========================================================================= Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 22:01:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: the bleeding edge If it really was a "Tony Greene" who sent the clarifying message from a place designated as "New Zealand", I would like to proffer my thanks for said clarification. The only problem I am having is deciding whether what I am saying right now is being said by anyone I recognize. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 07:59:56 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: reading retallack Should've picked up on this before (has someone already mentioned it?), but there were two interesting papers on JR at the recent New Hampshire conference, (where she also read, wonderfully) -- Burton Hatlen 'Joan Retallack, a philosopher among the poets, a poet among the philosophers' and Alan Devenish, 'Living with the mess: Joan Retallack's "poethical wager"'. Perhaps these are already mounted at the EPC? Or will be published in the proceedings? (Check with Loss Glazier or Romana Huk.) - - - - - > John Cayley Wellsweep Press [in Chinese HZ: ~{?-U\02~} ~{=[i@3v0fIg~}] ^ innovative literary translation from Chinese ^ 1 Grove End House 150 Highgate Road London NW5 1PD UK Tel & Fax: 0171-267 3525 Email: cayley@shadoof.demon.co.uk http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/ < - - - - - ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 09:50:14 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Sylvester Pollet Subject: Kellogg's Mantle The quick help on La Curandera made me feel it was perhaps time to respond to David Kellogg's oft-repeated plaint that his fireplace lacks an adjust- able shelf. He borrows words from Thomas Kinsella to say it: There is no mantle/and it does not descend. David, if you see it as a long bosuns chair, the construction is pretty straightforward. Take a 2x8 or 2x10, drill two holes at each end, run lines crossing diagonally under the plank, & tie them together a couple of feet above it (though eye-splices give a more elegant appearance). Attach a single-sheave block to the ceiling, clip (or tie with a bowline) a halyard to the shelf lines, haul it up to what- ever height you like, and tie it off to a cleat on the wall next to the fireplace. If you don't like the halyard crossing the space behind the mantle, you'll need a second block to act as a fairlead--then you can run the halyard along the ceiling to wherever you like--even right to your armchair, if you bolt a cleat to the side. You can adjust it rise-descend without even getting up. But remember, some people don't even have fireplaces. best, Sylvester ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 11:11:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Re: Mickey's (not Kellogg's) Mantle In-Reply-To: And here I've thought all along that it was Mickey's Mantle that does not descend now that Mickey Mantle has ascended to the Hall of Fame in the Sky. As Casey Stengel was wont to say: "You could look it UP." --dbc ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 11:13:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Kellogg's Mantle sylvester pollet rites: > The quick help on La Curandera made me feel it was perhaps time to respond > to David Kellogg's oft-repeated plaint that his fireplace lacks an adjust- > able shelf. He borrows words from Thomas Kinsella to say it: There is no > mantle/and it does not descend. now, this is an area in which i've experienced some confusion of late, don't ask me why it seems to have come up fairly frequently in the last several months: isn't the fireplace thing spelled "mantel," whereas the garment thing is spelled "mantle"? ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 08:00:02 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: modernism and the orient Could someone, back-channel, send me details -- or the organizer's email address -- of the recently forwarded posting to Poetics about a forthcoming conference at Yale on 'Modernism and the Orient'. Thanks, in anticipation. (I lost the reference it in a delete-key shuffle.) - - - - - > John Cayley Wellsweep Press [in Chinese HZ: ~{?-U\02~} ~{=[i@3v0fIg~}] ^ innovative literary translation from Chinese ^ 1 Grove End House 150 Highgate Road London NW5 1PD UK Tel & Fax: 0171-267 3525 Email: cayley@shadoof.demon.co.uk http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/ < - - - - - ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 12:16:59 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: Kellogg's Mantle Thanks for the help! That's as good as the response I got from the geophysicist... >The quick help on La Curandera made me feel it was perhaps time to respond >to David Kellogg's oft-repeated plaint that his fireplace lacks an adjust- >able shelf. He borrows words from Thomas Kinsella to say it: There is no >mantle/and it does not descend. David, if you see it as a long bosuns >chair, the construction is pretty straightforward. Take a 2x8 or 2x10, >drill two holes at each end, run lines crossing diagonally under the plank, >& tie them together a couple of feet above it (though eye-splices give a >more elegant appearance). Attach a single-sheave block to the ceiling, clip >(or tie with a bowline) a halyard to the shelf lines, haul it up to what- >ever height you like, and tie it off to a cleat on the wall next to the >fireplace. If you don't like the halyard crossing the space behind the >mantle, you'll need a second block to act as a fairlead--then you can run >the halyard along the ceiling to wherever you like--even right to your >armchair, if you bolt a cleat to the side. You can adjust it rise-descend >without even getting up. But remember, some people don't even have >fireplaces. best, Sylvester > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www duke.edu/~kellogg/ There is no mantle and it does not descend. -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 15:10:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: OLson date Would anybody on the list know the exact date of composition of Charles Olson's "A Plan for the Curriculum of the Soul" (the text that is used on the inside covers of the various Institute of Further Studies booklets). I know it dates to somewhere between fall '63 & spring '65, i.e. the date sof Olson's teaching gig at UB, but need a more exact date. Backchannel or post to the list, whatever -- & thanks. Pierre ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 15:34:33 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: Nedge Comments: To: cap-l@tc.umn.edu Nedge #4 off the presses The 4th issue of Nedge is now available. Includes a number of list members, also special section of Chinese dissident poets in translation (Xiaobin Yang, Fang Zi, Bei Ling, Xue Di, Meng Lang); several Russian poets in translation (Mandelstam, translated by Tom Mandel; Ivan Zhdanov, by John High; Elena Shvarts, by yrs truly; and "Castaneda limericks" by Alexander Vernikov). Also: Mad Sarah (complete) by Kristin Prevallet; Elke Erb trans. Rosmarie Waldrop; a wonderful Morocco travel-poem by Stuart Blazer; collages by Wendy Kramer & Jacques Debrot; essays/reviews by Janet Sullivan, Dave Chirot, others. Published by the Poetry Mission, PO Box 2321, Providence, RI 02906. To order within the U.S.: send $6.25 ($5. issue plus $1.25 postage) to the above address. Or send $10. for a 2-issue postpaid subscription (#4 & 5). Limited copies available; priority will go to those who prepay; but you may also email me your street address & I will send & bill you. Outside U.S.: please email me & we'll figure it out. Listmember contributors: it's on the way to you! The Poetry Mission is an independent nonprofit all-volunteer arts organization. - Henry Gould Henry_Gould@brown.edu ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 14:16:08 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: OLson date >Would anybody on the list know the exact date of composition of Charles >Olson's "A Plan for the Curriculum of the Soul" (the text that is used >on the inside covers of the various Institute of Further Studies >booklets). I know it dates to somewhere between fall '63 & spring '65, >i.e. the date sof Olson's teaching gig at UB, but need a more exact >date. Backchannel or post to the list, whatever -- & thanks. Pierre Pierre. I think Fred Wah might be able to tell you. His address is wah@acs.ucalgary.ca George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 17:16:09 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: slam Is there any connection between poetry slams and slam dancing? Can we look forward to poetry moshes anytime soon? Jordan ___________ Jordan Davis jdavis@panix.com "more poetry t-shirts, please" ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 17:45:23 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Re: slam In-Reply-To: Henry Rollins (Black Flag) comes to mind lot of punk/poets--Exene Cervenka or earlier Patti Smith & Richard Hell (pogo as proto-slam . . . On Tue, 1 Oct 1996, Jordan Davis wrote: > Is there any connection between poetry slams and slam dancing? Can we look > forward to poetry moshes anytime soon? > > Jordan > > > ___________ > Jordan Davis > jdavis@panix.com "more poetry t-shirts, please" > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 18:22:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Julie Marie Schmid Subject: Re: slam In-Reply-To: The poetry slam is actually named in memory of a grand slam that Marc Smith saw Ernie Banks hit. Even so, there seem to be some pretty obvious connections that one could draw between the two. On Tue, 1 Oct 1996, Christina Fairbank Chirot wrote: > Henry Rollins (Black Flag) comes to mind > > > lot of punk/poets--Exene Cervenka or earlier Patti Smith & > Richard Hell > > (pogo as proto-slam . . . > > On Tue, 1 Oct 1996, Jordan Davis wrote: > > > Is there any connection between poetry slams and slam dancing? Can we look > > forward to poetry moshes anytime soon? > > > > Jordan > > > > > > ___________ > > Jordan Davis > > jdavis@panix.com "more poetry t-shirts, please" > > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 12:52:46 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: the way of all languages also hopeful but unthought through manipulation breaks down because of the predictable failures of communication between the manipulators yes? Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 08:08:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: Nedge In-Reply-To: from "Henry Gould" at Oct 1, 96 03:34:33 pm > Published by the Poetry Mission, PO Box 2321, Providence, RI 02906. > To order within the U.S.: send $6.25 ($5. issue plus $1.25 postage) > to the above address. Or send $10. for a 2-issue postpaid subscription > (#4 & 5). Limited copies available; priority will go to those who > prepay; but you may also email me your street address & I will > send & bill you. Outside U.S.: please email me & we'll figure it out. > > Listmember contributors: it's on the way to you! > > The Poetry Mission is an independent nonprofit all-volunteer arts > organization. > - Henry Gould Henry_Gould@brown.edu > Henry, I'd like to sign up. My address is 653 Euclid Ave., Toronto, ON M6G 2T6. I can send you a cheque. Just let me know. The postage is a bit more I think. Later, Mike ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 08:54:31 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: Nedge In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 2 Oct 1996 08:08:19 -0400 from Thanks, Mike. I haven't done this before - I guess my bank will accept foreign personal checks. I'll send you a copy, check with my bank, and get back to you (that way I'll know the exact postage too). - Henry ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 09:02:30 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry G Subject: Re: Nedge In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 2 Oct 1996 08:54:31 EDT from Very sorry, poetics list. Once again the mechanics of "reply" eluded me. I thought it would go back to sender only. - HG ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 08:32:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: what is real and what is not re the recent thread concerning the ficitional & factual and the disappearance of the real--or the real of disappearance-- and the princess and the prince discuss what is real and what is not but there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden --Bob Dylan --db cooper aka chirot > >>if possible, could you post the following to your list? >> >> CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: >> CHANCE: 3 DAYS IN THE DESERT >> >> JEAN BAUDRILLARD PLAYS (near) VEGAS >> with ALLUCQUERE ROSANNE STONE & DIANE DI PRIMA >> >>WHEN? November 8 - 10, 1996 >>WHERE? Whiskey Pete's Casino, Primm Nevada (see below) >>HOW? Check out the CHANCE website at: >> http://www.artcenter.edu/events/chance.html >> email: chance@artcenter.edu >> phone: 818/568-4805 >> >>WHAT?..... >>CHANCE is a philosophical rave & summit meeting between artists & >>philosophers, chaosophists & croupiers, mathematicians & musicians at >>Whiskey Pete's Casino in the Nevada desert. A CHANCE to redefine this >>century's romance with randomness & synchronicity less innocently for our >>era. >> >>CHANCE to explore the multiplicity of identity. >> >>Three days of chance encouters, gambling & deep thought with Jean >>Beaudrillard, Allucquere Rosanne Stone & 30 other internationally active >>cultural strategists.....Music from the San Francisco bands Towel & >>Ohm-a-Revelator.....a one-time mystery jam between six special guest star >>musicians with Red Krayola lead guitarist Tom Watson.....the intensely >>nameless beauty of Oguri & Renzoku butoh.....a roving fun-house of >>installation art & readings organized by Sarah Gavlak, Pam Strugar & Dan >>Frydman. >> >>Appearing in addition to Baudrillard, Stone & diPrima will be >> >>DOUGLAS HEPWORTH, Wall Street Chaos Trader >>DJ SPOOKY, That Subliminal Kid >>SHIRLEY TSE, Hong Kong Artist >>ANN ROWER, New York Writer >>SYLVERE LOTRINGER, Semiotext(e)ician >>JEREMY GILBERT-ROLFE/THE CHANCE BAND/SHEPPARD POWELL >>& THE CHANCE OF THE UNKNOWN >> >>Primm, Nevada is located at the border of Nevada & California: Paiute >>nuclear waste specialist Calvin Meyers will lead a desert walk & talk about >>the desecration of tribal land. >> >>WHO? As above..... & YOU! >> >>WHY? >> >> >>the Outsider Bookstore >>4505 Fountain Avenue >>Los Angeles, CA 90029 >>ph #(213) 660-4361 >> >> >> >> > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 09:46:37 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Sylvester Pollet Subject: Kellogg's Mantle/Mantel for Maria Damon--yes, though either spelling is acceptable, same word. The French distinguish with a qualifier: manteau and manteau de cheminee. But now, what's the French for bosun's chair? I don't have my big Larousse here, but find maitre d'equipage for bosun (boatswain). Maybe Pierre Joris could help? Ah, Poesy! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 09:03:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: new book... taking a moment to call your attention to the work of a long-time friend of mine, greg hewitt, whose first book of poetry, _to collect the flesh_, is just out on new rivers press (winner of the minnesota voices project annual competition)... greg's work is at once intellectually demanding and surprising, constructed around (generally) a lyrical-narrative 'i' that is sometimes colloquial, sometimes more formal... a number of the poems in this collection deal with love between men, and with father-son relationships... perhaps my favorite is "george washington, lover," which is simply remarkable in surfacing a homoerotic potential between washington and alexander hamilton... highly recommended... joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 09:15:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: new book... EEK... and i go and spell greg's last name wrong... must be some sort of coded alphaphobia... it's not hewitt, it's hewEtt... so sorry// joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 09:22:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: new book... ah, joe, you beat me to the draw...and for those of you in the twin cities area, tonite at the Landmark Center in St Paul there'll be a reading/book signing party for greg (by the way it's "hewett" with an e, rather than "hewitt," those of you racing for your "books in print"), at 7 or 7:30. see ya there, groovoids. bests, maria d In message <199610021403.JAA03593@charlie.cns.iit.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > taking a moment to call your attention to the work of a long-time friend of > mine, greg hewitt, whose first book of poetry, _to collect the flesh_, is > just out on new rivers press (winner of the minnesota voices project annual > competition)... > > greg's work is at once intellectually demanding and surprising, constructed > around (generally) a lyrical-narrative 'i' that is sometimes colloquial, > sometimes more formal... a number of the poems in this collection deal with > love between men, and with father-son relationships... perhaps my favorite > is "george washington, lover," which is simply remarkable in surfacing a > homoerotic potential between washington and alexander hamilton... > > highly recommended... > > joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 09:37:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: new book... oh joe, so sorry, didn't mean to be schoolmarmish...just living up to my Lady Poetrix, Mistress of Discipline persona... md In message <199610021415.JAA05430@charlie.cns.iit.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > EEK... and i go and spell greg's last name wrong... must be some sort of > coded alphaphobia... > > it's not hewitt, it's hewEtt... > > so sorry// > > joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 12:05:27 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: the way of all languages Tony -- Aren't those predictable 'failures of communication' actually the sites of artistic negotiation? Isn't it pleasant to sit here watching the clouds go by while monopoly capitalism extinguishes itself through a bland hierarchical arson? While Bob Dylan sings? While another one steps up to the microphone? Jordan ______ Jordan Davis jdavis@panix.com Orion sightings: 7th & A, eight postings on the phonebooth, dealing mainly with 'nasal crutches' ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 12:08:28 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: malomar Comments: cc: drothschild@penguin.com the fans said alomar sucks alomar sucks alomar sucks as the umps took the field last night at yankee stadium the fans withrew their support later in the game as blue was telling mariano dunken where the bench was after calling him out on a pitch both high & outside with runners on ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 10:45:51 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Dis Mantel Here? At 12:02 AM 10/2/96 -0400, Maria Damon wrote: >now, this is an area in which i've experienced some confusion of late, don't ask >me why it seems to have come up fairly frequently in the last several months: >isn't the fireplace thing spelled "mantel," whereas the garment thing is spelled >"mantle"? The garment thing is, to my knowledge, always "mantle", but the fireplace thing can be either "mantel" or "mantle." ********************************** sjcarll@slip.net Steve Carll http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. --Paul Celan ********************************** ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 11:27:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Watts Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 30 Sep 1996 to 1 Oct 1996 In-Reply-To: <199610020403.AAA03255@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> from "Automatic digest processor" at Oct 2, 96 00:02:14 am Pierre asks the exact date of composition of Charles Olson's PLAN FOR A CURRICULUM OF THE SOUL. I checked with Ralph Maud, who came up with a letter from Olson to George Butterick, dated 26 February 1968, re/ the publication of the "Plan" in THE MAGAZINE OF FURTHER STUDIES. Olson writes: "Just for the accuracy, please change word "drugs" in first line of "Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul" to "the mushroom. . . ." The "Plan" was published in THE MAGAZINE OF FURTHER STUDIES, No. 5, July 1968. Ralph reckons that Olson wrote it expressly for the magazine early in 1968, probably February. The letter can be found in the Don Allen file at the Archive for New Poetry, UC San Diego. Cheers, Charles Watts ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 14:32:15 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: limpets from new Bertrand Russell biography by Ray Monk-- little Bertram at five, his first trip to the seashore-- "Aunty, do limpets think?" "I don't know," she replied. "Then," he said "you must learn." ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 15:19:07 +0000 Reply-To: dmachlin@flotsam.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Dan Machlin Subject: Laura Moriarty and Melanie Neilson@SEGUE THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3RD, 7:30 p.m. sharp SEGUE PERFORMANCE SPACE 303 EAST 8th STREET (BETW AVES B&C) Suggested Contribution $3.00 LAURA MORIARTY is the author of Symmetry (Avec), L'Archiviste (Zasterle), like roads (Kelsey St), Rondeaux (Roof), Two Cross Seizings (Sombre Reptiles), Persia (Chance Additions) and Duse (Coincidence Press). She is the Director of the American Poetry Archives at The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University. MELANIE NEILSON is the author of Civil Noir (Roof) and Natural Facts (Poets & Poets). A chapbook Vertigo is forthcoming from Moxey Books. An essay "Chandeliers get in my ears: Reading Bruce Andrews" will appear in AERIAL # 9. She has work in upcoming issues of Primary Writing, Tongue To Book (U.K.) and the anthologies Moving Borders (Talisman House) and Out of Everywhere (Reality Street). She is the editor of Big Allis Magazine. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 11:02:58 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: CAN-RW digest 235 (fwd) Sorry this is kind of long. gab. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 06:28:45 -1000 From: can-rw@pencil.math.missouri.edu Topics covered in this issue include: 1) Details on mean-spirited immigration bill by rcowan@lesley.edu (Center for Campus Organizing) 2) CAN-PEACE: Campus Activism to Cut Military Spending by rcowan@lesley.edu (Center for Campus Organizing) 3) CHALLENGE THE LIE$: Lie #2 by rcowan@lesley.edu (Center for Campus Organizing) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Topic No. 1 << start of forwarded material >> From: USSA Erica Adelsheimer To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: Immigration Update USSA Immigration Update October 1, 1996 The immigration bill (H.R. 2202) that passed the House last week was most recently attached to the FY97 CR/Omnibus bill. The CR was passed yesterday by the Senate and signed last night by President Clinton. While some of the most reprehensible provisions of the immigration legislation were removed prior to Senate and Administration approval, the bill remains a mean-spirited document which penalizes undocumented persons and makes it more difficult for legal immigrants and U.S. citizens to reunite with their families. Provisions which were removed prior to passage: % Deeming a sponsor's income as available to a legal immigrant student who applied for federal financial aid % Gallegly Amendment, which would have denied public education to undocumented children % Deportation of immigrants who received public benefits for 12 months (including students who received grant aid) % Denial of certain public benefits to legal immigrants (although most legal immigrants remain ineligible for many public assistance programs under the welfare legislation signed into law by Clinton in August) % Denial to legal immigrants of access to treatment for HIV Provisions which remain in the bill: % Establishment of pilot program for collecting information about non-immigrant students to ensure that such student do not overstay their visas. The program would require entering foreign students to pay a fee of up to $100 to support the program % Requirement that sponsors of immigrant relatives earn at least 125% of the poverty level % One year time limit for applying for political asylum % Denial of certain due process measures to persons who arrive without documents, including political asylees % Establishment of employee verification program (with a 27% possibility of error!) in five states with high populations of undocumented persons so that employers can check legal status of prospective employees % Increased burden of proof for prospective employees claiming hiring discrimination based on immigration status. Such persons will need to show an "intent" to discriminate, a nearly impossible standard % Increased border control, including 1000 new agents by 2001 and $12 million for a new border fence and other measures Students should register their complaints about the immigration legislation with both their Representatives and Senators as well as with the Administration and should indicate that part of the student agenda for the upcoming year will be to work to reform this oppressive and discriminatory bill. Erica Adelsheimer Phone: 202.347.USSA Legislative Director Fax: 202.393.5886 U.S. Student Association E-mail: ussaleg@essential.org 1612 K Street NW Ste. 510 http://www.essential.org/ussa Washington, DC 20006 ------------------------------ Topic No. 2 Yesterday, both Congress and the President approved a 1997 Pentagon budget of $244 billion, $9.4 billion more than the military wanted, while claiming to be concerned about "balancing the budget!" We invite you to join an e-mail discussion for campus activists interesting in challenging this hypocracy, and the military/prison priorities of our society in general. The list is called called CAN-PEACE (Campus Activists' Network, Peace Activism) and already there are about 150 subscribers. In 1996-7 CAN-PEACE will provide communication for campus activists participating in a national campaign and speaking tour to question the justification for federal priorities in which 52 cents of every tax dollar is used by the military. To expose the underlying ideology behind this madness, we are calling this campaign "Challenge the Lie$. We also offer resources to help make this campaign a participatory activity, open to anyone concerned about our society and willing to challenge the climate of fear and cynicism that enables military and prison contractors to continue robbing us blind. Several national groups, listed below, have agreed to provide information and support. This discussion is cosponsored by national Peace Action and its new Student Peace Action Network, and facilitated by Brad Van Guilder of Stockton State College (fac193@pollux.stockton.edu). You are invited to subscribe; you may unsubscribe at any time. 1. TO SUBSCRIBE, send e-mail to: canet@pencil.math.missouri.edu with a subject of "canet" whose body just says: sub can-peace Firstname Lastname 2. TO SEND A MESSAGE to the list, you must be subscribed. E-mail it to: can-peace@pencil.math.missouri.edu 3. TO UNSUBSCRIBE, send e-mail to: canet@pencil.math.missouri.edu with a subject of "canet" whose body ONLY says: unsub can-peace 4. If the volume of mail on this list becomes too large, you can always change your subscription to a "digest" (1 big message per day) by sending e-mail to: canet@pencil.math.missouri.edu with subject "canet" and body: set can-peace mail digest To undo this use "ack" in place of "digest". To suppress mail for the summer, use "noack" in place of "digest." 5. For a list of Campus Activists' Network discussions, send email to: canet-info@pencil.math.missouri.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | CHALLENGE THE LIE$ || A national campaign to expose the stranglehold | | Social Justice || military and prison spending have placed on | | Speaking Tour || important social and environmental priorities. | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Host a speaker; research the facts; design your own campaign! CCO will | | provide a packet with petitions, flyers, brainstorm ideas, and speakers:| | Helen Caldicott *Gene Carroll *Jonah Edelman *Michio Kaku *Loretta Ross | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | The organizing packet is only $1 from the CENTER FOR CAMPUS ORGANIZING | | P.O. Box 748, Cambridge, MA 02142, 617-354-9363 o cco@igc.apc.org | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Email contacts for "Challenge the Lie$" co-sponsors are: -Center for Campus Organizing (Dave Pai, davepai@user1.channel1.com) -DC SCAR (Ray Davis, dcscar@igc.apc.org) -Speak Out! (Felicia Gustin, speakout@igc.apc.org) -Student Peace Action Network (Amy Quinn, pacampusnet@igc.apc.org) -Women's Action for New Directions (Susan Shaer, wand@world.std.com) ------------------------------ Topic No. 3 LIE #2: "The U.S. Constitution prevents us from spending our tax dollars on social programs." WHAT'S THE TRUTH? Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution reads: " The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States" The Constitution does not prevent investments in our social welfare. What prevents these investments is a Congress controlled by the weapons industry! [Excerpted from the _Challenge the Lie$ Campaign Organizing Guide_, (c) 1996 Center for Campus Organizing. You may distribute this lie and rebuttal provided that this notice is included in its entirety.] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | CHALLENGE THE LIE$ || A national campaign to expose the stranglehold | | Social Justice || military and prison spending have placed on | | Speaking Tour || important social and environmental priorities. | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Host a speaker; research the facts; design your own campaign! CCO will | | provide a packet with petitions, flyers, brainstorm ideas, and speakers:| | Helen Caldicott *Gene Carroll *Jonah Edelman *Michio Kaku *Loretta Ross | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | The organizing packet is only $1 from the CENTER FOR CAMPUS ORGANIZING | | P.O. Box 748, Cambridge, MA 02142, 617-354-9363 o cco@igc.apc.org | | -for an excerpt, send a blank e-mail to: ctl@pencil.math.missouri.edu | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ End of CAN-RW Digest 235 ************************ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 17:11:21 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: privileged cultural moments and you! So what will everybody do if Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for literature? J ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 10:05:46 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: the way of all languages Jordan - Magic Fire Music + harp and nasal twang + While the Clouds Roll by (synthesizer strings)+ wearing a George Costanza Fan Club t-shirt + bra with words on it: Poetics List + e-mail address ( TM Eliza NZ Enterprises)-- worn outside--- + Stock Market report (voice over) ---all these in negotiation with one another could be productive of lots and lots of art? like the murder of the doll that looks like George's mother for starters (TVNZ 2 yesterday 7.30 p.m.) JUXTAPOSED mind you with 8 p.m. Mad About You. The nightmare for the stand-up with ketchup on his trousers, no material, no props is also productive, if confronted and acted out? Have a Nice Day. Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 18:27:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: the way of all languages looks good to me Tony until you get to the TV part. J ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 18:03:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: privileged cultural moments and you! In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > So what will everybody do if Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for literature? > > J shd be an interesting moment to be in mpls. i guess i'll...walk down 4th St.--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 09:36:26 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: privileged cultural moments and you! >So what will everybody do if Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for literature? > >J > > I suppose everyone will just have to go get stoned......... Mark Roberts Student Systems Project Officer & User Representative SIS Team. Information Systems University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Ph. (02) 93517710 Mobile 015063970 Fax (02) 93517711 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 22:42:07 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tenney Nathanson Subject: Blue Monday citation Maria-- thanks for the reference; will brush off my Mansion (hmm) and go at it Tenney >tenney: it was originally in german, i read it in french; it's "Identite du >discours et transgression lyrique." poetique 32, novembre 1977. he actually >talks about lyric --i guess maybe i'm misrepresentning it to call it >"poetry"--md ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 23:14:24 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: malomar >the fans said alomar sucks alomar sucks alomar sucks as the umps took the >field last night at yankee stadium > >the fans withrew their support later in the game as blue was telling mariano >dunken where the bench was after calling him out on a pitch both high & >outside with runners on Yeah? Well, the umpires sure shafted the Texas pitchers in the second game. AND Raines was not safe at first! I will never forgive. Never. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 23:27:47 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: privileged cultural moments and you! >So what will everybody do if Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for literature? > >J Look forward to Rush Limbaugh getting the Peace Prize. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 07:31:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Immigration Laws & privileged cultural moments Thanks again to Gabrielle Welford for the posts concerning the Immigration Laws. Actually the privileged cultural moment wasn't Dylan quote--but if you scroll down past that, is a post re conference to be held on Chance in Las Vegas (where else?) featuring Baudrillard, Diane di Prima, Tom Watson, et al. Too bad Pascal the Wagerer can't be there! "No more "liknesses of reality,' no idealistic images, nothing but a desert!" --K. Malevich, "The Non-Objective World" "The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed dwon in confusion." --Heraclitus "I pity the poor immigrant/who wishes he would have stayed home." --Robert Zimmerman ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 08:01:04 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Blue Monday citation i must admit i have put this essay to uses that may not do justice to its complexity. i'd be interested to hear what u think of it, tenney, plus all you others who may be familiar w/ it... bests, maria d In message <2.2.16.19961002224215.507f95e6@mail.azstarnet.com> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Maria-- > > thanks for the reference; will brush off my Mansion (hmm) and go at it > > Tenney > > >tenney: it was originally in german, i read it in french; it's "Identite du > >discours et transgression lyrique." poetique 32, novembre 1977. he actually > >talks about lyric --i guess maybe i'm misrepresentning it to call it > >"poetry"--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 08:52:45 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Bouchard Subject: Re: privileged cultural moments and Jordan >> So what will everybody do if Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for literature? Realize how correct Pound was when he warned poets to ignore all literary prizes-- expecially the ignoble Nobel. daniel_bouchard@hmco.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 09:55:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathrine Varnes Subject: Poet Ad (fwd) A forward from Amittai F. Aviram: ANNOUNCEMENT I hope the following job announcement is not inappropriate to this list. We're hiring a POET! The following announcement is appearing in the _MLA Job List_, the _Chronicle of Higher Education_, and the _WPA Job List_-- Beginning Assistant Professor. Poet to teach in undergraduate and MFA program. Significant publications and promise of wide recognition. Interest in Women's Studies preferred. Letter, CV, recommendation letters, and WRITING SAMPLE should be sent to: Professor Robert Newman Chair Department of English University of South Carolina Columbia, South Carolina 29208 Feel free to e-mail me if you need more info. Best, Amittai F. Aviram Associate Professor Department of English University of South Carolina Columbia, South Carolina 29208 E-mail avirama@vm.sc.edu or (alias) amittai.aviram@sc.edu ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 10:31:51 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: orion Jordan thanks for the oriion sighting: >>Orion sightings: >> 7th & A, eight postings on the >> phonebooth, dealing mainly with >> 'nasal crutches' orion was looking good at a mad alex reading last week. walked around talking about stephen paul miller and presence. was stephen paul miller really his own presence? or was his presence just a bourgeois rhetorical tactic to gain attention? sorry i'm paraphrasing. Bill ps, how do you verify an orion sighting that is written down? please instruct me how to read. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 11:44:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: rerion (fwd) billi remember you saying orion saying something more like is stephen paul miller an ironic stance adopted as a parody by a more intelligent being, or is stephen paul miller merely the victim of his own bourgeous rhetorical stance? (another paraphrase but gives the idea i came away with.) to answer the question of how you spot orion words---he puts copies of his poems on mail boxes & lamp posts in the east village--Jordan collects them--I think hw should publish them--urge him to type a few for our edification--i think orion is brillian--but he smells bad. Tony Door, EV ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 11:51:34 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Re: orion bill, i may have missed the start of this thread: are you referring to Orion Feig? BTW, just now heard from stephen-paul miller in Krakow, who is settling in there for a while on a fullbright. if you or someone wants his email address, let me know. he says he'd love to write something for some publication about the polish scene and poetry etc. burt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 14:07:47 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: orion None other than Orion Feig, who is currently describing Steven Spielberg and Hal Sirowitz in the magic-marker notes he tapes to street signs and phone booths in the East Village. These notes seem very much the product of a schizophrenic imagination (a lot of parsing out the meaning of words by means of folk etymology, a lot of free-floating and then very pointed hostility). As I say, his latest motif is 'the nasal crutch', the meaning of which I prefer not to know. Joel Lewis knows more about Orion than I do, probably many of you know Orion. He spends most of his time in Tompkins Square Park. I don't know where he sleeps. I'm told he goes south for the winter. Kenny Goldsmith has some of Orion's writings up on his website. Kenny? Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 10:55:38 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christopher Reiner Subject: WITZ address change Hi everybody... WITZ: A Journal of Contemporary Poetics has a new a address. WITZ P.O. Box 40012 Studio City, California 91614 The next issue will appear around the end of this month. It will feature an essay by Jefferson Hansen ("Anarchism & Culture) and reports on two recent conferences (Assembling Alternatives and the Russian extravaganza in New Jersey). Also, of course, book reviews. Subscriptions to WITZ are $10 (US)/3 issues (individuals) and $30 (US)/3 issues (institutions). Back issues are archived at the Electronic Poetry Center, in the "Journals" section. best, Chris Reiner creiner@crl.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 14:52:11 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan sondheim Subject: marking maybe nothing [ to exclaim ] much sadness although ( a voyeur in memory of screen - neither white knees press outside into pants, nor arms move window knuckle rap-glass; nevertheless eye in shaved pussy / cock in knees... however shivered floorflesh pants in pants since my breath goes down your legs rap glass? ) but my breath goes up your legs nonetheless,... there's no other point to the real and Net sex sounds like everything else: either like a poem about it or a story. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 20:08:44 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Columbia Teach-in The intellectual community joins the new labor movement in "The Fight For America's Future" A Teach-In with the Labor Movement October 3-4, 1996 Columbia University New York, New York _________________________________________________________ Opening Plenary: Thursday, October 3, 1996 7:30 p.m. Low Library Chair: Eric Foner, Columbia University Speakers: John Sweeney Betty Friedan President, AFL-CIO Wilson Center for Scholars Cornel West Patricia Williams Harvard University Columbia University Richard Rorty University of Virginia _________________________________________________________ Plenary Session #2: The Incorporation of America Friday, October 4, 1996 -- 9:00 a.m.- 10:30 a.m. Altschul Auditorium, (Int'l. Affairs Bldg.) Chair: Ira Katznelson, Columbia University Speakers: Katha Pollitt Orlando Patterson Writer Harvard University Linda Chavez-Thompson Joel Rogers Executive Vice-President, University of Wisconsin AFL-CIO Madison _________________________________________________________ Morning Workshops Friday October 4, 1996, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm 1. Globalization and the American Standard of Living Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 410 Convener: Steve Fraser Participants: Bennett Harrison, New School for Social Research Ron Blackwell, Corporate Affairs, AFL-CIO Joel Rogers, University of Wisconsin, Madison 2. Politics and the Future of the Labor Movement Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 404 Convener: Mike Kazin Participants: Ruy Teixeira, Economic Policy Institute Roger Wilkins, George Mason University Mark Erlich, Carpenters Local #40 Elaine Bernard, Harvard Trade Union Program 3. Labor and Immigration Location: Hamilton Hall, Rm. 302 Convener: Gary Gerstle Participants: Katie Quan, UNITE Philip Kasinitz, Hunter College Maria Ontiveros, Golden Gate Law School Patricia Fernandez Kelly, Johns Hopkins University 4. Working Families on the Fault-line Location: Hamilton Hall, Rm. 303 Convener: Joan Williams Participants: Lillian Rubin, University of California, Berkeley Guy Molyneux, Peter Hart Research Association Joan Williams, American University Law School 5. Organizing the University Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 411 Convener: Richard Boris Participants: Wells Keddie, AAUP Kathy Newman, GESO Activist, Yale University Kris Rondeau, University Organizing, AFSCME Maida Rosenstein, UAW Local 2110 (Barnard) 6. Culture, Identity, and Class Politics Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 403 Convener: Nelson Lichtenstein Participants: Todd Gitlin, New York University Robin Kelley, New York University Jo-Ann Mort, UNITE Jerry Hudson, 1199 7. The Wages of 'Race': Unions and Racial Justice Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 413A Convener: Tom Sugrue Participants: David Roediger, University of Minnesota Derrick Bell, New York University Mae Ngai, Asian Pacific Am. Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO Michael Eric Dyson, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 8. Labor and the Law (cosponsored by the CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEREST LAW, Columbia Univ. School of Law) Location: Jerome Greene Lounge, Law School Convener: David Abraham Participants: Karl Klare, Northeastem University Willie Forbath, Texas/UCLA Larry Englestein, AFL-CIO Katherine Stone, Cornell Law School _________________________________________________________ Afternoon Workshops Friday October 4, 1996, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm 9. Intellectuals and the Labor Movement Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 403 Convener: Norman Birnbaum Participants: Bob Welch, Assistant to the President, AFL-CIO Tom Geoghegan, Labor Lawyer & Writer Paul Berman, Writer 10. Work, Welfare, and the Labor Movement Location: Hamilton Hall, Rm. 302 Convener: Josh Freeman Participants: Katherine Newman, Harvard University Bill Fletcher, Education Dept., AFL-CIO Herb Gans, Columbia University 11. Union Summer & A New Generation of Organizers Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 410 Convener: Kevin Pranis Participants: Sarah Potter, student, Columbia University Andy Levin, Director, Union Summer Johanna Marquina, student, CUNY Staten Island Valerie McCrory, Yale Student Labor Action Coalition 12. African Americans and the Labor Movement Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 413A Convener: Leith Mullings Participants: Jerry Hudson, 1199 Betty Hugley, 1199 13. Organizing Women Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 411 Convener: Joan Williams Participants: Marion Crain, Univ. of North Carolina Law School Chris Woods, Organizing Department, AFL-CIO Donene Williams, Harvard Union of Clerical & Technical Workers, AFSCME 14. Professional and Technical Workers Location: Hamilton Hall, Rm. 301 Convener: Stanley Aronowitz Participants: Tom Dawes, Local 375, AFSCME Ernst Benjamin, AAUP John Ronches, Committee of Interns and Residents 15. Are Labor's Values (Still) Everyone Else's? Location: Hamilton Hall, Rm. 303 Convener: Ronald Aronson Participants: Jerry Deneau, Graphics Communications Intl. Union Lewis Gordon, Brown University Heidi Hartmann, Inst. for Women's Policy Studies 16. Organizing in the Global Economy Location: Int'l Affairs Building, Rm. 405 Convener: Mark Levitan Participants: Wilfredo Larencuent, UNITE William Milberg, New School for Social Research Barbara Shailor, International Affairs, AFL-CIO Pharis Harvey, International Labor Rights Federation _________________________________________________________ Closing Plenary Session: Organizing the Unorganized Friday, October 4,1996 -- 4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m. Altschul Auditorium, (Int'l Affairs Bldg) Chair: Manning Marable, Columbia University Speakers: Richard Trumka David Montgomery Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO Yale University Karen Nussbaum Jose La Luz Women's Department, AFL-CIO Int'l Area Director, AFSCME Frances Fox Piven City University of New York _________________________________________________________ Names of approximately 150 distinguished academic and union endorsers omitted; among others: Julian Bond, Alan Brinkley, Jonathan Cutler, Christopher Jencks, Randall Kennedy, Jonathan Kozol, Denis MacShane M.P., Victor Navasky, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Carl Schorske, Richard Sennett, Lester Thurow, Michael Walzer, William Junius Wilson, _________________________________________________________ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations + United Automobile Workers Local 2110 + District Council 37, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees + UNITE + New World Foundation, New Labor Fund + Amencan Association of University Professors + Queens College Labor Resource Center + Sagan Foundation + American Social History Project + Bernstein & Lipsett, Washington, D.C. + Carol Bernstein Ferry + Jeremy Blacklow + Sarah Potter + Timothy McCarthy _________________________________________________________ Committee for a National Teach-In; Steven Fraser & Nelson Lichtenstein, Co-Chairs Phone:(212) 598-5706 Fax:(212) 420-5899 E-mail:Steve_Fraser@hmco.com For more information, contact Jonathan Cutler: jcutler@email.gc.cuny.edu _________________________________________________________ [End] This document will be available on the Web at: http://jya.com/teachin.txt ftp://jya.com/pub/incoming/teachin.txt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 20:36:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: a stretch of cultural moments (for george jones) "TIME DON'T MEAN A THING TO ME I'VE GOT LIFE TO GO" S I N G S I N G S I N S I N I N I N I I I N I N S I N S I N S I N G S I N G S I N S I N I N I N I I I N I N S I N S I N S I N G S I N G S I N S I N I N I N I I I N I N S I N S I N S I N G S I N G S I N S I N I N I N I I I N I N S I N S I N S I N G S I N G S I N S I N I N I N I I I N I N S I N S I N S I N G S I N G S I N S I N I N I N I I I N I N S I N S I N S I N G S I N G --dbchirot ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 06:41:09 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ward Tietz <100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: Geneva Sound Poetry Events I'm sorry I'm so late with this, but here's a brief summary of the "festival de la Batie" sound poetry events I said I'd post, which were held in Geneva, Switzerland on September 13th, 14th and 15th. It was a very enjoyable festival. There was a nice mix of work, performed text, recording-enhanced material, theatrical/linguistic and looser happening-style performance. The entire "festival de la Batie" was very well organized and publicized, with posters, catalogs, all over Geneva and also in neighboring France. Roger Lewinter held a conference/reading on Mallarme on the 13th. I heard part of it in rehearsal, but missed the performance, so I can't say much more. I heard, though, that Mallarme devotees enjoyed it. The performances of September 14th were quite memorable. The highlight, I thought, was Bernard Heidsieck who gave what was probably the most complete literary performance I've ever seen. As Mark McMorris said, it's surprising Heidsieck isn't better known in the U.S. He has an elegance and presence in performance that's quite rare. Amanda Stewart performed some very nice pieces, technically accomplished and varied in an almost classic sound poetry style, with a lot of phonemic emphasis and speed. Some of her pieces had a more textual base and displayed a more writerly character, which made for an interesting contrast. Guenther Ruch and Juergen Olbrich performed an action based piece with interaction via phone and fax. They placed phone calls to designated participants, which were broadcast to the audience, received faxes throughout the performance, and performed a variety of sound actions involving velcro, the hammering of spaghetti, the destruction of a cuckoo clock, etc. Their piece had some very curious and successful moments. The performances of the 15th were also quite varied. The evening started off with Christian Uetz. He performed most of his pieces in High German, with sections in Swiss German dialect, a few pieces in French and then also a few in German, French and English, all it seemed from memory. His work was very athletic with a lot of twist and speed. It seemed to work especially well in German. Mark McMorris and I performed second. Our piece "Accompong" combined elements of the languages of the Jamaican Maroons, along with the use of various large three-dimensional letter-rubrics that had been constructed out of steel and wood. The performance joined action to voice to rubric: interacting with the letters, rocking them, carrying them, hitting them, and so on, while speaking, reading, or shouting. Mark's performance of the Nyankopong section of the piece, which Mark performed while balancing a 90 pound steel "M", his head in the "V" of the "M" on a waist-high wooden "H", was mysterious and beautiful. Julie Patton's performance was very well received. A lot of people enjoyed her blusey, jazzy rhythms and it was a pleasant reminder to have music so strongly allied with speech rhythms. The pieces that emphasized her voice were very nice, especially the passages which had speech moving in and out of song. Bob Cobbing and Hugh Metcalfe rounded out the evening with a sound performance extravaganza. They were wonderfully wild, brilliant, awful, funny, wise, stupid, scary, and best of all comfortable and at ease. Bob Cobbing's singing is a wonder. It's difficult to know exactly where it comes from, but then it's there, and it's wonderful; no words, just grumbly sounds, with drums, bells and other instrumentation mixed in. Hugh Metcafle's musical improvisations were perfect accompaniment. Ward Tietz ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 09:32:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth Goldsmith Subject: Orion There is a remarkable co-written novel on line by Margueritte and Orion. Each swaps turns at writing and Orion's style is particularly astounding: http://www.thecurrent.com/newworld/harvey.htm Don't Call Me Harvey by Margueritte and Orion This is the true story of Orion, a poet in his forties experiencing a full blown schizophrenic illness while living outdoors in the famous Tompkins Square Park of New York City, and Margueritte, a poet in her fifties who is a psychiatric nurse. The title, DON'T CALL ME HARVEY is from a joke of theirs that developed from one of Orion's delusions, that Margueritte was really Lee Harvey Oswald. +============================================================+ Kenneth Goldsmith play: http://wfmu.org/~kennyg kennyg@bway.net work: http://www.ubuweb.com 611 Bway #702, NYC 10012 v. 212.260.4081 Beans Dear? ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 09:37:09 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth Goldsmith Subject: Orion In All His Graphic Glory On The Web Jordan D. sed: >Kenny Goldsmith has some of Orion's writings up on his website. >Kenny? There is a bunch of Orion's incredible work, scanned in all its graphic glory at: http://wfmu.org:80/~kennyg/found/orion/orion01.html Kenny G. +============================================================+ Kenneth Goldsmith play: http://wfmu.org/~kennyg kennyg@bway.net work: http://www.ubuweb.com 611 Bway #702, NYC 10012 v. 212.260.4081 Beans Dear? ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 11:15:01 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tod Thilleman Subject: Re: Orion's Autobiography schizophrenia as autobio-novel,a kind of helix-related parsing thru the medium of one poetess/nurse Margueritte, as opposed to schiz as poetry on east village phone booths (abc no rio mid eighties rantings on the kennedy assasination & 'You') was I believe, written, published, or going to be published by Enemy Loose Publications in Brooklyn, NY called Don't call me Harvey. Any interested in obtaining, should try query at 718-398-6311..... ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 10:37:24 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeremy F Green Subject: The New Norton I don't know if this is an old thread (haven't had much time for lurking/reading lately), but has anyone had a look at the new (4th edition) Norton Anthology of Poetry? It's just about to hit the bookstores. I got a glimpse at it last night. Pre-20th century looks like a big improvement; 20th century very discouraging. Stein (from "Stanzas in Meditation") and Riding are now included, but the post-1950 selection is pretty horrific. A couple of Michael Palmer poems, but no Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, etc., etc. Maybe the thinking was that Paul Hoover's Pomo. Norton had covered such "minority" interests, but please, Brad Leithauser?! And my particular pet peeve: STILL NO OPPEN. Jeremy Green ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 12:49:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Burroughs The following, from Jim McCrary, is an announcement of activities related to the work of William S. Burroughs here in Lawrence in November. Y'all come on down. > >"Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts" organized >by Los Angeles County Museum of Art traveling to Lawrence, >Kansas. > >KU Spencer Museum hosting retrospective of WSB. Ports >of Entry. Show opens Nov 2. Symposium sponcered by >Spencer and Hall Center on that date from 10am-5pm > will feature: Allen Ginsberg, >Kathy Acker, Legs McNiel (punk writer), Robert Sobieszek >(curator of show for LA County Museum of Art) and George >Condo (painter and WSB collabortor). Opening reception at >musuem (free to public) from 5-7. For more information >contact Spencer Museum, U of Kansas, Lawrence, Ks. > >Nov 26th, 7:30 pm at Lied Performance Center, Lawrence, Ks > >NOVA Convention Revisited featuring: > >Patti Smith, Deborah Harry, Ed Sanders, Phillip Glass, Laurie Anderson, >John Girono. > >Lied Center Box office or Ticketmaster. > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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, 4 Oct 1996 13:28:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Tabbi Subject: Re: job announcement This is Joe Tabbi. I'm on the poet search committee this year at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and I would be pleased to read applications from people on this list. The advertisement follows. Thanks! SEEK POET. Assistant Professor, tenure track, or Associate Professor, beginning fall, 1997, pending budgetary approval, in creative writing (poetry). Significant book publications and experience teaching at graduate and undergraduate levels required. MFA in creative writing or PhD in appropriate field desirable. Creative writing faculty advise students and share in responsibility for the writing program, which offers the BA, MA, and PhD with specialization in creative writing. We encourage applications from women and members of minority groups. Send application letter, curriculum vitae, and writing sample (maximum 10 pages) to: Cris Mazza, Chair Search Committee in Creative Writing UIC-English (M/C 162) Rm. 2027, 601 S. Morgan Chicago, IL 60607-7120 Do not send additional materials until requested to do so. Screening begins immediately. For fullest consideration, send application by November 1. The University of Illinois at Chicago is an AA/EIOE. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 15:27:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: epc Subject: Wislawa Szymborska (fwd) I forward a message of some interest ... --- Forwarded message: > From: Richard Soos > Subject: Wislawa Szymborska > ___________________________________________________________ > > I am both happy and proud to let you know that Wislawa Szymborska was > awarded the Nobel Literature Prize this week. She has been a candidate for > several years, and it is great to see her finally earn the award at age 73. > She has many loved poems translated into English, including "The End and the > Beginning", and "People On The Bridge." One of my personal favorites is: > > Hitler's first photograph > > And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe? > That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy! > Will he grow up to be an L.L.D.? > Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House? > Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose? > Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know: > printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's? > Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander? > To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride? > Maybe to the Buergermeister's daughter? > > Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey bun. > While he was being born, a year ago, > there was no dearth of signs on the earth and in the sky: > spring sun, geraniums in windows, > the organ-grinder's music in the yard, > a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper. > Then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream. > A dove seen in a dream means joyful news-- > if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come. > Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartschen knocking. > > A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib, > our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well, > looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket, > like the tots in every other family album. > Sh-h-h, let's not start crying, sugar, > The camera will click from under that black hood. > > The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunen. > And Braunen is a small but worthy town-- > honest businesses, obliging neighbors, > smell of yeast dough, of gray soap. > No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps. > A history teacher loosens his collar > and yawns over homework. > > - trans. Baranczak/Cavanagh > > Poland deserves to be proud of its rich poetic heritage. Wislawa Szymborska > is the 9th woman to win the literature award in 95 years. > > This is the second year in a row that a poet has won, and the second year in > a row that a European has won. Folks to watch for in coming years include > Hugo Claus from Belgium, Ismail Kadare from Albania, Jaan Kross from > Estonia, Gyorgy Konrad from Hungary, Doris Lessing from Britain, Jose > Saramago and Antonio Lobo Antunes from Portugal, John Ashbery of the United > States, and Bei Dao of China. > > Irish poet Seamus Heaney was last years winner. One of my personal favorites > of his is: > > Oracle > > Hide in the hollow trunk > of the willow tree, > its listening familiar, > until, as usual, they > cuckoo your name > across the fields. > You can hear them > draw the poles of stiles > as they approach > calling you out: > small mouth and ear > in a woody cleft, > lobe and larynx > of the mossy places. > > > *************************************************** ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 15:48:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: LANSING!!! PETTET!!! In BOSTON! This Tueday, Oct. 8th, 7:30 PM. Big! Big!! Big!!! Reading with Gerrit Lansing and Simon Pettet. Orgazined by the Grolier: call for details, and don't miss it. The best poetry you're going to hear from now to ever . . . . !!!! ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 14:36:01 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Messerli Subject: Re: Wislawa Szymborska (fwd) And these are supposed to be great poems!!!? Drivel by my standards. Douglas At 03:27 PM 10/4/96 -0400, you wrote: >I forward a message of some interest ... >--- >Forwarded message: >> From: Richard Soos >> Subject: Wislawa Szymborska >> ___________________________________________________________ >> >> I am both happy and proud to let you know that Wislawa Szymborska was >> awarded the Nobel Literature Prize this week. She has been a candidate for >> several years, and it is great to see her finally earn the award at age 73. >> She has many loved poems translated into English, including "The End and the >> Beginning", and "People On The Bridge." One of my personal favorites is: >> >> Hitler's first photograph >> >> And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe? >> That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy! >> Will he grow up to be an L.L.D.? >> Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House? >> Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose? >> Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know: >> printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's? >> Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander? >> To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride? >> Maybe to the Buergermeister's daughter? >> >> Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey bun. >> While he was being born, a year ago, >> there was no dearth of signs on the earth and in the sky: >> spring sun, geraniums in windows, >> the organ-grinder's music in the yard, >> a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper. >> Then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream. >> A dove seen in a dream means joyful news-- >> if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come. >> Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartschen knocking. >> >> A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib, >> our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well, >> looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket, >> like the tots in every other family album. >> Sh-h-h, let's not start crying, sugar, >> The camera will click from under that black hood. >> >> The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunen. >> And Braunen is a small but worthy town-- >> honest businesses, obliging neighbors, >> smell of yeast dough, of gray soap. >> No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps. >> A history teacher loosens his collar >> and yawns over homework. >> >> - trans. Baranczak/Cavanagh >> >> Poland deserves to be proud of its rich poetic heritage. Wislawa Szymborska >> is the 9th woman to win the literature award in 95 years. >> >> This is the second year in a row that a poet has won, and the second year in >> a row that a European has won. Folks to watch for in coming years include >> Hugo Claus from Belgium, Ismail Kadare from Albania, Jaan Kross from >> Estonia, Gyorgy Konrad from Hungary, Doris Lessing from Britain, Jose >> Saramago and Antonio Lobo Antunes from Portugal, John Ashbery of the United >> States, and Bei Dao of China. >> >> Irish poet Seamus Heaney was last years winner. One of my personal favorites >> of his is: >> >> Oracle >> >> Hide in the hollow trunk >> of the willow tree, >> its listening familiar, >> until, as usual, they >> cuckoo your name >> across the fields. >> You can hear them >> draw the poles of stiles >> as they approach >> calling you out: >> small mouth and ear >> in a woody cleft, >> lobe and larynx >> of the mossy places. >> >> >> *************************************************** > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 18:42:38 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest Subject: Re: Wislawa Szymborska (fwd) i always hate these "drivel by my standards!" kinds of messages about poems that are, by general measures of these things, good quality. it has such a sour, preening tone... the heaney is, as any heaney poem is, at the very least a solid poem. i don't happen to think it is his best, and i can think, easily, of poems by him i like better ("Mid-Term Break" springs immediately to mind). the poem by Wislawa Szymborska was, i thought, wonderful -- a sort of quick, idiosyncratic, feminist re-vision of something i would have thought had no new angles. i DID find myself wondering how much i missed in translation, if the translator(s) appended their own cross-translations of lovetalk, and what the literal in polish would be -- how does "honey bun" cross? is it really "honey bun" in the polish, or one of those wonderfully murmurous, tender polish repeating appellations. "Bapcia" (bap-shee) is grandmother, and, even more sound-charming, djadju (dja-jdoo) -- not sure of polish spelling here -- is grandfather. how, i wonder, did "precious little angel" and "mommy's sunshine" move in the polish. what i really liked especially about the Szymborska poem is the way it brings the home-ish, the rich sound of one of the most central human relationships, the "lovetalk" of a mother to a child, the ecstasy of that state and its glowing, rhythmic language, into both the traditionally male realm of HIStory and into the realm of the Significant Literary. such a bold, witty stroke... e ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 17:30:03 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Messerli Subject: Re: Wislawa Szymborska (fwd) I think they're both bad poems by any standard but the most academic notions of poetry. Further the poems reproduced by Szymborska in the NY TIMES and LA Times were equally, to my thinking, mediocre. Douglas At 06:42 PM 10/4/96 -0400, you wrote: >i always hate these "drivel by my standards!" kinds of messages about poems >that are, by general measures of these things, good quality. it has such >a sour, preening tone... > >the heaney is, as any heaney poem is, at the very least a solid poem. i >don't happen to think it is his best, and i can think, easily, of poems by >him i like better ("Mid-Term Break" springs immediately to mind). the poem >by Wislawa Szymborska was, i thought, wonderful -- a sort of quick, >idiosyncratic, feminist re-vision of something i would have thought had no >new angles. i DID find myself wondering how much i missed in translation, >if the translator(s) appended their own cross-translations of lovetalk, >and what the literal in polish would be -- how does "honey bun" cross? is >it really "honey bun" in the polish, or one of those wonderfully murmurous, >tender polish repeating appellations. "Bapcia" (bap-shee) is grandmother, >and, even more sound-charming, djadju (dja-jdoo) -- not sure of polish >spelling here -- is grandfather. how, i wonder, did "precious little angel" >and "mommy's sunshine" move in the polish. > >what i really liked especially about the Szymborska poem is the way it >brings the home-ish, the rich sound of one of the most central human >relationships, the "lovetalk" of a mother to a child, the ecstasy of >that state and its glowing, rhythmic language, into both the traditionally >male realm of HIStory and into the realm of the Significant Literary. >such a bold, witty stroke... > >e > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 20:30:10 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Wislawa Szymborska (fwd) um, what's "solid" abt that Heaney poem? ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 00:15:00 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Szymborska I liked the Szymborska poems I read in various newspapers. Never heard of her. Hard for me to tell yet. A lot of "lie down in Tiamat" out there. But they se emed clear, original, simple in a good way. A good storyteller. I'll give her the benefit of the drivel. I mean doubt. Under cover of a whisper under wings of snow I draw forth the star from the velvet cloak I draw forth the star of your protection Black Madonna, Black Madonna. Where life has fallen and ships gone under and clouds of November take flight in haste and clouds of November shadow your cloak Black Madonna, Black Madonna. Who thinks you are gone follows their shadow far from the sky road your green star glimmers far from the sky road and circles the children Black Madonna, Black Madonna. - Henry Gould (oh, who's children? Whose?) ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 04:17:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Heidsieck before Heaney Multiple comments here: Ward, Okay, I'll bite (munch): "The highlight, I thought, was Bernard Heidsieck who gave what was probably the most complete literary performance I've ever seen. As Mark McMorris said, it's surprising Heidsieck isn't better known in the U.S. He has an elegance and presence in performance that's quite rare." I agree with you that he should be much more well known, but I'd love to know what about his performance made it "the most complete literary...." Don't just tease us. We want the facts, the details, the nuances. Regarding Szymborska and Heaney: I've seen some of her poems in translations that made me think that there might be something there, as well as ones that look like the worst of Anne Sexton (which is sort of how I took the one posted here). I think it's difficult to make the kind of sweeping "drivel" judgment across languages unless one has a lot of evidence. After all, there are dozens of dreadful Lorca translations and mushy translations of Baudelaire abound. I try to imagine how hard it must be translate certain American and Canadian poets (Rae Armantrout's poems, for example, are so taught and yet fully coded in a particular idiom that one would have to either jettison a world of nuance [precisely what gives her poems their remarkable depth] or else puff them out the way popped corn kernals are, which might end up looking like some of Szymborska's poems. Heaney on the other hand might be an argument for recognition of different modes of English as different languages, but... reading works like the one below (and I've found this sort of stuff in every piece of his I've ever read), I cannot imagine the self respecting poet who would not simply cringe at that "cuckoo your name" line, which happens to be the hinge of this whole hoary construction. Beyond that, he's simply putting the pathetic back into its fallacy, no? Oracle >> >> Hide in the hollow trunk >> of the willow tree, >> its listening familiar, >> until, as usual, they >> cuckoo your name >> across the fields. >> You can hear them >> draw the poles of stiles >> as they approach >> calling you out: >> small mouth and ear >> in a woody cleft, >> lobe and larynx >> of the mossy places. >> >> The idea that this is "solid" is like suggesting that a redwood burl coffee table is great sculpture (or "solid" sculpture). It's perhaps tighter than some of the conservative bad poems (as distinct from the conservative good ones, which frankly there are plenty of) out there, but it definitely depends on thinking that that old conceit is reason enough to write a poem and that the word "mossy" is in itself a sufficient revelation to ground its clanging sense of closure. What makes this "award winning" is a study in the social pathology of reading in our time, rather than a study in literature, no? Ron Silliman ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 09:16:00 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Messerli Subject: Messerli returing to Szymbroska Dear Ron, You're quite right about the comments you made about=20 translation. It is hard to truly evaluate a poet on the basis of translation, although I do think--particularly with a good translation (which this may not be)--one can get a fair sense of the work, and in some (few) cases it can actually make the work seem MORE interesting. Perhaps the=20 excellence of Swedish translation of Szymborska's work=20 accounts for the award--although the Nobel committee has certainly made some atrocious choices in literature over the last decade. I was, of course, being intentionally provocative yesterday, for several reasons. At times there seems to be a kind of unstated notion on the list, a kind a passive notion that all poetry is the same, and=20 no distinctions need be made, that we should never talk about the "quality" of a poem. More importantly: although I can enjoy a good dildo as much as the next man and woman, it does seem that it would be fun, occasionally, to turn our attention back to poetry and=20 the discussion of it. I think "Hitler's First Photograph" is particularly bad, however. I interprete the poem as a mildly ironic construction with two possible ideas behind it: 1. That all children (and human beings) have the potential for great evil, and 2. Given the "cutsey" childlike attentions of the adults, that=20 whatever happened to the young Hitler boy, the culture helped=20 to instill. Both of these ideas are a bit facetious: Certainly we may all have the potential for great evil, but fortunately there are not that many Hitlers. And although the culture may have instilled many of ideas that led to Hitler's actions, it was not committing the vast atrocities without him. But what I object to even more than the thematics is the METHOD of=20 the poem. It relies simply on the one word--Hitler. Without that,=20 the entire work would collapse. If you said the Strauss baby, for=20 example, the poem would be truly trite. But Szymborska relies solely=20 on the recognition by her readers that this is not just ANY child, but=20 the monster himself.=20 In short she has created a little construct that relies entirely upon the reader's agreement before he has even uttered the first word of=20 the poem. There is no discovery of anything in this poem; it is all=20 pre-determined before we have even begun. We will react as we do=20 because the poem hits at the point where the reflex is inevitable. For me poetry (writing in general) is always a discovery, an uncover- ing, if you will, of questions more than answers, particularly=20 since it engages the very medium through which we recieve and=20 comprehend the world. There is no room for reflex actions or pre- conceived constructs in order for the poem to truly exciting. Storytelling it is--as Henry Gould has responded. But I go with Pound every time: "Flaubert and De Maupassant lifted prose to the rank of a finer art, and one has no patience with contemporary poets who escape=20 from all the difficulties of the infinitely difficult art of good=20 prose by pouring themselves into loose verses." At another point,=20 Pound makes clear that he dismisses poets who are merely telling=20 stories by chopping up their lines into verse. For me storytelling=20 (which I love) and poetry are quite different arts. This is only one poem, however, and I make no claims to know=20 Szymborska's oeuvre. But certainly none of the poems I read=20 (admittedly only seven short poems!) could compare with the poetry=20 of Lorine Niedecker (another so-called "homey" poet) or William=20 Carlos Williams, or George Oppen, or Louis Zukofsky, of Ezra Pound,=20 or Paul Celan, or Benjamin P=E9ret, or Marina Tsvetayeva, or=20 Tchicaya U Tam'si....the list could go on for a long while:=20 all poets who never received the Nobel Prize. Thanks, Ron, for your good responses. Douglas At 04:17 AM 10/5/96 -0700, you wrote: >Multiple comments here: > >Ward, > >Okay, I'll bite (munch): >"The highlight, I thought, was Bernard Heidsieck who gave what was >probably the most complete literary performance I've ever seen. As >Mark McMorris said, it's surprising Heidsieck isn't better known in the >U.S. He has an elegance and presence in performance that's quite >rare." > >I agree with you that he should be much more well known, but I'd love >to know what about his performance made it "the most complete >literary...." Don't just tease us. We want the facts, the details, the >nuances. > >Regarding Szymborska and Heaney: >I've seen some of her poems in translations that made me think that >there might be something there, as well as ones that look like the >worst of Anne Sexton (which is sort of how I took the one posted here). >I think it's difficult to make the kind of sweeping "drivel" judgment >across languages unless one has a lot of evidence. After all, there are >dozens of dreadful Lorca translations and mushy translations of >Baudelaire abound. I try to imagine how hard it must be translate >certain American and Canadian poets (Rae Armantrout's poems, for >example, are so taught and yet fully coded in a particular idiom that >one would have to either jettison a world of nuance [precisely what >gives her poems their remarkable depth] or else puff them out the way >popped corn kernals are, which might end up looking like some of >Szymborska's poems. > >Heaney on the other hand might be an argument for recognition of >different modes of English as different languages, but... reading works >like the one below (and I've found this sort of stuff in every piece of >his I've ever read), I cannot imagine the self respecting poet who >would not simply cringe at that "cuckoo your name" line, which happens >to be the hinge of this whole hoary construction. Beyond that, he's >simply putting the pathetic back into its fallacy, no? > > Oracle >>> >>> Hide in the hollow trunk >>> of the willow tree, >>> its listening familiar, >>> until, as usual, they >>> cuckoo your name >>> across the fields. >>> You can hear them >>> draw the poles of stiles >>> as they approach >>> calling you out: >>> small mouth and ear >>> in a woody cleft, >>> lobe and larynx >>> of the mossy places. >>> >>> >The idea that this is "solid" is like suggesting that a redwood burl >coffee table is great sculpture (or "solid" sculpture). It's perhaps >tighter than some of the conservative bad poems (as distinct from the >conservative good ones, which frankly there are plenty of) out there, >but it definitely depends on thinking that that old conceit is reason >enough to write a poem and that the word "mossy" is in itself a >sufficient revelation to ground its clanging sense of closure. What >makes this "award winning" is a study in the social pathology of >reading in our time, rather than a study in literature, no? > >Ron Silliman > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 12:52:43 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan sondheim Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.16.19961005074757.2b474f56@cinenet.net> Well, I personally like the fact that the poem rises or falls on "Hitler" - that the word disorients the whole. The other point here is the rela- tion of the Poetics list to traditional and other poetics/ries - Why _this_ poem up for critique and not one of the less traditional - which have been far more numerous? Is interpenetrated abstraction harder to judge? Are we too polite? There was a billowing and uncomfortable softness to the Szymbroska poem, even in translation, that reminded me of Dali's Hitler comments, equally uncomfortable; I'm not at all that willing to dispose so succinctly. As far as facetiousness, it was a poem, not a thesis, but it does open itself to thesis/plural, just as any poem does, even bad ones. Alan http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ desire in deity (D.G.R) ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 10:10:21 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Messerli Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska Alan, I guess it depends upon how you define words like "traditional." For me, the tradition of 20th Century poetry has been one of innovation and experimentation. The "billowing and uncomfortable" softness which you describe is characteristic of a great many poems (of any generation) which are often described as more "traditional" or as (and I think this is a misnomer, even though I have used it myself) "academic." I just think they're weaker poems, outside of the great tradition of 20th century writing. As for delimiting the critique, I'd have no limits. I just felt the need to react to the high praise poured upon poets who have won the Nobel Prize. Enough said from me. But I hope others will go on. Douglas At 12:52 PM 10/5/96 -0400, you wrote: >Well, I personally like the fact that the poem rises or falls on "Hitler" >- that the word disorients the whole. The other point here is the rela- >tion of the Poetics list to traditional and other poetics/ries - Why >_this_ poem up for critique and not one of the less traditional - which >have been far more numerous? Is interpenetrated abstraction harder to >judge? Are we too polite? > >There was a billowing and uncomfortable softness to the Szymbroska poem, >even in translation, that reminded me of Dali's Hitler comments, equally >uncomfortable; I'm not at all that willing to dispose so succinctly. As >far as facetiousness, it was a poem, not a thesis, but it does open itself >to thesis/plural, just as any poem does, even bad ones. > >Alan > > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html > images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ > desire in deity (D.G.R) > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 13:18:32 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan sondheim Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.16.19961005084217.246f0ee4@cinenet.net> By "billowing and uncomfortable" softness, I was referring to the contents of the poem, not the style (which I agree with you about of course) - I just wanted to clarify this. It reminded me in a weird way of Sartre's Childhood of a Leader. Alan On Sat, 5 Oct 1996, Douglas Messerli wrote: > Alan, > > I guess it depends upon how you define words like "traditional." For > me, the tradition of 20th Century poetry has been one of innovation > and experimentation. The "billowing and uncomfortable" softness which > you describe is characteristic of a great many poems (of any generation) > which are often described as more "traditional" or as (and I think this > is a misnomer, even though I have used it myself) "academic." I just > think they're weaker poems, outside of the great tradition of 20th > century writing. > > As for delimiting the critique, I'd have no limits. I just felt the need > to react to the high praise poured upon poets who have won the Nobel Prize. > > Enough said from me. But I hope others will go on. > > Douglas > > > At 12:52 PM 10/5/96 -0400, you wrote: > >Well, I personally like the fact that the poem rises or falls on "Hitler" > >- that the word disorients the whole. The other point here is the rela- > >tion of the Poetics list to traditional and other poetics/ries - Why > >_this_ poem up for critique and not one of the less traditional - which > >have been far more numerous? Is interpenetrated abstraction harder to > >judge? Are we too polite? > > > >There was a billowing and uncomfortable softness to the Szymbroska poem, > >even in translation, that reminded me of Dali's Hitler comments, equally > >uncomfortable; I'm not at all that willing to dispose so succinctly. As > >far as facetiousness, it was a poem, not a thesis, but it does open itself > >to thesis/plural, just as any poem does, even bad ones. > > > >Alan > > > > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html > > images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ > > desire in deity (D.G.R) > > > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ desire in deity (D.G.R) ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 13:34:36 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ward Tietz <100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: Re: Heidsieck Ron, I suppose what I was thinking of with Heidsieck was a perception of fullness and dimension in his performance that I rarely experience at typical readings of fiction or poetry. I think this probably has something to do with a slightly different understanding of the formal possibilities of reading. In Heidsieck's case I think this comes from experimentation outside of the normal channels of writing, with tape recorders, multi-track recording, etc., that stress different units of sense, rhythm and sound. This allows him, I think, to conceptualize and perform a reading with a wider range of expressive solutions. He started one piece, for example, in a gravely whisper and went through a very varied range of articulation in speed, volume and tone that I think would have been very difficult to conceptualize without a considerable background in sound or music. I think this applies to someone like Robert Ashley too, although certainly in Ashley's work music is a much more important element. But again a sense of sound and performance that is developed outside of textual practice becomes available to reading, and is reclaimed in some ways as another dimension of the text. It's tricky because it gets back to a notion of what the material was in the first place and how it was formalized. With Heidsieck you get the sense that what's performed could function autonomously as a text. There is a sense of solidity and craft that almost offers the performance as a bonus or surplus, but then it's the strength of the performance that convinces you of this fact, so it's difficult to say finally what enforces the criteria. I think this sort of thing is somewhat rare in sound poetry. The more conceptual approach taken by Gerhard Ruehm, for example, or the more phonemical and sound oriented work of Henri Chopin, tend to bypass textual paradigms, and in many other cases where literary forms are foregrounded there is often some incommensurability that goes along with it. The text was mediocre, but the performance of it was good, etc. With Heidsieck it was all there. Ward Tietz ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 14:11:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska Doug Messerli write: > >But what I object to even more than the thematics is the METHOD of=20 >the poem.... she has created a little construct that relies entirely upon >the reader's agreement before he has even uttered the first word of=20 >the poem. ... But certainly none of the poems I read=20 >(admittedly only seven short poems!) could compare with the poetry=20 >of Lorine Niedecker (another so-called "homey" poet) or William=20 >Carlos Williams, or George Oppen, or Louis Zukofsky, of Ezra Pound,=20 >or Paul Celan, or Benjamin P=E9ret, or Marina Tsvetayeva, or=20 >Tchicaya U Tam'si....the list could go on for a long while:=20 >all poets who never received the Nobel Prize. > Right, and isn't that kind of the point? How many Nobel winners got legs? In 100 years who'll read stuff that just confirms that the cliches of folks in 1996? And if its marginally clever, wow, the reader gets to feel smart too. We have a guy in town here who wrote a whole chapbook on Mengele -- Mrs. Mengele worried about her husband's health, that kind of thing. So embarrassing! And they asked him to read at the Jewish Center! And people told me what a shame it was that I missed 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: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 18:22:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: [Fwd: ] This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------2A5B7FA42F62 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit hmm, fear & loathing near vegas... if I still had my old mustang, I'd drive out to hear that jam... Pierre ps. Douglas seems rather accurate in his evaluation of the latest wet-dynamite prize winner. but who worries about the nobel anyway? writers rarely get it, it's mainly the likes of Pearl Buck or Shameless Hussy, this Brit generation's token Irish. The kiss of death, as Sartre knew, & therefore refused to accept it. Pierre --------------2A5B7FA42F62 Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Received: from jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU (jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU [128.143.200.11]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id QAA09501; Sat, 5 Oct 1996 16:27:28 -0400 (EDT) From: owner-spoon-announcements@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Received: (from daemon@localhost) by jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU (8.7.1/8.6.6) id OAA68763 for spoon-announcements-outgoing; Sat, 5 Oct 1996 14:05:21 -0400 Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 14:05:21 -0400 Message-Id: <199610051805.OAA68763@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU> From=20bunny@pop.loop.com Sat Oct 5 14:04:38 1996 Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 09:35:28 -0800 From: bunny@pop.loop.com To: spoon-announcements@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Subject: CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: BAUDRILLARD/STONE/DIPRIMA/NEVADA Sender: owner-spoon-announcements@lists.village.virginia.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: bunny@pop.loop.com [NOTE: Spoon-Announcements is not a list; it's a mechanism for distributing information of potentially general interest to all subscribers of the Spoon Collective's mailing lists without bombarding them with cross-postings.] [The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] would you be so kind as to post this for me? i thank you in advance - edi vach=E9 CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: CHANCE: 3 DAYS IN THE DESERT JEAN BAUDRILLARD PLAYS (near) VEGAS with ALLUCQUERE ROSANNE STONE & DIANE DI PRIMA WHEN? November 8 - 10, 1996 WHERE? Whiskey Pete's Casino, Primm Nevada (see below) HOW? Check out the CHANCE website at: http://www.artcenter.edu/events/chance.html email: chance@artcenter.edu phone: 818/568-4805 & 213/441-9795 WHAT?..... CHANCE is a philosophical rave & summit meeting between artists & philosophers, chaosophists & croupiers, mathematicians & musicians at Whiskey Pete's Casino in the Nevada desert. A CHANCE to redefine this century's romance with randomness & synchronicity less innocently for our era. CHANCE to explore the multiplicity of identity. Three days of chance encouters, gambling & deep thought with Jean Beaudrillard, Allucquere Rosanne Stone & 30 other internationally active cultural strategists.....Music from the San Francisco bands Towel & Ohm-a-Revelator.....a one-time mystery jam between six special guest star musicians with Red Krayola lead guitarist Tom Watson.....the intensely nameless beauty of Oguri & Renzoku butoh.....a roving fun-house of installation art & readings organized by Sarah Gavlak, Pam Strugar & Dan Frydman. Appearing in addition to Baudrillard, Stone & diPrima will be DOUGLAS HEPWORTH, Wall Street Chaos Trader DJ SPOOKY, That Subliminal Kid SHIRLEY TSE, Hong Kong Artist ANN ROWER, New York Writer SYLVERE LOTRINGER, Semiotext(e)ician JEREMY GILBERT-ROLFE/THE CHANCE BAND/SHEPPARD POWELL & THE CHANCE OF THE UNKNOWN Primm, Nevada is located at the border of Nevada & California: Paiute nuclear waste specialist Calvin Meyers will lead a desert walk & talk about the desecration of tribal land. WHO? As above..... & YOU! WHY? the Outsider bOOkstore 4505 fountain avenue los angeles, ca 90029 213/660-4361 bunny@loop.com ''..*.:'*..+..'*..+.''why be good? be beautiful & be sad!''..*.:'*..+.+...= =2E'' =2E.....*.:'*..' ..****..-:charles baudelaire, by trunc:-....*.:'*..'.....*= *.... --------------2A5B7FA42F62-- ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 20:20:45 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska In-Reply-To: Message of Sat, 5 Oct 1996 09:16:00 -0700 from But Doug, what if your idea of the "idea" behind the poem is off the mark? What if the un-Poundian "looseness" of the [unjudgeably translated] verse is an effect of concision - i.e., say Szymborska was less concerned with rhythm and mellifluousness than with brevity and impact? Setting aside the question of whether we can so neatly dissect the idea/poem - what if her "idea" is simply to present the shock of 20th century horror and disaster buried, encapsulated in the single image of Hitler/child? i.e. concision - one of the few (admittedly ambiguous) ways poetry has of speaking the unspeakable. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 20:37:25 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska In-Reply-To: Message of Sat, 5 Oct 1996 14:11:36 -0500 from Hey Judy, maybe you should nominate that poet for the Nobel. His work seems to mean a lot to the people around your part of the country. And heck, maybe when he's translated into Polish, or the other European languages, all the dumb slobs over there who want to feel smart will get a kick out of it too. Gee, aren't prizes dumb? - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 20:55:13 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska >By "billowing and uncomfortable" softness, I was referring to the contents >of the poem, not the style (which I agree with you about of course) - I >just wanted to clarify this. It reminded me in a weird way of Sartre's >Childhood of a Leader. > >Alan I am having trouble, as this thread ravels, understanding what A Sondheim is saying here. First, I have tyrouble with the concept of "content" in a poem. But ignoring that for the moment, how can there be, as "content", some "billowing and uncomfortable softness." I just can not get my head around this. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 00:11:58 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Anselm Hollo Subject: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels Subject: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels Both Szymborska's and Heaney's works are examples of the kind of poetry favored by the Nobel Prize Committee (not to mention the U.S."mainstream" press and large tracts of academia). It's the SLOW and UNDEMANDING kind. Poetry that moves at speeds even a little higher than the average firing of neurons in a Committee member's brain, or (and perhaps, hence) requires her/him to read it more than twice, is automatically eliminated. The rest is "cultural" "politics" and has never been anything else. It is, of course, unfortunate that the public at large, presented with poorly translated snippets such as those printed in the U.S. press (of Szymborska's work), has once again received its annual confirmation of the utter triviality and irrelevance of poetry. "If THIS is the BEST...". NB: It is also not surprising that three recent Nobel laureate poets (the late Josef Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney) have just appeared as co-authors of a festschrift to, you guessed it, the pretty darn slow and undemanding Robert Frost. "'Something there is that doesn't hump a sump,' He said; and through his head she saw a cloud That seemed to twinkle." --Kenneth Koch, "Mending Sump," 1950 Cheers, Anselm Hollo ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 00:51:09 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan sondheim Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska In-Reply-To: That's exactly my billowing and soft point, content-ed or no. On Sat, 5 Oct 1996, George Bowering wrote: > >By "billowing and uncomfortable" softness, I was referring to the contents > >of the poem, not the style (which I agree with you about of course) - I > >just wanted to clarify this. It reminded me in a weird way of Sartre's > >Childhood of a Leader. > > > >Alan > > I am having trouble, as this thread ravels, understanding what A Sondheim > is saying here. First, I have tyrouble with the concept of "content" in a > poem. But ignoring that for the moment, how can there be, as "content", > some "billowing and uncomfortable softness." I just can not get my head > around this. > > > > > George Bowering. > , > 2499 West 37th Ave., > Vancouver, B.C., > Canada V6M 1P4 > > fax: 1-604-266-9000 > e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ desire in deity (D.G.R) ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 21:55:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Giscombe/Fugitive Dodie, my jaw dropt when I heard about your students' remarks regarding Giscombe's essay. I couldnt believe it. Holy shit! No, I have never run into anything like this. Maybe racist Canadian students are more reserved. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 12:49:09 +0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Simon or Chris Subject: nobel prize Hey wait a minute, the Nobel prize in literature is political (in the New York Times front page sense) rather than literary, even if sometimes writers of genuine literary value win. The Szymborska prize is related to bringing Poland into Europe, along with promises of NATO enlargement and eventual EU membership. The last two "Polish" Nobel Laureates (I.B. Singer and Czeslaw Miloscz) were American citizens; Singer didn't even write in Polish. She is representative of Polish intellectuals who did not go into exile and maintained integrity despite Communism etc etc. She gets the prize instead of the somewhat better known Zbignew Herbert because (I'm guessing) of a) her gender and b) Herbert's international reputation presupposes a greater degree of compromise with the authorities. I don't know the Polish language but I am sure that, within its parameters, she is a fine a poet. The way the prize seems to work is that a country or region is deemed due for the prize, and then the issue is, which of that locations leading writers is most appropriate -- thus, Oe Kenzaburo over Inoue Yasasushi or Endo Shusaku. I don't know what other Irish writer besides Heaney there was to chose from, but clearly the Northern Ireland peace process is responsible for his award. Meanwhile, Pearl Buck remains the only Chinese writer to have won, French writers seem scandalously underrepresented, etc. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 00:54:02 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan sondheim Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels In-Reply-To: <961006001158_203161284@emout14.mail.aol.com> Who is poetry for? This is the basis of the entire thread. Frost, like it or not (and I'm not fond of him), has a wide-spread audience, much larger than most of the people, if not all of us, writing on Poetics. So we decry demographics, yes? We retain a certain purity against slow and undemanding work? Alan On Sun, 6 Oct 1996, Anselm Hollo wrote: > Subject: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels > > Both Szymborska's and Heaney's works are examples of the kind of poetry > favored by the Nobel Prize Committee (not to mention the U.S."mainstream" > press and large tracts of academia). > > It's the SLOW and UNDEMANDING kind. > > Poetry that moves at speeds even a little higher than the average firing of > neurons in a Committee member's brain, or (and perhaps, hence) requires > her/him to read it more than twice, is automatically eliminated. The rest is > "cultural" "politics" and has never been anything else. > > It is, of course, unfortunate that the public at large, presented with poorly > translated snippets such as those printed in the U.S. press (of Szymborska's > work), has once again received its annual confirmation of the utter > triviality and irrelevance of poetry. "If THIS is the BEST...". > > NB: It is also not surprising that three recent Nobel laureate poets (the > late Josef Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney) have just appeared as > co-authors of a festschrift to, you guessed it, the pretty darn slow and > undemanding Robert Frost. > > "'Something there is that doesn't hump a sump,' > He said; and through his head she saw a cloud > That seemed to twinkle." > --Kenneth Koch, "Mending Sump," 1950 > > Cheers, > > Anselm Hollo > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ desire in deity (D.G.R) ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 5 Oct 1996 21:59:28 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Giscombe/Fugitive >Dodie, Maria, et al: > >The students you are describing are having a natural reaction to your class. >Not natural in the sense that they are correct in their reactions, but natural >in that what they (probably most) are exposed to up to the point of your class >result predictably in those reactions. No, Daniel, that is not a natural reaction. That is a conditioned response. It is something they pick up from their racist families and friends, etc. Nature never was guilty of that kind of prejudice. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 01:20:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: poetry and play resend to old thread I'm sure there are several on the list more conversant with the poetic and language implications of the following. For me it also has some interesting psychological and neuropsycholical implications: "that spell of the "sheer sound of words" which bursts out in the expressive, sorcerous, and mythopoetic tasks of language, and to the utmost extent in poetry...endowing the distinctive features themselves with the power of _immediate_ signification.....in rereading the poem 'Das grosse Lalula' of Christian Morgenstern in his book of _Galgenlieder_ introduced by Zarathrustra's saying - 'a true man conceals in himself a child who wants to play' - one is struck by lines...with glossolalic _ntr_, ...[and] counting-out rhymes....it was precisely the counters of children's games which inspired the versicle '_Vanja-banja_' ...by the Russian avant-garde poet Elena Guro (1877-1913)." (234) "the drive for autonomization through the use of the sound shape with no evident meaning attached...[as in] glossalalia....[and a] magical formula chanted for protection.... Such usage is correlated with the magical function of language. It is seen as a way for the human and the divine, the human and the superhuman, to communicate. Obvious resemblences to avant-garde poetry...; to children's counting-out rhymes...; to the verbal play which children seem to delight in...; and to magical phraseolical expressions. All of these uses show the so-to-speak 'spell' of the speech sounds...the drive for autonomization and _immediacy_ of the distinctive features is associated with the mythical, the poetic, the magical, and the playful use of language." (270) Waugh and Jacobsen, _The Sound Shape of Language", de Gruyter, 1987 tom bell ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 11:27:15 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Yunte Huang Subject: Re: nobel prize In-Reply-To: Pearl Buck is Chinese? Nevah heard of it. Actually Chinese writers have been crying all the time that us chinks have never gotten anything from them Nordics. But the committee blamed on the translation. I blame the translation too, but for a different reason (see my essay "The Translator's Invisible hand: The Problems in the Introduction of Contemporary Chinese Poetry" in _River City_ Winter 1996 issue). I'm really sick of my countrymen wanting the prize so bad. I like what Pierre Joris (hi, P, your recent visit at Buffalo was wonderful!) and Anselm Hollo said about this prize-winning event. Nobel Prize is not always the right place to look for interesting works. I won't be surprized at all if Bei Dao gets it in the near future, but the fact is Bei Dao's poetry is no longer interesting to many people. Go and read it if you don't believe me. The time when the Nobel Committee can no loger blame on the translation, when the translation of Bei Dao's poetry become smooth and transparent enough to cater to the committee member's taste (a tendency I bashed in my essay), Bei Dao will get it. But it will only give me more reasons to ignore whatever comes out of that royal academy. Long liver revolution. Yunte Huang ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 09:40:27 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 4 Oct 1996 to 5 Oct 1996 The exchange on 4 Oct was fascinating because I rreally felt something being thought & said. Silliman's comments making real sense, & I would go with Messerli on how all those ommissions 'prove' the problems of the Nobel,or perhaps any prize. But maybe it's the 'play' of language in someone like Armantrout that can't be translated, while the 'thematic' of the Hitler poem is all too obvious. I could read it with s light smile & say, yeah, while with her stuff I'm always, delightedly, at sea, I admit. The shoe never does drop, so I keep coming back to watch the performance again. I do like the fact that for the first time since I starte getting this a week or so ago, there was some discussion about poetry & poetics (although I always enjoy George's disocveries of new dido poems, oops I mean dildo... All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'Metaphor is not sacred; it's just complex' - Paula Gunn Allen ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 09:26:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels i think, as alan says, the question does turn on what poetry is for, who it's for, etc... clearly, whether we find it merely interesting or useful or trivializing or politically motivated or commercial, poetry has its uses... now if you come at it in literary terms, and you're careful to define what those terms are, you can probably argue for the aesthetic value of just about anything... and poetry as a contested site then turns on the specifically literary value one finds in it... which is not to say that it isn't somehow political at the same time (as are all consequent judgments)... but if you come at it in political terms, it may be that lamentably simplistic poetry (from somebody's literary angle, i mean) does enormous political or cultural work... so it does seem---what i'm trying to say, sorry for not saying it sooner---that in passing judgment, we ought at least to be willing to clarify our presuppositions... this list has a good number of folks subbed who subscribe as well to an interest in and positive appraisal of langpo (right?), hence it's somewhat less than surprising to find criticism here of nobel laureate work... i would like to think we might at times be just as critical of langpo work (have we been?---which we? which work?)... and i would like to think, in any case, we would try to serve up our judgments with due regard for other aesthetics & politics and such like... which is to say, make legible what it is we come to poetry for... perhaps the problem, specifically, is that there's more than two aesthetics around these parts...?... joe ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 08:51:52 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Messerli Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska Dear Henry, My only response is that there are certainly much better ways to present "horror and disaster." Indeed, I didn't feel any "horror or disaster" from her poem--she persumed it, but her poem certainly didn't present me with any. That's my point. It's all preconceived. No horror. No disaster in this cutesy-pie poem. Having just published a book on the "horrors" of Nazism and World War II (part of a larger exploration of evil in the 20th century) I'm most interested in methods of presenting or--as I would prefer--discovering and questioning the horrors of our past--and potential future. Didn't see them in Szymbroska at all. Douglas At 08:20 PM 10/5/96 EDT, you wrote: >But Doug, what if your idea of the "idea" behind the poem is off the mark? >What if the un-Poundian "looseness" of the [unjudgeably translated] verse >is an effect of concision - i.e., say Szymborska was less concerned with >rhythm and mellifluousness than with brevity and impact? Setting aside the >question of whether we can so neatly dissect the idea/poem - what if >her "idea" is simply to present the shock of 20th century horror and disaster >buried, encapsulated in the single image of Hitler/child? i.e. concision - >one of the few (admittedly ambiguous) ways poetry has of speaking the >unspeakable. - Henry Gould > ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 09:29:00 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 3 Oct 1996 to 4 Oct 1996 About that Norton. Havng tried to teach from it, in a regularized course on British & American poetry post-WW2, so not looking for anything too far out, I still couldnt believe how bad the choices were for 'their' poets (bad on Lowell for example in some ways, very poor on Hughes), but also how absolutely awful the choices were for, say, Olson, in terms of what an anthology might be assumed to do, & then never no never after all these years, a sign of even a small serial poem from Spicer. I gave up. This doesnt sound much better (& up here, the cost!) I'd agree about the Oppen too. Let alone the recent writers -- feh! ------------------------------ > >Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 10:37:24 -0700 >From: Jeremy F Green >Subject: The New Norton > >I don't know if this is an old thread (haven't had much time for >lurking/reading lately), but has anyone had a look at the new (4th >edition) Norton Anthology of Poetry? It's just about to hit the >bookstores. > >I got a glimpse at it last night. Pre-20th century looks like a big >improvement; 20th century very discouraging. Stein (from "Stanzas in >Meditation") and Riding are now included, but the post-1950 selection is >pretty horrific. A couple of Michael Palmer poems, but no Susan Howe, Lyn >Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, etc., etc. Maybe the thinking was that Paul >Hoover's Pomo. Norton had covered such "minority" interests, but please, >Brad Leithauser?! > >And my particular pet peeve: STILL NO OPPEN. > > >Jeremy Green All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'Metaphor is not sacred; it's just complex' - Paula Gunn Allen ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 10:59:11 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Frost's audience In-Reply-To: Uh, I hate to mention this, but _North of Boston_ and _New Hampshire_ are pretty clever books of poetry in which one hears the rumblings of future Creeleys Kochs Berrigans ets ceterae. That may just be my weetabix settling now, of course, but wasn't the concern for audience--the will to audience--the (to be Olsonian about it) FACT of Frost? Jordan PS I think Simon's 'political' reading of the Nobels is absolutely correct-- ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 18:26:39 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Jarnot Subject: Ear Inn Series Hey you all: Here's an update from the Ear Inn: Saturday October 5th was the first reading of the series, featuring Brooklyn poet Prageeta Sharma and Providence poet Mark McMorris. It was a rocking day-- Prageeta opening with new work (recently rejected by the Paris Review) which was very cool. Mark read some new and some old favorite poems which were "exposed, meandering, supine" and great. Mark has a brand new beautiful chapbook from Burning Deck (Mothwings) and his book The Black Reeds is coming out from University of Georgia Press in February. The audience included fashionable luminous luminaries Jackson MacLow, Stacy Doris, Judith Goldman, baseball great Bill Luoma, Douglas Rothschild (of the New York Rothschilds), Chris Stroffolino, new new yorkers Anselm Berrigan and Lee Ann Brown, Drew Gardner, Joe and Leo Elliot, Segueway baron Dan Machlin, West Coast poet Robert V. Hale, Iowa poet Katy Lederer, Samuel Truitt, Sean Killian, Julie Patton, a table of unidentified poetry lovers and/or government agents, and a bunch of people watching baseball at the bar. The Ear in is at 326 Spring Street, readings start at 2:30, $3 contribution. Don't miss out on the fun/never a dull moment/sometimes a free beer-- if you happen to be in new york next saturday October 12 you can come to see Cliff "secret bard of the lower east side" Fyman and Lee Ann "crush groove" Brown. Cliff's been working on a new series of Mayer-esque experiments and Lee Ann will be reading from new and forthcoming work-- keep an eye out for her book Polyverse, soon to arrive from sun and moon. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 15:25:16 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels While I agree with Simon & Jordan that the Nobel is political-- it seems to me that this merely increases the need to raise aesthetic questions with regard to those anointed. Is the Nobel in Literature anything more than bad poets used for propaganda purposes? Occasionally it may be, though I have no examples at hand. This is not to say that the propoganda aims may not on occasion have some efficacy-- however it is one more example of the degree to which individuals are subject to state authority. That this is _so_ obvious is exactly why it needs to be pointed out. _The Best American Poetry 1996_ edited by Adrienne Rich, was recently published. The introduction contains an epigram and two or three citations from Charles Bernstein's _A Poetics_. The book itself, which, admittedly, I have not examined carefully, seems to contain very little that would fall under the rubric "innovative writing." Past editions of this "Best" have included a number of such writers. So, discursive statements about the usefulness of an aesthetics of multiplicity are ok, but the actual practice of such. . . ? I'll look at the book a bit more, hopefully it's more interesting than it appears. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 17:25:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: new B City B City # 11 edited by Connie Deanovich & Mark Wallace William Fuller Susan Schultz Andrew Levy Jefferson Hansen Rodrigo Toscano Carolyn Koo Joe Ross Rod Smith Jean Donnelly Mark DuCharme Mark Wallace Connie Deanovich available for $6 from B City 517 North Fourth St Dekalb Illonois 60115 ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 14:33:39 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: Re: Heidsieck before Heaney In-Reply-To: <199610051117.EAA28607@dfw-ix12.ix.netcom.com> On Sat, 5 Oct 1996, Ron Silliman wrote: > Heaney on the other hand might be an argument for recognition of > different modes of English as different languages, I must leeeeap in here. Please say more. This is an idea that intrigues me so much I want to fashion it into some kind of dissertation--having sprung into it via Finnegans Wake rather than Heaney. And as a political reclaiming move, like Tom Leonard foregrounding the local English over mainstream (or BBC as he says), as Susan Schultz says of Lois Ann Yamanaka here. And the local Englishes--as I well know from having lived in Ireland and Hawai'i--rooted in the grammar and much of the vocabulary of the language(s) that was there before. gab. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 22:32:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: poetry and play Does the current bankruptcy of Duty and Truth leave poetry as play as the lone pillar? From the apparently infamous Steele book: "Kant's _Critique_ 'Poetry...expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination...free, spontaneous, and independent of determination by nature..as a sort of schema for, the supersensible. It plays with semblance, which it produces at will, but not as an instrument of deception; for its avowed purpose is merely one of play.' "Poetry lacks direct relevance to the world of empirical fact and ethics...it is merely 'play'...spontaneous...'self-active' Power of Imagination'" Poe - "Poetry of words.._The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty_. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or Truth." ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 21:09:52 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels At 9:26 AM 10/6/96, Joe Amato wrote: >so it does seem---what i'm trying to say, sorry for not saying it >sooner---that in passing judgment, we ought at least to be willing to >clarify our presuppositions... this list has a good number of folks subbed >who subscribe as well to an interest in and positive appraisal of langpo >(right?), hence it's somewhat less than surprising to find criticism here >of nobel laureate work... i would like to think we might at times be just >as critical of langpo work (have we been?---which we? which work?)... and i >would like to think, in any case, we would try to serve up our judgments >with due regard for other aesthetics & politics and such like... which is >to say, make legible what it is we come to poetry for... This is NOT Kevin, this is Dodie. I don't think anyone said S's poems were drivel because they weren't language poetry. They were declared drivel from the perspective of the type of poetry they were attempting to be (with reservations given due to the vagaries of translation). Pushing this into a langpo versus the rest of poetry is irritating to me. As far as political poetry goes, San Francisco is reeking with bad political poetry. Nobody's giving any of it a Nobel Prize. From the perspective of someone trying against all odds to curate an "experimental" reading series (many of my readers would never want to be called langpos) I'm very appreciative of any space that provides a welcome environment to share and discuss the avante-garde. Even though I've been critical of the theory "boys" in the past I actually miss them on this listserv. Most of the world is against experimental writing. It's too bad this space has been co-opted by so many who share that againstness. Dodie Bellamy ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996 22:53:07 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Hope you all can come to my play Hi everyone, this is Kevin Killian. If any of you are going to be in the Bay Area on Wednesday (October 9) (and I know many of you will be), then please come to my play, "Wet Paint," which Small Press Traffic is presenting in collaboration with the San =46rancisco Art Institute, in conjunction with the "Beat Culture and the New America" show which has just opened here in S.F. It's on Wednesday, October 9, 7:30 p.m. at the San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall (800 Chestnut Street at Jones Street, SF)=8Ba block up from Columbus. And cheap! It is only $6 to get in=8Bfour dollars if you are a student or a member of Small Press Traffic. And if you attend the Art Institute you get in free. One woman . . . Jay DeFeo . . . walking a perilous tightrope between obscurity and fame in the late 1950s. The brilliant romantic artist, taunted by sister Kay de Feo, a mind so vicious she sneaks in night after night to dash more paint on Jay=B9s finished production. Jay, woman, rebel, artist, haunted by a shoplifting arrest in her past, and puzzled by how dark her apartment seems to be getting. And the men in her life, the _cute guys_ who made North Beach a bongodelia of high art and Beat esteem--Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, Michael McClure, Wally Hedrick, Kenneth Anger. And the visitors from Mexico, who dared Jay De Feo to her masterpiece por chevre--Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera! Her shady psychiatrist, pressuring her to abandon feminist art work and return to Hallmark sell-out. The Hollywood starlet who came to the Fillmore to study up for an important role--Tuesday Weld. And Janis Joplin, the woman who worshipped Jay and inspired =B3The Rose.=B2 "They invented a new kind of art . . . and a new kind of SEX to go with it!" Starring D-L Alvarez, David Buuck, Ethel Chase, Norma Cole, Margaret Crane, Kate Delos, Kathi Georges, Phoebe Gloeckner, Craig Goodman, Jonathan Hammer, Clifford Hengst, Scott Hewicker, Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton, Karla Milosevich, Rex Ray, Michelle Rollman, Leslie Scalapino, Wayne Smith and Alicia Wing. Actually, the play will have no reference to the artist (and former iconoclast) Bruce Conner, whose attorneys wrote to me very sternly shortly after the publicity began to unfold about my play. They claimed they had an advance copy of my play (wrong! I just finished it yesterday!) and that under no circumstance was I to use his a) name b) image or c) likeness in what he calls a "frivolous exploitation" of his work. I wanted to hire a lawyer of my own, to accuse him of prior restraint, etc., --but decided not to, it's supposed to be fun. So come on down and help me pay tribute to a great artist, Jay DeFeo, and the California funk assemblage movement in general. Thanks for your bandwidth everyone. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 03:54:52 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan sondheim Subject: terrible true account of the origin of the text 2.81 A True Account I went onto IRC to investigate breathing/heaving through textual correc- tions and backups. I joined channel #zz as @Alan op. There was no one else of course. I began typing when "Helis" (changed the name) replied to me. Helis was not on zz, but was somehow monitoring it and messaging me with comments. This is precisely the origin of scattering/heaving - the breath- ing of the text here, beyond the control of _this_ writing into the domain of the _other:_ /j zz

#zz \|/ PhoEniX v2.25 \|/ *** Alan (sondheim@panix3.panix.com) has joined channel #zz*** Users on #zz: @Alan @Alan (+is) #zz \|/ PhoEniX v2.25 \|/ I want to Describig ng desire as it implements itself across the screen, whatreen, what Describing desire as it implements itself across the screen, what

I8AM @Alan (+is) #zz Lag ? - E/X E/X 'd refer to as breathing or heaving - which is an extension of the _text-t he _text-object_ I'd refer to as breathing or heaving - an extension of the _text-object_

into a symptomology, diegesis - thinking through the aura that rera that re- sults into a symptomology, diegesis - thinking through the aura tha t results

[Helis:440@urh.uiuc.edu] why do you think this?or thinking 9AM @Alan (+is) #zz Lag ? - E/X E/X at cross-purposes - as if: an action, i.e.: or thinking at cross-purposes - as if: an action, i.e.:

/m Mel is why not becua ause this is running in this fashion<-[Helis]-> why not because this is running in this fashion

/me worrying through the text and intrusion of the fourth -* Alan worrying through the text and intrusion of the fourth -

/whois Helis< P> *** Whois Information for: Helis*** Address : 440@isr0419.urh.uiuc.edu*** IRCNAME : NEKKED WOMAN*** Server : irc.ilstu.edu ([thor.cmp.ilstu.edu] Illinois State University)[Helis:440@urh.uiuc.edu] you are strange40AM @Alan (+is) #zz Lag ? - E/X 1 - E/X /m Helis i'd think so to be sure -<-[Helis]-> i'd think so to be sure -

/sc

Pub: #zz @Alan taking it further with the other coming into the sane taking it further with the other comin g into the sane

/me auratic, downtrodden...* Alan auratic, downtrodden...

