind right now].
e
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 10:28:36 +1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Daniel Salmon <dpsalmon@IHUG.CO.NZ>
Subject: Re: eudora crash
Mine was running eudora 154, but is a fairly small 486, which could
contribute to the problem i guess, the strange thing is that when both i and
my provider (at different times) tried to look at it through netscape 2 it
came up with the same error, it was only when i looked at it in the old
netscape with its less complex mail prog. that i could get in and delete the
corrupt message.
Dan
At 01:54 AM 7/18/96 -0400, you wrote:
>No Eudora crash here either.
>Did the possessors of the crash copies have the latest versions?
>Did they contact the "publisher"?
>Any details appreciated
>since these are not just words
>but writing.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 19:17:29 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Tristan D. Saldana" <hbeng175@DEWEY.CSUN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Proles vs. the Pulitzer
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960718100605.28447A-100000@osf1.gmu.edu>
On Thu, 18 Jul 1996, GRAHAM W. FOUST wrote:
> INCOHERENT "POETIC" BABBLE GETS THE PULITZER
>
> After reading about the award and reading one of her "poems" within
> the story in the _Des Moines Register_, I was curious enough to get
> two of her books from the library. My suspicions were right. Her
> "poetry" consists of long streams of incoherent babbling. I find it
> hard to believe that any publisher would accept her work. It is
> especially hard to believe that she merits a Pulitzer Prize.
I don't know . . . I mean it's sometimes problematic to tell a language
poet from a coxcomb . . . where a language poet departs and where an
imposter may slip in. Their may have been imposters who have "hitched a
ride" under this aesthetic category of putting language first as the
primary world of experience, or at least it would be convenient to do so.
However, (at least from having read _Materialism_ and _The Dream of a
Unified Field_) I find her stuff wonderfully -linguistically -
conspicuous. I wouldn't call it "long streams of incoherent babbling" in
any event. Inarticulate (more reticulated), non-linear, and spatial . . .
by all means. Whether Graham deserved the Pultizer is another thing. I
am not sure about her "liberal" appropriation of other texts. She pushes
Eliot's belief of what mature and amateur/immature poets do.
What does anyone else think?
Tristan
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 23:41:48 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Thomas Bell <trbell@USE.USIT.NET>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
In-Reply-To: <199607182208.SAA03622@toast.ai.mit.edu>
On Thu, 18 Jul 1996, Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest wrote:
> this problem about poetry being regarded as "principally therapeutic"
> (from Brigham Taylor's message) is at the heart of the victim art
> controversy i mentioned on earlier posting.
> flux does not, as such, automatically make a writer, either in that
> one having it will be a writer or that one writing must have it.
As a professional therapist I find the connection of therapy and
victim art problematic and close to offensive. The nconnection might be
out there somewhere in the popular imagination, but effective therapy has
never had any connection to personal revalation. It is an art (or science)
just as poetry is art or criticism(?).
some days tom, other days Thomas Bell, Psy.D.
late night steam dissapating.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 02:07:47 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
"connection of therapy and victim art problematic and close to offensive" --
huh? connection is as follows:
person told as part of therapy, produce art centered on your problems.
or patient reads how sexton's art was therapeutic for her and decides
producing art about problems will be therapeutic for them.
--> they produce art about traumas
---> this art makes people think they have to describe it about art because
whoops, as great art because person putting it out in public as art
wants to believe themself a great artist. if they aren't told it is
great art, their feelings will be hurt.
---> as editors/evaluators/grantees, we begin giving/granting/evaluating
well "victims," people whose art is about their victim hood because
we feel bad for them, we want to go on record as thinking the source
of their trauma is bad, we are so empathetic to the trauma we want to
respond based on how bad trauma was and how sorry we feel for them,
etc ALL NOT having to do with the art as art, all at the expense
of non-victim artists. leading the mid-ground to search for trauma
of the day because that makes them a victim which will make their art
worthwhile as other victim's art is because they are victims. and
i KNOW these exist because i see/receive/struggle with/see in other
people's evaluative/grant/editing process same struggle arriving at
different places. this is what croce's article was about, how as
critic she is meant to evaluate art by victim as art when all around
her she is feeling/perceiving pressure to evaluate it as suffering
by victim.
-------------------
reverse of this connection, which i've also seen:
artist feels something is off in her/his work, it is not 'deep' or
'meaningful' enough. there is not enough of the stuff of real important
human lives.... yes, you hear it coming, not enough suffering, not enough
of the trauma that other important people write about -- no drugs, no alcohol,
so...
---> artist decides in order to make their art more relevant they have to
experience life, suffer, so
--> they start shooting up, having sex with most of the east village,
going out drinking and...
== they end up junkies (a very close relative of mine has)
== they get aids (i'm afraid to count any more -- there have been too many)
== they black out alot of their life in drinking and
== get killed in auto accident (couple i know, and several i've heard of)
== lose major parts of their life, family's life, sanity to drink
== don't stop drinking
and all of these don't do much for their art. i've seen alot of terrible
artists who did one of above to get sense of being more "in" to the marrow
of creation and now they are terrible artists who drink alot/shoot up/have
aids and write about it. lost people. had people die.
all of this IS real life true, not just "popular" myth. i don't know what
you meant, or thought you meant that was offensive. this is what i meant
and i don't think it is offensive, i think it is scary and sad.
i also meant, on another plane, that when you've gone through something
tough, there is, of course, the fact that for a lot of us, it comes out
in the writing. and it is very hard to know if the writing is just trauma
working its way out and not really very good art, and the "buzz" of energy
we get from looking at that work of our own is from having conquered the
trauma enough to write about it. and of course people evaluating/editing/
grantmaking, are brought by first set of responses into seeing it through
the filter of you the poor victim.... artist. and you could mistake the
sympathy, carefulness, kindness, as awe, as reward, as whatever it is that
good work touches off. we WANT good work so much we do mistake it. keep
telling ourself the work MUST be great or people wouldn't like it so much.
i am having alot of trouble seperating out and getting others reading to
separate out, sympathy/victim response from critical response. i'm not
sure when i get praise for art as such or when someone feels sorry for me.
i'm not sure when my "buzz" is because it is good or because i've written
myself out of it. again, real life, lived, mine, not "popular" misperception.
again, don't know what you thought you saw, but don't see that that struggle
is offensive. damn well OUGHT to struggle that way says i -- got to keep
ourselves honest, our work honest. i don't want to end up 50, a terrible
writer, whinging at readings and forcing scraps of awfulness on bored,
embarrassed outsiders so i can get off on their scraps of uncomfortable
sympathy. and i've seen those too, gotten their scraps of paper pressed
on me and had to come up with what i want to make the most helpful, not
the most easy, response.
e
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 09:29:27 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
eliza--
i'm interested, & potentially troubled, by yr contentions re:
"victim art", but i'd like to understand better what you are
trying to say. praps some of my confusion has to do w/ the
generality of yr remarks? could you give concrete examples
(beyond sexton) of the problems you see? wd be easier fr me
to evaluate yr arguement in ref. to specific works, rather than
broad generalizations ov "how victim/art functions"...
i'm thinking, frinstance, about various poetries by Nam vets,
bill shields & elliot richmond, or various ov the Viet Nam
Generation publications (mostly prose)... & since i think yr
talking more about "our" critical reception of the work, i
might suggest that for some folks, a cathartic working-out
of what that (now mythic) figure in our social history is
useful work, and such writing might be useful Culture...
owens etal might have provided such after WW1... but you
seem to be positing a single use-value--Art--that all writing
shd be evaluated by?
i'm looking, to, at a recent collection edited by Cynthia Edelberg
called _Scars: American Poetry in the Face of Violence_... i'm
having all kinds of questions abt the book, which contains work
from a range of authors (frm Rachel Blau Duplessis, Rosemarie
Waldrop & Robert Creeley to Amy Clampitt & Joyce Carol Oates)
addressing violence by catagory--domestic, race, war... one
of the selection criteria (which i'm guessing you wd agree with?),
seems to be that the writers generally present a voice of
"objectivity", rather than firstperson & "emotional"... i mself
am not convinced that there is such a thing as objectivity beyond
a basically rhetorical gesture, and if there were such a thing i'm
not sure i'd value it very highly... but are you suggesting that
"victim art", in the pejoritive, is work that lacks enuf objectivity,
or emotional distance, to be credible? or something else?
i'm also wondering about "victim art", which implies i guess a
connotation of autobiography, and other topical work that
addresses emotionally charged subjects... certainly problematic if
there wd be a different critical response to a text based on the
"authenticity" of the writer's experience--is that part of what you're
critical of...
ultimatly, i'm very interested in the place of poetry _in_ the society,
as living culture, and some of yr concerns seem to be about just that--
i'd like to know more about what you think, particualarly about specific
texts or writers...
asever
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 11:29:40 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bill Luoma <Maz881@AOL.COM>
Subject: Bromige & nonose
George,
have you read Bromige's work in Kevin & Dodie's mirage mag? is that new
work? it's much fun. i hope it's part of a book about to come out.
i even laughed at the language-referential bits which usually make me cringe
when i see or hear them around.
yes, he upset my nono, which is using troped-out words like this or sign or
word or major signifiers like history or thinking or poem etc. but somehow
he managed to pull it off. does anyone have an example they'd like to share
about getting your nonose upset in a good way?
for example, maybe Jeff Derksen has been struck by a two word title that he
liked?
Bill Luoma
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 11:28:24 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bill Luoma <Maz881@AOL.COM>
Subject: Anne Sexton's shrink
Brigham,
why do you want to dis anne sexton? she wrote a good poem about the van
allen belt. (Don Allen's anthos). which is just another belt like the salem
pack
that sits
on her file cabinet
parallel to her wrist
watch as she buttons
and unbuttons
her die
I mean Jed Rasula told me some things I didn't want to know.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 09:59:43 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: clear-cut
I doubt that Nico Vassilakis (one of the few local lurkers on this list who
hasn't come out during the recent spate of, uh, odd de-lurkings from the
Northwest) will get around to noting this before leaving for an extended
road trip (watch for readings by him, Noemie, & Quixote somewhere near you
shortly), so I'll briefly announce a new publication/Web site that debuted
at last night's Subtext reading.
Clear-cut is an extremely ecumenical anthology of writing by more than
thirty Seattle writers, including some people some of you know: Antero
Alli, Laynie Brown, Maxfield Pol Chandler, Steve Creson, Jerome Gold, Jeane
Heuving, Paul Hunter, Jay Jaworski, Joseph Keppler, Marion Kimes, Charlotte
London, Michael Magoolaghan, Tom Malone, Bryant Mason, Noemie Maxwell,
Heather McHugh, S P Miskowski, Robert Mittenthal, Doug Nufer, Mickey
O'Connor, John Olson, Roberta Olson, Belle Randall, Robbo, Steve Shaviro,
Willie Smith, Curtis Taylor, Craig Van Riper, Nico Vassilakis, Don Wilsun,
J Yarrow.
There's a clear-cut Web site just down the road from the Subtext site:
<http://www.speakeasy.org/clear-cut/>
You'll find information there about ordering a print copy of the book. The
texts should be available online there, sometime real soon now, but they
aren't there now.
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 12:12:45 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
Comments: To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
At 9:29 AM 7/19/96, Robert Drake wrote:
>i'm thinking, frinstance, about various poetries by Nam vets,
>bill shields & elliot richmond, or various ov the Viet Nam
>Generation publications (mostly prose)... & since i think yr
>talking more about "our" critical reception of the work, i
>might suggest that for some folks, a cathartic working-out
>of what that (now mythic) figure in our social history is
>useful work, and such writing might be useful Culture...
>owens etal might have provided such after WW1... but you
>seem to be positing a single use-value--Art--that all writing
>shd be evaluated by?
Luigi,
I couldn't agree with you more. I think that the relationship between art
and content is random to say the least--in other words I think that dreck
can be produced no matter the content and that great writing can be
produced out of just about anything. This is also harmonizing with Bill
Luoma's nonose comment. I'm speaking here more from a prose
perspective--in poetry I think the whole issue of content becomes more
problematic/complex. But look at the history of Great Works of
Fiction--it's loaded with suffering and victims--but goes beyond that
self-indulgence somehow. Much of my writing project is to take
dis-enfranchized female experience and hurl it into the avant-garde.
Recently I was delighted by _The House of Mirth_ because in many ways the
content of it doesn't differ that much from the content of _Cosmo_, the
most petty and superficial of female obsessions and occupations, and how
Wharton writes through that to show its absolute poignancy and oppression
and tragedy. I think that one can write out of a position of victimhood
and make it work. In my Mina Harker project I made Mina a sort of half
goddess, half woman--that way I had the pleasure of letting Mina wallow in
her sense of victimhood, to be a Garbo, a Bette Davis of victimhood--but I
never try to pull a fast one over on the audience and hide that Mina is
wallowing. It's nearly impossible to be a woman writing and to not be
writing out of some position of abuse--some of us are abused more than
others, to be sure, but all women are abused in this culture. This is just
an example, plenty of men are also abused. To propose that writing about
abuse is valuable as art, merely because it is about abuse is absurd--not
that there isn't some value in writing workshops whose sole purpose is for
people to write about their abuse. But, I don't see why this has to be
rationalized as art.
The whole issue of victim art often comes up in my life in terms of writing
about AIDS--all the crappy writing that comes out of AIDS, and how to deal
with that. Once a friend who was teaching a course on writing and AIDS
called up Kevin and asked him, rather desperately, for suggestions of good
writing about AIDS that he could teach--because he was having a hard time
pulling together a list. It was after that that Kevin himself began
writing about AIDS, out of a sense, I believe, that skilled writers have a
responsibility to confront this epidemic. The other obvious example of
someone making art (art really is a dreadful word) out of this
incomprehensible tragedy is Aaron Shurin. Neither Kevin nor Aaron are
avoiding the devastating emotional impact in all this by falling into some
safe stance of objectivity.
I think I'm rambling here. But I guess what I'm saying is that I don't
believe that there are these priviledged subjects that should therefore
blind us to the fact that what the person is producing is bad writing.
That's not doing anybody any favors. Difficult, painful material deserves
the same cut-throat technical proficiency as anything else.
As far as Sexton goes, though she has her moments, I think much of her
stuff *is* dreck. But then you have her unfortunate twin Plath, who is, in
my opinion, a brilliant writer. Content isn't what makes the difference
here.
Dodie Bellamy
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 12:25:15 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Another "Yasusada" Sighting
While out doing errands this morning, I looked through the newest American
Poetry Review & was amazed to see four pages devoted to the legendarily
non-existent Araki Yasusada.
But wait, there's more: a limited edition selection of verse is
forthcoming from Northern House in the UK, as well as a larger manuscript
being readied for publication.
Do any of the list readers from Britain know the Northern House people?
They should probably be told of the spurious nature of the work they're
planning to publish.
How much further can this hoax go? Will work by "Yasusada" end up in a
Norton anthology before the end of the century?
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 12:53:07 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
Comments: To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
This is Dodie again.
R. Drake's mentioning of Viet Nam made me think of one more thing. Several
years ago I read an oral history of Viet Nam. It was an amazing book, some
cheap paperback that I may or may not still own. One chapter in particular
that still haunts me was by this American soldier who had spent something
like six years locked in a tiny bamboo cage, I can't remember the
dimensions, but he couldn't stand up in it. In straightforward, clean
prose he proceeded to explain in detail what he did to keep from going
insane, memory games, mathematics, etc. It was horrifying and awesome. I
think this *is* an important cultural document. Thank god nobody talked
him into writing some sappy poem about the scariness of some metaphorical
cage.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 17:12:18 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Another "Yasusada" Sighting
i know i'm being a dummy here, but what is the yasusada legend? i've never
heard of araki yasusada...
e
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 16:52:00 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" <pritchpa@SILVERPLUME.IIX.COM>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feeling
Comments: To: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
The book you're referring to, Dodie, is "Nam," compiled by Mark Baker (or
possibly Barker). I've been haunted for years by that particular chapter. As
I recall (it's been over ten years since I read it), the POW in question
would spend each day building his dream house. In his imagination, he pored
over every aspect of construction with the same kind of deliberation as the
actual building would have required. In this way, it took him years to
finish "the project." It sounds like something straight out of Borges and is
a real testament to poesis in its most elemental form.
Best,
Patrick Pritchett
----------
From: Kevin Killian
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
Date: Friday, July 19, 1996 4:26PM
<<File Attachment: HEADERS.TXT>>
This is Dodie again.
R. Drake's mentioning of Viet Nam made me think of one more thing. Several
years ago I read an oral history of Viet Nam. It was an amazing book, some
cheap paperback that I may or may not still own. One chapter in particular
that still haunts me was by this American soldier who had spent something
like six years locked in a tiny bamboo cage, I can't remember the
dimensions, but he couldn't stand up in it. In straightforward, clean
prose he proceeded to explain in detail what he did to keep from going
insane, memory games, mathematics, etc. It was horrifying and awesome. I
think this *is* an important cultural document. Thank god nobody talked
him into writing some sappy poem about the scariness of some metaphorical
cage.
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 14:59:54 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Pierre@50
>George,
>
>OK, I'll bite: what is an eyebrow window?
Oh, how can I tell you without drawing it. Well, it is a kind of gable
window in that it juts out from the roof. But instead of having an inverted
V shape it has its little personal roof in the shape of an eyebrow.
..........................
"An occasional crow makes poetry more interesting but not prophetic."
--Carl Rakosi
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 15:10:36 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Bromige & nonose
>George,
>
>have you read Bromige's work in Kevin & Dodie's mirage mag? is that new
>work? it's much fun. i hope it's part of a book about to come out.
I havent been fortunate enough to see it, and though Brom and I see each
other often, I havent talked about his new poems with him lately. Mainly we
talk about our recently-finished co-authored novel, for which we have no
publisher. But i can say that ever since I first knew him, circa 1959, he
has had a deft comic, satirical touch that does not dump him into the
canister labeled satiric poet. I think he can do it to almost anyone.
..........................
"An occasional crow makes poetry more interesting but not prophetic."
--Carl Rakosi
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 15:20:07 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: MAXINE CHERNOFF <maxpaul@SFSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
In-Reply-To: <v01520d00ae1525972a2f@[205.134.228.78]>
Dodie's right about sappy poems on important subjects and the suitability
of other media with the same subject matter. No one, of course, should
censor anyone else or his/her subject matter, but what grates is that
crass marketers of writing often dwell on subject matter. I was recently
at a gathering where a local poet told another what she was reading in
just that way: a great book of poetry on incest, another on the war, etc.
Try to tell someone that you write about flux or the perilous language of
human communication and you're in trouble. What's your
subject--language-- might go over here but try it on the general public
or on a polite gathering of "writers" and you're in big trouble. Wish it
weren't so but it is.
Maxine Chernoff
On Fri, 19 Jul 1996, Kevin Killian wrote:
> This is Dodie again.
>
> R. Drake's mentioning of Viet Nam made me think of one more thing. Several
> years ago I read an oral history of Viet Nam. It was an amazing book, some
> cheap paperback that I may or may not still own. One chapter in particular
> that still haunts me was by this American soldier who had spent something
> like six years locked in a tiny bamboo cage, I can't remember the
> dimensions, but he couldn't stand up in it. In straightforward, clean
> prose he proceeded to explain in detail what he did to keep from going
> insane, memory games, mathematics, etc. It was horrifying and awesome. I
> think this *is* an important cultural document. Thank god nobody talked
> him into writing some sappy poem about the scariness of some metaphorical
> cage.
>
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 15:33:30 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Re: Another "Yasusada" Sighting
Comments: cc: elliza@AI.MIT.EDU
>i know i'm being a dummy here, but what is the yasusada legend? i've never
>heard of araki yasusada...
>e
"Araki Yasusada" is a fake poet whose work has been turning up in several
very presitigious mags over the last few years. Outside of this list I've
seen little or no mention of the fact that this is a rather tacky hoax.
The mention of forthcoming work in the APR header makes it possible for
someone to actively stop some future publication rather than merely note
another instance of this.
Here's a better description of the situation than I could give myself from
the poetics archives:
>Date: Tue, 29 Aug 1995 21:45:29 -0400
>Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
>Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
>From: Lee Chapman <Leechapman@AOL.COM>
>Subject: Yasusada = Hoax?
>To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
>
>As one of the editors who recently published work by Araki Yasusada (Brad
>Morrow, CONJUNCTIONS, and Jean Stein, GRAND STREET, were others), I feel a
>responsibility to inform anyone who may have read the work (in FIRST
>INTENSITY #5) that it is more than likely a hoax; that is, a person or
>persons unknown to me at this time concocted the bio and writings of this
>supposed Hiroshima poet. The person who submitted the work to me refuses to
>confirm or deny the rumors of fakery, and with absolutely no evidence in
>favor of Yasusada's existence, while there is plenty against it, I think it's
>safe to assume that the rumors are true.
>
>I don't want to interrupt the flow of current discussions to use this forum
>for a big screechy diatribe on the ethical ramifications of such practices,
>but I want everyone to know that I did not know of the hoax when I accepted
>the work, which obviously I found very moving--and timely, of course.
>However, I believe that the author's deliberate targeting of some major
>literary magazines, such as CONJUNCTIONS, just in time for the 50th
>anniversary of the horror of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is
>indefensible.
>
>If the purpose was to bring attention to this 50-year-old horror, well I
>think we are already perfectly aware of that--many of us have been living
>"under that bomb" for all our lives! If the author's purpose was to assure
>that he/she/they received closer attention by synchronizing their attack with
>the anniversary, well they succeeded. They got our attention. But now what
>are they going to do with it?
>
>My main purpose here is to alert you all to this hoax, and to warn any
>publishers who may have been approached by anyone (such as Kent Johnson of
>Freeport, Illinois, who submitted the work to me) claiming to be associated
>with "Yasusada's editors."
>
>The perps did a nice job of writing, but they trashed their own creation when
>they decided to trash their readers' hearts. Thousands of human beings died
>in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and thousands of their family members are still
>alive today, to remember the horror personally. To use their pain as a
>springboard to some kind of notoriety is unconscionable. There are hoaxes
>(such as the Ern Mally affair in Australia during World War II, in which the
>target was a single editor) and there are hoaxes (such as Yasusada, in which
>the pain of millions of people--as everyone on earth is affected to some
>extent by what happened in Japan 50 years ago this month--was callously
>ignored, apparently in favor of personal gratification); this one really
>stinks.
>
>I guess I diatribed after all. Sorry. As it seems that the RENGA got started
>after someone posted a note about the Yasusada business in FIRST INTENSITY,
>I'm somewhat to blame for the seemingly endless renga-ing. You know, I almost
>didn't publish the renga part of the Yasusada submission--see what happens
>when you don't listen to your instincts?
>
>Best to all,
>Lee Chapman
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 15:48:22 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Tristan D. Saldana" <hbeng175@DEWEY.CSUN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Another "Yasusada" Sighting
In-Reply-To: <v02130500ae15bc076ab7@[192.0.2.1]>
What might be a poet hoax? How can we recognize one?
Tristan
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 22:30:08 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Thomas Bell <trbell@USE.USIT.NET>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
In-Reply-To: <199607190607.CAA03904@toast.ai.mit.edu>
Yes, exactly - this has nothing to do with competent therapy. It
has to do with popular misconceptions, critics, and academic fashion.
On Fri, 19 Jul 1996, Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest wrote:
> "connection of therapy and victim art problematic and close to offensive" --
> huh? connection is as follows:
>
> person told as part of therapy, produce art centered on your problems.
> or patient reads how sexton's art was therapeutic for her and decides
> producing art about problems will be therapeutic for them.
>
> --> they produce art about traumas
> ---> this art makes people think they have to describe it about art because
> whoops, as great art because person putting it out in public as art
> wants to believe themself a great artist. if they aren't told it is
> great art, their feelings will be hurt.
> ---> as editors/evaluators/grantees, we begin giving/granting/evaluating
> well "victims," people whose art is about their victim hood because
> we feel bad for them, we want to go on record as thinking the source
> of their trauma is bad, we are so empathetic to the trauma we want to
> respond based on how bad trauma was and how sorry we feel for them,
> etc ALL NOT having to do with the art as art, all at the expense
> of non-victim artists. leading the mid-ground to search for trauma
> of the day because that makes them a victim which will make their art
> worthwhile as other victim's art is because they are victims. and
> i KNOW these exist because i see/receive/struggle with/see in other
> people's evaluative/grant/editing process same struggle arriving at
> different places. this is what croce's article was about, how as
> critic she is meant to evaluate art by victim as art when all around
> her she is feeling/perceiving pressure to evaluate it as suffering
> by victim.
>
> -------------------
>
> reverse of this connection, which i've also seen:
>
> artist feels something is off in her/his work, it is not 'deep' or
> 'meaningful' enough. there is not enough of the stuff of real important
> human lives.... yes, you hear it coming, not enough suffering, not enough
> of the trauma that other important people write about -- no drugs, no alcohol,
> so...
>
> ---> artist decides in order to make their art more relevant they have to
> experience life, suffer, so
> --> they start shooting up, having sex with most of the east village,
> going out drinking and...
>
>
> == they end up junkies (a very close relative of mine has)
> == they get aids (i'm afraid to count any more -- there have been too many)
> == they black out alot of their life in drinking and
> == get killed in auto accident (couple i know, and several i've heard of)
> == lose major parts of their life, family's life, sanity to drink
> == don't stop drinking
>
> and all of these don't do much for their art. i've seen alot of terrible
> artists who did one of above to get sense of being more "in" to the marrow
> of creation and now they are terrible artists who drink alot/shoot up/have
> aids and write about it. lost people. had people die.
>
> all of this IS real life true, not just "popular" myth. i don't know what
> you meant, or thought you meant that was offensive. this is what i meant
> and i don't think it is offensive, i think it is scary and sad.
>
> i also meant, on another plane, that when you've gone through something
> tough, there is, of course, the fact that for a lot of us, it comes out
> in the writing. and it is very hard to know if the writing is just trauma
> working its way out and not really very good art, and the "buzz" of energy
> we get from looking at that work of our own is from having conquered the
> trauma enough to write about it. and of course people evaluating/editing/
> grantmaking, are brought by first set of responses into seeing it through
> the filter of you the poor victim.... artist. and you could mistake the
> sympathy, carefulness, kindness, as awe, as reward, as whatever it is that
> good work touches off. we WANT good work so much we do mistake it. keep
> telling ourself the work MUST be great or people wouldn't like it so much.
> i am having alot of trouble seperating out and getting others reading to
> separate out, sympathy/victim response from critical response. i'm not
> sure when i get praise for art as such or when someone feels sorry for me.
> i'm not sure when my "buzz" is because it is good or because i've written
> myself out of it. again, real life, lived, mine, not "popular" misperception.
> again, don't know what you thought you saw, but don't see that that struggle
> is offensive. damn well OUGHT to struggle that way says i -- got to keep
> ourselves honest, our work honest. i don't want to end up 50, a terrible
> writer, whinging at readings and forcing scraps of awfulness on bored,
> embarrassed outsiders so i can get off on their scraps of uncomfortable
> sympathy. and i've seen those too, gotten their scraps of paper pressed
> on me and had to come up with what i want to make the most helpful, not
> the most easy, response.
> e
>
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 22:40:47 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Thomas Bell <trbell@USE.USIT.NET>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feeling
In-Reply-To: <01I79ITSO95M8ZFUFH@iix.com>
I do resonate with this. I would however call it hero art. It is
certainly not victim art, and it is legitimately therapeutic as
well as inspiring.
tom
On Fri, 19 Jul 1996, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote:
> The book you're referring to, Dodie, is "Nam," compiled by Mark Baker (or
> possibly Barker). I've been haunted for years by that particular chapter. As
> I recall (it's been over ten years since I read it), the POW in question
> would spend each day building his dream house. In his imagination, he pored
> over every aspect of construction with the same kind of deliberation as the
> actual building would have required. In this way, it took him years to
> finish "the project." It sounds like something straight out of Borges and is
> a real testament to poesis in its most elemental form.
>
> Best,
>
> Patrick Pritchett
> ----------
> From: Kevin Killian
> To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS
> Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
> Date: Friday, July 19, 1996 4:26PM
>
> <<File Attachment: HEADERS.TXT>>
>
> This is Dodie again.
>
> R. Drake's mentioning of Viet Nam made me think of one more thing. Several
> years ago I read an oral history of Viet Nam. It was an amazing book, some
> cheap paperback that I may or may not still own. One chapter in particular
> that still haunts me was by this American soldier who had spent something
> like six years locked in a tiny bamboo cage, I can't remember the
> dimensions, but he couldn't stand up in it. In straightforward, clean
> prose he proceeded to explain in detail what he did to keep from going
> insane, memory games, mathematics, etc. It was horrifying and awesome. I
> think this *is* an important cultural document. Thank god nobody talked
> him into writing some sappy poem about the scariness of some metaphorical
> cage.
>
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 23:54:04 +0000
Reply-To: jzitt@humansystems.com
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Comments: Authenticated sender is <jzitt@bga.com>
From: Joseph Zitt <jzitt@HUMANSYSTEMS.COM>
Organization: HumanSystems
Subject: Murmurings from the Renga Pits
For anyone who's interested: after a six month wandering of
attention, I've gotten back to working on boiling the Renga down into
a hypertext.
I'm toying with doing it as a Java app rather than in
simple HTML. The question boils down to whether the wait involved in
schlepping lines back and forth across the Net is more or less
annoying than waiting once to drag the whole file, with the program
(well, Java classes) along with it, down. Either way, I'm trying to keep
the interface clear and the program platform-independent.
It's not going to be ready really soon, but will emerge in the fullness of time :-).
---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1----------
|||/ Joseph Zitt ==== jzitt@humansystems.com ===== Dallas, Texas \|||
||/ Question Authority, The == SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List \||
|/ http://www.realtime.net/~jzitt == <*> <*> == The Data Wranglers! \|
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 01:34:25 MDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Louis Cabri <ldmcabri@ACS.UCALGARY.CA>
Subject: si
In-Reply-To: <v02130502ae14ea7d6ae0@[192.0.2.1]>; from "Herb Levy" at Jul 19,
1996 9:59 am
The concept gradually ate
Until only a scifi movie
Remained, & gradually
Ate the scifi movie remains
The day when incoherence
Became obvious
Something happened, as if
By thinking
I feared for my life & friends
"Once again," upon a rhyme
It pounced as proof, science
Nor seances suede
***
Re: Gulf War/Political poetry, I patch this from my scrapbook,
a rather cynical assessment:
"[A] poet is an "unacknowledged legislator" who bravely takes a
stand against corruption in power. It is this model, dimly
remembered, that leads the poets I heard read during the Gulf War
to choose their antiwar poem to read first; that tang of
forbiddenness with (the best part) no real risk behind it.... A
quick index of the difference between this purely simulated
forbiddenness and the real thing may be got in comparing reaction
to these antiwar poems (applause, indulgence, boredom) and the
reaction to a Stanford University lecturer who, a few months
later, publicly declared that he used marijuana and that he had
sometimes brought it to work with him. He was fired. No one
reacted." ("A Show of Defiance: Poetry as 'Protest' in
Contemporary America," John C. Dolan, in Rhetorical Republic -
I didnt take down who the editor is nor biblio details).
It's interesting to me where and how the line is drawn on the
question of the political a/effect of poetry/language. Dolan here
draws it one way. Stanford U may not get too much contrastive
sympahty, however. Another way to draw it would be as a legal
limit of, say, defamatory libel, as it's called in the Cdn
Criminal Code. I think it's Derrida who has an interesting essay on the
"undecidable performative" in a French poet whose names escapes
me right now, a rhetorical maneouvre of self-reflexive language that freaked
de Man out (he said the u.p. couldn't be "tolerated"). I can't give
example of the u.p. right now (but McCaffery's poetry has lots of
instances of it, I think). Anyway, one could call the legal limit
a "decidable performative." There was a recent case in Canada
concerning the legality of a protester's poster outside the
court, whose message was ultimately directed toward a Crown
decision concerning charges of manslaughter brought against
Kingston Penitentiary guards in the case of Robert Gentles. I
don't know if the protester was charged under the Code.
***
Re: victim art, imposters, concepts, perhaps these lines may
suggest new
...Behind every survival is a whole totality in words.
i.e., parenthesis it is a text. To answer a
question in runic workings of quotations
behind which passion slips.
And left, imagining a sum: an _I_ inverted
to an _it_.
At the same time as an imposter.
B. Watten, from "Conduit" in _Conduit_ (Gaz, 1988)
-Louis
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 04:51:39 -0700
Reply-To: rloden@cris.com
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rachel Loden <rloden@CRIS.COM>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
MAXINE CHERNOFF wrote (in part):
> Try to tell someone that you write about flux or the perilous language of
> human communication and you're in trouble. What's your
> subject--language-- might go over here but try it on the general public
> or on a polite gathering of "writers" and you're in big trouble. Wish it
> weren't so but it is.
Hear hear. I just spent much too much time trying to jump through
all the byzantine hoops on a local arts council application (including
a demand for a "statement" which seemed more appropriate for a
lepidopterist than a poet). I found myself liberally quoting from
Frank O'Hara's brilliant tapdance before the Paterson Society: "I
don't want to make up a lot of prose about something that is
perfectly clear in the poems...At any rate, this will explain why I
can't really say anything definite for the Paterson Society for the
time being." Which will no doubt win me lots of points with the
bureaucratic Cerberus who guards the gateway to the judges, and
probably with the judges themselves--but the alternative was vile.
Rachel Loden (briefly delurking)
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 08:02:25 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
Dodie typed:
> I think I'm rambling here. But I guess what I'm saying is that I don't
> believe that there are these priviledged subjects that should therefore
> blind us to the fact that what the person is producing is bad writing.
> That's not doing anybody any favors. Difficult, painful material deserves
> the same cut-throat technical proficiency as anything else.
The problem of the reader's (and critic's) identification with the
author's persona is as pervasive as a virus. I find it odd that many of
our champions of multiculturalism have denounced in "victim art" what
I consider to be equally problematic in multiculturalism: it posits
inherent values to the experience/ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation
of the poet. To argue by authority is the fastest possible way to lower
the level of a dialogue between diverse parties.
> As far as Sexton goes, though she has her moments, I think much of her
> stuff *is* dreck. But then you have her unfortunate twin Plath, who is, in
> my opinion, a brilliant writer. Content isn't what makes the difference
> here.
Are you saying that craft makes the difference? If so, I'd have to agree.
Still, I thought that much of _To Bedlam and Part Way Back_ was good,
and that much of Plath is overstated or overly dramatic.
Speaking of victim art: "Every woman adores a fascist" seems rather
simplistic. Plath's suburban pain was hardly comparable to the suffering
of Jews, gypsies, dissidents and homosexuals in WWII concentration camps.
The problem here, I think, *is* one of craft (Plath's verbal felicity
and fecundity notwithstanding). The difficulty for the writer is to avoid
getting painted into a corner: not to make blank statements in an attempt
to be powerful, but to address the complexity and subtlety of an experience
as well as its power. Plath's suffering was horrible enough as it was.
She didn't need to sing anapestic similes involving Hitler to prove
her point.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
PS: A horrible confession: I used to listen to library recordings
of Plath in high school. (For all I know, I probably cried.) Later,
I discovered Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whom I love far more than Plath
and Sexton combined.
Plath and Sexton, Eliot and Pound. Have you ever *heard* Plath's
expatriate accent on those recordings?
PPS: I'm not *dissing* Plath and Sexton, I'm *reading* them.
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 06:20:06 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ron Silliman <rsillima@IX.NETCOM.COM>
Subject: Hoaxification
I'm curious -- and maybe a little disturbed -- at the idea that one
would want to stop the publication of any of "Asusada's" work before it
comes into print just because it's a hoax. Besides being a classic
instance of prior censorship, I think it fails to see what's going on
in the whole phenomenon.
After the Social Text "hoax" and the lengthy discussion here of the Ern
Malley affair (which I'd not heard of before this list), it seems worth
looking a little more closely at the ideas that are put into play.
Let's look at the basics:
(1) Asusada doesn't exist -- he is a social construct built by one or
(more likely) more people. There's been speculation here about who that
might be, but it seems to me unimportant.
(2) The work as writing is pretty good. One reason it's getting
published is because it IS better than just decent.
(3) The social narrative that is Asusada's "background" (Japanese
survivor of Hiroshima, lost his family, got into the work of Spicer and
Barthes in the 1960s, etc) is compelling enough to get the work into
places (Grand Street, APR) that, frankly, wouldn't publish Spicer if he
was alive today (oh, maybe Grand Street would, now that Corbett's the
poetry editor).
(3a) It would be possible to argue that the work crosses over from the
ordinary to the publishable BECAUSE of the context the hoax creates --
but I'm not convinced of that.
(4) "Asusada" is the only "poet" publishing right now who foregrounds
the horror of nuclear war. Think about that. Is that "tacky"? It may in
fact be just the opposite.
(5) "Asusada" also plays on the orientalism of various English-speaking
writers/editors/readers in complex ways. Is it an exploitation of it or
an expose? I think it may be both, but a lot of what makes people
uncomfortable with this hoax is that it sets it up pretty ambivalently
and we don't like to feel those dynamics at play in ourselves -- even
when they are.
(6) "Asusada" by now must know that lots of folks recognize the project
as a hoax and that when he/they appear in APR or elsewhere they give
its editors (and readers) the opportunity to feel for a moment the way
Andrew Ross and the editors of Social Text must feel. I hear that same
tone of defensiveness in some of the posts on Asusada here that I heard
in Ross' replies (there's been more of the same in the Nation of late
as well). I think we all know how SILLY that sounds to others. Maybe we
should try to hear it in ourselves as well.
(7) Having been the person who first brought Asusada's name up on this
list (I wrote a note about how good I thought the work in Conjunctions
was), I write this from the perspective of "one of the _taken_."
Having "said" all that, I don't see why anyone would want to stop the
publication of this work. I can see that, if the editor were your
friend, you might want to let them know that the context is different
from/more complex than they might think. But why stop it?
All best,
Ron
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 10:02:25 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: Hoaxification
ron--
author as a social construct? that might be "Asusada", but it
couldn't be "me"...
[chetongueek]
asever
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 10:48:06 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christina Fairbank Chirot <tinac@CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: poetry and nuclear war
Thanks to Ron Silliman for his thoughtful note re Asusada. A
cautionary note is well taken when the issues of censorship and nuclear
destruction are found in conjunction.
Actually there is an excellent ongoing forum for work concerned
with Hiroshima and its ongoing after effects: the International Shadows
Project. The Project has mounted exhibits and events for several years
now, from here In Milwaukee to California to, this year, Finland. For
information on the Project, there is a site at Grist On-Line:
http:/
/www.thing.net/~grist
Check on Jukka Lehmus' Page for info on how to
participate and for photos of this year's work in progress (including
wooden dice made by Karl Gartung, of Woodland Pattern Book Center here in
Milwaukee). Also on Grist On-Line, check Karl Young's Light and Dust
Books for available catalogues of previous Shadows Projects and for Young's
poem Three,Hiroshima done as part of the 1990 Project.
Get in touch and participate--the anniversary of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki is approaching--another way to think of that "deadline".
who are you/the moment is escaping/ we couldn't do anything so
hideous/our death keeps going on and on/we couldn't do anything so
hideous/the citadel faces its own darkness/it'll be over in just a
minute/the moment is escaping/who are you
from Three, Hiroshima by Karl Young
---get in touch with the International Shadows Project--
--dave baptiste chirot
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 09:07:42 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
At 8:02 AM 7/20/96, Carnography wrote:
>Speaking of victim art: "Every woman adores a fascist" seems rather
>simplistic. Plath's suburban pain was hardly comparable to the suffering
>of Jews, gypsies, dissidents and homosexuals in WWII concentration camps.
Rob,
Jacqueline Rose addresses this issue in her excellent _Haunting of Sylvia
Plath_. I won't attempt to paraphrase from a book I read a few years ago,
but one thing that Rose points out is that in fact Plath was much more
politically engaged than is commonly known--one of her many aspects
"edited" out of her myth by her executors. Rose argues that Plath's
references to the Holocaust, fascism, Rosenbergs, etc., aren't as
gratuituous as they seem.
Michael Davidson picked up on this at his recent talk at the Orono
conference when he led off his talk on Cold War Politics with a discussion
of the _Bell Jar_.
"Every woman adores a fascist." Of course it's simplistic--and I'm sure
Plath knew that in this sing-songy nursery rhyme poem. I think she's very
much in control in this poem and is being in-your-face provocative.
Plath's hard for a lot of people to like because she's mean. I admire that
about her.
Sexton's the bored well-to-do housewife who drank too much and liked to
screw around. Plath at least struggled in her life, financially and
socially, had some real tragedy. As far as suburban goes, wasn't she
living in London when she wrote "Daddy?" Or maybe she was still in the
country with the bees?
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 11:47:31 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Curt Anderson <cander@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Hoaxification
My impression of the Asusada hoax is quite different from Ron Silliman's. I
don't think the poems are particularly good, and I doubt they would have
been widely accepted independent of their poetically correct pedigree. The
instructive and insidious thing about the work is that it manipulates the
editor, and thus the reader, by virtue of the circumstances it clothes
itself in. It presents itself as exotic, critically and aesthetically
current, and socially conscious. I acknowledge the value of appropriation
of materials to some extent, but appropriating identities is something else
altogether, especially when that identity manipulates its relationship to an
event in which thousands of innocent people were extinguished. I got thrown
off the list by the Eudora bouncer, and haven't been privy to previous posts
on the subject, other than Silliman's, but I know a couple editors who have
been taken in by the hoax and the distress the publication of misrepresented
material has caused them. Just thought I'd put in my monthly two bits, Ron.
Now back to the darkness.
Curt Anderson
Cander@mtn.org
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 12:54:33 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Emily Lloyd <emilyl@EROLS.COM>
Subject: like a big pizza pie, that's Eudora...
...quick note to say that I, too, had Eudora fall-out like Peter and
others, so haven't seen mail from the list in a week--managed to download
some garbled messages eventually, so Rob (Hardin)--I know you responded
to my last post to you, but don't know what you said--backchannel me,
maybe? yers in accidental aloofness, emily
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 07:47:26 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
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From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Re: Hoaxification
Ron -
Acouple of quick things & then I gotta run.
I agree that my use of the term "stop" was an overstatement, but I still
think it makes sense for potential publishers of poetry "by" Yasusada to
have the opportunity to make an informed decision of the work they are
considering.
Your comparisons with Ern Malley & the recent Social Text fiasco are right
on. But those works were submitted for publication to show that the
editors were rubes who didn't know what they're doing. This is not the
same as the avant garde tradition of false identities, which have most
often included collaborations from within an artistic community to "fool"
those outside it. One could make the argument that this ispartly what's at
work in the Yasusada project, but then where do you draw the line as to who
is within & outside of the artistic community under consideration? APR,
Grand Street, First Intensity, Conjunctions, Aerial?
At this point there's no way of knowing who Jack Spicer would be "if he
were still alive", but APR has published work by others who were in the New
American Poetry & so have other mags w/o roots in the experimental
tradition that wouldn't (yet) touch anyone in, say, In the American Tree.
I also agree that some of the Yasusada poems are good. But the "social
narrative" of the author is becoming more & more of the recent
publications, which seem mired in footnotes and other explanatory material.
A lot of the APR stuff is letters and journal entries with lots of
accompanying apparatus. If this more recent stuff is indicative of the
larger project, I think we're ultimately going to see an awkwardly
parodistic "novel" with some good poetry in it.
As for Yasusada's being the only poetry dealing with the atomic bombing of
Japan, I think you were moving from the Bay area to Philadelphia during at
least a part of the fiftieth anniversary of these bombings and so may have
missed some of what seemed to be A LOT of related poetry. Much of this
work wasn't in an "experimental" tradition, but I think there's a project
that Karl Young is involved in that might better fill that bill.
Have a good weekend
Bests
H
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
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Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 14:38:04 -0400
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From: Mark Wallace <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: avant garde as production network
Dear David Baratier:
I have some sympathy for the problems you speak about regarding
being "a card-carrying member of the avant garde," that is (and I'm
reading you implicitly here) your sense that working in a range of "avant
garde" poetries, you sometimes get the sense that people read that as a
committment on your part to believe certain things and not others, to
practice certain ways and not others, and yet you're not sure always that
you want to believe or practice these things, and certainly not in every
instance.
There have been a lot of debates on this list about what the
notion of an avant-garde really could be in 1996, and whether using the
world itself is even valid, so I don't think at this time I really want
to repeat those arguments here. But what I would suggest, as a way of
thinking about the problems you bring up, is two different definitions of
avant garde, both of which describe different areas of pheonomena. One is
that group of poems which at various points and times have been described
by that term, the other is a social network of people who claim in
various degress to be involved in something called "avant garde" practice.
The difference is important (and could be further characterized).