/1AM @Alan (+is) #zz Lag ? - E/X l1 - E/X

*** Alan has left channel #zzAlan (+is) Lag 1 - E/X _________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:21:19 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: Reality Street Editions Web Site Please visit Reality Street Editions' new web site at: http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/reality/ ... and keep visiting, since we will be adding new content, including hypertextual arrangements of work by cris cheek, Miles Champion and others. Email inquiries, orders, etc. to *Ken Edwards* please: 100344.2546@compuserve.com As a reminder of what's on offer, here is an author/title listing: cheek, cris & Jones, Sianed Songs from Navigation 1-874400-09-1 GB Pounds: 12.50 Corcoran, Kelvin Lyric Lyric 1-874400-00-8 GB Pounds: 5.99 Duncan, Andrew Cut Memories and False Commands 0-9507018-6-6 O/P Edwards, Ken Good Science (pub. by Roof Books) 0-937804-48-7 GB Pounds: 6 A4 Landscape 0-9507018-5-8 GB Pounds: 2.50 Fisher, Allen Dispossession and Cure 1-874400-03-2 GB Pounds: 6.50 Unpolished Mirrors 0-9507018-2-3 GB Pounds: 15 (signed edition only) Gevirtz, Susan Taken Place 1-874400-02-4 GB Pounds: 6.50 Howe, Fanny O'Clock 1-874400-07-5 GB Pounds: 6.50 Kirsch, Sarah The Brontes Hats 0-904225-13-5 GB Pounds: 7.99 (signed edition GB Pounds: 15) T 1-874400-05-9 GB Pounds: 4.50 James, John Dreaming Flesh 0-904225-14-3 GB Pounds: 5.99 Kinderlieder (pub. by Avocado) No isbn, GB Pounds: 7.00 Mulford, Wendy The Bay of Naples 0-9507018-8-2 GB Pounds: 5.99 (signed edition GB Pounds: 15) O'Sullivan, Maggie In the House of the Shaman 1-874400-01-6 GB Pounds: 6.50 O'Sullivan, Maggie (ed.) Out of Everywhere 1-874400-08-3 GB Pounds: 9.00 Raworth, Tom Catacoustics 0-904225-12-7 GB Pounds: 5.99 Reedy, Carlyle The Orange Notebook 0-9507018-3-1 O/P Riley, Denise Mop Mop Georgette 1-874400-04-0 GB Pounds: 6.50 Riley, Peter Distant Points 1-874400-06-7 GB Pounds: 6.50 RSE 4Packs 1 Champion, Miles Kidd, Helen Tarlo, Harriet Thurston, Scott Sleight of Foot 1-874400-10-5 GB Pounds: 5.00 Seed, John Interior in the Open Air 0-9507018-9-0 GB Pounds: 5.99 (signed edition GB Pounds: 10) Welch, John Blood and Dreams 0-9507018-7-4 GB Pounds: 6.95 (signed edition GB Pounds: 10) Wilkinson/Rodefer/Mengham Writing out of Character 0-904225-15-1 GB Pounds: 6.50 Reality Studios magazine Set of 6 volumes, Reality Studios 5-10 (1983-88) GB Pounds: 20 Email inquiries, orders, etc. to *Ken Edwards* please: 100344.2546@compuserve.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:21:46 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: Ig-nobel (I guess I may have missed the punctuation for 'tongue-in-cheek', since the post was otherwise great but I can't resist the following, in case anyone thinks she was born there or something...) >Pearl Buck remains the only Chinese writer to have >won, "Chinese" ?????? !!!!!! "writer" ? There are also some members of the gliterati on both sides of the Atlantic (but not, as far as I know, on the "far" side of the Pacific) who think that Jung Chang (author _Ugly Ducklings_) is a "Chinese writer". "Chinese" ? "writer" ?????? !!!!!! ... It's just that this is precisely the sort of problem that those of us trying to get Chinese writers *read* 'over here' have to deal with. The general reader *does* think that Pearl Buck, Han Suyin, Jung Chang etc. are Chinese writing. - - - - - > John Cayley Wellsweep Press [in Chinese HZ: ~{?-U\02~} ~{=[i@3v0fIg~}] ^ innovative literary translation from Chinese ^ 1 Grove End House 150 Highgate Road London NW5 1PD UK Tel & Fax: 0171-267 3525 Email: cayley@shadoof.demon.co.uk http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/ < - - - - - ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:21:31 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: Many Press Web Site The Many Press (London) has just set up a web site at: http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/many/ Please visit it when you can. The site is based on the 1995 annotated catalogue which covered 20 years of the press's output. It's a long and interesting list and it continues to grow. "The Press when founded was part of the poetic revival of the late Sixties and early Seventies; there was a feeling, quite widely shared, that much of what was most interesting was likely to be found outside the productions of the mainstream publishers. Changes in the technology of typesetting and printing also had much to do with it. During the Seventies I printed a number of publications at the Printshop of the Poetry Society. Financially the Press has always been a non-profit-making venture, though the limitations of my time and energy, rather than financial considerations, are what have mainly restricted the Press' output." - from the introduction to the catalogue by the editor, John Welch John Welch does not have an email account, but I can forward messages to him if they are sent to: many@shadoof.demon.co.uk Here is the author/title list. For more details of the books and their availability, please go to the site. Paul Ashton Farmworker's Story Anthony Barnett Quiet Facts Kate Bass The Onion House Alison Brackenbury Two Poems John Cayley Under it All Alfred Celestine Confessions of Nat Turner David Chaloner Today Backwards Amarjit Chandan Being Here Andrew Crozier Were There Tim Dooley Three Poems Ricardo Duranti The Archer's Paradox Cory Harding The Art of Flicker Book Speech Jeremy Harding The Book, The Bay, The Breakfast Table Ralph Hawkins English Literature Neville Hodgson Privileged A Ticket Anthony Howell The Mekon Winter's Not Gone Peter Hughes Bar Magenta The Interior Designer's Late Morning The Metro Poems Charles Ingham The Alexander Graham Bell Poems Writing a Letter Home Nicholas Johnson Listening to the Stones Martha Kapos The Boy Under the Water Judith Kazantis Two Poems Nicholas Lafitte Near Calvary B. C. Leale Three Poems Tom Lowenstein Booster: A Game of Divination Filibustering in Samsara The Shaman Aningatchaq La Tempesta's X-Ray Barry MacSweeney Hellhound Memos The Many Review Brian Marley Turbines Simon Marsh Bar Magenta The Vinyl Hat Years Rod Mengham Glow-Worms Peter Middleton Signs Ruth Padel Alibi Jeremy Reed Jack's in his Corset Peter Riley The Musicians The Instruments Peter Robinson Anaglypta Going Out to Vote Overdrawn Account Sudeep Sen New York Times Vittorio Sereni The Disease of the Elm Andrew Shelley Peaceworks W. G. Shepherd The Antonine Poems The First Zone of the Growth Furnace The Gifted Child Three Odes of Horace Colin Simms Time Over Tyne Voices Ian Sinclair The Penances Six Towns Poetry Festival Peacocks Two James Sutherland-Smith The Country of Rumour Death of a Vixen A Singer from Sabiya Martin Thom Ceremonial Devices Peter Tingey Nick Totton Seeing It Through A Talisman Vanessa Poetry Magazine Irving Weinmann The Eye of the Storm John Welch Braiding the Squadron Erasures Estuary The Fish God Problem Five Poems Five Landscapes For a Birth Grieving Signal Hydrangea Performance The Storms/Lip-Service Six of Five Nigel Wheale The Plains of Sight Phrasing the Light Simples Peter Winter The Steel Chair Twenty One Poems John Welch does not have an email account, but I can forward messages to him if they are sent to: many@shadoof.demon.co.uk ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:21:52 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: New Books from the Many Press ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MANY PRESS (London, UK) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW PUBLICATIONS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peaceworks by Andrew Shelley. Poems. 24pp. 1996. GB Pounds: 3.00. 0 907326 34 X Andrew Shelley was born in Huddersfield in 1962. He was educated at the University of Cambridge and at Oxford where he held a fellowship and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Samuel Beckett. He has also held scholarships at the universities of Athens, Crete and Istanbul. His articles and literary journalism have appeared in a wide range of publications including Essays in Criticism and The Sunday Times and his poetry in various little magazines and anthologies. He is currently preparing a collection of poems and a prose work. He lives in Oxford. Shelley's is an intellectual yet sensuous poetry in which the insisted-upon details of individual experience are held in often rebarbative contact with the increasingly embattled categories of mind that support shared life, common society. Despite this, by virtue of a reasoned intuition that attends as much to the particular contingencies of life - at home in work and love - as to their wider determinations, there occur moments of great lyrical intensity in which thinking and feeling combine. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Onion House by Kate Bass. Poems. 16pp. 1996. GB Pounds: 2.50. 0 907326 35 8 Kate Bass was born in East Finchley in North London in 1962. Poems of hers have appeared in magazines; this is her first collection to be published. After graduating in Chemistry from Edinburgh University in the early eighties she worked for the Patent Agency in London. In 1989 Kate Bass moved to Cambridge; since 1993 she has been studying Illustration at Anglia Polytechnic University. Kate Bass' poems combine directness with a strong sense of mystery. There is great accomplishment in the apparently calm and ordered balance of her narratives; but always underlying them a haunting sense of otherness. It is writing which can, for instance, introduce the myth of Persephone in a manner which is all the more effective for seeming quite natural and unforced. The Onion House features a cover illustration by Kate Bass. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prices include postage, but if you cannot send funds in British pounds, please add US$ 8.00 to cover bank charges. Please also visit the Many Press web site: http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/many/ Please order direct from: The Many Press 15 Norcott Road London N16 7BJ England email inquiries (must be forwarded): many@shadoof.demon.co.uk ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 03:54:00 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: SOME OTHER KIND OF MISSION Anselm sugggests that the Nobel prize committee wants work that won't cause short circuits in their brains (or rapid sub-cranial movements of any kind). Big surprise. My own favorite would have been Bao Dei, who has written some poems that read well in English. And it would have been nice to have had a laureate younger than I. It may be that his work has "smoothened" out to reach that take-it-slow crowd. Remember, that if they gave it for music, Tom Jones would've had a Nobel years ago. Still, I think there's always the question (often a political one) of how a given writer's work fits into her/his society, as such. Brodsky has a very different meaning in Russia (where he represented a total refusal to "play along") than in the US (where he became another Cold War icon) and I've often wondered *which* Brodsky won the prize. If there were justice in this world, we'd be hearing the names Creeley and Ginsberg on the short list for such awards, not to mention Rakoski, Guest, Ortiz, Grahn.... On the other hand, if you want to give your brains and heart a real workout, there's another great new book out -- SOME OTHER KIND OF MISSION by Lisa Jarnot, from Burning Deck ($11, wherever good books are sold...which means SPD, Woodland Pattern & through Rod at Bridge Street). It'll remind you why you read poetry in the first place. Ron Silliman ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 08:01:20 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 6 Oct 1996 08:51:52 -0700 from On Sun, 6 Oct 1996 08:51:52 -0700 Douglas Messerli said: > >My only response is that there are certainly much >better ways to present "horror and disaster." Indeed, >I didn't feel any "horror or disaster" from >her poem--she persumed it, but her poem certainly >didn't present me with any. That's my point. It's >all preconceived. No horror. No disaster in this >cutesy-pie poem. I'm sorry to grind another minor issue to small powder - but are you saying there's no irony in the poem? That it's a Norman Rockwell cutesy-pie image of Hitler as child? No, you're not going that far. You're saying she "presumed" the history. Well, I'm saying that was her point: to hide it all in full view. To maintain silence & show Hitler as a child: a shocking thing to do in a poem. You found it distasteful; but however one finds the poem, the reader IS confronted with the history that followed, by means of the concise bizarre fusion of Hitler/child. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 09:17:33 -0400 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: forward: New Orleans Rev. call for work Forwarded message: Subj: New Orleans Review Call for Work Date: 96-10-06 16:17:40 EDT From: Wtlav New Orleans Review, published by Loyola University, is currently seeking creative written work in any genre. We attempt to publish a wide range of literary material, from traditional to experimental, from Leon Stokesbury to Ron Silliman to Jake Berry. If you would like to submit, please do so by e-mail to: Wtlav@aol.com We can only accept previously unpublished work. ------------------------------- Reply to Wtlav, not to R. Drake... ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 09:31:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bob Holman Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 5 Oct 1996 to 6 Oct 1996 To go fast, you start slow. Anybody out there yodling harmelodic lullabyes? My daughter likes "inchworm" from _Hans Christian Andersen_ (Danny Kaye). Brilliant exegesis of political forces (which Polish intellectual, etc.). Could a Nobel go to an Israeli poet at this moment? Which Bosnian Serb? Try Eavan Boland's _Object Lessons_ for "other" Irish. "Mending Sump" rules. Bob Holman reads his poems at Biblio's, 317 Church just below Canal, NYC, every Monday in Oct, 6:30-8:30. A Retrospective Series from Mad Alex: Ex=tended Play. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 09:33:06 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Bouchard Subject: Re: Giscombe/Fugitive George Bowering: "natural in that what they (probably most) are exposed to up to the point of your class" is meant to imply what you are calling "a conditioned response." I was not saying that bigotry and racism are natural. Perhaps "inevitable" would have been a better word to describe the reactions of students (the students of Dodie and Maria; reactions that students of mine have also had) when presented with ideas and material that radically challenges notions of the world that they may have been brought up with. I will strive to be more careful with my choice of words. daniel_bouchard@hmco.com __________________________________________ >The students you are describing are having a natural reaction to your class. >Not natural in the sense that they are correct in their reactions, but natural >in that what they (probably most) are exposed to up to the point of your class >result predictably in those reactions. No, Daniel, that is not a natural reaction. That is a conditioned response. It is something they pick up from their racist families and friends, etc. Nature never was guilty of that kind of prejudice. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:10:29 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Re: LANSING!!! PETTET!!! UPDATE! UPDATE! BOSTON'S EVENT OF THE SEASON -- THE GERRIT LANSING, SIMON PETTET READING -- WILL BE HELD IN THE SENIOR COMMON ROOM of ADAMS HOUSE 26 PLYMTON STREET CAMBRIDGE tommorrow! tesday, october 8th! 7:30 p.m.! OH YES OH YES OH YES!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!! ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 11:29:01 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Burt Kimmelman -@NJIT" Subject: Hank Lazer Hank, are you out there? if so, could you backchannel me? Burt kimmelman@admin.njit.edu ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:37:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels well dodie you got a point... but i got a point too!... the point is simply this: i haven't heard anybody around here, who's stayed around here for any length of time, dismiss a langpoem (and please permit me this shorthand)---or for that matter much of what you're calling "experimental" work, which i like to think i'm committed to mself---with a tag as summary as douglas's "drivel"... if this *has* happened, please refresh my memory... in any case, and being only a bit of a gadfly, i think it's only fair to observe that it FEELS easier around here to tag a nobel laureate's work so than to so tag a poem by, say, zukofski... now i far prefer, mself, zuk to szymborska... but that's not the point, or at least, not my point... and i agree with rod, insofar that there would seem to be a mainstream against which many different alternative poetries are inevitably 'measured' and dismissed... still, i was pressing a bit to ask whether, in fact, there is some inertia around here when it comes to self-critique, by which i mean critique of more experimental forms... and the only way i know to handle this w/o presumption is to propose judgments along with a sense of where one is coming from... but mebbe that's just the point---mebbe there's already the assumption of some shared assumptions that not everybody around here shares... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 12:23:27 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Smith Subject: found found this yesterday, the Fox network lineup: Big Deal Oops Presidential Debate charles ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:27:07 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels At 10:37 AM 10/7/96, Joe Amato wrote: >still, i was pressing a bit to >ask whether, in fact, there is some inertia around here when it comes to >self-critique, by which i mean critique of more experimental forms... and >the only way i know to handle this w/o presumption is to propose judgments >along with a sense of where one is coming from... > >but mebbe that's just the point---mebbe there's already the assumption of >some shared assumptions that not everybody around here shares... First of all, I don't think that tolerance for other schools has ever lead to good poetry or art--or has ever been a requirement for poets or artists. Poets should have the right to draw from whatever feeds them and to dismiss the rest. And you and others are right that drivel is a really ugly, dismissive word. I never would have used it--it does reverb with bigotry. I don't think that people who are into expermental writing (langpo being just one vein of that) do have these uniformly shared assumptions. When this list was smaller there was lots of fighting going on among the members. I think people are very aware of the lack of shared asssumptions on this list. I think that's why many people I'd like to be hearing from are no longer posting. There has to be a certain common ground for things to be worth discussing. Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 12:06:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels i guess my problem w/the szymborska pome is that it doesn't do enough to justify itself. it cd be done in 4 lines. i read the 1st stanza w/ some interest, expecting it to go somewhere, but it didn't, it just said the same thing over and over in not very rich language. there aren't enough ideas in it for me, it doesn't accomplish enough on its own terms. alice miller's chapter on hitler's childhood in thou shalt not be aware is far more powerful and developed, regardless of what you think of her theory. md ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 12:07:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: found cool. In message <961007122327_204142129@emout02.mail.aol.com> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > found this yesterday, the Fox network lineup: > > > Big Deal > Oops > Presidential Debate > > > > > > charles ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 10:45:11 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: Giscombe/Fugitive At 9:33 AM 10/7/96, Daniel Bouchard wrote: >I will strive to be more careful with my choice of words. Yes, Dan, please do that. Dan's posting reminded me that I never responded to any of the responses to my original post. First of all, thanks for all the support and good suggestions I received on this list and back channel. By way of follow-up, the two ringleaders of the racist responses dropped my class. The remaining nine students are sweet as can be. I enjoy all of them. Their written responses to Giscombe were not racist. One guy, without ever referring to the Giscombe essay, wrote this gruesome little story about capturing mice in traps. I liked it a lot. I encourage them to give "creative" responses to the readings, not essays. When we had our follow-up discussion, neither of the ringleaders was there and the rest of the class apologized to me for not being more vocal in combatting them. One woman who hadn't read the essay when the blow-up happened said she went home and read it and was very confused about what the problem was for the other students. I think that the extreme negative reaction to the essay went beyond racism--I think that many of the students found the Giscombe essay more formally challenging than I had anticipated--to me it was pretty straightforward. I think its unconventional formal elements were threatening to some and they didn't have the vocabulary to address that (beyond "This guy can't write!") and so they attacked something they knew how to talk about. Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 12:22:47 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Beth Simon Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels For those interested (no lo etc.) Clare Cavanaugh will read from her translation of Wislawa Szymborska's View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems , which, it says here, won a PEN/Bk of the month award for outstanding transl for 1996 for her and her collaborator, Stanislaw Baranczak. She reads in Madison, WI (she's a UW-Madison assoc prof) at Borders Bks on Oct 8 (tomorrow), at 7:30 pm. beth simon ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 13:31:41 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Concentration the imitable joe amato wrote: >still, i was pressing a bit to >ask whether, in fact, there is some inertia around here when it comes to >self-critique, by which i mean critique of more experimental forms... and I would direct him to the also imitable Alfred Corn who on the CAP-L side of things is asking EXACTLY THE SAME THING -- which is 'what makes a langpoem bad.' What would make a Seamus Heaney poem good? Or for that matter a poem by any of the other 'squish-poets' -- Kinnell Hughes Rich etc -- or the 'pinot-grigio' poets or the coff coff -- go ahead Rod investigate the Best of the year, but don't think of it as a book of poems, think of it as a game of concentration. When you find an unusual word, try and remember where else in the book you saw THE SAME WORD. When you find a person writing under unusual circumstances, find someone else writing under THE SAME CIRCUMSTANCES. When you notice a profoundly corny figure -- aerial view of town at night -- find another poem with THE EXACT SAME FIGURE. Do not assume that great poems will simply come along. Ridicule anyone who tells you what you have to do or what you cannot do in a poem. Joe -- why don't _you_ tell us what a bad language poem is. Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 12:31:25 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Beth Simon Subject: Re: Heidsieck before Heaney Dear Gab and Ron S., Processes of piginization and creolization, and then decreolization, yes? beth simon ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 14:18:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: Concentration geez, jordan, alfred corn?... ok: am trying to get other poetic pov's into this discussion, much in line with dodie's observation that there are those on this list who no longer post (and i feel this latter of late too)... and i've (or had anyway) a hunch that one reason could be possibly b/c they don't want to be accused of liking drivel... but perhaps this is too too harsh a way of putting things, at least insofar as douglas m. is concerned... i understand that he was himself being provocative... but perhaps in being provocative he touched a nerve that needed touching... in any case, i can imagine a public context (not this one) where i might have mself made an observation similar to douglas's... but my point, again, is why was it made here?... so, what makes a bad langpoem bad?... er, no---what makes a langpoem bad?... or what do i expect of such poetry (assuming we could have a "such") that, lacking, i tend to see as bad?... pretty much (isn't this a surprise?) what i would say makes most poetry bad---lack of engagement, of follow-through with the aesthetic... not wringing out of the words so many of their possibilities (and i mean thematic as well), or not creating a formal context through which such wringing might take place... which is probably an argument for complexity of sorts... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 08:35:48 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Englishes/Latins Is what happened to Latin i.e."becoming" French, Spanish, Italian etc and then dying happening to English, with its wide range of Englishes. I had an amazing essay written in a Polynesian English a couple of weeks back. It was non-standard, but it worked, provided I worked at translating it to my own version of English. I cd not find effective paraphrases that were not cumbersome and awkward, comparefd to the very compacted language of the text. It offered an Olsonian "refreshing" of language. Unfortunately I haven't got it here to quote. I guess Susan Schultz and Gabrielle Welford will recognise what I'm talking about. best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 15:48:09 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: Concentration Joe, I knew you'd take the comparison in stride, that's why I made it -- and I'd be all too quick to rattle off the qualities I think make a non-bad poiem, langly or otherwise -- energy, sufficient complexity, vulnerability (charm), except that I've been a real ball hog and want to start raking in the assists -- so -- what are some other good qualities? Or does value in poetry work some way that doesn't have to do with qualities? Jordam ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 16:07:14 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Libbie Rifkin Subject: Berrigan cites Hello List, Does anyone know where Ashbery says "The academy of the future is opening its doors"? And/or where Apollinaire said it first? How about where Williams said "The sonnet is dead." I have the interview where he talks about how he hates the sonnet, but that line isn't it. Berrigan's sonnets have me on a wild goose chase. Thanks, all. Libbie ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 15:53:32 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: Re: Concentration In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 7 Oct 1996 15:48:09 -0400 from On Mon, 7 Oct 1996 15:48:09 -0400 Jordan Davis said: > >except that I've been a real ball hog and want to start raking in the assists >-- >so -- what are some other good qualities? Or does value in poetry work some >way that doesn't have to do with qualities? Okay Jrdn, here's something from left field. There are the usual qualities that are called for in your basic good poem: the ones you mentioned, plus music, sense of the language (meaning & sound), originality, sense of past writings, sense of future writings. Let's continue with baseball metaphor & consider realm of poetry a playing field, where sometimes there are levels of standards, not set in stone, but people have a sense of them. Then there are some of real originality who sort of make the game their own. They can do all the basics - but they personalize everything, take it to a new level of freedom & depth. Some qualities these originals rely on, I believe, that you don't hear much about nowdays, are: anonymity, modesty, renunciation. Tools by which poetry enters other dimensions of the human conversation. Opposite side from mannerism, poem as autotelic object, etc. The danger here, is kind of debased "civic" poetry, poetry used for some manipulative purpose; but the real originals tend to avoid this or transcend this category. This is the feeling of Russian poetry & culture that I harp on now & then & that real exper ts in it (which I'm not) will probably deny: but it's a kind of modesty & solemnity which you just don't hear in American poetry nowdays, that I'm aware of. A solemnity coming from a sense of commitment to a larger conversation, & a free place within it for poetry. Probably has its down side too (the hokum of the Serious). Think of Anonymous as the perennial benchmark for quality. Just rambling here. - Henry G ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 16:15:16 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: Concentration In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 7 Oct 1996 15:53:32 EDT from Addendum to previous: maybe part of sense that Russian poetry is part of a larger conversation is due to the fact that Russians not only like to sit around drinking and talking - it's kind of an integral everyday ritual & part of their life (or used to be). The bigger conversation was happening right in your own crowded apartment. - HG ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 16:17:28 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Coffey Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 5 Oct 1996 to 6 Oct 1996 -Reply Comments: To: Nuyopoman@AOL.COM bob holman wrote: Try Eavan Boland's _Object Lessons_ for "other" Irish. Let me second that recommendation. Boland's memoir (published by Norton last year) is a brilliant critique of an entire tradition, in this case, Irish and Anglo-Irish poetry, which carefully exposes the male domination of the forms, down to the expectations of the poetic voice, the poetic subjects, and the poet himself in his public and private persona, in the pub, in the classroom, in the bedroom. she candidly recounts her own instinctive acknowledgment that this was the case, her early careerist attempt to orient herself as a "male" poet and, only after having met with some unsatisfying success and then experiencing motherhood, did she find an alternative voice, for herself at least, and perhaps for others... her book also broadens, or perhaps it is deepens, the interesting site of struggle that language is in Ireland, which I have always taken as a coherent example of how cultural, political and in boland's case sexual issues are fought out at the level of language. Also, the book is beautifully written. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 16:33:26 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: kaona Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins In-Reply-To: <2705B286AE1@ccnov2.auckland.ac.nz> da kine stay da kine--perhaps an emphatic 'contextuality' is what struck you most? or do you mean something different in saying 'compact'? On Tue, 8 Oct 1996, Tony Green wrote: > Is what happened to Latin i.e."becoming" > French, Spanish, Italian etc and then dying > happening to English, with its wide range of > Englishes. I had an amazing essay written in > a Polynesian English a couple of weeks back. > It was non-standard, but it worked, provided > I worked at translating it to my own version > of English. I cd not find effective paraphrases > that were not cumbersome and awkward, > comparefd to the very compacted language > of the text. It offered an Olsonian "refreshing" > of language. Unfortunately I haven't got it > here to quote. I guess Susan Schultz and Gabrielle > Welford will recognise what I'm talking about. > > best > > Tony Green, > e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 16:45:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Roberts Subject: polkas, gigues, and slams Yes, poets and everyone else for that matter is free to draw whatever aesthetic and political lines they want as far as their own tastes and poetics are concerned. However, it seems gratuitous to slam Frost-- who never won a Nobel, who is not exactly a live wire these days, and who was once marginally innovative even if we now assume his poetic to be a dead end. As for the ad hominem remarks on the slow-wittedness of readers who prefer Heaney et al and/or who actively dismiss other traditions, I am reminded of the Speed & Performance threads of a couple months back. What kinds of mental and physical operations does experimental poetry require/enact/enforce, and is it possible to produce inductive arguments about their political and psychological differences from the Nobel stuff, on the basis of their respective rates of consumption? Answering these questions seems a more interesting response to the perennial retrospection and repetition compulsion of these award-givers/receivers. I am not persuaded that Creeley or Snyder say, are running at a different speeds from other poets like Merwin or Simic who are not affiliated with avant-garde social networks. However, Zukofsky or Olson, say, are demanding different responses than Walcott and Heaney, but settling for or even reinforcing an implicit binarism is not going to crack the institutional prejudice against the global energies of experimentalism. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 16:59:55 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Coffey Subject: Re: Concentration -Reply Comments: To: jdavis@PANIX.COM jordan davies wrote: and I'd be all too quick to rattle off the qualities I think make a non-bad poiem, langly or otherwise -- energy, sufficient complexity, vulnerability (charm), except that I've been a real ball hog and want to start raking in the assists -- ok, i'll bite. I wonder if the call for folks to identify "good" language poems might be met with an embarassment of silences; or perhaps a few nominations, in jordanspeak, of "non-bad langpoems." i could say, show me a good hannah weiner poem and I'll show you a bad language poem, but i haven't read all of hannah. do i need to? or p inman, who once read a paper at st mark's that was brilliant. still, i haven't read all of P; do i need to? for a good language poem: mac low's light poems, all of them. and anything in jackson's From Pearl harbord Day to FDR's birthday, from Sun & Moon. and Bruce Andrew's Wobbling, or Give em Enough Rope, Fiona Templeton's London. what makes for a poem i want to read over and over? an order of sounds I delight in hearing or having my tongue perform that themselves suggest or imply worlds of possible meaning that destabilize the one I left before entering the poem and that manage to permanently alter the world of meaning i return to. that's all. This has happened to me with writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein and Paul Muldoon, and never Heaney. Or Olson. Or Charles Bernstein. Allan Davies yes. And wild Steve McCaffery. But never Neidecker. Someone stop me, I will stop, Sam, thanks. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 17:29:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels In-Reply-To: I think there's plenty of support for experimental poetry on this list, enough that I don't see why we couldn't critique some of it without much risk of losing our "common ground." If anything, i wld probably want even more "difference." If "experimental" folks (and i count myself one, for lack of a better term) are reluctant to post, even here, because of the perception of such difference, that doesn't seem to me to speak well of the vigor of the discourse. And besides, as any one here knows, it doesn't take that many voices to make a strong thread anyway, so if there's something to say that isn't getting said why not just take a shot? steve Dodie wrote: > I don't think that people who are into expermental writing (langpo being > just one vein of that) do have these uniformly shared assumptions. When > this list was smaller there was lots of fighting going on among the > members. I think people are very aware of the lack of shared asssumptions > on this list. I think that's why many people I'd like to be hearing from > are no longer posting. There has to be a certain common ground for things > to be worth discussing. > > Dodie > Steve Shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 11:05:19 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins Compact in some structures, verbs of one tense, no participles, no agreements of singular/plural mainly, but sadly I haven't got it in front of me. It was a second year undergraduate essay and I have given it back without photocopying it first. Contextually, it seemed to address an audience that wd take the language for granted, as if "at home". There is also a Samoan student at M.A. level, who can and does write a more standard English, but in middle of that will devote several sentences to a kind of apologetic tone about discussing high art topics, as if to another audience, one unfamiliar with, distrustful of and defensive towards pakeha culture. But she doesn't write an altogether different English from what is usually thought of as "standard" in the academy. This is nothing new to many on the List I suppose. But it has become recently very noticeable among my students, with more and more Polynesian and Asian students (in great cultural variety) . The effect on European Art History is curious. The eurocentric character of the discourse becomes glaringly apparent. best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 18:03:40 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: polkas, gigues, and slams >As for the ad hominem remarks on the slow-wittedness of readers who prefer >Heaney et al and/or who actively dismiss other traditions, I am reminded of the >Speed & Performance threads of a couple months back. What kinds of mental and >physical operations does experimental poetry require/enact/enforce, and is it >possible to produce inductive arguments about their political and psychological >differences from the Nobel stuff, on the basis of their respective rates of >consumption? Answering these questions seems a more interesting response to >the perennial retrospection and repetition compulsion of these >award-givers/receivers. I am not persuaded that Creeley or Snyder say, are >running at a different speeds from other poets like Merwin or Simic who are not >affiliated with avant-garde social networks. However, Zukofsky or Olson, say, >are demanding different responses than Walcott and Heaney, but settling for or >even reinforcing an implicit binarism is not going to crack the institutional >prejudice against the global energies of experimentalism. I agree. After days trashing Heaney, Frost and Szymborska, this thread has finally provoked some responses that value diversity, first from Michael Coffey and now from Gary Roberts. Thank you. De gustibus. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www duke.edu/~kellogg/ There is no mantle and it does not descend. -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 18:28:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: polkas, gigues, and slams Comments: To: David Kellogg Nobel Prize = best poetry money can buy. The whole idea of the Nobel & its ilk raises the old Ciceronian "Who benefits?" Not poetry, I think. Rather the bourgeois institutions that seek to quell the anxiety they experience vis-a-vis "art" and so create wprizes and whatnot to that end. The Nobel has always seemed to me a ratification of the status quo. Writing that "agitates the sleep of mankind" seldom is recognized by the Committee (though Beckett would certainly seem to prove the exception). James Agee once spoke of "the emasculation of acceptance" when talking about the relationship between art and its intended audience. That's a pretty loaded phrase, to be sure; divisive and more than a bit juvenile, but if the shoe fits... At all events, no writer should be looking for rewards from captains of industry. How the Nobel gratifies bestower and recipient, but esp. the former, tells us more about the current relationship between art, commerce and culture, then about putative "artistic merit." It seems to me that once you establish the idea of a prize, you've already compromised something essential in the creative process. Cheers, Patrick Pritchett pritchpa@silverplume.iix.com ---------- From: David Kellogg To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: polkas, gigues, and slams Date: Monday, October 07, 1996 5:53PM >As for the ad hominem remarks on the slow-wittedness of readers who prefer >Heaney et al and/or who actively dismiss other traditions, I am reminded of the >Speed & Performance threads of a couple months back. What kinds of mental and >physical operations does experimental poetry require/enact/enforce, and is it >possible to produce inductive arguments about their political and psychological >differences from the Nobel stuff, on the basis of their respective rates of >consumption? Answering these questions seems a more interesting response to >the perennial retrospection and repetition compulsion of these >award-givers/receivers. I am not persuaded that Creeley or Snyder say, are >running at a different speeds from other poets like Merwin or Simic who are not >affiliated with avant-garde social networks. However, Zukofsky or Olson, say, >are demanding different responses than Walcott and Heaney, but settling for or >even reinforcing an implicit binarism is not going to crack the institutional >prejudice against the global energies of experimentalism. I agree. After days trashing Heaney, Frost and Szymborska, this thread has finally provoked some responses that value diversity, first from Michael Coffey and now from Gary Roberts. Thank you. De gustibus. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www duke.edu/~kellogg/ There is no mantle and it does not descend. -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 19:40:43 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Andrew D Epstein Subject: Re: Berrigan cites In-Reply-To: On Mon, 7 Oct 1996, Libbie Rifkin wrote: > Hello List, > Does anyone know where Ashbery says "The academy of the future is opening > its doors"? And/or where Apollinaire said it first? > > How about where Williams said "The sonnet is dead." I have the interview > where he talks about how he hates the sonnet, but that line isn't it. > > Berrigan's sonnets have me on a wild goose chase. > > Thanks, all. > Libbie > Hi Libbie -- The "academy of the future is/ Opening its doors" is from the poem "Last Month" which is from Rivers and Mountains. It's also in the Selected. Take care, Andrew Epstein ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 13:23:37 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: wystan Organization: English Dept. - Univ. of Auckland Subject: Szymborska Dear List, One of the many things you do is inform. I have read an opinion or two about one poem by this Polish prize winner, and on the prize itself. Can we do better than this? Has anyone one here read any other poems by her? Who reads Polish? List I'm all ears. Wystan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 19:33:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Berrigan cites the sonnet is dad indeed. but whose. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 18:35:51 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: william marsh Subject: Dora Marsden Can anyone tell me who "Dora Marsden" is? -- reference in Wms' "Spring and All", in the first paragraph of the prose section following "By the road to the contagious hospital..." ? Thanks in advance. bmarsh ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 21:44:51 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Schultz Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins Dear Tony--I'd love to see that nonstandard essay. all best, Susan (Schultz) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 21:22:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Roberts Subject: yet more Nobel Of course, prizes are the devil's blessing, but I am unsure whether the "status quo" argument is accurate. Beckett is indeed a major exception, but then again, who would deny his importance? What about Claude Simone and Octavio Paz? These recent winners are not exactly "status quo" and have direct ties to avant-gardism. Going a little further back, what about Neruda and Montale? Sure they're safe enough now, but that wasn't always the case. I know that quibbling about a roster is not really getting to the heart of the poetic issues necessarily raised by this year's selection, but I thought maybe the ambiguous examples I have cited would complicate the tendency to think of the prize as only going to the Pearl Bucks of the world. Gary R. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 01:37:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Concentration -Reply Michael Coffey, In naming Inman & Weiner as the langpos you're not enticed by I'm tempted to say oh, so you really don't like language poetry. To say a few words not so much in defense but in response-- both of these poets seem to me to write on their own terms, there is a very strong sense of the immediacy & integrity in the writing. Ok, what immediacy, what integrity? Inman's immediacy is that the weight of each letter, each word, each phrase, each paragraph is the same, & they are all weighed very carefully. The writer has attended to them neither more nor less than they demand. Peter often mentions Beckett (a fine synonym for integrity), & one senses in his work that Beckettian understanding that there is really nothing to be gotten from the writing other than the experience of it, the doing of it. So, to be gotten from the reading of it is a very particular kind of intelligence, I can't help but think of deKooning but without the heroic junk. Hannah's a dialogic hurricane. Hurricane's have something like 200,000 times the power of an atomic bomb. One feels that the intensity of engagement with language that _she_ feels in the writing is something like that. If you don't like hurricanes, don't go there. I'm fascinated by them. Or if you don't like that overblown analogy simply say that it's a multiple dialogism -- there's _a_ conversation going on in her work, but it's not locatable, it never stays in one place long enough, & yet it's _information_. & I think often she's very funny. Try _The Fast_, though _Little Books/Indians_ is possibly my favorite. Not liking Olson or Bernstein or Niedekker's a conudrum I shan't engage at the moment. But o I plea that the great infinity might bestow upon you the treasures & fruits & vegetables of their wondrous labour --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 22:47:29 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Messerli returing to Szymbroska >That's exactly my billowing and soft point, content-ed or no. > Now I am having even more difficulty. How can a point be billowing? George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 7 Oct 1996 22:47:32 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: nobel prize Pearl Buck remains the only Chinese writer to have >won, French writers seem scandalously underrepresented, etc. Pearl Buck was Chinese? George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 19:00:25 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Beard Subject: New journal - CURRENT I'm emerging from a long period of lurkerdom to announce a new journal: CURRENT - journal of the mind & senses http://www.comm-unity.co.nz/~current/ It includes work by listmembers Charles Alexander, Tom Beard, John Geraets, Tony Green and ShaunAnne Tangey. Other contributors with whom you may be familiar include Ebon Fisher, David Howard, Kapka Kassabova, Sugu Pillay and Mark Williams. The contents will be updated as new work comes to hand, and an announcement on the print version will be made shortly. CURRENT aims to be a multi-disciplinary, multi-media journal, and includes poetry, audio, theory, fiction, interviews and visual art. Also of note is "Complete with Instructions", possibly the first use of Java to present and animated poem. I look forward to your feedback. Tom Beard. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 03:32:48 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wendy McClure Subject: Anyone up for picking on BAP? Whoa just wrote the following post and then logged on and there was the digest in all its flammable glory... just scanned it for now cause I gotta sleep... I get the sinking feeling that I missed all the fun... Rod Smith writes: >_The Best American Poetry 1996_ edited by Adrienne Rich, was recently >published. The introduction contains an epigram and two or three citations >from Charles Bernstein's _A Poetics_. The book itself, which, admittedly, I >have not examined carefully, seems to contain very little that would fall >under the rubric "innovative writing." Past editions of this "Best" have >included a number of such writers. So, discursive statements about the >usefulness of an aesthetics of multiplicity are ok, but the actual practice >of such. . . ? I'll look at the book a bit more, hopefully it's more >interesting than it appears. >--Rod Something compels me to buy the BAP books every year and for the past few I've found little to reward the reflex... the Rich edition, while I'm not crazy about it, is the first one in a while that hasn't left me mostly regretting another year of the habit. As for the relationship between her intro and the book itself I'd say her appropriation of the Bernstein quotes hold up for the purpose of her essay at least --i.e. really only one instance where she takes anything that C.B. has to say towards "innovation" in writing, and there she's citing only a few of her choices (& they're actually ones I agree with, a really good Giscombe poem for one). Now for the rest of the book & the ensuing practice, -- or two practices, I guess, one is Rich's selection & she's pretty honest about her priorities, admitting to pushing aside the designations of "best" ... anyway, when it comes to the poets themselves and _their_ practice of an aesthetic multiplicity I got the vague feeling that they blew it somehow, usually in the form of too much "post-practice": something like 50 pages of contributor's notes filled w/ anecdotes and/or explanations for things that not particularly evident in the poems themselves (esp. disheartening when they were "formal choices") --in short, a lot of "aesthetic" that didn't seem to make it into the poems. Overall I guess I consider the collection as a document of Rich's encouragement and read the poems together w/ her intro as an assessment of so much more that needs to be done towards a poetics of innovation and difference... it's not an easy choice but I guess I'd rather see some of the poems fall visibly short of the editor's expressed standards, as opposed to the limits of a safer consistency that I've seen in BAP before. --Wendy McClure ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 08:01:25 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "David W. Clippinger" Subject: Marjorie Perloff Could someone please backchannel me Marjorie Perloff's address. Thank you, David Clippinger ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 08:10:00 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: polkas, gigues, and slams In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 7 Oct 1996 18:28:00 -0500 from On Mon, 7 Oct 1996 18:28:00 -0500 Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume said: It seems to me that once >you establish the idea of a prize, you've already compromised something >essential in the creative process. I think Pindar, for one, would disagree. Isn't there a love/hate atmosphere for everyone, winners/losers & bystanders, involved with prizes? But the world would be a drabber place without races, competitions, prizes, recognitions. A "simpler" place, in a negative sense. I don't think the Nobel committee, or anyone else, considers the Nobel the ultimate arbiter of value. The arbiter, in literature, is the reader, the audience. I for one was moved when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel, & it's sad if it's considered another example of Western imperialism. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 08:42:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: Dora Marsden In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.32.19961008013551.006c3c28@nunic.nu.edu> from "william marsh" at Oct 7, 96 06:35:51 pm > Can anyone tell me who "Dora Marsden" is? -- reference in Wms' "Spring and > All", in the first paragraph of the prose section following "By the road to > the contagious hospital..." ? > > Thanks in advance. > > bmarsh Dora Marsden was the editor of the Freewoman which became the New Freewoman and then The Egoist around 1914. At that time she asked Harriet Weaver to take over editorial responsibilities while Marsden pursued her interest as a philosophical writer (while writing for the magazine that went on to hire Pound as literary editor and to publish work by Joyce, Eliot, HD, Aldington, Fletcher, de Gourmont, etc.). Marsden's books include The Definition of the Godhead, The Mystery of Time, and The Philosophy of Time. If you can, you should check out the original issues of the magazines. They're fascinating. Pound, Joyce, and HD alongside articles on vegetarianism and free love and Marsden's long philosophical essays on time and the godhead. Mike mbougn@chass.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 07:49:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins In message <961007214449_204619422@emout05.mail.aol.com> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Dear Tony--I'd love to see that nonstandard essay. > > all best, Susan (Schultz) yeah me too--md ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 20:59:32 +0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Simon or Chris Subject: poil buck yes of course Mrs. Buck was born (nee Seidenstricker, I think) somewhere in West Virginia and only went to the orient as a small child (not sure of exact date -- her parents were missionaries). The nobel prize line is a misremembered quote from John Yau. however, her translation of the Shui Hu Chuan, which she called "All Men are Brothers," (its otherwise translated as "The Water Margin" or "Outlaws of the Marsh") is well worth anybody's reading. It is a slightly odd sounding English she used, probably affected by her translation method (supposedly, because she was fluent and illiterate in Chinese, she had a collaborator read the book aloud to her and she translated from that) but it gives more of the flavor and feel of that kind of Chinese literature than anything else I know. Rexroth was a fan of her translation, so is Alice Notley. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:03:43 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: Concentration In-Reply-To: from "Henry Gould" at Oct 7, 96 03:53:32 pm Henry writes: > Let's continue with baseball metaphor > & consider realm of poetry a playing field, where sometimes there are levels > of standards, not set in stone, but people have a sense of them. Then there > are some of real originality who sort of make the game their own. The part of the baseball metaphor that comes to my mind is the team thing. After all the razzle dazzle aesthetics (which start to sound remarkable like something cribbed from John Crowe Ransome or Allen Tate), everybody just wants their team to win. The problem is the umps are all recruited from the other team(s). > anonymity, modesty, renunciation. Tools by which poetry > enters other dimensions of the human conversation. Opposite side from > mannerism, poem as autotelic object, etc. Wow, that's the most scandalous, avant-grade thing ever posted here! Have people on the list heard that Bob Dylan sold the rights to "The Times They Are a Changin'" to the Bank of Montreal for use in their new advertising campaign? Maybe that was part of the deal of that got him shortlisted for the Nobel. This is just not the kind of world in which Bob Creeley can ever get the Nobel prize. Maybe we should make up our own prize and award it to him. Mike mboughn@chass.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:22:45 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: Concentration In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:03:43 -0400 from On Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:03:43 -0400 Michael Boughn said: > >Have people on the list heard that Bob Dylan sold the rights to "The >Times They Are a Changin'" to the Bank of Montreal for use in their >new advertising campaign? Maybe that was part of the deal of that got >him shortlisted for the Nobel. Yeah, but they agreed to change the lyrics to: "The Monies they are a-Changin'". > >This is just not the kind of world in which Bob Creeley can ever get >the Nobel prize. Maybe we should make up our own prize and award it to >him. Maybe Bob (Dylan, that is) would help fund it. He is from Minnesota, after all. - Henry "Eat Crow, Ransom" Gould ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:57:46 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Sylvester Pollet Subject: WCW vs. The Sonnet Libby Rifkin et al, It's not quite in the words you quoted, but the line of WCW's I like re sonnets is in his Author's Introduction (1944) to the Collected Later Poems: "To me all sonnets say the same thing of no import- ance." He goes on to clarify, "There is no poetry of distinction without formal Invention...." Which may be what we're really griping about vis a vis the poem on baby Shickelgruber. On that thread, though, I don't trust The New York Times to choose a poet's best work--there's a politics of that level of selection also. I'm suspending judgment until I read more work. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:37:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: nobels, the Good, here we go... (1) re the nobels: any way we might speculate as to how the literature awards do/do not align with more empirical fields?... sure, we all know that lit. tends to be, on the surface of it, a more subjective category... or does it?... i mean, is there a common denominator at work in the nobels, one that presumably seeks out, say, the Good... regardless how political all the awards may be de facto, what i'm asking about here is whether and how a meta-category (say, the Good) is distributed across the award spectrum... (2) this relates to jordan's question to me (loaded as hell!---but thanx jord, we need to be provoked so) about what makes for a bad langpoem (and will *somebody* please forgive me this shorthand)... i teach tech. writing, and as i just posted a list member backchannel, i tend to focus these days in my classes, as a sort of historical backdrop, on the distinction between good tech. writing that's designed (literally) for beneficial ends and good tech. writing that's not... that is, the latter writing might be proficient, expeditious, and so forth, but may be used in the service of BAD ethics, morals, politics... so mebbe, in fact, it's BAD (and there are surely places and people who would say so---which raises the issue of good and bad as these relate to culture and community)... in particular, my classes examine the national socialist rhetoric of wwii (we build on a remarkable essay that appeared some time ago in _college english_ (march 1992), steven katz's "the ethics of expediency: classical rhetoric, technology, and the holocaust")... in short: if i can take my tech. writers, and tech. writing in general, to task for not owning up to its complicity in a rhetorical bracketing of ethics-morals-politics (have a look at the stc ethical code) while promoting some technical-technologized "good," why then i suppose, i should hold poetry so accountable... and certainly with an understanding that poetry (whatever it is) doesn't work the same way, hence that poetic 'accountability' is not going to work the same way... and with the recognition that some poetries seem to be more easily held accountable (why is this?), which is not to say that they're less demanding necessarily... i'm posing questions here for which i have no easy answers... but of course the question of the good is not simply formal---and in any case, formal issues, as many would argue, do in fact lend themselves to matters of social un/desirability, esp. when viewed against various norms... joe ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 10:29:00 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: WCW vs. The Sonnet In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:57:46 EDT from On Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:57:46 EDT Sylvester Pollet said: >ance." He [WCW]goes on to clarify, "There is no poetry of distinction without >formal Invention...." This should be written in stone over the portals to 20th century American experimental writing. It's the dogma I was referring to in my "shocking" post re: mannerism, poem as object, etc. In my noble dream world I have revised this maxim to read: "There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, carefully disguised and completely hidden". - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 10:49:05 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Fred Muratori Subject: WCW on the Sonnet > >How about where Williams said "The sonnet is dead." I have the interview >where he talks about how he hates the sonnet, but that line isn't it. > >Thanks, all. >Libbie Hi Libbie -- Though I can't find WCW's original statement on the sonnet, your question gives me an opportunity to bring up WCW's later comment on the form, which everyone seems to have forgotten, and which significantly modifies his earlier opinion. This is from a letter to James Laughlin dated Jan. 23, 1938. The comment follows WCW's expression of admiration for the sonnets of Merrill Moore: "The sonnet, I see now, is not a form at all but a state of mind. It is the extremely familiar dialogue upon which much writing is founded: a statement then a rejoinder of a sort, perhaps a reply, perhaps a variant of the original -- but a comeback of one sort or another...I never had the intelligence to realize that it wasn't the sonnet that was at fault but the bad artists who wrote in the form that were the calamity. The imagination rescues us all but how difficult to realize the simplest formulations until someone, some ONE, liberates us. Now sonnets can be written again." This is from pages 25-26 of the _Selected Letters_ of WCW to Laughlin, published by Norton in 1989. Take care, Fred Muratori Fred Muratori Reference Services Division Olin - Kroch - Uris Libraries Cornell University fmm1@cornell.edu http://fmref.library.cornell.edu/spectra.html ************************** "The spaces between things keep getting bigger and more important" -- Jon Ashbery ************************** ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 10:20:10 CST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeff Hansen Organization: The Blake School Subject: what's a good poem OK, I've been a lurker for a while. On dismissal: I'm quite suspicious of it, particularly when it involves intergenerational activity. It is not necessary to dismiss poets you don't find useful. Just ignore them. Underlying the whole Nobel thread is the frustration of experimental poets at not having access to the insitutions with tremendous culural capital. We want wider distribution and exposure. Mainstream newspapers and intellectual publications ignore us in favor of the Heaneys et al of this world. We want some of that largesse for ourselves. We want experimentalism to be more central to cultural life. What would that mean, socio/politically/economically, to have experimentalism at the core? Perhaps a look at the visual art world through much of the 20th century would give an answer. `Tain't a pretty sight. Any other ideas? So why do we rail? (And I rail as much as anyone. Yesterday at lunch I explained why the mainstream Erdrich was inferior to the nonmainstream Young Bear, and not a few weeks earlier I had denounced Heaney to the same colleague.) If major cultural capital brings with it the grotesque wheeling and dealing and imaging-making that we see in the artworld, who needs it? Visual artists that I know are all appalled by their position relative to the image-makers. Would experimental poetry, if given major support, be different? Probably. Innovation in visual arts is tightly tied to marketing and niche-making. There is not enough of a market in poetry to sell mainstream stuff, let alone experimental. Perhaps experimental could get more capital without changing. Dunno. Maybe this is why I don't post a lot: I dunno. As far as what I like in a poem, language or otherwise: Challenge. I want it to stretch my mind. Sometimes this is historical: why did someone write this in 1432? Sometimes it is based on figurative language: where do the metaphors lead me? Sometimes it's the sound of the piece: can I give words to such a feeling? how is such a sensation created? Sometimes it is based on a weird pull, a sense that the poem is uttering a significance for my life that I cannot articulate. Sometimes I know the poet and wonder why he or she would write this from what I know of the givens of biography. I want poetry that provides me an opportunity for mental calisthenics. I propose a new prize. The POETICS LIST MENTAL CALISTHENICS POET OF THE YEAR. Dig it. Jeff ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 11:01:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Subject: Creeley Festival >This is just not the kind of world in which Bob Creeley can ever get >the Nobel prize. Maybe we should make up our own prize and award it to >him. At the University at Buffalo, we've cut to the chase with our Creeley 70th birthday celebration, starting Thursday night and going to Saturday night. Come on down, up or over -- (All events are free.) Thursday, October 10 8pm: Hallwalls: Eileen Myles Reading, introduced by Robert Creeley Friday, 10/11 3-5pm Katherine Cornell Theater, North Campus Welcome: UB President William Greiner Reading: Gil Sorrentino and Amiri Baraka 5-6:30pm 420 Capen Hall Opening, "Here: Fifty Years of Poetry in Buffalo", Poetry/Rare Books Collection, 420 Capen 8:30-10pm Katherine Cornell Theater Reading by Robert Creeley // Conversation with Creeley and Jim Dine Saturday, 10/12 4-5pm Katherine Cornell Theater: John Ashbery 8:30pm Hallwalls: Concert with Steve Kuhn and Carol Fredette Reception and party with Mercury Rev ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 11:00:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Concentration mike b rites This is just not the kind of world in which Bob Creeley can ever get the Nobel prize. Maybe we should make up our own prize and award it to him. now *that* is a truly sensible suggestion. like what the before columbus foundation did with the American Book Award and what Messerli's doing w/ the Gertrude Stein awards. all we need is a big chubby endowment. md ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:40:28 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: Marjorie Perloff Why don't you ask her yourself--she's on the list: Marjorie Perloff x, Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 11:58:23 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: Dora Marsden In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.32.19961008013551.006c3c28@nunic.nu.edu> I don't know much about Marsden, but Mariani's bio of WCW mentions a long piece of hers called "Lingual Psychology" that was serialized in The Egoist. WCW critiqued the piece in a long letter to the mag that was printed over two successive issues. All this around 1917. --steve On Mon, 7 Oct 1996, william marsh wrote: > Can anyone tell me who "Dora Marsden" is? -- reference in Wms' "Spring and > All", in the first paragraph of the prose section following "By the road to > the contagious hospital..." ? > > Thanks in advance. > > bmarsh > Steve Shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 11:40:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: yet more Nobel Comments: To: Gary Roberts You raise a good point, Gary. Mebbe I shld have sd "tends to ratify." All the examples you mention are "exceptions" and one could add more. (I think). But for every Paz or Montale there seem to be ten Jaroslav Sieferts (the WS of his day?). Taking it farther back, why give the prize to Kipling and not to Conrad? What about Joyce, Woolf, Pound, WCW? Why has a US poet never won? We could beat this thing to death and maybe we have. At bottom I suppose it all comes down to the fact that hierarchies (of whatever kind) always breed resentment. On the other hand, I like Henry's notion that's it all just part of the circus... Patrick Pritchett ---------- From: Gary Roberts To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: yet more Nobel Date: Monday, October 07, 1996 10:48PM Of course, prizes are the devil's blessing, but I am unsure whether the "status quo" argument is accurate. Beckett is indeed a major exception, but then again, who would deny his importance? What about Claude Simone and Octavio Paz? These recent winners are not exactly "status quo" and have direct ties to avant-gardism. Going a little further back, what about Neruda and Montale? Sure they're safe enough now, but that wasn't always the case. I know that quibbling about a roster is not really getting to the heart of the poetic issues necessarily raised by this year's selection, but I thought maybe the ambiguous examples I have cited would complicate the tendency to think of the prize as only going to the Pearl Bucks of the world. Gary R. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 13:18:58 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: Concentration In-Reply-To: <325a7a8e578e504@mhub2.tc.umn.edu> from "maria damon" at Oct 8, 96 11:00:14 am > > mike b rites > This is just not the kind of world in which Bob Creeley can ever get > the Nobel prize. Maybe we should make up our own prize and award it to > him. > > now *that* is a truly sensible suggestion. like what the before columbus > foundation did with the American Book Award and what Messerli's doing w/ the > Gertrude Stein awards. all we need is a big chubby endowment. > md > Although I know it's a bit meagre, Bob would probably be happy with a bowling trophy and a ten dollar money order. It's the thought, or the thinking, etc. Onward, Mike ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 13:24:15 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: reconstruction Henry. Sound and meaning? I'm not sure that's sufficiently complex. Frinstance what about syntax, which is a simultaneous structuring of sound and meaning that isn't particularly affected by word choice or intended meaning? I'm also worried that putting 'sound and meaning' up front that way will lead to the [what's the right word here? privileging? valorization? winning-of-awards? ratification! that's it, dirty ratification] of one particular kind of sound, as the perennial victory of the absurd squish-writers has shown. I'd hate it if everybody tried to write like Clark Coolidge --- wait maybe they did and it was the 80s -- even though to my ear parts of _Solution Passage_ sound as good as anything else. My understanding of anonymity in Russian poetry is that one had to be anonymous because one had to be anonymous. I would hate to feel that necessity, and I would hate to emulate the behavior of people who felt that necessity. To have a name is not so bad. Each one works out where they are on the axis of comfortable / cautious. The trend always seems to tip back towards cautious during even the most predictable election year -- fast money. So -- I liked Jefferson's list -- Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 10:46:25 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: Concentration Mike Boughn wrote: >This is just not the kind of world in which Bob Creeley can ever get >the Nobel prize. Maybe we should make up our own prize and award it to >him. I think the National Poetry Foundation did just that for Robert Duncan in 1984/5 after so little attention had been paid to Duncan's "Ground Work I". I think the cash award came from donations from poet/critic signers of the certificate. I think this was discussed in the Duncan Sagetrieb issue. I don't have it at hand so I may have misremembered some details. I agree, though, that prizes as an ongoing annual "event" are a cheap way to deal with culture. Or Culture. Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 13:27:31 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: reconstruction In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 8 Oct 1996 13:24:15 -0400 from On Tue, 8 Oct 1996 13:24:15 -0400 Jordan Davis said: > >Sound and meaning? I'm not sure that's sufficiently complex. Frinstance >what about syntax, which is a simultaneous structuring of sound and meaning >that isn't particularly affected by word choice or intended meaning? I'm >also worried that putting 'sound and meaning' up front that way will lead >to the [what's the right word here? privileging? valorization? I'll agree with you there. Sounds like a textbook: "Sound & Meaning: Poetry for Hungry 9th Grade Ears". & I liked Jefferson's post too. He mentioned something about how the sound creates a new or hard-to-grasp feeling, that said it better. But if you want complexity I think the sound & meaning have to work together with the syntax, maybe not in lockstep, but... it IS affected by vocabulary & meaning. Ashbery & his disciples like to disconnect them, create fake rhetorics... I used to like it but now find it sort of boring. >My understanding of anonymity in Russian poetry is that one had to be >anonymous because one had to be anonymous. I would hate to feel that >necessity, and I would hate to emulate the behavior of people who felt that >necessity. To have a name is not so bad. Each one works out where they are >on the axis of comfortable / cautious. The trend always seems to tip back >towards cautious during even the most predictable election year -- fast >money. I'm thinking of it more in terms of the various literary effects of anonymity. I think French poets get at it pretty well. Villon, Corbiere, even Laforgue - they achieve this kind of "Everyman" quality - the poem stands on the exact borderline between folksong and art song - the writer gets lost in Anonymous. Or there's a fusion of the individual and Anonymous. This works on a lot of levels. Not to advertise too much but I wrote an essay that gets into this called "School of Anonymous" in the latest Nedge. I wouldn't call it caution - to write like Anonymous is not something for the cautious. More like a kind of negative capability. - Henry Gould > >So -- I liked Jefferson's list -- > >Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 14:00:00 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: reconstruction In-Reply-To: If the opposite of anonymity is identity (the textual kind if anyone wants to know) then we valorize both anonymity and identity when we experience them as oppositional and liberating. So particular writing procedures are probably context dependent in this sense. Syntax is as always a particularly generative area to investigate because more obviously than the easily metaphorized squishyness of sound (and what could be squishier than meaning) syntax is a braid or torque or juxtaposition that involves self and other in an active deployment: syntax is social. Joseph ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 14:02:53 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: reconstruction In-Reply-To: PS Of course syntax is social also means that various manipulations (including but not limited to distortions) of syntax are social too. No one kind of syntactical procedure should be assigned the same social valence always and everywhere but trends are audible and worth differing over as we invent and reinvent. I do not mean trends as in trendy but rather well if Shlovsky says thus and such about parataxis and Bernstein agrees that describes a trend as opposed to a closed system. Shared but not universal facts. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 14:22:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: reconstruction Joseph -- you're right that squishiness is context-dependent -- I'm thinking mainly of the squish-poets' tendency to make lugubrious every process they encounter, as if everything were a fen. That's probably incorrect grammar, but if syntax is social, is bad grammar the residuum of individuality that we have to preserve? Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 14:22:07 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: reconstruction In-Reply-To: PPS I know what I meant by a distortion of syntax but looking back over what I wrote a few minutes ago I wish I could retract that phrase: I don't mean to imply a norm from which distortions etc. but I do think that ordinary language in the sense of ordinary language philosophy allows for the establishing of language games which recognize distortions. The same could be said for realism (I mean realism the way Silliman, Watten, Hejinian do and the way that tradition can be said to start in Whitman, Dickinson, and Thoreau). Realism as a constructivist narrativity grounded in fact. Syntax one of the motions. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 14:48:42 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: reconstruction In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 8 Oct 1996 14:22:07 -0400 from To get back to anonymity: there's a perfect example of what I was talking about with regard to the French, in Dan Bouchard's new magazine, MASS AVE. It's called "Matrix Blues", by Giovanni Singleton. It's not a narrativity memo from a de-centered slave-subject of the po-squish zitgeist. It's all Anonymous & all Giovanni Singleton, simultaneously. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 14:57:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Poetics List Subject: Call for Papers (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 08 Oct 1996 12:07:04 -0400 From: Kathleen Crown To: poetics@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: Call for Papers Hello All: Here is the updated Call for Papers for POETRY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE, to be held at Rutgers next April. The deadline has been extended to DECEMBER 1st. Please do not send email proposals; email inquiries may be sent to kcrown@rci.rutgers.edu. --Kathy Crown please post on appropriate lists: call for papers The Department of Literatures in English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick announces Poetry and the Public Sphere: a conference on contemporary poetry, April 24-27, 1997 Scheduled to partcipate: Adrienne Rich, Robert Hass, Sonia Sanchez, Miguel Algarin, Poets from the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, Charles Bernstein, Tricia Rose, Charles Altieri, Maria Damon, Alicia Ostriker, Cheryl Clarke, Michael McKeon, Elin Diamond, Abena Busia, and many others. This interdisciplinary conference is open to the public and aims to provide new understandings of poetry's participation in the public sphere. The last two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in public poetry--readings, festivals, performances, films, television series, and poetry slams. In examining the way poetry affects and is affected by social context, we will consider a range of contemporary poetries in their public settings, including performance-oriented, community-based, socially engaged, and formally experimental work. Questions of audience and aesthetics will be central to our discussion of poetry's active role in building, defining, questioning, and motivating social and political communities. The conference will feature poetry readings and performances, keynote lectures, and panel presentations by a wide range of poets, scholars, and activists. We welcome submissions from anyone with an interest in poetry. We are currently accepting: Detailed two-page proposals for 15-minute papers, not limited to the topics below. (Feel free to suggest panel topics; however, we are not accepting group panel proposals at this time.) Detailed proposals for roundtable discussions (no more than four people), to consist of five-minute remarks and a moderated discussion. You may provide participant names or make suggestions. Please provide names and brief profiles of chair and 3-4 panelists, plus a two-page proposal describing the topic, approach, and intended contribution of each discussant. poetry and social movements poetics of performance poetry politics of form poetry and public sphere theory poetry as witness poetry and community activism African American poetry poetry slams ethnography and poetry poetry and popular culture global poetry Latino/a poetry poetry and identity politics poetry and/as history Native American poetry gay/ lesbian poetry spoken-word events feminist poetry poetry and AIDS rap-meets-poetry politics of publishing Asian American poetry contemporary poetry cultures Send proposals by December 1 to Harriet Davidson, Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies, P.O. Box 5054, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903-5054. More information will be available soon at our website (address to come); information about a pre-conference discussion forum online will also be available at that address. -- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 15:29:40 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: homage to Ed Foster Henry, Thanks for bringing up Dan Bouchard. DAN BOUCHARD IS READING IN NEW YORK CITY!!!!!! WOW!!!!!!! AT 7 PM ON THURSDAY THE 10TH!!!!!! AT POETRY (BLEEP)ING CITY!!!! THE MAYOR WON'T BE THERE!!!!! HE'S ALREADY APOLOGIZED!!!! 5 UNION SQUARE WEST, 7TH FLOOR!!!!! READING WITH DAN IS DAVID MILLS!!!! OH! MY! GOD!!!!!!! Love, Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 16:17:27 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Smith Subject: Awards In a message dated 96-10-08 12:11:38 EDT, you write: << mike b rites This is just not the kind of world in which Bob Creeley can ever get the Nobel prize. Maybe we should make up our own prize and award it to him. now *that* is a truly sensible suggestion. like what the before columbus foundation did with the American Book Award and what Messerli's doing w/ the Gertrude Stein awards. all we need is a big chubby endowment. md >> or like the National Poetry Award organized by the national Poetry Foundation (& others) in 1985 to recognize Robert Duncan's work. cs ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 14:09:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Quartermain Subject: (Sort of) end of silence I simply want to thank everyone for all those wonderful and really encouraging get-well messages and sympathy -- it's amazing, such messages really do help. And I am clearly, now, on the road to full recovery -- minor surgery turned into major life-threatening systemic infection, but massive i.v antibiotics for a week stemmed the tide. So I feel like a rather exhausted but successful Canute, and am slowly catching up on all my delinquencies. And again I send my heartfelt thanks to you all. Peter + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Peter Quartermain 128 East 23rd Avenue Vancouver B.C. Canada V5V 1X2 Voice and fax: 604 876 8061 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 18:12:51 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: (Sort of) end of silence Welcome back, Peter Quartermain! Now how about making up for your downtime? Tell us the meaning of life. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 19:52:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Quartermain Subject: Re: Dora Marsden Among others, Marsden published Williams, who in The Egoist for August 1917 published "The Great Sex Spiral: A Criticism of Miss Marsden's 'Lingual Psychology.'" This and related matters are thoroughly discussed in Bruce Clarke's really excellent book _Dora_Marsden_and_Early_Modernism_:_Gender, _Individualism_and_Science_. U Of Michigan Press, 1995. Peter At 08:42 AM 10/8/96 -0400, you wrote: >> Can anyone tell me who "Dora Marsden" is? -- reference in Wms' "Spring and >> All", in the first paragraph of the prose section following "By the road to >> the contagious hospital..." ? >> >> Thanks in advance. >> >> bmarsh > >Dora Marsden was the editor of the Freewoman which became the New >Freewoman and then The Egoist around 1914. At that time she asked >Harriet Weaver to take over editorial responsibilities while Marsden >pursued her interest as a philosophical writer (while writing for the >magazine that went on to hire Pound as literary editor and to publish >work by Joyce, Eliot, HD, Aldington, Fletcher, de Gourmont, etc.). >Marsden's books include The Definition of the Godhead, The Mystery of >Time, and The Philosophy of Time. > >If you can, you should check out the original issues of the magazines. >They're fascinating. Pound, Joyce, and HD alongside articles on >vegetarianism and free love and Marsden's long philosophical essays on >time and the godhead. > >Mike >mbougn@chass.utoronto.ca > > + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Peter Quartermain 128 East 23rd Avenue Vancouver B.C. Canada V5V 1X2 Voice and fax: 604 876 8061 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 19:56:14 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Quartermain Subject: Re: (Sort of) end of silence Why, thanks, George. The meaning of Life is the same as the meaning of Time. Didn't you know? Peter At 06:12 PM 10/8/96 -0700, George Bowering wrote: >Welcome back, Peter Quartermain! > >Now how about making up for your downtime? Tell us the meaning of life. > > > > >George Bowering. > , >2499 West 37th Ave., >Vancouver, B.C., >Canada V6M 1P4 > >fax: 1-604-266-9000 >e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca > > + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Peter Quartermain 128 East 23rd Avenue Vancouver B.C. Canada V5V 1X2 Voice and fax: 604 876 8061 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 18:31:26 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: DS Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins Is that ethical?? At 07:49 AM 10/8/96 -0500, you wrote: >In message <961007214449_204619422@emout05.mail.aol.com> UB Poetics discussion >group writes: >> Dear Tony--I'd love to see that nonstandard essay. >> >> all best, Susan (Schultz) > >yeah me too--md > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 00:01:17 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels Rod Smith wrote (regarding the best American Poetry 1996): >I'll look at the book a bit more, hopefully it's more interesting than it >>appears. I think Mark Twain said of Wagner "his music sounds better than it is." Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 03:15:25 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: The meaning of Time/Life Peter, It's good to know that you will be with us for a few more decades. We're counting on it. I do hope that the meaning of Life (& Time) is not the same as the meaning of Sports Illustrated. Or even of M/E/A/N/I/N/G All best, Ron -------------------------------------------------- Jeff, In this world there are those of us who think that the experience of reading should be like weightlifting, an exercise that can be felt as such and which leaves us all the stronger for it. And then there are those (in the majority) who think it should be like watching television, transparent and "painless." Frost was for the latter, and that is why he was a "bad person." Ron Silliman ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 03:38:55 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden Subject: Re: Szymborska/Heaney/Nobels I think Twain said "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." Which is, perhaps, an even defter put-down. Rachel Loden Herb Levy wrote: > > Rod Smith wrote (regarding the best American Poetry 1996): > > >I'll look at the book a bit more, hopefully it's more interesting than it > >>appears. > > I think Mark Twain said of Wagner "his music sounds better than it is." > > Herb Levy > herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 07:32:20 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: The meaning of Time/Life ron rites: > Jeff, > > In this world there are those of us who think that the experience of > reading should be like weightlifting, an exercise that can be felt as > such and which leaves us all the stronger for it. And then there are > those (in the majority) who think it should be like watching > television, transparent and "painless." Frost was for the latter, and > that is why he was a "bad person." > > Ron Silliman funny, i never thought of weightlifting as an analogue for the reading experience. wonder why not. and then some of us think that the experience of reading should be like having a conversation with a smart and or trusted friend or stranger: challenging, revealing, transformative. or maybe weightlifting w/ the friend as weight. now there's a promising potential for revelation, transformation, challenge. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 07:33:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins 1. if permission is asked and granted 2 if the name is not revealed, i don't know why it wouldn't be. md In message <199610090531.SAA28643@ihug.co.nz> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Is that ethical?? > > At 07:49 AM 10/8/96 -0500, you wrote: > >In message <961007214449_204619422@emout05.mail.aol.com> UB Poetics > > discussion > >group writes: > >> Dear Tony--I'd love to see that nonstandard essay. > >> > >> all best, Susan (Schultz) > > > >yeah me too--md > > > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 09:19:24 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steven Clay Subject: The Book, Spiritual Instrument / The Word Made Flesh Granary Books announces two new publications: 1)-THE BOOK, SPIRITUAL INSTRUMENT edited by Jerome Rothenberg & David Guss. The Book, Spiritual Instrument addresses the "ethnopoetics of the book." Originally published as New Wilderness Letter #11 in 1982 and now long out-of-print, this newly designed edition contains all of the original material along with a new preface by Jerome Rothenberg. Contents include: "Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel" by St=E9phane Mallarm=E9= , translated and visually interpreted by Michael Gibbs; "The Book and the Desert/[Wilderness]" an interview with Edmond Jab=E8s, translated by Jack Hirschman; "The Book as an Instrument of Performance" Becky Cohen's fold-out section of photographs of poets reading from their work; Alison Knowles & George Quasha on The Book of Bean; "A Book" by Dick Higgins; selections from the Popul Vuh with translation and commentary by Dennis Tedlock; plus works by Karl Young, David Meltzer, Tina Oldknow, J. Stephen Lansing, Eduardo Calder=F3n, David Guss, Jed Rasula, Paul Eluard, Gershom Scholem and Herbert Blau. The Book, Spiritual Instrument is a welcome and important contribution to discussions of poetics, book art and performance. "Prefaced by Mallarm=E9's famous dictum that 'everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book,' this spirited collection demonstrates the reverse as well: everything in the book exists in order to end up in the world. . . In a series of exemplary essays on, and demonstrations of, what might be called the ethnopoetics of the book, books from a wide range of cultural traditions are portrayed as radical extenders of form rather than neutral vessels of content. The result is a vision of books as laboratories for the invention and performance of perceptual systems: new worlds carved out of the wilderness of human thought and language." -Charles Bernstein, Poet, Editor and David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics, SUNY-Buffalo. Designed by Diane Bertotlo. Paperback, smythe sewn, 160 pages, illustrated throughout with black & white photographs. ISBN 1-887123-08-3 Price: $21.95 plus $6.00 shipping (domestic) / NY residents add appropriate sales tax 2)-THE WORD MADE FLESH by Johanna Drucker Calling attention to the visual materiality of the text, this book attempts to halt linear reading, trapping the eye in a field of letters which make a complex object on the page. The writing refers continually to the visceral character of language, literalizing metaphors of tongue,breath, and flesh. The work both embodies and discusses language as a physical form, one whose properties cannot be ignored by arriving at a disembodied content. "Unlike the avant-garde artist's book of the early century, Drucker's doesn't boast a single illustration, a single pictorial equivalent to the text. Rather, it is the alphabet itself that is made flesh, the letter being seen in all its visual potential, as if to say that, desensitized as we are by the endless billboard discourse around us, we have almost forgotten the astonishing power of the alphabet to create human meanings." -Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice Printed offset in two colors, this is a facsimile of the original letterpress edition (now long out-of-print) 12 1/2" wide, 10 1/2" high. 30 pp. Handbound in boards and with a two-color letterpress dust jacket printed by the artist. ISBN 1-887123-09-1 $60 + $8 shipping (domestic)+ applicable tax for those in the state of NY. TO ORDER contact Steve Clay at Granary Books via Email: sclay@interport.net a selection of other unusual books published by Granary may be seen at: www.granarybooks.com Granary Books 568 Broadway #403 New York, NY 10012 212 226-5462 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 09:26:07 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Schultz Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins Tony--you ought to ask the student first...yes. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 11:34:11 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: noble Dodie wrote: "As far as political poetry goes, San Francisco is reeking with bad political poetry. Nobody's giving any of it a Nobel Prize." someone should give Jack Hirschman the noble just for those letters to Djuna Barnes in the new miragie. thanks. and how is wayne smith doing? Bill ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 06:16:20 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: "Death in a Landslide" in New York this week (fwd) Anyone in the city seen this? gab. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- I thought I would pass on this message from Jay Martel, one of the writers of TV Nation and most recently, the writer of the play "Death in a Landslide" which is in New York this week. Dear Friends, I need your help in getting the word out as soon as possible about "Death in a Landslide," a new comedy. The show opened last weekend to fantastic response but the odds are that the play has two more weeks of life and then goes away forever. Given these dire circumstances, I want the largest number of people to see it as possible. Even if you're not in the New York area or are unable to make the show OR have already seen it, I would greatly appreciate your help in forwarding the following couple paragraphs to five e-mail buddies who might be able to come: "Death in a Landlside" is a play about what happens when Death comes for Cuff Riley, the slickest political operator in Washington. In a bargain that's part "Faust," part "Frankenstein," Death spares Cuff in exchange for Death getting a shot at the presidency. In other words, Cuff Riley goes where Lee Atwater would have--if he could have. By far the strangest independent presidential candidate since Ross Perot, Death hits the campaign trail with a pro-gun, pro-capital punishment, pro-death-pro-life platform that charms conservatives, splinters liberals, and gives a whole new meaning to the concept of "scare tactics." Using campaign slogans like "Death: For a Change" and "Give us Liberty AND give us Death, " Cuff Riley uses every trick in his bag to elect a Force of Nature president and, of course, gets more than he bargained for. The show stars Chuck Montgomery (Hal Hartley's "Amateur") and Joseph McKenna (Terry Gilliam's "Twelve Monkeys"), was directed by Kirk Jackson (Cucaracha's "Viva Las Vegas"), written by Jay Martel, and co-produced by Michael Moore and Kathleen Glynn ("T.V. Nation," "Roger and Me"). "Death in a Landslide" runs for only two more weeks, beginning at 8:00 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, from now until October 20th at the Grove Street Playhouse (39 Grove Street in the Village, west of Bleecker and Seventh Ave.). Tickets are $12. For more information and reservations call 726-8142. Thanks, Jay ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 06:09:14 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: Re: (Sort of) end of silence In-Reply-To: <2.2.16.19961008194921.24df4ece@pop.unixg.ubc.ca> On Tue, 8 Oct 1996, Peter Quartermain wrote: > Why, thanks, George. > The meaning of Life is the same as the meaning of Time. > Didn't you know? > Peter > Why, darn! I thought it was 42! gab ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 09:23:49 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: william marsh Subject: Re: what's a good poem >I propose a new prize. The POETICS LIST MENTAL CALISTHENICS POET OF THE YEAR. i.e., COOL-AESTHETICS POET OF THE YEAR? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 09:28:43 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: nobels, the Good, here we go... Joe Amato wrote: >(1) re the nobels: any way we might speculate as to how the literature >awards do/do not align with more empirical fields?... sure, we all know >that lit. tends to be, on the surface of it, a more subjective category... >or does it?... i mean, is there a common denominator at work in the nobels, >one that presumably seeks out, say, the Good... regardless how political >all the awards may be de facto, what i'm asking about here is whether and >how a meta-category (say, the Good) is distributed across the award >spectrum... Taking your lead to look beyond the Nobel Prize for Literature, let's look at prizes within the arts in general, rather than to the Nobels in general. (I don't see The Good in revisiting territory previously covered in the lengthy discussions of the Sokol essay in Social Text, but maybe that's just me.) Looking at any award system, I think you'll find the common denominator is not The Good, but rather The Opinion, a very different philosophical category. Especially when The Opinion comes from a committee. In this case, The Opinion of what's good usually has to do with the social dynamics of who's on the panel, who selected them, etc. There are very few selection committees for prizes, grants, fellowships, etc. with a mandate to value innovation in the arts across the board. Cf. Appendix 7 of Jed Rasula's American Wax Museum for some poetically relevant details. It's not much better in other genres, in some it may be worse. Bests Herb Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 09:29:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: nobels, the Good, here we go... Abstracting the argument away from good and bad innovative poems to Good and Bad innovative poems doesn't address the same problem. Especially in the context of an article on expedience, rhetoric, accountability, & complicity with the Holocaust and concept-matrices like "ethics-morals-politics". I think many (though not all) on the list would agree that there can be bad innovative poems that are not Evil. However, I expect few list members will be willing to go on record with their specific choices for this category. & that's the real problem with looking for a definition of a "bad innovative poem" on this list. Most people who have the chops to make the distinctions feel uncomfortable doing so in such a public forum. The field is too small for that kind of public in-fighting. & this list is even smaller, though more public. Perhaps when a "mainstream" writer or critic says something like "but you experimental writers just support each others work, making little critical distinction among writers at the same career levels" or some such, the best response is to say "yes, it looks VERY familiar, doesn't it?" Bests Herb Joe Amato wrote: >(2) this relates to jordan's question to me (loaded as hell!---but thanx >jord, we need to be provoked so) about what makes for a bad langpoem (and >will *somebody* please forgive me this shorthand)... i teach tech. writing, >and as i just posted a list member backchannel, i tend to focus these days >in my classes, as a sort of historical backdrop, on the distinction between >good tech. writing that's designed (literally) for beneficial ends and good >tech. writing that's not... that is, the latter writing might be >proficient, expeditious, and so forth, but may be used in the service of >BAD ethics, morals, politics... so mebbe, in fact, it's BAD (and there are >surely places and people who would say so---which raises the issue of good >and bad as these relate to culture and community)... in particular, my >classes examine the national socialist rhetoric of wwii (we build on a >remarkable essay that appeared some time ago in _college english_ (march >1992), steven katz's "the ethics of expediency: classical rhetoric, >technology, and the holocaust")... in short: if i can take my tech. >writers, and tech. writing in general, to task for not owning up to its >complicity in a rhetorical bracketing of ethics-morals-politics (have a >look at the stc ethical code) while promoting some technical-technologized >"good," why then i suppose, i should hold poetry so accountable... and >certainly with an understanding that poetry (whatever it is) doesn't work >the same way, hence that poetic 'accountability' is not going to work the >same way... and with the recognition that some poetries seem to be more >easily held accountable (why is this?), which is not to say that they're >less demanding necessarily... > >i'm posing questions here for which i have no easy answers... but of course >the question of the good is not simply formal---and in any case, formal >issues, as many would argue, do in fact lend themselves to matters of >social un/desirability, esp. when viewed against various norms... > >joe Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 12:58:58 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: chops and steaks (the atmosphere of jokes) >I think many (though not all) on the list would agree that there can be bad >innovative poems that are not Evil. However, I expect few list members will >be willing to go on record with their specific choices for this category. & >that's the real problem with looking for a definition of a "bad innovative >poem" on this list. Most people who have the chops to make the distinctions >feel uncomfortable doing so in such a public forum. The field is too small >for that kind of public in-fighting. & this list is even smaller, though >more public. Herb -- interesting that THIS paragraph would appear shortly after a cogent paragraph by you about Good v. Opinion, a case long since settled out of Court. Re: having those chops and not using them -- very wondrous. I've heard of people who know medicine but don't like to practice -- _pro bono_ -- poetry reform, Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 11:35:46 PDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jerry Rothenberg For any of you in the San Diego area, the following is a calendar of readings for this fall s New Writing Series. All readings, it should be noted, are free and open to the public, and (except for that on October 24th) all will take place at 4:30 p.m. in the Visual Arts Facility Performance Space. NEW WRITING SERIES SCHEDULE / FALL QUARTER 1996 DAVID MELTZER + Wednesday October 16 4:30 p.m. at Visual Arts Facility Performance Space JAYNE CORTEZ + Wednesday October 23 4:30 p.m. at Visual Arts Facility Performance Space YEHUDA AMICHAI + Thursday October 24 7:00 p.m. at The Cross Cultural Center (Lyman and Artists Lane) BOB PERELMAN + Friday November 1 4:30 p.m. at Visual Arts Facility Performance Space WILL ALEXANDER + Wednesday November 6 4:30 p.m. at Visual Arts Facility Performance Space SUSAN HOWE + Wednesday November 13 4:30 p.m. at Visual Arts Facility Performance Space MYUNG MI KIM + Wednesday November 20 4:30 p.m. at Visual Arts Facility Performance Space ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 14:39:12 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "MICKIE E. KENNEDY" Subject: Re: nobels, the Good, here we go... In-Reply-To: I would like to go record as saying most poems are both bad and Evil, with the caveat that the remainders are unlikely to be both good and Good--just at a lower cost and found in a bin at your local bookstore. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 15:35:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: That's Blaxdhhhhhhxqtploitation! In-Reply-To: <199610090405.AAA28199@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> Re the erudite eds at American Book Review: I don't know what's happening to the OCR software in Normal, Illinois, but my short-short review of Darius James's _That's Blaxploitation!_ got obscured by a stonehenge of em-dashes, double parentheses, bulgingly balanced sentences and improvisatory spellings. Though ABR's proofreaders are usually fastidious, I somehow got translated into what can only be described as Prig Latin: I read like some harumphing disembrained polyglot in a tome by Oliver Sachs! Indeterminists, take note: a good time can be read by (A=E5hhhll<)>. To all others, I say: Buy Darius James's book and the rest will make sense. BTW: In the same issue of ABR, there is another review that I must recommend: "Legend and Language," Marjorie Perloff's illuminating look at the neglected (but resurrected) Mina Loy. And guest-editor Larry McCaffery is his usual selfless self, breathlessly promoting neglected writers like an Ezra Pound on meth. (McCaffery's an angel; I just wish there were more like him.) Anyhow, back to work on an album with the Scottish band, Truth. I just laid out my own book, _Distorture_, for Black Ice Books, due in March, 1997: a labor for the anal, it's true, but I'm thrilled that the publishers gave me that kind of artistic control. Respect for authorial aesthetics? Nothing normal about that. All the best, Rob Hardin http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 15:31:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: nobels, the Good, here we go... herb, all points well-taken... still, i'll press a bit and say that i think the question of good/Good bad/Bad is worth continued navigation in these parts (and i know neither of us means The Good), albeit i admit to being somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed... and in part for the reasons you mention about the nature of this public forum... really, i hate to keep coming back to this issue, but if in fact it's the forum itself that's preventing such dialogue, why then there's the need to reflect on same... what is it about that complex [wink] of ethico-moral-political that's untouchable around here?... i might make the argument (as i have on occasion) that certain attitudes about poetry or poetics are irresponsible when it comes to their institutional embodiment... now as a teacher, the institutional is relatively easy for me to access (in such terms, i mean)... but even poets and writers with no professional obligations or commitments to teaching must readily acknowledge that what they advocate as poets and writers have institutional effects that are more and less desirable... i regret, for example, those three nobel laureate poets (i think it was walcott, paz, and milosz) who together proclaimed their opposition to electronic media, an attitude that i find not only lamentable and compromising to more innovative work, but in fact aiding and abetting print hegemonies from which all three of these gents' work *might* be said to profit directly... of course emedia is my hobbyhorse... and of course this question of the Good i raise is specifically one having to do with inter-poetic, if not inter-media, struggle (sorta)... but if you find yourself linking your effort as a poet or scholar or teacher with broader social concerns, why then the Good will of necessity be ramified across many other domains... anyway, i'd like to hear more... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 10:02:49 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins Sorry, I don't have the essay and I don't have a note of the name of the writer, and I would be extremely reluctant to post it anyway, as initially a private communication and in confidence. If the student had been someone on this list and willing or able to discuss the essay herself in her own terms, ,on equal terms, maybe then. I think it would be difficult or obnoxious to expose the writer herself to view, as an object of linguistic curiosity. The questions raised by non-standard writings in supposedly standardised and standardising environments is the issue that I'm concerned with and my reason for citing the essay in the first place. best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 10:20:39 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: DS Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins That was what i meant when i asked if it was ethical, thanks Tony. >I think it would be difficult or obnoxious to expose the writer >herself to view, as an object of linguistic curiosity. The questions > raised by non-standard writings in supposedly standardised and >standardising environments is the issue that I'm concerned with and >my reason for citing the essay in the first place. > >best > >Tony Green, >e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 17:50:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins In-Reply-To: <19F8D23793@ccnov2.auckland.ac.nz> from "Tony Green" at Oct 10, 96 10:02:49 am > The questions raised by non-standard writings in supposedly > standardised and standardising environments is the issue that I'm > concerned with and my reason for citing the essay in the first place. > > best > > Tony Green, > e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz > Tony Do you feel like elaborating what those questions are for you in relation to this particular essay? I'd be interested to hear. Mike mboughn@chass.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 18:10:37 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matt Kirschenbaum Subject: FYI: MLA Resolution (fwd) > From root Wed Oct 9 16:44:12 1996 > Message-Id: > Date: Wed, 09 Oct 1996 16:37:22 -0400 (EDT) > Reply-To: e-grad@listproc.bgsu.edu > Sender: owner-e-grad@listproc.bgsu.edu > Precedence: bulk > From: mbousque@email.gc.cuny.edu > To: Graduate Student Caucus of the MLA > Subject: MLA Resolution (fwd) > MIME-version: 1.0 > Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII > Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT > X-Sender: mbousque@broadway.gc.cuny.edu > X-Listprocessor-Version: 7.2 -- ListProcessor by CREN > > > Dear e-gradders: The attached is a resolution regarding the exploitation > of graduate students and other academic workers drafted by the MLA's > Radical Caucus. > > It is _not_ one of the resolutions drafted by the Graduate Student > Caucus, although the concerns expressed overlap in many areas. > > If you wish to indicate your support for the Radical Caucus resolution, > you may do so by following the instructions contained in the post below. > > Best, Marc > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Wed, 09 Oct 1996 11:59:42 -0700 > From: Leo Parascondola > To: mbousque@email.gc.cuny.edu > Subject: MLA Resolution > > Marc -- I have included a separate posting of the Radical Caucus MLA > Resolution. Are you in a position for forward this to E-GRAD or ANY > OTHER discussion list that seems relevant? If so, would really > appreciate it. I have taken the liberty of identifying you as contact > person for Grad Student Caucus to Working Class Studies discussion > group of CCCC. There are many grad students who are probably crossovers > who will be interested in our issues inside MLA. Resolution follows. > > Best, Leo > *************************** > > Resolution to 1996 MLA Delegate Assembly on Exploitation of Part-Time, > Adjunct, Graduate Assistant, and other Campus Labor > > (sponsored by members of the Steering Committee of the Radical Caucus > of the MLA) > > CURRENT MLA MEMBERS ONLY will want to print, sign, and fax the > resolution below; others will want to take note. Deadline for > submission to MLA office is Oct. 15, 1996. SIGNED COPIES SHOULD BE > FAXED IMMEDIATELY to either: > > 212-533-0680 or 212-477-9863 > > Please phone the MLA, 212-475-9500, to verify that the fax has > indeed been received. Please fax your signed copies in immediately! The > absolute deadline is Oct.15 (one week from now). > > Please do not email your hyperspace "signatures" to the MLA. They WILL > NOT ACCEPT any such signatures. Resolution begins below. > ________________________________________________________________________ > > WHEREAS global movements of capital, coupled with rampant > corporate greed and shrinking tax expenditures on the public good, > have resulted in unprecedented levels of unemployment and > underemployment among all sectors of the world's workforce, an > increasing polarization of skilled and unskilled workers, and > corporate downsizing; and > > WHEREAS the consequences of this trend has been, from the point > of view of capital, a decreased need for college- and university- > trained workers in general and, in particular, a decreased need for > the graduates of nonelite and public colleges and universities; and > > WHEREAS the impact of this trend in U. S. higher education has > been budget cuts, elimination of jobs and in some cases of entire > departments, speed-up, increasing use of part-time and adjunct > faculty, greater exploitation of graduate student labor, and erosion > of tenure; and > > WHEREAS this trend reflects the increasing polarization of the > "haves" and the "have-nots" and reveals the inherent antagonism > between the interests of capital and the educational needs of the > great majority of the working class (which includes most of the > so-called "middle class"); and > > WHEREAS those who work and teach on campuses should not gain any > > improvement in their working conditions off the backs of graduate and > > undergraduate students in the form of tuition and fee hikes, which > have been astronomical over the past two decades; and > > WHEREAS there is an urgent necessity for an activist movement on > > campuses that unites tenured and untenured professors, adjunct and > part-time faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, and > other campus workers; > > BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the MLA advocate that all college > and university-level teaching positions other than those of graduate > students be full-time, with full benefits, at a living wage, and > carrying reasonable expectations of job security, while graduate > students and teaching assistants should receive a living wage and full > > benefits; and > > BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the MLA support unionization efforts > > among campus workers at all levels; oppose reprisals on those who > engage in unionization activity; and oppose any and all attacks on the > > tenure system; and > > BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the MLA censure institutions not > complying with these principles and take appropriate punitive > measures, such as banning job advertisements in the MLA JOB LIST and > > suspending institutional membership in the ADE and/or ADFL. > > NAME SIGNATURE INST. AFFILIATION > > > > > > Please: FAX your signature immediately to one of these two MLA fax > numbers: > 212-477-9863, or 212-533-0680. > > Please either FAX or mail a copy to: > > Grover Furr > Department of English > Montclair State University > Upper Montclair NJ 07043 > > FAX: 201-655-7031 > > Please circulate widely and continuously. The deadline for the > first 10 signatures is October 15. Obviously we would like to get as > many signatures as possible, right up to the MLA Convention itself. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:42:47 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Englishes/Latins Yes, Michael Boughn, I cd elaborate a little. But I am in a state of some confusion over what is happening. I've just come from a small group tutorial "on" Watteau. The little group of three older women arrive together (Anglo-Scottish, Irish) one young Chinese woman, who cannot be persuaded to say anything, one exceedingly shy young man and one tall blond young woman, Anglo-Scottish, whatever, and for the first time this whole semester which is now finishing, four young women, Polynesian and quite various in appearance. The assumptions of a teacher of European art history as to the audience's assumptions and what it takes for granted culturally are no longer operative in this situation. Chinoiserie is something to pause over --, so is the appearance of persons of colour in paintings by Watteau or Rubens, though that has not been an issue yet -- but the styles of dress and makeup of Watteau's imaginary figures of courting couples is emphatic about the whiteness of the skin of the young women's bosoms. How does that sound and look to the Polynesian women? As for their writing, what is expected of them? What do they expect of themselves? I am looking for possibilities of encouraging them to ask their own questions about the artworks they are looking at and in the language they have available to them. Is this naive of me, is this altogether going in the wrong direction? Should I be encouraging them to appear the same as all the other students, as if cultural difference did not enter into the equation? Consequently "grading papers" becomes a more complicated task than usual, when it is clear that cultural differences are making themselves felt in the language. I have met this before with one or two students in a class, but now about a third of my second year class is not European in its cultural expectations and I feel the need to adjust what I do, but I am unsure how to do it. I have a strong suspicion that it requires the university as a whole, or at least the humanities teachers to take action as a group, and that anything I do to encourage non-standard writing may get the students concerned into deep trouble with other teachers. best 4 is ss, hPakehachinese Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:53:01 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Creeley Festival Thanks for the invitation to Creeley Fest -- and for one received in the mail yesterday, Charles,-- Judi Stout and Tony Green will be there in thought or in a manner of speaking. All the best to Buffalos and to Bob -- and to Pen.. Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:02:13 +0900 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Nada Gordon Subject: weightlifting Ron (and all): Reading should be like weightlifting because it makes you a stronger person??!??! So a complex text = Popeye's spinach, lo how the muscle bulges. Ketjak as Charles Atlas course. Ugh. I wouldn't say I'm one of that select group of people who believes so, no. But I recently read a book about the emotional lives of animals and learned the word "funktionslust" -- the enjoyment of one's capabilities, i.e. the pleasure a cat takes in climbing trees or a monkey in swinging from branch to branch. Maybe I like to read tough things because I can, and that pleasure is its own reward, not the great macho overweaning ectomorphic forehead brain muscle that will develop because I made the exertion. And if it does, I'll just have to wear a scarf or something. Although I do like spinach, I don't eat it primarily because it's good for me. And speaking of lust -- I know the battery fell out of the dildo thread long ago, but I found this bit in Philip Whalen's On Bear's Head last night. NB this is not a hoax, look it up for yourselves, p. 376: > "IN MY LIVINGROOM! >Sitting there imagining "Divine Bodies" in My Livingroom! >Maybe you think I didn't tell him! Without a stitch on, & that >Electric Vibrator of mine that the DOCTOR told me to use for my >Neck and Shoulder! Maybe you think I wasn't nearly floored! I >want to tell you . . ." nada ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 22:02:47 -0400 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: afterwords website [forward] ================= Begin forwarded message ================= Announcing the all new... afterwords literature website http://www.io.org/~dalopes/after/ Now more powerful, faster and easier to use. Search the entire small press catalogue to find what you're looking for or to generate a custom list of items. The search tool will return matches to any part of the listing, including author, title, publisher, type, and description. So you can generate your own list for bill bissett, Ganglia Press, sound poetry... anything you like. The previous lists (work by and related to Daniel f Bradley, Greg Evason, jwcurry, damian lopes, bpNichol and David UU) have been condensed into a form that is faster to browse. All the details remain quickly assessible, but you'll spend your time browsing rather than waiting for documents to load. A frame-ready browser, like Netscape 2 or higher, is recommended. afterwords literature is a retailer of small press literature. __________________________________________________ Box 657 Station P Toronto Canada M5S 2Y4 http://www.io.org/~dalopes/ ================= End forwarded message ================= ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 14:20:33 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: AWOL: New magazine releases (forwarded) >Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 12:41:31 +1000 >To: awol@ozemail.com.au >From: awol@ozemail.com.au (awol) >Subject: AWOL: New magazine releases > >New Magazine Releases > >It can be difficult keeping up with the latest issue of your favourite >magazine. Now you can order them through AWOL. Decide which magazines you >wish to order and and then email us with your order. We will invoice you by >email, fax or snail mail mail your payment and we'll mail you yourmagazines >(we hope to allow credit card ordering soon). > > > >Tinfish 3 > >Tinfish 3 is now available through AWOL distribution. Tinfish is a journal >of experimental >poetry with an emphasis on work from the Pacific region. Issue 3 contains >work by >Contributors: Nathan Kageyama, red flea, Malia Pangilinan, Kapulani, Susan >M. Schultz, Rob >Wilson, John Kinsella, Carolyn Lei-lanilau, Adam Aitken, Tony Quagliano, >Pam Brown, Liz >Waldner, Janet Bowdan, Range poets, Graham Foust, Connie Deanovic, Faye >Kicknosway, >MTC Cronin, John Olson, Che Quian-zi, Joe Balaz, Mark Peters, Stephanie >Strickland, >Duoduo, Bret Bajema, Ron Silliman and Mark Wallace. > >RRP $5.00 (ISSN 1087-2132) > > > >Antithesis Vol 8. No 1 > >Antithesis is a postgraduate journal of interdisciplinary studies. Articles >in in this issue include >'Inoculating the Internet: Memetic Metaphors & the Computer-mediated >Community' by Sean >Smith, 'Wilde at Heart: Disease & the Wildean Body' by Benjamin Flood, 'Located >Cosmopolitans: Grounding the Rhetoric of Autonomy' by Tania Lewis, 'The >Erotic Impact: >Terminal Velocities in Cyberspace (or how to survive a virtual crash) by >Tom Pettman, >'Cancerous Bodies & Apartheid in JM Coetzee's Age of Iron' by Fiona Probyn, >'In the >Footsteps of the Flaneur: Modernism & Thomas Pynchon's V' by Brain Morris & >'The Idot in >the Mirror: The Rhetorics of Jacques Lacan' by Justin Clemes. Poetry by >Adam King, Lizz >Murphy, Jane Sloan, Terry Callahan, Catherine Magree & Justine Lloyd. > >$10.00 (ISSN 1030-3839) > > > >Overland 144 > >Overland 144 is a special Black Writing edition featuring work by Warrigal >Anderson, Samuel >Wagan Watson, Fabienne Bayet, Mudrooroo, Pat Mamajun Torress & Lisa Bellar. >In addition >there is work by Kevin Brophy, Ben Goldsmith, Geoff Page, Denis Kevans, >Jill Jones, PI0, >plus more poetry, reviews, fiction & articles. > >$8.00 (ISSN 0030-7416) > > > >Lexicon 1 > >Lexicon is a new literary magazine published from Brisbane. It aims to >highlight work by new & >unplished writers of all genres. The first issue is an impressive debut, >well produced and >containing some interesting writing. It is also perhaps the only Australian >literary magazine to >contain a cross word! > >$4.95 (no issn) > > > >For order under $20 please add $1.50 postage. All prices are in Australian >dollars. Please contact us for overseas prices (Overseas orders for Tinfish should be directed to sschultz@hawaii.edu). >You can also order through >the Virtual Bookshop section of our website. These titles are also >distributed by AWOL so if you want to order them through your local >bookshop tell them to contact us. > > > > > > > > > >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, Mobile 015063970 >Fax 61 2 7472802 > > > > Mark Roberts Student Systems Project Officer & User Representative SIS Team. Information Systems University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Ph. (02) 93517710 Mobile 015063970 Fax (02) 93517711 ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 02:54:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: The Weight Nada Gordon, How's Japan?? When I compared reading to weightlifting it was with the presumption that weightlifting is one of the most sublime pleasures one can have in this world. Try it. You'll see. There is hardly anything that can compare to the afterburn of a good leg press. Ron Silliman ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 07:34:14 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 7 Oct 1996 to 8 Oct 1996 Not sure what thread I'm getting into here, but as someone who has always had some trouble understanding why heaney was taken so seriously, who found his work unatisfying on various levels although I understood somewhat why he was taken up as he was, I do want to pass on a small story that partly ties in to Tony Green's talk about various 'englishes.' A colleague in Post-Colonial studies also plays in a small group that does mostly Irish (Celtic) folk music around Edmonton in various bars where the irish in town gather. Heaney's brother lives here so he visits upon occasion. The last time he was here, the announcer told the audience he was in the place & everyone gave him a standing ovation, after he was introduced as a poet who spoke for them all. So: Eavan Boland probably has many valid points against such rhetoric as his, but.... Further unto this, my friend said that the Irish woman in the group, who is not an "English" type, bu which he meant she did not study literature, was trying to explain to him the various 'codes' operative whenever a catholic & protestant met, finally threw up her hands & said, "I cant explain, but listen," picked a copy of heaney's poems out of her backpack, & read him a poem in which heaney explored exactly that problem. His point, as he knows I'm not a fan, was that for his community, heaney does have something important to say. I cannot disagree, even if I still find most of the poetry only 'interesting,' not exciting to me. The first of these could justbe a reaction to 'fame,' but the second suggests that in fact heaney does speak to & for a particular community. This ongoing discussion has been fun to follow. Meanwhile, I too welcome Peter back, even though he was gone before I joined. It's been a long time since we talked Peter, but I'm glad we still might be able to the next time I'm in Vancouver... All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'The universe opens. I close. And open, just to surprise you.' - Phyllis Webb ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 09:02:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: The Weight In message <199610100954.CAA17515@dfw-ix2.ix.netcom.com> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Nada Gordon, > > How's Japan?? > > When I compared reading to weightlifting it was with the presumption > that weightlifting is one of the most sublime pleasures one can have in > this world. Try it. You'll see. There is hardly anything that can > compare to the afterburn of a good leg press. > > Ron Silliman dear ron, how's pennsylvania? when i compared reading to good conversation it was with the presumption that good conversation is one of the most sublime pleasures one can have in this world. try it. you'll see. there is hardly anything that can compare to the afterglow of a good yak w/ a pal. maria damon ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 09:02:45 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Judy Roitman Subject: Ron Johnson A friend asked me to ask about Ron Johnson -- he heard that Johnson died but knows little more. If you know any more, please respond to me backchannel; I'm going out of town and will be off the listserve. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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, 10 Oct 1996 10:15:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gary Roberts Subject: watteau Tony, One of the things that you all could consider in Watteau's paintings is the role of costumes, ceremony, and interaction rituals. To use a crit theory buzz word, his painting are very much about the "performative" aspects of self-presentation. Trying as a group to derive a rhetoric and vocabulary of gestures and signs in his paintings seems like a useful exercise, as long as you don't have a predetermined list that you are trying to get the group to guess. How are emotional states, for example, alluded to or signified by the surface features of the human figures and their settings/backgrounds? How outlandish are they from your perspectives? Is racial whiteness a staged property/a stage prop in his work? It seems that the familiar conflation of make-up (for clowns and women, say) and oil paint for pictures is also at play here. How could non-European readers of Watteau's paitings (or even the something like the photos of Cindy Sherman) relate to or criticize the cultural work of masking and unmasking? As for writing, it seems to me that you might need to determine if you and the rest of the group accept any analogies between the kind of dynamic social self-presentation in the images and self-presentation in writing framed by institutional settings. Gary R. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 07:29:18 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden Subject: Re: weightlifting Nada Gordon writes: > And speaking of lust -- I know the battery fell out of the dildo thread > long ago, but I found this bit in Philip Whalen's On Bear's Head last > night. NB this is not a hoax, look it up for yourselves, p. 376: > > > "IN MY LIVINGROOM! > >Sitting there imagining "Divine Bodies" in My Livingroom! > >Maybe you think I didn't tell him! Without a stitch on, & that > >Electric Vibrator of mine that the DOCTOR told me to use for my > >Neck and Shoulder! Maybe you think I wasn't nearly floored! I > >want to tell you . . ." Well, Nada, since we're sharing distressful experiences, I was on an innocent jaunt to http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/silliman/demo.html when I stumbled on the L-po dildo, to wit: My thumb instead of a dildo: serbo-martian exile pens essay in plain style. Dear Loss: is there to be no sanctuary even at the EPC? Rachel Loden ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 10:01:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: That's Blaxdhhhhhhxqtploitation! Comments: To: Carnography ABR is going through a "transition" right now owing to Romayne Rubina= s'=20 vacating the job she held for so long (and did so well, in my opinion= ). The=20 new editor is Paula Goodnight and when I talked to her a month ago sh= e=20 sounded as though she'd been thrown to the lions. Too bad about your = piece.=20 Things should settle down soon (I hope). Patrick Pritchett ---------- =46rom: Carnography To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: That's Blaxdhhhhhhxqtploitation! Date: Wednesday, October 09, 1996 3:23PM Re the erudite eds at American Book Review: I don't know what's happening to the OCR software in Normal, Illinois, but my short-short review of Darius James's _That's Blaxploitation!_ got obscured by a stonehenge of em-dashes, double parentheses, bulgingly balanced sentences and improvisatory spellings. Though ABR's proofreaders are usually fastidious, I somehow got translated into what can only be described as Prig Latin: I read like some harumphing disembrained polyglot in a tome by Oliver Sachs! Indeterminists, take note: a good time can be read by (A=E5hhhll<)>. To all others, I say: Buy Darius James's book and the rest will make sense. BTW: In the same issue of ABR, there is another review that I must recommend: "Legend and Language," Marjorie Perloff's illuminating look at the neglected (but resurrected) Mina Loy. And guest-editor Larry McCaffery is his usual selfless self, breathlessly promoting neglected writers like an Ezra Pound on meth. (McCaffery's an angel; I just wish there were more like him.) Anyhow, back to work on an album with the Scottish band, Truth. I just laid out my own book, _Distorture_, for Black Ice Books, due in March, 1997: a labor for the anal, it's true, but I'm thrilled that the publishers gave me that kind of artistic control. Respect for authorial aesthetics? Nothing normal about that. All the best, Rob Hardin http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:13:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wendy Battin Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 7 Oct 1996 to 8 Oct 1996 In-Reply-To: <199610101330.JAA11824@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> On Thu, 10 Oct 1996, Douglas Barbour wrote: > Irish woman in the group, who is not an "English" type, bu which he meant > she did not study literature, was trying to explain to him the various > 'codes' operative whenever a catholic & protestant met, finally threw up > her hands & said, "I cant explain, but listen," picked a copy of heaney's > poems out of her backpack, & read him a poem in which heaney explored Doug, Do you happen to know which poem? (Sure there are many, but am curious to know which she chose.) Wendy --------------------------------------------------- Wendy Battin wjbat@conncoll.edu (home) http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/wjbat/ (CAPA) http://shain.lib.conncoll.edu/CAPA/capa.html --------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:22:04 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: [Fwd: Electronic Music Foundation Update] This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------284051C549E6 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit More news from the electronic music foundation, for those on the list innerested in new & experimental musics -- Pierre --------------284051C549E6 Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Received: from User2.Logical.NET (root@Logical.NET [204.97.128.1]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA05784 for ; Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:06:14 -0400 (EDT) Received: from [204.97.130.44] (dialup12.logical.net [204.97.130.44]) by User2.Logical.NET (8.7.6/8.6.12) with SMTP id KAA28197; Thu, 10 Oct 1996 10:20:37 -0400 (EDT) X-Sender: emf@logical.net Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 10:24:27 -0500 To: emfnet@emf.org From: EMF@emf.org (Electronic Music Foundation) Subject: Electronic Music Foundation Update ELECTRONIC MUSIC FOUNDATION ============================ October 10, 1996 ACCESS TO MATERIALS This update contains summary information about EMF's website and tells you how you can receive detailed information by email if you prefer. We are sending this update to you either because you're already on our list or because we believe you'll be interested in this information. These updates will be sent approximately every month. If you would rather not receive future updates, simply let us know. If this has been forwarded to you by someone else and you would like to receive these notices directly, just send an email message to list@emf.org and say something like "Put me on your list" and we'll put you on our list. Contents: 1. CDeMUSIC is growing fast 2. The rest of the website 3. Looking for classroom materials? 4. Receiving information by email 5. Partner and sponsor news 6. A few editorial words about our email communications 7. Last call for Charter Subscribers ============================ 1. CDeMUSIC is growing fast CDeMUSIC is fast becoming a worldwide comprehensive and coherent source for compact discs of non-commercial, experimental, and electronic music. Our web site lists CDs by composer's name as well as in curated catalogs and selected organization and company catalogs. We're now in process of creating a composer's page for every composer, with links from an alphabetical list. These pages will eventually include all materials related to that composer's available work. We're starting with Charter Subscribers and important pioneers in the field (often the same people). To get an idea of where this is going, click on David Tudor or Alvin Lucier at http://www.emf.org/cde_gencat.html The curated catalogs currently are 'Pioneers of Electronic Music', 'John Cage and the New York School', 'A Few Stitches from The Knitting Factory', 'Microtonality', and 'Words and Music'. And several additional catalogs are in progress. The selected company and organization catalogs currently include the EMF label, the CDCM computer music series, Wergo's Computer Music Currents series, the INA/GRM label (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), North/South Recordings, SEAMUS, and Stockhausen Verlag. This list also will grow dramatically during the next month. The catalogs can be browsed at http://www.emf.org/cde_catalogs.html Further, a group of 'spotlight' CDs, which will change every ten days or so, will focus on particular composers and catalogs. The current spotlight is on the pioneers and includes 'The Historical CD of Digital Sound Synthesis', Laurie Spiegel's 'Unseen Worlds', and David Tudor's 'Neural Networks'. Take a look at http://www.emf.org/cde_frontdoor.html We project growth not only in numbers of CDs, but also in the scope of the collection. In the next month or so, expect to see increasing numbers of CDs of improvised music and the acoustic avant garde. ============================ 2. The rest of the website The EMF Worldwide Calendar is updated on a weekly basis and now includes special features and notices (from IRCAM, CNMAT, The British Harry Partch Society, to name a few) as well as events listings. Have a look at http://www.emf.org/cal_frontdoor.html Note the pictorial features on David Tudor's and Sophia Ogielska's 'Toneburst' at Wesleyan University, 'Lucier @ 65' (concert coming up in New York), the 1996 ICMC in Hong Kong in August, and Tod Machover's 'Brain Opera' as seen in New York in July. Current offerings in The EMF Store include Iannis Xenakis' 'Formalized Music', Reynold Weidenaar's 'Magic Music From the Telharmonium', Trevor Wishart's 'Audible Design', and Luigi Russolo's 'The Art of Noises'. Take a look at http://www.emf.org/store_frontdoor.html We're also offering 'M', Intelligent Music's interactive composing program, written by David Zicarelli in 1986. This is a historically important program that everyone should experience. It takes an hour or two to learn and it contains a wealth of musical wisdom. The main screen is shown at http://www.emf.org/store_m.html If you're interested in the web, keep checking 'Sites, Sights, and Sounds' for continuing updates on exceptionally interesting places to visit, a list of internet electronic music resources, and an electronic music internet directory which is fast becoming comprehensive. ============================ 3. Looking for classroom materials? Note that there exists a videotape called 'Mastering the Theremin' in which Lydia Kavina, virtuoso and Leon Theremin's cousin, shows how the theremin is played. Read the description at http://www.emf.org/store_videotheremin.html and you'll note that the format of the videotape is a series of lessons moderated by Robert Moog. This is not, however, only for those who want to learn how to play the theremin. This is for any and all teachers lecturing in electronic music. It shows students how this remarkable instrument is played. And btw, don't forget to listen to the classic compact disc of Clara Rockmore playing the theremin in concert. It leads the listing in the pioneers catalog at http://www.emf.org/cdcat_pioneers.html ============================ 4. Receiving information by email If you don't have easy access to the web and you'd like to receive any catalogs, product notices, or other information as email, just send an email message to EMF@emf.org and tell us what you'd like. We'll do our best to comply. ============================ 5. Partner and sponsor news Robert Moog, who normally presides at Big Briar, Inc. where he designs theremins according to Leon Theremin's principles, will be speaking at the Theremin Center in Moscow on October 14 and 15, and then making presentations on October 17, 18 and 19 at Musikmassen, an electronic music festival in Goteborg, Sweden. Carla Scaletti and Kurt Hebel, inventors of the Kyma System at Symbolic Sound, will be demonstrating the latest Kyma upgrades in booth 1406 at the AES show, November 8-11, in Los Angeles. ============================ 6. A few editorial words about our email communications Issues regarding the emailing of this information have occasionally been raised. And since we agree with those who hold that crowding cyberspace with ugly commerce is undesirable behavior, we'd like to clarify our position. EMF's mission is the dissemination of information and materials about the history and current practice of electronic music. Dissemination of information means giving away information. Dissemination of materials means selling materials. We do both. Our sales, however, are of noncommercial items not easily found elsewhere. Our sales are not to be confused with a large-scale commercially motivated operation and our email notices should not be comfused with a commercial junk-mail infringement of Internet ethics. We enlarge our email list partly by requests directly from individuals who want to receive it, partly by recommendations from others. So if you're surprised to receive this mailing, well, check it out and simply decide if you'd like to continue to receive mailings. If not, just let us know. ============================ 7. Last call for Charter Subscribers A Charter Subscriber is someone who has chipped in during our first two years of existence to help us establish our operations. In exchange for their support, we offer lifelong professional and consumer benefits, including preferential access to all of our programs. Note our distinguished list of current Charter Subscribers at http://www.emf.org/emf_csubs.html Note also that our startup period will end this month. If you're interested in becoming a Charter Subscriber, please act fast. If you're interested in knowing more, look at http://www.emf.org/emf_invitation.html or ask us about it by email. ===================================================== CDeMUSIC is a trademark of Electronic Music Foundation, Inc. ===================== 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 --------------284051C549E6-- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:29:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Ron Johnson Judy, The same rumor came my way in a letter from ken irby a few weeks back -- but have not been able to confirm (or definitely deny) the rumor, not even via our numero uno obit-man, the owner of this here list. meanwhile I will go on believing that news of RJ's death has been much exagerated. -- Pierr ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 13:11:44 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: chat net jordan, dodie, i don't know what i want from this list. perhaps part of the dull problem is that we have high expectations. & also it's as difficult to say anything interesting about poetry as it is to write a good poem. also we are afraid of saying anything interesting because so many people are listening so we take the form of poetics to be marketing press release. & it's not just here. i've been thinking that all poetics is just marketing. it's not necessarily wrong or possible to escape from this, but it's often dull if not acknowledged & tweeked. i thought kevin's invite to his play was fabulous. i guess i like the announcements the best because they're not subtle. also evident of high expectations are what we call the back channel. i've never liked the meaning commonly associated with this phrase because i think this is the back channel here. i mean what we call the back channel is the real channel. Bill ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 13:49:27 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ward Tietz <100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: Re: The Weight I've written a few heavy words in my time. The heaviest so far is the word "FOLKS" which was made out of bricks as part of a piece for the Convergence II festival in Providence, RI in 1989. It weighed 5 tons. After the festival someone in the parks department made a patio out of it. I usually write words in the 100 to 200 pound range. They're far more commonplace, but they're easier to lift. Ward Tietz ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 12:49:24 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Cope Subject: Re: Ron Johnson Judy Roitman asks: A friend asked me to ask about Ron Johnson -- he heard that Johnson died but knows little more. If you know any more, please respond to me backchannel; I'm going out of town and will be off the listserve. *** If anyone knows more please post to the list as well. I'd like to know more about this, as Johnson's a poet I've only very recently had occasion to read... Thanks, Stephen Cope ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 12:57:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: (Sort of) end of silence >Why, thanks, George. >The meaning of Life is the same as the meaning of Time. >Didn't you know? >Peter I knew! I did know! I just forgot, just forgot! George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 15:51:15 CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joel Felix Subject: Re: Ron Johnson Dear List--uh, Peter O'Leary has recieved a letter from the (kicking) Ron Johnson w/in the last week...so unless one of the fabled plains lightning balls has taken him in the last few days i think it's safe to assume he's alive. More interesting is how this rumor may have started, maybe owing to his dropping out of the SF area to Topeka, Kansas. Ron would love to hear what anyone w/in earshot of this list may have to say abt the complete ARK on Living Batch press. His address: Ron Johnson 3901 Drury Lane Topeka, KA 60604 Joel Felix Stephen Cope wrote: >If anyone knows more please post to the list as well. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 16:28:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: Ron Johnson Comments: To: Joel Felix Thanks for the info Joel. That's very good news. I love the new (&complete) ARK and will drop RJ a note when I've finished it to say so. (But really now, Drury Lane? Is this Book of the Green Man Redux or what?) Patrick Pritchett ---------- From: Joel Felix To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: Ron Johnson Date: Thursday, October 10, 1996 4:13PM Dear List--uh, Peter O'Leary has recieved a letter from the (kicking) Ron Johnson w/in the last week...so unless one of the fabled plains lightning balls has taken him in the last few days i think it's safe to assume he's alive. More interesting is how this rumor may have started, maybe owing to his dropping out of the SF area to Topeka, Kansas. Ron would love to hear what anyone w/in earshot of this list may have to say abt the complete ARK on Living Batch press. His address: Ron Johnson 3901 Drury Lane Topeka, KA 60604 Joel Felix Stephen Cope wrote: >If anyone knows more please post to the list as well. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 17:36:05 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian McHale Subject: Re: Ron Johnson In-Reply-To: Message of 10/10/96 at 15:51:15 from U63132@UICVM.UIC.EDU Wait, wait. Now that we know Johnson is still with us, could someone please supply fuller data on publication of the Complete Ark. Address for Living Batch Press, please? E-mail, even? Brian ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 17:44:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gwyn McVay Subject: Re: Ron Johnson/rumors In-Reply-To: strange rumors about the mainstreamers too--we got a call at the office today asking us if Gjertrud Schnackenberg had died--is somebody trying to quash poetry by spreading disinformation? Gwyn ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 12:02:49 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: watteau Gary Roberts, thanks for your v interesting comments on possible places for interaction in the paintings and then in the writing and also I suppose in the role playing in the classroom. best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 17:17:14 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marisa Januzzi Subject: Re: Ron Johnson/Dora Marsden Hello list Two fast notes in total haste (my whole life is total haste these days!) to say ---THANK YOU for resurrecting Ron Johnson; been meaning to send fan mail myself and thought, for a minute there, I'd lost my chance. ARK and Living Batch books (including his Southwest Cooking book) are distributed through Univ. of New Mexico Press-- I think it was Charles Alexander who sent this post via the list to me, when I was trying to get a hold of ARK. Any good local bookstore, in other words, shld be able to get it for you. Heck I even shamed the local B&N into carrying it & placing a copy in the window. Backchannel me for good sources of o.p. Johnson stuff. As for Marsden, I'm surprised no one's trotted out my favorite anecdote about her-- how she waited all night on the roof of Parliament, for the right moment to call down through the circular opening in the dome and heckle (I think) Winston Churchill about suffrage: "What about the women, Mr. Churchill?" They were all over her like the bomb squad on luggage. It's in the biography. ciao-- Marisa >Wait, wait. Now that we know Johnson is still with us, could someone please >supply fuller data on publication of the Complete Ark. Address for Living >Batch Press, please? E-mail, even? > Brian ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 19:32:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Jay and Kay deFeo Hey there, dbkk, are we going to get a report on Kevin's play? breathless, maria d ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 18:00:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden Subject: assorted indignities Rob Hardin wrote (in part): > > Re the erudite eds at American Book Review: > > I don't know what's happening to the OCR software in > Normal, Illinois, but my short-short review of Darius James's > _That's Blaxploitation!_ got obscured by a stonehenge > of em-dashes, double parentheses, bulgingly balanced sentences > and improvisatory spellings... Recently received ten contrib copies (now buried in the back yard) of a mag that shall remain nameless. A prose piece was printed *as a poem*, complete with twenty gut-wrenchingly bad line breaks and various spelling riffs. Just sign me-- Rachel, prisoner of poesy ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 00:24:47 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Cope Subject: Re: Ron Johnson As regards Johnson: I believe it was Chicago Review that recently did an issue dedicated to him. I haven't seen it myself, but am of mind that it had essays as well as selections etc. Anyone know more about it? Thanks, Stephen Cope ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 08:51:51 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: Ron Johnson In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 11 Oct 1996 00:24:47 -0700 from Stephen: _Chicago Review_ 42.1 (1996) has short essays on Ronald Johnson by Creeley and Gunn, an interview with the un-dead by Peter O'Leary (co-editor of LUNG), ARK 66 (for EP), BEAM 1, RJ's "Hurrah for Euphony" (prose), and an intro floating the boat by Devin Johnston. Also some Bronk, Fanny Howe, etc. $6 from Chicago Review 5801 S. Kenwood Ave. Chicago, IL 60637-1794 Subscriptions = $18 (good things coming down the line at CR I think) --keith ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 09:44:42 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Bouchard 8, Mills 9 Bouchard 8, Mills 9 at Poetry City Time: B (27 mins), M (40 mins) Attendance: 20 Opening day at Poetry City, the Mayor threw out the first ball, "MASS AVE" editor Bouchard was in good form, loose, built up with six shorter pieces to his longer work "August." Early line drives--"Make way for the language," "If you'd like to make a speech, press pound now," "for lack of what is Pound there," "ampersand ampersand ampersand." A rally in the third as Bouchard riffed on the last line of the Maximus Poems, "My wife my car my color my credit rating..." Titles of poems: "A Pavement Ontology," "Hesiod's Notebook," "Ben's Release," "Purple Finch," and "Washington Square." Bouchard was wearing tan bucks, a green-brown sweater, blue jeans and a watch. His poems are political, because as he put it, he could avoid political concerns as much as he could avoid the fact that it's snowing. Shaking off a cold and the ride in from Boston, Bouchard read eight poems coolly. David Mills, a teacher in the T&W program, read nine poems, drawing significant guffaws from the mostly Subpoetics crowd with lines like "I'm gonna call Dick Gregory," "Our stepfather who art in Macon County," and "One must be at least an octoroon on this ride." In a zipped-up fleece jacket, black jeans, black shoes, Mills, whose subject matter ranged from the topical (Clarence Thomas, oral sex, cross-country car trips) to the almost purely rhythmic, Mills was a captivating eccentric stage presence. Titles included: "North Rim," "Great Adventure," "Back Space Talking," and "Strangers in Paradise." A brief post-game wrap-up at Poetry City was followed by a brisk walk to the Cedar in the cold. Too crowded. Half the audience of the reading went to the Old Town, where if you want to get what they do, get the hamburger. The shepherd's pie isn't bad but... (In attendance at the reading: Bill Luoma, Douglas Rothschild, Tim Davis, Judith Goldman, Steven Hall, Marcella Durand, Anna Van Lenten, Tim Griffin, Anselm Berrigan, and others.) --Jordan Davis ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 08:33:47 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 9 Oct 1996 to 10 Oct 1996 >Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:13:08 -0400 >From: Wendy Battin >Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 7 Oct 1996 to 8 Oct 1996 > >On Thu, 10 Oct 1996, Douglas Barbour wrote: >> Irish woman in the group, who is not an "English" type, bu which he meant >> she did not study literature, was trying to explain to him the various >> 'codes' operative whenever a catholic & protestant met, finally threw up >> her hands & said, "I cant explain, but listen," picked a copy of heaney's >> poems out of her backpack, & read him a poem in which heaney explored > >Doug, >Do you happen to know which poem? (Sure there are many, but am >curious to know which she chose.) > >Wendy > >--------------------------------------------------- >Wendy Battin wjbat@conncoll.edu >(home) http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/wjbat/ >(CAPA) http://shain.lib.conncoll.edu/CAPA/capa.html >--------------------------------------------------- Sorry, I dont, but I will ask my friend if he recalls the title of the poem & get back to you. He was telling me this partly because he knew I wasnt a big fan of Heaney's. As a theoretical type, deeply into post-colonial work, he considers another Nobel winner the 'best' (? wrong work: he means, I think, most interesting in terms of what he does) poet in english today: Derek Walcott. I had read only a few Walcott poems & not thought much one way or another, but a reading of the _Collected Poems_ did lead me to somewhat reise my opinion. There is much there, albeit within a tradition I am not all that interested in, that is fascinating. Sorry for getting off topic from your request. I will ask. All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'The universe opens. I close. And open, just to surprise you.' - Phyllis Webb ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 08:49:58 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 9 Oct 1996 to 10 Oct 1996 Boy it sure is good to hear that Ronald Johnson is alive & well, but even better to hear about a complete (is that it?) ARK. Ive been following him with delight since _The Green Man_, & especially _Radi Os_. All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'The universe opens. I close. And open, just to surprise you.' - Phyllis Webb ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 11:09:48 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Andrew D Epstein Subject: Re: Ron Johnson In-Reply-To: <199610110724.AAA06594@sdcc3.ucsd.edu> On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Stephen Cope wrote: > As regards Johnson: I believe it was Chicago Review that recently > did an issue dedicated to him. I haven't seen it myself, but am of > mind that it had essays as well as selections etc. Anyone know > more about it? > > Thanks, > > Stephen Cope > > Chicago Review (Vol. 42, no 1) did just do an issue dedicated to Johnson. There is an interesting interview with Johnson by Peter O'Leary (who some of you may have met at Orono -- I did), an introduction to ARK by Devin Johnston, enthusiastic remarks on the work by Thom Gunn and Robert Creeley, two sections of ARK, and a prose piece ("Hurrah for Euphony") by Johnson. Andrew Epstein ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 11:05:46 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tod Thilleman Subject: Re: chat net bill I like the non-subtle advances made thru language too, and I think you've hit on the weighty core to what of course is the approaching structure life-philosophy. dig two books, one kind of older, onr kind of new: Daimon Life by David Krell who has a new novel out on the life of Neitzche. DL is study of Heidegger's Sein Und Zeit over against the what the poetics which (neat you'd like them drawings on the cover,) that unsubtle language you are singing about. New one: Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and creativity by Stephen Diamond. I mention these, and the incredible actuality and greatness of the commercial on television for the visa gold card, inserted between the bickering europeans at the cash machine...which ran during the olympics. I'm also digging the budweiser spin-off for WPLJ the croaking men as toady sign readers in the backyard swimming pool, and the new chevrolet jingle making its way over the air's waves and digging tthe new addition to the epc biblio hannah weiner of the worded forehead, great wealth on her writing career I just downloaded and glad to have ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 13:31:14 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: Re: That's Blaxdhhhhhhxqtploitation! In-Reply-To: <199610110413.AAA21197@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> >ABR is going through a "transition" right now owing to Romayne Rubinas' >vacating the job she held for so long (and did so well, in my opinion). The >new editor is Paula Goodnight and when I talked to her a month ago she >sounded as though she'd been thrown to the lions. Too bad about your piece. >Things should settle down soon (I hope). > >Patrick Pritchett Patrick: I hope my missive didn't seem dismissive: ABR is great, and I wouldn't want to put it down in any way. I have only known the staff at ABR to be fastidious, and my James piece was really a kind of prolonged blurb for his work, which I feel is frequently overlooked. Had my piece been longer or more serious, I might have been genuinely upset; still, it is never a good idea to sound like a hydropcephaloid in an academic publication. Sorry to hear about Romayne Rubinas's departure. I'm certain that Paula will do fine once she settles in (if she hasn't already). Still, really didn't mean to complain about ABR. I only wanted people to understand that I'm not a careless or illiterate writer, which is what I appear to be in my swift, pithed, and formerly pithy piece. (Also: I'm never faxing *anything* to *any* publication ever again.) All the best, Rob Hardin http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 14:18:56 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan sondheim Subject: ....liam dedrawroF (dwf) 18.2 sgniht talf daed era slegna gnipeels ma I nehw sdrow ym egnarraer ohw ekawa ma I nehw sdrow ym egnarraer meht esare sdrow ym etirw niaga dna niaga yas t'nac I tub wonk t'nod I gnihtyna tuoba tsuj enil eht kcolb yeht esuaceb slegna tuoba taht os ti egnarraer trohs ti peek reporp ro seman rieht evig t'nac _ti_ deggar snur _ti_ taht os sserdda gnihton ot steg ti resolc eht ________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 17:49:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: noble In-Reply-To: <961009113411_205977576@emout02.mail.aol.com> Is "miragie" a mag? Can Bill or somebody give publication/subscription info? steve On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Bill Luoma wrote: > someone should give Jack Hirschman the noble just for those letters to Djuna > Barnes in the new miragie. thanks. and how is wayne smith doing? > > Bill > Steve Shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 18:07:16 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Evans Subject: How To Not Read Robert Potts's review of Iain Sinclair's CONDUCTORS OF CHAOS (Picador) appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of 20 September 1996. I just got around to reading the review--which bears the lurid title "The blood-soaked perimeter"--this morning. The single non-ideological claim that I can reconstruct from the full-page, four-column review is this: "There is a book." This afternoon, when I should have been doing any number of other things, I found myself thinking of Potts's review. It struck me that such a pure example of xenophobic reading doesn't come along everyday, and so I set about writing through the review, trying not to overlook any of its moves. Since the review was in a manifest state of non-relation to anything like the objective fact of CONDUCTORS OF CHAOS I decided to go along with Potts (and Husserl) and just bracket the "thing-itself" entirely. That is, rather than address the numerous distortions at the level of empirical fact, I thought I would concentrate on what this person took to be "the case." To better watch the way his claims (implicit and explicit) worked, I tried to substitute abstract terms for as many of the particular elements as I could. (In cases where I couldn't bring myself to "abstract" I left the term in between brackets.) The review is broken into two parts, each of which begins with an oversized drop-cap. There are eleven paragraphs in all, to which the numbered sections of my comments correspond. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- HOW NOT TO READ There is a book. I. 1. There is a book. But the book does not know (or will not say) what kind of book it really is. The reviewer is in a position to clarify the matter. The book is an anthology. There is a group. But the group does not know (or will not say) that it is a group. The reviewer, though not a member of any group himself, can tell a group when he sees one. The group has brought upon itself its own marginality. The reviewer likes to say this while engaged in the application of all the techniques of marginalization known to him. The editor's project in this book is not original. Having suppressed what is novel about the editor's project in an earlier sentence, the reviewer can now charge him with lack of originality. It does not help that the reviewer can think of one other project that also did not deny the existence of experimental writing. The group is fearful, idiosyncratic, and sectarian. The reviewer is fearless, normal, disinterested. The group is shy, insular, distrustful. The reviewer is gregarious, open, without worry because without sin. The group has for a long time been complacent and self-absorbed. The reviewer's ethnographic gaze provides "a fresh and foreign" look at the group's essential truth. 2. The writers whom the editor has brought together in his book know that one another exist. The reviewer takes exception to such effrontery. Certain specific writers go so far as to respect other specific writers. The review knows this to be communism. Though united in their anti-capitalist practice of respect for one another and for writing, these writers apparently find it unnecessary to think that they are all writing the same thing. The reviewer is familiar with what passes for intelligence at [Cambridge]. 3. The group that does not know itself to be a group is the [X] School. The reviewer will maintain this fact in the face of all evidence, subjective and objective. There is a writer in the book who is forthright. The reviewer pauses to commend this virtue otherwise so little in evidence in the present volume. This forthright writer once attempted to address the fact that writing he recognizes as having value has existed for quite a while and in many places. The reviewer regrets that this writer chose the insular venue of a little magazine in order to make his remarks; still, the reviewer likes a writer who will name names and spell out the complex internal workings of this arcane and hostile group whose conspiratorial reach cannot be overstated. The group has pursued its agenda with grim determination in [X] and in [Y]. The reviewer takes this opportunity to warn members of the bourgeoisie in each of these high-risk areas to take measures against the theft of their speaking voices. 4. Some of the writers in the book have a critique of speech-based poetics. Some/others also seem to have read [Rimbaud]. The highly organized ring of voice-thieves, numbering more than thirty, have undertaken voluntarily and arbitrarily an agenda of "willed incoherence," but some (well over half) will their incoherence to a greater degree than do others (the other half). The reviewer makes an important distinction here between the otherwise delightful practice of ripping out the vocal chords of bourgeois poets and the same practice taken to "hideous extremes." Some of the writers in the book have found it possible to read other poems composed in the twentieth-century. The reviewer takes this opportunity to remind his readers of such oddities and atrocities as "open field" and "(post)modern" poetics and, that most recent aberration, ["L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E"] poetry. Some of the writers in the book can give reflexive accounts of their aims. Some also are accustomed to reading the reflexive accounts given by others. The reviewer is living proof that pausing to reflect before writing can introduce serious obstacles to facile expression. Some of the writers in the book do not imagine their readership to be incapable of complex thought-processes. The reviewer cannot understand how these writers mean to have literary or political success if they are not willing to accept such basic assumptions as the essential ignorance and laziness of readers and citizens. A specific writer in the book has so extended his capacity for reflexivity that he actually has a critical relationship to an intellectual position he nonetheless respects. The reviewer firmly believes that a strict separation should always be maintained between what one likes and understands and what one despises and is paid to review in the TLS. Even this specific writer seems to consider the majority of readers to be human and to be familiar with the phonemic distinction between "th" and "dr," as in the words "think" and "drink." The reviewer avails himself of the opportunity to call his reader a horse while vouching for the clear water in his trough. The specific writer is an intellectual; not surprisingly, then, he remains committed to certain of the preconditions for reasonable discourse. The reviewer praises the writer for not breaking entirely with form, syntax, and logic. 5. The specific writer has been preceded in his poetic and intellectual practice; indeed, one poet and intellectual in particular has shouldered a great deal of the burden of generating and sustaining interest in the practices this writer values. The reviewer wishes that the younger of the writers could be more discerning with respect to the selection of his predecessors. This predecessor makes more than ornamental attempts at transforming the processes of "meaning." The reviewer disallows the validity of any meanings that aren't "clear" upon first reading; he does not mind that no text valued by his culture meets this criterion. This predecessor does not rigidly separate cognition from emotion, thinking perhaps that the expansion of one cannot but expand the other. The reviewer expects to be compensated in pleasure for every meaning he passes up; no arrests to date. The predecessor has a body of work of tremendous breadth, complexity, and internal differentiation. The reviewer extracts the essence of his project from four cited lines. Suspicion is once again the posture recommended to all good people who find themselves in the vicinity of [X]. The same four lines which synopsize a writer's life-work and recommend its wholesale dismissal can, conveniently, also synopsize and facilitate the dismissal of the nearly five hundred pages of writing in the book under review. 6. Knowing all linguistic acts that don't resolve to clear meaning instantly upon encounter to be "gobbledygook," the reviewer introduces an important distinction between strategic "gobbledygook" and that inferior brand of "gobbledygook" which has devolved into mere "charmless mannerism." Some of the writers in the book bring the visual dimension of their text to the foreground; some/others also have grounds for considering the restriction of meaning to "intention" an intellectual anachronism that did not survive serious examination in any of the disciplines of the human sciences that devoted a moment's thought to it. They might point to philosophy, linguistics, literary and cultural studies, history, sociology in making their case. The reviewer concedes that some private meaning may incidentally attach to typographical irregularities perpetrated by a given author, but cannot be brought to consider that a reader could ascertain the nature of this entirely hermetic experience from the evidence provided by the text. Some of the writing in the book values surprise, the unexpected, the spontaneous. The reviewer is certain that just outside the gates of narrative regularity awaits total anarchy. Some of the writers in this volume have detected what seems to them a worrisome and cloying uniformity in the kinds of messages produced within the circuits of the dominant, capital-intensive media; some/others think that poetry needn't reproduce the structure and content of these messages. The reviewer reminds his reader once again that these are the sort of people who forced one to learn a pronunciation of the word "hegemonic." His verdict upon them is subtly rendered: at least they are not as troubled as they might be by the "eerie homogeneity of their strings of apparently meaningless phrases." II. 7. The editor in introducing the work he has assembled in this book has not adopted a tone of smug indifference toward that work. The reviewer's own style suggests to no one, surely, the adjectives "rabid and polemical." The editor passionately argues his poetic position. The reviewer considers only dispassionate utterances that presuppose his own assumptions to be "clear." The editor's poetics are not merely wrong (a substantive evaluation) but they even fail on procedural grounds--they are "disguised." The editor in introducing the work he has assembled in this book has taken the trouble to foresee, and respond to, a frequent objection made to much writing of value; namely, that it is (too) difficult. The reviewer notes in his opponent's language (and when wasn't the editor of this volume considered an opponent by this reviewer?) an allusion to a predecessor, but really lights up when he thinks of another (more recent) predecessor's retort to that (less recent) predecessor. The reviewer's preferred predecessor describes the writer/reader relationship on a contractual mode in which the reader contracts with the writer for a specified amount of meaningful experience, to be paid for in cash and ingested at the reader's convenience, satisfaction guaranteed. The preferred predecessor abases himself before the image of an harried reader tight on time and money. The writer should do nothing unduly troublesome to such a reader. The editor, his book, and the writers whose work is collected in that book, all want to do troubling things to such readers. 8. The reviewer feels just as though he has been appointed to adjudicate the contract dispute between the book and its possible readers (it is a class-action suit). Noted on the readers' behalf are numerous injurious failures to deliver: there are no theses or critiques, no musical pleasures (due in part to the existence of a bad foreign predecessor who encouraged writers to abjure music), nor even fragments of music. Because no rational alternative to the contract that binds seller to buyer can be imagined by the reviewer, and because certain of the writers in the book under review do not write in a manner conformable to the contract theory of language, a "religious covenant" must be in place. Here the reviewer relies on the old saw, when you try to be secular, it is because you are a Marxist; when you try to be Marxist, it's clearly because you are a cult-member. 9. In a book nearly five hundred pages long there are likely to be techniques, and even whole pieces, that someone out of sympathy with the project in general can like. The reviewer writes one sentence about each of the seven writers who appear to him as having, however inexplicably, broken free of the cultish, conspiratorial, gobbledygook-centered, communist-plot-hatching, Cambridge set. Exceptional writer 1 floods the reader, speckles the noise, and is grimly amusing. Exceptional writer 2 wrestles with and somehow overcomes her platitudinous subject matter. 10. Exceptional writer 3 isn't part of the group anyway, as shown by the beauty and self-confidence of his poem imitative of a foreign predecessor of uncertain long-term value. Exceptional writer 4 contributes an essay and an elegy; the former is careful, the latter quietly subtle. Exceptional writer 5 receives two sentences. He is said to be careful in how he confuses things and also hilarious and disturbing. Exceptional writer 6 overcomes a tendency to obliqueness to present a "hospital-centered narrative." Exceptional writer 7 also receives two sentences. He too shows signs of obliqueness, but he is charming and innocent in addition. Indeed, this writer conflates musicality with mellifluity in a way that excites the reviewer. He is called a "Holy Fool" but the reviewer means it as a compliment. 11. The review of the book that won't say what kind of book it is, collecting work by a group of writers who won't say they are a group, edited by a person who doesn't know what he means to do, and who only writes poetics in disguise, must end sometime (sigh). What better way to close, thinks the reviewer, than with another allusion to the cultural authority of my preferred predecessor. Poetry is a wide and varied territory, says the predecessor; we understand him to mean that there are many contracts to sign. Taking sides is no way to understand poetry, says the predecessor; we understand his advice to us very well: Quiet subsumption under a false universal is preferable to stubborn endurance in illegitimate particularity. These guiding words of the preferred predecessor are especially stirring in the wake of the reviewer's systematic violation of every norm appealed to therein. It is refreshing to find practice once again so far out ahead of abstraction and theory. The writers in the book under review have decided to test the validity of their writing against criteria other than those of the market. The reviewer sees this as elective auto-marginalization. The writers in the book under review have contested the assumption that writing which submits to market-criteria is the only writing there is. The reviewer sees this as sour grapes. The appearance of objectivity requires concessions such as: No work is all bad. The reviewer candidly admires some of the results yielded by "open forms, surrealism, ellipsis." That out of the way, the temporarily postponed judgment arrives with undiminished zeal: No work is all bad, but this work is as near as one gets. What is good about the writing of sullen elective auto-marginalizing types is not specific to them. It is good also in good, accessible, mainstream writing. What is good about the good writing in this bad book may lift some of these writers out of the captivity of the bad group responsible for the bad book. The bad writers will sink back into the shadowlands of narcissism, self-congratulation, and delusory elitism, where they will try to suppress their brief encounted with "fresh and foreign critical interrogation." The reviewer will appear again in the pages of the TLS. _________________________________________________________________________ r i a t n m u a t s u o o o s ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 16:04:38 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Ron Johnson/rumors >strange rumors about the mainstreamers too--we got a call at the office >today asking us if Gjertrud Schnackenberg had died--is somebody trying to >quash poetry by spreading disinformation? > >Gwyn Is there really a poet with such a name, or are we in the middle of another composite novel? George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 18:28:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: How To Not Read two-shay, steve evans! (gotta spell it that way cuz my enclitics don't work on e-mail) great review of review. --md ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 19:17:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: robert zamsky Subject: Minnesota Dear List: I will be in Minneapolis for a conference on October 18 and 19 -- I've never been to the city before and would love any information about readings, events, etc... thanks -- rob zamsky ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 21:29:22 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wendy Battin Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 9 Oct 1996 to 10 Oct 1996 In-Reply-To: <199610112335.TAA17477@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Douglas Barbour wrote: > Sorry, I dont, but I will ask my friend if he recalls the title of the poem > & get back to you. Many thanks. That was one of my earliest englishes and I'd like to take a look & listen, esp to the coding. Wendy ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 19:40:58 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: DS Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 9 Oct 1996 to 10 Oct 1996 and may i say i enjoyed Omeros which i read start to finish At 08:33 AM 10/11/96 -0600, you wrote: >>Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:13:08 -0400 >>From: Wendy Battin >>Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 7 Oct 1996 to 8 Oct 1996 >> >>On Thu, 10 Oct 1996, Douglas Barbour wrote: >>> Irish woman in the group, who is not an "English" type, bu which he meant >>> she did not study literature, was trying to explain to him the various >>> 'codes' operative whenever a catholic & protestant met, finally threw up >>> her hands & said, "I cant explain, but listen," picked a copy of heaney's >>> poems out of her backpack, & read him a poem in which heaney explored >> >>Doug, >>Do you happen to know which poem? (Sure there are many, but am >>curious to know which she chose.) >> >>Wendy >> >>--------------------------------------------------- >>Wendy Battin wjbat@conncoll.edu >>(home) http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/wjbat/ >>(CAPA) http://shain.lib.conncoll.edu/CAPA/capa.html >>--------------------------------------------------- > >Sorry, I dont, but I will ask my friend if he recalls the title of the poem >& get back to you. He was telling me this partly because he knew I wasnt a >big fan of Heaney's. As a theoretical type, deeply into post-colonial work, >he considers another Nobel winner the 'best' (? wrong work: he means, I >think, most interesting in terms of what he does) poet in english today: >Derek Walcott. I had read only a few Walcott poems & not thought much one >way or another, but a reading of the _Collected Poems_ did lead me to >somewhat reise my opinion. There is much there, albeit within a tradition I >am not all that interested in, that is fascinating. Sorry for getting off >topic from your request. I will ask. > >All the best > >Doug > >Douglas Barbour >Department of English >University of Alberta >Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 >(403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 >H: 436 3320 > >'The universe opens. I close. >And open, just to surprise you.' > - Phyllis Webb > > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 10:49:12 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: Visible Language: New Media Poetry *** Apologies for cross-postings *** Just published and well worth checking out: A special issue of the journal: VISIBLE LANGUAGE Volume 30, no. 2 NEW MEDIA POETRY Poetic Innovation and New Technologies Guest edited by: Eduardo Kac Contents: -------- Introduction / Eduardo Kac The Interactive Diagram Sentence: Hypertext as a Medium of Thought / Jim Rosenberg Poetic Machinations / Phillipe Bootz Videopoetry / E. M. de Melo e Castro We Have Not Understood Descartes / Andre Vallias Virtual Poetry / Ladislao Pablo Gyori Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext / John Cayley Holopoetry / Eduardo Kac New Media Poetry: Theories and Strategies / Eric Vos Selected Webliography / Eduardo Kac -------- ORDER FROM: Visible Language, Rhode Island School of Design Graphic Design Department, 2 College Street, Providence RI 02903, USA Tel: 401-454 6171 Email inquiries: charris@risd.edu (Carrie Harris, for more details) This issue: $10 (check postage with business contact) Subscriptions: (1 year = 3 issues) $30 (individ.) $55 (instit.) -------- Web references: Eduardo Kac:- http://www.uky.edu/FineArt/kac/kachome.html Jim Rosenberg:- http://www.well.com/user/jer/ John Cayley:- http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/in/ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 08:20:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Minnesota In message <9610120017.AA08435@unlgrad1.unl.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Dear List: > > I will be in Minneapolis for a conference on October 18 and 19 -- I've > never been to the city before and would love any information about > readings, events, etc... > thanks -- > > rob zamsky what's the conference? there're a coupla weekly papers, the Twin Cities Reader and the City Pages, that have extensive listings of events, etc. they're free at most coffee shops, etc. also, call the Loft (the largest writing institution in the cities) for their events. the loft is pretty conservative in its scope tho. also call bryant-lake bowl (a groovy bowling alley, cafe, and "alternative" performance space), and the walker art center, which sometimes hosts fun stuff. some listers past and present from the tcs are: me, mark nowak, jeff hansen, gary sullivan, marta deike, kurt anderson, jonathan brannen (actually i morris mn), bob gale (another person to call about events, as he edits SHOUT!, a free monthly for spoken word arts), some lurkers i do and don't know about. that's about it for first thing in the morning; i'll give it a bit more concerted thot in the next week or so. maybe we cd have a coffee hr somewhre and meet u. maria d ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:12:27 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Creeley at 70 in Buffalo CREELEY AT 70 IN BUFFALO DATELINE BUFFALO. The 70th birthday celebration in honor of Robert Creeley moves along with extraordinary momentum. First night: Eileen Myles, introduced by Creeley, read to a packed crowd in the large Halwall's performance space, with its stage bordered on three sides by the audience. Her figure animated against the somewhat large stage, reading and letting each page of text drift to the floor after reading it. Voice, presence, narrative rang solidly to a thoroughly enthusiastic crowd. Second day: the formal opening of activities by William Greiner, UB president and Creeley colleague who first met Creeley long-distance while Creeley was in Finland. Then, Gil Sorrentino, fondly introduced by Joseph Conte, reading in the Katherine Cornell Theatre, a good-sized semi-formal spaceship architecture palace space on the edge of Buffalo's tundra-tinged north campus. Sorrentino read prose from a new piece (I think forthcoming in _Conjunctions_). A richly written piece, supercharged with irony, purposely laden with the banalities of the wife-swapping personalities it characterized and the revolting misogyny and sexual beasty balls of its less-than-likable narrator. Above this content, the precision of Sorrentino's prose glimmered like a city skyline. Amiri Baraka, originally scheduled to read with Sorrentino, was unable to appear. Creeley therefore gave a preview mini-reading, talking briefly and reading the full text of his _Dogs of Auckland_ (approximate title) chapbook forthcoming from Meow Press. A gorgeous piece of work. This reading was followed by a reception in the poetry collection and its great assembly of rare, beautiful, and ephemeral Creeley materials and also a retrospective (mostly small press) of poetry chez Buffalo for the past 50 years. A delirious spread of rare and richly-diverse print artifacts that gave a varied sense of the "scene" as passing in and out and back into the "city of no illusions". Back at Katherine Cornell, next up was the Creeley-Dine event, the room full to the rafters. (So packed the fire marshall was threatening to turn back poetry-goers if they could not prove they had a seat.) Creeley introduced at length and eloquently by Susan Howe. Then an extraordinary reading by Creeley. First an explanation of the 1-2-3 method then a 1-2-3 section from _Mabel: A Story_ a prose work dating an early Creeley-Dine collaboration. This was a long piece, at times dropping into choppy Burroughsesque rhythms, other times richly wry and funny, and other times simply sailing along tellingly. A rare treat to witness the performance of this important earlier prose piece. This reading was followed by "Histoire de Florida" a later, powerful, long, languid, pulling out like the tide and the backdrop of all-that-has-happened, rhythmic, emotional, and meditative masterwork. Then Dine was introduced excellently by Charles Bernstein followed by the Creeley-Dine conversation. Truly extraordinary, to hear these two men talk about a range of subjects near and dear to both art and writing, "tools" of any trade, age and its perspectives, perseverance and its perspectives, the necessities of incessant travel and, well, all in all, what it means to hang in there. This was a primo opportunity to hear both the writer and the artist talk. Creeley and Dine were terrific. It was a particularly wonderful opportunity to hear from Dine, an artist who gets to Buffalo all too rarely, and to hear him speak so openly, honestly, his talk as rich as writing itself, there in the open space where things are stilled for some hours we can all hold for the true celebration of artistic life they are. Hey, this *is* what it means to hang in there. STILL TO COME: Ashbery reading this afternoon then tonight Hallwalls Jazz concert with Steve Kuhn and Carol Fredette. ONLINE: check out http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/creeley/70th where you can also see the Dine painting for this event and other stuff. --- Loss Glazier http://writing.upenn.edu/epc ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 10:16:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: How To Not Read bravo, steve!... i'm gonna be using that piece of yrs sometime, if you don't mind, in one or the other of my classes... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 10:03:36 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 10 Oct 1996 to 11 Oct 1996 Re Steve Evans's review of the review: I just want to say Thank you. That was illuminating & great fun to boot. I really must go out & find that thing, or maybe not... All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'The universe opens. I close. And open, just to surprise you.' - Phyllis Webb ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 13:18:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: Ron Johnson Comments: To: Brian McHale Brian and anyone else: The info on Living Batch is: Living Batch Bookstore 106 Cornell Dr SE Albuquerque, NM 87106 505- 262-1619 (don't know about e-mail) Price of the ticket: $25.00 Bon voyage! Patrick Pritchett ---------- From: Brian McHale To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: Ron Johnson Date: Thursday, October 10, 1996 4:58PM Wait, wait. Now that we know Johnson is still with us, could someone please supply fuller data on publication of the Complete Ark. Address for Living Batch Press, please? E-mail, even? Brian ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:46:32 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: Jay and Kay deFeo >Hey there, dbkk, are we going to get a report on Kevin's play? >breathless, >maria d Maria, thanks for asking about my play, "Wet Paint," which indeed did get finished, still wet, and presented on Wednesday. All the actors=8Ba motley crew of the Bay Area's best painters, filmmakers, poets, videographers, drag performers, art writers, and novelists=8Bshowed up, which was such a help, and so difficult corralling 19 divas all in one room at one time. And some of them are the kind who, presented with a script, will whip out rulers to determine how many inches they have (of dialogue, of course). But they were all there and all fantastic. I could try to reconstruct the audience a la Jordan Davis, but I was too nervous really to note more than a few of the hundreds of people who were there. I remember however Fanny Howe coming up to me after the show was over and saying that it reminded her of growing up in Cambridge when her mother, Mary Manning Howe, was in charge of the Poets Theater there (mid-fifties?), and nothing could have pleased me more. Also spotted: the writers Rebecca Solnit, Tina Rotenberg, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Matthew Stadler, Renee Gladman, Michael Price, Avery Burns, Leslie Davis, Pamela Lu, Barbara Guest, Susan Gevirtz, Laura Moriarty, Brian Strang, Aaron Shurin, Charlie Smith, Rena Rosenwasser, Duncan McNaughton, Bill Berkson, Larry Kearney, Jay Schwartz, Lauren Gudath, George Albon (replete with new, utterly delicious new boyfriend), and the artists Brett Reichman, Fran Herndon, Chris Komater, Peter Mitchell-Dayton, Vincent Fecteau, Jennifer Locke, Nao Bustamente.... And many more both on this list and not. Tosh Berman, you will be glad I know to hear that each of *your* appearances was greated with a tremendous round of applause. You were played by a Cabbage Patch doll that Dodie bought at our local Thrift Town--actually, a Cabbage Patch knockoff, and carted around in a simply, 1959 style brown paper bag. At one point in the action of the play, you wander away and get sucked into the vast 2000 pound "Rose" painting of Jay DeFeo, but happily rescued by your good father. More later. Thanks=8BKevin K. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:33:46 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeremy F Green Subject: Re: How To Not Read In-Reply-To: <199610112207.SAA24318@brown.edu> My thanks too to Steve Evans. Along with the practice of "summing up" complicated bodies of work with a sentence or 4-line quotation, the TLS reviewer (who is Robert Potts?) manages also to bracket the construction of tradition in the Sinclair anthology. A few of the demonized poets showcase their forebears: David Jones, J.F.Hendry, W.S.Graham, Nicholas Moore...So I guess what is being bracketted here is British modernism. As ever, "traditionalists" like the TLS reviewer prove to have the most advanced amnesia. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 15:42:56 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Ronald Johnson It's Kevin Killian--again. As far as Ronald Johnson goes, Dodie tells me that he's reading at New College in November (if she remembers correctly) so bring your copies of ARK for him to sign. Has anybody seen the new "Ronald Johnson" by Dirk Stratton--it's one of those little books from Boise State University (Western Writers Series #122). The drawing of RJ on the cover makes him look just like poetics list member Ed Foster; however there's no picture of author "Dirk Stratton." Does anyone know him, or do I just remember that name from "Bonanza"? (Or, possibly, some old Fred Halsted film from the seventies?) Stratton says (page 52), "Maybe Johnson is a writer of the American West, but we are simply unable to recognize exactly why." So it's interesting. E-mail for Western Writers Series is at wws@quartz.idbsu.edu. Thanks everybody. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 18:06:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Jay and Kay deFeo thanks kevin, i'm glad i asked; sounds delicious.--md ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 23:47:36 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Jarnot Subject: Ear Inn Update EAR INN UPDATE: On Saturday October 12th Cliff Fyman and Lee Ann Brown read at the Ear Inn. Cliff Fyman-- resident of the lower east side, secret poetical genius, and waiter at Sardi's Restaurant-- read from a spectacular mix of prose and poetry, including his crowd pleasing oulipo poem "mouse". Lee Ann Brown-- recent returnee to New York City-- read from her new project Cento, mixing it up with some greatest hits (such as "Crush") and newest new short poems inspired by some of the filmmakers represented at this year's International Film Festival at Lincoln Center. For the second week in a row the Ear Inn was filled to capacity. Attendees included Bernadette Mayer, Philip Good, Lewis Warsh, Barbara Henning, Gavin Smith, Melanie Neilson, Robert Fitterman, Jeff Hull, Douglas Rothschild, William Luoma, Drew Gardner, Boston poet Sianne Ngai, new New Yorker Daniel Farrell, Albany poet Chris Funkhouser, Boston poet Daniel Bouchard, Anselm Berrigan, a busload of poets from Staten Island, and some other people eating lunch. Don't miss out on the fun. Come early stay late drink beer. The Ear Inn is at 326 Spring Street in lower Manhattan. Next week's readers are ANSELM BERRIGAN and KIM LYONS. Anselm is a Yale Younger Poet. John Ashbery says "He rocks." Brooklyn poet Kim Lyons recently had some great work in THE WORLD. Allen Ginsberg recently said "She totally rocks." Check out the Ear. Lou Reed says "It rocks big time." ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 22:59:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eryque Gleason Subject: Re: Ear Inn Update dear lisa (or anybody else), could you post the whole schedule for the ear? thankee! eryque >EAR INN UPDATE: > >On Saturday October 12th Cliff Fyman and Lee Ann Brown read at the Ear Inn. > Cliff Fyman-- resident of the lower east side, secret poetical genius, and >waiter at Sardi's Restaurant-- read from a spectacular mix of prose and >poetry, including his crowd pleasing oulipo poem "mouse". Lee Ann Brown-- >recent returnee to New York City-- read from her new project Cento, mixing >it up with some greatest hits (such as "Crush") and newest new short poems >inspired by some of the filmmakers represented at this year's International >Film Festival at Lincoln Center. > >For the second week in a row the Ear Inn was filled to capacity. Attendees >included Bernadette Mayer, Philip Good, Lewis Warsh, Barbara Henning, Gavin >Smith, Melanie Neilson, Robert Fitterman, Jeff Hull, Douglas Rothschild, >William Luoma, Drew Gardner, Boston poet Sianne Ngai, new New Yorker Daniel >Farrell, Albany poet Chris Funkhouser, Boston poet Daniel Bouchard, Anselm >Berrigan, a busload of poets from Staten Island, and some other people >eating lunch. > >Don't miss out on the fun. Come early stay late drink beer. The Ear Inn >is at 326 Spring Street in lower Manhattan. Next week's readers are ANSELM >BERRIGAN and KIM LYONS. Anselm is a Yale Younger Poet. John Ashbery says >"He rocks." Brooklyn poet Kim Lyons recently had some great work in THE >WORLD. Allen Ginsberg recently said "She totally rocks." Check out the >Ear. Lou Reed says "It rocks big time." ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 23:12:41 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Creeley at 70 in Buffalo Loss- Thanks so much for going to the trouble to writew that interim report of the Creeley fest. Wish I were there. I mean sometimes Buffalo is lucky and sometimes vancouver is. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 00:22:56 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Steve Carll reading Hi, it's Kevin Killian. Thanks, Steve, for announcing your reading over the internet. I'm back and I'm glad I went. As usual the reading started over 2 hours late, but "on time" for other readings that I've attended there at 530 Page Street. Everyone was in a party mood and that's exactly what they got. First Edmund Berrigan read--a selection of poems from all different manuscripts, leading up to the new work, a series of prose poems in which he has finally escaped from the autobiographical this and that allusion trap of his previous oeuvre. Well done, Edmund. Then I saw some big strong men moving around an elaborate stereo system and realized we were in for a multi-media presentation by Steve Carll. He put on a record and announced that since he wrote to music, it seemed possible to try to reproduce those conditions while reading. I think the record was by Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders. Over this melange of sound Steve read excerpts from his two new books, "Sincerity Loops" and "trace a moment's closure for clues," for about twenty five minutes, then the music stopped and he read some short funny essays on "Drugs" Caffeine, television, ecstasy, morphine, crack and alcohol are some I remember. Everyone was in stitches or if not stitches in knits and purls. Long live the salon, where there's an intimacy that sometimes more suited towards sharing new work than in the big spaces in town here. Now how can I get funding for having people over at my apartment? Does funding = theater? ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 06:41:07 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ken Edwards <100344.2546@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: How To Not Read Thanks, Steve Evans. I've taken the liberty of snail-mailing a copy of your devastating piece to Iain Sinclair, the editor of _Conductors of Chaos_. By the way, may I commend the anthology to readers of this list who want to get a fix on what's happening these days in British poetry that's interesting. Ken Edwards ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 07:14:39 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: Creeley at 70 in Buffalo - Part II CREELEY AT 70 IN BUFFALO DAY 3. Back in the Katherine Cornell theatre, Susan Schultz could have had no more style, zest, and presence than in her introduction of John Ashbery in which she first met a man who called himself Ashbery (Bernstein) and in which she recounted her pilgrimage to the Ashbery family apple farm not far from the site of the present event. Ashbery=92s reading was first-rate. Ashbery, a poet who will soon be the same age as the man who this gathering celebrated, performed fully in command of his craft, reading from his latest book as well as from new poems. Ashbery=92s reading was followed by a reception across the hall where poetrygoers were able to congregate and compare notes at the penultimate chime of this poetry celebration=92s verse-bent clock. What could top things so far? The finale of course! The night of day three, Hallwall=92s Jazz concert with Steve Kuhn and Carol Fredette. Perhaps the= most decked out I=92ve seen Hallwall=92s with not only great book tables (thanks= to Talking Leaves) but also, inside, two food tables, one with the cheeses, meats, breads, and grapes, and the other buckling under the weight of the two enormous cakes (one chocolate, one yellow) specially lettered for such a day. Inside, Kuhn and Fredette got going. Standards sprinkled among renditions of takes from the Steve Swallow release _Home_ (ECM Records 1160) on which Sheila Jordan did the vocals. The piano=92s tones, registers,= chordal thunderwalls in boots soled with celestial dust =97 while Fredette=92s scats were nourished by dizzying drops into the deep, mellow, honey-coated lower register of her extraordinary voice. Many numbers to stun the crowd ("She Was Young" and "Ice Cream" among the memorable takes) and many numbers lifted like toasts to the music ship=92s first mate seated with a grin and pensive attentiveness front row center. One of the outstanding moments was Kuhn=92s solo improvisation dedicated to Creeley. No piano has ever been explored, imploded, stretched into silver multi-vocaled strands, rode into a thundered, multi-leveled, multi-chromatic union with the absolute possibilities of sound. As the program was originally envisioned, Mercury Rev would=92ve been next= on stage. They had canceled so, really, it would=92ve been over now. But seated behind me in the second row, humming audibly to some of the standards was the man who would do the finale for this 70th, Amiri Baraka, introduced with incredible acumen by Bill Fischer. Baraka could=92ve no less stormed the stage than if he had been= backed by the John Coltrane quartet itself. Baraka=92s small build gives one no preparation for the immense vision, rhythm, voicing, and cadences that will emerge from the flaming words of his performance. Invoking as central to the _Yugen_ of Baraka=92s earlier years, "the big three" of the magazine,= Ginsberg (is that right?), big Charlie Olson, and Bob Creeley. (Sorrentino, by the way, also appeared in _Yugen_.) Baraka paid homage to Creeley then performed from _Transbluecency_ and his more recent _Funk Lore_ (Los Angeles: Littoral Books, 1996). Baraka=92s humming, chanting, and vocal renditions of the standards-a la-Baraka were in perfect accord with the chords still lingering, clinging to the packed, overflowing theatre. No printed text can do this! People filling all seats, people on all sides, standing, squatting, spilling out into the Hallwall=92s hallway. Blues, transblues,= transvoicings, the unbelievable coup d=92=E9tats of Baraka=92s "lowcoups" (African American version of that knock-out blast commonly associated with the haiku), and his closing triumph (slaves, dig, we were once slaves). Indeed, it was about people, what we are, the rhythms that vibrate through one and the same. Amiri brought it home. And home we were =97 at least so is Buffalo in many senses. Oh, for a home like this. Happy birthday celebration, Robert= Creeley! ONLINE: check out http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/creeley/70th/ where you can also see the Dine painting for this event. --- Loss Glazier http://writing.upenn.edu/epc ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 10:34:32 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: nobels, the Good, here we go... Joe - I'm sorry it's taken a couple of days to get back to this. 'cause no one else picked up on this thread, I probably should have just back channelled this. But I took the morally indefensible position of sending it to the entire list instead. I understand the desire for a more clearly sited ethos in the work. I'm just not sure I see it growing out of some official selection of this week's poem of the year, or defining a bad innovative poetry, the discussions which you jumped off from. Despite the mottled (at best) political history of experimental verse in this century, it is difficult to imagine any innovative writing now that comes from a conservative mindset. Although I don't see Language poetry as the only viable contemporary innovation, I may have been blinded to other possibilities by the blitz of adamant progressive left positions taken in many (especially early) critical and poetic works from the Language end of things. Perhaps I just don't know about the redlining bank loan officers, killers, and right-wing militia members who are currently writing innovative non-mainstream verse. Looking at moral issues much finer than these gets into a morass that often just seems like gossip to me. Let those writers who are without sin ... I can think of a couple of things that do go in a direction that may be useful to you. In Bob Perelman's two recent books of essays, especially, but not only, the sections about Pound and Andrews, touch on the responsibility of the writer, and the reader, to address moral and political issues. And I recently read a short piece somewhere (& I'll probably be embarassed, if not ethically compromised, when I finally remember where) that made a case for the anthology "Poems for the Millenium" as a stronger collection of ethical/politically engaged work than some of the current collections of "poetry of witness." >herb, all points well-taken... still, i'll press a bit and say that i think >the question of good/Good bad/Bad is worth continued navigation in these >parts (and i know neither of us means The Good), albeit i admit to being >somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed... and in part for the reasons you >mention about the nature of this public forum... > >really, i hate to keep coming back to this issue, but if in fact it's the >forum itself that's preventing such dialogue, why then there's the need to >reflect on same... what is it about that complex [wink] of >ethico-moral-political that's untouchable around here?... > >i might make the argument (as i have on occasion) that certain attitudes >about poetry or poetics are irresponsible when it comes to their >institutional embodiment... now as a teacher, the institutional is >relatively easy for me to access (in such terms, i mean)... but even poets >and writers with no professional obligations or commitments to teaching >must readily acknowledge that what they advocate as poets and writers have >institutional effects that are more and less desirable... i regret, for >example, those three nobel laureate poets (i think it was walcott, paz, and >milosz) who together proclaimed their opposition to electronic media, an >attitude that i find not only lamentable and compromising to more >innovative work, but in fact aiding and abetting print hegemonies from >which all three of these gents' work *might* be said to profit directly... > >of course emedia is my hobbyhorse... and of course this question of the >Good i raise is specifically one having to do with inter-poetic, if not >inter-media, struggle (sorta)... but if you find yourself linking your >effort as a poet or scholar or teacher with broader social concerns, why >then the Good will of necessity be ramified across many other domains... > >anyway, i'd like to hear more... > >best, > >joe Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 11:32:48 -0700 Reply-To: jbrook@ix.netcom.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Brook Subject: San Francisco library scandals As some on this list already know, the San Francisco library--especially its new high-tech main library--has been having a rough time of it. The New Main Library buiding is a kind of suburban postmodern joke-- plenty of light wells and no room for books or reading. The City Librarian is in love with obsolete computers and his corporate pals who are intent on privatizing library services on a fee-per-use basis. The system is short-staffed--it takes a book between one and three months to make it back to the shelf after it's been returned to the library. The City Librarian is responsible for dumping many thousands of books without following proper weeding procedures. And on and on. All this in the effort to make the San Francisco public library a "21st-century library." Though some of the scandals are indeed local and have to do with particular corrupt and incompetent people, the example of what's happened to the San Francisco Public Library has bearing on the transformation of libraries around the world. To my mind, it's an object lesson of what can go wrong when a mania for technology combines with the limited morality of corporate sharks to turn a public space into an "information node" and "profit center." The result is an antilibrary: enemy of books and readers. Details are available in Nicholson Baker's fine article in this week's New Yorker, "The Author vs. the Library." The current Ampersand has articles by historian Gray Brechin, poet and librarian Steve LaVoie, and bookbinder Dominic Riley. I have a letter in the current San Francisco Weekly. And I've attached a summary of a recent CNN spot on the subject. James Brook - - - - - - CNN Abstract of SFPL Piece as posted on WWW (Web has pics) Title: San Francisco library accused of pitching thousands of books Date of Post: October 13, 1996 Web posted at: 8:15 a.m. Broadcast: Story aired October 12, 1996 at 2:20 p.m.(PST) (Also on FOX TV) WEB address: San Francisco Library Accused of Pitching Thousands of Books SAN FRANCISCO (CNN) -- A group of book lovers in San Francisco is fuming over the opening of a new library, claiming that thousands of books were dumped to accommodate the spanking clean building. "I think the library, in essence, has become a showcase for high technology at great expense to book collections and print collections," historian Walter Biller said. Biller has a computer list which he claims identifies thousands of books, many irreplaceable, that were discarded when the San Francisco Public Library moved into its new location, heralded as the coming of a new age for libraries. "I believe 19,000 of them were last copies," he said. A recent New Yorker article called it "The Great Book Purge" and said more than 100,000 books were hauled to the dump. Librarian Marcia Schneider admits an error occurred "for a brief period of time," and library officials say they don't know for sure how many books were tossed out, but estimate it to be around 20,000. But Schneider points out that some 430,000 new books were added to the library's collection when it moved. "It has 9.1 miles of more shelf space than the old library. It has proportionately more shelf space than the old library," Schneider said, adding that it's a debate about the future of libraries. "In many ways, it's a debate about technology versus the old-fashioned version of the library." Critics say computers belong in the library but so do the print treasures of the past. "Where are the books?" Biller asks. "There are atriums. There are spaces in the floor that go up five stories and there is nowhere for books?" Correspondent Rusty Dornin contributed to this report. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 12:20:11 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Creeley at 70 in Buffalo - Part II > Loss, thanks for section 2. Interesting Baraka notes. I have been lucky enough to hear him in each decade in different places, and I appreciate what you say about amazing power he knows to speak. I remember once in the late, I think 80s, he is at the Sunsplash in Victoria, and there are a bunch of youngsters (this is outdoors of course) who have come to hear Taj Mahal, but then this other Black man, a little guy in glasses, makes his first noise in the mike, and those youngsters, been sprawled about, they SIT UP fast, and lissen! But also remember in the Olson days, Amiri saying he was never going back to Buffalo, and I imagine he uttered a number of nevers in his day. Thanks again for the desc. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 20:30:54 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dan Raphael Dlugonski Subject: Molecular Jam Am real happy to announce the publication of my new book, Molecular Jam, from Jazz Police Books (wordcraft@oregontrail.net.) the book is available from SPD, Permeable Press & Chris Drumm Books. on the back cover, Ivan Arguelles says "Like the best of his contemporaries, Jake Berry or Will Alexander, Raphael takes his language into the swiftly developing chasms of new sci-tech terminology, while still maintaining his balance of humor. Clearly, in reading his text, we are part the end of the 20th century" I'll be reading from the book 11/13 at Powells Books on SE Hawthorne here in Portland OR. >There are 13 messages totalling 447 lines in this issue. > >Topics of the day: > > 1. POETICS Digest - 9 Oct 1996 to 10 Oct 1996 > 2. Visible Language: New Media Poetry > 3. Minnesota > 4. Creeley at 70 in Buffalo > 5. How To Not Read (2) > 6. POETICS Digest - 10 Oct 1996 to 11 Oct 1996 > 7. Ron Johnson > 8. Jay and Kay deFeo (2) > 9. Ronald Johnson > 10. Ear Inn Update (2) > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 19:40:58 +1300 >From: DS >Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 9 Oct 1996 to 10 Oct 1996 > >and may i say i enjoyed Omeros which i read start to finish > >At 08:33 AM 10/11/96 -0600, you wrote: >>>Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:13:08 -0400 >>>From: Wendy Battin >>>Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 7 Oct 1996 to 8 Oct 1996 >>> >>>On Thu, 10 Oct 1996, Douglas Barbour wrote: >>>> Irish woman in the group, who is not an "English" type, bu which he meant >>>> she did not study literature, was trying to explain to him the various >>>> 'codes' operative whenever a catholic & protestant met, finally threw up >>>> her hands & said, "I cant explain, but listen," picked a copy of heaney's >>>> poems out of her backpack, & read him a poem in which heaney explored >>> >>>Doug, >>>Do you happen to know which poem? (Sure there are many, but am >>>curious to know which she chose.) >>> >>>Wendy >>> >>>--------------------------------------------------- >>>Wendy Battin wjbat@conncoll.edu >>>(home) http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/wjbat/ >>>(CAPA) http://shain.lib.conncoll.edu/CAPA/capa.html >>>--------------------------------------------------- >> >>Sorry, I dont, but I will ask my friend if he recalls the title of the poem >>& get back to you. He was telling me this partly because he knew I wasnt a >>big fan of Heaney's. As a theoretical type, deeply into post-colonial work, >>he considers another Nobel winner the 'best' (? wrong work: he means, I >>think, most interesting in terms of what he does) poet in english today: >>Derek Walcott. I had read only a few Walcott poems & not thought much one >>way or another, but a reading of the _Collected Poems_ did lead me to >>somewhat reise my opinion. There is much there, albeit within a tradition I >>am not all that interested in, that is fascinating. Sorry for getting off >>topic from your request. I will ask. >> >>All the best >> >>Doug >> >>Douglas Barbour >>Department of English >>University of Alberta >>Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 >>(403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 >>H: 436 3320 >> >>'The universe opens. I close. >>And open, just to surprise you.' >> - Phyllis Webb >> >> > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 10:49:12 +0100 >From: John Cayley >Subject: Visible Language: New Media Poetry > > *** Apologies for cross-postings *** > >Just published and well worth checking out: > >A special issue of the journal: VISIBLE LANGUAGE > Volume 30, no. 2 > >NEW MEDIA POETRY >Poetic Innovation and New Technologies >Guest edited by: Eduardo Kac > >Contents: >-------- >Introduction / Eduardo Kac > >The Interactive Diagram Sentence: >Hypertext as a Medium of Thought / Jim Rosenberg > >Poetic Machinations / Phillipe Bootz > >Videopoetry / E. M. de Melo e Castro > >We Have Not Understood Descartes / Andre Vallias > >Virtual Poetry / Ladislao Pablo Gyori > >Beyond Codexspace: >Potentialities of Literary Cybertext / John Cayley > >Holopoetry / Eduardo Kac > >New Media Poetry: >Theories and Strategies / Eric Vos > >Selected Webliography / Eduardo Kac > >-------- > >ORDER FROM: >Visible Language, Rhode Island School of Design >Graphic Design Department, 2 College Street, >Providence RI 02903, USA >Tel: 401-454 6171 >Email inquiries: charris@risd.edu (Carrie Harris, for more details) >This issue: $10 (check postage with business contact) >Subscriptions: (1 year = 3 issues) $30 (individ.) $55 (instit.) > >-------- > >Web references: >Eduardo Kac:- http://www.uky.edu/FineArt/kac/kachome.html >Jim Rosenberg:- http://www.well.com/user/jer/ >John Cayley:- http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/in/ > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 08:20:36 -0500 >From: maria damon >Subject: Re: Minnesota > >In message <9610120017.AA08435@unlgrad1.unl.edu> UB Poetics discussion group >writes: >> Dear List: >> >> I will be in Minneapolis for a conference on October 18 and 19 -- I've >> never been to the city before and would love any information about >> readings, events, etc... >> thanks -- >> >> rob zamsky > >what's the conference? there're a coupla weekly papers, the Twin Cities Reader >and the City Pages, that have extensive listings of events, etc. they're free >at most coffee shops, etc. also, call the Loft (the largest writing institution >in the cities) for their events. the loft is pretty conservative in its scope >tho. also call bryant-lake bowl (a groovy bowling alley, cafe, and >"alternative" performance space), and the walker art center, which sometimes >hosts fun stuff. some listers past and present from the tcs are: me, mark >nowak, jeff hansen, gary sullivan, marta deike, kurt anderson, jonathan brannen >(actually i morris mn), bob gale (another person to call about events, as he >edits SHOUT!, a free monthly for spoken word arts), some lurkers i do and don't >know about. that's about it for first thing in the morning; i'll give it a bit >more concerted thot in the next week or so. maybe we cd have a coffee hr >somewhre and meet u. >maria d > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:12:27 -0400 >From: Loss Glazier >Subject: Creeley at 70 in Buffalo > > CREELEY AT 70 IN BUFFALO > > DATELINE BUFFALO. The 70th birthday celebration in honor of Robert >Creeley moves along with extraordinary momentum. First night: Eileen Myles, >introduced by Creeley, read to a packed crowd in the large Halwall's >performance space, with its stage bordered on three sides by the audience. >Her figure animated against the somewhat large stage, reading and letting >each page of text drift to the floor after reading it. Voice, presence, >narrative rang solidly to a thoroughly enthusiastic crowd. Second day: the >formal opening of activities by William Greiner, UB president and Creeley >colleague who first met Creeley long-distance while Creeley was in Finland. >Then, Gil Sorrentino, fondly introduced by Joseph Conte, reading in the >Katherine Cornell Theatre, a good-sized semi-formal spaceship architecture >palace space on the edge of Buffalo's tundra-tinged north campus. Sorrentino >read prose from a new piece (I think forthcoming in _Conjunctions_). A >richly written piece, supercharged with irony, purposely laden with the >banalities of the wife-swapping personalities it characterized and the >revolting misogyny and sexual beasty balls of its less-than-likable >narrator. Above this content, the precision of Sorrentino's prose glimmered >like a city skyline. Amiri Baraka, originally scheduled to read with >Sorrentino, was unable to appear. Creeley therefore gave a preview >mini-reading, talking briefly and reading the full text of his _Dogs of >Auckland_ (approximate title) chapbook forthcoming from Meow Press. A >gorgeous piece of work. This reading was followed by a reception in the >poetry collection and its great assembly of rare, beautiful, and ephemeral >Creeley materials and also a retrospective (mostly small press) of poetry >chez Buffalo for the past 50 years. A delirious spread of rare and >richly-diverse print artifacts that gave a varied sense of the "scene" as >passing in and out and back into the "city of no illusions". Back at >Katherine Cornell, next up was the Creeley-Dine event, the room full to the >rafters. (So packed the fire marshall was threatening to turn back >poetry-goers if they could not prove they had a seat.) Creeley introduced at >length and eloquently by Susan Howe. Then an extraordinary reading by >Creeley. First an explanation of the 1-2-3 method then a 1-2-3 section from >_Mabel: A Story_ a prose work dating an early Creeley-Dine collaboration. >This was a long piece, at times dropping into choppy Burroughsesque rhythms, >other times richly wry and funny, and other times simply sailing along >tellingly. A rare treat to witness the performance of this important earlier >prose piece. This reading was followed by "Histoire de Florida" a later, >powerful, long, languid, pulling out like the tide and the backdrop of >all-that-has-happened, rhythmic, emotional, and meditative masterwork. Then >Dine was introduced excellently by Charles Bernstein followed by the >Creeley-Dine conversation. Truly extraordinary, to hear these two men talk >about a range of subjects near and dear to both art and writing, "tools" of >any trade, age and its perspectives, perseverance and its perspectives, the >necessities of incessant travel and, well, all in all, what it means to hang >in there. This was a primo opportunity to hear both the writer and the >artist talk. Creeley and Dine were terrific. It was a particularly wonderful >opportunity to hear from Dine, an artist who gets to Buffalo all too rarely, >and to hear him speak so openly, honestly, his talk as rich as writing >itself, there in the open space where things are stilled for some hours we >can all hold for the true celebration of artistic life they are. Hey, this >*is* what it means to hang in there. > STILL TO COME: Ashbery reading this afternoon then tonight Hallwalls Jazz >concert with Steve Kuhn and Carol Fredette. > ONLINE: check out http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/creeley/70th where >you can also see the Dine painting for this event and other stuff. >--- >Loss Glazier >http://writing.upenn.edu/epc > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 10:16:36 -0500 >From: Joe Amato >Subject: Re: How To Not Read > >bravo, steve!... i'm gonna be using that piece of yrs sometime, if you >don't mind, in one or the other of my classes... > >best, > >joe > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 10:03:36 -0600 >From: Douglas Barbour >Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 10 Oct 1996 to 11 Oct 1996 > >Re Steve Evans's review of the review: I just want to say Thank you. That >was illuminating & great fun to boot. I really must go out & find that >thing, or maybe not... > >All the best > >Doug > >Douglas Barbour >Department of English >University of Alberta >Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 >(403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 >H: 436 3320 > >'The universe opens. I close. >And open, just to surprise you.' > - Phyllis Webb > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 13:18:00 -0500 >From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" >Subject: Re: Ron Johnson > >Brian and anyone else: > >The info on Living Batch is: > >Living Batch Bookstore >106 Cornell Dr SE >Albuquerque, NM 87106 >505- 262-1619 >(don't know about e-mail) > >Price of the ticket: $25.00 >Bon voyage! > >Patrick Pritchett > ---------- >From: Brian McHale >To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS >Subject: Re: Ron Johnson >Date: Thursday, October 10, 1996 4:58PM > > >Wait, wait. Now that we know Johnson is still with us, could someone >please >supply fuller data on publication of the Complete Ark. Address for Living >Batch Press, please? E-mail, even? > Brian > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:46:32 +0100 >From: Kevin Killian >Subject: Re: Jay and Kay deFeo > >>Hey there, dbkk, are we going to get a report on Kevin's play? >>breathless, >>maria d > >Maria, thanks for asking about my play, "Wet Paint," which indeed did get >finished, still wet, and presented on Wednesday. All the actors=8Ba motley >crew of the Bay Area's best painters, filmmakers, poets, videographers, >drag performers, art writers, and novelists=8Bshowed up, which was such a >help, and so difficult corralling 19 divas all in one room at one time. >And some of them are the kind who, presented with a script, will whip out >rulers to determine how many inches they have (of dialogue, of course). >But they were all there and all fantastic. > >I could try to reconstruct the audience a la Jordan Davis, but I was too >nervous really to note more than a few of the hundreds of people who were >there. I remember however Fanny Howe coming up to me after the show was >over and saying that it reminded her of growing up in Cambridge when her >mother, Mary Manning Howe, was in charge of the Poets Theater there >(mid-fifties?), and nothing could have pleased me more. > >Also spotted: the writers Rebecca Solnit, Tina Rotenberg, Jocelyn >Saidenberg, Matthew Stadler, Renee Gladman, Michael Price, Avery Burns, >Leslie Davis, Pamela Lu, Barbara Guest, Susan Gevirtz, Laura Moriarty, >Brian Strang, Aaron Shurin, Charlie Smith, Rena Rosenwasser, Duncan >McNaughton, Bill Berkson, Larry Kearney, Jay Schwartz, Lauren Gudath, >George Albon (replete with new, utterly delicious new boyfriend), and the >artists Brett Reichman, Fran Herndon, Chris Komater, Peter Mitchell-Dayton, >Vincent Fecteau, Jennifer Locke, Nao Bustamente.... > >And many more both on this list and not. Tosh Berman, you will be glad I >know to hear that each of *your* appearances was greated with a tremendous >round of applause. You were played by a Cabbage Patch doll that Dodie >bought at our local Thrift Town--actually, a Cabbage Patch knockoff, and >carted around in a simply, 1959 style brown paper bag. At one point in the >action of the play, you wander away and get sucked into the vast 2000 pound >"Rose" painting of Jay DeFeo, but happily rescued by your good father. >More later. Thanks=8BKevin K. > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 11:33:46 -0700 >From: Jeremy F Green >Subject: Re: How To Not Read > >My thanks too to Steve Evans. > >Along with the practice of "summing up" complicated bodies of work with a >sentence or 4-line quotation, the TLS reviewer (who is Robert Potts?) >manages also to bracket the construction of tradition in the Sinclair >anthology. A few of the demonized poets showcase their forebears: David >Jones, J.F.Hendry, W.S.Graham, Nicholas Moore...So I guess what is being >bracketted here is British modernism. As ever, "traditionalists" like the >TLS reviewer prove to have the most advanced amnesia. > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 15:42:56 +0100 >From: Kevin Killian >Subject: Ronald Johnson > >It's Kevin Killian--again. As far as Ronald Johnson goes, Dodie tells me >that he's reading at New College in November (if she remembers correctly) >so bring your copies of ARK for him to sign. Has anybody seen the new >"Ronald Johnson" by Dirk Stratton--it's one of those little books from >Boise State University (Western Writers Series #122). The drawing of RJ on >the cover makes him look just like poetics list member Ed Foster; however >there's no picture of author "Dirk Stratton." Does anyone know him, or do >I just remember that name from "Bonanza"? (Or, possibly, some old Fred >Halsted film from the seventies?) > >Stratton says (page 52), "Maybe Johnson is a writer of the American West, >but we are simply unable to recognize exactly why." So it's interesting. >E-mail for Western Writers Series is at wws@quartz.idbsu.edu. > >Thanks everybody. > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 18:06:22 -0500 >From: maria damon >Subject: Re: Jay and Kay deFeo > >thanks kevin, i'm glad i asked; sounds delicious.--md > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 23:47:36 GMT >From: Lisa Jarnot >Subject: Ear Inn Update > >EAR INN UPDATE: > >On Saturday October 12th Cliff Fyman and Lee Ann Brown read at the Ear Inn. > Cliff Fyman-- resident of the lower east side, secret poetical genius, and >waiter at Sardi's Restaurant-- read from a spectacular mix of prose and >poetry, including his crowd pleasing oulipo poem "mouse". Lee Ann Brown-- >recent returnee to New York City-- read from her new project Cento, mixing >it up with some greatest hits (such as "Crush") and newest new short poems >inspired by some of the filmmakers represented at this year's International >Film Festival at Lincoln Center. > >For the second week in a row the Ear Inn was filled to capacity. Attendees >included Bernadette Mayer, Philip Good, Lewis Warsh, Barbara Henning, Gavin >Smith, Melanie Neilson, Robert Fitterman, Jeff Hull, Douglas Rothschild, >William Luoma, Drew Gardner, Boston poet Sianne Ngai, new New Yorker Daniel >Farrell, Albany poet Chris Funkhouser, Boston poet Daniel Bouchard, Anselm >Berrigan, a busload of poets from Staten Island, and some other people >eating lunch. > >Don't miss out on the fun. Come early stay late drink beer. The Ear Inn >is at 326 Spring Street in lower Manhattan. Next week's readers are ANSELM >BERRIGAN and KIM LYONS. Anselm is a Yale Younger Poet. John Ashbery says >"He rocks." Brooklyn poet Kim Lyons recently had some great work in THE >WORLD. Allen Ginsberg recently said "She totally rocks." Check out the >Ear. Lou Reed says "It rocks big time." > >------------------------------ > >Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 22:59:54 -0500 >From: Eryque Gleason >Subject: Re: Ear Inn Update > >dear lisa (or anybody else), could you post the whole schedule for the ear? >thankee! eryque > >>EAR INN UPDATE: >> >>On Saturday October 12th Cliff Fyman and Lee Ann Brown read at the Ear Inn. >> Cliff Fyman-- resident of the lower east side, secret poetical genius, and >>waiter at Sardi's Restaurant-- read from a spectacular mix of prose and >>poetry, including his crowd pleasing oulipo poem "mouse". Lee Ann Brown-- >>recent returnee to New York City-- read from her new project Cento, mixing >>it up with some greatest hits (such as "Crush") and newest new short poems >>inspired by some of the filmmakers represented at this year's International >>Film Festival at Lincoln Center. >> >>For the second week in a row the Ear Inn was filled to capacity. Attendees >>included Bernadette Mayer, Philip Good, Lewis Warsh, Barbara Henning, Gavin >>Smith, Melanie Neilson, Robert Fitterman, Jeff Hull, Douglas Rothschild, >>William Luoma, Drew Gardner, Boston poet Sianne Ngai, new New Yorker Daniel >>Farrell, Albany poet Chris Funkhouser, Boston poet Daniel Bouchard, Anselm >>Berrigan, a busload of poets from Staten Island, and some other people >>eating lunch. >> >>Don't miss out on the fun. Come early stay late drink beer. The Ear Inn >>is at 326 Spring Street in lower Manhattan. Next week's readers are ANSELM >>BERRIGAN and KIM LYONS. Anselm is a Yale Younger Poet. John Ashbery says >>"He rocks." Brooklyn poet Kim Lyons recently had some great work in THE >>WORLD. Allen Ginsberg recently said "She totally rocks." Check out the >>Ear. Lou Reed says "It rocks big time." > >------------------------------ > >End of POETICS Digest - 11 Oct 1996 to 12 Oct 1996 >************************************************** > ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 16:10:23 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Beth Simon Subject: _Out Of Nowhere, The Body's Shape_ My first collection of poetry, _Out Of Nowhere, The Body's Shape_ (Pecan Grove Press), published April, 1996, is about to go into a second printing. It is available from Pecan Grove Press, 1 Camino Santa Maria, San Antonio, Texas 78228-8608. Beth Simon Assistant Professor, Linguistics and English (yes, one can pay the rent by means of language and poetry) Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805 simon@cvax.ipfw.indiana.edu ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 16:34:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: lentricchia... anybody catch frank lentricchia's remarkable renunciation of lit. theory & criticism ("last will & testament of an ex-literary critic") in the september/october _lingua franca_?... in his about-face, lentricchia pretty much pooh-poohs any writing or insights or theories 'about' literature, having presumably (if this isn't simply a sokal-style prank, i mean, and i don't think it is) found the pleasure of the text per se in reading books aloud (as a platonic 'rhapsode,' no shit) in his undergrad. (as opposed to his grad.) classrooms... evidently, he's now taken to writing fiction himself... of course this'll likely be served up by conservatives as a primo example of an ideologically-based critic who now confesses to having been led astray... really love to hear what anybody & everybody else thinks... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 17:54:59 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Bernstein Subject: Conductors of Chaos Steve Evans' superb critique might prompt some of us to follow up on Ken Edwards's suggestion to get Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology, ed. Ian Sinclair. Included: Bergvall, Catling, cheek, Corcoran, Crozier, Duncan, Fisher, Gascoyne, Graham, Griffiths, Halsey, Harwood, Haslam, Hendry, Home, James, Jones, Lake, Lopez, MacSweeney, Mengham, Milne, Monk, Moore, Oliver, O'Sullivan, Out to Lunch, Pattereson, Prynne, Reed, Riley, Riley, Rodefer, Torance, Wilkinson, Williamson. I don't have this book yet, so I will reserve some of the comments I am tempted to make just based on that list ... but I do have the order form for it and I am going to use it. _________ Plesase send me ___ copies of The Conductors of Chaos 0 330 33`35 3 @ 9.99 pounds Payment method: check to Macmillan Distribution (but I assume UK currency only) OR AmEx, Visa, Masterecard Card # expiration date: signature: from Picador 25 Eccleston Place London SW1w 9NF fax:0171 881 8001 I am unaware of any US distribution -- ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 18:27:47 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rick Bursky Subject: Thirty pound sacks: poem The Thirty Pound Sacks After a heavy rain the river crested. Parcels of low-lying fields slipped along the banks, opening the earth to free shallow-graved corpses and send them into the brown water with enough dead breath to find buoyancy inches beneath the surface. We saw the dark masses passing as if evicted from heaven and attempted to spill their hopelessness into the ocean. Children pitched stones and shouted the name of an unpopular child's grandmother. Later fisherman dragged grappling hooks across the bottom, retrieved corpses and limbs, wrapped them in thirty pound sacks and sold them to men sent by their wives to wait on the docks. Other men brought home sacks of sticks and fish heads soaked in salt water. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 11:48:41 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Creeley at 70 in Buffalo - Part II Thanks for Parts I & II, Loss Glazier. best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 19:13:01 MDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kali Tal Subject: Re: lentricchia... >anybody catch frank lentricchia's remarkable renunciation of lit. theory & >criticism ("last will & testament of an ex-literary critic") in the >september/october _lingua franca_?... yup, i sure did. read it and was nauseated by it. reminded me of certain folks i know who went through mid-life religious conversions. i, too, thought at first that i might be reading farce, but no such luck. what's weird about lentricchia's stance, however, is that i don't know a single literary critic who *doesn't* read for the sheer pleasure of it. we might all talk theory, but most of us got into theory because we love the Word, and we'd surely like our students to share that love. (that's why we assign them books we liked ourselves, isn't it?) so his argument is basically, well... straw. i mean, who's his opposition? lit critters who don't like literature? find me one. >of course this'll likely be served up by conservatives as a primo example >of an ideologically-based critic who now confesses to having been led >astray... it seemed clear enough to me that the article was *written* for this purpose. (rather than because lentricchia suddenly felt compelled to confess his change of heart.) has he joined the national association of scholars? does he want to Take Back the MLA from the hordes of queer-commie-theorists? what's *he* got to be bitter about? interesting that it was in the same issue as a pretty favorable article on far-right colleges. what might be _lingua franca's_ agenda? (un unreliable rag, at best.) middle-aged tenured white men turning to the Right and embracing all that is Good and Traditional don't surprise me at all. for them, it's a comfortable place to sit; maybe more comfortable than hanging out with the queer-commie-theorists who are bound to ask embarrassing questions and make unflattering comparisons. me, i'm impressed with the middle-aged tenured white guys (and i know quite a few) who *refuse* to mainstream even though they'd personally benefit by it. peace, kali Kali Tal Sixties Project & Viet Nam Generation, Inc. PO Box 13746, Tucson, AZ 85732-3746 kali.tal@yale.edu Sixties Project: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/sixties/ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 04:25:30 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dan Raphael Dlugonski Subject: post-electronic jam My apologies to the list for attaching a previous digest to my posting on mynew book. thanks for your patient wading. dan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 12:30:01 +0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Kinsella Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 12 Oct 1996 to 13 Oct 1996 re The Conductors of Chaos Anthology: Salt 10 (May 1997 - Salt 9, November 1996 is due out shortly) will carry not only a comprehensive review of this book, but new poems from a number of the poets featured. Salt 9 includes an "oddity" that may be of appeal to those interested in the work of J.H. Prynne - a French translation of "Day Light Songs" ("Chansons =E0 la Journee-Lumi=E8re") by the late Bernard Dubourg. Folio (Salt), the co-publishers of Salt, are publishing Prynne's "Collected Poems" in 1997. Salt 9 also includes three new Ashbery poems. John Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 09:19:20 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Steve Evans I think Steve Evans should be strongly encouraged to send his recent piece to the New York Times Literary Supplement. Whether they will publish it or not, I'd be interested in hearing how they respond. What do you think, Steve? 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, 14 Oct 1996 09:22:40 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: Conductors of Chaos In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 13 Oct 1996 17:54:59 -0400 from Curious that the _TLS_ even bothered to assign a review for _Conductors of Chaos_. Messerli, Hoover, Weinberger, etc.--were they reviewed in the _NY Times Book Review_ or _The New York Review of Books_? Curious too that the book that props up Robert Potts' critique of the anthology (Donald Davie's _Purity of Diction in English Verse_) was published in 1952. Having read him now,I'd say that Potts is not altogether obtuse but merely unsympathetic and predictable: yet another voice of the Movement. Nodding in the direction of one or two poets who challenge that frame (Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, etc.) sustains it by making it appear flexible. As a study in the tactics of a "mainstream," it might be contrasted with the silence of literary journalists in the US. Potts is so intent on blasting Prynne and "Cambridge" that he obliterates real differences among the poets in the anthology, so that we hear nothing, for instance, of the fact that the anthology includes a poet born in 1918 (Nicholas Moore) and another born in 1964 (Drew Milne). Part of the work of the anthology involves uncovering some of that which the Movement helped bury, but this cannot be mentioned apparently so that the Movement remains timeless and "English." More to say but not today--except that the anthology, as CB suggests, is well worth checking out. Keith ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 11:01:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Conductors of Chaos Keith Tuma wrote: > > Curious that the _TLS_ even bothered to assign a review for _Conductors of > Chaos_. Messerli, Hoover, Weinberger, etc.--were they reviewed in the _NY > Times Book Review_ or _The New York Review of Books_? Keith: the NYTBR has an odd "policy" according to which it does not review "anthologies." There is of course no explanation why this policy was set up when god or the editor of the NYTBR hovered over chaos & decided reviewing the world. -- Pierre ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 12:26:11 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: your review howlie doven, just got caught up to poetics and read your review this morning. wowa. absolutely meowie. I was howling at every line. woke up roommate. i've never felt brackets to be so amusing and simultaneously terrifying. so where is all that [poetry] you've been writing? love, Bill ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 09:35:40 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAXINE CHERNOFF Subject: Re: Conductors of Chaos In-Reply-To: <961014.100734.EST.KWTUMA@miamiu.muohio.edu> Bravo, Keith Tuma. When Messerli, Hoover, and Weinberger appeared, there were no major mainstream American reviews though the TLS did give the Hoover anthology (and perhaps the others in different issues?) a short but sympathetic review. As for the NYT, they were reviewing Amy Hempel's salute to dogs (or was it poems by dogs) anthology around that time. Life is strangely and predictably unfair, no? Bravo qalso to the Creeley thread, esp. Ron Silliman's recent posting and to all the Nobel bashers! Maxine Chernoff On Mon, 14 Oct 1996, Keith Tuma wrote: > Curious that the _TLS_ even bothered to assign a review for _Conductors of > Chaos_. Messerli, Hoover, Weinberger, etc.--were they reviewed in the _NY > Times Book Review_ or _The New York Review of Books_? > > Curious too that the book that props up Robert Potts' critique of the anthology > (Donald Davie's _Purity of Diction in English Verse_) was published in 1952. > Having read him now,I'd say that Potts is not altogether obtuse but merely > unsympathetic and predictable: yet another voice of the Movement. Nodding in > the direction of one or two poets who challenge that frame (Douglas Oliver, > Barry MacSweeney, etc.) sustains it by making it appear flexible. As a study > in the tactics of a "mainstream," it might be contrasted with the silence of > literary journalists in the US. > > Potts is so intent on blasting Prynne and "Cambridge" that he obliterates > real differences among the poets in the anthology, so that we hear nothing, > for instance, of the fact that the anthology includes a poet born in 1918 > (Nicholas Moore) and another born in 1964 (Drew Milne). Part of the work of > the anthology involves uncovering some of that which the Movement helped bury, > but this cannot be mentioned apparently so that the Movement remains timeless > and "English." > > More to say but not today--except that the anthology, as CB suggests, is well > worth checking out. > > Keith > ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 10:59:26 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Robertson & Moure rock SPT Small Press Traffic presents Erin Mour=E9 Lisa Robertson =46riday, October 18, 7:30 p.m. at the New College Theater 777 Valencia Street, SF $5 Erin Mour=E9 is one of Canada=B9s greatest poets. Her restless poetic presen= ce on the Canadian scene has been praised, questioned, rewarded, scorned, embraced, doubted since the late 70s. Originally from Calgary , she now lives in Montreal and, having been recently "downsized", now works as a freelance editor and translator. In her writing, "the body, women's bodies in particular, and language intersect to dislocate expectation and reinvent the world." She has published seven books of poetry including _Furious_ (which won the Governor General's Award=8Bthe Pulitzer Prize of Canada, except more so). Her poetry has been collected in _The Green Word: Selected Poems 1973-1992_ (Oxford University Press). Her most recent books are _Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love_ (Vehicule, Montreal, 1992) and _Search Procedures_ (Anansi, Toronto, 1996). Lisa Robertson is a member of the Kootenay School of Writing, a group of energetic young poets who collectively changed the face of Western Canadian writing beginning in the 1980s. She co-edits the poetry journal _Raddle Moon_ with Susan Clark in Vancouver. Her new manuscript, _Debbie: an epic_, on which she has been working for many years, promises to be a Molotov cocktail of Edith Sitwell=B9s _War Trilogy_ and Stanley Donen=B9s _Funny Fac= e_. =B3Think pink!=B2 In her spare time, she tells her American fans, Lisa visit= s scrap yards and trains large dogs. Her books and chapbooks include _The Apothecary_ and _XEclogue_ (Tsunami Editions), _Barscheit Horse_ (with Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart) (The Berkeley Horse), and the brand new _The Descent: a light comedy in three parts_ (Meow Press). ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 17:33:28 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Jarnot Subject: fall ear inn readings October and November 1996: Readings at The Ear Inn OCT 19: ANSELM BERRIGAN, KIM LYONS Kim Lyons recently collaborated with Ed Epping on an artists book called Mettle. She has poetry forthcoming in The World and Pagan Place and her chapbook, Rhyme the Lake, is available from leave books. Anselm Berrigan has returned to New York after a two year stay in San Francisco. His recent publications include a chapbook, On the Premises, and poems which have appeared in several magazines, including Talisman, Prosodia, and Yale Younger Poets. OCT 26: DEIRDRE KOVAC, BARBARA HENNING Deirdre Kovac lives in Brooklyn. She is associate editor of Big Allis and is completing her first collection of poems, Mannerism. Her poetry and criticism have appeared recently and are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Letterbox, Object, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and Torque. Barbara Henning is the editor-publisher of Long News Books. Her most recent collection, Love Makes Thinking Dark, was published by United Artists Books in 1995. Her work can be found in Talisman, Chain, and Trois and she has a collection of poems, In Between, forthcoming from Spectacular Diseases. NOV 2 BETH BORRUS, SCOTT BENTLEY Scott Bentley lives in Oakland and teaches at Cal State Hayward. He has an O book called Ground Air that rides shotgun into the KWave. He handles landscapes and large objects. Beth Borrus has recently returned from a hiatus in Paris with Edith Piaff. She has a new collection of poems called Fast Divorce Bankruptcy published by Incommunicado. She lives in Elizabeth and works in Newark. NOV 9 ANGE MLINKO, EDWIN TORRES Ange Mlinko lives in Providence and edits Compound Eye. She has a new chapbook out from Lift called Immediate Orgy & Audit. She grooves to New York. Edwin Torres is a poet who exists in the you-misphere of the alphabet. He was recently curator of the monday night series at St. Mark s and a recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art. His two collections are Lung Poetry & I Hear Things People Haven't Really Said. NOV 16 DREW GARDNER, CHUCK STEIN Drew Gardner does not play loud like a young jazz drummer. He has two chapbooks, Stonewalk published by St. Lazar and The Cover from Leave. He practices at night and lives in Brooklyn. Chuck Stein will not stop working on his life project forestforthetrees. His most recent book is a selected poems from Station Hill called hatracktree. Marie Osmond has performed his speaking backwards poetry on Ripley's Believe It or Not. He lives in the Hudson Valley. NOV 23 LYDIA DAVIS, PATRICIA JONES Patricia Jones has a new book out from Coffee House called The Weather That Kills and a Telephone chapbook called My Mythologies Always. She is a fellow at Breadloaf, teaches at Sara Lawrence and lives in the heart of Brooklyn. Lydia Davis is a prose writer and translator living in upstate New York. Recently out from High Risk are The End of the Story and Break It Down. A new collection of stories called Almost No Memory is soon to be published by Farrar-Strauss. NOV 30 ROSS BROCKLEY, JIM KRELL Jim Krell is the author of three collections of poetry: Here & Now, a Black Sparrow imprint edited by Jonathan Williams, Vice of Woes, and On the Advice of Wolves (Terminal Inc.). His new project is a series of love poems to Michelle. He is a fixture in the east village. Ross Brockley performs Monday nights at the Luna Lounge. His work has been described as the surrealist mutterings of damaged goods. As Janeane Garafolo says in Playboy, "I woke up and rolled over, and there was Ross Brockley. My first thought was, Oh, I know that guy! He's funny. Thank God it's a good comic. I mean he could have been a hack." SATURDAY AFTERNOON READINGS begin at 2:30 pm, $3.00 contribution goes to readers. THE EAR INN is at 326 Spring St. NYC. Coordinators for this series are Lisa Jarnot (October) and Bill Luoma (November). Continuing support of this series is provided by the Segue Foundation. Funding is made possible by support from the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts. PLEASE SUPPORT THE EAR-- COME EARLY FOR LUNCH, STAY LATE FOR DINNER! ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 11:12:22 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: student sincerity This is Dodie-- Still teaching--or as Lacan put it, playing "subject supposed to know." (Forgive me if I've screwed up the reference.) Anyway, I'm still stumped when somebody brings in something that is totally wrong-headed, how to steer them gently into a more useful direction. The following poem was posted to the beat generation listserv, and it seemed to me to be a perfect example of bad student poetry. When I look at it my mind goes blank--as far as anything useful to say. One simply couldn't grunt out, "Don't do this anymore." If this were handed in to any of you--what would you say about it--as a way to begin a dialogue? Thanks. Dodie > HEY JACK KEROUAC > (Robert Buck/Natalie Merchant) > > Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother > and the tears she cried, she cried for none other > than her little boy lost in our little world that hated > and that dared to drag him down. > Her little boy courageous who chose his words > from mouths of babes got lost in the wood. > Hip flask slinging madmen, steaming cafe flirts, > they all spoke through you. > > Hey Jack, now for the tricky part, > when you were the brightest star > who were the shadows? > Of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite. > Now they sit and rattle their bones and think of their blood stoned days. > You chose your words from from mouths > babes got lost in the wood. > The hip flask slinging madmen, > steaming cafe flirts, nights in Chinatown, howling at night. > > Allen baby, why so jaded? > Have the boys all grown up and their beauty faded? > Billy, what a saint they've made you, > just like Mary down in Mexico on All Soul's Day. > > You chose your words from mouths > of babes got lost in the wood. > Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls in Harlem, howling at night. > What a tear stained shock of the world, > you've gone away without saying goodbye. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 14:07:40 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan clara sondheim Subject: blushes, ecology (fwd) ecological resources space blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses oh and textual extensions appear to disturb ecology deconstruct the manifold of the screen they produce the spear of impinged meaning garner repetition observe clues it is as if the computer is comfortable with total collapse as if the body extends infinitely as I have calculated so many words or lines to the miles so many miles until an ocean or mountain is attained it s the precision of the form the audience gasp no one can absorb everything in the world hold presence in extensio like a clean bridge gone down through dark grey days deeper into the pit falling into whatever waters are dredged from the unconscious you shoot upwards into me it isn t your place not to shoot at the bottom of every line every text there s an open mouth what desire shoots us space falls like pits flat on the floor on the right take a tumble the effort of pulling the screen down repeatedly as if you are down on me as if I m down today what s your name nearing the second or third level nearing the fourth or fifth level nearing the sixth or seventh level nearing the seventh or eighth level nearing the sixth or seventh level nearing the fourth or fifth level nearing the second or third level the length of a rope beyond all measurement this is a text that space behind the eyes you descend dissolute clothes falling off as you near what would be the bottom of a MUD where you might be reborn alive again in a church specifically pray within Lars lpmud converted for my pleasure it s as if naked you arrive at the entrance where the pray re embodies you gives you some weapons maybe but we re all the same here I m wandering but I wander only in the way you know this down dismemberment phantom limbs and spaces devils grinning angels throwing everything they ve got hideous yes hideous faces I could leave you with face s memory my own or the odd imprint of my body there on the right of the screen pale mixed with your own reflection I would say a fountain not a pillar from blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses a pool and not from the tautness of a fabrication of skin flesh blood bones gristle what you would throw past the longing of these words blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 14:15:48 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: student sincerity Dodie-- That's a song lyric, not a poem. It's by the 10,000 Maniacs. The music's no good either. --Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 13:23:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: student sincerity Comments: To: Kevin Killian Bad student poetry it may be (personally I never liked this song), but she - Natalie Merchant - and they - 10,000 Maniacs - have made a fortune from it. ---------- From: Kevin Killian To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: student sincerity Date: Monday, October 14, 1996 1:00PM This is Dodie-- Still teaching--or as Lacan put it, playing "subject supposed to know." (Forgive me if I've screwed up the reference.) Anyway, I'm still stumped when somebody brings in something that is totally wrong-headed, how to steer them gently into a more useful direction. The following poem was posted to the beat generation listserv, and it seemed to me to be a perfect example of bad student poetry. When I look at it my mind goes blank--as far as anything useful to say. One simply couldn't grunt out, "Don't do this anymore." If this were handed in to any of you--what would you say about it--as a way to begin a dialogue? Thanks. Dodie > HEY JACK KEROUAC > (Robert Buck/Natalie Merchant) > > Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother > and the tears she cried, she cried for none other > than her little boy lost in our little world that hated > and that dared to drag him down. > Her little boy courageous who chose his words > from mouths of babes got lost in the wood. > Hip flask slinging madmen, steaming cafe flirts, > they all spoke through you. > > Hey Jack, now for the tricky part, > when you were the brightest star > who were the shadows? > Of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite. > Now they sit and rattle their bones and think of their blood stoned days. > You chose your words from from mouths > babes got lost in the wood. > The hip flask slinging madmen, > steaming cafe flirts, nights in Chinatown, howling at night. > > Allen baby, why so jaded? > Have the boys all grown up and their beauty faded? > Billy, what a saint they've made you, > just like Mary down in Mexico on All Soul's Day. > > You chose your words from mouths > of babes got lost in the wood. > Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls in Harlem, howling at night. > What a tear stained shock of the world, > you've gone away without saying goodbye. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 13:30:32 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Maria Damon (Maria Damon)" Subject: Re: student sincerity actually dodie there're many ways to approach this. as one who teaches how tto read more than how to write my remarks may be off the mark for your purposes, but here goes. the obvious one is to play the song to them and ask how the effect is similar or different when the experience is not one of reading but an aural one. it is as fatuous a song as it is a text? then, the issue of fatuousness itself. one of the charms of the song, it seems, is that it to some extent engages kerouac's charms and embarrassments --his fatuousness, in fact. one could juxtapose a passage of kerouac with this song lyric and compare/contrast. the song's clumsinesses can be looked at not as errors but as part of the genre in which the lyricist is working. K's work is both oddly compelling but also mortifyingly self-indulgent, sweet but often misguided and evocative of what mary pratt calls "strategies of innocence" (cf. "little boy lost etc")as the subject-in-power naturalizes his descriptions of his chosen exotic locale through seeming objectivity that is, nonetheless, nuanced with affirmations (the naturalist, for example, describes the flora and fauna of the "unspoiled" i.e. not-yet-Europeanized territory in ways that obviously value its unspoiledness, disavowing his/her complicity with more openly predatory invaders). so, jack both celebrates primitivism and aspires to transcend it; his sympathetic renderings nonetheless place him in a clearly superior position to those he describes. (you speak with the voice of the little people, o saint jack, so you Represent and subsume them). you can use the song to analyze the kerouac cult, to discuss women's interesting investment in kerouac. this song and songwriter are no favorites of mine, but if a student brought it in to class with an obviously worshipful intent, these are some of the tactics i might use. let me know what happens. xo, md >This is Dodie-- > >Still teaching--or as Lacan put it, playing "subject supposed to know." >(Forgive me if I've screwed up the reference.) Anyway, I'm still stumped >when somebody brings in something that is totally wrong-headed, how to >steer them gently into a more useful direction. The following poem was >posted to the beat generation listserv, and it seemed to me to be a perfect >example of bad student poetry. When I look at it my mind goes blank--as >far as anything useful to say. One simply couldn't grunt out, "Don't do >this anymore." If this were handed in to any of you--what would you say >about it--as a way to begin a dialogue? > >Thanks. > >Dodie > >> HEY JACK KEROUAC >> (Robert Buck/Natalie Merchant) >> >> Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother >> and the tears she cried, she cried for none other >> than her little boy lost in our little world that hated >> and that dared to drag him down. >> Her little boy courageous who chose his words >> from mouths of babes got lost in the wood. >> Hip flask slinging madmen, steaming cafe flirts, >> they all spoke through you. >> >> Hey Jack, now for the tricky part, >> when you were the brightest star >> who were the shadows? >> Of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite. >> Now they sit and rattle their bones and think of their blood stoned days. >> You chose your words from from mouths >> babes got lost in the wood. >> The hip flask slinging madmen, >> steaming cafe flirts, nights in Chinatown, howling at night. >> >> Allen baby, why so jaded? >> Have the boys all grown up and their beauty faded? >> Billy, what a saint they've made you, >> just like Mary down in Mexico on All Soul's Day. >> >> You chose your words from mouths >> of babes got lost in the wood. >> Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls in Harlem, howling at night. >> What a tear stained shock of the world, >> you've gone away without saying goodbye. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 08:11:18 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: student sincerity steaming cafe flirts -- I'd keep that and forgo the rest. best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 11:56:26 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: student sincerity Comments: To: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" At 1:23 PM 10/14/96, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: >Bad student poetry it may be (personally I never liked this song), but she - >Natalie Merchant - and they - 10,000 Maniacs - have made a fortune from it. So you would say, "Keep doing this--if you don't win a Nobel Prize, it will make you rich some day?" ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 10:29:00 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Don Cheney Subject: Re: student sincerity ---------------------------- Forwarded with Changes --------------------------- From: dbkk@SIRIUS.COM at @UCSD Date: 10/14/96 11:12AM *To: POETICS@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU at @UCSD Subject: student sincerity ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- hey dodie, that's a "10,000 Maniacs" (pop group) song! so start by discussing plagiarism! my girlfriend teaches at the local community college and a student recently turned in a paper that was written straight out of an encyclopedia. he even left in the reference to related topics: "....(see apartheid)." don dcheney@ucsd.edu This is Dodie-- Still teaching--or as Lacan put it, playing "subject supposed to know." (Forgive me if I've screwed up the reference.) Anyway, I'm still stumped when somebody brings in something that is totally wrong-headed, how to steer them gently into a more useful direction. The following poem was posted to the beat generation listserv, and it seemed to me to be a perfect example of bad student poetry. When I look at it my mind goes blank--as far as anything useful to say. One simply couldn't grunt out, "Don't do this anymore." If this were handed in to any of you--what would you say about it--as a way to begin a dialogue? Thanks. Dodie > HEY JACK KEROUAC > (Robert Buck/Natalie Merchant) > > Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother > and the tears she cried, she cried for none other > than her little boy lost in our little world that hated > and that dared to drag him down. > Her little boy courageous who chose his words > from mouths of babes got lost in the wood. > Hip flask slinging madmen, steaming cafe flirts, > they all spoke through you. > > Hey Jack, now for the tricky part, > when you were the brightest star > who were the shadows? > Of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite. > Now they sit and rattle their bones and think of their blood stoned days. > You chose your words from from mouths > babes got lost in the wood. > The hip flask slinging madmen, > steaming cafe flirts, nights in Chinatown, howling at night. > > Allen baby, why so jaded? > Have the boys all grown up and their beauty faded? > Billy, what a saint they've made you, > just like Mary down in Mexico on All Soul's Day. > > You chose your words from mouths > of babes got lost in the wood. > Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls in Harlem, howling at night. > What a tear stained shock of the world, > you've gone away without saying goodbye. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 13:36:41 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: student sincerity At 1:30 PM 10/14/96, Maria Damon (Maria Damon) wrote: >actually dodie there're many ways to approach this. Maria, Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I'd make some back, except I'm feverish and can't stop sneezing. I think my body is in revolt and against the poetics list. x, Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 16:57:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: student sincerity Comments: To: Kevin Killian America uber alles, nicht wahr? Sorry if I sounded snide, Dodie. I found Maria's remarks very insightful, esp. the idea of juxtaposing Kerouac's text with the song's. But if it happened in my class, and I must add that I don't teach yet, but will soon, I think I wld. lead the discussion into an exploration of fetishes and sentimentality, albeit gently. JK and the Beats are invoked in this song for their nostalgic value. It all smacks of scars that never felt the wound. That wld be the place to begin: get the writer to explain/justify his/her intentions and attendant emotional associations. Albeit gently. In a way this song is rather sophisticated as a document of inauthentic public longing, more for what it deliberately leaves out then what it includes. It succeeds in reducing the Beats to icons in a teenager's bedroom on a par with stuffed animals and Metallica posters. Patrick ---------- From: Kevin Killian To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: student sincerity Date: Monday, October 14, 1996 2:50PM At 1:23 PM 10/14/96, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: >Bad student poetry it may be (personally I never liked this song), but she - >Natalie Merchant - and they - 10,000 Maniacs - have made a fortune from it. So you would say, "Keep doing this--if you don't win a Nobel Prize, it will make you rich some day?" ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 17:35:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: student sincerity pat p rote: > I think I wld. lead the discussion into an > exploration of fetishes and sentimentality, albeit gently. JK and the Beats > are invoked in this song for their nostalgic value. It all smacks of scars > that never felt the wound. That wld be the place to begin: get the writer to > explain/justify his/her intentions and attendant emotional associations. > Albeit gently. In a way this song is rather sophisticated as a document of > inauthentic public longing, more for what it deliberately leaves out then > what it includes. It succeeds in reducing the Beats to icons in a teenager's > bedroom on a par with stuffed animals and Metallica posters. i like this too --jk is so nostalgic himself for small town america and innocence ("sad" and "strange" are his favorite words it seems) --it seems like a great way to lead into a discussion of longing --there's also something about the familiarity with which the song treats beat icons, "hey billy" etc that speaks of the wannabe-ness of both Beats and postbeat yearners...see susan stewart's wonderful book On Longing, which by the way is also a great text to teach along w/ elizabeth bishop and travel literature in general, or have i already said this here before? xo,md ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 18:41:55 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan clara sondheim Subject: Re: student sincerity In-Reply-To: <01IAN24VMIDU9JDT9J@iix.com> stuffed animals and Metallica posters are pretty strong icons; also, are you assuming with "scars that never felt the wound" that there aren't similar pressures today? My daughter has identified with Jane's Addiction, Courtney Love, Nirvana, Black Crows, etc. (as have I for that matter); these are _current_ issues, not necessarily nostalgia, although they're cast as such. Don't forget the Beats appeared to have something to rebel against, something for; look at the situation now - Alan On Mon, 14 Oct 1996, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: > America uber alles, nicht wahr? Sorry if I sounded snide, Dodie. I found > Maria's remarks very insightful, esp. the idea of juxtaposing Kerouac's text > with the song's. But if it happened in my class, and I must add that I don't > teach yet, but will soon, I think I wld. lead the discussion into an > exploration of fetishes and sentimentality, albeit gently. JK and the Beats > are invoked in this song for their nostalgic value. It all smacks of scars > that never felt the wound. That wld be the place to begin: get the writer to > explain/justify his/her intentions and attendant emotional associations. > Albeit gently. In a way this song is rather sophisticated as a document of > inauthentic public longing, more for what it deliberately leaves out then > what it includes. It succeeds in reducing the Beats to icons in a teenager's > bedroom on a par with stuffed animals and Metallica posters. > > Patrick > ---------- > From: Kevin Killian > To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS > Subject: Re: student sincerity > Date: Monday, October 14, 1996 2:50PM > > > At 1:23 PM 10/14/96, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: > >Bad student poetry it may be (personally I never liked this song), but she > - > >Natalie Merchant - and they - 10,000 Maniacs - have made a fortune from it. > > So you would say, "Keep doing this--if you don't win a Nobel Prize, it will > make you rich some day?" > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ faith has no interval ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 18:51:43 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Smith Subject: Fwd: Conquering the World with Type Bay Area people might be interested in this. Alastair is the publisher of Poltroon Press (Lucia Berlin, Tom Raworth among others), a typographical wizard & genius on the linotype. --------------------- Forwarded message: From: BurchTypo@AOL.COM (Kathleen Burch) Sender: BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU (The Book Arts: binding, typography, collecting) Reply-to: BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU (The Book Arts: binding, typography, collecting) To: BOOK_ARTS-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU (Multiple recipients of list BOOK_ARTS-L) Date: 96-10-12 18:48:35 EDT San Francisco Center for the Book presents: Alastair Johnston: Four Lectures Wednesdays 7-9; October 16 & 23, November 6 & 20 $5 general public, $3 Center members Slide show & discussion following, exploring myriad and provocative issues surrounding typography. Topics: Parts of the Book, Making Design Suit Contents, Problems of Legibility, Vernacular Type & Letterform The S.F. Center for the Book is at 300 de Haro at16th St. in San Francisco -- 415-565-0545 Kathleen Burch BurchTypo@aol.com San Francisco Center for the Book ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 18:26:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: student sincerity Comments: To: alan clara sondheim What you say is certainly true, Alan, but I don't see any "current" problems finding overt expression in this particular song, the dominant tone of which is wistful, not angst-ridden. The appropriation of the Beats as icons/fetishes does, however, express some degree of anxiety about a generation's longing for direction. (And yes, I suppose a stuffed animal is as powerful an icon as a crucifix). Patrick ---------- From: alan clara sondheim To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: student sincerity Date: Monday, October 14, 1996 6:00PM stuffed animals and Metallica posters are pretty strong icons; also, are you assuming with "scars that never felt the wound" that there aren't similar pressures today? My daughter has identified with Jane's Addiction, Courtney Love, Nirvana, Black Crows, etc. (as have I for that matter); these are _current_ issues, not necessarily nostalgia, although they're cast as such. Don't forget the Beats appeared to have something to rebel against, something for; look at the situation now - Alan On Mon, 14 Oct 1996, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: > America uber alles, nicht wahr? Sorry if I sounded snide, Dodie. I found > Maria's remarks very insightful, esp. the idea of juxtaposing Kerouac's text > with the song's. But if it happened in my class, and I must add that I don't > teach yet, but will soon, I think I wld. lead the discussion into an > exploration of fetishes and sentimentality, albeit gently. JK and the Beats > are invoked in this song for their nostalgic value. It all smacks of scars > that never felt the wound. That wld be the place to begin: get the writer to > explain/justify his/her intentions and attendant emotional associations. > Albeit gently. In a way this song is rather sophisticated as a document of > inauthentic public longing, more for what it deliberately leaves out then > what it includes. It succeeds in reducing the Beats to icons in a teenager's > bedroom on a par with stuffed animals and Metallica posters. > > Patrick > ---------- > From: Kevin Killian > To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS > Subject: Re: student sincerity > Date: Monday, October 14, 1996 2:50PM > > > At 1:23 PM 10/14/96, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: > >Bad student poetry it may be (personally I never liked this song), but she > - > >Natalie Merchant - and they - 10,000 Maniacs - have made a fortune from it. > > So you would say, "Keep doing this--if you don't win a Nobel Prize, it will > make you rich some day?" > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ faith has no interval ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 14:02:33 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: Help us publicize this as much as possible (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 96 11:49:21 EDT From: Shamita Dasgupta AN APPEAL: "For any person what is important is self-respect. This came to me through Manavi. It is pathetic the way things are. Manavi is a ray of hope." -- A survivor of domestic abuse "Manavi is the first organization in the U.S. to address the special concerns of battered women of South Asian descent. For more than a decade, Manavi has been providing invaluable services to a minority community that requires culturally specific intervention." -- Ellen Pence, Domestic Abuse Intervention Project ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ Dear Friend: It is time again to support women who need your help to survive with dignity and pride. Your thoughtful contributions are essential for Manavi to continue our work of assisting women who are experiencing violence in their lives. We request that you keep Manavi in mind again when you make your 1996 United Way pledge. In recent years, our work has been recognized and supported by many organizations such as WNYW Fox Television, Community Foundation of New Jersey, and AT&T. However, our challenge keeps growing. Last year, we assisted nearly 200 women in our communities. We cannot even hope to accomplish our work without your support. Your contributions to Manavi will help us provide counseling, small loans, legal support and other assistance to women of South Asian descent in need. We ask you to specify Manavi (P.O. Box 614, Bloomfield, NJ 07003; Phone (908) 687-2662; Fax (908) 687-1868) in your Donor Options Section of United Pledge card. Please include the organization code # 009648, as it will help United Way in their distribution process. If you would like more information about Manavi, please do not hesitate to contact us. We will be happy to send you information about our organization. Our website is: http://www.research.att.com/orgs/ssr/people/bala/manavi Sincerely, Shamita Das Dasgupta, Ph.D. Representative UNITED WAY AGENCY CODE: 009648 --- from list postcolonial@lists.village.virginia.edu --- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 17:47:50 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: student sincerity At 6:41 PM 10/14/96, alan clara sondheim wrote: >stuffed animals and Metallica posters are pretty strong icons; also, are >you assuming with "scars that never felt the wound" that there aren't >similar pressures today? My daughter has identified with Jane's Addiction, >Courtney Love, Nirvana, Black Crows, etc. (as have I for that matter); >these are _current_ issues, not necessarily nostalgia, although they're >cast as such. Don't forget the Beats appeared to have something to rebel >against, something for; look at the situation now - True--there is something thrilling and beautiful even in identifying fully with a cultural icon--it kind of fibrillates aspects of one's subconscious. But there are honest ways of expressing this and there are ways that come across, as Pat puts it, inauthentic. I think that the difficulty with the "Hey Jack Kerouac" is that, besides its minefield of cliches, it involves an unexamined ownership of experience that doesn't belong to the writer--in a way that doesn't take it in any new directions. On the beatlist, constantly Kerouac is referred to as "Jack." As if merely reading "On the Road" made you one of the heightened brotherhood, in someway made you Jack. This is sounding a lot like communion. Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 20:58:09 -0400 Reply-To: alan clara sondheim Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan clara sondheim Subject: Re: student sincerity In-Reply-To: While I tend to agree with you (and I don't like Hey Jack Kerouac as a poem), I'm loathe to define "honest" and "authentic/inauthentic" etc. - especially given an incredibly fragmented culture. And music _means_ to a lot of people way beyond the lyrics - look at Robert Walser's analysis of heavy metal. Personally, I prefer 10000m to Madonna, etc. But the point is that expressivity in music culture goes way beyond the ostensible lyric content of the songs, and I'm not sure that "authenticity" has had any real coin since Heidegger and/or Sartre... For me, a problem on this list, repeatedly, is that of _audience._ Who are we critiquing and in what context? Similar issues came up with the Nobel Prize poem. I don't think we're careful enough in listening, and especially in listening to alterity. Alan On Mon, 14 Oct 1996, Kevin Killian wrote: > True--there is something thrilling and beautiful even in identifying fully > with a cultural icon--it kind of fibrillates aspects of one's subconscious. > But there are honest ways of expressing this and there are ways that come > across, as Pat puts it, inauthentic. I think that the difficulty with the > "Hey Jack Kerouac" is that, besides its minefield of cliches, it involves > an unexamined ownership of experience that doesn't belong to the writer--in > a way that doesn't take it in any new directions. On the beatlist, > constantly Kerouac is referred to as "Jack." As if merely reading "On the > Road" made you one of the heightened brotherhood, in someway made you Jack. > This is sounding a lot like communion. > > Dodie > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ faith has no interval ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 21:18:18 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Vincent Subject: Reading Stephen Vincent and Stefanie Marlis will read this Friday evening October 18, 7:30 at Olivers Bookstore 645 San Anselmo Avenue, San Anselmo California ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 20:42:11 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: student sincerity Comments: To: alan clara sondheim At 8:58 PM 10/14/96, alan clara sondheim wrote: >and I'm not sure that "authenticity" has had any >real coin since Heidegger and/or Sartre... Thanks for bringing some philosophy into this, you know, making it a *serious* discussion. Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 23:18:38 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan clara sondheim Subject: Re: student sincerity In-Reply-To: Well, rather than bringing philosophy into it, let's continue in our usual fashion of disparaging popular poets and poems, pop music, and anything else that doesn't meet our unstated standards. Because after all, we know better. We're experimental. I agree - no philosophy - just pure opinion. I LOVE IT http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ faith has no interval ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 13:36:57 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: student sincerity What about Nick Cave for next years Nobel prize? >Well, rather than bringing philosophy into it, let's continue in our usual >fashion of disparaging popular poets and poems, pop music, and anything >else that doesn't meet our unstated standards. Because after all, we know >better. We're experimental. > >I agree - no philosophy - just pure opinion. I LOVE IT > > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html > images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ > faith has no interval > > Mark Roberts Student Systems Project Officer & User Representative SIS Team. Information Systems University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Ph. (02) 93517710 Mobile 015063970 Fax (02) 93517711 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 02:36:32 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: Trip Report Illegal Park for Chris & Juliana The description of this is an event at Writer's House that took place October 7-8 1996 on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. Shawn had announced the safeness of an academic lot behind Writer's House but also cautioned that minnesota plates had proven to be dangerous. I wondered how plates from california would fare. You're right to think they didn't fare well. My car got towed, the remnants of a hurricane were around, Willmington is whence we came and these are the nodes. After Marlene is fed toast on 5th street, Juliana & I get in the car to drive to Philadelphia. Juliana points between the seats and asks if I keep my bird there. No, I keep it over here I say and reach and pull the crow feathers out of the vent. Chris is taking the train. We go thru the Holland Tunnel and hit the turnpike. We talk about references. I'm embarrassed not to have any good ones. We pass Cherry Hill which has a big bed bath & beyond. Juliana thinks we should have been getting off the njTp but I say there are To 95 signs around. When it's 10 miles to the Delaware bridge I ask Juliana if she feels like we've gone too far. Yes. At the end of the njTp I ask the toll taker what the best way to phili is. He stands six five, wears cop ray bans and looks like uncle fester. 