But it seems pretty clear that what's frustrating you, at times anyway,
is the issue of the avant garde as a social network committed to the
production and distribution of certain kinds of texts. Frankly, many
poets actively resist seeing themselves as part of a production
"network" at all--they like to think of themselves as free individuals
who critique the very notion of production/consumption, and the idea that
they themselves are both producers and consumers is an uncomfortable one.
What it seems to me that you're questioning, in valuable ways, is your
relation to this kind of production activity. Is there really some part
of avant garde practice that is just simply capitalist production, is
there any part that gets beyond that? Are you, when labelled "a
card-carrying member" of the avant garde, simply a production manager for
certain kinds of texts? Are you a member of a significantly oppositional
community? Are you committing yourself to the creation only of certain
kinds of products, and what if you don't want to create only those
products? Are there ways in which the creation of a poem, and the reading
of one, can critique or escape production-consumption relations?
A lot of writers have attempted answers to these questions, and
many of them have failed, too. I'm just now reading Raymond Williams' THE
POLITICS OF MODERNISM in which, so far anyway, he sees the failure of
high modernism as the way in which it was eventually "bought out" by
capitalist modernity and became the "postmodern," which he reads often as
modernism without any real subversive capability, a failure which he sees
as arising at least in part from the unresolved internal contradictions
of modernism. I've heard this before from Jameson, and thought it was wrong
then
too--Williams seems to be implying that if postmodern art really was what
it should be, then normative capitalist production couldn't
continue--therefore, postmodern art must in some way "support" capitalist
production. In so saying, I think he misses the idea that postmodernist
art can indeed critique capitalist relations of production PERFECTLY, and
still not make a damn bit of large scale difference. Why? Because people
who make art are not in charge. Should they be?--that's a problem for
another day.
I think, finally, that there's no way out of
production/consumption relations. HOWEVER, there are different kinds of
production, and different kinds of use of that production, not all of
them fundamentally exploitative. That is, production is not at all
negative by definition--it's only negative when it's a certain KIND of
production (at the moment, the mass production of standardized products
of relentless and alienating banality, as just one for instance).
The question then becomes, if I want to produce something, how do
I conceive of that? And I think I remain committed to the possibility of
an "avant garde" not because avant garde art is unproblematic, or because
one's existence as a producer of any kind is without ambivalence, but
because it's my sense that the "production network" of the avant garde is
the only public social environment, at this time, in which such questions
are even raised. That is, the avant garde production environment holds
out the POSSIBILITY of being a producer who is not deluded about
production, that is, of being someone who has become not a producer only
but more importantly a CREATOR (a term I'm using here in clearly
polemical fashion).
mark wallace
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 15:23:21 -0400
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Rod Smith <AERIALEDGE@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Hoaxification
As Yasusada's "debut" took place in _Aerial 6/7_ with an extremely
well-informed, and very funny piece called "Renga and the New Sentence" I
thought I'd weigh in on this again. First, I agree with Ron on many points--
whoever's doing it is a very good writer, who is I think aware of the
complexities of what they're doing. I'm curious to see what this work in APR
will be. Let them publish it, then have the hullabaloo. If it appears and
becomes a "controversy" -- I'll be curious to see if APR handles it any
better than the Sokal slather. When I published the piece in _Aerial_ I
suspected it was fake, or more accurately, was almost sure it was fake. I
think on close reading it becomes obvious. The only thing I regret somewhat
is the fake Spicer footnote, which I take some responsibility for. I have to
admit at the time I published it I thought whoever it was wld come forward
sooner. The questions raised re subsuquent publications-- "cashing in" on
Hiroshima _are_ very problematic. However, interestingly, many of those who
attack Yasusada assume the writer is not Asian or Asian-American-- my guess
is they're right, but we don't know that to be the case yet now do we? Maybe
"Yasusada" is making a point about "author as construct"-- which is that it's
_not_ accepted. Motivation is given primacy within interpretation, & if you
don't have an identity to hang that motivation on? Interestingly "the lid"
came off at Conjunctions when Harpers wanted to reprint some of the
material-- the question of where to send the check. . . I don't know how that
was resolved, I doubt anybody got paid anything, even a contributor's copy.
One might argue that, as long as Yasusada's identity remains obscure, the
gesture is truly purely _literary_. I'm not sure I'd make that argument, &
it's all this not-sureness which is fascinating. One is challenged to read
the work on its own terms-- which quickly, even more quickly than usual,
become our own.
Rod
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 17:49:06 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kathrine Varnes <kvarnes@UDEL.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
In-Reply-To: <v01520d00ae163e693caf@[205.134.228.71]>
Mainly, I agree with what's been said on this thread, but I've known some
art therapists who do wonderful work. What their clients produce may not
be "art," but it is valuable. This is different, of course. Therapy as
Art, as opposed to Art as Therapy. It operates under different rules,
but I'm loathe to completely reject it.
So, what are the 7 seven deadly sins of suburban life anyway? Is this
class anxiety, or what, that suburbs are so despised?
But back to Sexton and Plath. Yes, I'm tired of seeing these two names
together. You'd think they were joined at the hip. Joining them like
this means that one always has to come out on top, our binaried damsels in
distress. Enough already. They both struggled. They both wrote.
Kathrine
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 16:53:42 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
trying again to post something written a few daze ago; my computer's acting
funny; most of the discussion has by now covered most of what went thru my mind,
esp luigi drake and dodie, but here're my 2 cents;;;
In message "maria damon" writes:
> i have difficulty with the concept of "victim art" as a problem. first of
> all, it's a pejorative term coined by someone who refused to see a dance by a
> well-known choreographer/dancer who is hiv positive and whose show explicitly
> addressed this. so? aren't all registers of human experience reasonable
> material for art? i think she just didn't want to deal with it; or that the
> critical tools she had acquired thru writing and studying were not equipped
> to handle the complexities of the situation, but she couldn't admit that, so
> had to make it the art's problem rather than hers. i think it hard to
> separate art from context, and am not sure what the point is; the phrase
> "the work should stand on its own" seems particularly empty to me. what about
> something like the diary of anne frank, whose fame is very much due to the
> circumstances under which it was produced? is there a problem with its
> popularity?
> md
>
>
>
>
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Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 16:54:08 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
tom bell writes:
effective therapy has
> never had any connection to personal revalation.
tom: can u say more abt this?
md
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 17:10:34 -0500
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Hoaxification
Re: "author as construct"
One of Anne Carson's books has as its only biographical note "Anne Carson
lives in Canada."
This attempt to deflect attention away from the usual biographical comforts
was siezed by a reviewer in the Flash as a clue to hypothesize (not
incorrectly, as it turns out) about her persona.
Can't win.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 17:15:40 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth & hoaxification
Th victim art strand and the Yasusada strand -- aren't they the same?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 17:32:53 -0500
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Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: catching up
hi guyzies: i'm recovering from a few days of enforced lurkerhood due to my
inability to post messages. it was actually useful to be in th receiving-only
position for a while, cuz i found that most of the points i was burning to make
were made eventually, though of course w/ different nuances, agendas and
conclusions than i may have arrived at. so if my posts seem after-the-fact
redundant, that's why.
last night i was part of a "bob kaufman night" at the walker art center. the
evening featured allan kornblum of coffee house press hand-pressing (or whatever
the term is --hand printing?) a broadside of a kaufman poem, "no more jazz at
alacatraz," which was offered free to audience and participants. (kornblum and
i have settled our skirmish abt. cranial guitar without my having to bring a
formal grievance, btw). i picked up a bunch, so ---if you want one, send me yr
snail mail and i'll mail you one.. . first five folks to respond get um.
on plath/sexton: there's no doubt in my mind that plath is by far the superior
poet. also, i think when both plath and sexton use nazi/holocaust imagery to
express their own pain they are telling us how painful in fact life was for
middle class women in the 50s and early 60s. i'm pretty into my jewishness and
the horror of the holocaust and all that, but for some reason i don't find their
appropriation of images of jewish suffering offensive; it just reminds me of the
horror lurking under the plastic image of feminine "fulfillment" in the
so-called age of prosperity, probably cuz i can see how destructive those gender
expectations were to my older female relatives --my mother, my aunt, etc.
however, i must admit to preferring sexton's poetry; i think i'm put off by
plath's meanness, and also a sense i get from her of tremendous performance
anxiety; she reviles "daddy" but will do anything, including being vicious to
others, to get his approval...hard to substantiate, and as far as i know she was
not a vicious person, but it's a subtext i pick up from the strenuous brilliance
of her performances in verse...whereas sexton seems so desperate to be liked in
her verse that i feel more invited to interact w/ it, it seems "warmer,"
whatever that means. at the same time, it really irked me when, as a teenager
in the 1970s, i'd tell people i wrote poetry and they assumed my models were
plath and sexton and that i was doomed to suicide, or wanted to be, or
something--like, they couldn't see past my gender and my class..... it may be
that, in general, i'm attracted to art that's not perhaps as technically
"perfect" as other art, or as ambitious...for instance, as i wrote to bob von
hallberg, i've never been that drawn to pound or eliot (though i prefer pound's
aesthetic risk-taking over eliot), though they are the acknowledged masters of
the modernist era. stein, it seems to me, completely sidesteps the issue of
"perfection," which is why i find her so brilliant. i also often find i prefer
"folk art" to "high art", and that i appreciate roughness and unfinishedness
over the dazzling, polished tour de force (the one big exception being
hawthorne's short stories, which leave me breathless)...
anyway, blah blah blah. md
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 17:34:34 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Hoaxification
i'm with ron on this one.--md
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Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 14:08:34 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
In-Reply-To: <v01540b04ae16748835ed@[204.180.204.130]>
nNot to dis Rob Hardin here, but I think comparisons between pain hardly
every are useful. Who can assess the pain of a small child in an abusive
situation, wherever they are? gab.
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Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 15:23:09 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert J Wilson <rwilson@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Yasu/Sada
In-Reply-To: <199607201320.GAA21801@dfw-ix3.ix.netcom.com>
Re Ron's comments on the "Yasusada" effect in mags like Grand Street and
APR, it is helpful to recall the devious page of acknowledgments that Jack
Spicer affixed to the "Book of Magazine Verse": "None of the poems in
this book have been published in magazines. The author wishes to
acknowledge the rejection of poems herein by editors Denise Levertov of
THE NATION and Henry Rago of POETRY (Chicago)." At the same time the
books of magazine verse were being filled with (what Oppen called) "the
Merwin" and "the Simpson" and so on, 'voice' a crafty crafted function of
aesthetic/market consistency. So I take "Yasusada" to be a function of
that same search for pained subjectivity, cum a glimmer of historical
pathos and multicultural aura now that the market has shifted a bit, and a
touch of Spicer thrown in for hip measure. By the way, as some Japanese
allies here have advised me, "Yasusada" is not a Japanese name: "Yasu" is
a name and "Sada" is a name but Yasusada is a hoax name, sort of like
calling yourself "Sillimanwilson" and writing about Brass factories and
your abjected Japanese aunt. Now Yasu/sada is a real poet, and he is a
typesetter for Bamboo Ridge Press when he is not selling futures for
Castle and Cook in a taro patch. Cynical reason rules at Grand Street,
and I am trying not be cynical and morose about seeing Yasu/sada's face on
the baseball-card-like cover of APR next month.
By the way, if you want to see one of the best, weirdest, and most
disjunctive love lyrics ever written in USA, see "After the Pastoral,
Driving With My Grandfather to the Place Where Scott Coles Died, the
realities, an Aside for Rochelle" in Occident Vil 3 (spring/summer 1969)
by "Ronald Silliman" who just at that point (as a kid as it were) was
tossing off such poems in his sleep. I admired it then, and still do now,
let the Yasu/sadas come and go like sneakers on the shelf life shelves.
Regards,
Rob Wilson
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 11:20:11 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nada Gordon <nada@GOL.COM>
Subject: roughness
maria damon wrote
>i'm attracted to art that's not perhaps as technically
>"perfect" as other art, or as ambitious...for instance, as i wrote to bob von
>hallberg, i've never been that drawn to pound or eliot (though i prefer pound's
>aesthetic risk-taking over eliot), though they are the acknowledged masters of
>the modernist era. stein, it seems to me, completely sidesteps the issue of
>"perfection," which is why i find her so brilliant. i also often find i prefer
>"folk art" to "high art", and that i appreciate roughness and unfinishedness
>over the dazzling, polished tour de force
Me too. I prefer sketches to paintings, a clunky ear to grand rhetorical
flow, e.g. my students' unfinished utterances, their traces of grappling,
sentences "ending" with "but..." -- even when such a rough or naive
aesthetic is deliberate (as in tea bowls or Klee drawings). As Kokan
(Japanese zen monk of the 14th century) wrote of his students' poems
Their poems may be halting, uneven, doltish, and clumsy,
and sometimes make no sense at all; but still, they are
often filled with a self-possessed purity and integrity
that make me marvel.
(As quoted in David Pollack's *The Fracture of Meaning*)
Besides, words like "mastery" really get under my skin
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 17:07:30 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: roughness
In-Reply-To: <v01510107ae173cd2ef50@[202.243.51.206]>
Oh, I like this, yes. There's a discussion going on on the MLA grad
students list at the moment about plagiarism--a lot of moralistic
hohumming--and I do believe so much of that desire to cheat comes from
never being valued for the clunky insights, instead the teacherly
humanistic "try to better yourself, dear" before you even know who you
are! Grrrr. I love to encourage my students to clunk while I clunk along
with them. :-) gab.
On Sat, 20 Jul 1996, Nada Gordon wrote:
e.g. my students' unfinished utterances, their traces of grappling,
> sentences "ending" with "but..." -- even when such a rough or naive
> aesthetic is deliberate (as in tea bowls or Klee drawings). As Kokan
> (Japanese zen monk of the 14th century) wrote of his students' poems
>
> Their poems may be halting, uneven, doltish, and clumsy,
> and sometimes make no sense at all; but still, they are
> often filled with a self-possessed purity and integrity
> that make me marvel.
>
> (As quoted in David Pollack's *The Fracture of Meaning*)
>
> Besides, words like "mastery" really get under my skin
>
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 23:17:23 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: roughness
>maria damon wrote
>
>>i'm attracted to art that's not perhaps as technically
>>"perfect" as other art, or as ambitious...for instance, as i wrote to bob von
>>hallberg, i've never been that drawn to pound or eliot (though i prefer
pound's
>>aesthetic risk-taking over eliot), though they are the acknowledged masters of
>>the modernist era. stein, it seems to me, completely sidesteps the issue of
>>"perfection," which is why i find her so brilliant. i also often find i
prefer
>>"folk art" to "high art", and that i appreciate roughness and unfinishedness
>>over the dazzling, polished tour de force
>
>Me too. I prefer sketches to paintings, a clunky ear to grand rhetorical
>flow, e.g. my students' unfinished utterances, their traces of grappling,
>sentences "ending" with "but..." -- even when such a rough or naive
>aesthetic is deliberate (as in tea bowls or Klee drawings). As Kokan
>(Japanese zen monk of the 14th century) wrote of his students' poems
>
> Their poems may be halting, uneven, doltish, and clumsy,
> and sometimes make no sense at all; but still, they are
> often filled with a self-possessed purity and integrity
> that make me marvel.
>
>(As quoted in David Pollack's *The Fracture of Meaning*)
>
>Besides, words like "mastery" really get under my skin
I do agree with Maria, but perhaps not so much with Nada -- just that I
think sometimes it takes some fairly amazing "mastery" (forgive me) to make
works which manage to maintain that roughness or immediacy which is so
attractive. Living with a painter for more than a decade now, and one whose
work does exhibit that sense of roughness, I find her work (& that of others
who manage it) far more interesting than student work (although some
students manage it, too) whose constructions seem so often to not quite know
what they want to do. And I may not care that much for grand rhetorical
flow, but I think the alternatives might include music like Thelonius
Monk's, whose ear I would hardly call "clunky." But yes I do like work which
includes its "traces of grappling."
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 17:14:11 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nada Gordon <nada@GOL.COM>
Subject: Re: roughness
In reply to Charles Alexander, who wrote
>I do agree with Maria, but perhaps not so much with Nada -- just that I
>think sometimes it takes some fairly amazing "mastery" (forgive me) to make
>works which manage to maintain that roughness or immediacy which is so
>attractive.
Well yeah, why do you think I mentioned tea bowls and Klee? Can't we just
substitute "practice" for mastery?
>Living with a painter for more than a decade now, and one whose
>work does exhibit that sense of roughness, I find her work (& that of others
>who manage it) far more interesting than student work (although some
>students manage it, too) whose constructions seem so often to not quite know
>what they want to do.
So then for you "mastery" = intention? Hmm. Can we take a poll of
listmembers to find out how many of us and how many of our constructions
know quite precisely what we/they want to do?
I wasn't talking specifically about student attempts to make art, visual or
verbal, but their maneuverings in a distinctly foreign language, a kind of
flapping around in a linguistic twilight zone. Tony Green not so long ago
posted some student "mistakes" ("logoparaphernalia") that I perceived as
not merely funny but poetic too. Those students obviously didn't know the
art value of their words -- mine don't either. Clark Lunberry wrote about
this phenom in an article called "The Poetless Poem: Deviant English and
the Para-Poetic" that appeared in the "Word" issue of Kyoto Journal #29,
1995. Pat Reed's beautiful chapbook on her experiences teaching Vietnamese
and Laotian refugees is infused with her students' 'para-poetic' language.
The startling thing about such language is ... they do it by accident. And
it takes a *practiced* reader to perceive it aesthetically.
Anyway for me the problems with the word, the concept, of *mastery* --
aside from the patriarchal/slaveowner overtones -- is the deadness and
finality of it. Mastery means the end -- you get your black belt, you don't
need to try anymore. Mastery obviates discovery. Recently I heard a poet
referred to as "a master of language" and I shuddered at the image -- no
more grappling, he'd won the wrestling match.
My students ask me sometimes, Nada, how can I master English? And I say
you can't, but that's OK, no one can
(but there are an awful lot of things you can do to practice)
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 17:14:06 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Nada Gordon <nada@GOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Yasu/Sada
Robert Wilson wrote
> By the way, as some Japanese
>allies here have advised me, "Yasusada" is not a Japanese name: "Yasu" is
>a name and "Sada" is a name but Yasusada is a hoax name
Yes. Sada is the name of the woman in "In the Realm of the Senses" who,
um, dismembered her lover. The film is based on a true story.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 04:38:35 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: avant garde as production network
Mark Wallace:
> Williams seems to be implying that if postmodern art really was what
> it should be, then normative capitalist production couldn't
> continue--therefore, postmodern art must in some way "support" capitalist
> production. In so saying, I think he misses the idea that postmodernist
> art can indeed critique capitalist relations of production PERFECTLY, and
> still not make a damn bit of large scale difference.
> Why? Because people who make art are not in charge. Should they be?--that's
> a problem for another day.
A "perfect" critique of normative capitalist production is not
necessarily a perfect solution to the problems of normative
capitalist production. Thus, it is questionable that the artist
who is put "in charge" will be able to fix or replaced what s/he
has successfully criticized.
Semiotics, which was supposed to be our Nietzschean bullshit decoder
for linguistic systems of ideological propoganda, has only made
advertisers ever more efficient. The problem was not that Barthes's
criticism failed. It was that people used semiotics to encode
as well as to decode. The ethical ramifications of Barthes's
criticism were often ignored by the very people who were
fascinated with his analytical methods.
The artist, forge a new career by running for office?
I'd settle for a society that was responsive to the
conscience of the artist.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 11:05:59 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: roughness
>... Mastery means the end -- you get your black belt, you don't
>need to try anymore
from my understanding of martial arts, nothing could be further
from the truth... likewise, not at all how i understood ca's
remarks. now, substitute "tenure" for "blackbelt", and i might
know of examples that fit... but none of them wd qualify as
"masters" in my book...
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 10:16:24 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Maerra Yaffa Shreiber <shreiber@BCF.USC.EDU>
Subject: Re: Loy readings
In-Reply-To: <960717213529_436537557@emout14.mail.aol.com>
Carolyn Burke (Mina Loy's biographer) will be reading from *Becoming
Modern* around the Bay area
during the next few weeks:
Printer's Inc.- Palo Alto, July 25- 7:30
Barnes and Noble, Sacremento, August 5, 7:30
A Clean Well Lighted Place, August 6, 7:30
She is eager to meet poetics folks....
Maeera Shreiber
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 11:15:20 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Loy readings
At 10:16 AM 7/21/96, Maerra Yaffa Shreiber wrote:
>Carolyn Burke (Mina Loy's biographer) will be reading from *Becoming
>Modern* around the Bay area
>during the next few weeks:
> A Clean Well Lighted Place, August 6, 7:30
This is Dodie. I've been looking forward to this event, even though
readings at A Clean Well Lighted Place give me the creeps--the huge gap
that is promoted between reader and audience, everybody feeling very
elitist because they read books, etc. This is where I saw Linda Gray
Sexton and Donald Spoto (twice).
For those of you who can't make this reading in SF, if you hold tight
you'll get a second chance: Carolyn Burke will be speaking on Loy at Small
Press Traffic in January.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 18:16:53 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Megana Camille Roy <MinkaCroy@AOL.COM>
Subject: poetry & performance (plays)
....Dean Taciuch thinks that what matters is "the language," and
worries that actors would be concerned with the emotions and
meanings.
...Tony Green worries about a "danger" in the kind of reading he
supposes actors would do, and feels that "the poetry is damaged" by it.
In my experience (with poetic plays) there are problems working with
conventionally trained actors. Their training doesn't match the task. They
look
for subtext, psychological underpinnings etc. I've found actors who can go
with
the text, the texture and word play etcetera but they're pretty rare. The
problem is uncertainty. The actors look for certain responses for the
audience
and look in the play for ways to get those responses, which may be totally
inappropriate to the play. The difficulty is that the confidence of the
actors is
undermined. The best person to address this is the director, but it's also
hard
to find directors who can really go with a "poetic play". There's not much
interesting writing going on for theatre today and the split between
playwrights
in the theatre community and every other writing community makes finding
the right actors/director harder. An alternative is not to use actors much,
but
artists and poets and others, as kevin killian does.
camille roy.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 18:51:06 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: pathos, nothing more than bathos
Dodie:
> Rose argues that Plath's
> references to the Holocaust, fascism, Rosenbergs, etc., aren't as
> gratuituous as they seem.
Yes, but even though I worship the keyboard you type on, I
can't just take your word for it: I'd have to read Rose's argument
to know whether or not I agreed. But somehow, I doubt Rose's case
is a strong one: Plath isn't citing historical stats about the
women in Pakistan. She's talking about herself, her own history,
her own psychology, and comparing her plight to that of the survivors
of the holocaust. "Every woman adores a fascist?" Plath and the
Jewish women of Dachau's Joy Division occupy two distinct levels
of suffering. Many of us have experienced Plath's kind of suffering:
mental illness, depression, a sense of political/emotional powerlessness
and betrayal, that-gas-in-a-sealed-garage sense of anger helplessly
directed inward. However, none of us has ever lived a concentration camp.
> "Every woman adores a fascist." Of course it's simplistic--and I'm sure
> Plath knew that in this sing-songy nursery rhyme poem. I think she's very
> much in control in this poem and is being in-your-face provocative.
Being in control of one's poetic technique is not the same as
maintaining one's historical perspective. And being provocative
isn't the same as being perceptive.
> Plath's hard for a lot of people to like because she's mean. I admire that
> about her.
I have no problem with Plath's meanness, when it is focussed and specific.
Her anger at Ted Hughes was fine until she reinvented herself as Elektra
and railed at the cosmos at large instead of him.
Plath walks a delicate tonal tightrope, as did many of the so-called
confessional poets (Snodgrass, for example). Irony on one side,
sentimentality on the other. Conscious anger here, intolerance
and specious inductive reasoning there. Often, she succeeds. But
nearly as often, she fails. "Daddy" is incantatory and effective.
But that doesn't mean it is truthful or politically astute.
Also: Pop culture is littered with the corpses of privileged suicides
who lashed out at the society that praised them. Kurt Cobain, too,
could be "mean," like Plath. But a cruel tone is usually most effective,
it seems to me, in humor and satire. At her best, Plath manages a balance
of anger and grim wit. Her anger is given some degree of sophistication
by her sense of irony.
Unfortunately, "Daddy" is campy in a way that Sylvia Plath never
intended. Suicide poetry will always exemplify a certain campiness,
no matter how earnest the practitioner. The best poets have grim
fun with the role they've assumed.
> Sexton's the bored well-to-do housewife who drank too much and liked to
> screw around. Plath at least struggled in her life, financially and
> socially, had some real tragedy.
In this context--in the context of lasting craft--what do
autobiographical details have to do with the quality of
the poet's work? Plath brought up her own suburban life
and made parallels to Nazi Germany. That was the only reason
I mentioned her life in the burbs.
Yes, I, too, tended to prefer Plath to Sexton, initially.
Prosodically--in terms of diction, word-music, formal
intricacy--I still do. But a bit of perspective is always
in order. Plath could be mannered and shrill. And Sexton was
a far better technician at the beginning of her career than
she was at the end. _To Bedlam and Part Way Back_ and _All
My Pretty Ones_ contain many poems that are in an entirely
different mode than Sexton's later work. There is less self-
conscious lyricism and more description, as if the slow accretion
of detail were a matter of amassed, localized identity. The tone
is relatively restrained. I find the narrative range of Sexton's
early poems more satisfying than Plath's earlier attempts.
And by the way, to whomever complained about it:
Plath and Sexton are usually mentioned together because they
were both confessional poets who studied with Lowell, came from
the same aesthetic and political milieu, were contemporaries,
knew each other, talked about suicide together, wrote about
suicide obsessively, were troubled by mental problems, shared
the iconography of the asylum, and eventually killed themselves.
Yes, I'd say it is a *great injustice* that Plath and Sexton
are ever mentioned together.
> As far as suburban goes, wasn't she
> living in London when she wrote "Daddy?" Or maybe she was still in the
> country with the bees?
How many Nazis brought their victims to London to take care of babies
in semi-provincial neighborhoods? Hughes might be bad, but he ain't
no Mengele.
Also: To say that a suburb is not a concentration camp is not to insult
suburbia itself or to condemn suburban life. If "Daddy" is a tribute
to suburbia, then I certainly won't be visiting my mother in Lake Oswego.
By the way: An attempt to assess Plath reasonably is not an attempt
to dismiss her work. Poets, even lasting ones, are rarely perfect.
If praise sounds qualified, judgment reserved, it is because I
try to read poets fairly. Thoughtful criticism comes out of respect
and not contempt.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
PS: to maria:
> i think when both plath and sexton use nazi/holocaust imagery to
> express their own pain they are telling us how painful in fact life
> was for middle class women in the 50s and early 60s.
That's exactly my point. The parallel is false and overly dramatic.
Bosnian survivors have every reason to make such parallels. However,
a relatively well-off, academically-ordained white-collar poet
of the sixties is simply misrepresenting her condition, even
trivializing her own pain, by making such a comparison.
PPS:
> Not to dis Rob Hardin here, but I think comparisons between pain hardly
> every are useful. Who can assess the pain of a small child in an abusive
> situation, wherever they are? gab.
Not to diss gab, but her analogy illustrates my point.
To compare the experience of a small relatively unabused child
in a suburb (Plath) with a small child in a *concentration camp*
is extremely useful. If the first child calls her captors Nazis,
she is being accurate. If the second refers to her parents as Nazis,
she is being hyperbolic.
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 17:49:09 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: roughness
No, Nada, I wouldn't want to equate "mastery" with intention. And I don't
much like the word either. And I think one can absolutely begin & proceed
without quite knowing what one wants to do or where one wants to go -- and
still have the final work come out with a surety which is there, and yet
which may include, and even reveal, its traces of grapplings. In fact that's
what much work I love does. So I think we're probably in agreement more than
I realized -- and I thank you for setting me straight about what you mean.
thanks,
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 11:29:53 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: Bad news
that, George, wd be almost as good as a Larry Rivers Festival with a
save-the-wolves organization
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 11:37:15 +1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Dan Horne <DHORNE@NZ.ORACLE.COM>
Subject: Victim Art
I've been following the thread on "victim art" with some interest, as I
recently found myself in a situation where a nurse asked me to evaluate the
poetry of one of her teenage patients who recently died of cancer. She wanted
to know if I could recommend any of them to any editors I knew. It was an
unenviable situation, since as a lay person I felt unqualified to judge, and
secondly, such a task is inherently subjective. I was asked to weigh the very
real emotional pain the writer was going through with a set up aesthetic
criteria that, rightly or wrongly, I bought to the poems. In the end, I had
to say to the nurse that the poems didn't align themselves with the ideologies
of the journals I knew. The nurse wasn't to happy about that, and I felt even
worse for saying so...
Regards
Dan Horne
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 11:27:07 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: philosophers & poets
I've been thinking this weekend about Derrida and poets. It does not
seem a bad thing for poetry to have to face a philosopher (for which
read a "writer") who plays at capturing attention by
1)self-presentation with props = sheaf of papers to read at length
2)seemingly long and seemingly uninterruptable discourse
Surely it is open to poets (for which read "writers") to respond by
brazen interuption, by demonstrative headshakings and laughter and
attempts to take over the platform/ audience situation.
If "poetry" means ONLY a tightly specific kind of writing, with no
sense of poet-presentation, it will go down where it perhaps may
belong in the present time. The competition from the "philosopher"
should perhaps be a wake up call. Not an occasion for calling "foul".
best
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 22:30:59 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Pastiche for Charles
This glyphic cyst,
Now sinuous cutworm etched in lead and lemon,
Would, if it were veined,
So drain the caves within these aphid hives
That the Heretical Manor of Hands would prove
Vermiform steeple, and Adam Kadmon,
A skein of fistic hymnals
Whose dirge-pearl slivers raked my window-skin--
See, it gleams toward doors.
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 22:53:04 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Henry Gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: My Vacation in Minnesota
MY VACATION IN MINNESOTA
5th Grade
Mrs. Peterson, Home Room
Minnesota was very quiet and cool.
Up north in Minnesota there are a lot of pine trees and not people. There
are loons that make weird calls at night across lakes from very far away.
My Dad says there are bears but not to be scared they won't bother you if
you don't bother their Moms and cubs.
My Mom had a paragraph written by a guy named Thoreau in the cabin. In his
writing he said we were given life here on earth so we could live, and that
was good enough for him.
My Dad likes to make deals. He talked to 3 different guys plus a guy in Tower
(where it was 75 below last January) just to buy a motor for his rowboat.
Eveleth is where the Hockey Hall of Fame is. There is also the Thunderbird
Iron Mine where there is a big hole and you can see a long ways almost to
Canada.
My Dad will be 70 in 1997. He was too young for World War Two. He joined
the Navy as soon as he could and sailed around Lake Superior.
My Mom says "we are all God's children". She has white hair and is a
a good camper, she makes pots too with clay.
Every morning I took the Grumman down to the end of the bay. There are
tamaracks there and no roads all the way to the arctic circle almost.
The water was smooth. It was very, very quiet. There was a little bird
called a White-Breasted Sparrow that makes a very clear-toned song so high
clear sweet, penetrating not piercing, that carries so far through the
solemn melancholy pines. Somewhere between Chet Baker and Morse Code.
I just drifted there for a long time, the lake water licking the canoe.
By Henry Gould
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 21:01:46 -0800
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Julia Stein <jstein@LAEDU.LALC.K12.CA.US>
Subject: Re: victim art
>In message "maria damon" writes:
>> i have difficulty with the concept of "victim art" as a problem. first of
>> all, it's a pejorative term coined by someone who refused to see a dance by a
>> well-known choreographer/dancer who is hiv positive and whose show explicitly
>> addressed this. so? aren't all registers of human experience reasonable
>> material for art? i think she just didn't want to deal with it; or that the
>> critical tools she had acquired thru writing and studying were not equipped
>> to handle the complexities of the situation, but she couldn't admit that, so
>> had to make it the art's problem rather than hers. i think it hard to
>> separate art from context, and am not sure what the point is; the phrase
>> "the work should stand on its own" seems particularly empty to me. what about
>> something like the diary of anne frank, whose fame is very much due to the
>> circumstances under which it was produced? is there a problem with its
>> popularity?
>> md
>>
Since Anne Frank's diary was mejntioned, I'd like to also refer to the
Holocaust literature as part of "victim art."
>>In dealing with "victim art" I'd recommend Lawrence Langer's book The
>>Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. Langer analyzes poetry and novels of
>>the literature of atrocity. He looks at works by both Jews and non-Jews, by
>>those who survived the death camps and those who were not imprisoned or
>>interned. A lot of the issues regarding "victim art" are also discussed by
>>Langer.On page 1 Langer asks, 'How should art-how can art--represent the
>>inexpressibly inhuman suffering of the victims, without doing an injustice to
>>the suffering."
One of the poets Langer analyzes is Paul Celan who spent the war years in a
camp in his native Romanian. Throughout his "years of alienation (and,
presumably, incarceration) only one thing, Celan reports, remained
attainable in the midst of other other casualities of war: language."
Langer quotes Celan on language saying that "It went on lviing and gave
birth to no words to describe what had happened; bit it survived these
events. Survived and came to light again, 'enriched' by it all."
>>
>>
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1996 22:31:57 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: A plea for Ginny
This is Kevin Killian speaking. I know y'all are busy watching the
Olympics and too busy to have yet read the new issue of Minneapolis' "James
White Review," which features a new interview with Allen Ginsberg. The
interviewers spoke to AG over a speakerphone and had more than the usual
trouble transcribing the tapes afterwards, I thought I'd share a few good
ones with you:
Who are the good poets of today?
AG: Eileen Myles, Sharon Mesmer, Bono (from U2) , Andy Clausen, and Ann
Tyler.
[I have racked my brains to think who "Ann Tyler" could be, but Dodie
figured out it must be "Antler," who AG has named for the last 25 years
when asked for his favorite poets of today.]
Can you comment on other influences on the Beats?
AG: One of my mentors was William Carlos Williams. I also knew Ezra
Pound. We had many connections with the daddies of the past. And the
mommies, because when I worked back in the 50s, I sent books to Marianne
Moore, and connected with a lot of the womenfolk that were not so
well-known-like Marine Heidegger.
[Marine Heidegger, of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.]
Tell us a little about Naropa.
AG: West Coast poets Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and
Robert Duncan could come and cross paths with Paul Orlovski, Sid Corman,
Creeley, John Ashbery, Kenneth Cope, Sharon Holmes and me. About a month
ago we did a big, big benefit with Patti Smith and Annie Kay (her
guitarist) in Hale Auditorium.
Why is the Beat Generation now of interest to younger people?
AG: The sexual, spiritual liberation, liberation of the word, and the
private poetic candor, which actually got us in trouble with the law. We
had to overcome the legal trials for 57 to 62, which liberated Henry
Miller, Burroughs, Ginny, myself, and everyone like that. The word was
liberated.
[Ginny: "Thief's Journal," "Our Lady of the Flowers," "Flowers by Ginny"]
AG: There was the association with the psychedelic world, as well as
the whole Eastern meditative world; the old European surrealist world; and
the old homemade Americanist Williams, Morrison and Heartly world.
[Context is everything and I believe that AG is referring to the homemade
W.C. Williams/Marsden Hartley world.]
What kind of advice would you give to a young poet today just starting out?
AG: Recognize the vast consciousness you already have. Then, if
possible, read a lot of Burroughs, Kerouac, Corso, Ginny, and Rimbaud.
Maybe get that big book by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg of
international writing. Poems for the Millenium, University of California
Press. It's a big, thick, thousand-page book of world poetry.
[Pierre and Jerome, I hope you are including plenty of Ginny's work in Vol
2 of your anthology. Young poets must learn! Have a heart!]
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 18:58:04 +0900
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Akitoshi Nagahata <e43479a@NUCC.CC.NAGOYA-U.AC.JP>
Subject: "Araki Yasusada"
The name "Yasusada" is perfectly all right as the first name of a Japanese
man--kind of oldish, though. "Araki" is also a common last name. I don't
know if the "Yasusada project" is a hoax or not. Is he hailed as a tanka
poet? I've never heard of him myself, but there must be thousands of tanka
or haiku poets I've never heard of. Could someone post his (pseudo-)bio?
I'm going to check a Who's Who. (Our library has none of the magazines
referred to. A shame, indeed.)
Akitoshi Nagahata
e43479a@nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 09:29:28 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: poetry & performance (plays)
>In my experience (with poetic plays) there are problems working with
>conventionally trained actors. Their training doesn't match the task. They look
>for subtext, psychological underpinnings etc. I've found actors who can go
>with the text, the texture and word play etcetera but they're pretty rare. The
>problem is uncertainty. The actors look for certain responses for the
^^^^^^^
>audience and look in the play for ways to get those responses...
thanx camille, for finding that word for me... i'm reading "certain" as
"sure" or "determined", tho i'm not sure that's what you meant... but ive
been thinking about similar issues around slam poetry & other attempts to
bring poetry to the popculture marketplace... fr all but the most
accomplished slammers, the possibilites of uncertainty are sacrificed
fr the immediate & certain "effect"--& those lost multiple possibilites
are essentially *all* of what i'm drawn to in poetry. ov course,
if the poetry & the performers (*and the audience*) are up to it, it's
still possible; only that marketplace values push in the other
(defined, packaged, known) direction...
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 09:04:00 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
i have not been in this situation often but when i am i sometimes recommend not
a literary mag or journal but one that deals, with, say, cancer, or children w/
diseases, etc, whatever is specific to the art at hand. there's a magazine for
almost everything, including one for parents of kids w/ disabilities. the nurse
cd write a short piece contextualizing the poems. i once was asked to evaluate
an essay on sylvia plath's "daddy" as a poem about incest for an academic
feminist journal. i thought the paper made a perfectly plausible reading of the
poem, but it was written in a style not suitable to the venue. i suggested the
journal of sexual violence. i also, like you, had mixed feelings; maybe that
journal wd turn the essay down and say, try a feminist/literary journal. i do
think there's a place for everything.
aha --i've got it;i have a friend who's editing an anthology of writing of kids
w/ disabilities. she may be interested. i'll backchannel you w/ info.
bests, md
dan horne writes:
> I've been following the thread on "victim art" with some interest, as I
> recently found myself in a situation where a nurse asked me to evaluate the
> poetry of one of her teenage patients who recently died of cancer. She
> wanted
> to know if I could recommend any of them to any editors I knew. It was an
> unenviable situation, since as a lay person I felt unqualified to judge, and
> secondly, such a task is inherently subjective. I was asked to weigh the
> very
> real emotional pain the writer was going through with a set up aesthetic
> criteria that, rightly or wrongly, I bought to the poems. In the end, I had
> to say to the nurse that the poems didn't align themselves with the
> ideologies
> of the journals I knew. The nurse wasn't to happy about that, and I felt
> even
> worse for saying so...
>
> Regards
>
> Dan Horne
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 11:20:07 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Pastiche for Ted
This limping gland,
now worm and cuticle
of ornamental gasping
wood, if it were,
(add ampersand & channel Robert Duncan if regular meter persists)
so hint at dais, and chili, that drimping nibs
would wash thin oaken harnesses dry of bean=E9d broth
so in me vase, Rent-Boy, lice might steam again
& thou trou be concupiscence-clammed
damn, Shmeeracles,
meet my holster ward: Hughes.
--Jean Cleats,
semi-neglected gimp,
on the Anniversary of
the Birth of Our Master,
one Welt Pittman
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 08:32:06 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Re: Bad news
Hi Maxine Chernoff,
Sorry I'm late getting back to your response on this topic.
One of the things that I found so depressing about the earlier discussion
was that so many of us have recently been on funding juries and were unable
to deal with issues of style because of trendy issues that funding agencies
fund to be more important. My last experience on a panel in the Seattle
area was particularly depressing 'cause it was for the only local source of
money with virtually no strings attached (hotel/motel tax funds) but in
numerous fields (not just literature, but music, dance, & visual arts too)
MANY good people & organizations (working in modes that you describe as
"aesthetic difference, complexity, depth, what have you,") just didn't
bother to apply. Feh.
But back to the original topic, I think that actual DEPENDENCE on public
grants is often a mistake. If an organization (&I'm not just thinking of
presses here) can't get by on sales, admissions & donations from other
sources, government grants ARE obviously a good source of added funds. But
if the government is the primary source of funds, then the organization is
probably producing far more work than it's audience can support. While the
money may be good for a while, the overall glut of work isn't good in the
long run for the audience, the artist, or the organization. & as we have
seen over the last 30 years (not just the last five) of government funding
for the arts in the US, this money is very fickle.
Especially when dealing with work that has a limited audience, it's better
to produce fewer events, books, or whatever, and be able to keep going,
than it is to produce more than the market can support and fall apart. In
the long run a press or other organization that does fewer works per year
which is able to survive, can do more than an organization that is forced
to cut back or collapse if a non-audience-related source of support dries
up. Organizations, large or small, which are responsive to an audience's
needs & desires, even (perhaps, especially) a tiny, idiosyncratic audience
like the one for experimental poetry, rather than the needs & desires of
public funding sources, MAY be able to survive better without having to
resort to "management by crisis."
I'm suggesting only that organizations be more careful in how they select
work to present, NOT that they begin to present only stars to try to appeal
to a mass audience.
As an aside, the local university book store's sale always has a ton of
overstock New Directions books (this year including many things published
as late as 1995!) for $3 or less, & you're of course right about Hesse & T
Williams.
Bests
Herb
>Dear Herb, Dodie, etc.,
>
>Itis obviously thecase that nowhere in the arts as they are now funded by
>government grants is aesthetic difference, complexity, depth, what have
>you, taken as a serious value. Having recently served on several such
>panels, local and national, I was depressed but not surprised at how
>grossly evaluations were made ("This magazine has 12 women and 7 men--
>the editors must be very progressive!" etc.). When New American Writing
>still lived in Chicago and used to apply for Illinois grants, people
>would ask in panel review, "Why do they publish John Ashbery? Is he so
>important?" (not to mention the rest of our contributors who were far
>less recognizable.) Anyway, we decided to come out once yearly and to
>never write grants again.
>
>As for presses that survive, they seem to somehow gain institutional
>credibility-- you mean you're not dead yet? Hey, let's give you a
>grant. But getting to that point is extremely painful. When we were
>still applying for grants, we were told to "build a board," etc. No one
>seemed to care about our publicatiuon itself in the money world.
>
>As for New Directions, it was Herman Hesse and Tennessee Williams that
>finally stabilized them and allowed them to grow.
>
>MaXINE cHERNOFF
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 08:32:34 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Herb Levy <herb@ESKIMO.COM>
Subject: Re: A plea for Ginny (& Alice)
Kevin's post reminds me of the German (& only) bilingual edition of the
complete "Radio Happenings," a transcription of conversations between John
Cage & Morton Feldman, that was mentioned on poetics a few months ago. The
transcriptions seem very good and for many individuals named in the talks
brief identifying footnotes are provided, along the lines of "Jasper Johns,
American painter" follwed by birth & death years. These are mostly useful,
except when someone mentions the writer Alice James, who in the course of
the discussion, is identified as something like "the sister of the James
brothers."
The footnote for the James brothers gives the dates and occupations for
Frank and Jesse James.
Herb Levy
herb@eskimo.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 10:26:10 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
Thanks, Maria, for the reminder that there is a place and a value for this
so-called "victim art," it just may not be the value everyone on this list
wants to find in art. I originally was somewhat dismayed at this thread, in
that it seemed to want to posit stereotypes of sufferers who make art out of
their suffering, and on the other hand of artists who feel like they are
supposedto suffer in some specifically destructive ways. That seemed to me
to deny the specific nature of anyone who makes art out of any circumstance,
also seemed to want to lump all victims together, and I found that rather
insulting to large numbers of people who are really all different, despite
some shared social circumstances. But now the conversation seems to be
broadening in any number of ways, and I've enjoyed the comparisons of Plath
& Sexton, & more.
charles
>i have not been in this situation often but when i am i sometimes recommend not
>a literary mag or journal but one that deals, with, say, cancer, or children w/
>diseases, etc, whatever is specific to the art at hand. there's a magazine for
>almost everything, including one for parents of kids w/ disabilities. the
nurse
>cd write a short piece contextualizing the poems. i once was asked to evaluate
>an essay on sylvia plath's "daddy" as a poem about incest for an academic
>feminist journal. i thought the paper made a perfectly plausible reading of the
>poem, but it was written in a style not suitable to the venue. i suggested the
>journal of sexual violence. i also, like you, had mixed feelings; maybe that
>journal wd turn the essay down and say, try a feminist/literary journal. i do
>think there's a place for everything.
>aha --i've got it;i have a friend who's editing an anthology of writing of kids
>w/ disabilities. she may be interested. i'll backchannel you w/ info.