30 miles back was the best way he says. We go over the bridge to Willmington and pick up the 95 north. Juliana enjoys the factory on the right because it reminds her of the owner who murdered his wrestler boyfriend. Dupont is ISO 9002 certified. We get closer to phili and I apologize for missing the turn and say she will have to tell Douglass of my round about route. He will get mad. When fire is coming out the tops of poles a guy is walking on the expressway. He looks like a lion. Hey! It's Chris! It was another guy and not really Chris because if this guy had continued walking on the expressway he would have made it to Writer's House before Chris. Chris was supposed to read with Juliana and I was supposed to watch. Now it's 10 minutes after the reading is supposed to start and I'm on my way to the room with Josh to get something to read. Josh asks me questions on the walk back to Writer's House. I take a look at the crowd and go out on the porch to smoke hoping this will make the bus come. It doesn't. Josh gets up to start by introducing. I sit on the floor in the back. Bill bla bla bla Silliman bla bla bla San Diego bla bla bla Oakland bla bla bla Ben bla bla bla Brooklyn. Juliana bla bla bla 8 bla bla bla Chain bla bla bla Bard bla bla bla Buffalo bla bla bla Albany. Chris walks in with head perspiration, sits down on the floor next to me and everyone turns around and looks. Josh slides into a description of Chris. Phili bla bla bla Temple bla bla bla Oops bla bla bla Albany bla bla bla Jersey City. I'm in my reading with a football poem I wrote in a sports bar with my friend Jeff. Half way thru the piece I say this is a visual poem so why am I reading it. Then I talk about Joe Elliot and walk back to where Chris is sitting, flip open my bag, and pull out Joe's illustrated Half Gross. Then I perform the trick that Dug taught me. I hand one end of Half Gross to Chris and walk back to the reading place while the book folds out into a long long sheet. We hold it up. Bob wants me to read some. Earlier me & Juliana had liked some of the same lines and I look for the poems with these and read them. * Your ruler will turn your mind toward more than you think. * The tree man turned indomitable and pale. * You'll only unravel dreams with trust. * The numb inhabit known concepts. * You come to be a wed but are wed in place of Pluto. * They will find the clothes you leave on the ground. Absence is sacred. An unnamed relationship. Hulls persist on emptiness air overseas. The small still voice inside you is a transistor radio. * Halloween, the dark is alive. Your house is in order. Your bed is made. Leave. I end with Western Love at which Juliana felt like she was laughing too much because no one else was. I sit down on the floor next to Chris and Juliana begins to read. She reads Jordan says and Lisa's doing and wonders why new york writing is against a certain kind of abstraction. Chris passes me a note. Juliana reads the poem about working in the psychiatrist's office. She loves saying the refrain and everyone waits to see if it's going to be different and then we all try to answer the questions that follow about being mean. Answer them quietly to ourselves I mean. Chris reads last. He starts with cell #103 from Jennifer's new Imagination Verses and raves about her efficacy. Then he does the Chris Stroffolino thing and we're all amazed. He ends with a line about the snake in which it's embraced as a concept. Often I am permitted to return to Chris Stroffolino. After the reading Juliana and Chris are complaining about how it's hard to read after me because my work is so ironic. I get mad and say it's not ironic and walk out on the porch and smoke. Shawn sticks her head out and says ding ding ding and we sit and eat a dinner that Henrietta cooked in the kitchen. It's a good dinner. After dinner everyone talks and smokes on the porch. Chris explains to Ahmed how Hegel used Kant as a club to beat Kierkegaard. Ahmed doesn't believe in kinds. Teresa is a technical writer. Patrick used to live in a barn. Karen tells the story of the blubbering whore. Teresa's boyfriend talks about reading at borders. He has invited Phil Levine to town and uses Major Jackson as a consultant. Sherry knows what outsourcing means. This one is for Ron. Sherry needs to move her car so me & her & Juliana go to find it. We walk the campus and Juliana is jealous that someone gets to teach here. Sherry explains that she and her husband go out in state college to watch the Bulls. She discusses the Dennis Rodman book and likes the beginning. However, there are no good words to describe this beginning where Dennis has lost his Piston friends to trades after winning it all. Dennis is sad and wants to quit. He has no community and there is no space in the NBA for tattoos and colored hair. Well. You know the story. He just does it. I wonder to myself about the veracity of Sherry's opening lines about Dennis--that there are no good words to describe his predicament--and conclude that Sherry is really talking about herself. Sherry is Dennis Rodman. Sherry's car appears and we note it and walk around the corner into the white dog bar. Juliana asks me what my problem is because I'm saying drink then car and corner and bar and making no sense. Juliana buys the first round and I realize I'm having a fit. They want to see the visual poem so I hand it to them and walk into the bar next door because it has a cigarette machine. When I get back Juliana says I'm out of control. She is referring to the visual poem I think. I ask Juliana how big the Jordan piece is and she says that's how big it is. I say I laughed during it in response to her I want to be funny. I say her Testimony is terrifying. I love that. Why do you want to be funny? It's a dumb question because I want to be terrifying and I'm still mad about the ironic comment and o irony is certainly not terrifying I say. Western Love is about passion and passion is often not very funny and is only ironic to Alanis Morissette. Passion is also terrifying because it's everything, all at once and forever. Moreso I say the humor is trick just as it's a trick that I appear calm next to Douglass. People are also tricked by the dedication to Jennifer a female from Bill a male but if you ignore that and look at the poems it's often hard to figure out what genders are conversing. Juliana says she's noticed and then lays out her theory. New American writers had this creepy male I to female you. She loves the language poets because they attacked this problem and destroyed that I. Now Lee Ann's crush is making things difficult and Juliana's students are also confused about their genders and this imparts a new energy to the work. Juliana asks how is Jeff? I say Jeff is good. He my tokie furlong. She says in Buffalo he was always lying like if you asked him about the fabric of his jacket he'd say it was made out of vanilla brain coral. I explain that Jeff is one of the few men I love to hug and that he gives me rocks. Juliana says at one point Jeff had slept with all her Buffalo roommates. I say I thought Jeff had a passion for local girls who danced the polka. Sherry & Juliana talk about the polka. I smoke and laugh to myself concerning what Jeff said about Juliana. Sherry orders another round and tells us about fish ladders. I hear wacker drive and ways to order sequences and Sherry wonders how we answer questions about the mainstream. We don't we say. Instead Juliana talks about teaching the Next Generation where Dharmok and Gilhad are at Tenagra. She wants to see the aphasia virus episode because it is about the dissolution of community. Tenagra on the other hand means union. Sherry drives us back to the dorm and we go thru security with the guest passes. They say Guest of Al Filreis. 888-89-1035. Ex: 0-6/30/97 ACAD. PRG. IN RES. PENNcard is the property of the University of Pennsylvania and is not transferable. It should be carried at all times and presented upon request. There is a charge for replacement of a lost card. We go to sleep. Writer's House opens at noon and people walk in from the hurricane and meet. Shawn takes our orders for cheesesteaks. Delivery will take too long. She and Juliana go out into the hurricane for pick up. Louis is reading Laura Riding essays and says she was no angel. Who was I wonder. Louis then wants to look at my hat. I hand it to him and he looks inside and says adam. I ask Chris about his snake line and he says remember the don't tread on me flag? We had a flag with snake on it. I think about my car and run into the hurricane behind Writer's House to look for it. I walk back to Writer's House and kick a beam on the porch and laugh. The cheesesteaks arrive. I tell about the car. Juliana laughs. The cheesesteaks are good. Shawn has figured out where the car is and she and Juliana have gone to a cash machine and hailed a cab. Chris goes in the cab too and it's a full cab with a carribean driver who smokes Marlboro reds. vare vare it's exit 42 on 76 vare east like valley forge 70 hold on a minute 2 blocks away lot rain miss luther miss luther roger give me 1 minute 2700 even standing by the door is mary 924 the flag had a snake on it 63rd is chestnut ha ha ha say girlfriend what's the exit 42 what's the place r&k towing do you have cable do you have cable a better country with a snake on the flag 924 apt a The Sunoco balls are numbered 550 & 536 and exist in a field of cultivation. Juliana pays $80 as I dig out my license. UPENN will reimburse her when she presents the receipt. We get lost on the drive back to campus. My passengers hold the softballs in the back seat and comment. Juliana notes that one says Fitterman and one says Douglass. She likes the one named Douglass. Shawn announces she played softball in high school and at UPENN. Fastpitch. I say I find that fastpitch softball is harder to play than hardball. We learn Shawn used to pitch and struck out lots and hit a few batters and that made people mad until she found her love of poetry. We're getting more & more lost in the hurricane and find ourselves approaching the Walt Whitman bridge. Chris says stop stop turn around turn around we're going to end up in Willmington we're going to end up in Willmington. Chris there is nowhere to stop or turn around. Beatific Chris is agitated so a service road appears. A sign says To Refineries and I jerk the car to the right. Fields of numbered tanks calm us down. We drive under the Walt Whitman and find another service road that leads back to the 291 and our way. Juliana says that's the most fun she's had in a long time. I thank Chris for his advice. The car we leave in a meter and head back inside Writer's House. Soon there will be a talk in the livingroom. Gil will show and Bob and Teresa and Louis and Dave. Josh & Shawn are managing. Gil sits down next to me so I try and flatter him. Your burning deck book has a lot of passion for how sparse it is. I tell him yes he should take it as a complement. The tape recorder starts. Gil talks about Beatitude and SF in the early 70s and kush. He started Paper Air to talk back to those friends when he moved to Phili. The editors in turn say things about their mags. Juliana Chain, Bob Hills, Dave X-Connect, Teresa Painted Bride and Louis Hole. Bob asks Louis about Vancouver and Louis talks about Ottawa. Bob asks a two-part question of the three visitors and suddenly it's an interview. Are you a language poet & do you have any hostility toward language poetry. Juliana goes first. It's her tradition and she has no Oedipal problems. Her eyes look like Cal Ripken's. Chris goes next and says he was already an ashberian street poet before he came to language poetry and so had a certain amount of hostility toward it. Chris is looking right at Gil. Why are you looking at me Chris? We laugh. Then I say I can't be a language poet because I wasn't there then. I say language poets were some my of teachers and I was receptive to the work because I had no poetry background having just come from the sciences. It wasn't all fluffy and stuff I say. I also say that I admire their community model but don't feel any compulsion to replicate or riff their forms. Then I describe Juliana's theory as a way of talking about generational difference and feel like I've stolen her theory. She says ya, Lee Ann is doing it and her Bard students are confused about their genders. Bob says but Carla and Lyn have the sex piece. Yes they do and it's hot I say and he says Carla's deSade piece is too & I disagree thinking it's more of a mind fuck than a fuck fuck but instead I say it doesn't turn me on. Bob says Ron has sex in his work. I think Bob is waiting for me to address the puking blow job line and I bite. It doesn't turn me on I say. Somehow we've gotten off Juliana's theory and on to straight sex. She is the only one in the interview to say fuck. We eat at Chili's on the Writer's House budget. There is talk of movie star names & middle names & meanings of last names & street names. The food arrives and Louis ends up with the best name. After dinner we go out into the hurricane. We are careful to keep our umbrellas pointed to the sources of the shifting wind. Vance meets us on the way in and knows about the car. Goodbye's are said to those at Writer's House. Louis gives the best goodbye: Dare I say Juliana, I've never seen you laugh so much. There, I said it. Josh needs to clean up the room and Chris is getting a ride back to new york in the car. They want to come to the room now and I want them to wait at Writer's House. They win and walk to the room. Juliana & I take the car. Juliana says Louis is great. Ya I say. I fell in love with him. I guess we're going to have to make him tapes when he can no longer walk into things. I'm soaked. I start undressing and look at Chris & Josh and snit you want to watch me undress? They leave the room. I change and feel guilty for snitting and give Josh some books and say come stay with me in New York. Chris comes back in the room and comments on my changed appearance. We sit on the floor and try to map a route out of Phili. We take a long time to decide on the route. I want to go interstate because of the hurricane but Chris is afraid we'll end up in Willmington. Juliana & I look at each other and laugh. Chris, we came from Willmington. Chris is very funny on the drive home. He says in future interviews we should answer questions in a smart alec way like the Beatles. Juliana says nobody's going to ask us when we last cut our hair. However when I think back to the interview Juliana did give an answer like that. Bob asked her what it was like to be a writer in New York. Juliana said there's a lot of nice people to talk to. What?? In New York there's a lot of nice people to talk to. We drop Chris in Jersey City and head to Brooklyn. Jennifer's new books are there and I rip open the package and look at the cover of Imagination Verses. How french I say and swoon when I read what she signed inside: For Bill -- There will always be room for you in my heart's stable! Thank you for being ever tender. love, Jennifer Then I read With a Preface by the Author and laugh and love her fanciful turns and turn to the preface. Even The Love Poem Agitates The Beloved To Fall In Love With The Poet. It's a handsome collection. Juliana likes it. ---------- Thanks to everyone that helped me, & please, help me once again. Bill ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 21:50:46 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: DS Subject: Re: student sincerity I've often though Amnesty international should intervene on behalf of those forced to listen to him... (or worse read his poetry) At 01:36 PM 10/15/96 +1000, you wrote: >What about Nick Cave for next years Nobel prize? > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 07:50:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Trip Report thanks for the trip report bill, wish Ida bin there. the folks that drove me to my gig at the writers house (back in feb) also got ticketed for where they parked. i had a great time too. bob was a terrific host and josh and shawn and tim were totally cool. i love the idea of the writers house. my friend david wallace, a medievalist, just left UMN's crumbling morass for Penn's ivied halls, so you phillies, please be nice to him if you cross his path. he says it's a treat to be at a place where colleagues like what they do and students come to class prepared. xo, md ps maybe there's something about that writers' house...i missed my gig due to heavy snowstorm and delayed plane, bob waited 2 hrs for me at the cold gray train station, we rescheduled for the following day. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 12:48:23 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Sound & Language event FRIDAY 18th October from 9pm - 2am Sound & Language curates: The Night of the Living Tongues with: Asian Dub Foundation (rap, dub, drum and bass) Aaron Williamson (performance poet) Orphan Drift (the curse of the vernacular) Ronald Fraser-Monro (Barbara Tartland and T.S.Idiot herselves) Josefina Cupido (one woman one drum) Sianed Jones / Martin Sercombe installation (horizon rushes) the event is Free - with donations towards the disability access fund at Colchester Arts Centre Church Street Colchester CO1 1NF (01206 577301) all welcome - capacity venue - come early to be safe rather than sorry message ends love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 00:32:41 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: student sincerity In-Reply-To: <199610150850.VAA03972@ihug.co.nz> Oh really!! I can't think of anyone who is forced to listen to Nick Cave & beleive it or not some people actually do come to 'serious' poetry after starting out on the easy stuff like Mr Cave. On Tue, 15 Oct 1996, DS wrote: > I've often though Amnesty international should intervene on behalf of those > forced to listen to him... (or worse read his poetry) > > > At 01:36 PM 10/15/96 +1000, you wrote: > >What about Nick Cave for next years Nobel prize? > > > ^X ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 10:17:09 CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Zukowski Subject: Private's Coming Out Private Arts #10, a Special Anniversary Issue contains old faves and new raves, " . . . a swirling range of poetry and fiction . . . as well as photographic essays and mixed media pieces combining language and art . . . beautifully put together, if a bit daunting . . ." (Literary Magazine Review) "The page is now a living surface. Fluidity is the order of the day." (Metropolis) Private Arts 10 features: Charles Bernstein, Star Black, Norma Cole, Larry Eigner, Lyn Hejinian, John Knoepfle, Richard Kostelanetz, Douglas Messerli, Ralph J. Mills Jr., Ursule Molinaro, Ed Paschke, Christy Sheffield Sanford, Leslie Scalapino, Christopher Sorrentino, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, David Foster Wallace, Rosanne Wasserman, Curtis White, John Yau, and several others. Price: $15 plus shipping Buy now, pay now--or later with Visa or MasterCard. E-mail your order, specifying the type of card along with the name that appears on the card, the card number, and expiration date to: ziozio@aol.com and make sure to include your full shipping address. Copies of Private Arts 8 and 9--Special Double Issue are available for $12 plus shipping. ------------------------- "adjacent actuality naturally just happens inspiring awe accuracy false reminiscence as the murmur necessary and sufficient to the intimate grandeur of morning" --from Private Arts 10 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 11:52:59 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: ye olde music thread I get migraines from the music of Nick Cave. However, that same music has been known to cure hives. agitatedly, Jordan, who has been miffed since last year when Herb Levy referred to the music of Brian Eno as fit only for poseurs ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 11:26:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: student sincerity Comments: To: alan clara sondheim Okay. Scratch "authenticity." Try "earned appropriation" instead. But what would constitute such? Good point re: context & audience, Alan. As "documents of culture," everything considered such is fair game for analysis - pop songs as well as poetry. Still, I'm not sure we can hold a pop song accountable in the same way we do a poem. Its aims are different. For instance (a broad generalization here, for which I may be crucified): songs tend to play down to an audience, poems tend to play up. On the other hand, when I was going through my divorce ten years ago, no poem in the world offered me as much comfort as maudlin country songs on a jukebox in a rundown bar. This was after a number of beers, of course. (Of course). Patrick ---------- From: alan clara sondheim To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: student sincerity Date: Monday, October 14, 1996 10:30PM Well, rather than bringing philosophy into it, let's continue in our usual fashion of disparaging popular poets and poems, pop music, and anything else that doesn't meet our unstated standards. Because after all, we know better. We're experimental. I agree - no philosophy - just pure opinion. I LOVE IT http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ faith has no interval ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 11:29:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Kerouac,bpNichol & listening There is a good Kerouac song--"Kerouac" by Willie "Loco" Alexander and the Boom Boom Band. (That song and "MASS.AVE" were regional Boston hits and remain Boston radio played classics to this day. Wiile was in The Lost in the Sixties and later in one of last incarnations of the Velvet Underground before forming the Boom Boom Band.Willie has a cult following in France--the journal Nineteen did a special on him and various collections of his work have come out on the New Rose label.) Alan Sondheim had a good point re listening to popular music. Kerouac's use of popular songs as well as jazz is well known. (See the "Tapes" sections of Visions of Cody for example.) bpNichol made great use of popular music. Karl Young has noted bp's interest in why people liked what they liked and bp's checking out Guy Lombardo lps as an example. Paul Dutton, in "bpNichol and the Past-Present of a Future Music" (Musicworks #44) writes: "bpNichol's taste in music was eclectic, his love of it abiding, his appetite for it inexhaustible, his knowledge of it broad and deep. He was familiar equally with jazz from its roots through to its latest developments, with the range of pop musics from the twenties to the eighties, with Broadway and film musicals, and with the works of contemporary composers. He was as eager to attend a performance of a Stockhausen work as to go to an Ornette Coleman concert, a Tony Bennet show, or a Rod Stewart rock-up". bpNichol frequently cites Coleman's Free Jazz lp as having "cleansed my ears". A range and freedom in listening opens possibilities in writing for the poet. Don Cherry, who plays on Free Jazz, used to enjoy reading aloud the poems of "Leroi Jones" while simultaneoulsy putting on rural blues lps, Dous'n'Gouni music from Mali, early Neil Young, the theme song from "Viva Zapata" and Melanie's "Candles in the Rain". On "Sonny's Time Now" you can hear Sonny Murray, Albert Ayler and Don Cherry playing with "Leroi Jones" reading/performing. CDs of Kerouac reading to jazz are readily available. "Hey, Jack Kerouac" could be a vehicle to get people/students into listening to music in relation to writing via sounds rather than "meaning" of lyrics. Writing in relation to notation--which could be way to bring in area of visual poetry as well--relation of notation of writing to visual presentation--Kerouac's "Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form" for example. Kerouac in "Esssentials of Spontaneous Prose": "sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image". bpNichol from Journeying and the Returns, quoted by Dutton: "I place myself there, with them, whoever they are, wherever they are, who seek to reach themselves and the other thru the poem by as many exits and entrances as are possible". Might be interesting to see/hear/read what exits and entrances could be made of/with "hey, Jack Kerouac" by using methods of notation, sketching and blowing Kerouac and bpNichol open as possibilities in writing. --dave baptiste chirot ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 14:12:14 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: alan clara sondheim Subject: Re: student sincerity Comments: To: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" In-Reply-To: <01IAO4VGG0TA9JDYPV@iix.com> Songs can be difficult as well in a variety of ways, and it's hard to tell where pop ends and something else begins - think of Cabaret Voltaire in the 70s and 80s, or SPK for example. I also think of the lyrics of, say, Gang of Four, which, as I remember, were pretty sophisticated. In any case, these musics aren't particularly easy - just as following a solo in heavy metal - really following it - isn't easy either. So it becomes a matter of odd definition - what constitutes a pop song as such? And is there pop poetry? (Joyce Kilmer, Edgar Guest, etc.?) Alan On Tue, 15 Oct 1996, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: > > Okay. Scratch "authenticity." Try "earned appropriation" instead. But what > would constitute such? Good point re: context & audience, Alan. As > "documents of culture," everything considered such is fair game for analysis > - pop songs as well as poetry. Still, I'm not sure we can hold a pop song > accountable in the same way we do a poem. Its aims are different. For > instance (a broad generalization here, for which I may be crucified): songs > tend to play down to an audience, poems tend to play up. On the other hand, > when I was going through my divorce ten years ago, no poem in the world > offered me as much comfort as maudlin country songs on a jukebox in a > rundown bar. This was after a number of beers, of course. (Of course). > > Patrick > ---------- > From: alan clara sondheim > To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS > Subject: Re: student sincerity > Date: Monday, October 14, 1996 10:30PM > > > Well, rather than bringing philosophy into it, let's continue in our usual > fashion of disparaging popular poets and poems, pop music, and anything > else that doesn't meet our unstated standards. Because after all, we know > better. We're experimental. > > I agree - no philosophy - just pure opinion. I LOVE IT > > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html > images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ > faith has no interval > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ faith has no interval ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 14:05:10 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: another reading in RI Comments: To: cap-l@tc.umn.edu for all you southern New England inchworms, glow-worms, & earwigs - another reading at Native Gallery: Karen Donovan & Walker Rumble of Oat City Press will read from their work and unfold some of their fine letterpress printing. Friday, Nov. 8th, at 8 pm, right after the opening for the November gallery show. Native Gallery, 387 Charles St, Providence. Right off 95 at the junction with Route 146; call 401-521-3554 for info & directions. Free (we pass the hat); refreshments (gallery show opening starts at 5:30). Sponsored by da Poetry Mission. Jack Spandrift will probably not be there (I've asked him to spend some quality time with his pit bull). - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 19:45:03 BST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ira Lightman Subject: Re: How To Not Read As a British poet, I'm amazed that nobody has raised a small hand of reservation about Steve Evans' review of the TLS review of Conductors of Chaos. I don't agree at all with Mark Wallace that Steve Evans should consider more widely circulating this review; it just about works in the context of this group, where, much to my own personal regret, we experimentalists get more of our chests as outbursts, especially versus the mainstream, than we do engage in real debate. I found Keith Tuma's remarks at least a little bit informed about Britain; but I disagree entirely that the review had a strict Movement agenda; Robert Potts' citing of Donald Davie does not automatically make a Movement agenda; more likely, I think, a Davie agenda, a canon drawn from Davie's enthusiasms like Jack Clemo, MacDiarmid, Bunting, Feinstein, Tomlinson and Sisson; none of these poets were part of the movement, nor benefitted from them. Steve Evans, if you're reading this, I recommend Davie's Under Briggflatts A History of British Poetry 1960-88, it's much more complex and critically well written than Potts' piece (or your own, I might as well join this stonefight from glasshouses) and justifies Potts' enthusiasm for Davie. I think Steve Evans piece, as Derrida said of Freud's reading of the Emperor's New Clothes, existed before the review and makes very little engagement with it. By engagement I mean what I think Davie meant about it being counter-productive to take sides; an act of engagement involves concession, taking criticism, not wholesale rebuffing plus character assassination. I don't know Robert Potts, but I think Steve Evans has misread his tone and attacked him unfairly. People who live in glasshouses and throw stones at others' critical prose are exemplified by remarks like: "a pure example of xenophobic reading" How pure? Xenophobic? "Hating all"? When he makes a point of applauding some? My reading of the review is that Potts doesn't like capitalism either, so agrees with the aims of the anti-capitalists in the book but questions whether they succeed (and further speculates how such aims might). His use of Davie's remarks about having some respect for the person who pays for your book *can* be sidestepped, but not by branding Potts and Davie as collaborators in capitalism. First of all, where's the distinction in Steve Evans' piece between multinational capitalism and small business? Davie's father was a shop keeper, running a small business. Many of the poets I, and I suspect Steve Evans, like have come to us via thrifty small businesses ie small presses. If you believe writing should be given away, not sold, which is what I often do with my writing, as a kind of ambassadorship or discipleship of not just me but poetics, then that too is a complication to confront Robert Potts with. But saying he is just conforming to the market doesn't have proper historical or theoretical resonance as a critique. The market in this sense is, I assume, meant to stand for lowest common denominator spoon-feeding. Davie didn't advocate that, as one of the best writers on Pound and what we have to learn about prosody and music from Pound (which, I think, Potts is right to say many of the Chaos poets ignore, and mostly through inability with prosody and music, of the sort Davie tried hard, in his poetry small business entrepreneurship, to remedy.) It's true that Potts follows (and narrows the McDiarmid and Pound loving poetry of ideas loving) Davie in preferring lyric poetry of place: the poet in a landscape responding in conventional syntax. Still, Davie had a lot to say, that the Chaos poets could learn, about how taking the lyric stance one can then work on the music of the writing; it's true that this sometimes leads to critics saying no non-conventional syntax can have music, but that's not what Davie says about Pound. Does anarchy on the page create anarchy, freedom create freedom? Potts seems to me to ask if the Chaos poets manage what they think or want to do. I think he fails, badly and reprehensibly, to acknowledge Conductors of Chaos as an overview of a culture that sometimes does work best when talking to itself; he just quickly pricks its pretensions to effectiveness as a revolution. That's why he compares Davie's idea of a civil contract with what he sees here as a religious cult. A lot of his review hums with the resentment and the snooty behaviour towards outsiders that jolly well is prevalent in a lot of avant-garde poetry events in Britain (Cris Cheek's music and poetry events being a notable exception). He mentions the CCCP in Cambridge. Well, it bloody well is unfriendly to outsiders. He mentions Andrew Duncan's essay from Angel Exhaust because it shows an insider making the point that it's counter-productive and uncomfortable if you are inside and don't like brotherhood attitudes. The scene may very well by different in the US, and if Steve Evans has experienced rudeness from critics about a US scene less cult-ish than I share his rage at their over-reaction. In the UK, however, it's not entirely unjustified. It takes a long time to get used to the work on the page, and the public readings you can go to here don't help; indeed, I felt like a stupid person sitting not completely enwrapped, and indeed I feel *braved* the surface rudeness to get something from the poetics here. There is a difference between surface difficulty from a poet who is respectful and loving, and a surface rudeness from a poet who's rude and solitary and you only get anything from them in spite of them. Shouldn't we be aware of predecessors? Shouldn't Eliot be named? I can think of many, not least the more than occasionally ranty Andrew Duncan, who could benefit from thinking: "am I too much like Pound? How in a good way? How in a bad way?" I won't go on, but I feel Steve Evans has caricatured Robert Potts as a High Establishment figure, and that he's got him wrong, and missed some of the good points of the review: some warnings, now these poets are in the public domain, about why readers who basically vote with their attendance and hard- earned money and precious time would say some of these things if they were articulate. That would start the debate, and, I agree with Steve Evans that we could reason with their prejudices, slowly win them over, as we could never Robert Potts. But he is giving us some means to do this with his criticisms and ducking the criticisms means ducking an opportunity - not to conform, but to win over. Ira Lightman ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 11:58:42 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: return of the repressed (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 08:20:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Aldon L. Nielsen To: UB Poetics discussion group Cc: Recipients of POETICS digests Subject: Re: return of the repressed after a period of involuntary lurking, I am again able to telnet my way out of Colorado and onto my account in California,,, couple quickies today -- Just reading Lisa Jarnot's new Burning Deck Press book and advise all to get a copy at once -- great work Somebody (Loss?) reviewing Baraka at the Creeley bash said something about a Littoral Books publication by Baraka -- no Littoral books to be had in Boulder, it would seem -- can you give me title or any other info. about this book? Address or email of littoral?? (Tattered Cover in Denver, for all its other merits, has practically no small press poetry!) "bad song lyric, not a poem" -- now that's a binary opposition I'd never thought to see here -- when IS a song lyric a poem, when it's good? good to be back on the list -- though lurking had its solitary pleasures -- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 13:50:05 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: student sincerity I'm sorry. Could we start over? Who is Nick Cave? >I've often though Amnesty international should intervene on behalf of those >forced to listen to him... (or worse read his poetry) > > >At 01:36 PM 10/15/96 +1000, you wrote: >>What about Nick Cave for next years Nobel prize? >> George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 13:50:12 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Kerouac,bpNichol & listening Thanks for nice full post, David. People probably also know about a Ramblin' Jack Elliott song about Kerouac, which makes some sense, and is nowhere near stupid appropriation, because Jack and Jack were friends in the Village long ago. Also regarding bpNichol and his wide taste in music. He had tapes of all the Fred and Ginger movies. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 14:13:36 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: New Music Web tour Since there seems to be some interest in new music here let me briefly note that Arts Wire has just put up a Web "tour" of new music sites I did for them. It lists about 60-70 new music sites with brief descriptions. And if you want to learn more about Arts Wire, check out their general site. & to tie this in further to the poetics list, This month (poetics-list's own) Joseph Zitt is a guest of the Arts Wire New Music conference. I haven't had time to check in over there yet, but I'll be talk talking with you Joe. Bests Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 17:42:05 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: return of the repressed (fwd) You're quite right, Aldon. We should pay _no_ attention whatever to _context_. A text is the same whether it's a song lyric given as an example of popular treatments of the life of Kerouac on a listserv discussion of Beat Poetry, or given as an example of bad poetry on a listserv discussion of Important Poetry; or to take another example, could somebody please post the Potts piece from the TLS that Steve Evans was responding to? I thought there were some things in the piece (and not just mild praise of Douglas Oliver) that made it pleasantly eccentric and not unilaterally hostile. True, Potts seemed to be calling all of Prynne's work nonsense. Isn't there some sense in which this kind of review can be taken as high praise? Or, what could one say about Prynne's (or Ashbery's) work to demonstrate how it comes close to completing thoughts and clauses, and then to point toward I don't know a historical basis for _sublimity_? (Is this Potts the same person who wrote _Statutes of Liberty_, a to me hostile-seeming account of the New York School by a British critic? If so, then...) Grr, Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 18:26:28 +0000 Reply-To: dmachlin@flotsam.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Dan Machlin Subject: Reading: Charles Bernstein & John Kinsella Mark your calendars: CHARLES BERNSTEIN JOHN KINSELLA Sunday, November 17th, 7:00 p.m. sharp @ The Segue Performance Space & Poetry Archive 303 East 8th Street, NY, NY (betw. Aves B & C) Buzz 1R Suggested Contribution $5.00 (212) 674-0199 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 15:33:41 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeremy F Green Subject: Re: return of the repressed (fwd) In-Reply-To: Is this Potts the same person who wrote _Statutes of Liberty_, a to me > hostile-seeming account of the New York School by a British critic? If so, > then...) > > Grr, > Jordan > No, Geoff Ward wrote _Statutes of Liberty_. I think he would be pretty surprised to hear that the book was hostile to NY School (it seemed to me, on the other hand, unhelpfully hostile to theory). ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 15:58:01 -0700 Reply-To: Jeremy F Green Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeremy F Green Subject: Re: How To Not Read In-Reply-To: Thanks to Ira Lightman for opening up the thread on the _Conductors of Chaos_ review. A couple of thoughts: yes, we certainly should be making better distinctions (and not just the one between e-mail and published critical prose), and confusing shopkeepers with multinational corporations is dangerous indeed, though of course there is a name for this confusion: Thatcherism. Aren't there, in any case, good reasons for resisting the plain dealing/plain talking analogy (to hark back to Keith Tuma's point about the 'Movement'--the only mention of Prynne in Larkin's letters is when the former is unfavorably compared to Patience Strong, a wrongly reviled poet [Larkin says--I'm relying on memory] who at least knew that language was there to communicate!). Another question: is small press poetry publishing really the same as running a shop to make a profit? What sort of commodity is a poem? (there is a wonderful meditation on this in B.Catling's piece "The Stumbling Block" included in _Conductors of Chaos_). And don't we also have to come up with more nuanced categories than anti-capitalist vs. collaborator with capitalism? Jeremy Green ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:15:40 +1100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pam Brown Subject: Songs "bad song lyric, not a poem" - An old edict - "anything too silly to be said can be sung." Pam Brown ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 13:15:34 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: Actions on Doshi-Hussain Gufa (Press Release) (fwd) Please forward this to all your friends, colleagues, comrades who you believe will have a stake in this. This is a general call to all creative or socially-conscious people: artists, film-makers, literateurs, etc. etc. please fax an image, poem or short piece of prose or e-mail a letter to one of the following addresses. They are followed by the press release: e-mail: shmt.sahmat@axcess.net.in fax (images): 91-11-335-5845 91-11-462-2017 Please do this before Thursday noon, IST. Love, Arindam PRESS RELEASE Over 100 artists, writers, intellectuals, poets, theatre persons and gallery owners, among whom were notable artists Satish Gujral, Bhabesh Sanyal, A. Ramachandran, Manjit Bawa, Arpita Singh, Manu Parekh, Vivan Sundaram and Jatin Das; writers and critics Bhisham Sahni, Nirmal Verma, Krishen Vallabh Vaid, Ashok Vajpayeee, Keshav Malik and Suneet Chopra; gallery owners Rekha Puri, Renu Modi, and Arun Vadhera; poets Manglesh Dabral and Pankaj Singh; and theatre persons N.K. Sharma, Ram Gopal Bajaj and film critic Aruna Vasudev, gathered in the lawns of Rabindra Bhawan to protest against the vandalism indulged in by the Bajrang Dal at Ahmedabad that led to the destruction of a large number of irreplaceable works of art by the eminent painter M. F. Husain. Speaking on the occasion, there was unanimity among artists, writers and specialists that those who had committed this act had no comprehension of our temple iconography or cultural traditions. They further called on the Government of india and the state governments of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, to ensure that those spreading communal propaganda against the noted painter be brought to book and the vandals punished. To register their protestt against this unprecedented savagery, they called for an all India Protest Day on 18th October, to be observed with the "Closure of all art galleries, schools and institutions" and have called on artists all over the country to fax a drawing of Saraswati or an image of protest with their statements in support of Husain to the SAHMAT office in New Delhi as the art world denies the right of any single institution or set of institutions to dictate what we should paint. The images should be faxed by Thursday 12 noon at fax numbers 011-3355845 or 011-4622017. Madhavi Parekh, Anzum Singh, Renu Modi, Sadre Alam, Zargar Zahoor, S.P. Singh, Mir Imtiaz, Rajeev Bhargav, Sambhavi, Geeti Sen, Shikha Trivedi, Bulbul Sharma, Aruna Vasudev, Rashmi Vajpayee, Amrut Patel, Manu Rewal, Sudip Roy, Reya Thakur, Sujata Dere, Meera Menezes, Ujjwal Gupta, Alpana, Sushma Gupta, soma Basu, Trikha Gupta, Rekha Purie, Pankaj Singh, Kanchan Chandra, Keshav Mallick, Manu Parekh, Vivan Sundaram, Paramjit Singh, Arpita Singh, Manisha Parekh, Jhupu Adhikari, Ruchira Gupta, Anil Chandra. %%% overflow headers %%% To: poco , Multiple recipients of list SASIALIT , Vivek Agrawal , Niraj Anand , Sonit Bafna , Ritu Bhatt , Preeti Chopra , Geeta Cowlagi , Ananya Das , Shubhagato Dasgupta , Aparna U Datey , Sambit Datta , Abhilash Dave , Ashish Dave , Partho Dutta , Deb Dutta Ganguly , Nagaraja Harshadeep , "Sanjay M. Kewlani" , Tarun Khanna , kamal kishore , Satish K Kolluri , Manish Kothari , KRISHNAN , Amlan Majumdar , Minakshi Maniben , Sapna Mehta , Dipankar Mukherjee , "Muhammad I. Muzaffar" , "Maulik K. Parikh" , Meghana Parikh , Vaishali Patel , Vikramaditya Prakash , Vidhya Sampath , Mahua Sarkar , Sasha Sattar , Shukla Sawant , Navin Saxena , Peter Scriver , Jagan Arvind Shah , Setu Shah , Charu Sharma , Manu Prithvish Sobti , union street <102630.1201@compuserve.com>, "Subramaniam K. Ramakrishnan" , Pratap Talwar %%% end overflow headers %%% --- from list postcolonial@lists.village.virginia.edu --- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 19:16:50 +0000 Reply-To: dmachlin@flotsam.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Dan Machlin Subject: Re: Invasion of the reading reminders THIS THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 7:30 p.m., Sugg. $3.00 The Segue Performance Space & Poetry Archive 303 East 8th Street, NY, NY (betw. B & C) JULIE PATTON (Performance Texts) LEE ANN BROWN (New Video Work + Writings) JP&LB (Textual Collaborations/Installation) JULIE PATTON recently returned from a Worldwide Tour with musician Don Byron, with whom she performed improvised spoken-word texts. Days ago she participated in a Sound Poetry conference in Geneva, Switz. She is a New York City visual artist, performer and poet who has exhibited and performed her work internationally for over a decade and at the Whitney, New York Shakespeare Festival and Lincoln Center. Other recent performances of hers included the Festival Internacional de Poesia en Medelin, and Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna, Austria. She has been on the faculty of The Naropa Institute since 1994. LEE ANN BROWN is the recent recipient of The New American Poetry Prize and her book POLYVERSE is forthcoming from Sun & Moon Press (Spring 1997). She also has new poems in Resistor Magazine. She is the editor of Tender Buttons Press, a press devoted to experimental writing by women, and has taught filmmaking at the University of Rhode Island and writing at The Naropa Institute. The two short videos she will be showing were filmed in Super8 last summer at the Royaumont Institute in France and are said to include celebrity cameos. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:23:28 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: student sincerity On the other hand, >when I was going through my divorce ten years ago, no poem in the world >offered me as much comfort as maudlin country songs on a jukebox in a >rundown bar. This was after a number of beers, of course. (Of course). I can remeber a relationship breakup where I used a mixture of early Michael Dransfield poetry STREETS OF THE LONG VOYAGE especially combined with the Sex Pistols. A very potent combination......... Mark Roberts Student Systems Project Officer & User Representative SIS Team. Information Systems University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Ph. (02) 93517710 Mobile 015063970 Fax (02) 93517711 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:40:47 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: Songs >"bad song lyric, not a poem" - > >An old edict - "anything too silly to be said can be sung." > >Pam Brown > > my grandmother once said....... "anything too silly to be said should be written down in sonnet form" sorry pam :) Mark Roberts Student Systems Project Officer & User Representative SIS Team. Information Systems University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Ph. (02) 93517710 Mobile 015063970 Fax (02) 93517711 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 19:48:18 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Tim Davis / Juliana Spahr @ Poetry City Believe by doubting Tim Davis (_The Analogy Guild_) and Juliana Spahr (_Nuclear_, _Testimony_, _Response_) will be reading their poetry at Poetry City on FRIDAY the 18th at 7 p.m. in the offices of Teachers & Writers Collaborative 5 Union Square West, NYC though if you go to Union Square anywhere else there may be a Union Square and imagine Tim and Juliana are there, reading send a report all poetry is or should be in quatrains! ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 17:04:19 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Hey Natalie Merchant I've always interpreted the song as poking some gentle fun at the Beat mythos, with the "Allen baby" and "Billy" references. The now-famous indetectibility of e-mailed irony is here made doubly difficult by the transcription of sung, voiced lyrics in transcription. Yuck. This is not my favorite song on the album it comes from, but hey Jordan, what about "A Campfire Song", "Verdi Cries", and/or "Don't Talk"? ********************************** sjcarll@slip.net Steve Carll http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. --Paul Celan ********************************** ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:16:21 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: ye olde music thread >I get migraines from the music of Nick Cave. >However, that same music has been known to cure hives. > >agitatedly, >Jordan, >who has been miffed since last year >when Herb Levy referred to the music of Brian Eno >as fit only for poseurs > > I can remember talking about Cave oh 18 months ago in a thread which again (I think started with Dylan) & I am probably going to make the same point as I did then.........But I 'discovered' poetry in books (you know real poetry in small press books and magazines which are really hard to get if you are 16 and don't know about the 2 trendy inner city bookshops which stocked one or two of these magazines in the late 70s) after listening critically to rock song lyrics (you know punk had just happened -Radio Birdman/The Saints). I know it is really easy to dismiss people like Dylan (early) and so on - but I think there is probably more 'cross over' than some in the academy would care to admit. Mark Roberts Student Systems Project Officer & User Representative SIS Team. Information Systems University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Ph. (02) 93517710 Mobile 015063970 Fax (02) 93517711 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 17:07:47 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: repressing the returned In-Reply-To: Ah yes, first message back on the list and I've managed to attract sarcasm already -- I believe I did read and comprehend the context of the remark about a bad song lyric vs. a poem -- but maybe I missed something -- Why would anybody ever think that a text is always "the same"? I neither think such a thing, nor suggest such in my short remark -- What I was wondering about was -- what is the critical context in which song lyric (bad or good) is opposed to "poem" (bad or good / example of something in a class or free-floating in the air, whatever -- it was an opposition that surprised me -- still does) I neither failed to attend to the context nor asked that anybody else do so -- Though I did assume an audience that had read the exchange to which I alluded --I'll confess to that -- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 21:37:37 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: chaos Oopa, all I should have said was I cannot stand "I'd never thought to see here" because it was the one thing "I'd never thought to see here." Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 20:40:16 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: How To Not Read In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 15 Oct 1996 19:45:03 BST from Ira-- Surely you wouldn't disagree that _Purity of Diction in English Verse_ (1952)-- the Davie book cited by Potts--was crucial to the "Movement"? Otherwise there's just the journalism of Larkin, etc. The fact that Davie attacked the Movement a few years later, the fact that _Under Briggflatts_ is a very different book (might as well plug my now-ancient review of it in Contemporary Literature, written before I had read most of the poets in _C of C_)--all this is beside the point. Those folks you mention Davie as having supported (Bunting, for instance, but very much Davie's Bunting) are nowhere mentioned in Potts' review. The blunt opposition Potts makes between "Davie's civic contract" and a "more religious covenant with the faithful" seems to me to 1) erase Davie's work post-conversion and (more importantly) 2) make Iain Sinclair's interests and framework representative of a very diverse group of "avant-garde" poets. Allen Fisher, for instance, was explicitly critical of Sinclair in his review of _A Various Art_, which Davie also reviewed by the way, taking the opportunity to say that he wished his former student Prynne would say what he was up to and that, well, Douglas Oliver and a few others in that earlier anthology were okay and the anthology should be applauded. Besides, I never said that Potts' values were exactly those of the "Movement," but rather an extension of them, a frame expanding slightly in order to contain some of that which challenges it so as not to break. Besides Oliver it's Tony Lopez, Barry MacSweeney, Michael Haslam, Andrew Crozier, Lee Harwood, and Denise Riley he singles out for praise. I imagine that, with more time than I have tonight, one could easily figure out why he has room for these poets and not Brian Catling, cris cheek, Allen Fisher, Peter Riley, Prynne, Bill Griffiths, Caroline Bergvall, Allen Fisher, Prynne, etc. These are the poets, apparently, who "clearly have no ear at all." These are the poets who "will no doubt be satisfied that their work is simply too good for most readers, and return to their worthy isolation." Potts' equation of marginalization with willful elitism--take that you snotty rats, back to your holes--this is, for me, one of the most frustrating motifs in his review. On the back of some reading in Andrew Duncan's prose he's also caricatured "Cambridge," it seems to me, and falsely linked everybody in the book with Prynne's procedures. He's heard talk of what others have called "a convention of critical silence" and imagines he's found a motive for it: up to now these poets have only wanted to talk with one another. Now he will stand in for the public, offering a "fresh and foreign critical interrogation" to counter their whispering, deciding who should be allowed to speak rather than whisper. It's ironic that his critique of some of the work in _C of C_ is very much indebted to the criticism of a poet whose work he has no use for--Drew Milne--and also, more broadly (it seems to me) to Prynne and others associated with "Cambridge" who in criticizing the propositions of langpo poetics have been insistent in arguing that "the more common response" to "a disrupted and dehiscent information vortex" is "simply to choose to read something else." I said earlier that Potts is not "obtuse"--so I agree with you on that score. And I'm no more a fan of the chest-thumping among the avant-garde than you are, apparently: it does seem to me that there's a reluctance among experimental poets and their supporters to write critically about one another, perhaps especially in the US. And the so-called 'mainstream' is regularly caricatured, as if Frank Bidart, Dana Gioia, and Sharon Olds were one and the same poet. But when I notice the silence that is the US mainstream's critical approach to nearly all alternative poetries, or when I read Robert Potts consigning 85% of the poetry in _C of C_ to oblivion because of its purportedly "willed incoherence" and its "hideous extremes" I think that I understand why the rhetoric among some of those on this list sounds the way it does. This is not to explain or justify Steve Evans' remarks about "xenophobia" or "capitalism"-- Steve will surely speak for himself. Keith ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 19:46:47 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: the other thing I'd never thought to see here In-Reply-To: nothing to do with all genres being "equal," though even what that means (equal to each other in what regard?) unclear -- but my original point was simply that I had always thought that lyric was in fact a genre of poetry, and that I hadn't thought to see them thus opposed to one another on a "poetics" list -- Perhaps part of the problem here, my having been absent so long from the discussions in question, is that my comment is now read in the light of discussions I was not involved in??? no hierarchical comment intended with regard to other lists anywhere -- nor any argument for absolute relativism, the which I continue to find untenable -- I was chilled when chilling wasn't cool -- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 23:55:21 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: ye olde music thread Comments: cc: jdavis@PANIX.COM >Jordan, >who has been miffed since last year >when Herb Levy referred to the music of Brian Eno >as fit only for poseurs The only composer I can remember being quite so blunt about, at least on poetics-list (I'm much more opinionated in real life), is Stockhausen. Though I can certainly imagine that I may not have referred to Mr Eno with the same degree of respect he often receives. Nick Cave, on the other hand, didn't he re-invent the Child ballads? Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 17:05:01 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Roberts Subject: Re: ye olde music thread >>Jordan, >>who has been miffed since last year >>when Herb Levy referred to the music of Brian Eno >>as fit only for poseurs > >The only composer I can remember being quite so blunt about, at least on >poetics-list (I'm much more opinionated in real life), is Stockhausen. >Though I can certainly imagine that I may not have referred to Mr Eno with >the same degree of respect he often receives. > >Nick Cave, on the other hand, didn't he re-invent the Child ballads? and he sings with Kylie! Mark Roberts Student Systems Project Officer & User Representative SIS Team. Information Systems University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Ph. (02) 93517710 Mobile 015063970 Fax (02) 93517711 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:25:05 GMT0BST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Larkin Organization: UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK LIBRARY Subject: Conductors of Chaos The latest Poetry Review has a special number (amazingly enough) on modernism, postmodernism etc called "Strange Attraction". First off is a rev of C of C by Ian Samson who is positive about the poetry but (rightly I think) very robust about the introduction. And his remark that chaos can be judged on how good the conducting is and shouldn't just rely on the consistency of chyme (a an acidic stomach residue)seem s fair general comment( general is as general does) as well as a momentary resourceful counter-rhetoric. See also keith Jebb on innovatory magazines and Stephen Burt on Langpo.Although designed to be accessible, none of this is throw-away or crabby infighting. It's the sort of issue from PR that would have been unimaginable until quite recently. There is even a poem from Drew Milne. Peter Peter Larkin Philosophy & Literature Librarian University of Warwick Library,Coventry CV4 7AL UK Tel:01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211 Email: P.E.Larkin@csv.warwick.ac.uk ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 02:16:08 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden Subject: Arshile 6 http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/creeley/70th/arshile/ A6 A Magazine of the Arts Poetry GILBERT SORRENTINO ROSMARIE WALDROP KEITH WALDROP STEFANIE MARLIS TERENCE WINCH RACHEL LODEN JESSE WEINER MARK SALERNO JOCELYN SAIDENBERG CHARLES HENRI FORD Special Selection TED BERRIGAN Last Poems Fiction HUBERT SELBY, JR Two Pieces Essay ALICE NOTLEY on Frank O'Hara's Poetry Art ALEX KATZ ROBERT CREELEY "Edges" A R S H I L E P.O. Box 3 7 4 9 Los Angeles, California 9 0 0 7 8 TWO Issues: Individual $18 / Institution $25 FOUR Issues: Individual $36 / Institution $50 INDIVIDUAL Issues: Nos.1,3,5 :$8 / Nos.2,4,6 :$10 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:04:59 CDT Reply-To: tmandel@cais.cais.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Mandel Subject: exinclusio Energy spent on what to leave out -- and how and why -- makes the space smaller. Energy expended on what to include -- and how and why to include more -- makes the space larger. Dylan -- early, late -- is great. Check out "Grain of Sand" on his Shot of Love ('81) do what he do make what you do invalid? otherwise, why use what you do -- what "we" do -- to push that song to the margin? easy to confuse saying "I want the edge" with what you may really mean: "I want to be the center." Next you'll be taking on John Lennon, Irving Berlin Petrarch, and all those we have reason to believe irrelevant, as "we" knew Mandelstam and others to be 'Course that "we" can't include "you?" You are correct? The mind at once dictator of formal synthesis and razor shaving subject where every location is also a margin. Tom Mandel ************************************************* Tom Mandel * 2927 Tilden St. NW Washington DC 20008 * tmandel@1net.com vox: 202-362-1679 * fax 202-364-5349 ************************************************* ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:17:01 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Hit Lyrics Aldon -- I suppose to be etymological about it you're right, that 'lyric' mode is a subset of 'poems.' However. I hear differences between N. Merchant and T. Campion? Between R. Zimmerman and R. Grenier? Differences which imply 'generic drift'? If of course a poem is words broken up into lines then there is no difference -- no visible difference -- between a 'song lyric' and a 'poem'. But, to be less implicated in damaged forms of categorization, the set of conventions for reading (hearing) a song lyric is so distinct from those for hearing (reading) a poem -- things float differently in those different media -- that to look at one as either 'equal to' or 'subordinate to' the other is I think in the same free range where a poem can be thought of as not enough like a personal essay. Which is not to say there is no profitable interplay between 'song lyric' and 'poem'. John Taggart's work comes to mind, as do David Shapiro's, Anselm Berrigan's, and Chris Stroffolino's -- but those works seem to borrow from musical strategies of sampling, dub, minimalism, extended remix -- to take a salient moment from a 'song lyric', or rather an area of overlap between 'song lyric' and 'poem' -- and riff. Now Steve Carll's _Sincerity Loops_ is a suite of poems founded on a different, textual principle -- reassembled from song lyrics one word at a time. IT'S RAIN I hear rain-shines show when mind comes, if you hear, and the sun. If lemonade shines it, everything's weather's state, might slip. The same "they" that sip rain can run sun into you. Fine, show that the weather's me can hide their mind. If the sun starts, comes, and the dead, they can hear rain, they don't shine. Comes their rain, the shines of it to the you; when can I rain me? The fine shines show and I don't shine rain when you can. Well as rain when mind-shade heads just be. The I rain I; the me rains a you when you can. _for John Lennon_ I hope Steve doesn't mind my using him this way. And if I'm misreading his project when I suggest that his discovery of subatomic particles of meaning in 'song lyrics' is directly connected to his transformation of 'song lyrics' into 'poems' then I hope Steve (or someone) will say so. [It's possible that Steve thinks of this poem not as transformation or translation but rather as cento. In which case, my bust.] As for 'absolute relativism' being untenable, Aldon, I'm sure you're right, but I'm not sure which absolute relativism you're saying I'm trying to hold. Are you saying that I'm describing the genres of 'song lyric' and 'poetry' in a way that has overtones of 'separate but equal'? Or that to describe the differences between 'song lyrics' and 'poems' is to engage in a kind of literary cranium measurement? Or that line-broken texts which are good are poems, and line-broken texts which are bad are songs? Why you wanna treat me so bad when you know I love you? Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:32:59 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Keith Tuma and "chest thumping" While I can't claim to know in detail the problems of English poetry that Keith Tuma and Ira Lightman are debating on this list, I do greatly object to the characteriziation that Keith makes of "chest thumping" among "experimental poets," as well as his just plain wrong suggestion that experimental poets in the U.S. are not critical of each other. I don't think I really need suggest what is wrong with reducing a whole body of contemporary critical writing by experimental poets to some sort of cliche about primitive macho posturing; nonetheless, Keith, if you think recent critical work by writers like Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Nathaniel Tarn, Barrett Watten, Juliana Spahr, Lew Daly, John Noto, Charles Borkhuis, Jefferson Hansen, myself and many others can be reduced to some sort of singular "thumping" about our shared value, then you haven't been reading very closely. Let me, just in case this doesn't seem clear to you, suggest a number of texts you might read that totally bely the suggestion that "American" "experimental poets" (whatever they are, exactly) are not critical of each other, although it seems to me that you've been on this list long enough perhaps to perceive that not everybody out here is in agreement. Please read, for instance, the highly contentious discussion between Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman in Content's Dream; please read the collection Juliana, Kristin Prevallet, Pam Rehm and I edited, A POETICS OF CRITICISM, with particular attention to pieces (for this context) by Lew Daly, Jefferson Hansen, and Susan Schultz; please read POETIC BRIEFS #19 with my essay on postlanguage poetry and the various responses to it that appeared in Poetics Briefs #20; please read Charles Borkhuis' essay in ONTHEBUS on the relation between surrealism and language poetry; please read ALL the introductions to the magazine Apex of the M; please recall, if you will, the intense discussions on this poetics list between Ron Silliman, Steve Evans, Juliana Spahr, myself and others about the value of "postlanguage" poetry; please read recent issues of TALISMAN with attention to the work of John Noto and Leonard Schwarz as well as the recent highly contentious debate between Marjorie Perloff and some others on "language poetry bashing," please read the almost brand new work by Hank Lazer and Bruce Andrews now out from Northwestern (is that right folks, please help here). While I'm tempted to have some sympathy for Ira Lightman's position about Donald Davie (despite the fact that Davie's now infamous article on Lorine Neidicker is about as close to macho "chest thumping" as contemporary poetics criticism gets), Ira loses my sympathy entirely when he starts characterizing the "experimental" poetry "scene" as the SOURCE of the negative feelings and in-breeding that he suggests limit or perhaps even destroy the potential significance of "experimental poetry." I suppose I am sorry, Ira, if someone in that community was meaner to you (and perhaps to others) than he should have been, but the stance of a sort of wounded innocent that you take towards that hostility is really pretty tough to swallow. Any idea WHY experimental poets in Britan might be hostile, Ira? Could it be that for 20-30 years writers like Tom Raworth, J.H. Prynne and many others after and around them have consistently been subject to the sort of willful misreading of their intentions that Potts seems so clearly guilty of? What have they to expect from these people but more mistreatment, further willful misunderstanding, and constant attempts to deny them resources and public platforms? Your own call for censorship at the beginning of your post, Ira, makes clear to me exactly where your own sympathies finally lie. Steve Evans may be incorrect about certain details regarding the context of Potts' review, and for that he should certainly be challenged. But it's blatantly apparent that Potts is equally incorrect about many details also. And yet, Ira, you make your point of view quite clear; by all means, let Potts speak in the Times, and defend Potts wherever possible, but no, no, don't even suggest that Steve Evans should publish his response in the same forum, because, after all, he doesn't really understand, and therefore shouldn't be allowed broad public access at all. 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: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 08:39:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: How To Not Read just a quick note to say that i think ira's post, and jeremy's, and keith's, and peter's and... are bringing out salient points re steve evan's analysis/parody... i don't know mself enough about the british scene to say anything pertinent, so i'm content to lurk and listen and learn... one thing though: perhaps steve can actually *use* the material being presented here ex post facto?... i mean, if steve were to agree with ira, in part, that certain of his assertions were tilted too contra (or too pro experimental), why then no reason he couldn't revise his own writing (and thinking), right?... i guess i'm saying that what steve gave us wasn't a published document (though i'd love to see it published side-by-side with potts' piece---or as a rejoinder)... in essence, his gesture---of submitting to this forum something for our consideration---was at the very least the result of some careful thinking and writing... and perhaps we might approach his contribution, whatever our reservations, as something that might profit from our input?... just a thought, albeit a bit pedantically put// best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:57:02 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: Situation #13 Situation #13 is now available. This issue features work by Phyllis Rosenzweig (very good, a must read), Paul Long, Renee Gladman, Paul Weidenhoff, Ken Sherwood, Tod Thilleman, Graham Foust, David Baratier, William Marsh, Steve Carll, and an electronic mail renga extravaganza, arRange of Rengas. Subscriptions to Situation are $10 for four issues, or $3 for single or back issues. Please make checks payable to Mark Wallace, 10402 Ewell Ave., Kensington, MD 20895. Thump thump. /----------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | | | 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, 16 Oct 1996 09:59:31 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Subject: Re: Keith Tuma and "chest thumping" In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:32:59 -0400 from Could somebody please say in which issue of TLS the Potts potshot is thrown? I couldn't find it at the liberry. Thanks - HG ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 07:09:21 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rachel Loden Subject: editor/Arshile Just to clarify (due to backchannel confusion): Arshile is edited by Mark Salerno (not by me). Rachel http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/creeley/70th/arshile/ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 14:20:27 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Sherry Brennan Subject: nick cave Comments: cc: jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu There is cross over both poetry and writing to msuc, exp. punk and jazz, and to some extent to the academy. Burroughs and Tom Waits recent-ish collaboration (Dark Rider) is only one example. Waits is a good poet and I myself like Nick Cave, though have not read his novel. And Jeff and a guy named Billy Joe Harris here have taught undergrad lit classes on music/noise/jazz and its aesthetics and relation to writing (such as Baraka) and reading. Song lyrics, like (as) poems, can be good or bad writing, it seems to me. But, just as importantly, I think the music (underground, punk, "alternative", jazz) itself--its noise, its fragmentation, its rhythms, its dissonances--has had a great deal of impact on my own writing, and I assume on others. Look at Larry Ochs (Rova Sax) and Lyn Hejinian. xs >I can remember talking about Cave oh 18 months ago in a thread which again >(I think started with Dylan) & I am probably going to make the same point as >I did then.........But I 'discovered' poetry in books (you know real poetry >in small press books and magazines which are really hard to get if you are >16 and don't know about the 2 trendy inner city bookshops which stocked one >or two of these magazines in the late 70s) after listening critically to >rock song lyrics (you know punk had just happened -Radio Birdman/The >Saints). I know it is really easy to dismiss people like Dylan (early) and >so on - but I think there is probably more 'cross over' than some in the >academy would care to admit. > > >Mark Roberts Sherry Brennan Development Research The Pennsylvania State University (814) 863-4302 SAB5@psu.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 10:22:03 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: Keith Tuma and "chest thumping" In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:32:59 -0400 from Gee, thanks, Mark, for the bibliography. Actually, I've read nearly all of the essays you mention--from Ron and Leslie's exchange through Tarn's essay on "new forms" up through the Apex manifestos and _A Poetics of Criticism_. I've watched Bob P and Charles B and Barry W slug it out, etc. It was not my point that the so-called "experimental" poetry scene is monolithic, uncontested turf. It's simply too small a pie for that ever to be the case, though I think that one might very well identify moments of more or less consensus. The last few years have clearly seen less, as langpo no longer requires the tactical solidarity necessary to secure an audience. My point is that, often, such critique operates with the working assumption that it is not necessary even to engage the so-called "mainstream" except in the most superficial, caricatured manner. This is, in my view, a self-defeating tactic (and I speak as a supporter of many of the poetries you mention). It allows those folks to ignore you; it breeds silence and contempt; it makes a wounded rhetoric of marginalization faintly comic. If one wants to inhabit the margins as a tactic or a matter of principle, that's one thing. If one one wants to complain about the "marginalization" of experimental writing and not engage the so-called "mainstream" with some precision, contesting its claims on public space and the "center," that's another. The situation in the UK, as far as I understand it, is very different. Until very recently, "experimental" poetry has not had there the academic base of support related or (to some degree) similar poetries have managed to secure (thanks to the labors of Marjorie P and others) in the US. The best British reader of Tom Raworth, for instance, is probably John Barrell, who I believe works as an art historian. And the "mainstream" there--for this reason as well as many others--seems more static, less fluid, though what Peter Larkin says about the _Poetry Review_ (a mainstream journal if ever there was one) is encouraging. I'll close with a quote from Ron Silliman: "The term academic poetry inhibits those who use it from developing a fully nuanced reading of the very writing it seeks to identify. How are we to distinguish a Bill Knott or a James Tate from a Timothy Steele or a Frank Bidart?" I'd wager that the very rhetoric of your post nearly makes my case. keith ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 12:26:53 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Smith Subject: Re: Ronald Johnson I thought it was interesting that _Ark_, as published by Passages, now consists of three parts (triad rules!) instead of the four Johnson had once projected. He used to explain at readings the architecture of the poem as culminating in a roof or dome --what he had already published as _RADI OS_ , the writing through by erasure of Paradise Lost . Btw, I stopped by SPD last week before Kevin's play, & they have copies of _Ark_ stacked on their new titles table, so you should be able to order it from them as well. charles ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 11:49:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Re: exinclusi & listening In-Reply-To: <3264EB8C-00000001@tmandel.cais.com> Thanks to Tom Mandel for his po/em/st. Tom Mandel writes: "easy to confuse/saying 'I want the edge'/with what you may really mean: 'I want to be the center'" Pascal noted that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. He also noted that it is not the elements which are new but the order of their arrangement. (If Pascal's God is a worn out concept to readers, note that M. Pascal's probability theorems are still in use today; i.e. his work continues to be useful whether his God is or is not.) Tom Mandel points towards a working with elements rather than the imposition of categories. Stuart Hall writes of "articulation" as an arrangement of elements to produce something "new" or what Pascal calls that which is "previously unavailable to memory". As an example Hall gives the British "articulated lorry" in which a truck cab is joined to a truck bed or trailer useful for moving things. Mandel writes: "Energy spent on what to leave out/--and how and why--/makes the space smaller./ /Energy expended on what to include--and how and why/to include more--/makes the space larger." Like the Dadaists in painting, poetry,and performance William Carlos Williams noted that anything can be used to make a poem. Russolo in the Italian futurist manifesto on Noise indicates that anything may be used to "amplify" and extend the sounds available to music. (Opening up the making of 'new' instruments as well as of "new" noises/sounds--Harry Partch a later example for instance, as well as Cage and Tudor et al.) Filmmakers have long used elements taken from stock footage, stock sound recordings, "amateur" "home movies"and used them with "directed" elements, sets, actors to open film spaces. (think of Kenneth Anger's use of popular songs, tv broadcast Hollywood movies and so on in "Scorpio Rising" as one example among hundreds.) Sampling in music and "referencing" in videos extend, expose and exploit the possibilities and contradictions in the articulation of elements. In "How Are Verses Made" Mayakovsky notes that it is not the evaluation of work from the standpoint of literary taste that is useful, but the study of the productive process. "How are verses made? Work begins long before one receives or is aware of a social command. Preliminary work goes on incessantly . . . A poet regards every meeting, every signpost, every event in whatever circumstance simply as material to be shaped into words". Distinctions and abstract categories--Mandel's "energy spent on what to leave out/--and how and why"--impose traffic limits so to speak on where, when, how fast or slow, how far or freighted Hall's "articulated lorry" may go. To separate song lyrics from "the" lyric "makes the space smaller" as Mandel writes. It is not song lyric in opposition to "the" lyric which is useful, but their apposition as elements and materials. In "bpNichol and the Past-Present of a Future Music" Paul Dutton opens by quoting from bpNichol's The Martyrology, Book 1": a future music moves now to be written w g r & t its form is not apparent it will be seen Later in the essay (in Musicworks #44) Dutton writes: "Throughout his oeuvre, pop-song lyrics recur and, judging from Nichols' treatment of them in public readings, he intends the melody to be heard, if only in the reader's head. These pop-song quotes usually occur as fragments arising in the associative flow of the poetry. For instance, in The Martyrology, Book 6, reflecting on the birth of his daughter he writes 'when the selves merge / a new self emeges / we / "three are not alone" ', in which passage the 'three are not alone' would be sung to the appropriate portion of the melody of the Inkspots' 'My Echo, My Shadow and Me". Elsewhere in Book 6, he inserts original lyrics of a C&W-style love-song to his wife, obligingly supplying notation of the melody." The "articulation" of elements, rather than their control through the imposing of categories derived from abstractions and taste, "makes the space larger" as Mandel writes. Mandel also writes: "the mind at once dictator of formal synthesis/ and razor shaving subject where/ every location is also a margin". A circle with center everywhere and circumference nowhere articulated in arrangments of elements opens possibilities, listenings, notations, "lyrics"-- bpNichol, quoted by Dutton: "I place myself there, with them, whoever they are, wherever they are, who seek to reach themselves and the other thru the poem by as many exits and entrances as are possible". Thanks to Tom Mandel for noting "as many exits and entrances as are possible" " 'In Every Grain of Sand' " --dave bapiste chirot , On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Tom Mandel wrote: > Energy spent on what to leave out > -- and how and why -- > makes the space smaller. > > Energy expended on what to include -- and how and why > to include more -- > makes the space larger. > > Dylan -- early, late -- > is great. > Check out "Grain of Sand" on his Shot of Love ('81) > > do what he do > make what you do > invalid? otherwise, why > > use what you do > -- what "we" do -- > to push that song to the margin? > > easy to confuse > saying "I want the edge" > with what you may really mean: "I want to be the center." > > Next you'll be taking on John > Lennon, Irving Berlin > Petrarch, and all those we have reason to believe > > irrelevant, as "we" knew > Mandelstam and others to be > 'Course that "we" can't include "you?" You are correct? > > The mind at once dictator of formal synthesis > and razor shaving subject where > every location is also a margin. > > > Tom Mandel > > > > ************************************************* > Tom Mandel * 2927 Tilden St. NW > Washington DC 20008 * tmandel@1net.com > vox: 202-362-1679 * fax 202-364-5349 > ************************************************* > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 10:13:58 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Crossing Jordan In-Reply-To: Damn, I NEVER said you were committed to absolute relativism -- I said that I was not -- as in, I don't go around suggesting that all genres are equal (precisely because I don't know what that might mean and do not believe it) -- my original point was simply that song lyrics are a kind of poetry -- whatever drift we may celebrate or condemn in whatever genre of verse we speak of, I'd rather not get into the business of expelling genres from the category of "poetry," particularly on the basis of my not much caring for some instances of the genre -- I think Robert Bly's prose poems pretty much, as my students are fond of saying, suck -- But I think I'd better have some other grounds than quality before I declare that they are not poems -- "I started out on Nick Cave but soon hit the harder stuff." alternate take available on CD only: "I started out on John Cage but soon hit the harder stuff." love you too, honest I do -- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 13:53:20 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: spirits rejoice Aldon -- Point taken. All I said was 'that's a song lyric, not a poem.' You, apparently responding to someone else, said the logical equivalent of 'bad song lyric does not imply not poem.' Can't argue with that. Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 11:19:49 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Ronald Johnson sighting This Dodie. KK just called me and said he read in the paper that Ronald Johhnson is reading here in SF at New College tomorrow at 7:30. KK called the Poetics Program at NC and confirmed that this is, indeed, the case. New College is located on Valencia between 18th and 19th. See you there! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 21:50:37 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Re: How To Not Read Thanks to Ira. Gets me going. I'm wanting to extend one particular section of his post on conduits. Before that though I'm glad that Conductors of Chaos is attracting so much contradictory press. Almost every reviewer wants to salvage one contributor or another from the consignment to oblivion. Discussion is being generated. My problem with the anthology is its white blanket, another chance to build more awkward alliances gone blowing. Agenda's need to be forged with such forefront, work needs to be written to make such agendas possible. Readings / Conferences / Festivals / audiences need to be considered in such lights. Peritext yes and context and pretext. Every aspect of production, positionality and interaction. It's all editing or marketing or curating. There is no purity and no escape. No pre-tense. Then to Ira: >It takes a long time to get used >to the work on the page, and the public readings you >can go to here don't help; indeed, I felt like a stupid >person sitting not completely enwrapped, and indeed >I feel *braved* the surface rudeness to get something >from the poetics here. There is a difference between >surface difficulty from a poet who is respectful and >loving, and a surface rudeness from a poet who's rude >and solitary and you only get anything from them in >spite of them. In England there are at least four 'brotherhood' poetry hoods, that I can identify. These are broad 'hoods', each employing a differing club ethos for bonding. One is the CCCP (Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry) scene - often featuring strong poets but with a standoffish sociality. My sense is that with some of the younger people there (such as Simon Perill) getting involved, the stony edifice is cracking a little. Let it not be imputed that there are no parties at CCCP - I too have been in Prynne's study when he breaks open a case of wine and plays Chinese music on the stereo. But that's an inside track, many never get invited. (aren't most scenes like this really?) Head over body. Second there is the so-called London grouping (of which I was, maybe am still considered, a part). The London stance is/was certainly more critical in regard to the lyric 'I' than at CCCP - more Lang-po friendly, and readings tended more towards the performative, even mixed media. Sometimes, mea culpa, London readings could be punky and bolshy and high energy engagements (not for eberyone). Third there is Apples and Snakes and its affiliates. More of a Slam crowd for Identity politics in rap and dub style performance. I've read there and enjoyed it, but recognise that there can be a tendency to consign those who don't like their poetry up front and in yer face, with rockin rithums and rimes, as hopeless high brow aesthetes. Fourth, the cheese and wine with book signing hushed reverence, in the presence of the poet, literary event, at which the coseting with sentimental middle class romanticism (poems about fine wines, net curtains and the latest translation of Virgil) can be equally alienating. Ira's point, made via Davie, about the interface with 'the public' being a place of considerable responsibility and demanding awareness of issues around access is worth noting. How does this resonate with stateside audiences? love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 11:52:33 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: Menocal, Shards of Love (fwd) Thought some of you would like to see this. Sorry for the length. gab. --------------------------------------------- Reply-To: bmmr-l@brynmawr.edu Maria Rosa Menocal. Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi + 296. ISBN 0-8223-1405-3 (pbk.: 0--8223-1419- 3). $49.95/$18.95 Reviewed by James J. O'Donnell -- University of Pennsylvania jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu A book of this title and subtitle could easily have been published at almost any date in the twentieth century. No critical fashion would have excluded it, and in any earlier generation, at least, it would have been relatively easy to calculate its contents, or at least to delimit them once a hint were given. This book is about Dante and Petrarch and Jim Morrison and Eric Clapton: and they are only its pretexts, for the range of its cultural contexts and its concerns is far wider. It is in the end a book about ourselves as readers. Outwardly its sequence of chapters begins in 1492, with Columbus departing Spain for his first great voyage at just the moment that the last of the exiled Jews are departing Spain from a neighboring harbor. The coincidence in time and certain other traces not often heretofore insisted upon evoke the possibility that Columbus himself, though not at that moment strictly an exile from the place of his departure, was equally an exile from his ancestry and religion -- Columbus the Jew? The possibility cannot be simply scoffed away, and it becomes the point of departure for meditations about the link between the self in exile and the selves that preceded it. Menocal is on familiar territory, for her earlier work has roamed neighboring waters, on the boundaries between Islamic and Christian middle ages. Indeed her theme (see her earlier The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History) has been that we too readily accept Islamic/Christian as a conceptual dichotomy that implies and necessitates cultural boundaries. But she is deft in deploying the poetry called muwashshahat (mixing Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin in the same songs) and the dazzling range of works of Ramon Llull to bring alive the ambiguity and the richness of what was rather on her presentation a meeting and mingling place than a boundary. The facts of the case, however, are pretext for the book's central concern: how we talk about the facts of this, and other, cases. "Philology" is the object under dissection, and it is given pitiless and almost always fair-minded scrutiny. The patron saints of the book (in a medieval kind of way: they loom over it without necessarily either winning our veneration or conferring their approval) are Auerbach, who believed in Romance culture, and Curtius, who believed in Latin culture. The one was an exile of extraordinary self- possession, the other a slightly furtive non-exile. (The self-consciousness of Auerbach's exile can best be seen, I think, in that in his first years in Istanbul in the late 1930s, he and his wife -- whose status as a banker's daughter presumably brought some protection -- left exile for summer holidays in their old mountain haunts in Germany every year. The innocence that could be displayed in the shadow of the beast remains one of the most appallingly endearing things about that time.) The upshot of Menocal's explorations (by now Dante is the text on the table) is a lucid exposition of the relativism of our positivisms, the way in which our most fervently-espoused practices of truth-finding have been their own best commentary and worst enemy. Menocal clearly stands against Grand Narratives and with the postmoderns. At this point the book turns sharply in an unaccustomed direction, and Eric Clapton appears. This is the early Clapton, and his chief performance for our purposes is Layla, recorded in 1972 under the nom de bande Derek and the Dominos, with not only Clapton but also Duane Allman lending memorable and crashingly vivid guitar accompaniment. There is an eery appositeness to evoking this text -- and text it is here. The name Layla (to veil a real- life love, no less than "Lesbia" did for Catullus) comes from medieval Persian legend, the name of the beloved of the lover Majnun, driven as mad as Clapton -- in the last stanza of his song -- fears being driven. Elsewhere on the same album a short and hypnotically lyrical song "I am yours" offers the clue to the connection in an album note that attributes the song to Clapton and "Nizami" -- a medieval Persian poet. Some will find the touch a little less light through these pages, but Menocal is still resolute and firm of grip on her theme, limning a lyric mode of exile and rejection which crosses still the old east/west boundaries as she spins a web from Persia to Miami. >From there it is a short leap to Petrarch, the serious writer who was also a balladeer, and back to Jim Morrison, buried in Paris after a career as poet and troubadour -- of a sort. Here again, summary does little favor to the discussion, which is never quotidian and always enriched by a wider sense of connections in many directions. That sense of connectedness is Menocal's great strength and it persists throughout what could otherwise have been a disjointed and unconnected book. Her style is easy, personal, and at the same time based on penetrating vision that the reader is happy to share. The weakness of the book is one that one little expects: its traditionalism. Traditional practices to be sure are here in abundance, always bracketed very decorously, but that is not what I mean. Instead I point to a deeper implicit Romanticism that remains strongly if silently on display in this book as it does in much else of our critical literature today. The last vestige of the Romantic passion lies in the assumption that literature, the literary text and its connections to other texts and even to real life, is the appropriate place in which to ground a connected sense of human community. To reduce Clapton and Morrison to the level of a Dante or a Petrarch (for all that they enliven the pages of a scholarly book, pressing them into the pages of a scholarly book leaves much of them aside -- and to be sure, Menocal is strong on emphasizing that Dante and Petrarch are similarly "reduced" as we receive them) is a sign of how very important the underlying exercise remains: to exalt "literature" by bringing it under scholarly control. Literature, finally for Menocal, is still worth talking about. That which is not generally thought of as high literature -- like the muwashshahat -- exists to be rescued, revived, and revered. Accordingly, the philological practices that she brackets so meticulously will in the end suck her in with them. This book does not self-consciously bracket itself, but the effect is almost the same. It is, to be sure, the only scholarly book that I have ever reviewed that led me to the record store to weigh the versions and buy the album. I bought the original, while retaining a decadent affection for the later "unplugged" avatar of the same song by Clapton -- no longer driving electric chords, but a meditative, almost melancholy, acoustic rendition. In indulging that secret affection, I fall away from the philological purity of this book. For it was the textualization of the song in its 1972 version that subjects the later version, in Menocal's words, to a "purist's disdain". That tastefulness is at its heart profoundly philological, and in the end that is the revelation of this book: to be unphilological or postphilological is still to be philological. To be postmodern is not yet to be anything quite new or different. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 18:28:52 -0400 Reply-To: James Sherry Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Sherry Subject: ROOF BOOKS SPECIAL OFFER ROOF BOOKS is making a special offer to Poetics Subscribers <> Poetics Subscribers may buy from the following list of Roof Books for $5 (five dollars) each. In order to qualify for this offer you must order a minimum of 3 (three) books from the list of titles below. Minimum order must be 3 (three) books! Postage is free 4th class book rate (allow two weeks for processing and delivery). You must order by November 15, 1996 to receive this offer. To order simply forward this message to JSHERRY@PANIX.COM: include your name, shipping address, and the list of books you want. Please make sure, however, you do not press reply, or you will respond to the entire poetics list and we don't want that. Roof Books will ship you the books, postage free with a stamped envelope and a bill. Upon receipt of your books, you send Roof a Check. Important: Checks must be payable to: "THE SEGUE FOUNDATION, INC." (put "Roof Spec. Offer: #books" in byline). List of special offer Roof Books: Again, you must order three. Bruce Andrews, Ex Why Zee Alan Davies, Signage Jean Day, A Young Recruit Ray Di Palma, Motion of the Cypher Ken Edwards, Good Science Larry Eigner, Areas Lights Heights Laura Moriarty, Rondeaux Nick Piombino, The Boundary of Blur Ron Silliman, N/O Diane Ward, Relation We had a fine response to last season's offer. Many people ordered & all responded promptly with their checks. 