>bests, md
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 11:33:32 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: T-Bone Prone <tbone@RIPCO.COM>
Subject: Re: philosophers & poets
In-Reply-To: <3C25F954736@ccnov2.auckland.ac.nz>
On Mon, 22 Jul 1996, Tony Green wrote:
> I've been thinking this weekend about Derrida and poets. It does not
> seem a bad thing for poetry to have to face a philosopher (for which
> read a "writer") who plays at capturing attention by
> 1)self-presentation with props = sheaf of papers to read at length
> 2)seemingly long and seemingly uninterruptable discourse
> Surely it is open to poets (for which read "writers") to respond by
> brazen interuption, by demonstrative headshakings and laughter and
> attempts to take over the platform/ audience situation.
You are complaining about reading, not "writing" or "writers". I think if
you do not have the ears for the performance, in any setting, you ought
to keep that information to yourself, letting others listen.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 09:56:27 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: pathos, nothing more than bathos
At 6:51 PM 7/21/96, Carnography wrote:
>Dodie:
Rob,
First of all I worship your website. Believe it or not, I'm tired of
spewing out opinions, so this will be brief. But, I think that your
emotional responses to the Holocaust are blinding you to the postmodern
trope that nobody owns an experience. Plath has just as much right to it
as anybody else.
Secondly, you're right--Plath's early work is stilted and weak. But so what?
Thirdly, I disagree with the whole notion that Plath *is* a confessional
poet. Just because she took a workshop with Robert Lowell should she be
punished for it the rest of her (after)life? Her "I", to me , is a
performance and is conscious of itself as a performance--and it shifts from
poem to poem, sometimes line to line. To me this is a different agenda
than the confessional school's whatever (I won't make any value judgement
here). "Ariel" a confessional poem?
Sexton's fairy tale poems (which I haven't read in like a dozen years) also
in my foggy memory of them seem an attempt to stretch beyond the
tunnel-blindness of confession.
Also, I agree with you about assessing a poet's work by his or her life, it
sucks, and I won't ever hint at that again.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 12:36:45 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: Yasusada
Ron,
On Thursday I was talking with Ethel Rackin, the managing editor at
APR, and after hearing the reasoning behind the yasusada publication I
have to state that the historical context was a part of the process.
By this I do not mean to say that the "orientalism" dynamic that you
mention was the context that established the work as worthy of print
but rather a poetry that pre-dated French existentialism, Laccn,
etcetera, with similar ideas. While I know from your essays that you
have a definte interest in exposing the multicultural marketing of
consience, if one believes the year of the work the historical context
in and of itself establishes merit. The impression I received from
Ethel, in so far as publication, was one of discovery, where yasusada
was admired as a precursor, not published as a exploitation of a
social narrative of guilt.
I can say that the elaborate deception set up by Kent Johnson in
Illinois was not merely a simplified "5 pieces in a SASE" like many
would like to believe. There were contacts set-up in Japan, Illinois,
at least one other state, & another country (I forget!) three
translators (plus yasusada), who each had pages of biographical
material, a sketch of yasusada, supplied by Johnson and many other
intricacies involving permissions from yasusada's estate.
Why stop publishing yasusada? Besides the ethical concerns of the
sham, it reifies Greenblatt's New Historicism, through the
decontextualization of time through subsequent historical revision of
the work in relation to refashioned time zones. The two-flex mirror of
the critic as a reflecting and deflecting construct of the moment they
are writing within and the one they are writing about has it's
continuity flawed-- actually, this shift is interesting-- I'm going to
think about this a bit longer before I ram foot in mouth-- any ideas
on the consequence appreciated--
As for whether APR would publish Spicer if he was alive, while it's
speculative to make any assessment, I can mention that Bernstein,
Seidman, Stroffolino and many others have recently graced its pages.
Be well.
David Baratier
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 10:52:06 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
At 10:26 AM 7/22/96, Charles Alexander wrote:
>[T]here is a place and a value for this
>so-called "victim art," it just may not be the value everyone on this list
>wants to find in art. I originally was somewhat dismayed at this thread, in
>that it seemed to want to posit stereotypes of sufferers who make art out of
>their suffering, and on the other hand of artists who feel like they are
>supposedto suffer in some specifically destructive ways. That seemed to me
>to deny the specific nature of anyone who makes art out of any circumstance,
>also seemed to want to lump all victims together, and I found that rather
>insulting to large numbers of people who are really all different, despite
>some shared social circumstances.
Charles,
Don't you think this broad stab at the Victim Discussion Thread is rather
unfair, kind of passive-agressive even? Clearly you have certain comments
by certain people in mind here. Your post makes it sound like the thread
itself were this self-generating entity. Isn't it insulting to lump
together all the discussors of Victim Art? Aren't they too really all
different despite shared social circumstances?
I'm not contesting that you're a nice guy, Charles, but, again, I take
issue with the notion that white middle class liberals have the right to
decide what's insulting to other groups of people. I'm reminded of a scene
I saw on the street here in San Francisco. There's this black guy with an
artificial leg, who sits on the sidewalk, removes his artificial leg and
stands it in front of him, then asks passersby for money. I was standing
near him one day, waiting for a bus or something, so I had some time to
observe. White folks walking by averted their eyes and looked like they
were going to faint with guilt. Then a black woman approached, she pointed
to the man's plastic leg, and exclaimed to her friend, "Look at that!"
Then they proceeded to laugh heartily, like they hadn't seen anything that
funny in ages.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 13:49:03 -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 <mdw@GWIS2.CIRC.GWU.EDU>
Subject: avant garde as production network
Dear Rob Hardin:
Yes, I suppose I too would settle for a "society responsive to
the conscience of the artist." Only seeing as how it would be the first
time in history such a thing has been the case--since in Europe at least
the history much more commonly, though by no means exclusively, is that of
"artists speaking the
conscience (AS IF) of their rulers"--it doesn't seem to me very likely. I
don't get the impression that anyone can be trusted with anyone else's
conscience more than a little perhaps here and there, and this
unfortunately holds true for artists as well. It's hard to avoid feeling
that no one's got the right to govern, or can be trusted to do it. This
was of course THEORETICALLY the idea behind the formation of the U.S.
government--various branches balancing each other because no one can be
trusted to govern. Too bad everyone wasn't really allowed a piece of the
action...
What we need, I guess, is a system that really balances everyone's LACK
of a right to govern the conscience of others.
Only that doesn't seem very likely either, does it?
mark wallace
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| |
| mdw@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu "I have not yet begun |
| to go to extremes" |
| GWU: |
| http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~mdw |
| EPC: |
| http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/wallace |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 10:51:42 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: william marsh <wmarsh@NUNIC.NU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Jorie Graham
>What does anyone else think?
>
>Tristan
>
Back in grad school I was studying with Jorie's good friend Jane Miller who
one day announced in class that Jorie Graham was touting her then most
recent book _The End of Beauty_ as the "first post-modern book of poetry."
I don't know if that's true or not, but after reading the book I decided it
did have the slippery sheen of the carefully disjunctive, an "imported"
radical flair (don't know how else to put it), so maybe the quote was
allegorical.
Bill Marsh
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 13:54:43 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry gould <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 22 Jul 1996 10:52:06 +0100 from <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
On Mon, 22 Jul 1996 10:52:06 +0100 Dodie said:
>
>I'm not contesting that you're a nice guy, Charles, but, again, I take
>issue with the notion that white middle class liberals have the right to
>decide what's insulting to other groups of people.
Dodie, doesn't this contradict your previous thread arguing for the postmodern
notion that "nobody owns an experience"? (A notion I find dubious myself.)
- Henry Gould (card-carrying flesh muddle clash weirdo)
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 13:13:20 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Judy Roitman <roitman@OBERON.MATH.UKANS.EDU>
Subject: Re: Jorie Graham
>Jorie Graham was touting her then most
>recent book _The End of Beauty_ as the "first post-modern book of poetry."
You've got to be kidding.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Judy Roitman | "Glad to have
Math, University of Kansas | these copies of things
Lawrence, KS 66045 | after a while."
913-864-4630 | Larry Eigner, 1927-1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 12:34:00 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
At 1:54 PM 7/22/96, henry gould wrote:
>On Mon, 22 Jul 1996 10:52:06 +0100 Dodie said:
>>
>>I'm not contesting that you're a nice guy, Charles, but, again, I take
>>issue with the notion that white middle class liberals have the right to
>>decide what's insulting to other groups of people.
>
>Dodie, doesn't this contradict your previous thread arguing for the postmodern
>notion that "nobody owns an experience"? (A notion I find dubious myself.)
>- Henry Gould (card-carrying flesh muddle clash weirdo)
Why, Henry, maybe you're right.
db
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 09:26:02 -1000
Reply-To: Gabrielle Welford <welford@hawaii.edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: pathos, nothing more than bathos
In-Reply-To: <v01540b00ae1742560cfb@[204.180.204.130]>
But you see, you just did what I said you can't do, assess one child's
pain in comparison with another's. I like what Dodie says about nobody
owning experience. gab.
On Sun, 21 Jul 1996, Carnography wrote:
> > Not to dis Rob Hardin here, but I think comparisons between pain hardly
> > every are useful. Who can assess the pain of a small child in an abusive
> > situation, wherever they are? gab.
>
> Not to diss gab, but her analogy illustrates my point.
>
> To compare the experience of a small relatively unabused child
> in a suburb (Plath) with a small child in a *concentration camp*
> is extremely useful. If the first child calls her captors Nazis,
> she is being accurate. If the second refers to her parents as Nazis,
> she is being hyperbolic.
>
> http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
>
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 12:46:24 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
At 1:54 PM 7/22/96, henry gould wrote:
>On Mon, 22 Jul 1996 10:52:06 +0100 Dodie said:
>>
>>I'm not contesting that you're a nice guy, Charles, but, again, I take
>>issue with the notion that white middle class liberals have the right to
>>decide what's insulting to other groups of people.
>
>Dodie, doesn't this contradict your previous thread arguing for the postmodern
>notion that "nobody owns an experience"? (A notion I find dubious myself.)
>- Henry Gould (card-carrying flesh muddle clash weirdo)
But, then, Henry, maybe you're wrong. I think there's a difference between
using an experience in your work versus claiming to speak for someone else.
My words here aren't very clear. Like in my work--if I steal a scene from
Carrie, that's different than me claiming to speak *for* Carrie and her
victimization. In the first instance I'm making some sort of personal
response to one aspect of Carrie's plight. Incorporation (as in eating) as
an act of love, you know, back to the oral phase. This is different than
my acting like I have the right to speak for telekinetic abused teenagers.
What if I took that a step further and tried to make you, Henry, feel
guilty for your non-p.c. attitudes towards telekinetic abused
teenagers--you wouldn't like that very much, would you Henry?
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 07:47:25 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
Someone ought to check up on the context of Sylvia Plath's writing:
especially the available options around Cambridge University in the mid
1950's, available especially in Delta and in other mags of the time, excavate
the likes of Dickie Drain and co, that'd be amusing. As far as I can
recall there were not many ways to go: Thom Gunn socialist verse was
one; tomb and womb and doom another, which is probably where S.P.
comes in; Ted Hughes at that time was after Lawrencian sounding
allegories, in between fist fights with people on Saturday nights, so
they used to say; I had friends who took Dylan Thomas seriously, as
much as anything because the available modes were curiously unaware
of how much they were largely overflows from sentimental prose.
vaguely remember what S.P. looked like, seeing her in
lecture-classes, but don't recall that I ever met her. But, I do know
that that was a particular literary context with its ambitions set,
as much as anything by available publication possibilities in London,
e.g.John Lehmann's London Magazine. best
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 15:55:27 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: henry <AP201070@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 22 Jul 1996 12:46:24 +0100 from <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
On Mon, 22 Jul 1996 12:46:24 +0100 Dodie said:
>
>But, then, Henry, maybe you're wrong. I think there's a difference between
>using an experience in your work versus claiming to speak for someone else.
>My words here aren't very clear. Like in my work--if I steal a scene from
>Carrie, that's different than me claiming to speak *for* Carrie and her
>victimization. In the first instance I'm making some sort of personal
Maybe I'm right AND wrong. That would be in line with the nebulous
distinction you're pointing out. Is speaking FOR someone always an
imposition? Sometimes an advocate is a lifesaving necessity.
Both "scene-stealing" and advocacy are based on empathy (not a very
p.c. trait these days).
>response to one aspect of Carrie's plight. Incorporation (as in eating) as
>an act of love, you know, back to the oral phase. This is different than
>my acting like I have the right to speak for telekinetic abused teenagers.
>What if I took that a step further and tried to make you, Henry, feel
>guilty for your non-p.c. attitudes towards telekinetic abused
>teenagers--you wouldn't like that very much, would you Henry?
You seem to be stealing a scene I never played in the first place...
- Henry
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 08:15:04 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: roughness
/For mastery!( gendered term) read, when appropriate,
mistressly! as in M.A.= Mistress
of Arts. I'm surprised this has not yet been done.
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 17:05:05 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Emily Lloyd <emilyl@EROLS.COM>
Subject: Re: roughness
Don't know about mistresses of arts, Tony, but I know it's possible to
get a Spinster of Arts degree (as opposed to a Bachelor) at New College
USF...personally, not a fan of mistress *or* master, unless in
Sade...emily
Tony Green wrote:
>
> /For mastery!( gendered term) read, when appropriate,
> mistressly! as in M.A.= Mistress
> of Arts. I'm surprised this has not yet been done.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 16:38:32 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
>Charles,
>
>Don't you think this broad stab at the Victim Discussion Thread is rather
>unfair, kind of passive-agressive even? Clearly you have certain comments
>by certain people in mind here. Your post makes it sound like the thread
>itself were this self-generating entity. Isn't it insulting to lump
>together all the discussors of Victim Art? Aren't they too really all
>different despite shared social circumstances?
Yes you're right, Dodie. I did have one particular comment in mind, but I
decided not to post when it came up (& now I'm not sure I remember who
posted it), probably for better reason than my less hesitant post you are
responding to. And I certainly could have seconded Maria's comments without
knocking anybody else. Guilty.
charles
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 17:50:00 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Jonathan A Levin <jal17@COLUMBIA.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
In-Reply-To: <3D6B6C34565@ccnov2.auckland.ac.nz>
on Plath, Gunn, Cambridge, the 50s--a question, a footnote, and a
response:
I wonder what you mean, Tony Green, by Gunn's "socialist verse" of (I
guess) the 50s? Having just written 16,000 words on him, I'm not sure
what you have in mind, but would like to know. Most of that early stuff
is just about bikers and and other assorted types doing the existential
errand thing, so far as I can tell. In any event, there's an excellent
description by Donald Hall (in a 1989 issue of PN Review) of what Gunn's
first appearances in Oxford were like, the "general flabbbergast" of his
reading--"Oxford recoiled before stanzas militant, intransigent, tough,
brainy, swashbuckling and violent." Gunn has an infamous nazi reference in
a poem called The Beaters that appeared in The Sense of Movement (the 1957
book, Gunn's second, written during his first year in California, 1955/56)
and that he removed from later editions and from the 1994 Collected Poems.
Gunn is playing around in the poem with s/m, the "tools of perversity,"
etc., and has a "swastika-draped bed" in the second stanza. What's a
little disturbing is that the beaters, here, really aren't very far from
the usual bikers and soldiers of Gunn's first two books: "They know they
shall resume pursuit, elsewhere, / Of what they would not hold to if they
could." I guess Gunn was himself a little embarassed to look back on
this.
A last thought, while I'm entering the thread: perhaps I'm just unwilling
to be postmodern, but I don't see how one can live with the possibility
that an experience is equally available to all. That's not a metaphor I
could live by. I, for example, constantly find myself uable to
"appropriate" certain "female experiences," for example: I play in a
softball game with men and women, and am a moderately good player, so
often "command respect" of others in the game. I don't, for example,
usually get "poached"; I get a good batting spot; etc. Once, when a
particulary self-confident third baseman poached a couple of balls from me
at short, at one point nearly killing me (and screwing up a force out I
would have easily had at third), a friend pointed out that now I "knew"
what it was like to be a woman in the game. She's of course right--I had
a taste of it--but in another sense, I'll never really know what it's like
to be a woman in this game, because too many default assumptions are
"always already" working in my favor. Alas. That's a trivial example,
in the long run, but I think it gets the dynamic right: some experiences,
despite their public dimension, will never belong to anyone but those who
experience them, and it's misleading, I think, to think otherwise. Nasty
deeds will unfortunately always be appropriated in ways that diminish,
obfuscate, or erase their nastiness, and the best we can do is to insist
on the historical specificity of those deeds and their consequences. We
respond to the particular face of suffering (to echo Levinas,
loosely)--we're not responding to anything in ourselves.
Best--
Jonathan Levin
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 16:08:02 +0100
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Kevin Killian <dbkk@SIRIUS.COM>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
At 3:55 PM 7/22/96, henry wrote:
>Maybe I'm right AND wrong.
Ditto for me Henry. A truer thing was never said on this list.
Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 11:38:41 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
Jonathan A Levin. Loose talk about Gunn. He'd gone by the time I
arrived, but he had friends and supporters who I encountered and the
impetus was to bring real working class images and values into the
foreground, to oppose middle-class literary values. It obvioudsly did
that in the figure invoked and in the versification. This -- at second
hand --I took to be a rather programmatic social realism in verse.
It, about that time, seemed to coincide with the "social realism" of
several British painters, Jack Smith, Middleditch, who else? early
John Bratby. It also resonates for me with Lucky Jim. However, you
are clearly really close to the texts of then poems as I am not.
The question was definitely being asked about the relations between
class structures and expectations and universities
and literature. And of course, in retrospect, it raises questions
about the viability of varieties of poetics for social change. I
would like to think it raised that question way back then too.
Does anyone close to the texts, as I am not, recognise
this kind of questioning in Sylvia Plath?
latera , i uppose
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 19:42:50 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Douglis Beck <DlisRicBck@AOL.COM>
Subject: _Yasusada_ on the move...
sorry that I've missed the whole of the _Yasusada_ controversy, but it seems
there's some interesting things said in saturdays digest from Ron & Rod, who
definitely act as a 1-2 punch on the subject. I would only add that such an
issue would not be an issue if _Yasusada_ were merely a pseudonym, or other
sort of mask. perhaps _Yasusada_ is accomplishing things for a particular
poet or group of poets that they feel they themselves cannot express because
of their own personal baggage; perhaps a poet has as a bio exactly that of
yasusada but has not fully dealt with that in their publishing to date. thus
it becomes an experimental preface/footnote to a certain poet's work. there
are numerous examples we can all sit around & dream up. the point does indeed
seem to be that, perhaps more than other _Hiroshima_ poets, the Yasusada
controversy is generating a discussion. for now the talking is centered on
how we should be concerned with the poet him/her/itself. hopefully everyone
will realize that this too is a mask of sorts, & eventually deal with both
our own reactions to the work itself & feelings about the atrocities sitting
beneath both text&bio. if all this talk is merely fodder for email, then who
cares, but if years from now people remember the _Yasusada_ controversy &
more importantly, remember whether, why & where they were @ the time, then it
seems the poet/poetry involved has indeed fulfilled (one of) the purpose of
poetry: to affect ourSelves in some way, to alter our aspect of seeing
things, to shew a difference. read now, deconstruct later. perhaps this will
be sufficient.
douglis.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 11:44:11 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: roughness
Thanks, Emily, for the Spinster of Arts note. It's interesting that
someone has thought to do something about this. The majority of my
students are women and it has seemed strange to persist with
mastery and masters degrees. Is mastery or mistressery of texts and
or of images as dubious from the point of view of sado-masochism as
mastery and mistressery in relations between persons? best
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 18:46:03 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: Victim Art: the girl w/ cancer
gosh, this is so smart, i wish i'd thought to say it. --md
> At 3:55 PM 7/22/96, henry wrote:
>
> >Maybe I'm right AND wrong.
>
> Ditto for me Henry. A truer thing was never said on this list.
>
> Dodie
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 11:51:14 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
Jonathan Levin, a line got left out shd have been something about
"early John Bratby" and then went on to say "you are clearly closer to
the texts than I am". Technical incompetence on my part, I bet. And
by the way good luck with the softball, I really can say nothing
whatever abt that, even tho New Zealand has just won the world
Championship. best
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 20:35:43 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: roughness
In message <3DAA93F552E@ccnov2.auckland.ac.nz> UB Poetics discussion group
writes:
> Thanks, Emily, for the Spinster of Arts note. It's interesting that
> someone has thought to do something about this. The majority of my
> students are women and it has seemed strange to persist with
> mastery and masters degrees. Is mastery or mistressery of texts and
> or of images as dubious from the point of view of sado-masochism as
> mastery and mistressery in relations between persons? best
>
> Tony Green,
> e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
i guess textual mistery is too old-fashioned, too evocative of mistress vendler
and other dominatrixes ...?
md
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 16:45:23 -1000
Reply-To: Gabrielle Welford <welford@hawaii.edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.95L.960722165030.18679A-100000@labdien.cc.columbia.edu>
I'm going to risk talking again about the experience thing, in response to
Jonathan, because perhaps what's important about Plath's move in
associating her childhood (and others' childhoods) with existence in a
concentration camp is not that it belittles the experience of
concentration camp victims but that it raises the question (which I think
very pertinent) of the experience of small children in bad news families.
I want to say, "who are we to know what Plath's childhood felt like to
her?" I cringe at the fingerpointing that says, oh she was just a
dramatic female who was making use of historical horrors to aggrandize
herself. I guess what it boils down to is that both myself and my sister
have experienced our own childhoods in such a way that what we've read,
seen, heard about concentration camps rings bells for us. I don't doubt
that she chose an image that made sense to her. We underrate the terror
of children all the time.
Also growing up in suburbia is no guarantee, believe me, of things being
"nice." Just hidden.
gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 23:25:48 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: on the interpretation of posts, or, Good Reasons To Lurk
although i've posted some, i have been ambivalent from the start about
posting on this list because so often the posts seem contentious and
confrontational to a fault. but even more distressing, so often posts
seem almost willfully misunderstood.
this brings me to the post in response to postings on victim art. i
am not sure if the reply post was directed to me and my original post
(jeez, a post on a post on a post. a goddess will strike me dead for
this), but some of the posts seem to be depressingly off the mark in
interpretation of what i said, meant, asked, hoped to bring into
discussion -- i don't have quote feature used frequently so here is
cut and paste (best i can do) of chax's particularly depressingly
astray interpretation (if indeed he was referring to my posting):
" I originally was somewhat dismayed at this thread, in that it seemed
to want to posit stereotypes of sufferers who make art out of their
suffering, and on the other hand of artists who feel like they are
supposedto suffer in some specifically destructive ways. That seemed
to me to deny the specific nature of anyone who makes art out of any
circumstance, also seemed to want to lump all victims together, and I
found that rather insulting to large numbers of people who are really
all different, despite some shared social circumstances."
i am not sure what you find problematic about positing a stereotype,
if by "posit" you mean affirm the existence of. more to the point, i
didn't "want to posit," i was bringing forth real actual meat people
examples of a disturbing sterotype that is taking hold of the popular
imagination, as stereotypes all too often do. the people embodying
stereotype exist, the effect of the stereotype, the effect of the
perceived stereotype, the effect of the perceived necessity for this
stereotype (recognized and unrecognized as such), etc. all exist. why
would the existence of this stereotype, as well as the recognition of
the existence of this stereotype, the damage such stereotypes do, the
perception of such stereotypes, "deny the specific nature of anyone
who makes art out of any circumstance"? one of the specific
circumstances people make art out of IS stereotypes as well as
responses to stereotypes, responses to responses, etc.
if you recall, i made very careful note of both the stereotype as a
stereotype, and as a problematic to art and suffering and the
relationship between the two. in other words, i was speaking of the
ACTUAL, REAL, MEAT PERSON existence of actual real suffering people
who make art and often, make it out of suffering. in fact, as this
comment seems to pass right over...
**** i am one of those "people" who found themselves making art from
personal suffering!******
how could that POSSIBLY "deny the specific nature of anyone who makes
art out of any circumstance," much less "lump all the victims
together" in an insulting way -- am i insulting myself? if i, as one
of the "large numbers of people" (talk about lumping!) say i'm not
feeling insulted by my comments about myself, can we then assume they
weren't offensive to me and the others assumed as a lumpen mass to be
rising up, insulted, or anyway being so described by one who has not
placed himself in that group but rather, stands outside of it telling
us all how we all feel? i mean, can i decide for myself what i feel
is insulting to me, or do i have to wait for a proper literary male to
tell me when i and others of my sort have been insulted?
nowhere in any of the posts did i say all the people who have
suffered, or people who have "shared that social circumstance," are
alike except insofar as we HAVE had an experience of suffering and
have had it intertwine with our art. nowhere.
for heaven's sake, i made this posting, and was very CLEAR about
making this posting BECAUSE as an artist, i am trying to sort out the
way suffering and art interact (an issue concerning me a great deal
right now) and i wanted to get other lister's particular experiences
with that interaction. and as an editor and fellow artist and reader,
i've seen the two interact to the detriment of the art all too often
lately and i wanted to find out other lister's specific experiences
with that. i've also felt pressure (almost crippling at times) to
assess and affirm the artistic quality of a peice when, IF i evaluate
as an art peice, i will be under fire for evaluating it as an art
peice rather than just blindly affirming it because of the victimhood
of the creator. and guess what -- i wanted to get other listers'
particular experiences with that.
since i make all sorts of distinctions, explain the unresolved nature
of my thinking on the matter, describe the tangles i perceive, and ask
the list to work on untangling or further tangling or just think about
the relationship of suffering and art, and i give my personal
experience, as well as experience i've had with others, i hardly think
i ought be accused of either wanting to "deny the specific nature of
anyone who makes art out of any circumstance," or of wanting "to lump
all victims together" -- if indeed chax's comments were directed to me.
of course i may be misreading chax (and possibly dodie), who may not
have had me in mind in the least in their posts, thus meaning i am
committing the very act that has my knickers in a twist here! (...who
has that saying about becoming the thing we hate...?) and if so i am
contrite and sorry.
but SHEESHSSHSHH, i made that posting to see how other artists and
academics and literati handle the art that comes from suffering in the
current storm of me-too victim writing. and NO i am NOT saying all
art about victimization is me-too victim writing, i'm saying that
there are a number of people out there touting works they claim are
art about their claimed victimhood, requesting funding, support and
publication for the works in high art venues with the claim that the
works deserve such support BECAUSE they are high art, but when the
"art" of the work is called into question, the victimhood gets invoked
as the reason why the work is art and why the work should not be
criticized.
i've said, and am still saying, that there is GREAT GREAT art about
suffering. and work about suffering doesn't have to be really great
art to be worth writing, or reading, certainly in many contexts. but
work about suffering which claims to be great art and claims it is off
limits to normal literary processes and critiques because of the
suffering of the writer, well, i have a problem with that. and in
part, i have a problem because as a writer who has and is writing
about suffering, i am deathly afraid of falling into that hole and
struggle with what i feel, sometimes, is a slide down the slope while
at the same time feeling like it is important to be a witness when
we've been called to witness something. i'm saying i don't know what
to do, or how to sort out conflicting ideas i have about it and i was
asking for more ideas, probably equally conflicting, because i'm a
passive-aggressive subconscious masochist and did not feel i was
suffering enough with o'hara-ian "quandriness," and i wanted others to
suffer WITH me! 'nuff said?!
e
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 00:17:49 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Thomas Bell <trbell@USE.USIT.NET>
Subject: Re: feelingth, nothing more than feelingth... try to forget
In-Reply-To: <31f155806e20002@mhub0.tc.umn.edu>
> tom bell writes:
> effective therapy has
> > never had any connection to personal revalation.
>
> tom: can u say more abt this?
>
> md
>
It's much like content vs. form. It's not what the trauma
was, for example, but how it was (is) dealt with. The art
of therapy is inchanging the way something is revealed
(maladaptively to cratively, for example, or intellectually
to emotionally) to resolve a problem. _What is revealed
really doesn't mean a whole lot. _Effective_ treatment is
a process that doesn't get stuck in the endless rut of
pity. I can sned some references if you like.
tom
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 21:41:43 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Craig Douglas Dworkin <dworkin@UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU>
Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 21 Jul 1996 to 22 Jul 1996
In-Reply-To: <199607230401.VAA31023@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
Greetings,
I'm sorry to make my first posting to this group a tedious technical
question, but I've been working through Zukofsky's "A-8" and unlike the
conic sections of "A-9," I can't quite figure out how the "r" and "n"
sounds are deployed in the two relevant sections. I've read Ahearn and
Quartermain, but neither go into specifics and my calculus is pretty
rusty; has anyone actually worked out the math? In the final "Ballade,"
apparently, "the ratio of the accelerations of two sounds (r, n) is equal
to the ratio of the accelerations of the co-ordinates (x, y) of a particle
moving in a circular path for nine symmetrically located points on the
path." I get the general idea ("revolution," "movement," "value," "mass"
in both political and mathematic/kinetic terms), but what is really going
on mathematically?
Many thanks,
--Craig
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 22:18:56 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: Bad news
How about a Silvia Plath festival organized by an organization dedicated to
saving energy by switching to natural gas?
..........................
"An occasional crow makes poetry more interesting but not prophetic."
--Carl Rakosi
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 22:23:00 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: A plea for Ginny
Kevin
Thank you so much for the quotations from the Midwest interview with Adam
Ginsbert.
..........................
"An occasional crow makes poetry more interesting but not prophetic."
--Carl Rakosi
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 15:13:04 JST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: John Geraets <frank@DPC.AICHI-GAKUIN.AC.JP>
Subject: Re: roughness
Comments: cc: nada@go1.com, t.green@auckland.ac.nz
I think that having been in Japan a while the notions of mastery,
intention, roughness have lost some of their specificity for me.
The best book I've read this year was on the faces of
three of my students. They told me they'd put on a "face
poem" presentation, that's all I knew. Their friend'd brought
a video camera to record it; another got up and turned on
the tape of the Swedish (I think) electrobeat group so
popular now amongst young Japanese. The three young women
marched in--yes, marched--they had put on white t-shirts beforehand
over their regular clothes, their faces had been decorated with
make up and some script I couldn't make out as yet. They
marched in, lined themselves behind the front table, then
one at a time half-shouted half-sung
E N J O Y Y O U R N O W.
Then, of course, they laughed, I laughed, we all did. It was
a great seven or eight seconds. Later, when we talked about
it as a class--you'll understand, in the difficult English
medium we share--they showed how they'd written on the cheeks
of each in turn enjoy-your-now in mascara (eh??sp?); also, the first
had written the kanji character for enjoy on her chin; the
second nothing; the third in katakana (a further Japanese
syllabry (?) used for introduced foreign words) now.
A few things got me. I enjoyed their sense of innovation, the
fact that they'd capitalized on (inadvertent no doubt) such a
classical english poetry theme, the tacticity, the unexpected
slight twist of the expected conventional syntax, the joy (so
different from my and my culture's sense of it, I think)...
Another group wanted to write a love poem, but found the going
tough. So they culled odd lines and snippets from Shakespeare, Keats,
and others gleaned from a collection of classical english poetry
that they'd found in the library (and boy! are Japanese university
libraries under-utilized!). Now that had a beautiful roughness, and
all the charm of our confabulation with found objects, poems,
whatever. Not quite satisfied, they built the poem into a brief
dramatic script based on a Costner film 'Revenge' (as I
recall). I mean...
Another group presented a story about a baby that a Sumo wrestler
discovered one day in his clothes drawer and who as she grew up
had her dream of becoming a supermodel in Italy almost thwarted
because she was overfed on chunko...
Watching and being with my 4th-year English majors "creative
writing" (eh?) class has been very interesting, not only
because we're really having fun but also because for me at least
it's opening up such notions as intentionality, mastery,
roughness to their own limitedness. And limitedness in a positive
sense, valuable in itself but also valuable in its denial.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 17:44:12 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: comparative suffering
In-Reply-To: <40CA1136D78@ccnov2.auckland.ac.nz>
being examined... hello to those other experiencers of hell on the
list--my examiners. :-) gab.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 02:33:26 GMT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Lisa Jarnot <jarnot@PIPELINE.COM>
Subject: new books/soho letter press
Howdy you all,
Soho Letter Press has put out four new chapbooks under the Situations
banner:
Situations #1: Lapsus Linguae by Marcella Durand, 16pp, $5.
Durand's Lapsus Linguae is about how one of the cats is afraid of the
stuffed
rabbit. Lyrics in series that cross. Teeth in the mystery of public
places
& tonguing is ok. "This office & all the computers in it are God."
Situations #2: Thunk by Kevin Davies, 16pp, $3.
Davies' Thunk is a mutating passage of prose blocks and short lyrics that
move in and out of hilarious and nasty exhortation to revolve. "Quit
naming
the animals." You may not wear a mask but you may get ripped on Cary's
secret stash.
Situations # 3: Western Love by Bill Luoma, 44pp, $5.
Luoma's Western Love is a series of short lyrics spoken by cowboys, jack
rabbits, and saloon girls. Images by Charles Buckley. "I want to crouch
around your merry mack."
Situations #4: Sea Lyrics by Lisa Jarnot, 40pp, $5.
Jarnot's Sea Lyrics are set as a series of prose poems about Jack London
Square, Alameda, and buying jam in the early morning. I am is the refrain.
They smart. As much music as you can handle. "I am a drag queen named
Heather not quite ready for New York."
The Situations chapbook series is published by Joe Elliot. So make Checks
out to Joe Elliot.
Send Orders to:
Soho Letter Press
71 Green Street
NYC 10012
phone: 212-334-4356
fax: 212-334-4357
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 23:27:22 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Re: feelingth/holocaust
> I guess you guys get an A.
>
> Dodie
What, are you nuts, darling? You get an A in this course:
All of us get A's for effort and C's for self-restraint.
Is there truly a person on this list who can read his/her
own posts without sighing and thinking "why did I say that?"
Tapping his ruler on the edge of the desk with such precision
that the rhythm of his report spells the word *mastery*
in morse code,
Rob Hardin
"We must take care to control our passions. Otherwise, madness
and violence are the result."--John Wesley Hardin, distant relation
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 23:13:17 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Thomas Bell <trbell@USE.USIT.NET>
Subject: Re: comparative suffering
In-Reply-To: <31f680b65111300@mhub0.tc.umn.edu>
"trauma" was defined by psychiatrists as "an event that is
outside the range of usual human experience and that would be markedly
distressing to almost anyone..."
I use this almost daily on insurance forms, etc. and still
puzzle over its meaning.
tom
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 09:35:46 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: seattle in sept. (forwarded message)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 20:02:59 -0600
From: Frank Moore <fmoore@lanminds.com>
To: "J.A. Heriot" <jaheriot@teleport.com>
Cc: fmoore@lanminds.com
Subject: seattle in sept.
PRESS RELEASE
They have called him "art outlaw" (CHICAGO NEW READER), "obscene artist"
(Sen. Jesse Helms], "transformative" (HIGH PERFORMANCE MAGAZINE). He has
made a reputation for himself as a controversial performance artist and
video maker. But it has been his poems, books, and essays about art,
magic, and life...and his zine THE CHEROTIC (r)EVOLUTIONARY... which
have inspired young radical artists and writers all over the world
during the last 30 years and have made him the voice for many different
alternative communities and forces of cultural change.
He is Frank Moore and he is coming to Seattle.
911 MEDIA ARTS will show his award-winning, intensely moving video Out
of Isolation...a unique love story, on SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1996 at 8
p.m. Mr. Moore will be available after the screening for questions.
911 MEDIA ARTS is located at:
117 Yale Avenue North, Seattle
206-682-6552
(Out of Isolation) "stayed in my mind far more persistently than I first
expected, at least based on what the film-makers with millions of
dollars at their
disposal call 'production values' and 'professional polish'. What most
of these high-priced pieces lack, of course, is substance and a
genuinely different -- and deeply challenging -- point of view.
Something to shake up, shatter, shame, inspire, perspire, ponder and
play with long after the cassette gets rewound. Your films did that for
me: they are definitely not easy to absorb, follow, or even 'enjoy' in
the ordinary pop-culture sense. But you don't forget watching them,
ever." Scott Lankford, Foothill College.
Then on SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1996 at 8 p.m. Moore will appear at PISTIL
BOOKS & NEWS doing a free poetry reading, EROTIC REALITIES.
PISTIL BOOKS & NEWS is located at:
1013 E. Pike, Seattle
206 325-5401
"If a zine could be a performance art piece, Cherotic is it. What a
wild, crazy smorgasbord of mind-blowing sensory assault. And it's all
tied together through the "shamanistic," erotic, electrified art of
Frank Moore. In the future, when we look back at the 90s, wondering
where the freaky culture came from, Cherotic and Moore will be a couple
of its heros." Sticky Green, The Sinner's Bible
"Since 1980, Frank Moore has been creating and carving a niche of his
own within a creative artistic and literary community at one time
traditionally reserved for others. His journey of self-identification &
self-discovery as unique statements are documented not only in his fine
collection of revolutionary, subversive, anarchical, magical videos,
books and 'zines but now he (and Linda Mac) have been very busy again,
producing and marketing The Cherotic Revolutionary, "a 'zine (according
to Frank) about 'The Edge' for and by people on The Edge...if not over
The Edge." EIDOS magazine
--
In Freedom, Frank
http://users.lanminds.com/~fmoore
-------- End forwarded message --------
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 10:39:30 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Carnography <scrypt@INTERPORT.NET>
Subject: Susan Walsh reported missing, 7/16/96
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7
Village Voice, current issue, page 13:
Susan Walsh, 36, a Voice contributor, disappeared last week after leaving
her home to run an errand. Walsh was the chief researcher for Red Light, a
book on the sex industry by Voice staffers Sylvia Plachy and James
Ridgeway, and an assistant producer for two television documentaries about
sex workers. She is five foot six inches, weighs 111 pounds and has blonde
hair and blue eyes. She was last seen at noon on Tuesday, July 16, on
Washington Aenuye in Nutley, New Jersey, and was wearing a black, one-piece
tank-top dress and black sandals. If you have any information about Walsh's
whereabouts, please call 201-694-8928.
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=
=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7
She was my girlfriend for four years (though we've been broken up for two).
I won't be on this list for a little while. I barely feel as if I'm
here at all.
All the best,
Rob Hardin
http://www.interport.net/~scrypt
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 13:02:28 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael Coffey <MCOFFEY@PW.CAHNERS.COM>
Subject: poetry month, as reported in pw
We have a piece in Publishers Weekly this week, reporting some figures
and impressions about the success, on the retail level, of the National
Poetry Month promotion, which i post without comment.
Poetry Month Survey: Sales, Interest Up
The first National Poetry Month (News, March 25) was launched this
past April with hopes of increasing both the general awareness of
poetry and poetry sales. The strategy appears to have succeeded,
according to a survey carried out by the Academy of American Poets,
the organizer and one of the sponsors of the campaign.The study found
that booksellers who already sell a lot of poetry are reporting substantial
increases in sales. Even for those booksellers who sell less, the event
increased customers? awareness of poetry, the first step toward
increasing sales, the report noted. Based on the April promotion, many
bookstores?including those that hold many poetry events during the
year?have found that their communities will support increased
poetry-related events year-round. The report also suggests that
publishers tour poets the way they tour other authors, at least during
the annual April poetry push. NPM also showed that many publishers,
not all of them small presses, are committed to promoting poetry.The
momentum in poetry sales has yet to die down for Borders, which
reports that April sales increased significantly over March?s as well as
over those of the previous April, in many cases by as much as a third.
Recent titles, prize-winning collections and collections advertised in
conjunction with NPM performed well, as did core backlist titles by such
classic authors as Dickinson, Whitman and Yeats. Poetry-on-cassette
sales were also successful, quadrupling from the previous
month.Barnes & Noble showed an average increase of 25%. For titles
specifically promoted during NPM, increases ranged from 50% to
100%.Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, Iowa, had a ?substantial
increase? in poetry sales, and they increased by ?at least 600%? for the
UCLA Bookstore in Los Angeles, with $3500 in poetry sales in the first
week of April alone.The academy report notes that the enthusiasm
generated during the first National Poetry Month will get a boost when
plans get under way for the second NPM in April ?97.
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 11:42:57 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Schlafly letter (fwd)
There's an address where Schlafly can be reached at the bottom. gab.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 7/24/96 2:29 PM
From: Tim Stroshane
Forwarded mail received from:
CENTER1:CENTER2:TCPBRIDGE:CI:SMTPGATE:"MSCOLEMAN@AOL.COM"
Here's something forwarded twice from a feminist economists' list
to the progressive economists' list. It's quite an exhortation
from the greatest of them all...
How can this woman sleep at night? Read on at your own peril, and not
on a full stumach. 'sister rat' maggie coleman mscoleman@aol.com
---------------------
Forwarded message:
From: eswank@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Eric W Swank)
Sender: femecon-l@bucknell.edu
Reply-to: femecon-l@bucknell.edu
To: femecon-l@bucknell.edu (Multiple recipients of list)
Date: 96-07-23 13:27:56 EDT
Listers,
Check this out. Also, Schlafly can be reached at the Eagle Forum's
email address is at the bottom of this posting.
Eric Swank
Ohio State
Forwarded message:
> From owner-wmst-l@UMDD.UMD.EDU Mon Jul 22 19:52:40 1996
> Message-ID: <960722140654_439383014@emout09.mail.aol.com>
> Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 14:07:32 -0400
> Reply-To: "Women's Studies List" <WMST-L@UMDD.UMD.EDU>
> Sender: "Women's Studies List" <WMST-L@UMDD.UMD.EDU>
> From: Jenny Thigpen <JThig92577@AOL.COM>
> Subject: schlafly letter
> To: Multiple recipients of list WMST-L <WMST-L@UMDD.UMD.EDU>
>
>
>
> Open Letter to VMI Alumni
>
>
>
> June 11, 1996 by Phyllis Schlafly
>
> This is an open letter to Virginia Military Institute Alumni.
>
> Dear Alumni:
>
> Your VMI training not only taught you to be tough, courageous
> and honorable, but also to survive humiliation and harassment. You
> are now facing your greatest challenge.
>
> You've lost a major battle. Are you going to be survivors, or
> are you going to let the enemy wipe you and your kind from the face
> of the earth, pour salt in the soil that produced you, and drop you
> down the Memory Hole?
>
> The most important factor in any confrontation is the ancient
> maxim "Know your enemy." I'm not sure you ever understood the
> nature of your enemy.
>
> The massive government lawsuit against VMI wasn't about "ending
> sex discrimination" or "allowing women to have access to the same
> educational benefits that men have at VMI." It was a no-holds-barred
> fight to feminize VMI waged by the radical feminists and their
> cohorts in the Federal Government.
>
> The radical feminists just can't stand it that any institution
> in America is permitted to motivate and train real men to manifest
> the uniquely masculine attributes. Feminists want to gender-
> neutralize all men so they can intimidate and control them. The
> feminists' longtime, self-proclaimed goal is an androgynous society.
> Repudiating constitutional intent, history, tradition and human
> nature, they seek to forbid us, in public or private life, to
> recognize the differences between men and women.
>
> Feminist strategy is straightforward: whine that women are
> victims of centuries of "oppression" and "stereotyping," lay a
> guilt trip on men, and use all the stereotypical cultural techniques
> that women have always used to wheedle what they want out of men.
> Then, use feminists on the public payroll in all three branches of
> government to change the laws in order to force us to conform.
>
> Since feminists successfully got women admitted into the
> military academies, and got the Clinton Administration to assign
> women to military combat positions, VMI and the Citadel remained as
> the most visible fortresses of the concept that men and women are
> fundamentally different. The feminists hate you just because you
> exist.
>
> The notion that a military institution that has functioned with
> success, public acceptance, and significant prestige for 157 years,
> suddenly, one day in June 1996, can be rationally said to violate the
> Constitution is patently ridiculous. Black robes and Ruth Bader
> Ginsburg's devious rhetoric about "scrutiny" can't make such judicial
> arrogance any less ridiculous.
>
> The idea of setting up a VMI course for women at Mary Baldwin
> College to save VMI from an adverse decision was a futile gesture,
> and Ginsburg held this expensive effort up to ridicule as "invented
> post hoc in response to litigation." You need to understand that
> the lawsuit against VMI had nothing to do with securing opportunities
> or benefits for women; it only had to do with destroying the
> masculine integrity of VMI.
>
> Ginsburg's opinion asserted that "women's successful entry into
> the federal military academies" proves that women can successfully
> matriculate at VMI. That assumption is false because VMI's regimen
> is very different from the military academies'. The VMI trial record
> proved that women's so-called "successful" experience in the federal
> military academies is based on quotas, dual standards, and gender
> norming. Female cadets compete against other female cadets for
> designated female slots, rather than competing against the men.
>
> The VMI decision was wholly predictable when Clinton appointed
> Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Court. Her activist determination to
> write her radical feminist goals into the Constitution was all
> laid out in her published writings, but no Senator questioned her
> about them. Every Senator who voted for her confirmation shares in
> the shame of this decision.
>
> VMI Alumni, your response to this Supreme Court defeat should
> be to reject the state subsidy and embark on a national fundraising
> drive to raise the money to keep VMI functioning exactly as it always
> has. If the still-existing single-sex colleges, such as Wellesley and
> Smith, can survive on private fundraising plus government student
> loans, and if Hillsdale College can survive without any government
> funds at all, there's no reason why VMI and the Citadel can't do
> this, too.