100% satisfaction on both ends. So... Order Today ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 18:58:55 -0400 Reply-To: James Sherry Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Sherry Subject: ROOF BOOK OFFER ROOF BOOKS is making a special offer to Poetics Subscribers <> Poetics Subscribers may buy from the following list of Roof Books for $5 (five dollars) each. In order to qualify for this offer you must order a minimum of 3 (three) books from the list of titles below. Postage is free 4th class book rate (allow two weeks for processing and delivery). You must order by November 15, 1996 to receive this offer. To order simply forward this message to JSHERRY@PANIX.COM: include your name, shipping address, and the list of books you want. Please make sure, however, you do not press reply, or you will respond to the entire poetics list and we don't want that. Roof Books will ship you the books, postage free with a stamped envelope and a bill. Upon receipt of your books, you send Roof a Check. Important: Checks must be payable to: "THE SEGUE FOUNDATION, INC." (put "Roof Spec. Offer: #books" in byline). List of special offer Roof Books: Again, you must order three. Bruce Andrews, Ex Why Zee Alan Davies, Signage Jean Day, A Young Recruit Ray Di Palma, Motion of the Cypher Ken Edwards, Good Science Larry Eigner, Areas Lights Heights Laura Moriarty, Rondeaux Nick Piombino, The Boundary of Blur Ron Silliman, N/O Diane Ward, Relation We had a fine response to last season's offer. Many people ordered & all responded promptly with their checks. 100% satisfaction on both ends. So... Order Today ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 19:19:40 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Flash: Creeley Update A note to announce the photo-enhanced (see the famous birthday cakes via the Net!) version of the Creeley 70th special is now online. For those of you with Netscape, you won't to miss this! There's a special link from just beneath the white banner on the main EPC home page. Have a look at http://writing.upenn.edu/epc and follow the link to "Review & Photos" ------------------------------------------------------ | Loss Glazier | | Electronic Poetry Center | | http://writing.upenn.edu/epc | ------------------------------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 17:56:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Marisa Januzzi Subject: Re: Ronald Johnson Actually, one of the things that's haunting me as I try to build a collection of ARK's pieces in first editions is the shift from cloth editions (1-33, from North Point, which has a dj, cover art, etc) to paperbacks, to stapled mimeo'd pamphlets over the period of published accretion. What sort of story does this tell (besides the potentially sad one about readership, money, presses going bust, the chapbook vs. cookbook market, etc.)? It's hard to picture the poem in four parts... Charles, did he project in print? Are drafts circulating somewhere? --Marisa >I thought it was interesting that _Ark_, as published by Passages, now >consists of three parts (triad rules!) instead of the four Johnson had once >projected. He used to explain at readings the architecture of the poem as >culminating in a roof or dome --what he had already published as _RADI OS_ , >the writing through by erasure of Paradise Lost . > >Btw, I stopped by SPD last week before Kevin's play, & they have copies of >_Ark_ stacked on their new titles table, so you should be able to order it >from them as well. > >charles ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 22:18:16 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Smith Subject: Re: Ronald Johnson Marisa, I should have checked this first. In "A Note on ARK" at the back of _ARK 50_ (Dutton, 1984), he writes: "The model in my head includes 3 books of 33 sections: The Foundations, The Spires, and The Outworks, then eventually that rewriting of _Paradise Lost_ by excision (the first 4 sections published in 1977 as _RADI OS_) which when complete will mark ARK 100 -- conceived as a kind of Dymaxion Dome over the whole." Last time I heard him read was late 80's or early 90's at an earlier incarnation of Small Press Traffic. I don't believe it was recorded, but may have been. He was reading from the then unpublished Arches to an audience of maybe 10. (They were being circulated then. Are these the mimeos you refer to?) I think that an earlier reading at Natoma Street, curated by Aaron Shurin & David Levi Strauss, was recorded. Aaron, are you still here? I seem to remember him making remarks about the structure at both events, though it's been a while now. There is no mention of any additional sections in the back notes of the new Living Batch edition, where he talks of the book being based on "trinities," so I guess he dropped the idea & the poem ends with ARK 99: "countdown for Lift Off." (& yes, the publication history of this poem is a sad story, but one I don't care to get into.) charles In a message dated 96-10-16 20:41:45 EDT, you write: << Actually, one of the things that's haunting me as I try to build a collection of ARK's pieces in first editions is the shift from cloth editions (1-33, from North Point, which has a dj, cover art, etc) to paperbacks, to stapled mimeo'd pamphlets over the period of published accretion. What sort of story does this tell (besides the potentially sad one about readership, money, presses going bust, the chapbook vs. cookbook market, etc.)? It's hard to picture the poem in four parts... Charles, did he project in print? Are drafts circulating somewhere? --Marisa >I thought it was interesting that _Ark_, as published by Passages, now >consists of three parts (triad rules!) instead of the four Johnson had once >projected. He used to explain at readings the architecture of the poem as >culminating in a roof or dome --what he had already published as _RADI OS_ , >the writing through by erasure of Paradise Lost . >> ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 20:57:01 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: AARON SHURIN Subject: Re: Ronald Johnson In-Reply-To: <961016221814_1447494133@emout16.mail.aol.com> Ron did read for our Works and Words series back in, oh, '82 or so, but the recordings from that series, I think, are in some dispute - or were - and though Levi may finally have secured them (which would be great) I'm not sure that happened. BUT, luckily, ye old Poetry Center sponsored a Johnson/Gunn reading in '90, and you can hear and see the ark-itecture rise from numbers 21,22,23,34,52,57,71 and 83. And I do mean rise! Aaron On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Charles Smith wrote: > Marisa, > > I should have checked this first. In "A Note on ARK" at the back of _ARK 50_ > (Dutton, 1984), he writes: > > "The model in my head includes 3 books of 33 sections: The Foundations, > The Spires, and The Outworks, then eventually that rewriting of _Paradise > Lost_ by excision (the first 4 sections published in 1977 as _RADI OS_) which > when complete will mark ARK 100 -- conceived as a kind of Dymaxion Dome over > the whole." > > Last time I heard him read was late 80's or early 90's at an earlier > incarnation of Small Press Traffic. I don't believe it was recorded, but may > have been. He was reading from the then unpublished Arches to an audience of > maybe 10. (They were being circulated then. Are these the mimeos you refer > to?) I think that an earlier reading at Natoma Street, curated by Aaron > Shurin & David Levi Strauss, was recorded. Aaron, are you still here? I seem > to remember him making remarks about the structure at both events, though > it's been a while now. > > There is no mention of any additional sections in the back notes of the new > Living Batch edition, where he talks of the book being based on "trinities," > so I guess he dropped the idea & the poem ends with ARK 99: "countdown for > Lift Off." > > (& yes, the publication history of this poem is a sad story, but one I don't > care to get into.) > > charles > > > In a message dated 96-10-16 20:41:45 EDT, you write: > > << Actually, one of the things that's haunting me as I try to build a > collection of ARK's pieces in first editions is the shift from cloth > editions (1-33, from North Point, which has a dj, cover art, etc) to > paperbacks, to stapled mimeo'd pamphlets over the period of published > accretion. > > What sort of story does this tell (besides the potentially sad one about > readership, money, presses going bust, the chapbook vs. cookbook market, > etc.)? > > It's hard to picture the poem in four parts... Charles, did he project in > print? Are drafts circulating somewhere? --Marisa > > >I thought it was interesting that _Ark_, as published by Passages, now > >consists of three parts (triad rules!) instead of the four Johnson had once > >projected. He used to explain at readings the architecture of the poem as > >culminating in a roof or dome --what he had already published as _RADI OS_ > , > >the writing through by erasure of Paradise Lost . >> > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 23:46:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: robert zamsky Subject: Re: Minnesota In-Reply-To: <325f9b231fdd010@mhub1.tc.umn.edu> from "maria damon" at Oct 12, 96 08:20:36 am Maria -- Thanks for the infor. on Minneapolis. I'll be there for a conference called "construction zones: narratives of identity." I'm presenting on the martiniquan poet-governor Aime Cesaire. I'll be sure to look up events in the papers, and coffee would be groovy too. rz ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 10:21:23 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeremy F Green Subject: Re: Keith Tuma and "chest thumping" In-Reply-To: The TLS in question is the issue dated September 20. It's the one with the picture of Tony Blair grinning like a pantomime devil on the front. > Could somebody please say in which issue of TLS the Potts potshot is thrown? > I couldn't find it at the liberry. Thanks - HG > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 15:10:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: What experimental poets do to the mainstream Keith Tuma: The problem that I still have with the position you're taking is that, despite the apparent reasoned objectivity of your tone, you're still engaging in the sort of wholesale, unaccurate generalizations about "experimental poetry" that you claim that experimental poets do to the mainstream. Yet shouldn't you be wary of making that generalization, and isn't the apparent "objectivity" of your tone in fact enabling you to cover up that you are engaging in such massive generalizations? I wish you would, in fact, point out to me the articles in which experimental poets are making the kinds of generalizations about mainstream poets that you claim they are making--I'm frnkly not as sure you as you are that those claims are being made. Thus, for all your claims to be "supporting" the sort of writing that I and others are committed to writing, you seem in your recent posts to admonish the avant garde to always be specific about the work of mainstream writers, while engaging in generalizations about the nature of what avant garde poets are doing. You insist that generalizations should not be made about "them" while at the same time making generalizations about those people you claim to be supporting. I'm sorry if this makes me a little testy, but I can't help it--and while you may have a point in taking me to task about the rhetorical nature of my response to you, isn't it clear to you that your refernce to avant garde "chest thumping" is highly rhetorical also, and perhaps even offensive? I greatly appreciate your willingness to detail the issues of the British poetry context in response to Steve Evans and Ira Lightman, and I wish, since you seem well-informed about experimental practice in this country also, that you would reconsider whether it's wise to make generalizations about the kind of generlizations that experimental poets are making. I have been, and remain, perfectly willing to discuss the sort of poetry I write with more "mainstream" poets, and anybody else for that matter, and I believe that in fact that is the case for almost all the "experimental" poets I know. The question is whether "experimental" poets are even allowed to engage in that sort of discussion in the first place. My experience tells me NO; my work and the work of many others is regularly condemned as unreadable, pointless word play. There is no free and open ground of debate about the relation between experimental and mainstream poetry in the U.S quite simply because those people who control the vast majority of poetry resources are quite simply not going to let experimental poets have more than even the smallest piece of those resources, if that. Thus there is no ground of "open" discussion--the ground begins with "objective" insults to experimental poetry, and then a call for those "experimental" poets to justify themselves to those who are insulting them. And it seems to me that despite your obviously worthwhile intentions, you're conceding too much of that ground already, with your suggestion that "experimental poets" must always explain themselves rationally and calmly to those who have STOLEN what limited resources for literature there are in this country. As far as I'm concerned, they should be justifying that theft to me and to others, something that they probably cannot do. I'm very pleased that you have read the wide variety of poetics relevant to this issue, and again, would just ask you to consider whether the stereotypes about experimental poets that you seem to be putting forward in recent posts are really the best way to achieve your own goals, which I'm quite certain are worthwhile. The modem I'm working on today does not allow me to correct writing errors effectively; I hope you will excuse me for that. 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, 17 Oct 1996 15:26:09 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 17 Oct 1996 15:10:33 -0400 from On Thu, 17 Oct 1996 15:10:33 -0400 Mark Wallace said: > >I have been, and remain, perfectly willing to discuss the sort of poetry I >write with more "mainstream" poets, and anybody else for that matter, and >I believe that in fact that is the case for almost all the "experimental" >poets I know. The question is whether "experimental" poets are even >allowed to engage in that sort of discussion in the first place. My >experience tells me NO; my work and the work of many others is regularly >condemned as unreadable, pointless word play. There is no free and open >ground of debate about the relation between experimental and mainstream >poetry in the U.S quite simply because those people who control the vast >majority of poetry resources are quite simply not going to let >experimental poets have more than even the smallest piece of those >resources, if that. Thus there is no ground of "open" discussion--the >ground begins with "objective" insults to experimental poetry, and then a >call for those "experimental" poets to justify themselves to those who are >insulting them. And it seems to me that despite your obviously worthwhile >intentions, you're conceding too much of that ground already, with your >suggestion that "experimental poets" must always explain themselves >rationally and calmly to those who have STOLEN what limited resources for >literature there are in this country. As far as I'm concerned, they should >be justifying that theft to me and to others, something that they probably >cannot do. Mark, I don't want to barge into or start another slanging match on these issues, but I just can't agree with the picture you draw here. First of all, do "experimental" poets have to sign on to this embattled scenario? Seems to me that "experiment" has been a pretty strong wave in US arts since the Armory Show. There are lots of magazines where experiments can be published; quite a few universities where poets can get accredited for their experiments; lots of places to read & conferences to attend; book publishers; talk shows like the poetics list; etc. Secondly, if you're going to call yourself "experimental" you can't at the same time claim all the good seats at the culture-vulture circus. Maybe the analogy to science is weak... but does a scientist demand the Nobel while he or she is still doing the experiments? It seems to me that when you set up mainstream/experimental as an agonistic contest then the "embattled" outfit is inevitable. It does seem clear that in the history of arts, the "new" does have to struggle against established forms to win a place, people do get neglected. Tell me if I'm wrong though - I don't see the French painters, say the Impressionists & those that followed, whining about their lack of recognition & power. They were too busy painting (& maybe striking deals). When they put on their independent shows, they shocked people - but also began to win them over. Rather than setting up a global theory of experimental/political arts revolution, which it seems to me is likely to lead to the paradoxical CORRUPTION of artistic drives & motives, I would think it more important to focus on making poetry that PLEASES oneself in the fullest sense - & not worry about the consequences so much. Finally, in my view, to set up some kind of simple distinction between experimental & mainstream would have the sad effect of hobbling real experiment. The impressionists knew & even admired the work of their academic forebears pretty thoroughly. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 15:55:53 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream At 03:10 PM 10/17/96 -0400, Mark Wallace wrote: [big snip] >while you may have a point in >taking me to task about the rhetorical nature of my response to you, isn't >it clear to you that your refernce to avant garde "chest thumping" is >highly rhetorical also, and perhaps even offensive? Hey! As a rhetoric teacher, I resemble that remark! Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ There is no mantle and it does not descend. -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:31:28 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: DS Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream The problem is people will always pay more for a painting than a poem... (even a whole book of poems) . Tell >me if I'm wrong though - I don't see the French painters, say the >Impressionists & those that followed, whining about their lack of >recognition & power. They were too busy painting (& maybe striking >deals). When they put on their independent shows, they shocked >people - but also began to win them over. Rather than setting up >a global theory of experimental/political arts revolution, which >it seems to me is likely to lead to the paradoxical CORRUPTION >of artistic drives & motives, I would think it more important >to focus on making poetry that PLEASES oneself in the fullest >sense - & not worry about the consequences so much. Finally, in my >view, to set up some kind of simple distinction between experimental >& mainstream would have the sad effect of hobbling real experiment. >The impressionists knew & even admired the work of their academic forebears >pretty thoroughly. - Henry Gould > > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 16:44:36 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream Interestingly, Mark spent a fair amount of time decrying the faux objective tone of defenses of the mainstream in response to Steve's piece & then lapsed into just such generalizations when it came to the issue of resources. I think the reason for this is that the generalizations become accurate when issues of resources are raised. Mr Gould wrote: >There are lots of magazines where experiments can be published; quite a few universities where poets can >get accredited for their experiments; lots of places to read & >conferences to attend There are lots of magazines because the people engaged in the writing are willing to spend their time & money on them. Most of them do not receive institutional support of any kind. This is true of many reading venues as well. There are not a lot of universities that support the generalization "experimental." I can think of 5, two of which, Naropa & New College, were started by poets. It seems to me no one has refuted the basic gist of the original post by Mr. Evans, & it would seem that the reason for this is that he was, & is, in fact, correct. corporate impressionism still sucks, Rod ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 14:05:05 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream Comments: cc: Multiple recipients of list POETICS In-Reply-To: <961017164436_1778717459@emout01.mail.aol.com> I was under the impression that there had been quite a bit of such whining and dining on the part of the imps. & their posts -- After many years of attempting to ford the mainstream, I, like Rod, started a publication to assist others whose backs were as wet as my own -- Then, what do you suppose happened? My wife got a Ford fellowship! Just read a book on postmodernism in which there is not only not a single ref. to any poetry, but no discussion of any "experimental" - "innovative" -- or even out of the ordinary in terms of the actual writing writing -- Seems it's all a matter of thematics %^$*^%#*%^#$ non-sequitur where none intended -- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 14:06:22 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Corporate Post-Impressionism Comments: cc: Multiple recipients of list POETICS In-Reply-To: <961017164436_1778717459@emout01.mail.aol.com> The buck sucks here ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 14:22:46 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: defender of pop Is Bob Dylan the only "popular" musician most people on this list won't simply dismiss out of hand, the way I've seen done with Natalie Merchant, Nick Cave, Oasis, etc.? OK, Nick's schtick gets a bit melodramatic at times, and he can be Gothic to the point of silliness, but he's certainly no anathema to art or anything. Check out "Weeping Song" from _The Good Son_. It's simple and minimally-arranged, yet the spare keyboards and haunting lyrics send real chills up my spine. And while I haven't read _The Ass Saw The Angel_ (or do I have the nouns back-asswards? Anyway, that book he wrote), I think it's kind of interesting that he was interested in writing in a deliberately archaic diction. If I'm not mistaken, "popular" music was originally defined as anything that wasn't "classical" music. Meaning that it would have been applied to folk, jazz, blues, and show tunes (they didn't have rock back then, nor yet, I don't think, rhythm to go with their blues). There has historically been a considerable amount of liberation to be found in making music which gets put into this category as if it were an insult. ********************************** sjcarll@slip.net Steve Carll http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. --Paul Celan ********************************** ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 16:48:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: grazie Could someone please provide (backchannel) me with David Baratier's e-mail address? David, are you out there? Much obliged. Patrick Pritchett pritchpa@silverplume.iix.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 14:42:07 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: { brad brace } Subject: Expunged Titles for 1996 Comments: To: avant-garde@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU In-Reply-To: <199610172015.QAA03051@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU> This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text, while the remaining parts are likely unreadable without MIME-aware tools. --1916234680-1464328669-845588527:#24120 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Expunged Titles for 1996: ________________________ Above-Cited-Extracts-Will-Show Accumulated-Associations-With-Whatever Against-All-Warranty-to-Cherish-Such-Emotions All-Kinds-of-Vague-Wonderments-and-Half-Apprehensions Architecture-of-Genetic-Manipulation At-Every-Fiftieth-Page Christ-and-the-Powers-of-Darkness-De-Locis Clandestine-Professional-Activities Condensed-Confidential-Comfortableness Confounding-Attempts-to-Explain-the-Mystery Dancing-Is-Primal-Architecture Encircle-the-Empty-Centralized-Space Eschatalogical-the-Doctrine-of-Last-Things Exemplary-Heroes-and-Saints-Coalesce Ideal-Cities-For-Permanent-Transients Innovative-Techniques-and-Personal-Visions Interrogating-Sporadic-Mechanical-Gazes Justice-Rationalization-Efficiency Longest-Day-in-the-Year-of-Our-Hemisphere Murdered-Enslaved-Oppressed-Exploited Nameless-Regal-Overbearing-Dignity Old-Fashioned-Claw-Footed-Look Paradigmatic-Gesture-of-Culture Precision-Hardwork-Secrecy Pugnacious-Academic-Adopted Pulsating-Sphere-Symphatic Replace-Strategy-With-Technology Series-of-Sinister-Premonitions Steer-Clear-of-the-Fiery-Pit Straight-Edges-Are-Always-Kept Suspicion-of-Something-Wrong Temple-of-Technological-Domination Terrificationibus-Nocturnisque-Tumultibus The-Copestone-Is-On The-Delights-of-Air-and-Earth The-Delusion-of-Presence-and-Involvement The-Intestines-of-Ancient-Dogs The-Missionary-and-the-Merchant The-Music-Reconciles-All-Contradictions The-Star-of-Heat-and-Pestilence The-Sun-Is-Breaking-Through The-Technological-Homogenization-of-Language The-Unmistakable-Smell-of-Fear Well-of-Water-Within-the-Walls What-That-Marvellous-Painting-Meant When-All-Preliminaries-Were-Over Which-Were-Likewise-Very-Projecting Double spaced submissions in Harvard format in three copies and IBM diskette to the address below: __ --1916234680-1464328669-845588527:#24120 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; name=".sig2" Content-Transfer-Encoding: BASE64 Content-ID: Content-Description: LS0NCg0KeyBicmFkIGJyYWNlIH0gIDw8PDwgYmJyYWNlQG5ldGNvbS5jb20g Pj4+PiAgfmZpbmdlciBmb3IgcGdwDQoNClRoZSAxMmhyLUlTQk4tSlBFRyBQ cm9qZWN0ICAgICAgZnRwLm5ldGNvbS5jb20vcHViL2JiL2JicmFjZSANCiAg Y29udGludW91cyBoeXBlcm1vZGVybiAgICAgICBmdHAudGVsZXBvcnQuY29t L3VzZXJzL2JicmFjZQ0KICAgICAgICBwaG90by1hcnQgICAgICAgICAgZnRw LnBhY2lmaWVyLmNvbS9wdWIvdXNlcnMvYmJyYWNlDQotLQ0KVXNlbmV0LW5l d3M6IGFsdC5iaW5hcmllcy5waWN0dXJlcy4xMmhyLyBhLmIucC5maW5lLWFy dC5taXNjDQpNYWlsaW5nLWxpc3Q6IGxpc3RzZXJ2QG5ldGNvbS5jb20gLyBz dWJzY3JpYmUgMTJoci1pc2JuLWpwZWcNClJldmVyc2UgU29saWR1czogaHR0 cDovL3d3dy50ZWxlcG9ydC5jb20vfmJicmFjZS9iYnJhY2UuaHRtbA0KDQo= --1916234680-1464328669-845588527:#24120-- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 15:29:09 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: song or poem? I think maybe part of the confusion between Jordan and Aldon may hinge on the use of the word "poem". Jordan, it seemed to me, was saying that a set of song lyrics do not equal a poem. Aldon took that to mean Jordan was asserting that song lyrics are not poetic, or not poetry. Which of course is a different animal altogether (well, not always, but often). Lots of things besides poems are poetic, some of the better song lyrics among them. Now stop fighting, you boys. Oh yeah, you already did. {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} }}}}waves woven on the loom of the sea{{{ {Steve Carll sjcarll@slip.net} }http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym{ {http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym} }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 11:48:50 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Beard Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream Henry Gould wrote: > Maybe > the analogy to science is weak... but does a scientist demand the Nobel > while he or she is still doing the experiments? This brings up an interesting point. Some of my friends have remarked that the term "experimental" can not apply in the arts, or at least not as a direct analogy to scientific experiment. In science, an experiment is designed to test a hypothesis: can the same be said for experimental art? I tend to disagree with them, and at least in terms of my own viewpoints, I'd say that the hypothesis that experimental writing sets out to test is "that a piece of writing written in such-and-such a way will be interesting to read". This may seem fairly vague: could any of the other writers here suggest any hypotheses that their experiments have tested? Of course, an experiment can either verify or falsify such a hypothesis, and my friends (coming from their own tastes etc) would suggest that much experimental writing falsifies the above hypothesis. This comes back to the point that others have made here about experimental writers not being critical of one another's work. If this _is_ the case, can such work be said to be experimental? Yours &c, Tom Beard. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Current: journal of the mind http://www.comm-unity.co.nz/~current/ and senses ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 18:21:06 -0600 Reply-To: landers@frontiernet.net Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pete Landers Organization: SkyLark Publishing Company Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream I think Keith's point is: If you choose sides, there will be war. He seems to me to be admonishing people to deal with the poetry itself, and I agree. He continually says "the so-called 'mainstream'" and "the so-called 'experimental'". The poetry itself, or the poets them- selves... Consider the success of New Directions. At what point do the writers JL publishes cease to be members of one group and join the other? Never, of course. But ever since they went into the black, ever since W.W. Norton began distributing them, they have enjoyed a wider circulation. Now they have Susan Howe. Does that mean that she is now a "mainstream" poet? I'm baffled, because Susan's most recent book would quickly be classified as "experimental" by those who use such words. I'm sure it all goes back to the anthology wars. Or perhaps it goes back to the beginning of the worship of Dionysus in Delphi... To me, a poem is good if I like it. Still, I must admit, there are back-scratch groups out there. Oddly, if I don't like most of what I see from a group, I am not inclined to read further, and vice-versa. But really, so few poets are really known that there can't really be said to be a mainstream. Just a lot of watering holes. About "chest-thumping": Listen, I am proud of my work. Nobody pays me for it. What is left for me to do but beat upon my own frail chest and declare, "Like me or don't, but I'm damn good!" And it could be delusion but what are you going to do? Spank me? God, I love this list! Pete Landers ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 19:51:11 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Evans Subject: Re: How To Not Read I am happy to confirm the suggestion so tactfully advanced by Joe Amato in a recent post, namely that I have been educated by the consequences of my review review. I feel especially indebted to Keith Tuma, whose knowledge of the British scene gives other Americans a standard to aspire to, and to the many participants in that scene (Chris Cheek, Peter Larkin, Ken Edwards, and others) who troubled themselves to respond to my posting with concrete information otherwise difficult to obtain here in the States. To Ira Lightman, whose passionate dissenting reading of my piece I admired--not least for the tremendous commitment to intellectual fair play that so obviously animated it--I reserve the special form of gratitude which takes the form of continuing a discussion across differences, not without the hope that these might be clarified and/or tentatively resolved. A word about the transposition of the terms of debate (what the Althusserians used to call "the problematic") across national boundaries may be in order here, particularly in light of Lightman's opening clause, "as a British poet...." It would be disingenuous to read too much into this particular filling out of the "speaking as an X" form, which at the outset simply means to mark the speaker's positionality and to lay the groundwork for some of the claims that will follow. But since many of those claims do crucially involve national identity, and do so in such a way as to equate that identity with privileged knowledge, I think it bears some elaboration. What I recognized in reading Robert Potts's review of _Conductors of Chaos_ was a phenomenon characteristic of the relation between the dominant and the dominated in the field of poetic practice. Compared to that, the fact of its appearing in a specific journal (the TLS) placed within a given national culture (England) struck me as secondary. Even after taking into account Maxine Chernoff's and Keith Tuma's important qualifications as to the different fate avant-garde anthologies have met when facing the U.S. literary establishment, I stand by the claim. The failure on the part of Robert Potts to be attentive to the specificities of the book under review, his indifference at the level of fact and his aggression at the level of motivation, were what prompted my response. As an American reader of poetry--i.e. one whose map of world poetry is inevitably subjected at a minimum to the complacencies, in the worst case to the structural arrogance of that position--I think the failure of Potts to communicate anything like an adequate relation to the anthology disturbed me precisely because I (and not only I) need the information. By the way, Ira, the phrase "xenophobic" was meant to indicate how deeply structured Potts review seemed to be by the fear of difference. Having read a little in the literature surrounding the Movement, I am not unaware that the problem of "foreigness" in 20th-century English poetry bears directly on the problem of American poetry and extends to the problem of an avant-garde project that was historically constituted as international (or as Raymond Williams prefers to say, "para-national") and which has proven belligerent to (and not surprisingly is therefore feared by) provincial nationalisms. If I have not been misled in my reading around the Arts Council's response to Mottram's editorship of the _Poetry Review_, this problem has been reformulated again and again by the dominant agents and institutions in English literary life, but the variations seem less important than the anti-modernist refrain. I am one of those who consider the historical achievements of the avant-garde project to have normative force in at least three areas pertinent to us today. First, in the defense of the autonomy of intellectual (including poetic) practice against all attempts to impose external criteria of evaluation. Second, in the refusal to permit national identity to act as the horizon of intellectual (including poetic) practice. And third, in the commitment to negate capitalism's negation of human (including intellectual, including poetic) potential. While the avant-garde project cannot be said to have corresponded exlusively to such aims (Marinetti?! Pound?!), what is valuable about it in my view are these dimensions of autonomy, anti-nationalism, and anti-capitalism. From such a standpoint, the fact that both Donald Davie and I had fathers who fit the category "shopkeeper" is of less concern (though the typicality amongst Movement poets of a trajectory from working-class families to Oxford and Cambridge to positions of academic anti-intellectualism does interest me) than the fact that we are once again talking of Davie when thirty-odd less known, less recognized, but by no means certainly less valuable writers have work before us. There is more, of course, to say. But then everyone is saying it.... _________________________________________________________________________ r i a t n m u a t s u o o o s ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 21:10:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eryque Gleason Subject: primi too taa about three years ago i saw a great short film, if i'm remembering right it was entitled "primi too taa" by ed ackerman. the film was based on some of kurt schwitters's sound poetry. i saw it on the big omnimax (r) screen in chicago, reclined way back watching ten foot high letters dance around while a voice behind us grunted and moaned, reading the type. absolutely incredible. does anyone know if and where i might find this on vhs? and if i got the title and director right? thanks, eryque ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 18:50:50 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: defender of pop >Is Bob Dylan the only "popular" musician most people on this list won't >simply dismiss out of hand, the way I've seen done with Natalie Merchant, >Nick Cave, Oasis, etc.? Dear Steve: I am not interested in decrying those people you listed after Bob Dylan. It is just that I have never heard of them. And how would I? I dont watch teenagers' TV shows, or read their magazines, or listen to commercial radio stations. And I dont have conversations with teenagers about music. So I have not heard of these people; but whenever I have been somewhere where I cannot get my ear away from someone's radio and they are playing commercial radio, I have not heard anything that seemed like good poetry to me. Having not heard of Kurt Cobain before he shot himself, and having been told that he was a big deal, I listened to a few cuts on a video channel on TV. I didnt hear anything that resembled either poetry (say, Paul Blackburn) or music (say Dollar Brand). George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 00:08:34 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: defender of pop >And I dont have conversations with teenagers about music. rock/pop is no longer the music of teenagers. if it ever was. actually, many teenagers these days are listening exclusively to rap. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 02:09:13 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream It's a sad comment on the way we think today that the experimental method has become the only or dominant point of reference on "experiment". My (mind and) dictionary may be old-fashioned or out-dated but for me it's still a "test or trial undertaken to _discover_ something", no? bests tom bell At 11:48 AM 10/18/96 +1300, Tom Beard wrote: >Henry Gould wrote: > >> Maybe >> the analogy to science is weak... but does a scientist demand the Nobel >> while he or she is still doing the experiments? > >This brings up an interesting point. Some of my friends have remarked >that the term "experimental" can not apply in the arts, or at least not >as a direct analogy to scientific experiment. In science, an experiment >is designed to test a hypothesis: can the same be said for experimental >art? > >I tend to disagree with them, and at least in terms of my own >viewpoints, I'd say that the hypothesis that experimental writing sets >out to test is "that a piece of writing written in such-and-such a way >will be interesting to read". This may seem fairly vague: could any of >the other writers here suggest any hypotheses that their experiments >have tested? > >Of course, an experiment can either verify or falsify such a hypothesis, >and my friends (coming from their own tastes etc) would suggest that >much experimental writing falsifies the above hypothesis. This comes >back to the point that others have made here about experimental writers >not being critical of one another's work. If this _is_ the case, can >such work be said to be experimental? > > > Yours &c, > > Tom Beard. > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Current: journal of the mind >http://www.comm-unity.co.nz/~current/ > and senses >------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 02:37:40 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? In-Reply-To: <199610180405.AAA11441@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> >Is Bob Dylan the only "popular" musician most people on this list won't >simply dismiss out of hand, the way I've seen done with Natalie Merchant, >Nick Cave, Oasis, etc.? No one dismissed Oasis "out of hand": I, a working session musician who plays on pop albums (populist that!), gave specific musical (not lyrical) reasons for disliking Oasis. It isn't a matter of pop music being inferior to classical music, it's a matter of Oasis in particular being a 90's Brit Alterna-Twee xerox of the Beatles-- full of vacant Sgt. Pepper mannerisms and chart-competent song structure and, in my opinion, very little else. However, since you mention it, let's talk about the lyrics: Oasis has less lyrical content than virtually any other band I've heard in years. Simply put, I feel their lyrics lack intelligent content, originality in tone, and prosodic ingenuity in form. Which makes them mediocre by any standard I choose to employ--pop or otherwise. However, I disagree with the gentlemen who dismissed Kurt Cobain's lyrics. His tone--self-mocking, hypersensitive, numb--is emotionally complex, his lyrics reveal quirky reading habits (_Perfume_, by Patrick Susskind, in which we find the misanthropic, odorless murderer with whom Cobain was said to identify) and powers of invention, and the prosody, which is important to me, stays consistently witty and bleak ("a mosquito: my libido," in C's most famous song). However, there is another issue here, which has nothing to do with genre, and that is *overexposure*. I could die tomorrow without ever hearing another news bit about Michael Jackson, and that isn't because he sucks as a musician. It is because I've heard enough Michael Jackson songs to last a lifetime, because his song form is usually eighties-rigid and that doesn't interest me, because I'm so familiar with his style that it can't teach me anything else, and because the guy is hopelessly *overexposed*. The issue isn't snobbery, it is my thirst for new work by equally deserving artists. I can hear the cantatas and quartets of Hans Werner Henze hundreds of times and still hear new levels in his work; he isn't overexposed; and I don't completely understand his style. That is why I listen to Henze and avoid Michael Jackson. If the reader infers snobbery simply because I've *mentioned* a classical composer, then the active snobbery (read: dismissiveness) is on the part of said reader and has nothing to do with my comparison. Even so, if someone here says, "Cobain; *yawn*; do we really have to discuss him *again*?" I for one will probably read said statement as a complaint about over-exposure. I won't presume it to be a snobbish condemnation simply because it is against a pop musician and appears in a poetics list. (And yeah, Nick Cave can write great lyrics. But I notice that no one is discussing his novel, _King Ink_!) To those of us who shuttle between the worlds of classical and popular music, academic writing and comic book scripting, poetry and industrial penny dreadfuls, rhetoric that condemns eclecticism as snobbery is as old as the high/low culture dichotomy it tries to assault. Boolean logic is limiting, whether it is used to denouce a genre of music, or to denounce en masse the critics of music in that genre. By all means, ask for respect where respect is due. But don't simplify the views of others in the name of respecting complexity. I could rail at critics for not respecting the visual poetry in Michael Soavi's _Cemetery Man_ (or _Morte Dellamorte_). But what good would that do, and what would it add to anyone else's experience of seeing the film? I'd rather say--to put it simply--: "_Cemetery Man_ is brilliant and funny, and is infused with a sexuality that manages to be violent, gory and passionate without being misogynistic." (And if anyone is interested, I'll go into greater detail.) In other words: don't get sidetracked by categories. Just quote the lyrics you like and show us why you like them. All the best, Rob Hardin (PS: Colon after em-dash courtesy of Thomas De Quincy.) http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 00:27:39 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Ronald Johnson, Jorie Graham Hi, it's Kevin Killian. Ronald Johnson's reading here in San Francisco was cancelled due to illness. En route to San Francisco from Kansas, RJ fell ill, but they hope to reschedule the reading for the Spring. OK, one reading I did go to on Wednesday was presented by the Poetry Center at SF State. I was so curious to see--for the first time--the Pulitzer Prize winner, Jorie Graham. To those of you on this list who are familiar with Graham, why didn't anyone tell me! I stuck my head in the door and saw her, and then bought her book, and she looks like the picture on the jacket, except incomparably more alive, glamorous, exotic! In the photo she looks like Gloria Steinem but in person, as one former student whispered to me, she *is* "the white Diana Ross." (The decadent Diana Ross of the "Muscles" period, tho I don't expect all of you, and certainly not you, George Bowering, to take my allusion.) I couldn't stay to hear "Jorie" read (tho' I did get her autograph), but others on this list were there and can fill you in. The Small Press Traffic event for Erin Moure and Lisa Robertson * is * still on! Hope to see lots of you there on Friday night Oct. 18 at 7:30 at the New College Theater, 777 Valencia, SF. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 00:42:09 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? At 2:37 AM 10/18/96, Carnography wrote: >I could rail at critics for not respecting the visual poetry >in Michael Soavi's _Cemetery Man_ (or _Morte Dellamorte_). >But what good would that do, and what would it add to anyone >else's experience of seeing the film? I'd rather say--to put it >simply--: "_Cemetery Man_ is brilliant and funny, and is infused >with a sexuality that manages to be violent, gory and passionate >without being misogynistic." Bravo Rob!!! I went to see this great movie on the urging of Juliana Spahr and Charles Weigl. After having gone to endless horror films the past 10 years I tend to sneer at comic horror films as being too self-conscious and not--I don't know what to say, emotionally involving isn't what I mean exactly--psychically engaging is more it. Anyway, Cemetery Man, for me, broke through that and was hilarious and "deep" at the same time. As I was telling my class the other day, you can make *anything* work if you go at it the right way. I was particularly impressed with its use of clich=E9s, which were blatantly displayed as clich=E9s, but still somehow managed to be moving. And yes, visually, it was a joy. Though I know one person at least who thought CM was a piece of fluff--I immediately lost all respect for him. Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:29:13 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Re: "chest thumping" and the uncalled for O Mark, you're just so - sensitive. You must be a poet. Us critics are all so - brutalising in our characterisations. Wasn't Tubthumper a Disney legend? Seriously, thanks for speaking out (at such great length) on 'our' behalf. Like many others here, I and I, I wouldn't bother answering, and so on . . . community . . . and so on. And all that, when I so want to and so on . . . be positive (like Giordano Bruno), and btw - who are the 'we' - where's the boundary between an 'in' and an 'out'? Is the 'so-called mainstream' the 'in' and the 'single-celled experimental' therefore 'marginalised' or 'margin-aligned' or 'out' - or is the 'experimental' really the 'in' and the 'we' of which I'm other being constituted? My binaries are so confused today. What we need is a poetic version of the NAFTA or a poets NATO with self-appointed representatives such as yourself, holding the crow(d)s back. Actually it's great to know that there are fearless guys, out there, clearing the streets for 'us' to write more safely down. I've been feeling so vulnerable and, well, marginalised within my own syntax lately. 'Experimental' being sometimes just another's experiment appropriated as convention, an all - still wearing the designer label - shhhh, don't touch, 'experimental'. Real pioneering snide. What's for breakfast Keith? streaming love and utterly reprehensible cris ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:31:09 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: apologia Hi, in this week of 'almost' total handgun ban in Britain - i must have sent a blank. sigh and sigh cris ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:28:50 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Re: What's experimental and totally predictable? Thanks for speaking out on 'our' behalf Mark. Like many others here, I and I, I wouldn't bother answering, and so on . . . community . . . and so on. And all that, when I so want to and so on . . . be positive, and btw - who are 'we' - where's the boundary between an 'in' and 'out'? is the 'mainstream' the 'in' and the 'experimental' therefore 'marginalised' or 'marginaligned' or 'out' - or is the 'experimental' really the 'in' and the 'we' of which I'm other being constituted? My binaries are so confused today. Shit Mark, it's great to know that there are fearless guys, such as yourself, out there clearing the streets for 'us' to walk more safely down. I've been feeling so vulnerable and, well, marginalised within myself lately. 'Experimental' being sometimes just another's experiment appropriated as convention, an all - still wearing the designer label. Real pioneering snide. What's for breakfast Keith? streaming love cris ps. Answer, Dear Board Members, it's the other side of defence ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 02:38:53 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: The Times (Lit Sup) are a-changing.... The discussion of the avant-garde and its fleas ariseth one more time, regular as rain, and I agree with Peter Landers that it's good to read it here where there are so many intelligent points of view. Yes, the avant-garde (as a tradition) uses the "mainstream" (which is neither main nor a stream) as a convenient foil. The TLS piece seemed to have other things in mind and falls into a long line of works that wishes it could repress the new (whereas the new wishes it could "liberate" the repressed). At the most recent summit of the G7 nations in Lisbon, the entertainment for the first night's formal banquet was the oft-mentioned Bob Dylan. Hopefully, he sang "masters of war," but the way he so often mumbles his performances who can say what might have been heard? I think that bank in Montreal is more on target than we would wish to admit. Like many here, I do take it as all but self-evident that his skills as a lyricist have had a far greater impact on us all than any number of talented (but less talented) successors. Tho I had hopes for awhile for the high formalism of Public Enemy. All best, Ron Silliman ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 22:01:21 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 17 Oct 1996 15:10:33 -0400 from Mark: Briefly, as I've a mountain of papers to grade. I know there's much down below your remarks, and I've scanned it and perhaps will respond to some of it tomorrow. Re my "generalizations" about "experimental" poets. There's a passage in a letter I read once from Basil Bunting to Zukofsky. In it, Bunting says to LZ that it would be a good idea if he set about re-writing poems the two of them agreed were bad, in order to show how he (LZ) might improve the project seemingly underway in the bad poem and mangled. I've always liked that idea, though I realize it's tedious work (as did LZ, surely). When I say that, often, the so-called avant-garde (and to get into my reasons for that phrase is more than I can handle tonight; it would involve a tour through Paul Mann's _The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde) doesn't engage the "mainstream" I mean that there's very little reading of "mainstream" poets in the prose of a-g poets. There is a lot of talk about things like "official verse culture," Charles' phrase, and often it is useful and always it is provocative and sometimes it is entertaining. There is no question that "experimentalists" don't get the goodies to the extent that others do: remember, I work in a university, I know something about these things. Thus it seems to me important to try, again and again as things change, to paint the scene(s) in broad strokes. Polemic can be useful at the right time and the right place. It also gathers an inertia and solidity that obstructs and obfuscates. But that's not my point. My complaint about a-g prose (for which you now chastise me as ceding too much ground) is that it too rarely moves through what is taken to be a mainstream making fine distinctions and careful critique. You ask me to show you examples of the sort of "generalizations" you think I'm attributing to the avant-garde. But it's mostly an absence I'm talking about, so I'll ask you to show me examples of a-g poets reading and criticizing (or praising) particular "mainstream" poets. Where are the readings of Frank Bidart, a poet I admire, or Dave Smith, a poet I don't. (Names selected randomly from the shelf beside me). Wouldn't it be more effective to engage those poets in this way rather than always (or usually) pursuing the broader maps--of the socio-economics of official verse culture, of the persistence of a naive cult of authenticity, whatever--in terms either richly provocative or powerfully analytical or merely in weak echoes that assume everything is settled? I surely think so. I'm talking about tactics. Now, there are of course exceptions. My friend Marjorie P, for instance, often grounds her celebration of experimental practices and her historical narratives legitimating them in exactly the way I am suggesting, though, to my dismay, Marjorie likes to pick on poor Phil Levine (and a few others)--easy targets. Not much talk in her work about, say, Robert Hass. Jed Rasula's recent book is exemplary here as well, though I have problems with its tone in places (as well as with some of its Baudrillardian moments). So, you see, I don't think I'm ceding anything--or, rather, this tactic cedes little. Even intelligent critical advocates of other poetries--Charles Altieri, Robert von Hallberg, John Koethe, Allen Grossman, others--are rarely engaged in a-g prose. An opportunity--to respond to Koethe's argument about "conventions" for instance-- is being bypassed. Look at what Walter Benn Michaels said recently (in a footnote inModernism/Modernity) about Marjorie P and Charles B. A cheap shot if ever there was one. It would be hard to take these if we were persuasive; clearly we're not. One way we're not, it seems to me, is in sustaining blunt binaries between "mainstream" and "avant-garde" practices (plural you note). But this takes me back to the avant-garde question I'm trying to avoid. Now as for "chest-thumping" and rhetoric and such. You can't imagine how horrified I am to see that phrase and my name in subject headings! You're right that your rhetoric bothered me, and I take your new one and your words concerning your old one as a friendly gesture: thanks. As for mine, I can only say that I used the phrase--perhaps too casually, spontaneously--as a way of expressing some solidarity with Ira, who had used the same or a related phrase. It was thus an echo, and one that meant to demonstrate that, though I had contested some of Ira's points in his post about Potts, Davie, _C of C_ and etc., I also thought I understood where he was coming from in other ways. You read the term as my accusing a-g prose writers of being "macho." That was not my intention in using the word, though I understand how you read it the way you did and indeed it is true that I think the a-g sometimes gets caught up in a miltaristic rhetoric (there's of course a long tradition). I don't think we need any more generals waving the banners of emerging or existing "movements." Indeed, I think such rhetoric is, as I've said, counter-productive in many ways. Well this is longer than I'd hoped it would be. I hope it explains things-- there are limits to this medium--and addresses the concerns of your post, which I'm trying now to remember! Keith ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 07:50:02 CDT Reply-To: tmandel@cais.cais.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Mandel Subject: all over the map (The last few days, for some reason, I've been rising earlier than usual. Hence a couple of posts.) Teenagers? If you've got them you know they may actually have serious interests. Natalie Merchant doesn't appeal to them, however -- sorry, George. Kurt Cobain was an incredible writer of the American pop song, really exceptional. Every song has a hook at the melodic, rhythmic and verbal whole. You have my personal guarantee, moreover, that you'll be hearing his songs on elevators within a decade... no, within five years. Remember that I said it. (And it is not a slam on KC) Pop music = music that is not classical? Huh? Verdi the most popular composer in the 19th century full stop. It really is possible to think in a way that is not simply manipulation of the given terms with the added spice of "where I stand" with respect to them (i.e. "I" "prefer" "experimental" "poetry") By all accounts, Robert Johnson loved to sing show tunes, could pick up anything he heard almost instantly and entertained everybody with a wide range of singing and playing. He's recorded doing blues only -- that's all he was allowed to represent as his range. (Tho listen to his "Red Hots" [I prob. have the name of that tune wrong] for an indication outside the box) On experimental poetry vs. mainstream: these are names not descriptors. Why do people volunteer to be lumped together, I always wonder? Putting the other guy down is an exact equivalent to praising oneself. Simply writing this on the wall above one's monitor will go a long way to inducing a useful silence. (There was, btw, a long thread on "experiment" in poetry vs. science on this listserv as much as 2-3 years ago.) Capitalism as denying human potential. Gee, that's not what Marx thought. But it does feel good to say it. Esp. when there's no cost attached. I often think about a man named, I believe, David Brodsky, a jew I'm sure (alas) who spent with the Mandelstams the last evening before Osip's final arrest. Brodsky was a literary guy of some kind, a translator I believe. He seemed reluctant to leave. In retrospect, his job was to be there to make sure the object of attention would not skip out. I'm sure he had a melancholy kind of compromised mind, committed to literature and with an overarching sense that "the revolution" simply must have a true hold on the future, given all the good energy it encapsulated, the social force it held. There were many like him I think, certain of generalizations, able to overlook any particular, with a moral equation handy when necessary to cover threadbare quotidian betrayals of common sense and pals. Oh well. Changing subjects: "Experimental" poetry and art are "mainstream" in our culture -- this would seem to be obvious on the face of it, certainly to anyone observing the career of say John Cage to pick only one example. Funded, published, recorded, etc. and all by institutions in the main stream of our culture and economy. I read the other day that Madonna "considers herself an avantgarde performance artist." How likely would it be that she would "consider herself" a Jew in Germany in 1938? A Panther in Chicago in 1968? Isn't it obvious to you that a term like "experimental" is an honorific? Self-praise? What about some NEW ideas. Maybe if we advertised this listserv outside the academy? Tom Mandel ************************************************* Tom Mandel * 2927 Tilden St. NW Washington DC 20008 * tmandel@1net.com vox: 202-362-1679 * fax 202-364-5349 ************************************************* ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 08:26:32 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 17 Oct 1996 16:44:36 -0400 from On Thu, 17 Oct 1996 16:44:36 -0400 Rod Smith said: > >There are lots of magazines because the people engaged in the writing are >willing to spend their time & money on them. Most of them do not receive >institutional support of any kind. This is true of many reading venues as >well. There are not a lot of universities that support the generalization >"experimental." I can think of 5, two of which, Naropa & New College, were >started by poets. It seems to me no one has refuted the basic gist of the >original post by Mr. Evans, & it would seem that the reason for this is that >he was, & is, in fact, correct. > >corporate impressionism still sucks, Most of the s-c mainstream magazines started the same way. I've been engaged on my own path in writing for a few decades now & have also succeeded pretty well in keeping my distance from the "institutional support" it seems the real a-g experimenters crave. What camp does that put me in? Well, unlike Madonna (maybe more like Mary Magdalen?) I don't care whether or not people consider me an "experimental artist". Bad taste, I know, to talk about oneself. Better to merge with the "normative" embattled proto-post-plus- nec-ultra-futurists... - Henry Gould Hypothesis: what corporations think of doing with art doesn't matter in the slightest. For one thing, corporations don't think. Have fun down at the bank lobby, Bob. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 08:57:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Welcome to the Windhover I know the connection between Hopkins and Olson ("the achieve of") has been pointed out, and I don't have my lyric sheet handy, but I could swear there's some 'Wreck of the Deutschland' in Chuck D.'s masterpiece, 'Welcome to the Terrordome.' Come see Juliana and Tim, Jordan PS Julie Patton (50 min) and Lee Ann Brown (30 min) last night at Segue (att: 27). Julie was in her performance diva/schoolmarm get-up, giving out blue stars to the audience for good answers, doing library time, singing the alphabet. Lee Ann showed two videos, "Carnet" and "Bunny Day (Bonne Idee)." Stealing the show was the man who inhaled his beard. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 08:59:26 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: UK Readings [Routed to you from the EPC] Name: Lawrence Upton Address: 100540.3335@Compuserve.com.uk Subject: Poetry readings in uk Comment: Sub Voicive Poetry, Upstairs, The Three Cups, Sandland Street, London WC1 28th October 1996 - Ira Lightman and Scott Thurston (UK) 5th November 1996 - Robin Blaser (Canada) 19th November 1996 - Michael Heller (USA) 14th January 1997 - Allen Fisher (UK) - Second Eric Mottram Memorial Reading 4th February 1997 - Basil King and Martha King (USA) ------------------------------------------------------ | Loss Glazier | | Electronic Poetry Center | | http://writing.upenn.edu/epc | ------------------------------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:54:00 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gwyn McVay Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? In-Reply-To: In a recent book called /'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy,/ compiled by Gavin Harris (is that right?) of /Details/ magazine, it's revealed that someone went around thinking "a mosquito: my libido" was "I'm a scarecrow and a Beatle." I kind of like that variant reading. Recommend this book for a silly jumpstart into disjunctive thinking on those mornings when your brain just won't turn over-- Gwyn ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:08:08 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: defender of pop In message <961018000833_213759808@emout15.mail.aol.com> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > >And I dont have conversations with teenagers > about music. > > rock/pop is no longer the music of teenagers. if it ever was. actually, many > teenagers these days are listening exclusively to rap. speaking of which, i'm kind of surprised that there hasn't been, in the year and a half i've been on the list, much discussion of rap and hiphop culture as a vanguard development, or at the very least, a cultural expression w/ something of relevance to poetixlisters. what do you all think of artists like tracie morris and other poets who take much of their inspiration from hip hop culture? md ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 10:15:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? Gavin Edwards "wrote" 'scuse me while I kiss this guy' and he didn't even credit Larry Fagin. Aesthetic certainty, Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 11:03:10 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: "chest thumping" and the uncalled for In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:29:13 +0000 from for breakfast: pop's tarts, blearyeyeddumbasshituniversitylifeidealesstwocoldpills, and kurt cobain not in an elevator but in part 2 of allen fisher's "mummers' strut" This is out of our range This is out of our range This is out of our range . . . This is getting to be This is getting to be This is getting to be . . . I'm a Negative Creep I'm a Negative Creep I'm a Negative Creep and I'm stoned Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't rock it begin another grasp from the inside rocket Here's a healthy orangejuiceand graingraingrain to Peter Quartermain, who published it in _West Coast Line_ (buy it for lunch) get yr bullets while you can, cris, keith ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 05:19:34 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: testy response (fwd) Hope you don't mind me forwarding this "other side" to the calls for support from India that I forwaded before. gab. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Arindam Dutta Reply-To: postcolonial@jefferson.village.virginia.edu Hello, I happened to be in a mailing to which you had sent an email reg the "Doshi-Hussain Gufa". My response to that mail is attached below. If you were not the originator of that email I trust you will forward this to whoever forwarded the original email to you. This is not meant to be a personal rebuttal nor is it my intention to hurt anyone's feelings. Thanks, -Sriram It is indeed heartening to see the citizens of India rise for freedom of expression which is probably the most sacred of all rights democracy can or should guarantee. But the groups heading the expression of such opinion, are they really fighting for the preservation of the freedom of speech and expression? I cannot but doubt it. I can clearly remember two different occasions when the freedom of expression was curtailed by the Govt. of India. First was the "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie and the second Martin Scorsese's film called "The Last Temptation of Christ". Both of these expressions by an artist were banned by the Indian Govt. There were no protests whatsoever from any corners. I cannot but notice the one commonality between the two instances I've quoted. They were concerned with a non-Hindu religion. And in the current instance whats the religion involved? Hinduism! Ah! What a coincidence! If you folks are really for freedom of expression start where all this started. Make "The Satanic Verses" and Martin Scorsese's film available to the Indian public before supporting M.F. Hussain's blasphemy of Hindu Gods. A little adherence to chronology never hurt anyone! --- from list postcolonial@lists.village.virginia.edu --- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 05:21:59 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: AZI KAMBULE UPDATE (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 03:51:05 -1000 From: Steven Hawkins 17 October 1996 NCADP CASE UPDATE & ACTION ALERT TO: CONCERNED ACTIVISTS FR: STEVE HAWKINS, DIRECTOR RE: AZI KAMBULE, S. AFRICAN YOUNGSTER FACING DEATH ROW IN MISSISSIPPI PLEASE FORWARD TO ASSOCIATES & MEDIA CONTACTS ----------------------------------------------------- Efforts to save Azikiwe Kambule, a 10th-grader facing death row in Mississippi as an accomplice to a murder he did not participate in, have produced an important early victory! Fundraising activities have at last collected enough money for Azi's family to retain a private attorney, a critical need against Mississippi's well-funded prosecutors. The arrival of new counsel means Azi's case won't go to trial until January at the earliest. Meanwhile, the campaign to save Azi continues to gain momentum. Students in Pretoria, where Azi's case is headline news, are holding a bake sale to help in fundraising efforts. Students at Oberlin College are circulating petitions on Azi's behalf. Columbia University students are hosting a poetry benefit. Over 500 letters, including appeals from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other human rights leaders, have poured into the office of Madison County District Attorney John Kitchens, demanding that he drop his effort to have Azi put to death. Dennis Brutus, a South African poet and former exile noted for years of work to win the release of apartheid's political prisoners, has convened the Azikiwe Kambule Committee for Justice to help coordinate activities on this important case. ACTION ALERT Thanks to all who have already written letters and/or contributed to the defense fund. The AKCJ is calling on concerned people to take the following steps next: *Encourage religious leaders to take a stand. Madison County District Attorney John Kitchens needs to understand that the path he is taking is not only anti-human rights but immoral. By the end of the holiday season, the Reverends Robert and Carolyn Abrams plan to collect at least 2000 letters from religious leaders of all faiths who oppose the death penalty for children. Address the letters as follows (model letters are available from the NCADP's national office) Mr. John Kitchens Madison County District Attorney c/o Revs. Robert and Carolyn Abrams 216 North Azalia Drive Wiggins, MS 39577 *Arrange for Dennis Brutus to speak in your area. The NCADP and AKCJ are setting up a speaking tour for Mr. Brutus to raise public awareness of the case. Interested parties should contact the NCADP for more information. *Pass around the "Stop Killing Kids" petition currently being circulated by the AKCJ and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and mail them to the NCADP by January 2, 1997. Petitions will be hand-delivered to Mississippi officials early in the new year. Original copies of the petitions are available from the NCADP's national office; please e-mail us at ncadp1@nicom.com to receive a copy. Alternatively, activists can lay out and run off petitions using the attached text and instructions. 17 October 1996 NATIONAL COALITION TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY 918 'F' St., NW Suite 601 Washington, D.C. 20004 (202) 347-2411 (ext. 16) phone (202) 347-2510 fax ncadp1@nicom.com ---------------------------------------------------------- SAVE AZI! PETITION TEXT Title: "Mississippi Must Respect the Human Rights of _All_ Children" Body: Whereas several major international human rights treaties ratified by the US -- including the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights -- prohibit seeking the death penalty for crimes individuals commit before the age of 18. Whereas the UN Convention on Rights of the Child, which the US has signed, clearly states: "Neither capital punishment nor life without possibility of release shall be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age." Whereas the US is the only Western country, and one of only five nations in the world, still executing children. Whereas the State of Mississippi has a vested interest in moving beyond its reputation for allowing its residents' human rights to be trampled. Be it resolved that we the undersigned urge Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice, Attorney General Mike Moore and Madison County District Attorney John Kitchens to respect international human rights law, and cease their efforts to put Azikiwe Kambule, or any other child, on death row or behind bars for the rest of their natural lives! ------------------- INSTRUCTIONS: Have petitioners provide their signature and printed name, and if willing, their address, phone number and e-mail as well. Please attempt to collect 250 signatures (1000 for students on large campuses). Return the petitions to the NCADP by January 2, 1997. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 17:50:42 BST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ira Lightman Subject: Re: How To Not Read Er hi, I'll just put my head above the parapet again. Thanks, Steve, for seeing my good intentions; I was only teasing you by nitpicking your style because I thought you were hard on Mr Potts who writes quite succinctly and readably; I don't think that makes him right, I do think he articulates some useful things to know people are thinking; I don't think the TLS is central command HQ; although it's read widely because still on automatic subscription to world libraries, I don't myself think it influences people to buy or not buy books as much as Poetry Review does - and as Peter Larkin said, it reviews C of C better; and I also think readers are used to its crankiness and its wrongness (it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, after all) and wouldn't go jump in a lake if it told them to. As I hoped, I've been thoroughly educated on how different the US is, and I can much better see it all now. I tentatively still quibble with the financial tack, but only because no-one in Britain except Seamus Heaney gets much money; patronage and more review space yes, but this is leading to cynicism towards hype, like everyone reviewing and interviewing the same films and stars, and actually something fresh comes well out of that. Which is why C of C is actually being bought, much more than A Various Art, which would probably sell if re-issued in a slightly expanded 2nd edition or some such. People are bored with the blah blah mainstream. It's also why reviewers are being more polite, more articles on Heaney won't sell their mags. Is there no potential of this stateside? I guess I'm defending: writing style as something one can work on in essays and personal deportment style and gig style as something one can work on in publicising difficult poetry. Thus, listening to what feedback we can get, and knowing how to take it usefully. But, Steve, I don't accept your defence: "the phrase 'xenophobic' was meant to indicate how deeply structured Potts review seemed to be by the fear of difference" Because almost none of the words and terms you're using are precise enough. 1) Xenophobic means xenophobic, and a thesaurus will yield "touchy", "reactionary" and "rattled", so that one can still wound by calling someone who is dangerously xenophobic "xenophobic". 2) "Deeply structured" seems to presume a lot as does 3) "fear of difference", especially since the latter can sound like you mean, Potts won't buy his groceries from someone not British (I'll leave your analysis of the deep structure of my idiomatic expression "as a British poet" which simply meant "as someone living in the country and the idiom you have misread, so I forgive you") or vote for his usual party if the candidate's sexuality or race or gender isn't his own, or goes out in gangs and physically hurts people. I just think Potts is, and far too many of us are, tuned into his own music and his own work and is being too quickly nasty as a literary reviewer. He doesn't hear it because it's not the same. That's less fear of difference than amour propre, which is highly highly highly common. But all I wanted to do was make a stand for a kind of essay style I like, and to see if my post could get people to tell me about the US more. Best Ira P.S. Mark Wallace, I cannot even backchannel you over your post. I know you've read my essay on British poetry and magazines and Davie, in Texture, because you've publically said so on the list. The charge of wanting censorship has actually made me really upset, as I consider you a friend, an ally, and an interesting head of steam (I mean that as an idiomatic compliment with the exact meant resonance that passion is great but must know itself to keep its passion and evolve at the same time). I'm considered by some in England as so pro-Language Writing that I'm just being trendy and outrageous and permissive for their own sake. I'm published by Leave Books, and edit a magazine promoting Juliana Spahr, Elizabeth Burns, Lisa Samuels and some British younger women whom I am the only British editor to seek, encourage and publish. You really don't know what you're talking about here, and have leapt to a whopping conclusion. Cris and everyone are teasing you harshly, and I say be sensitive, we're not all bashing you. But your impetuousness loses you this friend, barring an apology. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 11:53:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: public relations & poetry... hey folks, i don't quite know how to say this, but--- well, i'll try saying it this way: any of you know the book _toxic sludge is good for you: lies, damn lies, and the public relations industry_ by john stauber and sheldon rampton (common courage press, 1995) ?... i'm teaching it alongside _silent spring_, _discipline and punish_, _in the age of the smart machine_, and _rivithead_, for my business com. course (which i've formally retitled "communications and the workplace"---just to make what i do make a bit more surface-sense)... anyway, it's a real eye-opener, if you haven't (and mebbe even if you have) been paying attention to the growing propaganda machine in the u.s. that's comprised of giant public relations firms and their associated advertising giants... interesting that jed rasula uses the term, to wit: "... my focus is on the oddly neglected fact that New Criticism was in effect a public relations firm that pioneered and then successfully promulgated a certain brand of poetry" (_the american poetry wax museum_, 69) now jed doesn't situate such effects within the history of public relations per se, but instead correlates his observations about new criticism with what he calls the "the age of sociology" (the stauber/rampton book gives a brief overview of the history of pr, focusing on the field's founding fathers, ivy lee and edward bernays)... anyway, the stauber/rampton book *does* in fact provide an excellent (and as i say, scary) account of the far-reaching effects of contemporary pr maneuvering... and i was thinking last night, while discussing the book in class, about this discussion of experimental (term used advisedly, and i use it to denote formal qualities) vs. mainstream (term used advisedly, and i use it to denote economic realities), and wondering whether we haven't, all of us, fallen somewhat into the trap of failing to distinguish twixt the pr component of poetics, rather strictly speaking, and the various other practices that constitute the writing and study of poetry?... i mean, to use the term pr a bit less figuratively than does jed (who writes "in effect"), there are very real public relations operations no doubt being waged by very real firms ("literary" and otherwise) and individuals ("literary" and otherwise), and it is in the best interests of such firms and individuals to promote various aesthetics for various reasons (no, not necessarily poetry per se, but at the very least poetries that are probably understood as a subset of larger sociocultural practices)... and if there is A mainstream aesthetic, or general set of aesthetic practices that have gone mainstream, it is likely that this is the result of (no, i wouldn't use a highly-charged term like 'conspiracy') an encompassing, super-efficient pr effort, one that depends upon, say, something like what stauber/rampton detail as a key pr strategy: after ronald duchin (who attended the us army war college in carlisle, pa, and went on after his stints working for the secretary of the defense and the vfw to become vice-president of mongoven, biscoe and duchin---a leading pr "spy" firm) dividing activists into four categories: radicals, idealists, opportunists and realists... for duchin, it's the realists (i.e., pragmatists) who are most vulnerable to pr (you can appeal to their desire to work within the system)... then the opportunists (you can appeal to their base motives)... hence the radicals (those who are motivated by social justice and systemic change) are marginalized by educating the key group, the idealists---which latter are vulnerable simply b/c they can be persuaded ('educated') to accept a corporate compromise position that apparently reduces harm (to individuals)... but it's the so-called radicals, clearly, who are most resistant to pr logic... now we don't need to accept duchin's categories as such (or, for that matter, my alignment of pr-activist strategy with poetics issues), but if this DOES indeed represent a primary way by which pr firms regularly exploit citizenry (i.e., US) to corporate ends, we might consider the extent to which each of us, as readers, is vulnerable to contemporary pr-style logics... i won't work out the correspondences in detail (and besides, i may be verging here on sheer idiocy)... but mself, i find that i'm too pragmatic (probably my past incarnation as an engineer should have told me this), and mebbe a bit idealistic... i'd like to think i can be more radical than i am, or have been, which would mean working harder to accept writing that actively confronts my inertia, my tendency toward status quo, to be willing to entertain more fully writing that threatens to dismantle the established system in order to bring about a more diverse, if not representative, aesthetic reality... now i can't say to what extent one's personal (or public) commitment to a given poetry compromises one's willingness to bring about social justice (i'm talking in aesthetic terms here, and i trust some of you will note the resonance with my earlier attempt to discuss good/Good bad/Bad)... that is, i see no reason why, in theory, a poet who has garnered mainstream acclaim can't at the same time argue for a more radical rethinking/reworking of publishing possibilities (which i would say does not constitute yet more pr---simply b/c it's not a matter of re-propagandizing, but of activating for actual fair play)... at the same time, i can imagine, practially speaking, why there may be less real motivation to do so, once one is resting sufficiently on one's publishing laurels... same goes, in many ways, for scholars (lentricchia's recent 'conversion' a case in point)... but it does seem to me, in any case, that to bring about a multiplicity of perspectives in any discussion of poetry/poetics (and it's the binary of experimental/mainstream i'm after, finally) we ought at least to recognize the ways in which our apparently individualized perceptions of poetry and poetics have been shaped (literally!) by public relations efforts that attempt to exploit our habitual orientations, aesthetic and otherwise (and whence such orientations is another matter)... so if we talk about our commitment, as writers and readers, to various poetries---poetries which are of course subject to, say, political as well as aesthetic scrutiny---we might do well, too, to talk about how we see such commitments as speaking to (our) other, less literary, less scholarly public agenda... perhaps, say, the bulk of our contributions to this forum?... like, aside from establishing network community, communicating publication/distribution/readings information, permitting for dialogue across continents, chat, supporting our job searches (mea culpa), and even incl. (yes) the *noise* i so value around here---and is (or isn't) this enough?---what more can this forum do to recuperate those voices that have been lost in the mainstreams?... are we doing enough to promote diversity, or is there another way to conduct ourselves (shorter, more pointed posts?!) that might make room for more voices?... and one hobbyhorse: can we discuss the material realities of pr in even more material detail, can anybody out there make legible whether and to what extent there are pr agencies 'running' tls, dictating review policy? (in the absence of which discussion perhaps we *are* only dealing with a secondary effect, and don't quite grasp the extent of the problem(s), which is clearly the case with the multinationals)... and can we discuss this w/o provoking one another into intellectual warfare over whose commitment to the margins (if margins they be only *as a result of* poetry-related pr) is the more righteous?... anyway, apologies for going on some... i know this is messy, but i'm just thinking out loud... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 17:59:32 BST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ira Lightman Subject: How To Not Read & a political abstraction As a ps, I'll just paste in a paragraph from a backchannel note; if it seems ad hominem, it's just because I need to offer an alternative psychoanalysis of deep structure. Is language structured like "the" unconscious (Lacan), or is it more like a society or even a family, thinking of Derrida's Glas. Anyway, here's the homily: With wanting a response, surely most people know you put out a feeler and it never comes back as you'd predict and that's community? Okay, you can call that capitalism but it's also true of friendship, or just intimacy that means two people share an experience that helps them both. I can't call that friendship moment capitalist to fit a theory of the horrors of having to sell yourself or thing. I'm inclined to call the totalising rejection, of a whole type of relations, a pseudo "anti-capitalism"; and say it masks a passion (to want intimacy) so rich that it sure makes the poetry sing yeah but the person vulnerable, likely to control and over-react; and that's tragic human when it could have been gorgeous human. Ira ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 14:17:10 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: How to Not Read This is Mark Wallace speaking. Rod kindly let me use his e-mail as I'm away from the workspace today: Dear Ira, I'm very aware of the positive effect you are having on the poetic environment we are part of, which is why I have to admit to feeling distressed about your recent posts. In applying the word "censorship" to your recent position I was probably overstating my case, and for that I apologize. Frankly, I often overstate my case to this list on purpose, in an attempt to draw attention to issues that seem to me of importance. In so doing, I do attract some negative attention but manage also to encourage lively debate. I do however want to suggest that your initial post in response to Steve Evans does in fact suggest that his piece should not be further circulated and is not worthy of broader consideration. Here's what you said: > I don't agree at all with Mark Wallace that Steve Evans should consider more widely >circulating this review; it just about works in the context of this group, where, much to >my own personal regret, we experimentalists get more of our chests as outbursts, especially >versus the mainstream, than we do engage in real debate. In failing even to suggest that Steve's piece, perhaps rewritten for context, could have any relevance to the TLS, you still seem to me to be tacitly aiding those who think that the best response to avant-garde work is silence, dismissal, and ridicule. I must continue to insist that you rethink your position on these issues while at the same time remaining sorry that my tone-- purposefully gruff in order to make things happen --may have in this case personally offended you. Mark Wallace ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 14:18:29 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry G Subject: Re: public relations & poetry... In-Reply-To: Message of Fri, 18 Oct 1996 11:53:33 -0500 from Despite the fact that I probably would disagree in the end with Joe Amato about minds being "literally shaped" etc., and despite the fact that what he says here goes against most of the noise I've been making on these subjects, the issues he raises here are so important & pertinent to whatever people think "poetics" means! "experimental" refers to formalities - yes! "mainstream" to economics - yes! To talk about pr starts to get at historical realities, in a more direct way what I was mumbling about before in terms of there being more ways to "promote" specific poets & poetries than simply market capitalism. Here categories like propaganda & entertainment & art start to get fleshed out. And you might open up a new critical angle within poetry on the hall of mirrors. (Though he rightly suggests we can't step outside the hall ourselves.) - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 14:53:13 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 16 Oct 1996 to 17 Oct 1996 At 12:00 AM 10/18/96 -0400, George Bowering wrote: >Dear Steve: I am not interested in decrying those people you listed after >Bob Dylan. It is just that I have never heard of them. And how would I? I >dont watch teenagers' TV shows, or read their magazines, or listen to >commercial radio stations. And I dont have conversations with teenagers >about music. So I have not heard of these people; but whenever I have been >somewhere where I cannot get my ear away from someone's radio and they are >playing commercial radio, I have not heard anything that seemed like good >poetry to me. Having not heard of Kurt Cobain before he shot himself, and >having been told that he was a big deal, I listened to a few cuts on a >video channel on TV. I didnt hear anything that resembled either poetry >(say, Paul Blackburn) or music (say Dollar Brand). Ah, George, at least when you're dismissive, you do it with that sly sense of humor. It doesn't require any contact with teenagers or "their" culture (which is usually really segments of dominant culture targeted at teenagers) to hear of these musicians, and I don't often listen to commercial radio stations myself. But I do keep my eyes and ears open wherever I am, have listening sessions with my friends (who are in their 20's and 30's, for the most part), etc. etc. I might just add that it's intrinsic to Nirvana's poetics that their poetry won't resemble Paul Blackburn's or their music Dollar Brand's, but there's plenty of room in both fields for what their ideas of music and poetry are. I think that should be a given, but I wonder sometimes... If I remember rightly, your taste runs more toward jazz, does it not? I hear that was teenybopper music at some point too. :-) ********************************** sjcarll@slip.net Steve Carll http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. --Paul Celan ********************************** ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 20:45:03 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: wheeler Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 16 Oct 1996 to 17 Oct 1996 In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19961018215313.006c84f8@pop.slip.net> George & Steve: It's Abdullah Ibrahim. Cheers! Susan Wheeler ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 20:05:23 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Where are the ag readings of yesteryear In-Reply-To: <961017.225457.EST.KWTUMA@miamiu.muohio.edu> Keith -- I won't speak for any of the others on this list, who have already been sufficiently othered for the week, but my disucssion of David Smith appeared in an issue of _C.L.A. Journal_ some years back (even MORE years after I sent it in) -- will let you know when I get to Frankie B. I'm sure I'm not alone in having committed such things to print - ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 20:15:34 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 16 Oct 1996 to 17 Oct 1996 >George & Steve: > >It's Abdullah Ibrahim. > >Cheers! >Susan Wheeler One knows. It is just that when you say Dollar Brand to each other, you are signifying that you listened to him when that was still his name on records. Besides, he was given that name by a great African-American. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 20:15:37 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? >Gavin Edwards "wrote" 'scuse me while I kiss this guy' >and he didn't even credit Larry Fagin. > >Aesthetic certainty, >Jordan Fred Wah has said, some time ago, that he thought that was what Jimi H. was saying. Gotta be that Northwest accent. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 20:18:51 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 16 Oct 1996 to 17 Oct 1996 >If I remember rightly, your taste runs more toward jazz, does it not? I >hear that was teenybopper music at some point too. :-) > >********************************** >sjcarll@slip.net Steve Carll Well, yeah, it was. But when we werent listening to ch. Parker we were reading Andre Gide, most of us kids up in the Okanagan Valley. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 20:19:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream (fwd) this & next message got bounced back to me last night -- hope they don't now appear twice -- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 14:05:05 -0700 (PDT) From: Aldon L. Nielsen To: UB Poetics discussion group Cc: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream I was under the impression that there had been quite a bit of such whining and dining on the part of the imps. & their posts -- After many years of attempting to ford the mainstream, I, like Rod, started a publication to assist others whose backs were as wet as my own -- Then, what do you suppose happened? My wife got a Ford fellowship! Just read a book on postmodernism in which there is not only not a single ref. to any poetry, but no discussion of any "experimental" - "innovative" -- or even out of the ordinary in terms of the actual writing writing -- Seems it's all a matter of thematics %^$*^%#*%^#$ non-sequitur where none intended -- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 20:19:48 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Corporate Post-Impressionism (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 14:06:22 -0700 (PDT) From: Aldon L. Nielsen To: UB Poetics discussion group Cc: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: Corporate Post-Impressionism The buck sucks here ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 09:28:28 -0700 Reply-To: Poetics List Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Malone Subject: Helmut Heissenb|ttel Thought this obit from the 10/19/96 edition of The Times of London would be of interest. If you subscribe to The Times, there's also an accompanying photo! Apologies if this has already been posted. I'm on the digest version. Regards, Tom Malone ------------------------------------------- Providing web design and tech support for: http://www.eroscomix.com (frames) http://www.fetishsex.com Helmut Heissenb|ttel, German writer, died on September 19 aged 75. He was born on June 21, 1921. FOR almost 40 years Helmut Heissenb|ttel espoused an extreme literary modernism that by the end of his career had come to seem rather old-fashioned. Literature, he believed, could have only one real subject, and that was language itself. In a large body of work which resisted classification into any of the familiar genres he himself preferred to talk of "texts" and "projects", rather than "poetry" or "theory" or "prose" Heissenb|ttel attempted to penetrate language and lay bare its hidden workings, testing to the limit our ability to grasp the world through words. Not surprisingly, perhaps, he was never a popular writer. But he was esteemed by critics and fellow writers in Germany and elsewhere, and for a time in the 1960s and 1970s the experimental tendencies he embodied seemed an important part of literary life. His works were translated into English and other languages (though they were no easier to translate than to classify), and he was honoured with some of the German-speaking world's most coveted literary awards. The son of a bailiff, Helmut Heissenb|ttel was born in R|stringen near Wilhelmshaven. In the course of military service during the Second World War he was severely wounded, losing his left arm in 1941, after which he took no further part in the fighting. From 1942 to 1955 he studied at the universities of Dresden, Leipzig and Hamburg, reading first architecture, then German literature and art history. On finishing his studies, he spent two years working in advertising in Hamburg, before moving to Stuttgart to join the staff of South West German Radio, where in 1959 he succeeded the novelist Alfred Andersch as head of the "Radio-Essay" department, and where he remained until his retirement in 1981. Heissenb|ttel began to write at the age of 15, but his first published works date from the early 1950s. Collected in two volumes Kombinationen (1954) and Topographien (1956) these early pieces present a view of the world that is fragmented, contradictory and incomplete, but still unmistakably lyrical in inspiration and intent; this is writing that belongs to a recognisable poetic tradition. From the 1960s onwards, however, in works such as those collected into a series of numbered Textb|cher, Heissenb|ttel moved much further away from what he saw as the arbitrary hierarchies of conventional grammar and syn tax, and relied instead on techniques such as collage, quotation and juxtaposition. These methods were developed and elaborated to a daunting degree in the complex multiple perspectives of D'Alembert's Ende (1970), an extended fiction that was the nearest Heissenb|ttel came to writing a novel. But Heissenb|ttel's approach to language was always less purely playful than that of some of his contemporaries and associates, such as the Austrians Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayrvcker. What fascinated him about words was their role in human society, so that his linguistic games and experiments, far from becoming an end in themselves, are often turned to sharply satirical purpose. Heissenb|ttel was fortunate to be able to spend his working life in a job that provided a focus and forum for his literary and artistic interests: as editor in charge of the influential "Radio-Essay" programme strand at South West German Radio, he commissioned and collaborated on talks, readings and performances by many of the most significant avant-garde figures of the day. He was also a perceptive and original critic, not only of literature but of the visual arts. The range of his contacts, and the depth of their affection for him, was evident in the volume of tributes presented to him on his seventieth birthday in 1991. Helmut Heissenb|ttel is survived by his wife Ida, whom he married in 1954, and by a son and three daughters. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 13:29:05 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: Helmut Heissenb|ttel Thanks for forwarding the Times obit, Tom. What it goes to show, in view of recent threads here, is that Times or TLS, meme combat! The same dismissive attitude towards any wriitng that is not sterilized & sanitized mainstream salon-fahig. For Iain Sinclair's book the attack has to be in the face, given that Iain is still alive & kicking as are most of the writers in his anthology. The Heissenbuttel obit can be mnore gentile, given that heissenbuttel isn't around anymore. But the background ideology both pieces come from is close to identical. Basically the century's explorations are written off, there is a sense that happily we are back where we started, safe in old England, where Victoriana-Thatcherian values (culturally, Arnoldian-Eliotian conservatism) have won the day. Vide a sentence like the one opening one of the obit: > FOR almost 40 years Helmut Heissenb|ttel espoused an extrem= e > literary modernism that by the end of his career had come t= o > seem rather old-fashioned. One may be allowed to wonder, "to whom did it seem old-fashioned?" The all-knowing Times obit-lit-crit who lays the century's attempts at "making it new" to rest in one crisp sentence. It is the opening sentence & sets the tone. We now know that HH was a nice old out-of-date fart who doesn't need to be taken seriously TODAY. & we can then go on to be nice to him =97 'cause like all other Indians & poets, once dead, they're good =97 & talk, not unintelligently of what his project was.=20 Pierre =20 =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=3D=3D Pierre Joris | I still know little about poems, but I do know Dept. of English | that suspicion is important. Be sufficiently SUNY Albany | suspicious, suspect the words, the language, Albany NY 12222 | I have often told myself, heighten this=20 tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | suspicion =97 so that someday, soemthing New email: | can come into being... Ingeborg Bachmann joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| =20 =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=3D=3D ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 15:11:58 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Eclecticism: Snap Crackle AND pop I just want to go on record agreeing vociferously with Rob Hardin, who, with his extensive musical back (and fore) ground, obviously knows what he's talking about: ...agreeing that eclecticism is not snobbery and, therefore, we should stop worrying about the categories and discuss the work on its own merit, regardless of what part of the musical spectrum it comes from or who its intended or actual audience is. ...agreeing that Oasis are derivative of 60's British pop and complete morons to boot, making them and their music indefensible and uninteresting on critical grounds (however I must add that they're derivative of a musical style I'm personally not yet sick of hearing variations on, and I think they're quite good at pastiching aspects of that style. Why do I think this? Maybe a real musician could tell us...) ...agreeing with all that stuff about Nirvana too! On another interface, I'd like to just clarify something that Tom Mandel responded to: I am aware that what's now called "classical" music (particularly opera) once had a wide enough audience to merit the term "popular". However, when I used the term popular, I didn't mean popular, I meant popular. I mean the category popular music doesn't necessarily align itself with what's popular in the sense that a lot of people like it. Separated by a common language. All this agreeableness is making me thirsty. ********************************** sjcarll@slip.net Steve Carll http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. --Paul Celan ********************************** ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 01:48:18 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Anselm Hollo Subject: Re: Heissenbuttel encore Bravo, Pierre! & I guess we've both been around long enough to recognize that implacable philistinism, over there as over here. Seems like some of the young 'uns still have to find out. Anselm of the Corvidae ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 15:23:57 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Jarnot Subject: Ear Inn Update EAR INN UPDATE Despite a vicious rainstorm that even cancelled baseball, the Ear Inn was once again filled to capacity on Saturday October 19th. Hordes of poets braved the downpour and high winds to see Anselm Berrigan and Kim Lyons read their work. Anselm opened the reading with "I remember hearing Joe Brainard read his poem I Remember at the Ear Inn..." and proceeded from there with a great series of meditations about life in San Francisco. Bernadette Mayer later said that Anselm's Mount Shasta poem included a secret message about UFO activity. Kim Lyons complemented Anselm's reading with incredible meditations about life in New York. No UFOs, but some pigeons. She closed her reading with a new and truly epic poem called "Eon" which ranks in the top ten list of great poems read at the Ear Inn. The audience included, alphabetically: Tim Atkins, Brenda Coultas, Tim Davis, Joe Elliot, Rob Fitterman, Liz Fodaski, Drew Gardner, John Godfrey, Judith Goldman, Phil Good, Jackson Highfill, Mitch Highfill, Bill Luoma, Anna Malmude, Greg Masters, Bernadette Mayer, Sophia Mayer, Douglas Rothschild, Prageeta Sharma, Eleni Sikelianos, Lorna Smedman, Juliana Spahr, Brian Stefans, and Lewis Warsh. If your last name begins with B, I, K, N, O, P, Q, T, U, V, X, or Z, please come to the Ear Inn on Saturday October 26th at 2:30 pm to see Deirdre Kovac and Barbara Henning. Deirdre is a BIG ALLIS associate editor and her work has been kicking ass all over the country in magazines such as Denver Quarterly, Object, Letterbox, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. Barbara's most recent book, LOVE MAKES THINKING DARK, was released by United Artists last year. The Ear Inn is at 326 Spring Street in New York City. Come early, stay late it's the greatest show on earth. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 14:49:32 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matt Kirschenbaum Subject: Darick Chamberlain In-Reply-To: <845113597.18394.0@shadoof.demon.co.uk> from "John Cayley" at Oct 12, 96 10:49:12 am Does anyone on Poetics happen to have an email address for Darick Chamberlain, author of the "mock-machine mock epic" _Cigarette Boy_? Thanks, --Matt ================================================================= Matthew G. Kirschenbaum University of Virginia mgk3k@virginia.edu Department of English http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/ Electronic Text Center ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 17:44:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: [Fwd: South Africa International Book Drive] This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------31464C695251 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable may be of interest to some here on the list -- p --=20 =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=3D=3D Pierre Joris | I still know little about poems, but I do know Dept. of English | that suspicion is important. Be sufficiently SUNY Albany | suspicious, suspect the words, the language, Albany NY 12222 | I have often told myself, heighten this=20 tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | suspicion =97 so that someday, soemthing New email: | can come into being... Ingeborg Bachmann joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| =20 =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=3D=3D --------------31464C695251 Content-Type: message/rfc822 Content-Disposition: inline Received: from runner.utsa.edu (runner.jpl.utsa.edu [129.115.50.16]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.7.6/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA13741 for ; Sun, 20 Oct 1996 12:24:38 -0400 (EDT) Received: by runner.utsa.edu (5.0/SMI-SVR4) id AA01880; Sun, 20 Oct 1996 11:25:31 -0500 Received: from x2.boston.juno.com by runner.utsa.edu (5.0/SMI-SVR4) id AA01874; Sun, 20 Oct 1996 11:25:25 -0500 Received: (from lkomisar@juno.com) by x2.boston.juno.com (queuemail) id MAA15818; Sun, 20 Oct 1996 12:24:05 EDT To: pen@runner.jpl.utsa.edu Subject: South Africa International Book Drive Message-Id: <19961020.111930.8191.6.lkomisar@juno.com> X-Mailer: Juno 1.15 X-Juno-Line-Breaks: 0-34 From: lkomisar@juno.com (Lucy Komisar) Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 12:24:05 EDT Sender: owner-pen@runner.jpl.utsa.edu Precedence: bulk MIME-Version: 1.0 The new South Africa has libraries and schools, but it is tragically short on books. One non-profit organization that has begun to fill South Africa's need for books is the South African International Book Drive. This organization was founded in 1993 by Dr. Julius Wayne Dudley, a Professor of History at Salem State College in Massachusetts, USA. The South African International Book Drive has shipped more than 600,000 books to South Africa. Over three hundred South African schools and libraries are currently receiving books and educational materials from the organization which hopes to ship more than one million books to South Africa by the year 2000. Books of all types and for all age groups are desperately needed throughout the country. Textbooks, educational toys, works of literature, stationery, computer disks, writing instruments, as well as library reference materials are all in short supply and are desperately needed, Dr. Dudley reports. How you can help The South African International Book Drive welcomes donations of any of the items listed above or funds to help pay for related expenses. For more information or to make a donation, contact: Dr. Julius Wayne Dudley The South African International Book Drive 870 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115 USA Telephone: (617) 566-6384 or (508) 741-7394 Fax: (508) 741-6336 E-mail: wdudley@mecn.mass.edu --------------31464C695251-- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 11:53:02 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream I agree, Thomas Bell, "experimental" can only make sense as "trials", "trying it on" "seeing what can be done if such and such a condition were to be changed" and the histories of the arts are stories of trials & errors then? Sides do get taken over this (as per the v recent and continuing Evans,Wallace,Tuma, Lightman debate). The "psychic investments" involved are maybe something you cd comment on? How do us "marginalized" persons come to be that way? What is the attraction? What does it mean to want Steve Evans to hold off from a counter-attack on Potts who has it seems attacked Iain Sinclair and his anthologised companions? I can only wonder. best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 12:59:23 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tom Beard Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream tom bell wrote: > > It's a sad comment on the way we think today that the experimental method > has become the only or dominant point of reference on "experiment". My > (mind and) dictionary may be old-fashioned or out-dated but for me it's > still a "test or trial undertaken to _discover_ something", no? Good point. Maybe I am using the term "experiment" too literally or narrowly, but my background is in science and I think that it may be useful to consider the primary meaning (as used in the sciences) of a term when applying it to other fields. Still, your definition of an experiment as a "test or trial undertaken to _discover_ something" may not be too far from mine. The question is, do we have some idea of what it is we might discover? Do we have some way of telling whether, once the experiment has been undertaken, whether anything _has_ been discovered? Maybe a better term for activities (literary or scientific) that hope to discover something, without having a pre-conceived idea of what that something might be, is "exploratory". This might link in well with your emphasis on "discovery", though some might detect colonialist overtones in both words. It sounds like something to be conducted in the open air rather than in a laboratory. Still, using the word "discovery" as the touchstone for "experimental" writing might be unfair to other modes of writing. For example, many poets who work in the lyric mode would argue that a poem (for them) is a process of discovery, and yet few would apply the term "experimental" to such poems. I've come to dislike one traditional definition of the lyric mode as an "expression of personal emotion", preferring instead the idea that the lyric process is an "exploration of ((personal) emotion)". An exploration, possibly a discovery, but unlikely to be referred to as an experiment. I hope I'm not coming across as a nit-picker - just intrigued by the clouds of possible meanings that surround these words. Cheers &c, Tom Beard. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 20:45:21 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Thomas M. Orange" Subject: defensiveness as prop? In-Reply-To: <199610190407.AAA09394@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> A certain amount of the moronic is a staple for much of rock music's poetics: Well last year I was twenty-one, Didn't have a lot of fun; Now I'm gonna be twenty-two, I say oh my and a boo-hoo [Iggy Pop] I would argue that lyrics become poetic primarily in their delivery, which is why Dylan is poetic and Jim Morrison is not, why Iggy Pop is poetic and Sad preacher nailed upon the colour door of time, Insane teacher be there reminded of the rhyme, There'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify Political ends as sad remains will die. Reach out as forward tastes begin to enter you. [Jon Anderson] is not. Scan these two excerpts, go ahead. Iggy gives us a little iambic tetrameter, Anderson pens an almost perfect string of alexandrines. As far as content, the latter is perhaps more poetic, though far less intelligible and almost opaque in its aspirations for literariness. But Iggy means what he says and you know it in his delivery, especially when he proceeds in the song to let out a series of whoops! and yelps! and yrrrowps! that only he can do. (Nick Cave comes awfully close, as does Cobain in his own way.) In short, as much as I like Yes, Iggy has more poetry in his thumbnail than Anderson does. Cobain's "a mosquito/my libido" has something Iggy-esquely moronic about it, but does it fail as a poetic image? (Libido is small, pesky, displaces blood-as-food with toxin-as-irritant, etc.) It's not a reading I would want to push too far, of course. But with "In Utero," Cobain pushes "teen angst" (another rock staple) into a kind of unparalleled confessionalism (given what we know about the lengths he went to to seek relief for his chronic stomach trouble): I'm on warm milk and laxatives, Cherry-flavored antacid. Again, not terribly poetic by most standards. What about doll steak test meat Evocative, perhaps; poetic? Hard to say, until you factor in the raw and dare I say bloodcurdling delivery. Not having read any of Nick Cave's published writings, I can't really make a thorough case--given also that some of fun lyrics on Birthday Party albums are not by him ("Capers," Genevieve McGuckin; "A Dead Song," Anita Lane; "The Dim Locator," Rowland S. Howard). Cave does give us, however: Hamlets fishin in the grave x2 thru the custard bones and stuff he aint got no friend in there x2 I believe our man's in love Hamlet's got a gun--now he wears a crucifix x2 pow pow pow pow/pow pow pow pow Hamlet moves so beautiful x2 walking thru the flowers who are hiding 'round the corners He's moving down the street--now he likes the look of that cadillac and now he wants that cadillac pow pow pow pow/pow pow pow pow IS THIS LOVE some kinda love x2 Now he's movin' down my street and he's coming to my house crawling up my stairs WHERE FOR ART THOU BABY-FACE Where-for-art-thou pow pow pow pow/pow pow pow pow .... Whatever the merits of imagining Hamlet on a psychotic killing spree, the growl of the second "he ain't got no friend in there" and the second "where-for-art-thou" have to factor in to any assessment. Dylan sings "and [you know] something is happening [here] but you don't know what it is" differently each time. Sometimes it's "and you knooow something is happening...," sometimes it's "but sahmthing's happ-a-ning here...," etc. Cheers, Tom Orange London, Ontario ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 23:58:42 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Marginalized? As someone who is on the "margins" of poetry I'm a little confused. It seems to me that poetry is experimental (avant garde?) and academic, formal, free verse, traditional, etc., are offshoots (albeit reified) of this. I have a feling many lay people would agree? tom bell At 11:53 AM 10/21/96 GMT+1200, Tony Green wrote: > The "psychic investments" involved are maybe something you cd comment >on? How do us "marginalized" persons come to be that way? What is the >attraction? What does it mean to want Steve Evans to hold off from a >counter-attack on Potts who has it seems attacked Iain Sinclair and >his anthologised companions? I can only wonder. > >best > >Tony Green, >e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz > > ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 23:58:45 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: Situation #13 Received my copy. Looks great. Please send subscription info. I'm not sure whether or not I did this. tom At 09:57 AM 10/16/96 -0400, Mark Wallace wrote: >Situation #13 is now available. This issue features work by Phyllis >Rosenzweig (very good, a must read), Paul Long, Renee Gladman, Paul >Weidenhoff, Ken Sherwood, Tod Thilleman, Graham Foust, David Baratier, >William Marsh, Steve Carll, and an electronic mail renga extravaganza, >arRange of Rengas. > >Subscriptions to Situation are $10 for four issues, or $3 for single or >back issues. Please make checks payable to Mark Wallace, 10402 Ewell Ave., >Kensington, MD 20895. > >Thump thump. > > > >/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\ >| | >| 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, 21 Oct 1996 00:32:13 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream At 12:59 PM 10/21/96 +1300, Tom Beard wrote: >Good point. Maybe I am using the term "experiment" too literally or >narrowly, but my background is in science and I think that it may be >useful to consider the primary meaning (as used in the sciences) of a >term when applying it to other fields. > >Still, your definition of an experiment as a "test or trial undertaken >to _discover_ something" may not be too far from mine. The question is, >do we have some idea of what it is we might discover? Do we have some >way of telling whether, once the experiment has been undertaken, whether >anything _has_ been discovered? > I think we do. From the perspective of science (I am one of those, too.): " experimentation...is designed to detect causal agency. One does something to the world and then looks to see whether it has an effect." (from the latest _Am. Jl of Psychology_ sitting on my desk) that which is effecting? to continue: "As described by [the classic psychological reference on psychology] 'true' experiments incude contrasts (i.e., controls) as a means of ruling out rival plausible alternative explanations for any 'effects' observed." Are the "effects" of reading a poem due to the poem or the air in the room? These 'effects' might or might not be replicable in further experimental trials. I realize I'm being argumentative and do apologize for the possibility of this being taken in that sense, but like you I do feel this is an important issue. Cheers &c, Tom Bell ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 01:21:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: Re: Corporate Post-Impressionism (fwd) In-Reply-To: from "Aldon L. Nielsen" at Oct 18, 96 08:19:48 pm The buck sucks here & there suck Is out Let the buzzcocks play ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 01:27:55 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: Re: primi too taa In-Reply-To: <199610180108.VAA22994@shell.acmenet.net> from "Eryque Gleason" at Oct 17, 96 09:10:02 pm Eryque, Your man is Colin Morton. He's a poet and a good concrete poet. That film he did with folk in Winnipeg, I believe. In oTtawa he founded First Draft, a sound poetry performance group that empphasized script over improvisation (some tapes still kicking around), in the 80s. I agree, it's a great short film. He's at aa905@freenet.carleton.ca -Louis ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 22:40:48 -0700 Reply-To: jbrook@ix.netcom.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Brook Subject: SF library controvery - media sources All-- The dismal situation at the San Francisco Public Library has national resonance, as evidenced by the recent New Yorker and Newsweek articles on what the city librarian calls a "mall for the mind." I'm forwarding a list of media sources accessible over the web. Following this list you'll find my response to the Newsweek article. --James Brook ACCOUNTS OF THE SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY CONTROVERSY Recent News Media Available Via Links to the World Wide Web Compiled by Walter Biller, Editor, THE SAN FRANCISCO ALMANAC For further information: October 19, 1996 This post links to web sites carrying stories on San Francisco's public library controversy. Additional articles have been published in periodicals and newspapers in the Bay Area and around the world. For library administration accounts, see the SFPL website at . See also THE NEW YORKER, October 14, 1996, and NEWSWEEK magazine, October 21, 1996, for major articles not linked here. Searches of the Bay Guardian and Examiner websites will yield additional news. This list is in chronological order, August 28-October 16, 1996. DUBIOUS DISCARDS New evidence reveals that the library trashed more than 100,000 books in the last two years. (Search engine provides additional links.) Complete story at: SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN August 28, 1996 NEW LIBRARY INADEQUATE-NO SPACE FOR BOOKS, CRITICS CLAIM The new San Francisco Main Library opened its doors April 18 amid a flurry of excitement, but all that glitters is not gold. Complete story at: THE CITY VOICE (San Francisco) August 15, 1996 SPACE AT SF's NEW LIBRARY LESS THAN WE NEED, CHIEF ADMITS The chief librarian of the Main Library has finally admitted the new $140 million building has less room for books than anticipated - and "less than we need." Locate story via: Search engine provides this article and others. Best search phrases: "Gerald Adams" (byline field) and "library" (keywords field) SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER September 4, 1996 NEW CITY LIBRARY MAY BE POORLY DESIGNED Just when it seems that all of the ruckus surrounding the new Main Library has quieted down, another bombshell of controversy explodes. Complete story at: THE CITY VOICE (San Francisco) September 15, 1996 SAN FRANCISCO LIBRARY ACCUSED OF TOSSING THOUSANDS OF BOOKS Have libraries become high technology showrooms at the expense of books? CNN HEADLINE NEWS (San Francisco) website and broadcast October 12, 1996 MAYOR BROWN CALLS FOR AUDIT OF PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM San Francisco mayor Willie Brown tackled the issue of the recently disclosed deficit at the SF Public Library. A broad-based article. Complete story at: THE CITY VOICE (San Francisco) October 16, 1996 /// END POST/SFPL MEDIA LINKS August 8-October 16, 1996 /// Newsweek Letters Editor: The sorry state of the San Francisco Public Library ("A Mall for the Mind," The Arts, Oct. 14) shows no sign of improving: books are still being dumped, there's a $1.9 million deficit, and Mayor Willie Brown has called for an audit. City Librarian Ken Dowlin and his administration are indeed intent on recreating the public library in the image of the shopping mall. Their "public-private partnership" opens the door wide to corporatist ideology, which aims at enclosing and profiting from "the commons of knowledge." In decades past San Franciscans were the first to resist the effects of unchecked freeway building; Nicholson Baker and friends may well have started an information freeway revolt. James Brook Coeditor of Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995) ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 07:45:37 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Boughn Subject: Re: What experimental poets do to the mainstream In-Reply-To: <8FF2101BF5@ccnov2.auckland.ac.nz> from "Tony Green" at Oct 21, 96 11:53:02 am FROM THE CANADIAN BUREAU: There's a rumour that in Vancouver experimental dildoes are rapidly becoming mainstream due to some programmes at Simon Fraser University aimed at getting your ordinary sex shoppe consumer to "try on" and "explore" something a little different. It's widely believed that the researchers will now be eligible for Nobel prizes. There was also recent talk in the media here that the Royal Bank, as part of its campaign to take away business from the Bank of Montreal, has bought some other lyrics from Dylan and is now mounting a national ad campaign around the slogan "It don't take weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Aging Canadian "boomers" are reportedly up in arms that their nostalgia fantasies are being wantonly violated by big business. Credulously, Mike mboughn@chass.utoronto.ca ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 09:00:39 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Human Rights Watch Thought this may interest some here -- Pierre Human Rights Watch is pleased to announce its new site on the World=20 Wide Web. For those you with Web access, please visit us at=20 http://www.hrw.org. =20 Available in an easy-to-use format is the latest news about Human Rights Watch activities, campaigns and publications. A new feature of our work is the How You Can Help section, which gives ideas for specific action individuals can take to help promote respect for international human rights. A printable form for making donations is also available. =20 Detailed information about the organization is available on the site, including our most recent annual report, questions and answers about our work,job opportunities with Human Rights Watch and lists of board and staff members. =20 If you are interested in linking your organization's website to ours, please e-mail Robert Kimzey at kimzeyr@hrw.org. =20 For those without access to the Web, we will continue to maintain our gopher site at: gopher://gopher.humanrights.org:5000/11/int/hrw. To improve our e-mail list service, we are considering providing region-specific e-mail lists in addition to our general list. The regions are: =20 Sub-Saharan Africa The Americas and the Caribbean Asia Europe and Central Asia The Middle East and North Africa =20 If you would be interested in changing your subscription to one or more of these lists (which will enable us to tailor our transmissions to your regional interests) please let us know by e-mailing Karen Sorensen, online research associate, at sorensk@hrw.org. =20 Website Address: http://www.hrw.org Gopher Address: gopher://gopher.humanrights.org:5000/11/int/hrw Listserv address: To subscribe to the list, send an e-mail message to majordomo@igc.apc.org with "subscribe hrw-news" in the body of the message (leave the subject line blank). Human Rights Watch 485 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10017-6104 TEL: 212/972-8400 FAX: 212/972-0905 E-mail: hrwnyc@hrw.org =20 1522 K Street, N.W. Washington D.C. 20005 TEL: 202/371-6592 FAX: 202/371-0124 E-mail: hrwdc@hrw.org=20 --=20 =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=3D=3D Pierre Joris | I still know little about poems, but I do know Dept. of English | that suspicion is important. Be sufficiently SUNY Albany | suspicious, suspect the words, the language, Albany NY 12222 | I have often told myself, heighten this=20 tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | suspicion =97 so that someday, soemthing New email: | can come into being... Ingeborg Bachmann joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| =20 =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=3D=3D ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 08:35:19 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: Marginalized? In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 20 Oct 1996 23:58:42 -0400 from On Sun, 20 Oct 1996 23:58:42 -0400 Thomas Bell said: >As someone who is on the "margins" of poetry I'm a little confused. It seems >to >me that poetry is experimental (avant garde?) and academic, formal, free >verse, traditional, etc., are offshoots (albeit reified) of this. I have a >feling many lay people would agree? >tom bell I for one would agree with this. & I like Tom Beard's suggestion that "explore/discover" might work better than "experiment" to describe what's involved in most bona fide poetry. But the experimental method is only a part of the scientific method, which involves exploring & measuring possibilities. As Tom Mandel mentioned, there's probably a lot of previous talk on this line in the archives. But this leads me to another battleground... this debate over Potts & the marginalization of the experimental reminds me of the Sokal flapdoodle. Tony asks whether there is an element of self-marginalization (internalizing the oppressor?) involved. It seems to me there is in the process of making poetry a range or oscillation between the freedom of pure formal playing around & on the other hand a powerful impulse to formulate (in a scientific sense) - to bring things together, to comprehend, and to communicate these comprehensions. The new amalgams of understanding may be extremely precise, narrow & refined in an aesthetic sense & in the sense of a "message": this tends to create a superficial likeness between the two ends of the spectrum (pure play & new communication). Now if your writing tends toward the first - pure play, art for art's sake - then in a work-driven conflicted world, this seems to entail marginalization. & if your writing aims toward the second, the same may be true! but not so automatically, not so necessarily. In the second hand there's are real comprehensive/communicative push, that may extend beyond the borders of art per se. I know people are fed up with such abstract formulations. But what I'm trying to suggest is that perhaps there's a "basic theoretical poetry" just as there's a "basic theoretical science", and if this is the case, caution is called for before politicizing either "experimental" or "mainstream" on behalf of a political slant (either the politics of publication & literary clout, or politics per se). - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 09:18:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eryque Gleason Subject: Re: primi too taa louis, thanks a lot! >Eryque, > >Your man is Colin Morton. He's a poet and a good concrete poet. That film >he did with folk in Winnipeg, I believe. In oTtawa he founded First Draft, >a sound poetry performance group that empphasized script over >improvisation (some tapes still kicking around), in the 80s. I agree, it's >a great short film. He's at aa905@freenet.carleton.ca > >-Louis ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 14:32:44 BST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ira Lightman Subject: Meeting the poet through the poem It may just be a feature of living the other side of an ocean away from most of the living poets I read, but I have often found that the piece of writing I most like is done by the writer I most want to meet as a person; ie not just intelligent and artful but human. Yet it's often said (to readers?) that they will only be disappointed, I haven't found this. I think this certainly about Carla Harryman, who was the first Language Writer I really really liked and the first I met; the 2 or 3 conversations I've had in person with her feel like the biggest reading poetry buzz, not like from "fame" but that private thing of a book you read and the words in you reading. Has anyone else found this? Feeling the writer is a companion just from the text, then finding it so? Best Ira ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 08:29:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? to thomas orange's long post abt rock lyrics i must add my cents x2. i think the point about how delivery, or, as i'd say in other contexts, context itself, can make something poetic. this is something that's often often overlooked in these page-based discussions. there are many instances in which the banal can be transfigured by the power of a situation or the power of delivery. or when, embedded in the banal, a gem of "originality" leaps out --but it's the context that makes that originality gemlike...etc. md ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 08:55:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Marginalized? not that i have much stake in the discussion of what constitutes "avant garde" and what is "mainstream" --i've kept out of the discussion so far, but now i guess my logorrhea's caught up w/ me: i have been interested in the reception of my only book,which has the word "vanguard" in its title. most of my readership seems to be among writers and scholars interested in the avant-garde as a reified literary canon of writers and styles, whereas i was --and am --interested more in a process of being-out-on-a-limb for a cross-section of writers. thus i wrote abt robert lowell who would not qualify as "avant garde" by just about any standards, but who undertook an exploratory self-refashioning when he adopted the confessional mode. i paired lowell with some girls writing in a ged program in a south boston housing project. for me, this section wsa the most exciting. for others it counted only as a brave attempt to make "bad poetry" relevant. for me, it wasn't bad poetry and i wasn't on a missionary trip. i liked it. so, what's my point. i notice i'm rambling in the fields of personal anecdote, or, as kenneth koch sez of wordsworth, "nosing along in the shallows." i guess i agree with those on this list who would like to widen the sense of "experimental" toward process rather than categorizable product. doing so seems to make possible a broader range of interesting readings of all texts. at the same time, i have found that "experimental poetry" in the reified sense has been a terrific pedagogical tool for accomplishing that "defamiliarization" russian formalists posit as the trademark of literary language --the students are plunged immediately into the realm of the literary with no recourse, initially, to their recuperative quotidien narratives. but then again, maybe shakespeare accomplishes that for them too. In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > On Sun, 20 Oct 1996 23:58:42 -0400 Thomas Bell said: > >As someone who is on the "margins" of poetry I'm a little confused. It > seems > >to > >me that poetry is experimental (avant garde?) and academic, formal, free > >verse, traditional, etc., are offshoots (albeit reified) of this. I have a > >feling many lay people would agree? > >tom bell > > I for one would agree with this. & I like Tom Beard's suggestion that > "explore/discover" might work better than "experiment" to describe what's > involved in most bona fide poetry. But the experimental method is only > a part of the scientific method, which involves exploring & measuring > possibilities. As Tom Mandel mentioned, there's probably a lot of > previous talk on this line in the archives. > > But this leads me to another battleground... this debate over Potts & > the marginalization of the experimental reminds me of the Sokal flapdoodle. > Tony asks whether there is an element of self-marginalization (internalizing > the oppressor?) involved. It seems to me there is in the process of making > poetry a range or oscillation between the freedom of pure formal playing > around & on the other hand a powerful impulse to formulate (in a scientific > sense) - to bring things together, to comprehend, and to communicate these > comprehensions. The new amalgams of understanding may be extremely > precise, narrow & refined in an aesthetic sense & in the sense of a > "message": > this tends to create a superficial likeness between the two ends of the > spectrum (pure play & new communication). > > Now if your writing tends toward the first - pure play, art for art's sake - > then in a work-driven conflicted world, this seems to entail marginalization. > & if your writing aims toward the second, the same may be true! but not > so automatically, not so necessarily. In the second hand there's are > real comprehensive/communicative push, that may extend beyond the borders > of art per se. > > I know people are fed up with such abstract formulations. But what I'm > trying to suggest is that perhaps there's a "basic theoretical poetry" > just as there's a "basic theoretical science", and if this is the case, > caution is called for before politicizing either "experimental" or > "mainstream" on behalf of a political slant (either the politics of > publication & literary clout, or politics per se). - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 10:15:34 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: close readings I think Keith Tuma makes some good points about the necessity of close readings of poets across the boundaries of various "genre" limitations. LIke you, Keith, I share some interest in "mainstream" poets--Frank Bidart's pretty good, I like James Tate at times, and Frederick Turner seems to me fascinating in his wrong-headed ambitions; his belief that iambic pentameter is the natural rhythm of the human body strikes me as almost as crazy as phrenology--I keep thinking that he must be suggesting that if we went back to the earliest forms of human life, we'd find cave writing in iambic pentameter. I'm currently doing a rewrite of a piece "On the Lyric As Experimental Possbility" which I originally published in Witz but have never been happy with, and in the new version of that piece I do a close reading of poems by Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass along with a close reading of a recent poem by Jennifer Moxley (her new book, IMAGINATIONS, just out from Tender Buttons, is a must) in order to show how Jennifer's poem uses lyric to critique notions of singular, contained, asocial identity that Haas and Pinsky put forward as central to their work. Haas and Pinsky both finally settle on this notion that desire is not socially mediated, but rather a fact of being individual--one of the high points for Pinsky being when he suggests of people that "some like chocolate in the middle of the night" while others do not. Moxley, on the other hand, draws attention to the socially mediated aspects of her desires, while at the same time suggesting that attention to particularities and differences in issues of desire remain relevant. On the other hand, in doing such close readings, I often feel like I'm wasting time writing about poetry whose assumptions trouble me when I would prefer to write about poetry I like. There's the famous Frank O'Hara quote that Charles Bernstein was fond of using to me and others when I was a graduate student, a quote I'm going to paraphrase here--"Why write about poetry you don't like? History will take care of it for you." That position seems too hopeful to me, finally, but nonetheless, I do see the point of spending the little time I do have for critical writing on work that's congenial to me. It's a thorny problem, in any case. 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, 21 Oct 1996 10:05:18 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: Meeting the poet through the poem In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 21 Oct 1996 14:32:44 BST from Have you read Mandelstam's essay "On the Interlocutor"? He talks a lot about the distant reader, the reader in the future. I agree with what you said about the charisma aspect (maybe charisma has the wrong connotations). But then, people are complex(!!). I remember reading somewhere about the Italian partisans who captured Ezra Pound, how one or a few of them said he was immediately likeable, that he seemed like an extraordinary, a "good" man. These were the same partisans in a death-struggle with Nazis & collaborators. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 10:45:36 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Spahr (long work), Davis 19 Spahr (long work), Davis 19 at Poetry City Time: S (17 mins), D (30 mins) Attendance: 40 Setting a land speed record (and reminding many in the audience of Husker Du's best work), Juliana Spahr read from her long work "Live" at Poetry City last Friday. "What some of you fond of gerunds might call 'being human'", "or inappropriate 'uh'", "have you done mean things to people on purpose?", "methodologically sound if safely unsexy", "I may be ready to be a New York poet, I am beginning to know my way around", "I no longer take offense to New York-centric statements". Rhythmically, Spahr returned often to the pattern of "You or I are turning some man-or-woman head". Spahr gave an exciting, continuous-seeming reading, which was the opening half of this rain make-up doubleheader. She wore a black knit top, flower-print pants, and black shoes. After a twelve-minute intermission, Anna Malmude introduced the second reader. Tim Davis, dressed in black jacket (with two pens like fangs in the breast pocket), black jeans, black wing-tips, and a grey buttoned-up shirt, maintained a laugh-to-poem ratio of almost 2 throughout the reading, which included poems from his new book, _My Life in Politics, or a History of N=A=R=R=A=T=I=V=E Film_. The main part of his 19-poem reading was a series of poems written while on lunch break from his Eighth Avenue office. Forget Laughlin, cable Ferlinghetti--these are the lunch poems we've been waiting for. "This is the blankety all of content dependeth on", "Manhattan held a fenfull", "hulky run of buzzer doors", "a tremendous verse blew in", "yoo-hoo you", "another nestegg weasel rain", "take that acre, mule, and lurk in it", "all of history's letterhead", "a snuff film of butterflies running things", "This writing is Sudetenland", "stapled to a frappe", "a fart of cold, cold Rolaids", "Roger Rilke, over", "has-been ISBNS over and over...", "file under rank", "Grandma fingered a Fed", "gauze is good", "Uncle Duh had opened a glass of sash", "the bantu Jackie Coogan", "eau de Nickelodeon", "is this a delicious baloney?", "a crow in every ficus". I could go on, and so could Tim, whose side comments and pauses were flawless. In the audience alternately rapt and howling were: Bill Luoma, Brian Kim Stefans, Bernadette Mayer, Phil Good, Barbara Henning, Anselm Berrigan, Kevin Davies, Deirdre Kovac, Jeff Hull, Brenda Coultas, Eleni Sikelianos, Tim Griffin, Brigham Taylor, Judith Goldman, Kim Rosenfield, Rob Fitterman, Liz Fodaski, Dug Rothschild, Larry Fagin, Charles Weigl, Chris Stroffolino, Doug Stone, Catherine Talese, Nick Ciraldo, Alystyre Julian and Judean Patten. Once again, the Cedar's upstairs seating was closed for renovation. The post-reading crowd also found itself closed out of the Old Town Bar (this is why readings in New York on Friday nights are no good -- no place to take everybody afterwards), which had room at the bar, but no place to sit. Tim volunteered his Ave A apartment, bought pizzas, many brought beer, and the group carried on for several hours more. Schedule notices: This week, Poetry City goes back to its usual Thursday night slot with Poetry Project workshop leader Todd Colby and Cinema of Transgression inventor Nick Zedd. On Halloween, Poetry City will host San Franciscan Steve Carll and Stuyvesant town's own Carol Malmude Szamatowicz. And on 11/7 at 7 p.m., John Wieners and Eleni Sikelianos. --Jordan Davis ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 11:46:42 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: close readings In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 21 Oct 1996 10:15:34 -0400 from I keep asking History to take care of things for me, and it don't say a word. Once, a few years ago, Hegel showed up on my doorstep, with his dirty owl and a stick of bubblegum marked "Eastern Europe." He said, "Chew on this Dude." I said "It ain't Halloween yet, MasterNarrative, get that bird off my porch." He said he'd be back. --kt ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 09:05:21 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Being regarded as a dangerous experimentalist" In-Reply-To: <326b80e750d5229@mhub1.tc.umn.edu> This about the "primary" meaning of a word in science when applying it to another field is deeply distrubing -- we're not talking about quarks here -- as it wd. severely narrow the usage of an old and capacious term. My OED (admittedly the old edition -- I have to join that book clud so I can afford the newerversion) -- cites, to our point -- Kimble, 1878 "Though a poet should have a strongly passionate nature . . .he should . . . be able to expermentalize with it" OED's first def. is "the action of trying anything, or putting it to proof; a test, trial" -- clearly, that which is put to proof is not restricted to hypotheses -- and their is "experiment" in its theological sense -- "to have experience of" -- Caxton, 1483 -- "And these thynges sene and experymented, Esope returned to his labors" I have nbo problem with scientists using the word "experiment," as they have for centuries -- but I would hate to think that the word was to taken away from these other domains of experimental abuse -- "no problem," that is -- The term "experimental" poetry causes a rucus whenever it appears, but it appears to me to combine deliciously two of the oldest senses of the word -- But maybe this sense of mine dates to my days as an experimental Baptist -- this is not, by the way, experimental spelling -- You can tell when I'm away from my San Jose State office by the percentage of errors in my transmissions ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 12:41:57 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Marginalized? H Gould writ: > But what I'm trying to suggest is that perhaps there's a "basic >theoretical poetry" just as there's a "basic theoretical science", and if >this is the case, caution is called for before politicizing either >"experimental" or "mainstream" on behalf of a political slant (either the >politics of publication & literary clout, or politics per se) H, I think there may be a a "basic theoretical poetry." It would be that poetry is the type of writing that most resists decontextualization. The Chomsky/Whorf debate applies here-- but seems to me one cld argue Chomsky's deep structure also, or complimentarily, gives a view of language which honors the primacy of the individual. Seems to me the resistance to politicization is a very american phenomenon. In other industrial countries people still have a sense of the importance & value of their political opinions-- some degree of efficacy. Though that difference is disappearing as the global americanization (i.e. corporatization) continues. L.B.O. of the M.F.A.s? --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 12:55:57 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: Marginalized? In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 21 Oct 1996 12:41:57 -0400 from Rod, I agree with you completely (I think). See F. Oh'Hara's "Personism" on abstraction & individual. Nor did I mean to put down the useless play side of basic poetry. But if there's a "cognitive" side to it, an experimental discovery side of it, then there's no need to try to politicize mainstream/experimental. ALL authentic stuff is inherently experimental. And the cognitive/communicative aspect of the experiment may be less obviously experimental on the formal side while VERY "experimental" in the political/communicative side. What I don't agree with is academic phantom politics. The hoot & holler of us vs them, as if "new writing" = vanguard politics. To me that's a politically-correct smokescreen for very tiny office politics. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 19:24:49 +0100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Cayley Subject: defensiveness as prop? Never understood the (lack of real) relations between poetic and p(r)op lyricism, but was compelled to use a Stephen Morrissey (from the great days of the Smiths) utensil at the head of a forthcoming collection: so I broke into the palace with a sponge and a rusty spanner... There's a lot I'd be happy to read/recite(/sing?) from (Smiths-era) Morrissey, in any company. And what about the Scott Walker of 'Climate of Hunter' and 'Tilt'? What do 'we' think of that? - - - - - > John Cayley Wellsweep Press [in Chinese HZ: ~{?-U\02~} ~{=[i@3v0fIg~}] ^ innovative literary translation from Chinese ^ 1 Grove End House 150 Highgate Road London NW5 1PD UK Tel & Fax: 0171-267 3525 Email: cayley@shadoof.demon.co.uk http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/ < - - - - - ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 12:11:51 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tosh Berman Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? er... > >There's a lot I'd be happy to read/recite(/sing?) from (Smiths-era) >Morrissey, in any company. > >And what about the Scott Walker of 'Climate of Hunter' and 'Tilt'? What do >'we' think of that? > >- - - - - > >Bravo for even mentioning Morrissey and Scott Walker. "Tilt" is wonderful >poetry. tosh ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 16:33:16 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mary Hilton Subject: "Lead, Glass and Poppy" by Kristin Prevallet Now available from primitive publications -- "Lead, Glass and Poppy," by Kristin Prevallet, a riveting work incorporating past and present news stories into a "millennial convergence poem." About this chapbook, Mark Wallace writes: "Kristin Prevallet's work presents a distinctly modern witchery, a series of spells and counterspells designed to drive us from complacency with a paradoxically generous black magic. In her new chapbook, 'Lead, Glass and Poppy,' Kristin details exactly what happens when human beings take off blithely for the sun; they experience intense heat, destructive fallout, and the debris of deluded dreams. What surprise, then, that they find themselves once more in the chaotic history of misunderstood desires for transcendence." 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 a subscription of six. Other titles include: The History of the State May Last, 1616, by Mary Hilton The Haunted Baronet, by Mark Wallace All checks may be made payable to Mary Hilton and mailed to: primitive publications c/o Mary Hilton 1706 U Street, NW, #102 Washington, DC 20009 e-mail: mhilton@tia.org *or* 74463.1505@compuserve.com Inquires, submissions, or requests to be included on the mailing list are welcome. Thank you. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 17:08:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: Ichor Hope you can come to hear David Shapiro, John Godfrey & Brenda Coultas this fri night. this starts the second season of the Ichor series. @Clementine Gallery 526 W 26th St, 2nd floor 8:30 pm drinks will be served. bcnu ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 14:41:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: My Ship Is Coming In In-Reply-To: <845922110.28203.0@shadoof.demon.co.uk> "We" who still live where Walker once walked have had precious little opportunity to make anything at all of his post "Make It Easy on Yourself" recordings -- BUT, a new sampler of a decade or so of work since Walker left the Walker Brothers has now been released here -- No matter what anyone might make of Walker's writing, he's one of the greatest singing voices of his time -- (Though he often threw it away in the old days on songs about tight skirts and big legs) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 10:50:08 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: Marginalized? Henry Gould, oh no, I wasn't in the least bothered abt self-marginalization -- I happily marginalize my"self" all the livelong day etc. when left to my own devices. I was hoping that Thomas Bell might know something more than I cd guess at abt the motivation of the debate going on: more than anything I was interested to read Ira Lightman wanting to defend Potts who had in Steve Evans's view written a kind of review in which marginalizing or victimising further the victims of marginalization seemed to be so clearly displayed. You know, a psychoanalytic view of the whole performance wd not be amiss. What sort of crazinesses are poetic ambitions? What is to be gained? in fact? in imagination? best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 21 Oct 1996 21:40:59 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: My Ship Is Coming In >No matter what anyone might make of Walker's writing, he's one of the >greatest singing voices of his time -- (Though he often threw it away in >the old days on songs about tight skirts and big legs) Hey, onliest Walker I ever went and heard was Junior Walker and the All Stars. Am I right? George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 16:44:34 JST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Geraets Subject: Experimental marginalized Surely the thing we like about poetry, doing being or reading it, is the uncertainty, the uncertainty of that. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 02:32:44 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: What is a library? Having grown up with no more books in the house than Readers Digest Condensed novels and that wonderfully named low-end encyclopedia, The Book of Knowledge, I've had a lifelong appreciation for the transformative impact that a library (specifically the old Albany Public Library on Solano, now closed and moved a block hence to a large new postmodern space) had on my life. I first read Williams' The Desert Music there at age 16 and understood for the first time that poetry would be my calling. Much of what is going in SF with the new library is the fruition of many years of struggle over the direction of that place. Melissa Riley, who may be known to many on this list, has been involved in this for years -- the elimination of real librarians in the neighborhood libraries, the reduction of books, the elimination of neighborhood libraries themselves, etc. But it's a two sided tale at the very least. One of the architects of the library, Cathy Simon (who is married to the poet Michael Palmer) discusses the project in detail in an article in Representations 42, Spring 1993 (a special issue on "Future Libraries" that remains the best single edition of that journal, one that can be said to be truly devoted to policy in the literal sense of polis, worth reading cover to cover). Speaking of Michael Palmer, who last I heard was fond of writing in the Mission Branch of the SF Public Library, does anyone have an email address for the man? All best, Ron Silliman ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 09:16:02 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: A Parade of Theories At 4:44 PM the thing we like about poetry is the uncertainty At 9:05 AM we are certain about long-term value Years ago, Fed economists tracked corrugated-box sales (a lot of stuff is packed in boxes). More recently, Mr. Greenspan's command of obscure statistics has ranged from scrap- metal prices (often rising in good times) to railroad carloadings (they also move stuff). And with nothing more than an offhand comment at a congressional hear- ing, he has vaulted to market-moving status such arcana as the diffusion index of supplier-delivery lags (how long it takes for raw materials to reach factories). The dollar, the trade deficit, the price of gold and, most recently, the monthly unemploy- ment report have taken center stage. At 8:40 PM I have to explain that the lack of experientia is post-ironic, that the measure that puts youth and youthful response with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones puts Reagan in office, and that the sensuous experience of biting my fingernail is one I can enjoy at any of my nine jobs The mayor of Algiers was shot to death in the Algerian capital. Witnesses and French media say the official died in an ambush of his motorcade by Muslim fundamentalist rebels, but the Algerian government said he was struck by a stray bullet at his home. J ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 08:01:49 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tosh Berman Subject: Re: My Ship Is Coming In Again I have to strongly suggest his latest release "Tilt." It is a beautiful record. His lyrical writing is extremely fine and has beautiful imagery. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 09:51:06 CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Peter Zukowski Subject: Poetry reading in Chicago For those of you in or around Chicago, (or who will be on Wednesday): *************************************************** Private in Public Reading Series Presents POETRY IN CHICAGO a collaboration between Private Arts magazine and the Musueum of Contemporary Art. The Museum of Contemporary Art will celebrate the verbal as well as the visual through this event, presented in collaboration with Private Arts magazine. "Poetry in Chicago" is presented in anticipation of the upcoming MCA's exhibition "Art in Chicago, 1945-1995." Private Arts is a Chicago-based journal that publishes avant-garde literature and art from around the world. FEATURED WRITERS Brooke Bergan Carlos Cumpian William Fuller John Jacob Ralph J. Mills Jr. Sterling Plumpp 220 East Chicago Ave. Wednesday, October 23, 6 pm Theater, Mayer Education Center, first floor (Fee includes admission to the museum on the day of the event.) MCA members: $4 students and seniors: $6 nonmembers: $8 for information, or to purchase tickets in advance call 312.397.4010 *********************************************** This one-of-a-kind event will present an eclectic sampling of the most innovative poetry coming out of Chicago. Watch for a posting about the MCA's program "Fiction in Chicago" on Wednesday, November 6. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 11:53:58 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: mountain goats Hey all you listers out there with detailed and arcane knowledges of musics pop and otherwise, what can you tell me about The Mountain Goats? A student put me onto them recently and I'm glad he did. --Keith ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 12:06:13 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: close readings In-Reply-To: The problem Mark mentions is one I've often been bothered by myself. Writing well about poetry, in my experience, requires giving the poetry in question a *lot* of time and attention, and i'd just rather lavish that effort on poetry i like. And i'm afraid the temptation wld be strong, in writing about poetry i *don't* like, to not do it even the justice it deserves. This also intersects with a point I think Dodie raised about writers being free to dismiss work not useful to them. The poet in me feels this strongly, while the critic in me feels an obligation to be more fair-minded, and attentive. This is a dynamic that might be worth exploring in some detail. I'm quite aware, for ex., that just because certain work doesn't have value for me doesn't mean it might not be worthwhile for someone else. But I'm not sure the poet part of me, which has good reasons for ignoring or maybe even hating this work, wld allow the critic part to do a fair critical job of work on it. steve On Mon, 21 Oct 1996, Mark Wallace wrote: [snip] > On the other hand, in doing such close readings, I often feel like I'm > wasting time writing about poetry whose assumptions trouble me when I > would prefer to write about poetry I like. There's the famous Frank O'Hara > quote that Charles Bernstein was fond of using to me and others when I was > a graduate student, a quote I'm going to paraphrase here--"Why write about > poetry you don't like? History will take care of it for you." That > position seems too hopeful to me, finally, but nonetheless, I do see the > point of spending the little time I do have for critical writing on work > that's congenial to me. > > It's a thorny problem, in any case. > > 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 | > |____________________________________________________________________________| > Steve Shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 12:48:14 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry G Subject: Re: A Parade of Theories In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 22 Oct 1996 09:16:02 -0400 from On Tue, 22 Oct 1996 09:16:02 -0400 Jordan Davis said: >The mayor of Algiers was shot to death in >the Algerian capital. Witnesses and French >media say the official died in an ambush of >his motorcade by Muslim fundamentalist >rebels, but the Algerian government said he >was struck by a stray bullet at his home. What else is new in Byzantium? This just in: Fr. Bookotopos lambasted the iconoclasts again without leaving his chair, denouncing their position that the image proceeds directly and a-politically from the logos by way of the ouzia through the sun via the Cross-Bronx E. Fr. Gouldoparrotalkis offered a triple analogy between language poetics & the sheepshank or bowline version of Joycotopolis's _Finneganousius' Testament to the Hippogriffians_. > Bread riots south of the statue of Emperor Theobillclintos. New troubles in Hypo-Serbia. Turkey simmering on the anvil of the Great Game. Noise in bars as usual. - HG ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 10:18:48 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: I'm a Roadrunner, baby In-Reply-To: Now, The Walker Brothers conjoined with Jr. Walker; that WOULD have been a show to see-- ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 16:02:15 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Issa Clubb Subject: Re: mountain goats In-Reply-To: <961022.115833.EST.KWTUMA@miamiu.muohio.edu> >Hey all you listers out there with detailed and arcane knowledges of musics >pop and otherwise, what can you tell me about The Mountain Goats? Ah, I've been hoping the song/poetry thread would get around to him, so here goes: basically "they" are John Darnielle, though his friend Rachel is enough a part of the band to justify the plural, I guess. He's been part of the "Inland Empire" So.Cal. cassette scene for a long time. He also has several CDs; they should be available at indie record stores. I would say _Zopilote Machine_ or _Sweden_ would be the places to start--the others are still great but (to put it simply) they don't have as many songs. John's been trying to get into grad school in Classics, which explains the liner notes in Latin and the songs written from the p.o.v. of Roman emperors. He also has some idiosyncratic views on the history of American lit; you can follow this link -- http://www.duke.edu/~jnn/mountain_goats/mg.html -- to transcribed lyrics and some essays he's written about walt whitman and the bi-fi revolution. In his songs, all sorts of difficulties (history, literature, language & personal relationships) get wrapped up into intense little bursts of words that are usually narratives about places he's never been and people he's never known. Though I think he goes to Sweden some. from "alpha incipiens" on Zopilote Machine: i'm trying to piece together what you're saying but the birds are screeching, the hounds are baying i don't remember there being any hounds around here And if the Alistair Galbraith/Mtn Goats tour comes through your town, I would go see it, it will be worth the effort more than likely. --Issa _________________________ Issa Clubb Voyager Art Dept. mailto:issa@voyagerco.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 17:25:12 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: Re: close readings In-Reply-To: from "Steve Shoemaker" at Oct 22, 96 12:06:13 pm I'm aware of all these problems, too, and I'm very aware of it, and that these are problems that we share, and we can, I think we can talk about these problems in an aware way, but not too far away as to be invisible. I'm aware of the philosopher side of me, I am because that side peels the onions to spite the horse of French philosophy - except to the neglect of the transportation clerk side of me who is really much like a historian side of a rare element like selenium seen through the microscope of a fungal specialist, a wrong side "detailleur" (as Frennch rugby players call the action of their heels) who asks for extra pancakes syrop and butter at the annual stampede breakfast. So, the idealism of onions any day of the week versus the self-interested transgressive sugar-load only on holidays: these are the positions that I am aware of holding while reading closely, and between the two I tarnish balefully sodden, until the enlightenment of my friends on this list encunted the discussion further than expected. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 15:07:32 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: What is a library? > the old Albany >Public Library on Solano, now closed and moved a block hence to a large >new postmodern space) had on my life. I first read Williams' The Desert >Music there at age 16 and understood for the first time that poetry >would be my calling. That was Ron Silliman. Curious, because that was the poem that did it for me, too. I had been in the air force, and now here i was back at university, reading my way through the PS books, and finally I got to WCW, and when I opened that book, I was so alarmed that I dropped it onto the floor, great noise. Hey, come to think of it, I will be teaching it late in November. George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 20:50:44 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth Goldsmith Subject: Call for Papers (Internet) I am offering free internet housing for papers related to visual, concrete, & sound poetry in hope of starting a web archive. This will be appended to a new (updated) site housing works of visual & concrete poetry (historical, contemporary, and insane). For more information please contact me at: kennyg@bway.net Thanks, Kenny +=============================================================+ Kenneth Goldsmith play: http://wfmu.org/~kennyg kennyg@bway.net work: http://www.ubuweb.com 611 Bway, #702, NYC 10012 v.212.260-4081 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 21:16:33 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: michael moore According to Bronwyn S. Beistle: From root Wed Oct 23 00:16:16 1996 From: "Bronwyn S. Beistle" Message-Id: <199610230003.UAA51190@dept.english.upenn.edu> Subject: POLITICS: Borders a low-down union-busting slime mold company To: ecollier@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 20:03:25 -0400 (EDT) Cc: english-grads@english.upenn.edu, bush@bohr.physics.upenn.edu X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23-upenn3.1] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu Precedence: bulk For everyone who, like me, frequents Borders: a little political update. Bronwyn > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Sun, 20 Oct 1996 08:57:09 EDT > From: Thomas R Carpenter > To: gavin@world.std.com, emily_carpenter@timberland.com, xta@aol.com, > cereneta@wellsmktg.com, tereneta@uclink4.berkeley.edu, hrhst5+@pitt.edu, > rljohnson@aol.com, rs8pj@aol.com, 104302.3331@CompuServe.COM, > 105170.1065@CompuServe.COM, mark_meyers@brown.edu, > wayback@ix.netcom.com, siperadio@aol.com, chickenb@ix.netcom.com, > ssuyat@si.edu, ewdemeter@earthlink.net, jarret_yoshida@hrcusa.org > Subject: The Grumpy Monkey Labor Watch > > Bad Borders Make for Bad Neighbors > > One of the Grumpy Monkey Labor Watch's regular contributors recently > attended a Michael Moore (of "Roger & Me" and "TV Nation" fame) book > signing this evening, courtesy of Unabridged Books; he's on a 47 city > tour to promote his new book "Downsize This! Random Threats from an > Unarmed American". He also had a film crew present, and said he's making > a film about his experiences on this book tour. Anyway, near the end of > the question and answer period following his hour-long talk, he mentioned > the organizing efforts of the Chicago Borders Employees. > > On this book tour, Moore was scheduled to speak and do a book signing at > a > Borders store in Philadephia; when he arrived he found 200 people > picketing > outside the store, protesting the firing of a woman who had been > attempting > to organize the workers at that store. Not being one to cross a picket > line, Moore decided not to speak, but instead turned over the microphone > set > up for him to the fired employee and the picketers (after obtaining the > permission of the store's manager). > > One of the next stops on the tour was a brand-new Borders in lower > Manhattan > (I think in or very near the World Trade Center); when he got there, > store > managers informed him that he could sign books, but that he couldn't > speak > or read from his book "because of what happened in Philadelphia." ("And > this was the week before Banned Book Week!" he said.) > > After some negotiations between Random House and Borders, Moore decided > to > continue the book tour with a few more Borders-sponsored events as > planned. > In Des Moines he spoke and signed books at a local high school, unaware > that > the event was sponsored by a local Borders store. During the signing, a > note was slipped to him (which he pulled out of his jacket pocket and > read > to us) saying that the Borders employees were having a secret meeting > about > joining a union the next evening and that the Des Moines booksigning > event > was staffed entirely by Borders management, as management didn't want > Moore > to meet with or talk to any of the employees (who were not allowed to > even > attend the event). After the signing, he was met in the parking lot by a > group of Borders employees who told him that the District Manager for the > midwest had flown in for the signing ("And never introduced himself to > me," > Moore said), that a union-busting consultant had been with the District > Manager, moving around the room the whole time, and that several Borders > employees who had attended anyway had been recognized and "written up" by > the consultant; they were certain they were about to lose their jobs, > just > for attending the booksigning. > > Some of the book tour has been filmed for Moore's latest project. > According to Moore, the film he's making about his tour will definitely > include his experiences with Borders. > When he found out that a few employees from the Chicago Clark Street > Borders were > present, he asked if they would be willing to speak to him and the film > crew > after the signing; he also mentioned possibly showing up unannounced at > the > Clark Street Borders today (October 20th) to > talk to people there. > > WHAT YOU CAN DO: Show up at Borders on Clark Street today, and be > obnoxious. Continue to pressure Borders employees in your area to > organize. > > > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 18:52:48 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jeffrey W. Timmons" Subject: Re: michael moore Comments: To: Louis Cabri In-Reply-To: <199610230116.VAA69536@dept.english.upenn.edu> did anyone see the dc city paper on this local filmmaker--whose name i do not recall--who edited for m moore? apparently this guy agrees with some who suggest that the film roger and me was "manipulative"--in the sense that it deliberately altered chronology in the film to suit his political purpose. i share the films ethos but thought it was an interesting qualification; that and the fact that this filmmaker didnt get paid while moore had accepted some big-money gigs. i think we need more moores in the world but it sort of sounds like dole on campaign finance reform sometimes in this world of duplicitous complicity. jeffrey timmons ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 22:49:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: michael moore though i enjoyed roger and me, i did take exception to the scenes in san francisco, where the voice-over scornfully reports that "everyone had a job but nobody seemed to be working" cuz they were all in cafes drinking their fancy coffee drinks, which they actually enjoyed as drinks, rather than simply as bitter-tasting stimulants for more productive facctory work. what i didn't like was the assumption that the virtuous model for work was the suffering, factory, timeclock type of work. flexible or self-determined schedules, the enjoyment of leisure and the ability to be creative in cafes rather than on the assembly line are clearly symtoms of coastal decadence, trivial and shallow. In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > did anyone see the dc city paper on this local filmmaker--whose name i do > not recall--who edited for m moore? apparently this guy agrees with some > who suggest that the film roger and me was "manipulative"--in the sense > that it deliberately altered chronology in the film to suit his political > purpose. i share the films ethos but thought it was an interesting > qualification; that and the fact that this filmmaker didnt get paid while > moore had accepted some big-money gigs. i think we need more moores in > the world but it sort of sounds like dole on campaign finance reform > sometimes in this world of duplicitous complicity. > > jeffrey timmons ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 23:54:41 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: close readings In-Reply-To: <199610222125.RAA54618@dept.english.upenn.edu> Yes, the psychomachia is infinitely extensible. steve On Tue, 22 Oct 1996, Louis Cabri wrote: > I'm aware of all these problems, too, and I'm very aware of it, and that > these are problems that we share, and we can, I think we can talk about > these problems in an aware way, but not too far away as to be invisible. > I'm aware of the philosopher side of me, I am because that side > peels the onions to spite the horse of French philosophy - except to the > neglect of the transportation clerk side of me who is really much like a > historian side of a rare element like selenium seen through the microscope > of a fungal specialist, a wrong side "detailleur" (as Frennch rugby > players call the action of their heels) who asks for extra pancakes syrop > and butter at the annual stampede breakfast. So, the idealism of onions > any day of the week versus the self-interested transgressive sugar-load > only on holidays: these are the positions that I am aware of holding while > reading closely, and between the two I tarnish balefully sodden, until the > enlightenment of my friends on this list encunted the discussion further > than expected. > Steve Shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 22:02:05 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? To all of you who have been talking about Scott Walker, hooray for "Tilt" and so forth, but my favorites are still the Walker Brothers records, especially the Burt Bacharach-Hal David numbers. Wayne Smith and I wrote a play about a year ago and used Scott's version of "The Windows of the World" throughout. (It was a play about window dressers who dream of achieving fame as fine artists, so it "fit" kind of. Now I undersand there is a whole CD mined from the London archive of Scott Walker singing Burt Bacharach including one duet with my other favorite Dusty Springfield. Al Nielsen is right, Scott is the sexiest man in the world, and George Bowering, you probably did hear the Walker Brothers at least once upon a time, they had the #1 hit on the world charts at just about the same time you were writing your great poem "Brown Globe." ("You poets out there, if you still read words,/ Try to say something to me...." Thanks! --Kevin Killian >Never understood the (lack of real) relations between poetic and p(r)op >lyricism, but was compelled to use a Stephen Morrissey (from the great days >of the Smiths) utensil at the head of a forthcoming collection: > > so I broke into the palace > with a sponge and a rusty spanner... > >There's a lot I'd be happy to read/recite(/sing?) from (Smiths-era) >Morrissey, in any company. > >And what about the Scott Walker of 'Climate of Hunter' and 'Tilt'? What do >'we' think of that? > >- - - - - > >John Cayley Wellsweep Press [in Chinese HZ: ~{?-U\02~} ~{=[i@3v0fIg~}] > ^ innovative literary translation from Chinese ^ >1 Grove End House 150 Highgate Road London NW5 1PD UK >Tel & Fax: 0171-267 3525 Email: cayley@shadoof.demon.co.uk > http://www.demon.co.uk/eastfield/ > < - - - - - ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 02:22:28 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Honey Sondheim -- incommunicado "Trevor owned the stick" blan0 blan0nalb 0nalb bloo0 bloo0oolb 0oolb down0 down0nwod 0nwod stac0 stac0cats 0cats stic0 stic0cits 0cits tras0 tras0sart 0sart sc0at "Blanche trashed it." broug0broug0guorb0guorb ched 0ched 0 dehc0 dehc ck st0ck st0ts kc0ts kc ck st0ck st0ts kc0ts kc d tre0d tre0ert d0ert d do i_0do i_0_i od0_i od hed i0hed i0i deh0i deh ht th0ht th0ht th0ht th ick0ick0kci0kci what0ever "Whatever." k sti0k sti0its k0its k k stu0k stu0uts k0uts k nchon0nchon0nohcn0nohcn ncomm0ncomm0mmocn0mmocn opped0opped0deppo0deppo ose s0ose s0s eso0s eso say s0say s0s yas0s yas stick0stick0kcits0kcits stick0stick0kcits0kcits those0those0esoht0esoht tick 0tick 0 kcit0 kcit tock 0tock 0 kcot0 kcot unica0unica0acinu0acinu ver0ver0rev0rev whate0whate0etahw0etahw virir "Did you hear that? Jennifer said 'whatever.'" ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 02:52:46 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: Re: close readings Yes, my Soul had Sat ire's fully emblazoning Hide Seeking laughter, then Knit a sweater for Your Brow, Steve, As shining-trumptd Henry Would, or the Honey-Made Bill. Are we infinitely Extensible, All, as So much *Limitation* read o'er A Syllable's progression Twenty-Thousand Beagles beneath the Knees, Long In tongue And short in Fabled Pow'r to breach The prince's pimple? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 00:10:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tosh Berman Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? I am thrilled (and that doesn't happen too much am afraid) that there are some Scott fans on this list. It's interesting because some of the old Scott fans hate his new music. As for myself it is an interesting bridge from old Scott to new Scott. He never looks back and just goes forward. I think TILT is just a beautiful record. Has anyone on the list read the Scott bio put out by Virgin in England? NoT bad music bio. At one point he was working with Eno and Daniel L... I forgot his last name, but he is the guitar player that played with Eno and produced U2, ETC. Well, anyway Daniel's habit of wearing a scarf around his head really bugged Scott. Scott ended the sessions. Now that's what I call artistic temperment! tosh PS One should also buy the Walker Bros. NITE FLIGHT album. It was just re-issued and the Scott songs are similar to Bowie's Low period. I am sorry but this is poetry too! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 07:46:06 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: mountain goats et albini Haven't responded to any of the music threads yet because I've been finishing up an English album which, for my penance, Steve C., I was forced to do in the keyboard style of *George Martin*. (And yes, Martin could be pretty great--but that was thirty years ago, for Christ's festering sake! *Why*, God, why do producers always make me recap pop music history 101, bitch moan whine, etc etc [pause while correspondent straps mutated bees to his palms, aims the pulsating thoraxes at his temples and drenches his own face in carcinogenic bug goo]...but I digress. And no, I'm not dissing the B's, I'm dodging my recent repertoire.) Will get to that hardy handful in the next few days, but in the meantime: I love the Mountain Goats unequivocally and have since last fall. John Darnielle is a funny and literate songwriter, that's for subjective certain. And to those who don't get the deadpan folk-music demeanor, I say: "There are certain things about gardening you should know."--TMG best best, Rob Hardin PS: I've been asked to submit ideas for interviews with musicians to _Bomb_ and have been thinking about George Perle, Helios Creed, Six-Finger Satellite and Bloody Valentine (because of the textures). But the Mountain Goats are just about perfect because they haven't really broken and are unashamedly literary. (Apparently, Bloody Val is "too new to be a classic but too old to be current." Which doesn't matter to me, but it definitely seems to matter to _Bomb_.) If anyone knows how to get in touch with Darnielle, please backchannel the necessary info my way. Otherwise: until tomorrow. See you then then. http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 09:13:16 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: A Parade of Theories Henry G wrote: >=20 > On Tue, 22 Oct 1996 09:16:02 -0400 Jordan Davis said: > >The mayor of Algiers was shot to death in > >the Algerian capital. Witnesses and French > >media say the official died in an ambush of > >his motorcade by Muslim fundamentalist > >rebels, but the Algerian government said he > >was struck by a stray bullet at his home. >=20 > What else is new in Byzantium? > This just in: > Fr. Bookotopos lambasted the iconoclasts again without leaving > his chair, denouncing their position that the image proceeds > directly and a-politically from the logos by way of the ouzia > through the sun via the Cross-Bronx E. >=20 > Fr. Gouldoparrotalkis offered a triple analogy between language > poetics & the sheepshank or bowline version of Joycotopolis's > _Finneganousius' Testament to the Hippogriffians_. > > > Bread riots south of the statue of Emperor Theobillclintos. > New troubles in Hypo-Serbia. Turkey simmering on the anvil > of the Great Game. Noise in bars as usual. >=20 > - HG Henry -- don't know if you're response to the cited news of yet another killing in Algiers is not a bit off. Those killings are real -- a parade of real deaths, not a parade of theories -- even if the geography, the facts, &/or the reproting may seem byzantine. A year and a half ago -- & reported in the same manner -- a friend, an Algerian poet, was shot to death. Here is what I wrote then (& published in SULFUR 34) -- Pierre=09 Our eyes are fixed on the TV screen or the New York Times Op-Ed page, transfixed & horrified, emptied & blinded by what is happening in ex-Yugoslavia, in the ex-Soviet Union & its ex-satellites, that is, as usual, in ex-Europe & its ex-tensions. Blinded thus, we know little, if anything, about what is happening =97 the horror, the horror, to use a famous fictional European's dying words =97 in other parts of the world, = & the media is certainly not going to deal with it unless it has some kind of marketable Euro-American angle. The quasi-civil war in Algeria, for example, is going largely unreported, except when a few weeks ago when the ex-FIS (the outlawed fundamentalist Islamic party which, having more or less won the democratic elections a year ago, was sidelined by the FLN, the corrupt ex-revolutionary party that has been in power since independence in 1962, on which it has declared war) stated that to hasten its purification of the country it would kill all foreigners in Algeria (Twenty four were killed by the end of December.) Dozens of Algerians are being killed daily on both sides. The FIS's assassination strategy is simple: kill off the intelligentsia & anybody else able to voice any intelligent opposition =97 or at least enough of them as goryl= y as possible to make the rest shut up or leave the country for fear of dying. Among the many killed this past year were two poets: Tahar Djaout, who was shot May 26 and Youssef Sebti, who was knifed to death on December 28 as he was going to his job teaching sociology in a college of agronomy in the suburbs of Algiers. They were killed because they were, quietly and seriously, going about their business as writers & would not shut up, but kept writing & saying what needs to be said: that totalitarianism under any guise, religious or military, is the ultimate evil. In an eerie, prophetic mood, Tahar Djaout, more than twenty years ago, wrote a poem that celebrated the independence of his country, but that was simultaneously an elegy for the writer Mouloud Feraoun who had been assassinated towards the end of the war of independence in not dissimilar circumstances & for not dissimilar reasons: =20 MARCH 15, 1962 how to curb their rage to dissolve the stars =09 and to birth eternal night I challenge their iron and the enraged ire with which they multiply the chains in the blue smile of the Admiralty open on the promises today in long swallows I gulp =97 sun thundering over Algiers =97 the joys of a feasting where resurrected dawns gambol=20 and yet I think on the holocausts unleashed to make dawn break I think of Feraoun =97 smile frozen in the sun's circumcision they are afraid of the truth they are afraid of the straight pen they are afraid of truly human humans and you, Mouloud, you insisted and spoke about wheat fields for the sons of the poor and spoke of pulverizing all the barbed wire that lacerated our horizons they speak of you and say that you were too good that you felt revolted hearing shells greet each dawn that you believed human beings to be born so as to be brothers and though challenging all the orgies of horror you were incapable of hatred one day, Mouloud, goodness finally triumphed and we could wear the sun's trident and we could honor the memory of the dead because with your hands, those gleaners of dawn's mysteries, and your dreamy inveterate poet's face, you have known how to fulfill our truths written in sun scraps on the breasts of all those who revolt =20 --=20 =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=3D=3D Pierre Joris | I still know little about poems, but I do know Dept. of English | that suspicion is important. Be sufficiently SUNY Albany | suspicious, suspect the words, the language, Albany NY 12222 | I have often told myself, heighten this=20 tel&fax:(518) 426 0433 | suspicion =97 so that someday, soemthing New email: | can come into being... Ingeborg Bachmann joris@cnsunix.albany.edu| =20 =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=3D=3D ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 09:33:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: michael moore Comments: To: "Jeffrey W. Timmons" This problem was noted in a very few reviews of the film at the time of its release, most notably by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. Patrick Pritchett ---------- From: Jeffrey W. Timmons To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: michael moore Date: Tuesday, October 22, 1996 9:11PM did anyone see the dc city paper on this local filmmaker--whose name i do not recall--who edited for m moore? apparently this guy agrees with some who suggest that the film roger and me was "manipulative"--in the sense that it deliberately altered chronology in the film to suit his political purpose. i share the films ethos but thought it was an interesting qualification; that and the fact that this filmmaker didnt get paid while moore had accepted some big-money gigs. i think we need more moores in the world but it sort of sounds like dole on campaign finance reform sometimes in this world of duplicitous complicity. jeffrey timmons ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 10:11:49 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: michael moore well as to moore: i do have problems with his (at times) overwrought working class ethos, as maria suggests (the same problems i have with ben hamper's ethos in _rivethead_, the book that inspired moore's flick _roger and me_)... and no way do i condone moore's not paying his collaborator for services rendered, if this is indeed the case... but as to the film's manipulations: problem i'm having here is that it's so damned EASY to say this about that film... there are parts where i groan aloud at his stagings... but one might observe, quite justifiably, that moore is fighting fire with fire... and yes, one might likewise find this strategy regrettable... but where's the public sentiment that acknowledges, at the same time, gm's manipulations---the sorts of shenanigans that gm has been up to for decades now?... along with the rest of the auto industry?... i'm not defending moore, i'm just asking why we should bother dissecting his film WITHOUT a corresponding dissection of gm, and gm's shitty treatment of workers and unions?... or is moore's the last word on same? (in which event, his flick should be seen as even more valuable, no?)... this is the same old same old of liberal discourse, isn't it?... we're real good at critiquing liberal motives (i.e., ourselves), but not so good at situating such motives over and against the real problem... and i guess i have to observe here, a bit cranky this morning, that the real problem is not moore---but gm, and what companies like gm do---to people like us... to wit: if moore had met his obligations to his collaborator(s), if moore had not staged various scenes in his film, would the truth about gm be somehow less painful?... and if this isn't the point, then talking about moore, again, is at best talk about how the left shoots itself in the foot---which discussion, in the absence of informed discussion about gm's motives, might itself amount to shooting ourselves in the foot... apologies to those on the right// joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 10:57:06 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Subject: Re: A Parade of Theories In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 23 Oct 1996 09:13:16 -0500 from I agree with you, Pierre; I regretted sending one more silly post to the list, after the fact. I'm curious about how the contemporary situation in the west echoes ancient world politics going back, literally, to Byzantium. But by combining that with a take-off on some of the "byzantine" characteristics of the poetics list (a satire on myself, more than anybody else), the result was sadly more truly "byzantine" (in a negative sense - airy, abstract, divorced from real life) & cynical-sounding than I hope to be. I'm glad you called me on it. - Henry G. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 08:24:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: defensiveness as prop? Tosh Berman sort of asks: >At one point he >was working with Eno and Daniel L... I forgot his last name, but he is the >guitar player that played with Eno and produced U2, ETC. Well, anyway >Daniel's habit of wearing a scarf around his head really bugged Scott. >Scott ended the sessions. Now that's what I call artistic temperment! Daniel Lanois Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 08:51:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Herb Levy Subject: Re: mountain goats et albini Comments: cc: scrypt@INTERPORT.NET Rob Hardin proposes >PS: I've been asked to submit ideas for interviews with musicians >to _Bomb_ and have been thinking about George Perle, Helios Creed, >Six-Finger Satellite and Bloody Valentine (because of the textures). >But the Mountain Goats are just about perfect because they haven't >really broken and are unashamedly literary. (Apparently, Bloody Val >is "too new to be a classic but too old to be current." Which doesn't >matter to me, but it definitely seems to matter to _Bomb_.) Suggested title for George Perle interview: Pitch Class Set _Rocks_ My World! Herb Levy herb@eskimo.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 12:09:56 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Lecky Organization: Qwerty Arts: http://www.qwertyarts.com Subject: Qwerty Arts There is a great deal of new matrial on Qwerty Arts, an on-line journal of poetry, fiction, reviews, essays, art and book-arts related subjects. Also included are interviews with Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews and Alexander Theroux. Please stop by at: http://www.qwertyarts.com ________________________________________________________________________________ Thomas Lecky editor@qwertyarts Qwerty Arts: http://www.qwertyarts.com ________________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 12:14:31 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: british book disaster "The personal library of Professor Frank Kermode has suffered an extraordinary disaster, the _Guardian_ reports (September 19). 