>
> Don't make the mistake of changing VMI's unique lifestyle to
> try to accommodate Sister Rats. The women who seek a military career
> based on dual standards and gender norming can go to West Point,
> Annapolis, or the Air Force Academy.
>
> VMI Alumni, if you allow Ginsburg et all to do to VMI what Pat
> Schroeder et all have done to the United States Navy, you are not
> the exemplars of manhood we thought you were. And that goes for
> Citadel alumni, too.
>
>
> EAGLE FORUM -- eagle@eagleforum.org
> PO Box 618
> Alton, IL 62002
> Phone: 618-462-5415
> ----------------------------------------------
> Tell a friend about us!
>
> http://www.eagleforum.org
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
NOTICE FOR JOURNALISTS AND RESEARCHERS: Please ask for written
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Subject: Fwd: Schlafly letter
Date: Tue Jul 23 16:39:54 1996
Message-ID: <9607241421.aa27254@ci.ci.berkeley.ca.us>
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 15:06:58 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: English-only Update -- VI (fwd)
Yuk. All call. gab.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Update on English-Only Legislation -- VI
>
> July 25, 1996
>
>A modified English-only bill, approved yesterday by the House
>Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee, appears to be
>on a legislative fast track. After months of inaction, H.R. 123
>(the "Language of Government Act") is suddenly a priority for
>House Republican leaders. The measure is expected to come to a
>vote late next week, before Congress leaves for its August
>recess. With nearly 200 cosponsors and a clear display of
>party discipline in committee, the English-only bill seems
>likely to pass in the House, although Senate support remains
>uncertain.
>
>If enacted, H.R. 123 would designate English as the official --
>and sole permissible -- language of U.S. government business,
>with only a few exceptions. The use of other languages would be
>permitted for purposes of national security, international trade
>and diplomacy, public safety, and criminal proceedings.
>
>To mollify critics of the bill's restrictiveness, Rep. Randy
>Cunningham (R-Calif.) proposed an amended version of H.R. 123
>that would also waive the English-only mandate in the case of
>language education -- including programs funded under the
>Bilingual Education Act and the Native American Languages Act --
>public health, census activities, and civil lawsuits brought by
>the U.S. government. It would also exempt oral communications
>with the public by federal employees, officials, and members of
>Congress. Federal publications -- that is, virtually all written
>materials -- in languages other than English would still be
>banned. The House committee passed the Cunningham "substitute"
>on a vote of 19 Republicans in favor and 17 Democrats against.
>
>The committee's day-long session was remarkable for its rancor
>and partisanship, even by the standards of the 104th Congress.
>Democrats accused the Republican majority of desperately seeking
>to exploit anti-immigrant feeling in an election year, even if
>that meant violating constitutional principles of free speech
>and equal rights. "What about people who think in another
>language?" asked ranking Democrat Bill Clay (Mo.). "Would your
>bill prohibit that?" Republicans labeled such attacks as
>"demagogy," insisting they merely want to unite the country
>through a common language and help newcomers learn English.
>
>Rep. Matthew Martinez (D-Calif.) argued that the bill would
>deprive limited English speakers of essential rights and
>services while doing nothing to address the acute shortage of
>adult English classes in cities like New York and Los Angeles.
>(In the past two years, Congressional budget cutters have
>substantially reduced federal support for such classes.) "The
>idea that people who come to this country don't want to speak
>English is the sickest thing I've ever heard," Martinez said,
>accusing the bill's proponents of "promoting fear" of language
>minorities. "I'm sorry that people on the other side of the
>aisle are so insecure that they feel they need to do this," he
>said.
>
>Cunningham responded to Martinez: "You want to keep people in
>the barrio" by discouraging them from learning English. "We want
>to empower them." Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-N.C.) added that "the
>purpose of this bill isn't just to make people speak English;
>it's to help them reach the American dream." As a small business
>owner, Ballenger said he had personally sponsored language
>classes for his foreign-born employees. "My Vietnamese are the
>best workers in the world because they can speak English," he
>said.
>
>Citing the majority's refusal to discuss constitutional
>objections or to justify any need for the legislation, Rep. Pat
>Williams (D-Mont.) called the session "the most maddening debate
>I've sat through in my 18 years in Congress." Rep. Chaka Fattah
>(D-Pa.) observed that even though everyone was speaking English,
>there was little communication taking place between the two
>sides.
>
>Throughout the day the partisan split was consistent in votes on
>several proposed amendments, with not a single defection from
>either the Democratic or Republican side.
>
>The committee rejected an amendment by Del. Carlos Romero-
>Barcelo (D-P.R.) that would have allowed federal agencies to
>communicate in other languages to promote government efficiency.
>Rep. Jan Meyers (R-Kans.) argued that such an exemption would
>"totally gut the bill. What we're saying is that agencies must
>communicate in English. ... If I was in China, I wouldn't expect
>their government to print everything in my language."
>
>The lawmakers then approved a proposal by Rep. Lindsey Graham
>(R-S.C.) to extend English-only restrictions to all
>"publications, informational materials, income-tax forms, and
>the contents of franked [i.e., Congressional and other U.S.
>government] mail." Under questioning, Graham conceded that his
>amendment would forbid virtually any written communication by a
>federal agency in another language, including the tourist-
>oriented pamphlets of the National Park Service. Graham
>insisted, however, that "common sense" would eliminate any need
>to remove the slogan "E Pluribus Unum" from U.S. currency and
>coins.
>
>Rep. Patsy Mink (D-Hi.) offered an amendment to keep the bill
>from infringing the freedom of speech, due process, and equal
>protection of the law. But Republicans objected to including
>what Graham called a "laundry list" of constitutional rights.
>Instead, they inserted an assurance that H.R. 123 was not
>intended to conflict with the U.S. Constitution.
>
>Finally, the committee rejected an English Plus substitute
>proposed by Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.). It would have
>removed the bill's restrictive features and advocated a policy
>of encouraging the acquisition of English, plus other languages,
>to promote international competitiveness and preserve cultural
>resources. Before voting against the Becerra amendment,
>Cunningham conceded that "we're fools if we don't learn other
>languages in this country." But he insisted that language
>restrictions are necessary because of "a propensity for more and
>more Americans not to speak English" -- citing anecdotal
>evidence from his own Congressional district in south San Diego.
>
>Until this week, H.R. 123 had appeared to be going nowhere. Its
>chief sponsor, Rep. Bill Emerson (R-Mo.), recently died after a
>long bout with cancer. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a longtime
>backer of English-only legislation, apparently decided the
>measure could boost Republicans' prospects in the 1996 election.
>As recently as May, Committee chairman Bill Goodling (R-Pa.) had
>assured the Joint National Committee for Languages that he
>would block the bill from reaching the House floor. But Goodling
>did an unexplained about-face yesterday, along with Rep. Steve
>Gunderson (R-Wisc.) and other members of the majority side who
>had expressed reservations about H.R. 123 during committee
>hearings.
>
>In the Senate, Republicans have postponed three scheduled votes
>on a companion measure, S. 356, where support is weaker than on
>the House side of the Capitol. Meanwhile, the Justice and
>Education departments have spoken out in opposition. But
>President Clinton, who once signed a similar measure as governor
>of Arkansas, has yet to commit himself publicly on federal
>English-only legislation.
>
>
>Jim Crawford
>73261.1120@compuserve.com
>** Feel free to forward electronically or recirculate in print**
>
>
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 22:05:12 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: indigestible?
In-Reply-To: <199607260409.AAA02658@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Last night's digest proved to be a repeat of the previous day --
Did non-digest recipients get anything yesterday?
Who will translate for Bob Dornan if the English only bill passes?
Tried to go to the Beatnik Bookstore in Boulder last week -- the
proprietor didn't show up! seemed appropriate --
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 07:16:05 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Pierre Joris <joris@CSC.ALBANY.EDU>
Subject: EMF GENERAL ALERT (fwd)
Thot this message wld be of interest to a number of people on the list --
the Electronic Music Foundation is a great site & well worth checking out
& supporting -- Pierre
=======================================================================
Pierre Joris | "Form fascinates when one no longer has the force
Dept. of English | to understand force from within itself. That
SUNY Albany | is, to create." -- Jacques Derrida
Albany NY 12222 |
tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | "Poetry is the promise of a language."
email: | -- Friedrich Holderlin
joris@cnsunix.albany.edu|
=======================================================================
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 11:59:46 -0500
From: Electronic Music Foundation <EMF@emf.org>
To: emfnet@emf.org
Subject: EMF GENERAL ALERT
EMF GENERAL ALERT
========================== July 18, 1996
In brief, Electronic Music Foundation has just uploaded a completely new
Web site, packed with interesting information and leads to magnificent
music and related materials. The URL is
http://www.emf.org
This email message is being sent to you either because you've already asked
to be on our list or because someone passed on your address in the belief
that you'll be interested in what we have to say. If you would rather not
receive future messages from us, simply let us know. If you've received
this message from a friend and you'd like to hear from us directly, just
tell us so in no uncertain terms.
Contents:
1. CDeMUSIC becomes a Magellan 3-star site!
2. An overview of our new Web site
3. An invitation to participate
==========================
1. CDeMUSIC becomes a Magellan 3-star site!
We're very pleased to announce that Magellan has awarded our CDeMUSIC site
a three-star status. Their review mentioned elegant design and the
performance of an important function in making noncommercial CDs available.
http://magellan.mckinley.com/review.cgi?sid=63596
==========================
2. An overview of our new Web site
It's not only a new site, it's a whole new ballgame. Our goal, remember, is
to provide access to materials and dissemination of information regarding
the history and current practice of electronic music. Well, here's some
significant progress. For an overview, read a letter from the president.
http://www.emf.org/emf_letter.html
In the access to materials department, CDeMUSIC has reopened its doors in a
big way and we're in process of a continuing extension of our CD catalogs.
Our plans are to extend the scope of CDeMUSIC to include all forms of
exceptional and experimental music, even if it doesn't use electronics.
http://www.emf.org/cde_frontdoor.html
Further, we've redefined the Inner Circle to offer people better guidance
through the new music terrain.
http://www.emf.org/cde_circle.html
The EMF Store has begun operations with books by Barbara Golden, Iannis
Xenakis, Reynold Weidenaar, and Trevor Wishart; a videotape on the theremin
by Robert Moog; and M, the first interactive composing program, originally
published by Intelligent Music. Not only books, videotapes, CD-ROMs, and
other items that we think are important, we'll also offer historically
important software.
http://www.emf.org/store_frontdoor.html
The Open Market continues to allow composers to present their work directly
to the public.
http://www.emf.org/om_frontdoor.html
In the dissemination of information department, there's the EMF Worldwide
Calendar where you'll soon be able to find the most interesting events in
this most interesting of musical worlds.
http://www.emf.org/cal_frontdoor.html
Our guide to Web sites includes pointers to exceptional items (even if
occasionally ephemeral) and ongoing important resources. And just in case
you know what you're looking for, there's a real directory to the virtual
world.
http://www.emf.org/sites_frontdoor.html
And if you prefer to look rather than listen, we've begun to put together a
photo archive project. Our first group of photos is by Renee Moog. But
more. Have a look also at Renee's photo group from Senegal, called "A
Global Village." Navigate from the photo archives page.
http://www.emf.org/photo_frontdoor.html
==========================
3. An invitation to participate
We invite you to send us calendar information, recommend web sites, and let
us know if you have important photos. If you want to sell a CD or a tape or
some other item, contact us.
And if you'd like to support our activities, we'd be grateful. We've
extended the enrollment period for Charter Subscribers until September 15.
But please don't wait. The current list of Charter Subscribers is
distinguished not only by the excellence of the professional activity it
represents but also by its generosity in helping us get started. We will
recognize our Charter Subscribers forever.
http://www.emf.org/emf_csubs.html
We invite you to make a small investment, become a Charter Subscriber, and
achieve virtual immortality.
=====================================================
Electronic Music Foundation
116 North Lake Avenue
Albany NY 12206
USA
(518) 434-4110 Voice
(518) 434-0308 Fax
EMF@emf.org
http://www.emf.org
##
=====================
Electronic Music Foundation
116 N. Lake Ave.
Albany, NY 12206
USA
http://www.emf.org
518.434.4110 - voice
518.434.0308 - fax
EMF@emf.org - email
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 08:26:26 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gwyn McVay <gmcvay1@OSF1.GMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: English-only Update -- VI (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.93.960725150607.14503B-100000@uhunix5>
Gab, this may be typical of our Zeitgeist, but it betrays a really
twisted Weltanschauung and a complete lack of savoir-faire, not to
mention joie de vivre. ?Como no?
Gwyn
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 08:36:00 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" <pritchpa@SILVERPLUME.IIX.COM>
Subject: Re: indigestible?
Comments: To: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@email.SJSU.EDU>
Dear Aldon,
Welcome to Boulder. Yes, the Beat Bookshop keeps, appropriately as you said,
"odd hours." It's run by Tom Peters, who knows his books. Only last week I
scored a first edition of Ronald Johnson's "Ark: The Foundation" (sic) on
the cheap. Are you here for kicks, or is this a "career move?"
"Wake up new & strange
displaced,
at home" (Ted Berrigan)
Patrick Pritchett
pritchpa@silverplume.iix.com
----------
From: Aldon L. Nielsen
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS
Subject: Re: indigestible?
Date: Friday, July 26, 1996 3:20AM
<<File Attachment: HEADERS.TXT>>
Last night's digest proved to be a repeat of the previous day --
Did non-digest recipients get anything yesterday?
Who will translate for Bob Dornan if the English only bill passes?
Tried to go to the Beatnik Bookstore in Boulder last week -- the
proprietor didn't show up! seemed appropriate --
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 09:29:38 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: comparative suffering
In message <Pine.GSO.3.93.960724174332.5708C-100000@uhunix5> UB Poetics
discussion group writes:
> being examined... hello to those other experiencers of hell on the
> list--my examiners. :-) gab.
good exam vibes coming your way...md
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 13:23:04 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth/holocaust
re "Is there truly a person on this list who can read his/her
own posts without sighing and thinking "why did i say that"
-- you get that too? thank god. i thought i was the only one.
e
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 09:14:48 -1000
Reply-To: Gabrielle Welford <welford@hawaii.edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Gabrielle Welford <welford@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Re: English-only Update -- VI (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.960726082526.17832D-100000@osf1.gmu.edu>
Claro que si! How can we comprendre each other s'il y a seulement one
lingua? Newyddion drwg! gab.
On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Gwyn McVay wrote:
> Gab, this may be typical of our Zeitgeist, but it betrays a really
> twisted Weltanschauung and a complete lack of savoir-faire, not to
> mention joie de vivre. ?Como no?
>
> Gwyn
>
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 15:15:55 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Maria Damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: feelingth/holocaust
In message <199607261723.NAA06934@toast.ai.mit.edu> UB Poetics discussion group
writes:
> re "Is there truly a person on this list who can read his/her
> own posts without sighing and thinking "why did i say that"
> -- you get that too? thank god. i thought i was the only one.
> e
o geez--truer words were never typed.--md
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 16:49:05 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Michael Leddy <cfml@EIU.EDU>
Subject: Lacy and Creeley et al.
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960418115135.8A-100000@ux1>
I've been reading, not contributing. Okay, lurking. I'll show my face--
1. I've noticed discussion here and there of Steve Lacy's settings of
poems. But I don't think anyone has mentioned that the title track of his
fairly recent quartet recording _Revenue_ is presented as a portrait of
Robert Creeley. Another piece on _Revenue_, "This Is It," is based on
words by James Broughton (no vocal though).
2. The NY Times ran an obituary for Merrill Gilfillan this week, confusing
the naturalist father (who died, at 85 or 86) with his son the poet.
(I.e., the three books To Creature, Light Years, and River through
Rivertown, along with others, were credited to the elder MG.) Does
anyone know whatever became of MG the poet? Is he still writing? The
Times said that he lives in Boulder. (I've found all three books here in
"east-central Illinois.")
3. There was also a Times obituary for M. L. Rosenthal. (I remember
looking at The Modern Poetic Sequence many years back and at some point
realizing that the book did not include Louis Zukofsky.)
4. Finally, from last Sunday's Times Book Review, Richard Tillinghast on
Seamus Heaney: "He has been and is here for good."
Michael Leddy / Charleston, IL
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 21:49:02 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Jazz/Text alert
In-Reply-To: <199607270405.AAA16270@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Thanks for the tip on new Lacy --
Two additional CDs might be of interest to folk on the list --
Anthony Braxton's _Composition No. 173_ for four actors and 14
instrumentalists just released on Black Saint -- Not sure what I make of
the dialogue in this "play," but the recording makes fascinating
listening -- Things have come a long way since Hemphill's _Roi Boye_ --
The new Braxton was recorded in 94 in New York --
Not as new, but new to me, is Cecil Taylor's _Iwontunwonsi_, recorded at
Sweet Basil way back in '86, but mastered in March of 95 -- Session
begins with a Taylor poem -- CD Booklet alson includes a poem, in both
English and Japanese versions! -- well, maybe the Japanese isn't a
translation of the poem; how would I know -- to further confuse things,
the end of the poem in the notes says "to be continued to SSCD-8066 --
Anybody seen that anywhere yet??
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 09:57:02 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: this crime to the writing fraternity (fwd)
since one digest seems to have disappeared, I'm sending this through again.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 22:17:45 -0700 (PDT)
From: Aldon L. Nielsen <anielsen@athens>
To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Cc: Recipients of POETICS digests <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Subject: Re: this crime to the writing fraternity
Nobody has identified the segment I posted here from "A Critical Fable"
-- to my very great surprise --
Several on the list guessed James Russell Lowell -- Alan noted that
internal refs. made that unlikely -- several guessed a 20th century
parody of Lowell -- but nobdoy guessed that the poem is by --
AMY LOWELL
By the way, On my copy of _The Complete Poetical Works_ the subtitle
reads: "A Militant Crusader for the Cause of Modern Poetry"
but she never, in the entire volume, explains just what did cause modern
poetry --
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 18:52:11 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Thomas Bell <trbell@USE.USIT.NET>
Subject: cancer poetry
Some info in response to request last week:
Audre Lorde's _Cancer Journals_
Dreifuss-Katten lists 12 books of English and German poetry related to
Cancer experiences (Dreifuss- Kattan, E. (1990). Cancer stories:
Creativity and self-repair. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press).
tom
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 19:41:03 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: cancer poetry
one of the best books i read in 1990 was helene davis's _chemopoet_, poems
written during and about experiencing breast cancer.
e
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 18:23:32 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bob Holman <Nuyopoman@AOL.COM>
Subject: Gloria Tropp
In a message dated 96-07-15 00:14:45 EDT, you write:
<< Can anyone on this list give me any information about a poet named Gloria
Tropp? She was active on the East Village scene in the arly sixties, and
was then married to poet Stephen Tropp -- I'm particularly interested in
tracking down any publications by this poet -- It's possible her name may
have changed since that time --
For that matter, does anyone know Stephen Tropp?
Is Dick Higgins still on this list, who might have encountered them ? >>
Steve and Gloria Tropp, fascinating jazz poets, were around at the first
readings I sawin New York in 1969. They were Beat fringe, and good buddies
with the exquisite populist, Don Lev. Steve was a big white guy, a
messenger, who read surreal jazz bursts hilariously from a red springback
binder. Gloria, a beautiful black woman in a long gold fall, would scat
behind and in front. My favorite Steve was an "ALice in Wonderland" poem;
Gloria's outrageous "How Are Tings in Gloccamorra" was a universe-stopper.
The most astonishing performance I saw them give was in 1977 when the NYC
Poetyr Calendar had its first Benefit at the Basement Workshop. Gloria, who
has a tendency to forsake time when she performs, was last, and turned the
event from a Reading to an all-inclusive Performance, complete with
umbrellas.
Jim Brodey got wild.
Steve dies about ten years ago. Gloria still lives on Upper Riverside Drive,
as far as I know, and still performs on occasion.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 11:02:47 GMT+1200
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Tony Green <t.green@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ>
Organization: The University of Auckland
Subject: Re: cancer poetry
Anyone in the U.S. read Wystan Curnow's Cancer Diary? That is a
must...for one thing, right away from the personal-confessional mode.
It asks among other things: "Is there humour in a tumour?"
Tony Green,
e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 20:45:38 EST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" <kimmelman@ADMIN.NJIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: cancer poetry
Paul Blackburn's *The Journals* has some harrowing and beautiful
cancer poetry--very moving stuff; be warned.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 12:06:48 JST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: John Geraets <frank@DPC.AICHI-GAKUIN.AC.JP>
Subject: Re: cancer poetry
Comments: cc: w.curnow@auckland.ac.nz
Folks should also check out Wystan Curnow's _Cancer Daybook_ (1989),
another set of poems involving cancer treatment & experience.
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 21:48:43 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: dp
In-Reply-To: <199607290412.AAA00804@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
New address and phone number as follows:
Aldon L. Nielsen
3055 30th St.
Apt. #2
Boulder, CO 80301
(303) 541-9467
If you've sent material for _lower limit speech_, be patient. I hope
to get the next number out early Sept., from Boulder.
and THANKS for the info. on Gloria Tropp. I'm hoping to get an address
for her based on this --
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 22:20:46 -1000
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Susan Schultz <sschultz@HAWAII.EDU>
Subject: Tinfish Net\work announcement
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960728214610.24786B-100000@athens>
Tinfish Net\work announces the publication of red flea's _virtual
fleality_, the first in a series of chapbooks of poetry by writers from
Hawai'i and the Pacific. red flea's work appears in _Tinfish_ #2 and #3.
"red flea biography" reads:
red flea says
it's all the same
never ends
he jumps the gun
biting the hand
that feeds him
han shan's poems carved
on rocks
and trees
archilochus epigrams mere fragments
ishikawa takuboku's ears red with truth
bukowski's cup empty
echoing his laughter
incessant
ratta tat tat
the dead lecturer
rises from the dead
_don don don ka ra ka ka
don don don ka ra ka ka ka_
and to all who dare enter
waikiki babylon
remembereth westlake
and the dagger
in the hand of aloha
_the silent falling of the leaves of the trees
is a whisper to the living_
The chapbook costs $3.50 and can be obtained from Tinfish Net\work at
1422A Dominis Street, Honolulu, HI 96822. It can also be ordered at
sschultz@hawaii.edu. In approximately one month the chapbook will be
available with a cd of red flea reading his poetry to music (he calls it
"amplified poetry"); price to be announced later.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 07:55:33 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: FUNKHOUSER CHRISTOPH <cf2785@CSC.ALBANY.EDU>
Subject: cancer poetry
In-Reply-To: <199607290411.AAA13120@sarah.albany.edu> from "Automatic digest
processor" at Jul 29, 96 00:05:43 am
Kamau Brathwaite's _The Zea Mexican Diary_ chronicles
the six month period between the time he found out his
wife of many years (who took care of nearly all the
details of his life) was terminally ill, & when she died. It's
one of the most emotionally wrenching books I've ever read.
Poetry & prose poetry done up in KB's "sycorax video
style." University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
cf
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 09:18:51 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: cancer poetry
also, _Our Cancer Year_ by Harvey Pekar & Joyce Brabner...
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 09:33:22 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bob Gale <london@BITSTREAM.NET>
Subject: Line Break
Does anyone here have an info about "Line Break," a poetry radio show
produced out of Buffalo, and supposedly available for free to public radio
stations across the country? I live in the land of MPR -- which means
there's little chance we'll hear it hear -- but I'd like to learn more
about this show and how it was/is put together.
Thanks in advance.
Peace,
Bob
\\ The Spoken Word Network: Home of Shout! Newspaper, \\
\\ the Cacophony Chorus, and London Productions \\
\\ 3010 Hennepin Ave S, #245, Minneapolis, MN 55408 USA \\
\\ london@bitstream.net http://www.bitstream.net/london \\
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 09:42:36 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bob Gale <london@BITSTREAM.NET>
Subject: spoken word recordings
I'm working on creating a discography of commercially available spoken word
(all styles) recordings for use by a monthly review column that appears in
Shout! But been having trouble track down material (it's not like many
record stores carry poetry). I've noticed a few recent posts that mention
some jazz/text pieces, and if anyone else has any recommendations I'd love
to hear them. Referals to any supportive labels, or existing discographies,
also appreciated.
Peace,
Bob
\\ The Spoken Word Network: Home of Shout! Newspaper, \\
\\ the Cacophony Chorus, and London Productions \\
\\ 3010 Hennepin Ave S, #245, Minneapolis, MN 55408 USA \\
\\ london@bitstream.net http://www.bitstream.net/london \\
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 11:08:00 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" <pritchpa@SILVERPLUME.IIX.COM>
Subject: Re: spoken word recordings
Comments: To: Bob Gale <london@BITSTREAM.NET>
Bob,
This may be of help, or maybe you already know about it. Lindsay Hill has
produced several poetry/music CDs featuring Nathaniel Tarn and Nathaniel
Mackey. I don't know any details beyond that, but I could get his address
for you if you need it.
Also, Jack Collom and musician Ken Bernstein have just released a poetry CD
called "Calluses of Poetry." Can't recall label, but again, could get
details if so desired.
Patrick Pritchett
pritchpa@silverplume.iix.com
----------
From: Bob Gale
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS
Subject: spoken word recordings
Date: Monday, July 29, 1996 10:56AM
<<File Attachment: HEADERS.TXT>>
I'm working on creating a discography of commercially available spoken word
(all styles) recordings for use by a monthly review column that appears in
Shout! But been having trouble track down material (it's not like many
record stores carry poetry). I've noticed a few recent posts that mention
some jazz/text pieces, and if anyone else has any recommendations I'd love
to hear them. Referals to any supportive labels, or existing discographies,
also appreciated.
Peace,
Bob
\\ The Spoken Word Network: Home of Shout! Newspaper, \\
\\ the Cacophony Chorus, and London Productions \\
\\ 3010 Hennepin Ave S, #245, Minneapolis, MN 55408 USA \\
\\ london@bitstream.net http://www.bitstream.net/london \\
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 13:24:13 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: spoken word recordings
a good place to check, online, would be Fourtner Anderson's
*Brazen Oralities*, at http://www.infobahnos.com/~brazen/ .
much current work, including hard-to-find cassette & much
wonderful canadian content...
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 13:51:28 CST
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
Subject: Re: Spoken Word recordings
Steven Taylor has a CD which just came out
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 13:26:51 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: spoken word recordings
bob holman (nuyopoman@aol.com) shd be able to help a lot, w/ the mouth almighty
project and all. my guess is that there's more stuff out there than you can
shake a lamb's tail at.
bests, maria d
In message <v01540b01ae228a49942a@[204.73.77.101]> UB Poetics discussion group
writes:
> I'm working on creating a discography of commercially available spoken word
> (all styles) recordings for use by a monthly review column that appears in
> Shout! But been having trouble track down material (it's not like many
> record stores carry poetry). I've noticed a few recent posts that mention
> some jazz/text pieces, and if anyone else has any recommendations I'd love
> to hear them. Referals to any supportive labels, or existing discographies,
> also appreciated.
>
> Peace,
> Bob
>
> \\ The Spoken Word Network: Home of Shout! Newspaper, \\
> \\ the Cacophony Chorus, and London Productions \\
> \\ 3010 Hennepin Ave S, #245, Minneapolis, MN 55408 USA \\
> \\ london@bitstream.net http://www.bitstream.net/london \\
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 16:56:45 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest <elliza@AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: spoken word recordings
there is an extraordinary bookstore in the boston area called The Grolier,
Poetry Bookshop, (617) 547-4648, o 1-800-234-poem. 6 plympton street,
cambridge, ma 02138. the bookstore carries ONLY poetry, and some (not
much) text about poetry. she has a huge selection of tapes, and is very
good at hunting things down. she takes orders from everywhere and ships
things. proprieter's name is louisa (blanking on last name) and she is
VERY helpful. she actually READS what she sells, and is great at figuring
out "who was it who wrote that poem about the rabbit on the rug in front
of the fire" kinds of questions.
e
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 21:39:15 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: spoken word recordings
eliza writes:
> there is an extraordinary bookstore in the boston area called The Grolier,
> Poetry Bookshop, (617) 547-4648, o 1-800-234-poem. 6 plympton street,
> cambridge, ma 02138. the bookstore carries ONLY poetry, and some (not
> much) text about poetry. she has a huge selection of tapes, and is very
> good at hunting things down. she takes orders from everywhere and ships
> things. proprieter's name is louisa (blanking on last name) and she is
> VERY helpful. she actually READS what she sells, and is great at figuring
> out "who was it who wrote that poem about the rabbit on the rug in front
> of the fire" kinds of questions.
> e
it's louisa solano; she's great. get her talking about john wieners. or anyone.
she says great thing about our own kathryne lindberg ("going to dinner w/ her
was like taking a graduate seminar" meaning that it was exhilerating).
md
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 23:14:13 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bob Holman <Nuyopoman@AOL.COM>
Subject: Amygism
For me, Amy's battles against Pound was plenty good enough to lay claim to
Militant Crusader for Modern Poetry. Christ, what are patterns for!
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 22:04:53 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: bargain books, mpls
to those in the twin cities area:
Banks, a huge discount store that specializes in buying up entire stocks of
places that have gone under, etc, has a bunch of excellent books at half price.
i got Real: the letters of mina harker and sam d'allesandro,
creativity/anthropology, feminist measures, poetry by thylias moss, patricia
smith and dana bryant, as well as some anthologies of caribbean,
chinese-american, "chicago saloon" etc., poetry. passed on wm bronk, robt.
kelly, keats, wanda coleman (i'd paid full price abt 2 months ago), some
goodlooking routledge specials, comparative youth cultures, etc. quel find!
plus washcloths and hooks for my closet doors at a fraction of normal.
maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 21:51:04 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: spoken word
In-Reply-To: <199607300403.AAA04803@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Has anyone out there ever laid eyes on a recording of four Cleveland area
poets (ca late 60s early 70s) that includes selections by Russell
Atkins? I've been trying to find this for three years now -- Atkins
himself does not have a copy -- can't find it in the usual discographies --
Have seen printed ref. to it at least three times, so I'm reasonably
certain it's not a phantom entry --
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 09:49:28 -0600
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Bob Gale <london@BITSTREAM.NET>
>Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 13:51:28 CST
>From: David Baratier <dave.baratier@MOSBY.COM>
>Subject: Re: Spoken Word recordings
> Steven Taylor has a CD which just came out
Do you have a label or contact info on that?
Thanks,
Bob
\\ The Spoken Word Network: Home of Shout! Newspaper, \\
\\ the Cacophony Chorus, and London Productions \\
\\ 3010 Hennepin Ave S, #245, Minneapolis, MN 55408 USA \\
\\ london@bitstream.net http://www.bitstream.net/london \\
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 13:48:38 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Sylvester Pollet <POLLET@MAINE.MAINE.EDU>
Subject: cancer poems
Don't miss Ramon Guthrie's long heroic last shot, Maximum Security Ward.
Easiest to find in the Persea edition MSW & Other Poems, ed. Sally M. Gall,
NY 1984. Sylvester Pollet
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 20:35:50 EDT
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: JOEL LEWIS <104047.2175@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: melvin tolson
i found copies of Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery & Gallery of harlem Portraits
in a used bookstore in the Berkshires. I understand he was a controversial
figure in his time -- apparently he was the lone black high modernist. Is anyone
doing work on him? what is the take on his work these days? Odd that Tolson in
publishing Harlem Gallery in '65 was taking on an High Modernist project that
was being abandonned by many of its disciples.
Joel Lewis
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 21:11:15 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Douglis Beck <DlisRicBck@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 28 Jul 1996 to 29 Jul 1996
maria--
what bronk did you stumble over @ banks?
& do you have their # so I can call for it?
douglis.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 20:36:25 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 28 Jul 1996 to 29 Jul 1996
i cant remember title, it was a "slim volume" w/ glossy cover, a two-word title
i believe, talisman house press. i'll give u Banks's phone # but i shd warn you
they're a huge place, not a bookstore, just a close-out discount store; specify
that it's in the 2nd floor book room, on the poetry table
(612) 379-2803. good luck. apparently they had stuff like ginsberg's snapshot
poetics hardcover dirt cheap when they first got the shipment --i'm getting the
leftovers, which is good, cuz it's esoterica that folks like us dig...
bests, maria d
In message <960730211114_249183960@emout08.mail.aol.com> UB Poetics discussion
group writes:
> maria--
> what bronk did you stumble over @ banks?
> & do you have their # so I can call for it?
> douglis.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 20:38:45 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: conference fwd
From: Center for Advanced Feminist Studies <cafs@tc.umn.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 16:58:15 -0500
To: Multiple recipients of list CAFS-F2 <cafs-f2@tc.umn.edu>
Subject: CFP: Property, Commodity, Culture
Sixth Annual Cultural Studies Symposium, Kansas State University,
Manhattan, Kansas, March 6-8, 1997
PROPERTY, COMMODITY, CULTURE
Keynote Speaker: Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania), author
of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
Topic: "Marx's Coat"
"Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same."
-- William Shakespeare
Hark how the Trumpets Sound,
Proclaims the Land around,
The Jubilee;
Tells all the Poor oppressed
Nor more shall they be cess'd,
Nor landlords more molest,
Their Property.
-- Thomas Spence
"I'll--why, I'll go home to Tara tomorrow."
-- Scarlett O'Hara
Property: its very properties are now in question. If we are, as some
say, on the brink of virtualization, what becomes of property? What
happens when the old address that united name, goods, and legal
responsibility refers only to a city of bits? Or is this in fact only
the daydream of postmodern escapists who leave unthought and unthinkable
an earth grown poisonous? Is it the ruse of the capitalists, disguising
obvious and egregiously material inequities in the distribution of
wealth? Even taken in the old-style sense of turf, property remains the
pretext for marital, parental, class, and national
warfare. We invite discussion on these and a variety of other related
topics, proposals of individual papers, panel sessions, and innovative
conference formats.
Possible topics:
*Personal property/public responsibility*Visual rights
*Tenure *Transnational capital, globalism,
*Mode of production, social formation, and deterritorialization
and forms of property *The revival of nationalism: cultural
*Education as consumer good and economic property
*Children: property or persons *Virtual property and copyright
*Prostitution and sexwork *Class and turf
*Marriage: history and future *Enclosure and commons
*Slavery *Property and crime
*Privatizing the Internet *New populism and Wise Use
*Trademarking species: biotechnology *Fetishism: ritual, commodity,
sexuality
*Property and propriety *Privatizing public schools
*Queer propriety&properties of gender *Black markets
*White collar crime: property & penalty *Nation and immigration
*Labor and global capital: GATT, NAFTA, *Ownership, subjectivity, identity
*Property and performativity *Native American land
*Collaboration, credit, and property *Copying, copyright, copyhold
Abstracts for papers and panels: Limit proposals to one page, single
spaced, per paper; proposals for non-standard format sessions welcome.
Due date: October 4, 1996. Address proposals and queries to Tim Dayton,
Department of English, Denison Hall, Kansas State University, Manhattan,
KS 66506. Phone: (913) 532-6716. FAX: (913) 532-7004. E-mail:
TADAYTON@KSU.KSU.EDU.
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 22:17:58 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" <anielsen@ISC.SJSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Tolson
In-Reply-To: <199607310407.AAA06653@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Glad to hear you found these books -- MUST read his 50s +Libretto for the
Republic of Liberia_ -- Not at all the case that he was adopting "high
modernism" just as others were abandoning it --
Yes, people are doing work on Tolosn --
See Robert Farnsworth's bio. of the poet, and his edition of Tolson's
newspaper columns, both from U of Missouri Press -- Check out Michael
Berube's book on Tolson and Pynchon -- Lorenzo Thomas gave a talk on
Tolson at the Orono conference last month, which will appear eventually
somewhere -- perhaps in a new edition of Tolson's poems if we have any
luck with the National Poetry Foundation, who appear interested at last
post-conference -- Hermine Pinson did a good Tolson dissertation a few
years back -- and there is one intro. book of criticism on _Harlem
Gallery_ (as well as the usual Twayne book) --
More in the works -- Tolson's "high modernism" is not quite the
modernism of Eliot, Crane, etc. --
and no, he was not alone in working these veins -- Take a stroll through
_New Negro Poets U.S.A._ or Clarence Major's newly issued _The Garden
Thrives_ anthology for minimalist clues to a large history --
and a certain Dr. Anna Everett was heard at the American Literature
Association not long ago offering the first ever paper on Tolson as film
critic -- Carole Doreski, appearing on the same panel, did a good paper
on Tolson's 40s poems and newspaper work -- which will appear in a book
from Cambridge later on --
SIGNING OFF FOR A FEW WEEKS __ BLESSINGS TO ALL --
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 22:12:42 -0400
Reply-To: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
Subject: Re: bargain books, mpls
maria
who & or what are "chicago saloon" poets/poetries?
also wd be curious to hear more about patricia smith & dana
bryant & how their stuff works on paper (patricia is reigning
slam poetry queen, dana was a close contender at the national
slams a coupla years ago)...
everwandering
lbd
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 09:28:26 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Christina Fairbank Chirot <tinac@CSD.UWM.EDU>
Subject: address for Christopher Dewdney
Might anyone have an address for Christopher Dewdney? I'd much
appreciate knowing it if you do.
His work I'd highly recommend. Several books published by The
Figures, three available from SPD.
HAIKU
My roof was once firm
yet now it cannot even
keep the stars out.
(from Alter Sublime)
thanks for any assistance
dave baptiste chirot
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 10:02:22 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Charles Alexander <chax@MTN.ORG>
Subject: gone
dear poetics:
I'll be away for one week starting tonight, and I'm stopping list-serv mail
for that period. So if anyone wants to contact me about chax press books or
anything, please wait until after August 6.
thank you,
charles alexander
chax press
p.o. box 19178
minneapolis, mn 55419-0178
612-721-6063
chax@mtn.org
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 10:59:26 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: conference
Comments: To: au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU
hey everyone, stay tuned for a call for papers for a conference on
CROSS-CULTURAL POETICS organized by Mark Nowak and yours truly, to be held in
minneapolis the last weekend of june 1997.
bests, maria d
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 10:57:15 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Laura Moriarty <moriarty@SFSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: cancer poems
The last part of Jerry Estrin's book Rome: A Mobile Home,(Roof, the
Figures, O Books, Potes and Poets) "Nudes," was written while he had
cancer. And the last part of my book Symmetry (Avec Books) "Forever" was
written during my experience as a caregiver, though I don't think the word
cancer appears in either book.
Laura Moriarty
moriarty@sfsu.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 13:18:19 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Julie Marie Schmid <jschmid@BLUE.WEEG.UIOWA.EDU>
Subject: Re: bargain books, mpls
Comments: To: Robert Drake <au462@CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <199607310212.WAA14797@owl.INS.CWRU.Edu>
Chicago Saloon poetry is spoken word poetry performed at such venues as
the Green Mill, Weeds, and at many of the other bars around the city
where poetry is being read. I assume Maria is referring to the book
*Stray Bullets* which Tia Chucha press (great press run by poet Luis
Rodriguez and distributed by Northwestern) published about 6 years ago
but is still in print. It includes people like Patricia Smith, Marc
Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Carlos Cumpian, E. Donald Two-Rivers, et al.
Also, Patricia Smith is fabulous on the page--check out her book Close to
Death.
Would love to talk to any and all who are interested about this more--I'm
doing a dissertation of public poetries and have been here in the Windy
City for three months immersing myself in the poetry scene here and
loving every minute of it! Reach me here or at jschmid@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu.
Ciao!
On Tue, 30 Jul 1996, Robert Drake wrote:
> maria
>
> who & or what are "chicago saloon" poets/poetries?
>
> also wd be curious to hear more about patricia smith & dana
> bryant & how their stuff works on paper (patricia is reigning
> slam poetry queen, dana was a close contender at the national
> slams a coupla years ago)...
>
> everwandering
> lbd
>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 13:07:40 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: "Tristan D. Saldana" <hbeng175@DEWEY.CSUN.EDU>
Subject: Language Poetry; Deconstruction; New Criticism
Would a deconstruction of language poetry -- non-representational language
which strives to produce the primary world of experience to the dis-ease of
such poetics as Louis Simpson's -- be essentially a New Critical attempt
to render a text definitively (or unify textualities within a poem) what
Marjorie Perloff has noted as its vitally indeterminate qualifying
characteristics?
What does anyone think?
Tristan
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 15:38:04 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: maria damon <damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU>
Subject: Re: bargain books, mpls
In message <Pine.A32.3.91.960731131132.57404A-100000@green.weeg.uiowa.edu> UB
Poetics discussion group writes:
> Chicago Saloon poetry is spoken word poetry performed at such venues as
> the Green Mill, Weeds, and at many of the other bars around the city
> where poetry is being read. I assume Maria is referring to the book
> *Stray Bullets* which Tia Chucha press (great press run by poet Luis
> Rodriguez and distributed by Northwestern) published about 6 years ago
> but is still in print. It includes people like Patricia Smith, Marc
> Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Carlos Cumpian, E. Donald Two-Rivers, et al.
> Also, Patricia Smith is fabulous on the page--check out her book Close to
> Death.
>
yes that's the one. --md
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 14:18:05 -0700
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: George Bowering <bowering@SFU.CA>
Subject: Re: address for Christopher Dewdney
> Might anyone have an address for Christopher Dewdney?
You can get him c/o his publisher, McClelland & Stewart.
481 University Ave.,
Ste. 900.
Toronto, ON,
M5G 2E9
..........................
"The squid is in fact
a carnivorous pocket
containing a pen"
--Robert Bringhurst
George Bowering.
2499 West 37th Ave.,
Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada V6M 1P4
fax: 1-604-266-9000
e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 16:30:12 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: T-Bone Prone <tbone@RIPCO.COM>
Subject: Re: Language Poetry; Deconstruction; New Criticism
In-Reply-To: <Pine.HPP.3.91.960731124455.16890A-100000@louie.csun.edu>
On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Tristan D. Saldana wrote:
> Would a deconstruction of language poetry -- non-representational language
> which strives to produce the primary world of experience to the dis-ease of
> such poetics as Louis Simpson's -- be essentially a New Critical attempt
> to render a text definitively (or unify textualities within a poem) what
> Marjorie Perloff has noted as its vitally indeterminate qualifying
> characteristics?
>
> What does anyone think?
Well, I don't think so. A 'deconstructive' reading itself would be not a
unity, but a quarrel amongst possible readings. When Derrida reads a
poet, even Celan or Ponge, it is to -affirm- the specificity and
singularity of their poetic idioms, without turning that into a 'unified
textuality', and surely not to praise anything as vague as 'vitally
indeterminate qualifying characteristics'. It's a difficult trick, to
think the singular or idiomatic without thinking unity or essence. Not
everybody gets it.
>
> Tristan
>
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 17:42:47 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: Ian Wilson <IBar88@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Language Poetry; Deconstruction; New Criticism
In a message dated 96-07-31 16:15:12 EDT, Tristan D. Saldana writes:
>Would a deconstruction of language poetry -- non-representational language
>which strives to produce the primary world of experience to the dis-ease of
>such poetics as Louis Simpson's -- be essentially a New Critical attempt
>to render a text definitively (or unify textualities within a poem) what
>Marjorie Perloff has noted as its vitally indeterminate qualifying
>characteristics?
I think it would be a mistake to assume that the effect of using a
post-structural theory on a poetry which can be viewed as a literary
manifestation of that post-structural theory is the same as negating the
negation -- thus a return to the originary.
Ian Wilson
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
ibar88@aol.com
http://users.aol.com/ibar88/private/ian1.htm
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 22:48:42 -0400
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
Sender: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU>
From: george hartley <gehartle@MAGNUS.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU>
Subject: Re: Language Poetry; Deconstruction; New Criticism
Tristan:
>Would a deconstruction of language poetry -- non-representational language
>which strives to produce the primary world of experience to the dis-ease of
>such poetics as Louis Simpson's -- be essentially a New Critical attempt
>to render a text definitively (or unify textualities within a poem) what
>Marjorie Perloff has noted as its vitally indeterminate qualifying
>characteristics?
What is "the primary world of experience"? To the best of my knowledge,
Nick Piombino is the only poet related to language writing who explicitly
uses the language of "experience" (although he has something very specific
in mind). Barry Watten talks about "the world" lots in Total Syntax, but
again in ways that would undo some uses of the concept. What experiences
and what worlds do you have in mind?
The potential connections between a certain deconstruction & New Criticism
are in themselves intriguing--I'd want more time to construct something
there, but I think I'd begin by questioning how deconstruction would unify
textualities: the word "unify" might be the point at which we could
distinguish between the two projects, both of which depend on intense
scrutiny (close reading) of the text(s). Does the "its" of "its vitally
indeterminate qualifying" refer to deconstruction or language poetry or new
criticism?
Maybe I've missed some earlier parts of this thread.
George