'Sir Frank had carefully packed all his books in boxes in preparation for a house move. Unfortunately council refuse-collectors arrived at the hour appointed for the removal men, and began to carry out the boxes. By the time the misunderstanding came to light, some fifty boxes of Sir Frank's collection -- including numerous irreplaceable manuscripts, first editions and personal dedications -- had been pulped by a mechanical crusher. Much of the fiction has gone, as well as his superb library of contemporary poetry . . . . only the literary theory has remained unscathed.'" From NB by D.S., TLS October 4, 1996 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 13:50:27 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: A Parade of Theories At 09:13 AM 10/23/96 -0500, Pierre Joris wrote: >Henry G wrote: /snip/ >Henry -- don't know if you're response to the cited news of yet another >killing in Algiers is not a bit off. Those killings are real -- a parade >of real deaths, not a parade of theories -- even if the geography, the Thank you for the post, Pierre. This particular issue and cultural trend - distancing, the media, etc. was one of the things that brought me back to reading and writing poetry after a long hiatus. tom beel ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 18:24:22 GMT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Sherry Brennan Subject: Re: Michael Moore Speaking of pop culture -- Michael Moore's TV Nation is the only instance I can think of of someone turning the entertainment value of TV to some sort of political use value (apologies if I'm using this phrase incorrectly) for the left. interesting. disruptive. uses the medium against itself. Besides it's roaringly funny (perhaps moreso if you grew up in the rustbelt in the 70s). xs Sherry Brennan Development Research The Pennsylvania State University (814) 863-4302 SAB5@psu.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:11:56 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: A Parade of Theories In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 23 Oct 1996 13:50:27 -0400 from On Wed, 23 Oct 1996 13:50:27 -0400 Thomas Bell said: > >Thank you for the post, Pierre. This particular issue and cultural trend - >distancing, the media, etc. was one of the things that brought me back to >reading and writing poetry after a long hiatus. But don't quit clipping those newspaper articles, Tom. They sometimes lead to poems - besides being useful for insulation (daily moral temperature- control). - Henry /snip/ Gould ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:47:21 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: Kathy Change According to Hayley Thomas: From root Wed Oct 23 18:38:25 1996 From: hthomas0@sas.upenn.edu (Hayley Thomas) Posted-Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:38:17 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199610231838.OAA18665@mail2.sas.upenn.edu> Subject: Kathy Change To: english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:38:16 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23-upenn3.1] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu Precedence: bulk > Dear Folks, Here's the Associated Press's take on Kathy Change's life and death, as fowarded from the folklore listserv. Hayley Thomas > >> PM-Penn Suicide,0315 > >> Activist at Penn Campus Sets Self On Fire, Dies > >> PHILADELPHIA (AP) - An activist whose protests for world peace > >> were a fixture at the University of Pennsylvania committed suicide > >> on campus by setting herself on fire in a final attempt to draw > >> supporters to her cause. > >> Kathy Change, 46, doused herself with gasoline Tuesday morning > >> and ignited it, sending flames 10 feet high as about 50 people > >> watched at the Ivy League school, authorities said. > >> A university police officer, rushing to check out the fire, > >> threw his jacket over Change and rolled her on the ground to > >> smother the flames. She was pronounced dead at a hospital 25 > >> minutes later. > >> Police said they found suicide notes in a push cart about 15 > >> feet from where Change killed herself. > >> Change had delivered packages of her writings to six students > >> and two local residents about 2+ hours before killing herself, the > >> campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported. > >> "My real intention is to spark a discussion of how we can > >> peacefully transform our world," Change wrote in a three-page > >> statement dated Oct. 7 that was included in the package, the > >> newspaper reported. "I offer myself as an alarm against Armageddon > >> and a torch for liberty." > >> Change, who changed her name from Chang to reflect her > >> commitment to political reform, had frequently danced and displayed > >> flags on the Penn campus over the past 15 years to promote her > >> belief that America and the world must be transformed into truly > >> democratic societies. > >> In one of her writings, Change wrote that she hoped her suicide > >> would help to promote her ideas on government, the economy, law and > >> morality. > >> "I want to give my message as much impact as possible," she > >> wrote. "I truly believe that my death will make people more > >> sympathetic towards me and interested in my work and ideas." > >> > >> (Copyright 1996 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) > >> > >> AP-NY-10-23-96 0542EDT > >> > >> > > > > =============================================================== > Steve Winick > Folklorist/Journalist/Educator > > 400 s. 45th st. #A3 > Philadelphia, PA 19104 > swinick@sas.upenn.edu > http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~swinick > > "The rank is but the Guinea stamp > The man's the gowd for a' that." > ================================================================ > > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:52:42 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Honey Sondheim Subject: Re: Michael Moore In-Reply-To: <2.2.16.19961023143130.3aa7dd42@email.psu.edu> In another way and another era, Andy Kaufman of course. And Edward R. Murrow before him, again in another way. Alan On Wed, 23 Oct 1996, Sherry Brennan wrote: > Speaking of pop culture -- Michael Moore's TV Nation is the only instance I > can think of of someone turning the entertainment value of TV to some sort > of political use value (apologies if I'm using this phrase incorrectly) for > the left. interesting. disruptive. uses the medium against itself. > Besides it's roaringly funny (perhaps moreso if you grew up in the rustbelt > in the 70s). xs > > > Sherry Brennan > Development Research > The Pennsylvania State University > (814) 863-4302 > SAB5@psu.edu > _______________________________________________________________ http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ 718-857-3671 CuSeeMe 166.84.250.149 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:07:04 CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: eric pape Subject: Re: michael moore In-Reply-To: <199610231511.KAA28257@charlie.cns.iit.edu> Good job, Joe. Further consideration of GM's tactics of manipulation and Moore's acknowledgement of his own corporate complicity can be read in his recent Nation editorial. Thanks, Eric. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 08:49:35 +1300 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: DS Subject: Re: michael moore At 10:11 AM 10/23/96 -0500, you wrote: >apologies to those on the right// > >joe > WHY? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 12:58:48 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: VPI R TremblayMcGaw Subject: Open Studio: The Arts Online Thought there might be some of you on this list who'd be interested in this. Robin Tremblay-McGaw TO: Benton Colleagues FR: Anne Green, Open Studio Project Coordinator DA: October 23, 1996 RE: Recently Announced Benton Initiative **************************************************************************** The following is a recent press release announcing Open Studio: The Arts Online, a joint initiative between the Benton Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts to help nonprofit arts organizations and artists go online, increase the arts and cultural presence online and provide public Internet access at arts and community institutions. If you have any questions regarding the project or have any suggestions regarding organizations you believe should receive a request for proposal please feel free to give me a call at (202) 638-5770 or email me at annieg@benton.org. Thanks! **************************************************************************** Embargoed for Release Contact: Anne Green, Open Studio until October 22, 1996 202-638-5770 Cherie Simon, NEA 202-682-5570 National Endowment for the Arts and the Benton Foundation Launch "Open Studio: The Arts Online" Unprecedented Collaboration Creates Community Access Sites at Arts and Cultural Institutions in All 50 States (Washington, DC) -- The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Benton Foundation today announced the nation's first initiative to provide community access to the arts on the Internet at sites in all 50 states as well as propel the nonprofit arts online by helping them to become effective information providers on the World Wide Web. This new $1 million initiative, called Open Studio: The Arts Online, is an unprecedented collaboration between the NEA and the Benton Foundation to help nonprofit arts organizations and artists go online, increase the arts and cultural presence on the Internet, expand the online arts audience, and provide public Internet access at arts and community institutions. Open Studio is funded through an NEA Leadership Initiative award of $500,000, which the Benton Foundation is committed to matching as part of a cooperative agreement. "The National Endowment for the Arts was created to make the arts accessible to all people of all backgrounds in every district of the nation," NEA Chairman Jane Alexander said. "Open Studio is a groundbreaking project that will increase cultural and arts resources on the information superhighway and make the Internet a reality for people everywhere." "This project is about ensuring a public culture," said Larry Kirkman, executive director of the Benton Foundation. "We must work to protect noncommercial public space in the digital age. Artists and arts institutions, schools, libraries, as well as other independent voices must be able to make their noncommercial imprint on American cultural life and values." The two components of Open Studio include: 1) Free Community Access to the Internet More than 100 public access points to the Internet will be set up in arts organizations and culturally-oriented community centers in every state. Through this initiative, members of the public who are interested in accessing the Internet can receive personal assistance helping them learn how to browse the Web and access its cultural resources. Access sites will receive a matching award of $2,000 to $4,000. 2) Helping Artists & Arts Organizations Become Effective Information Providers on the Web Ten institutions with existing telecommunications resources, such as libraries, universities, and community telecommunications centers, will each receive up to $35,000 to serve as mentors to 10 local cultural organizations and 10 local artists, teaching them how to become effective information providers on the World Wide Web. The trainees will then mentor another organization or artist within a year of completing their own training. By the autumn of 1997, this program will generate an Internet presence for 200 arts organizations and artists with 200 more in training. Fourteen pilot sites (see attached list) are being launched on October 22, 1996. Remaining sites will be selected through a competitive process, with awards announced in February 1997. Information about applying for site awards may be obtained by sending email to mentorrfp@benton.org (for mentor awards) or accessrfp@benton.org (for access awards) or by visiting the Open Studio Web site at www.openstudio.org. The Open Studio Web site also serves as a public clearinghouse for project information, including a project description and status reports. A national advisory group will guide Open Studio. A list of committee members is attached. The Benton Foundation has recently hired Anne Green as the project coordinator for Open Studio. Ms. Green, who has a law degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, was most recently the coordinator of People For the American Way's artsave Project, a nationwide research and public education project in the visual and performing arts. Open Studio is an integral part of an overall effort by the NEA to extend its public outreach and serve the arts and the public more effectively through the Internet. In April, the Arts Endowment launched its own Web site at arts.endow.gov. The site includes a monthly magazine, a guide to the Arts Endowment, and an art resource center. The NEA, which has a $99.5 million budget this year, is the federal grantmaking agency created by Congress in 1965 to foster the excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts in the United States and to broaden public access to the arts. NEA Leadership Initiatives were created in fiscal year 1996 to sponsor specific initiatives for projects of national significance and impact, or those that serve as models in one field or discipline. The Benton Foundation, dedicated to protecting the public interest in the digital age, has long been a proponent for providing noncommercial public space in the new communications environment. The foundation's work ranges from published work on connecting schools and public opinion research on libraries to national policy summits on communications policy and practices in the public interest and the creation of a communications hub to link children's advocates. More information about Benton, including publications and cyber resource pages can be found at www.benton.org. ### ************************************************* Benton Foundation 1634 Eye Street NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20006-4006 phone: 202-638-5770 fax: 202-638-5771 benton@benton.org http://www.benton.org Robin Tremblay-McGaw Information Services Director Pacific Center for Violence Prevention http://www.pcvp.org HN4208@handsnet.org Connect Mail Sent: October 23, 1996 12:45 pm PDT Item: R00aRlt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 15:05:02 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Honey Sondheim Subject: last of 2 poem of bad language or poem of dead language into the sward the knight rode the prove his point xxxxxxxxx the night rode in on a mare xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx the seas of the moon poured tears of violation fabric xxxxxx that remembered the joust that remembered the lance xxxxxxxx island said, how do you do write suicide in avant-garde xxxx the stallion gripped her sides called flanks xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx outing them in the avant-garde; in this world xxxxxxxxxxxxxx everything talked, the sward said, the point said, xxxxxxxxx the night cried, mare nayed, ululation seas, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx like a rock, in the new moon's arms, like an island xxxxxxxx in the joust's-last-word's song so very long xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx so long xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ____________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 16:44:24 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Coffey Subject: Re: michael moore -Reply Comments: To: dpsalmon@IHUG.CO.NZ what i remember of seeing moore's roger and me was that the audience was in stitches, as they say; they thought the thing was so damn funny; now i knew it was being promoted as this wacky look at the depradations of big bad businessman through they eyes of a mischievous, famously defrocked magazine editor (remember mother jones/paul berman snafu?), but i was sure the picture was hard-hitting and unsettling.... which it was, I thought. and it seems to me that much of the drama and pathos that moore wrung from the story had to do with the way he told it, edited it, the disregard for chronology notwithstanding (who cares!); and yet his unflinching look at a woman who butchered chickens or the poor dude who evicted tenants was snickered at by my audience, as if these people were not poor and down-trodden and victims of gm, but somehow laughably hapless and stupid. in some ways, or somehow, moore's film, in certain respects (jeez, what qualifiers!) the film was co-opted by a nervous establishment and made into an acceptable comedy. did anyone out there have a simliar experience watching that film, i wonder... ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:03:28 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jeffrey W. Timmons" Subject: Re: michael moore Comments: To: Joe Amato In-Reply-To: <199610231511.KAA28257@charlie.cns.iit.edu> joe i hear you. and i agree. moore is very effective at what he does. the dc city paper likened it to inducing catholic guilt. i dont quite know how to respond to you though. im wondering if . . . turning our critical skills on ourselves is a good thing. certainly organizations need as much critique as anything but if we ourselves are above reproach doesnt that assume a purity of the critique that does not exist? jeffrey timmons ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 16:38:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: Kathy Change Comments: To: Louis Cabri I'm sorry, but I don't see the point of Ms. Change's actions, whom I've never heard of before. The implosive act of suicide has always struck me as the ultimate form of narcissism. Thank god, Gandhi, MLK, et al. never took such an attitude. An "alarm against Armageddon?" More like another advertisement. Patrick Pritchett ---------- From: Louis Cabri To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Kathy Change Date: Wednesday, October 23, 1996 2:04PM According to Hayley Thomas: From root Wed Oct 23 18:38:25 1996 From: hthomas0@sas.upenn.edu (Hayley Thomas) Posted-Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:38:17 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199610231838.OAA18665@mail2.sas.upenn.edu> Subject: Kathy Change To: english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:38:16 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23-upenn3.1] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu Precedence: bulk > Dear Folks, Here's the Associated Press's take on Kathy Change's life and death, as fowarded from the folklore listserv. Hayley Thomas > >> PM-Penn Suicide,0315 > >> Activist at Penn Campus Sets Self On Fire, Dies > >> PHILADELPHIA (AP) - An activist whose protests for world peace > >> were a fixture at the University of Pennsylvania committed suicide > >> on campus by setting herself on fire in a final attempt to draw > >> supporters to her cause. > >> Kathy Change, 46, doused herself with gasoline Tuesday morning > >> and ignited it, sending flames 10 feet high as about 50 people > >> watched at the Ivy League school, authorities said. > >> A university police officer, rushing to check out the fire, > >> threw his jacket over Change and rolled her on the ground to > >> smother the flames. She was pronounced dead at a hospital 25 > >> minutes later. > >> Police said they found suicide notes in a push cart about 15 > >> feet from where Change killed herself. > >> Change had delivered packages of her writings to six students > >> and two local residents about 2+ hours before killing herself, the > >> campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported. > >> "My real intention is to spark a discussion of how we can > >> peacefully transform our world," Change wrote in a three-page > >> statement dated Oct. 7 that was included in the package, the > >> newspaper reported. "I offer myself as an alarm against Armageddon > >> and a torch for liberty." > >> Change, who changed her name from Chang to reflect her > >> commitment to political reform, had frequently danced and displayed > >> flags on the Penn campus over the past 15 years to promote her > >> belief that America and the world must be transformed into truly > >> democratic societies. > >> In one of her writings, Change wrote that she hoped her suicide > >> would help to promote her ideas on government, the economy, law and > >> morality. > >> "I want to give my message as much impact as possible," she > >> wrote. "I truly believe that my death will make people more > >> sympathetic towards me and interested in my work and ideas." > >> > >> (Copyright 1996 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) > >> > >> AP-NY-10-23-96 0542EDT > >> > >> > > > > =============================================================== > Steve Winick > Folklorist/Journalist/Educator > > 400 s. 45th st. #A3 > Philadelphia, PA 19104 > swinick@sas.upenn.edu > http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~swinick > > "The rank is but the Guinea stamp > The man's the gowd for a' that." > ================================================================ > > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:50:31 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jeffrey W. Timmons" Subject: Re: michael moore -Reply In-Reply-To: michael i have to disagree with you. it is worth caring about if a writer/filmmaker/what have you "manipulates" the events to construct a version of the "real" to suit political ends. just because ones sympathies are with the artist does justify not observing the way in which s/he uses the medium. nixon afterall was a master craftsman. and need we discuss REAGAN? like i said: i liked the movie and i like moore. but that doesnt mean i dont care about how meanings are arrived at. and as far as coopting the movie . . . well i think it would be difficult to construe it as any sort of comedy--other than a darkly cynical one. though of course it may have been marketed as such. your audience and personal experience may have been different but though woman (who butchered rabbits by the way not chickens) and the sheriff certainly elicted something more than simply derision by its viewers? jeffrey timmons ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 16:34:43 CDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: jfelix Subject: Re: michael moore -Reply In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 23 Oct 1996 16:13:34 -0500 michael coffey typed: >for chronology notwithstanding (who cares!); and yet his unflinching look >at a woman who butchered chickens or the poor dude who evicted >tenants was snickered at by my audience, as if these people were not >poor and down-trodden and victims of gm, but somehow laughably >hapless and stupid. > >in some ways, or somehow, moore's film, in certain respects (jeez, what > qualifiers!) the film was co-opted by a nervous establishment and made >into an acceptable comedy. Yes, michael coffey, it was marketed as a comedy, and the audience that I saw it with in Detroit *did* snicker but I took it as a nervous snicker in the face of blashpemy--I am from and saw the film in an area of Detroit called Downriver where many of the big three's line employees lived and attacking roger smith was fun but abt as fun as cursing in church. The Pets or Meat lady as she became know was laughed at much as anyone considered retarded in grade school and it rankled me that michael moore *encouraged* her to reveal her oddities-- it was hard to feel that the film wasn't mocking her, a serious problem. But no one laughed at the evictor, and the most effecting moment of the film was when it turns out the evictor was evicting a guy mmoore had knew in high school--the scene on the porch in grey winter day when that high school friend was turning his hostility towards the evictor until moore prodded him to turn it outward to gm. That moment defined the ethics of moore's film for me, which I considered acceptable tho his method as many point out was manipulative at the least. (sidebar: yes maria damon it was a cheap shot at coffee house professionals as well--another failure of mmoore's art, but it seems to me *that* cheap shot was to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to galvinize the lowest commno denominator. Moore's film wouldn't have played well to his subject audience if he hadn't worn baseball hats and made fun of a percieved elite.) to return to the other problem the film is shown mostly in art houses such as the Detroit Institute of Arts whose patrons are mostly execs in the auto industry and you can bet they laugh up a storm at those left behind in the leaner meaner capital developing at the time. I live in Chicago now and the five years I've been here PBS has played Roger and Me three times. My question is why can a political work only be granted an audience in such venues which may not be high art to artists but to the culture as a whole...There are union people who may watch pbs and go to art houses i'm sure but the key to galvinizing the disenfranchised would not seem to be pbs. In my view this is just another way the whole system works against opposition. Sorry this post has rambled--and sorry it's not abt poetix (blush) but one more thing--the reason Roger and Me was blasphemy is another victory for corporate ideology--which I was told goes like this: (the worker, with an exec sitting on his left shoulder) yes labor will suffer but if we don't run the whole operation more cheaply in the face of global competition the whole corporation will fail." No wonder I care so much abt the detroit tigers--that's the only place for hope. joel felix ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 17:25:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: michael moore... oh, mebbe i shouldn't apologize to the right... that *was* an extremely grumpy post i posted this morning, and my day today has paved the way for nothing but more grumpiness on my part (not to worry---i won't indulge!)... happy to hear moore is in _the nation_ (thanx eric), i'll check that out... and no, jeffrey, you're quite right i think---we should be willing to critique ourselves, certainly... i just don't hear this sentiment regularly being expressed, say, by authority figures... i think we oughtta be sure to specify the power relations as such... i think moore's flick took it to the man, and yeah, michael---i think you may be right, that _roger and me_ *was* in some respects taken as an excuse to laugh it off, "it" here being our (u.s. i mean) nervous anxieties, aka our economic insecurities... i mean, there's a certain degree of truthful emotion that comes seeping out of that flick, esp. if you're the daughter or son of a working-class family, or have had the shop-experience first-hand... and laughter is one way to deal with despair... joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 15:35:33 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Laura Moriarty Subject: report on Whalen/McClure birthday event Wonderful event organized by Bill Berkson at the Art Institute and including many friends of the poets. McClure did a great reading and then many others, including some mentioned below in a piece by me, read from Whalen's work.The first quote is from the movie 12 Monkeys, the second from Whalen's "Further Notice" in On Bear's Head. from Ghost Atlas 5. Home because migraine Brain too cold or too large for head Generations of poets marching through Whalen/McClure birthday event Keith Abbott saying Et en Arcadia etc. And David Meltzer that time marches All over one and looking somewhat trampled Another widow among the readers Himself but reads most Musically of anyone Ghosts off the scale that day Disembodied voices facing The wrong way into time "It won't help you. It won't help others. It won't change anything." Leslie's frog erotics Ditto Bob's sacramental distribution of the cake A thousand years of catering in each gesture Alice Notley predicts her own silence Kit gets the laughs "People see me; they like that . . . I try to warn them it's really me." Kevin Killian brings Eddie Berrigan like a child bride Norman reads a Diamond Noodle counting poem Is stunned to know you Whalen unwilling love god Sits like a scepter Stands in slow motion Blowing out candles which don't Stay blown No one objects to his perfection ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 09:48:25 +1100 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pam Brown Subject: Re: british book disaster There are some in the colonies who are sceptical enough to question the nature of the contents of the fifty boxes....isn't Frank Kermode suing the council for compensation ?? Pam Brown, Sydney Poet At 12:14 PM 23/10/96 -0400, you wrote: >"The personal library of Professor Frank Kermode has suffered an >extraordinary disaster, the _Guardian_ reports (September 19). 'Sir Frank >had carefully packed all his books in boxes in preparation for a house >move. Unfortunately council refuse-collectors arrived at the hour appointed >for the removal men, and began to carry out the boxes. By the time the >misunderstanding came to light, some fifty boxes of Sir Frank's collection >-- including numerous irreplaceable manuscripts, first editions and >personal dedications -- had been pulped by a mechanical crusher. Much of >the fiction has gone, as well as his superb library of contemporary poetry >. . . . only the literary theory has remained unscathed.'" > >>From NB by D.S., TLS October 4, 1996 > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 21:51:35 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: olson & oratory "[I]n all parts of language...a certain agreeableness and grace are attendant on utility...for the stoppage of the breath, and the confined play of the lungs, introduced periods and the pointing of words...The largest compass of a period...is that which can be rounded forth in one breath." Cicero, "On the Character of the Orator." ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 21:27:15 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Spencer Selby Subject: mag list List of Experimental Poetry/Art Magazines P.O. Box 590095 San Francisco CA 94159 U.S. MAGAZINES ### ABACUS, Peter Ganick, 181 Edgemont Ave, Elmwood CT 06110 ### AERIAL, Rod Smith, Box 25642, Wash D.C. 20007 ### ALEA, Tom Epstein, 296 Cole Ave, Providence RI 02906 ### AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW, Illinois St Univ. Campus Box 4241, Normal IL 61790 ### AMERICAN LETTERS AND COMMENTARY, 850 Park Ave Suite 5B, NY NY 10021 ### ANT,ANT,ANT,ANT,ANT, Box 16177, Oakland CA 94610 ### ANTENYM, Steve Carll, 106 Fair Oaks #3, San Francisco CA 94110 ### APEX OF THE M, Box 247, Buffalo NY 14213 ### ARRAS, 141 West Newell Ave, Rutherford NJ 07070 ### ARSHILE, Mark Salerno, Box 3749, L.A. CA 90078 ### ATELIER, Sarah Jensen, Box 580, Boston MA 02117 ### B CITY, Connie Deanovich, 517 North Fourth St, Dekalb IL 60115 ### BALLPEEN, SEMIQUASI REVIEWS, Box 55892, Fondren Station, Jackson MS 39296 ### BIG ALLIS, Melanie Neilson, 11 Scholes St, Brooklyn NY 11206 ### THE BOMB, Ben Baxter, 1671 Cowlitz Ave, St Helens OR 97051 ### BOMBAY GIN, Naropa Institute, 2130 Arapahoe Ave, Boulder CO 80302 ### BOOGLIT, David Kirschenbaum, Box 221 Oceanside NY 11572 ### BRASS CITY, 77 Williamson Drive, Waterbury CT 06710 ### BULLHEAD, Joe Napora, 2205 Moore St, Ashland KY 41101 ### CENTRAL PARK, Stacey Schrader, Box 1446 NY NY 10023 ### CHAIN, Juliana Spahr, Jena Osman, 215 Ashland Ave, Buffalo NY 14222 ### CLWN WR, Box 2165, Church St Station, NY NY 10008 ### COLUMBIA POETRY REVIEW, English Dept of Columbia College, 600 South Michigan Ave, Chicago IL 60605 ### COMPOUND EYE, Ange Mlinko, 52 Park St #3, Somerville MA 02143 ### CONJUNCTIONS, Bradford Morrow, 33 W. 9th St., NY NY 10011 ### CROSS-CULTURAL POETICS, Mark Nowak, College of St Catherine, 601 25 Ave S., Minneapolis MN 55454 ### DENVER QUARTERLY, Bin Ramke, Dept of English, U. of Denver, Denver CO 80208 ### DIE YOUNG, Skip Fox, English Dept, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette LA 70504 ### DIRIGIBLE, David Todd, 216 Willow St, New Haven CT 06511 ### DISTURBED GUILLOTINE, Fredrik Hausmann, Box 14871, University Station, Minneapolis MN 55414 ### DROP FORGE, Box 7237, Reno NV 98510 ### ELECTRONIC POETRY REVIEW, http://www.poetry.org ### EXPERIODICIST, Jake Berry, Box 3112, Florence AL 35630, NinthLab@aol.com ### FIRST INTENSITY, Lee Chapman, Box 665, Lawrence KS 66044 ### FIVE FINGERS REVIEW, Box 15426, San Francisco CA 94115 ### FLASHPOINT, Box 6243, Washington D.C. 20015 ### FOUND STREET, Larry Tomoyasu, 2260 S. Ferdinand Ave., Monterey Park CA 91754 ### GENERATOR, John Byrum, 3203 W. 14th St, Apt 13, Cleveland OH 44109 ### GLOBAL MAIL, Ashley Parker Owens, Box 410837, San Francisco CA 94141 ### GRIST-ON-LINE, http://www.thing.net?/~grist ### HAMBONE, Nathaniel Mackey, 134 Hunolt St. Santa Cruz CA 95060 ### HAPPY GENIUS, Peter Landers, 103 Cedar Terrace, Hilton NY 14468 ### HEAVEN BONE, Steven Hirsch, Box 486, Chester NY 10918 ### HOUSE ORGAN, Kenneth Warren, 1250 Belle Avenue, Lakewood OH 44107 ### THE IMPLODING TIE-DIED TOUPEE, 82 Ridge Lake Dr, Columbia SC 4213 ### INDEFINITE SPACE, Marcia Arrieta, Box 40101, Pasadena CA 91114 ### JUXTA, Ken Harris & Jim Leftwich, 977 Seminole Trail, Charlottesville VA 22901, JUXTA43781@aol.com ### KIOSK, 306 Clemens Hall, S.U.N.Y, Buffalo NY 14260 ### KOJA, 7314 21st Ave Apt 6E, Brooklyn NY 11204 ### LIGHTNING & ASH, Paul Kremsreiter, 3010 Hennepin Ave S. #289, Minneapolis MN 55408 ### LILLIPUT REVIEW, Don Wentworth, 282 Main St, Pittsburgh PA 15201 ### LINGO, Jonathan Gams, Box 184, West Stockbridge MA 01266 ### THE LITTLE MAGAZINE, English Dept, SUNY at Albany, Albany NY 12222 ### LOGODAEDALUS, LOGO.CRIT, Paul Weidenhoff & W.B. Keckler, Box 14193, Harrisburg PA 17104 ### LOST AND FOUND TIMES, John M. Bennett, 137 Leland Ave, Columbus OH 43214 ### LOWER LIMIT SPEECH, A.L. Nielsen, 3055 30th St Apt #2, Boulder CO 80301 ### LYRIC&, Avery Burns, Box 640531, San Francisco CA 94164 ### MALCONTENT, Box 703, Naversink NJ 07752 ### MASS AVE., Daniel Bourchard, Box 230, Boston MA 02117 ### MEAT EPOCH, Gregory Vincent St Thomasino, 72 Orange St Apt 5B, Brooklyn Hts NY 11201 ### MESECHABE, Dennis Formento, 1539 Crete St, New Orleans LA 70119 ### MIRAGE #4/PERIOD(ICAL), Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy, 1020 Minna St, San Francisco CA 94103 ### N D, Box 4144, Austin TX 78765 ### NEW AMERICAN WRITING, Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover, 369 Milino, Mill Valley CA 94941 ### NO ROSES REVIEW, Carolyn Coo, 1322 N. Wicker Park, Chicago IL 60622 ### OPEN UNION STOP, 427 SW Madison Suite 136, Corvallis OR 97333 ### OPEN 24 HOURS, Buck Downs, Box 50376, Washington D.C. 20091 ### ORPHEUS GRID, John Noto, Box 420803, San Francisco CA 94142 ### O!!ZONE, Harry Burrus, 1266 Fountain View Dr. Houston TX 77057 ### PAPER RADIO, Box 425, Bremerton WA 98337 ### PARADOX, Box 643, Saranac Lake NY 12983 ### PAVEMENT SAW, David Baratier, 7 James St, Scotia NY 12302 ### PHOEBE, Graham Foust, George Mason U., 4400 University Drive, Fairfax VA 22030 ### PHOTO-STATIC, Lloyd Dunn, Box 8832, Iowa City, IA 52240 ### PICA, 165 N Ashbury Ave, Bollingbrook IL 60440 ### POETIC BRIEFS, Jefferson Hansen & Elizabeth Burns, 2510 Highway 100 South #333, St Louis Park MN 55416 ### POETRY NEW YORK, Box 3184, Church St Station, New York NY 10008 ### PRIMARY WRITING, 2009 Belmont Rd. N.W., Apt 203, Wash D.C. 20009 ### PRIVATE ARTS, Box 10936, Chicago IL, 60610 ### PROLIFERATION, Mary Burger, Jay Schwartz, Chris Vitiello, Box 15954, Durham NC 27704 ### PROSODIA, New College of California, 766 Valencia San Francisco CA 94110 ### RE: REFERENCE PRESS, 154 Doyle Ave, Providence RI 02906 ### RHIZOME, Standard Schaefer, 366 S. Mentor #108, Pasadena CA 91106 ### RIBOT, Paul Vangelisti, Box 65798, Los Angeles CA 90065 ### RIF/T, Loss Glazier, Ken Sherwood, e-poetry@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu ### ROOMS, Jaime Robles, 652 Woodland Ave, San Leandro CA 94577 ### SCORE, Crag Hill, 1015 NW Clifford St, Pullman WA 99163 ### SHATTERED WIG, Rupert Wondolowski, 2407 N. Maryland #1, Baltimore MD 21218 ### SITUATION, Mark Wallace, 10402 Ewell Ave, Kensington MD 20895 ### 6IX, 914 Leisz's Bridge Rd, Reading PA 19119 ### SPLIT CITY, Box 110171, Cleveland OH 44107 ### SPLIT SHIFT, Roger Taus, 2461 Santa Monica Blvd #C-122, Santa Monica CA 90404 ### SPOUT, 28 W Robie, St Paul MN 55107 ### SUBTLE JOURNAL OF RAW COINAGE, G Huth, 875 Central Parkway, Schenectady NY 12309 ### SUGAR MULE, M.L. Weber, 2 N. 24th St, Colorado Srings CO 80904 ### SULFUR, Clayton Eshleman, English Dept, Eastern Michigan U., Ypsilanti MI 48197 ### SUPERFLUX, Hoa Nguyen, 2533-b Folsom St, San Francisco CA 94110 ### SYN/AES/THE/TIC, Alex Cigale, Box 91, Canal St Station, New York NY 10013 ### TALISMAN, Ed Foster, Box 1117, Hoboken NJ 07030 ### TAPROOT REVIEWS, Luigi Bob Drake, Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107 ### TENSETENDONED, M.B. Corbett, Box 155, Preston Park PA 18455 ### TEXTURE, Susan Smith Nash, 3760 Cedar Ridge Drive, Norman OK 73072 ### THAT, Tom Beckett, 1070 Easton Valley Rd, Easton NH 03580 ### THIS IS IMPORTANT, F.A. Nettelbeck, Box 336 Sprague River OR 97639 ### TIGHT, Ann Erickson, Box 1591, Guerneville CA 95446 ### TINFISH, Susan Schultz, 1422A Dominis St, Honolulu HI 96822 ### TO, Seth Frechie & Andrew Mossin, Box 121, Narberth PA 19072 ### TORQUE, Liz Fodaski, 21 East 2nd St #12, N.Y. NY 10013 ### TRANSMOG, Ficus Strangulensis, Route 6 Box 138, Charleston WV 25311 ### UBU WEB VISUAL & CONCRETE POETRY, Kenneth Goldsmith, http:///www.ubweb.com/vp ### UMBRELLA, Judith Hoffberg, Box 3640, Santa Monica CA 90408 ### THE VISION PROJECT, Thomas Taylor, Taylort@pdx.edu ### VOLT, Gillian Conoley, Box 657, Corte Madera CA 94967 ### THE WASHINGTON REVIEW, Joe Ross, Box 50132, Washington D.C. 20091 ### WAY, 131 N. Pearl St, Kent OH 44240 ### WHATEVER, Stephen T. Mounkhall, 14 E 236th St, Bronx NY 10470 ### WITZ, Christopher Reiner, Box 40012, Studio City CA 91614 ### WOODEN HEAD REVIEW, 240 Thompson Ave, East Liverpool OH 43920 ### W'ORCS/ALOUD ALLOWED, Ralph LaCharity, Box 27309, Cincinnati OH 45227 ### THE WORLD, Poetry Project at St Mark's, 10th St & 2nd Ave, NY NY 10003 ### XIB, Tolek, Box 262112, San Diego CA 92126 ### YEFIEF, Ann Racuya-Robbins, Box 8505, Santa Fe NM 87504 ### ZYX, Arnold Skemer, 58-09 205th St, Bayside NY 11364 ### CANADIAN MAGAZINES ### BOO, 1895 Commercial Dr, Box 116, Vancouver, B.C. V5N 4A6 ### BRITISH COLUMBIA MONTHLY, Gerry Gilbert, Box 48884, Station Bent., Vancouver, B. C. V7X 1A8 ### CABARET VERT, Beth Learn, Box 157 Station P, Toronto Ontario M5S 2S7 ### CAPILANO REVIEW, 2055 Purcell Way, North Vancouver, B.C. V7J 3H5 ### COLLECTIF REPARATION DE POESIE, Jean-Claude Gagnon, 359 rue Lavigueur # 1, Quebec, Quebec G1R 1B3 ### CRASH, Maggie Helwig, Box 562, Station P, Toronto Ontario M5S 2T1 ### DADABABY, 382 East 4th St, North Vancouver, B.C. V7L 1L2 ### FILLING STATION, Box 22135 Bankers Hall, Calgary AB T2P 4J5 ### HOLE, Louis Cabri, 301, 1333 17th Ave N.W., Calgary AB T2M 0R2 ### INDEX MAGAZINE, 4068 St Laurent, Box 42082, Montreal, Quebec H2W 2T3 ### INDUSTRIAL SABOTAGE, J.W. Curry, 1357 Landsdowne Rd, Toronto, Ontario M6H 3Z9 ### OPEN LETTER, 499 Dufferin Ave, London, Ontario N6B 2A1 ### OVERSION, John Barlow, 1069 Bathurst St (3rd Floor) Toronto Ontario M5R 3G8 ### PUSH MACHINERY, Daniel Bradley, 30 Gloucester St #1005, Toronto, Ontario M4Y 1L6 ### RADDLE MOON, GIANTESS, Susan Clark, 2239 Stephens St, Vancouver B.C. V6K 3W5 ### RAMPIKE, Karl Jirgens, 95 Rivercrest Rd./ Warehouse, Toronto Ontario M6S 4H7 ### STAINED PAPER ARCHIVE, 1792 Byng Road, Windsor, Ontario N8W 3C8 ### TADS, Dept of English, Simon Fraser Univ, Burnaby B.C. V5A 1S6 ### TORQUE, Darren Werschler-Henry, Box 657 Station P, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2Y4 ### WEST COAST LINE, English Dept, Simon Fraser Univ, Burnaby B.C. V5A 1S6 ### MONDO HUNKAMOOGA, Stuart Ross, Box 141, Station F, Toronto, Ontario M4Y 2L4 ### U.K. MAGAZINES ### AND, Bob Cobbing, 89A Petherton Rd, London N5 2QT ### ANGEL EXHAUST, Andrew Duncan, 27 Sturton St, Cambridge CB1 2QG ### CURIOS THING, 71 Lambeth Walk, London SE11 6DX ### EONTA, 27 Alexandra Rd, Wimbledon, London SW19 7IJ ### FIRST OFFENSE, Tim Fletcher, Syringa, The Street, Stodmarsh, Canterbury, Kent CT3 4BA ### FRAGMENTE, Anthony Mellors, 3 Town Green Rd, Orwell, Cambridge ### INTIMACY, Adam McKeown, 4 Bower St, Maidstone, Kent ME16 8SD ### OASIS, Ian Robinson, 12 Stevenage Rd., London SW6 6ES ### OBJECT PERMANENCE, Peter Manson & Robert Purves, Flat 3/2 16 Ancroft St, Glasgow Scotland 7HU G20 ### PAGES, Robert Sheppard, Edge Hill University College, Ormskirk, Lancashire L39 4QP ### PARATAXIS, Drew Milne, School of English Studies, Arts Building, Univ of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9NQ ### RADICAL POETICS, 58 Crowshott Ave, Stanmore, Middlesex, HA7 1HT ### RAMRAID EXTRAORDINAIRE, Chris Brooke, 57 Canton Court, Canton, Cardiff ### RWC, Lawrence Upton, 32 Downside Rd, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5HP ### SHEARSMAN, Tony Frazer, c/o Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, Macau Mgt Office, Box 476, Macau ### STRIDE, Rupert Loydell, 11 Sylvan Rd, Exeter, Devon EX4 6EX### TALUS, Dept of English, King's College, Strand, London WC2R 2LS ### TERRIBLE WORK, Tim Allen, 21 Overton Gardens, Mannamead, Plymouth PL3 5BX ### TONGUE TO BOOT, Miles Champion, 5 Abbots Court, Thackeray St, London W8 5ES ### VERTICAL IMAGES, 62 Langdon Park Rd, London N6 5QG ### WORDS WORTH, Alaric Sumner, BM Box 4515, London WC1N 3XX ### CONTINENTAL EUROPE, AND ELSEWHERE ### ACTION POETIQUE, Henri Deluy, 3 rue Pierre-Guignois, 94200 Ivry-sur-Seine, France ### AMAE, Apdo 47, 28921 Alcoron (Madrid) Spain ### ARNYEKYOTOK, Szasz Janos, Timdr u 17 fsz 3, H- Budapest III, Hungary ### ART POSTALE, Vittore Baroni, Via C Battista 339, 55049 Viareggio, Italy ### AU/ART UNIDENTIFIED, 1-1-10-301 Koshienguchi, Nishinomiya, Hyogo, 663 Japan ### AXLE, Tony Figallo, Pete Spence, Box 4180 Richmond East, Victoria, Australia ### BACK TO FRONT, John Geraets, Liberal Arts, Aichi-Gakuin Univ, 12 Iwasaki, Araike, Nisshin-shi, Aichi-ken, 470-01, Japan ### BANANA SPLIT, Peter Bangsvej 74, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark ### A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE WHOLE WORLD, Alan Loney, 33A Komaru St, Remuera, Auckland, 1005, New Zealand ### BRIO CELL, LINGUA BLANCA, GLOSSOLALIA, J. Lehmus, Stenbocksv. 24, 02860 Esbo, Finland, Jlehmus@cute.fi ### CARPETAS EL PARAISO, Jose Luis Campal, Apt N. 6, 33980 Pola de Lavinia, Asturias, Spain ### CELACANTO, Marcelo Casarin, Quisquisacate 125, 5008 Cordoba, Argentina ### COMUNICARTE, Hugo Pontes, Caixa Postal 922, 37701-970 Pocos de Caldas, Brazil ### D'UN MOM ENCA, EL TRAPAS & IMAT, Apdo 9142, 08080 Barcelona, Spain ### DAS FROLICHE WOHNZIMMER, Fritz Widhalm, Fuhrmanngasse 1A/7, 1080 Wien Austria ### DIMENSAO, Guido Brilharinho, Caixa Postal 140, Uberaba 38001, Brazil ### DOC(K)S, Phillipe Castellin, 20 Rue Bonaparte, Ajaccio, France 2000 ### EX-SYMPOSIUM, 8200 Veszprem, Anyos u. 1-3 Hungary ### FULL, Ramon Salvo, Apdo 20033, 08080 Barcelona Spain ### GARATUJA, C. Postal 41, Bento Goncalves/RS 95700 Brazil, GOING DOWN SWINGING, Box 64, Coburg, Victoria 3058, Australia ### GRAFFITI, Horacio Versi, Colonia 815, of. 105, Montevideo, Uruguay ### IF, Jean-Jacques Viton, 12 Place Castellane, 13006 Marseille, France ### IMPRESSUM, Bruno Runzheimer, Nahestr. 8, 45219 Essen, Germany ### INIA KELMA, Nueva, 4, 41770 Montellano Spain ### INTERARTE, Douglas Zunino, Odebrecht 97, 89021 Blumenau, SC, Brazil ### KARTA, Bartek Nowak, Spoldzielcza 3/39, 42-300 Myszkow, Poland ### KERAUNIA, Sergio Fumich, via P. Togliatti, 3-20070 Brembio-Mi, Italy ### JALOUSE PRATIQUE, 80 rue Henon, 69004 Lyon, France ### LEOPOLD BLOOM, Vaci M. u. 52. II. 9., Szombathely, 9700 Hungary ### MACULA, Apdo 34101, 08080, Barcelona Spain ### MAGYAR MUHELY, Minerva u 3/a, H-1118 Budapest, Hungary ### MANDORLA, Roberto Tejada, Apartado postal 5-366, Mexico D.F., Mexico 06500, ### MANI ART, THE SECRET LIFE OF MARCEL DUCHAMP, Pascal Lenoir, 11 Ruelle De Champagne, 60680 Grandfresnoy, France ### MINIATURE OBSCURE, Gerhild Ebel, Cornelia Ahnert, Landrain 143, 06118 Halle/Saale, Germany ### MITO, via G. Bruno 37, 80035 Nola, Italy ### NIOQUES, Jean-Marie Gleize, 4 rue de Cromer, 26400 Crest, France ### NON (+) ULTRA, Matthias Schamp, Grosse-Weischede-Strasse 1, 44803 Bochum, Germany ### OASII, Stephen Ellis, 45/6 Bar Ilan St, Ranana 43701 Israel ### OFFERTA SPECIALE, Carla Bertola, Corso De Nicola 20, 10128 Torino, Italy ### OLHO LATINO, Paulo Cheida Sans, Rua Padre Bernardo da Silva 856, 13030 Campinas, SP, Brazil ### OTIS RUSH, Box 21, North Adelaide, 5006 South Australia ### PELE MELE, Guy Bleus, Box 43, 3830 Wellen, Belgium ### PINTALO DE VERDE, Antonio Gomez, APDO 186, 06800 Merida, Badajoz, Spain ### PIPS DADA CORPORATION, Claudia Putz, Prinz-Albert Str. 31, 53115 Bonn, Germany ### PLURAL, Paseo de la Reforma 18.1 piso, Deleg. Cuauhtemoc, DF 06600, Mexico ### P.O.BOX (Merz Mail), Pere Sousa, apdo 9326, 08080 Barcelona Spain ### POESIE, Micel Deguy, 8 rue Ferou, 75278 Paris Cedex 06, France ### POESIE EUROPE, Postfach 180429, D-60085, Frankfurt/Main, Germany ### POEZINE, Avelino De Araujo, Rua Serido 486, apt 1106, CEP 59020 Natal RN, Brazil ### POSTYPOGRAPHIKA, http://www.postypographika.com ### PUNHO MAGAZINE, MULTIPAIS, Paulo Bruscky, CP 850 Recife-PE, 50010-000, Brazil ### PRAKALPANA LITERATURE, KOBISENA, P-40 Nandana Park, Calcutta 700034, West Bengal, India ### REVUE PRETEXTE, 11 rue Villedo, 75001 Paris, France ### SCARP, Ron Pretty, Univ of Wollongong, Box 1144, Wollongong, NSW 2500, Australia ### SHISHI, Shoji Yoshizawa, 166 Suginami-ku koenjikita, 3-31-5 Tokyo, Japan ### SIGN'ZINE, Industrias Mikuerpo, Apdo 36.455, 28080 Madrid, Spain ### 69 ANALGESIC, Cesar Figueiredo, Apdo 4134, 4002 Porto Codex, Portugal ### SIVULLINEN, Jouni Vaarakangas, Kaarelantie 86 B 28, 00420 Helsinki, Finland ### SPINNE, Dirk Frohlich, Priessnitzstrasse 19, 01099 Dresden, Germany ### SPORT, Box 11-806, Wellington, New Zealand ### TERAZ MOWIE, Hartmut Andryczuk, Belziger Str. 29, 10823 Berlin, Germany ### TRANSFUSION, Alessandro Ceccotto, C.P. 116, 45011 Adria (RO) Italy ### VISUAL POETRY S.O.S., Alfredo Slang, via Ferro De Cavallo, 10, 31100 Treviso, Italy ### VOLL-ZINE, Rainer Golchert, Soderstrabe 29, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany ### YE, FALTBLATT, Theo Breuer, Neustrasse 2, 53925 Sistig/Eifel, Germany ### XUL, Jorge Perednik, Plaza 1629, (1430) Buenos Aires, Argentina ### ZAZIE, Box 521 Market St, Melbourne, Victoria, 8007 Australia ### ZOOM-ZOUM, Josee Lapeyrere, 4 rue des Carmes, 75005 Paris, France ### The preceding list is based on the research and judgments of Spencer Selby. The term "experimental" is not meant as a characterization of anyone's specific editorial focus or perspective. Please circulate, and mail possible additions, deletions, address changes or other comments to Spencer Selby, P.O. Box 590095, San Francisco CA 94159, U.S.A. email: selby@slip.net fax: 415-752-5139 This is list #36, dated 10/96 ### ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 07:58:19 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: olson & oratory In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 23 Oct 1996 21:51:35 -0400 from On Wed, 23 Oct 1996 21:51:35 -0400 Louis Cabri said: >"[I]n all parts of language...a certain agreeableness and grace are >attendant on utility...for the stoppage of the breath, and the confined >play of the lungs, introduced periods and the pointing of words...The >largest compass of a period...is that which can be rounded forth in one >breath." > >Cicero, "On the Character of the Orator." Reminds me that Von Hallberg in his Olson book talks about how the 1st part of Maximus is structured like a classical oration (Maximus was a sophist). But "periods" are not just physical, they are also imaginary. The trumpet player solos across periods. The rhythm of the language is translated by the listener's (different) breathing. - Henry G. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 09:09:46 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Bill Luoma Subject: Re: olson & oratory Louis, Thnks for the breath breath, my circumlocutions of which are weak, but i remember David Antin always talking about demosthenes putting rocks in his mouth when he practiced his speeches. Bill Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 21:51:35 -0400 From: Louis Cabri Subject: olson & oratory "[I]n all parts of language...a certain agreeableness and grace are attendant on utility...for the stoppage of the breath, and the confined play of the lungs, introduced periods and the pointing of words...The largest compass of a period...is that which can be rounded forth in one breath." Cicero, "On the Character of the Orator." ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 07:36:50 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: that poem by Seamus Heaney, for Wendy Battin Way back when: >Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 11:13:08 -0400 >From: Wendy Battin >Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 7 Oct 1996 to 8 Oct 1996 Wendy Battin asked: >Do you happen to know which poem? (Sure there are many, but am >curious to know which she chose.) I finally got the news today: the poem was "Whatever you say say nothing", which she had in Heaney's _New Selected Poems 1965 - 1987_, a book I dont have. I do have this memory of having come across it somewhere, but... On a related matter was rereading Gilbert Sorrentino's wonderfully outraged review of _The Distances_ in his _Something Said_ to pass this early response on to my class: all that anger, righteously & rightfully, against what he calls the 'shameful' neglect of Olson by 'the cultural idiots of our time.' Plus ca change? All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'The universe opens. I close. And open, just to surprise you.' - Phyllis Webb ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:02:19 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: to get back to Tracie Morris Maria, I have to admit that I've only seen Tracie Morris read about 1.5 times and 33% of that time was on Bob Holman's tv show. Could you give a little background on her, a poem maybe? (I know you're busy, a bibliographical citation would be fine) J ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 09:21:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Julie Marie Schmid Subject: Re: to get back to Tracie Morris In-Reply-To: Like Jordan, I would like to hear more about Tracie Morris's work. She's an amazing poet and I love her work. I've been trying to get a copy of her book--even talked to her on the phone about it--but to no avail. Julie Schmid On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, Jordan Davis wrote: > Maria, I have to admit that I've only seen Tracie Morris read about 1.5 > times and 33% of that time was on Bob Holman's tv show. Could you give a > little background on her, a poem maybe? (I know you're busy, a > bibliographical citation would be fine) > J > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:21:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: to get back to Tracie Morris In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Maria, I have to admit that I've only seen Tracie Morris read about 1.5 > times and 33% of that time was on Bob Holman's tv show. Could you give a > little background on her, a poem maybe? (I know you're busy, a > bibliographical citation would be fine) her book is self-published, it's called Chap-t-her Won. she's an amazing performer--imitates hiphop technology's distortion of sound via scratching, slowing down and speeding up the voice, etc.; and strong on the page too. influenced by carmen mcrae and active in the black rock coalition. maybe later i'll type in a sample poem, but yu gotta see her live. md ps thanks for asking ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:24:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: to get back to Tracie Morris perhaps enough of us cd prevail on her or on our publisher friends to re-issue chap-t-her won? i don't know much about her beyond having seen her consummate artistry a few times --maybe bob holman cd help us out here. bob?--md In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Like Jordan, I would like to hear more about Tracie Morris's work. > She's an amazing poet and I love her work. I've > been trying to get a copy of her book--even talked to her on the phone > about it--but to no avail. > > Julie Schmid > > On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, Jordan Davis wrote: > > > Maria, I have to admit that I've only seen Tracie Morris read about 1.5 > > times and 33% of that time was on Bob Holman's tv show. Could you give a > > little background on her, a poem maybe? (I know you're busy, a > > bibliographical citation would be fine) > > J > > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 11:26:40 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Whatever you say say nothing Speaking of that poem (in which Heaney, anticipating his own later celebrity, rhymes "Seamus" with "Famous"), there was an interesting booklet on Heaney published in 1991 in Ireland, by Desmond Fennell, called WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY NOTHING: WHY SEAMUS HEANEY IS NO. 1. The book is as brutal as the title. This is as far as I know the most severe attack on Heaney's stature ever to be published in Ireland. Fennell's attack -- which basically accused Heaney of careerism and political irresponsibility -- generated a whole series of agonized letters in the IRISH TIMES defending Heaney. The book is problematic, but I think often on-target. Goes on at length about the role of the U.S. in making of poetic reputations, and what Fennell calls "the gratuitous advantage of being a foreign poet" in the US. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ There is no mantle and it does not descend. -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 11:18:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: michael moore -Reply thanx to joel felix for that on-the-spot evaluation of moore's flick, which i found on-the-mark... on a related note: there are a number of anthologies (incl. two recent ones reviewed in this month's _college english_) that deal with working-class academics, and the sorts of conflicts that arise from this conjuncture (incl. in particular language issues).. seems to me that this sort of discourse is something we need more of, to try to grapple with our (class-based) sense of propriety, fairness and such like... interestingly, there's another piece in the same issue of _college english_ dealing with the teaching of composition as a distinctively middle-class pursuit, an idea that resonates well with dodie's ruminations on same in these spaces... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 12:20:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: Kathy Change In-Reply-To: <01IAZM3POTW28ZET33@iix.com> "The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide." --WCW, "The Descent of Winter" On Wed, 23 Oct 1996, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: > I'm sorry, but I don't see the point of Ms. Change's actions, whom I've > never heard of before. The implosive act of suicide has always struck me as > the ultimate form of narcissism. Thank god, Gandhi, MLK, et al. never took > such an attitude. An "alarm against Armageddon?" More like another > advertisement. > > Patrick Pritchett > ---------- > From: Louis Cabri > To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS > Subject: Kathy Change > Date: Wednesday, October 23, 1996 2:04PM > > > According to Hayley Thomas: > From root Wed Oct 23 18:38:25 1996 > From: hthomas0@sas.upenn.edu (Hayley Thomas) > Posted-Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:38:17 -0400 (EDT) > Message-Id: <199610231838.OAA18665@mail2.sas.upenn.edu> > Subject: Kathy Change > To: english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu > Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:38:16 -0400 (EDT) > X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23-upenn3.1] > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > Sender: owner-english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu > Precedence: bulk > > > > Dear Folks, > > Here's the Associated Press's take on Kathy Change's life and death, as > fowarded from the folklore listserv. > > Hayley Thomas > > > > >> PM-Penn Suicide,0315 > > >> Activist at Penn Campus Sets Self On Fire, Dies > > >> PHILADELPHIA (AP) - An activist whose protests for world peace > > >> were a fixture at the University of Pennsylvania committed suicide > > >> on campus by setting herself on fire in a final attempt to draw > > >> supporters to her cause. > > >> Kathy Change, 46, doused herself with gasoline Tuesday morning > > >> and ignited it, sending flames 10 feet high as about 50 people > > >> watched at the Ivy League school, authorities said. > > >> A university police officer, rushing to check out the fire, > > >> threw his jacket over Change and rolled her on the ground to > > >> smother the flames. She was pronounced dead at a hospital 25 > > >> minutes later. > > >> Police said they found suicide notes in a push cart about 15 > > >> feet from where Change killed herself. > > >> Change had delivered packages of her writings to six students > > >> and two local residents about 2+ hours before killing herself, the > > >> campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported. > > >> "My real intention is to spark a discussion of how we can > > >> peacefully transform our world," Change wrote in a three-page > > >> statement dated Oct. 7 that was included in the package, the > > >> newspaper reported. "I offer myself as an alarm against Armageddon > > >> and a torch for liberty." > > >> Change, who changed her name from Chang to reflect her > > >> commitment to political reform, had frequently danced and displayed > > >> flags on the Penn campus over the past 15 years to promote her > > >> belief that America and the world must be transformed into truly > > >> democratic societies. > > >> In one of her writings, Change wrote that she hoped her suicide > > >> would help to promote her ideas on government, the economy, law and > > >> morality. > > >> "I want to give my message as much impact as possible," she > > >> wrote. "I truly believe that my death will make people more > > >> sympathetic towards me and interested in my work and ideas." > > >> > > >> (Copyright 1996 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) > > >> > > >> AP-NY-10-23-96 0542EDT > > >> > > >> > > > > > > > =============================================================== > > Steve Winick > > Folklorist/Journalist/Educator > > > > 400 s. 45th st. #A3 > > Philadelphia, PA 19104 > > swinick@sas.upenn.edu > > http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~swinick > > > > "The rank is but the Guinea stamp > > The man's the gowd for a' that." > > ================================================================ > > > > > > > Steve Shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 09:55:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: michael moore -Reply At 11:18 AM 10/24/96 -0500, Joe Amato wrote: >on a related note: there are a number of anthologies (incl. two recent >ones reviewed in this month's _college english_) that deal with >working-class academics, and the sorts of conflicts that arise from this >conjuncture (incl. in particular language issues).. This is Dodie. I got my degree in ESL (which I've never taught) from Indiana University in Bloomington, where the program, in the mid-70s at least, was called Urban and Overseas English. It was a horribly boring program to my early twenties self. But, eventually I became captivated by the Urban wing, which involved studying Black English, a bit of a joke in whitest of white Southern Indiana. The class was taught by a white woman who was rather absent, it was said, because she was going through a divorce, and we would listen to tapess by Dick Gregory and appreciate them together, and then we would study the syntax of Black English and appreciate that together, and then we would study Black slang and appreciate that together. The one black woman in the class' speech patterns were coveted like jewels. For electives we took Black fiction and Black poetry. I took a rather sad course in the history of Black education in America. We were told that there was no such thing as standard English, that we should appreciate the richness of all dialects. And then we were informed, that, let's face facts, if people are allowed to speak in this rich dialect of Black English they weren't going to get anywhere in the world, that we had to help enable them by attempting to teach them standardized pronunciation and usage. It was an ugly job, but somebody had to do it. I, of course, being young and idealistic, was appalled, felt like this proposed occupation was evil like strip-mining. I think Iam still appalled. Dodie ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 12:44:17 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Michael Coffey Subject: Whatever you say say nothing -Reply Comments: To: kellogg@ACPUB.DUKE.EDU david kellog wrote: there was an interesting booklet on Heaney published in 1991 in Ireland, about a book "by Desmond Fennell, called WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY NOTHING: WHY SEAMUS HEANEY IS NO. 1. The book is as brutal as the title. This is as far as I know the most severe attack on Heaney's stature ever to be published in Ireland. Fennell's attack -- which basically accused Heaney of careerism and political irresponsibility -- generated a whole series of agonized letters in the IRISH TIMES defending Heaney. The book is problematic, but I think often on-target. Goes on at length about the role of the U.S. in making of poetic reputations, and what Fennell calls "the gratuitous advantage of being a foreign poet" in the US." david, i have not read fennell's book, so i cannot take issue with that. But i do feel compelled to ask what charges of "careerism and political irreponsibility" have to do with an assessment of a poet's work. if seamus weren't famous, what would a charge of "careerism" mean? and what does "political irresponsibility" mean if some folks think heaney has consistently been addressing the political divisions in ireland? well, it could mean that politics are partisan and subjective and that irresponsibility is a charge brought by someone who doesn't agree with another's politics. Heaney: irreponsible? What is a poet supposed to be responsible to, but himself. Perhaps he can only be judged by the standards he has set for himself. Suppose Heaney were not careerist, simply worked say for the BBC editing news footage in Belfast (lilke paul muldoon did for 10 years till, presumably, his "gratuitious" status as foreign poet got him a job at Princeton...look out now paul!), and was politically responsible in his work (oh, let's say he said goodbye to English like Michael Hartnett and wrote only in Irish, or wrote poems listing the war dead or made an impassioned plea in verse to Gerry Adams to have assasinated the violent faction of his IRA), would that make him a better poet? Suppose he did not have such a good ear and an eye for the imagery rooted in the soil he writes about, and one could prove that careerism and political irresponsibility were the causes, now then you'd have an argument. I do think that It is interesting and relevant to look at poetry as a possible language site where political and historical issues work themselves out (other issues work themselves out there too, like notions of self); but I would argue that poetry as a political act, as in a public act, is not possible today. Poetry has been disarmed, and to judge poets on this basis (and the careerism is also a political charge, really) is wrong-headed. Of course there are plenty of examples of poets who have made different career choices that didn't bring them to oxford or harvard or a nobel or even a teaching job, and some of these were no doubt consciouis choices. And examples there are too of poets who have made a difference in individual's lives by impacting they way they thought about politics. But that is such a small part of the impact of poetry that I hate to see those criteria bandied forth with such immense weight, when really the most enduring and interestingn poets are those who are writing because they are enthusiasts of the word and the poetic forms, the politics being incidental. And those poets who are there primarily because they have chosen poetry as a place to make political arguments, well, it shows. by the way, david: of the heany i have read, i'd say he is most uninteresting when trying to be political, such as him poem about going through the checkpoint and how that is what writing is for him; or when he compared his father's plougshare with his pencil; and the bog poems, finding his ireland in Scandinavian soil. better heaney describing water gouting from a well pump or the sound of a woman singing in a stone kitchen. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 12:30:31 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: michael moore -Reply joe rites: ..the teaching of composition as a distinctively middle-class pursuit, ... i havent read the article but it seems to me that the teaching of composition is a distinctively desperate pursuit since comp is among the few areas with an expanding job horizon...now, why this is so is another matter. sorry to those of you who aren't teachers...md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 13:19:23 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Chris Funkhouser Subject: Re: to get back to Tracie Morris Jordan, Tracie's got a poem in the US of Poetry video (& book) & 3 poems in ALOUND the Nuyo anthology. She is a great performer with a quick tongue ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 12:55:24 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Art on the Edge of Fashion Pour les amateurs de M. Nick Cave/For Nick Cave fans: (though for great lyrics & vocalisings & coverart i wd. direct yr. attention to the Born Bad and Desperate Rock and Roll series . . .dbc) 'Art on the Edge of Fashion' at the Arizona State University Art Museum focuses on contemporary art that uses the highly readable visual language of clothing and fashion. On February 1, 1997, the ASU Art Museum opens the exhibition with a happening of Rituals and Performances by local and national artists (8-10pm/Free). A performance by artist Nick Cave will take place April 4th. Invitation/Preview/Press Information WebPage address... http://asuam.fa.asu.edu/artedge/artedge.htm Eight artists from across the U.S. and Canada are featured in the exhibition: Charles LeDray (New York), Christine LoFaso (Chicago), Kerrie Peterson (Los Angeles), Elaine Reichek (New York), Beverly Semmes (New York), Jana Sterbak (Quebec), Nick Vaughn (Albuquerque), and Anne Wilson (Chicago). A catalogue with essays by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Heather S. Lineberry will be available February 1997. 'Art on the Edge of Fashion' February 1, 1997 through April 27, 1997. Arizona State University Art Museum _________________________________________________________ --- from list avant-garde@lists.village.virginia.edu --- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 14:42:28 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: michael moore's reply At 12:30 PM 10/24/96, mad about you wrote: >joe rites: >..the teaching of composition as a distinctively middle-class pursuit, ... > I'm sorry, I missed the context for this line -- but I must say that's a distinctive tie you're wearing -- J ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 14:16:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: michael moore -Reply maria, yep, certainly there are folks who want to teach comp. strictly on this basis (i.e., bread & butter)... this is one basis for the argument about rhet/comp suiting the powers that be (most generally from a specific group of marxist scholars)... i don't think it has to be this way... and i think dodie's experiences indicate how vexed the issues can be... the entire debate about 'standard english' (which many comp. teachers oppose) highlights why we need a better and broader public understanding of what higher ed. is all about... and i'd hate to think that it's all about more normalizing practices, even though it can often seem this way... joe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 15:32:06 -0400 Reply-To: Robert Drake Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Robert Drake Subject: Re: Whatever you say say nothing -Reply Michael-- >...but I >would argue that poetry as a political act, as in a public act, is not >possible today. Poetry has been disarmed... could you expand on this just a bit?? i mself find it almost impossible to see any language act as apolitical... & its always that kind of shortcoming in myself that benefits frm challange. are you saying that poetry is not a tactically efficent way of affecting political change? or something else? of course, if it's a shades-of-grey problem of how much weight to give to political content when e-valuating work, thats something different; and especially different from considering th formal significance of a poem's language in terms political... sorry to take just 2 lines so out of context, the th absoluteness of "is not possible" struck me strongly, and close to my own concerns. sincere luigi ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 14:55:16 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Poetry City Oct 24 NZ/TC Nick Zedd, director of "War Is Menstrual Envy", and Todd Colby, who said "I like cake", will be reading tonight at Poetry City. It's at 7 p.m. Poetry City -- 5 Union Sq W 7th Fl -- NYC FREE FREE so bring money to buy books we have Ange Mlinko's _Immediate Orgy and Audit_ $5 Tim Davis's brand new _My Life in Politics_ $6 Kim Lyons' early _In Padua_ $3 Rod Smith's _In Memory of My Theories_ $10 my own _A Little Gold Book_ $5 Nick Zedd's _Bleed Part One_ $5 Todd Colby's _Cush_ for an undisclosed sum if you don't have them you're obsolete as are we ain't it great J ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 16:05:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: Kathy Change Comments: To: Steve Shoemaker t(ouch)e ---------- From: Steve Shoemaker To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: Kathy Change Date: Thursday, October 24, 1996 3:28PM "The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide." --WCW, "The Descent of Winter" On Wed, 23 Oct 1996, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: > I'm sorry, but I don't see the point of Ms. Change's actions, whom I've > never heard of before. The implosive act of suicide has always struck me as > the ultimate form of narcissism. Thank god, Gandhi, MLK, et al. never took > such an attitude. An "alarm against Armageddon?" More like another > advertisement. > > Patrick Pritchett > ---------- > From: Louis Cabri > To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS > Subject: Kathy Change > Date: Wednesday, October 23, 1996 2:04PM > > > According to Hayley Thomas: > From root Wed Oct 23 18:38:25 1996 > From: hthomas0@sas.upenn.edu (Hayley Thomas) > Posted-Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:38:17 -0400 (EDT) > Message-Id: <199610231838.OAA18665@mail2.sas.upenn.edu> > Subject: Kathy Change > To: english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu > Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 14:38:16 -0400 (EDT) > X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23-upenn3.1] > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit > Sender: owner-english-grads@dept.english.upenn.edu > Precedence: bulk > > > > Dear Folks, > > Here's the Associated Press's take on Kathy Change's life and death, as > fowarded from the folklore listserv. > > Hayley Thomas > > > > >> PM-Penn Suicide,0315 > > >> Activist at Penn Campus Sets Self On Fire, Dies > > >> PHILADELPHIA (AP) - An activist whose protests for world peace > > >> were a fixture at the University of Pennsylvania committed suicide > > >> on campus by setting herself on fire in a final attempt to draw > > >> supporters to her cause. > > >> Kathy Change, 46, doused herself with gasoline Tuesday morning > > >> and ignited it, sending flames 10 feet high as about 50 people > > >> watched at the Ivy League school, authorities said. > > >> A university police officer, rushing to check out the fire, > > >> threw his jacket over Change and rolled her on the ground to > > >> smother the flames. She was pronounced dead at a hospital 25 > > >> minutes later. > > >> Police said they found suicide notes in a push cart about 15 > > >> feet from where Change killed herself. > > >> Change had delivered packages of her writings to six students > > >> and two local residents about 2+ hours before killing herself, the > > >> campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported. > > >> "My real intention is to spark a discussion of how we can > > >> peacefully transform our world," Change wrote in a three-page > > >> statement dated Oct. 7 that was included in the package, the > > >> newspaper reported. "I offer myself as an alarm against Armageddon > > >> and a torch for liberty." > > >> Change, who changed her name from Chang to reflect her > > >> commitment to political reform, had frequently danced and displayed > > >> flags on the Penn campus over the past 15 years to promote her > > >> belief that America and the world must be transformed into truly > > >> democratic societies. > > >> In one of her writings, Change wrote that she hoped her suicide > > >> would help to promote her ideas on government, the economy, law and > > >> morality. > > >> "I want to give my message as much impact as possible," she > > >> wrote. "I truly believe that my death will make people more > > >> sympathetic towards me and interested in my work and ideas." > > >> > > >> (Copyright 1996 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) > > >> > > >> AP-NY-10-23-96 0542EDT > > >> > > >> > > > > > > > =============================================================== > > Steve Winick > > Folklorist/Journalist/Educator > > > > 400 s. 45th st. #A3 > > Philadelphia, PA 19104 > > swinick@sas.upenn.edu > > http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~swinick > > > > "The rank is but the Guinea stamp > > The man's the gowd for a' that." > > ================================================================ > > > > > > > Steve Shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 11:20:09 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Re: A Parade of Theories & will Jonah's suspension for a spear-tackle keep him out of the NPC final? talk-back callers are divided on this issue TGNEWS Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 11:48:05 GMT+1200 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Tony Green Organization: The University of Auckland Subject: Taking a break Hi Poetics-listers, this is just to say I'm unsubscribing for a while, and many thanks for all the conversations. My e-mail address remains as is for the time being and my snail-mail for anyone who shd chance to want to write or send me a book or mag or Christmas card or Chanukah present is Unit 3, 27 Rangatira rd, Birkenhead, Auckland, 1310, Aotearoa/New Zealand. all the best Tony Green, e-mail: t.green@auckland.ac.nz ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 18:48:20 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: p p p p There's the politics of representation, or, representational politics, and its poetic analogies but then there's what Steve McCaffery calls quoting someone (not sure who) the statement that Poetry is politics that stays politics which is something else, completely, diffff ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 18:51:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Wendy Battin Subject: Re: that poem by Seamus Heaney, for Wendy Battin In-Reply-To: <199610241334.JAA26780@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> Thanks, Douglas. I'll try to get it from the library. Re mr fennell:: Think there's some saying on the order of "Who sows fennel will reap sorrow." But never mind. Wendy On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, Douglas Barbour wrote: > I finally got the news today: the poem was "Whatever you say say nothing", > which she had in Heaney's _New Selected Poems 1965 - 1987_, a book I dont > have. I do have this memory of having come across it somewhere, but... ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 19:42:40 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: robert zamsky Subject: Poesis & Politics I must say, I'm very intrigued with the recent discussion of poetry as political or not. It seems to me that there are many poets who pick up on the surrealist influence of an interest in language and poetic form themselvs as political issues. These conventions constitute our notions of identity, so it seems to me that perhaps the ultimate location for a liberation of identity (i.e. a political revolution at the ontological level) is within the realm of linguistic and formal play. Here, language and social order confront and implicate one another. Poetry is hardly robbed of its social influence -- if we choose to look at poetry in a somewhat more "poetic>" sense (as I think most of this list does), then we can derfinitely see how forms of comjmunication influence notions of identity and agency. Just a thought, and please excuse my typo's -- my modem is a bit stupid. Rob Zamsky ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 18:39:56 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: suicide and narcissism Of course lots of suicides have elements of narcissism in them (the "they'll be sorry they treated me badly" syndrome), but is this always the case? Is it narcissistic to believe that one person can make a difference (and by the way, the one person happens in this case to be...oneself)? As for Gandhi, he did go on hunger strikes, which certainly carried the threat of suicide. He seems to have gotten what he wanted that way, too, for a time. ********************************** sjcarll@slip.net Steve Carll http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. --Paul Celan ********************************** ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 18:39:54 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: Mountain Goats At 12:01 AM 10/23/96 -0400, Keith Tuma wrote: >Hey all you listers out there with detailed and arcane knowledges of musics >pop and otherwise, what can you tell me about The Mountain Goats? I had an article on John Darnielle (who pretty much IS The Mountain Goats) from a recent s.f. free alternative weekly lying around somewhere, but I must have already mailed it to someone, 'cause I can't find it. And unfortunately I have no memory of much that it said about him. When I saw him play an in-store show at the new location of Aquarius Records recently, his throat was sort of scratchy but it didn't detract from his charm. He definitely IS literary (he introduced one song by saying, "This next one wins the award for Most Pretentious Song Title of the Year: it's called "Song for the Julian Calendar") but his singing and playing are, to me anyway, dead earnest which (again, to me) blows any possible pretention out of consideration. He was accompanied on a few songs by Australian violinist (also guitarist) Alistair Galbraith. Their collaborations were ragged but delicate and haunting. Oh, I did remember one Darnielle quote. Because his albums are recorded on four-track machines and such, he's often labelled as part of the "lo-fi"movement, and the implied reduction of music to its recording medium irritates him, because after all, he says, "you wouldn't ask a writer if he's part of a 20-pound bond movement." {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} }}}}waves woven on the loom of the sea{{{ {Steve Carll sjcarll@slip.net} }http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym{ {http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym} }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 22:14:43 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: famus close readings, #1 Famus Close Readings Getting Ready to Have Happened #1. [tv ad for instant coffee: {negation of modernism's evg sunset, couple on ...divided by... "ordinary evg," cottage jetty, twinkling romanticism's waves, dog, laptop] "twilight" (of idols etc), of negation itself, contrasted w/ an afternoon at the office, profes- sional managerial class} ...times... (only "theoretical jetties," not a unified, general theory, only forces of interpretation "not yet subject, project, or object," nor rejected outright. --J. Derrida,"Some Statements and Truisms About Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and other small Seismisms.") ...minus... "jetee," (Fr.) to throw away ...plus... {indeterminacy introduced by the 'productive reader' who inserts name of a famous critic here) ...is greater than or hardly equal to... Charles Bernstein's "An Afternoon on the Jetee" (Arras #3) ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 08:01:01 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: Kathy Change In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 24 Oct 1996 16:05:00 -0500 from > >"The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide." > > --WCW, "The Descent of Winter" This seems to me the perfect type of the pretentious, brahminical, superficial formulation of the "writer trying to be clever". - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 11:06:34 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: there was a reading in Providence Your intrepid lil Rhody motormouth attended excellent reading here yesterday, down at the Cable Car, the quaint cinema lounge with the spongy loveseats. Mark McMorris (say that 20 times with pebbles in yr motor) & Joshua Saul Beckman, 2 very fine poets, leaned on the tv set (fortunately turned off) & read for about 40 mins each. McMorris is a subtle & strong writer, the refined sound/vocab & swift flow of images made me think of Montale a little (the mention of :"Genoa" in _Moth Wings_ keyed me onto it - am I on the right track?). Joshua Beckman, remarkably original writer, something between prose/poetry/ performance art/storytelling, wonderful surrealism with a lot of thought, heart, Whitman-kindness-compassion. Very funny too. His paragraphs on the joy of being an adult especially etc. Beckman publishes "Object Lesson" a serial of unique conceptions. Providence is brimming with poesis up to its ear-canals (the revamp of downtown makes it look like St. Petersburg or Venice too). p.s. check the poetics archives at http://wonderblob.fashion.digest to get the details on what they were wearing. - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 10:00:29 -0700 Reply-To: jbrook@ix.netcom.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Brook Subject: a librarian on libraries--and librarians All-- What follows is the posting of a librarian who's very critical of a certain drift in libraries and in his profession. He takes his interlocutors on the autocat newsgroup to task for their knee-jerk reactions to Nicholson Baker's "The Author vs. the Library" in the October 14 New Yorker. --James Brook P.S. to Ron Silliman: In Cathy Simon's article in Representations 42 ("A Civic Library for San Francisco") I find this quotation: "The function of a library is elemental: it is the house of the book, a building used to store and conserve books. It is a promoter of books, words, and literacy." I wish she had adhered to this elemental building program--the San Francisco New Main is an antibook environment. There's no room for the existing collection, no room to store books for reshelving, no room for expansion, no UV glass in the skylights, human circulation within the building is difficult, there's not enough room for the patrons. . . . But there's plenty of room for the Bank of America, the Gap & Co. As well as a gift shop and a cafe. Cathy Simon may be a good or even great architect in other respects, but the New Main doesn't work as a library, as eloquent and detailed testimony from some two dozen pages at a recent Library Commission meeting reaffirmed. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Subject: Re: Baker rebuttal From: Joseph Blackburn To: AUTOCAT (automation catalogers) newsgroup I sincerely hope that those of you who are so eagerly preparing rebuttals to Nicholson Baker's latest New Yorker article will kindly refrain from claiming to speak for librarians as a group or librarianship as a profession. You will likely not be speaking for those SFPL librarians who have made Baker their spokesman, nor, most likely, will you speak for me. I would also kindly request that you not, speaking as a librarian, condemn Mr. Baker for statements he did not make. Mr. Baker is not opposed to weeding, for on p. 52 of the New Yorker he speaks well of the practice and provides a definition that would do a library school student proud. What he opposes, among other things, is the way weeding was done at SFPL. Indeed, he criticizes City Librarian Dowlin for not adhering to Dowlin's own stated theory of weeding. If the recent weeds of the SFPL collection were anything like what Mr. Baker has described, then, in my opinion, a serious injustice has been done against our profession as well as against the people of San Francisco. Do not then embarrass yourself by claiming that Mr. Baker is too ignorant understand the necessity of weeding. Do not claim that he is incapable of judging whether or not a book has value. (He does not claim, as was supposed in an AUTOCAT post, that all old books are valuable just because they are old, nor does he likely believe, as was also posted, that SFPL should retain an old phone book because he once underlined a number in it. He provides numerous examples of books that may safely be withdrawn.) Do not claim that he would forbid you to discard moldly lettuce from your own refrigerator, as was said as well, and stunningly, on AUTOCAT. (What he would forbid you to do is to allow a book placed in your care to mold and then to be discarded without any attempt to ascertain its value or uniqueness.) When Mr. Baker's appreciation of card catalogs was published, it was implied by some AUTOCATs that Baker must be too thick to handle an one of our state-of-the-art online catalogs. He later proved on this very forum that he not only knew how to use the University of California's system, he knew its strengths and weaknesses better that many of his critics. Beware his sting. And since I've mentioned card catalogs, it should perhaps be noted here, as I cannot recall seeing it mentioned elsewhere, that Mr. Baker provides a very good reason for not discarding SFPL's card catalog in favor of exclusive reliance on the online system, viz, that the online catalog apparently does not include all of the books! What's the next step, using the lack of a card catalog as an excuse to trash any book not in the online catalog? I would also suggest that you not imply that Mr. Baker's vision of libraries and librarians is not a valid one merely because it is at variance with your own vision. That you may or may not have majority support is irrelevant. I know that Mr. Baker loves libraries, and I believe that he loves librarians. He at least loves what he thinks we are. I think that he believes that librarians are the preservers and promoters of the cultural, intellectual, and social history of humanity. When he encounters a library which "has built into it a contempt for, or at least an indifference to, literary culture and its requirements" (p. 59), he wants to scream out a warning, to us as well as to the public. When he encounters a librarian built in a similar fashion, his instincts are the same. Personally, I think it unfortunate that librarianship is not what he thinks it is. I certainly remember my own shock at discovering that librarianship was a job, not a calling, and that librarians as a group were no more likely to be devoted to "literary culture and its requirements" than were the members of any other profession. But still, I am here. San Francisco City Librarian Dowlin's philosophy is probably, just as Nicholson Baker fears, the current ruling philosophy of our profession. It is certainly a valid point-of-view, more especially so in a time when the public in general seems to have no interest whatsoever in funding a commitment to comprehensive research collections. Still, I think it sad that our (if I may be so bold, Mr. Baker) vision of what a great city library should be must not only be superseded, it must be physically destroyed. Perhaps that is, in its own way, a testament to the power of our ideas and our ideals. Joseph Blackburn hlcat@ttacs.ttu.edu Assistant Director of Technical Services (806) 743-2204 Library of the Health Sciences Fax: (806) 743-2218 Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Lubbock, TX 79430 ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 13:06:17 EDT Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: Sonnet With Dog In It Here's something with a dog in it, Jordan. Forgive & delete, all! - Henry G 8 A small tree (almond, dogwood) flowering in your eyes leafs through my spine, speaks volumes (my needle betrays). Maple leaf like a reef of sharp-eyed coral or hand cut by a blue glass frisbee (your hand shakes: it's constitutional in our society) insinuating states of _etats-unis_ or "marriageable rose some truant lips annul" That sheepdog would play in my summer's unruly realm but then she's furred as well for wolfish winter (one sheepshank: constellational insanity) A stratagem of light nips & barks scotch banter & morning roads are opening in her ample palm & everywhere this Love comes home to me! as every island road leads to the sea. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 21:01:54 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: wotz.good@mla I and other gfolks will be involved in a couple of interesting panels at MLA and I invite you to check out details on an interesting page John Lavagnino has set up. Set your Netscape browser to http://www.ach.org/mla96 and have a look! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey, is that your pet's picture on your MasterCard? > ------------------------------------------------------ < > | Loss Glazier | < > | Electronic Poetry Center | < > | http://writing.upenn.edu/epc | < > ------------------------------------------------------ < ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 20:22:27 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla yeah let's start making mla plans like we did last year. i'm gonna be talking about hannah weiner, that paper you all helped me with, on a panel on history, ecstasy and lyric. i notice that some of my favorite white boys have cornered the market on poetry of the african diaspora organized by the poetry division. for those of you who don't know michael eldridge (the only person on that panel not known to the poetix list), he was a student here at u mn and now works at humboldt state. a smart guy and pretty hip, a postcolonialist into caribbean stuff. also, walter lew and kimiko hahn are reading. juliana chang is talking aobut jessica hagedorn and there's a whole panel on slams. speakig of which, at the upcoming rethinking marxism conf at amherst i'll be on a panel called revolution of the word, with amitava kumar and some others i don't know talking about slams, populist poetics etc. ben friedlander is talking about levinas on the jewish cultural studies panel. i notice lisa s, charles b and barrett w are confabulating on laura (ingalls) riding at the little hotel in the big national capital. where shd we plan to gather this time? since i may be on a search committee, i may be spending all my non-talk time in a small room fulminating at the small handful of colleagues whom i adore and making life hell for some brilliant dissertation-finisher, but i can dash out for a coffee with a poetixer or 2. md In message <2.2.32.19961026010154.009df478@pop.acsu.buffalo.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > I and other gfolks will be involved in a couple of interesting panels at MLA > and I invite you to check out details on an interesting page John Lavagnino > has set up. Set your Netscape browser to > http://www.ach.org/mla96 > and have a look! > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Hey, is that your pet's picture on your MasterCard? > > ------------------------------------------------------ < > > | Loss Glazier | < > > | Electronic Poetry Center | < > > | http://writing.upenn.edu/epc | < > > ------------------------------------------------------ < ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 21:36:24 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: wotz.good@mla >I and other gfolks will be involved in a couple of interesting panels at MLA >and I invite you to check out details on an interesting page John Lavagnino >has set up. Set your Netscape browser to > http://www.ach.org/mla96 >and have a look! --- I forgot to mention. The two panels are "Digital Poetics" and "Hypertext and Poetry" - both under the rubric of POETRY AND COMPUTERS. Congratulations to John for bringing some alternatives to MLA! ------------------------------------------------------ | Loss Glazier | ------------------------------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 21:40:32 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla >where shd we plan to gather this time? since i may be on a search >committee, i may be spending all my non-talk time in a small room fulminating at >the small handful of colleagues whom i adore and making life hell for some >brilliant dissertation-finisher, but i can dash out for a coffee with a poetixer --- Or what about one of the evenings? Can we set up something like that? Is there any good lobster in DC. PS. I once went to the most fabulous Salvadorian restaurant on earth there! I could phone and find out... Vamos a comer! ------------------------------------------------------ | Loss Glazier | ------------------------------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 20:42:17 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: CALL FOR PAPERS Comments: To: kcrown@rci.rutgers.edu, amitava@nervm.nerdc.ufl.edu, chang-en@hermes.bc.edu, tribes@interport.net, Carolyn H Montgomery , london@bitstream.net, evadog@bitstream.net, kmoss@walker.mus.mn.us, nate_mackey@macmail.ucsc.edu, mwbibb@ark.ship.edu, fhconley@students.wisc.edu, dtv@mwt.net, JDILEO@ucs.indiana.edu, czpg@musica.mcgill.ca, nuyopoman@aol.com, jharring@falcon.cc.ukans.edu Conference: Cross-Cultural Poetics Dates: October 16-19, 1997 The conference described below will be part of a series of events including readings and performances by local and national poets, ethnographers, storytellers and community cultural workers. Despite artificial disciplinary barriers, ethnographers & poets have in recent years come to realize how similar their projects are. Cross-Cultural Poetics seeks to address the increasingly untenable boundaries between poetic & ethnographic practices. The conference will focus on the role of poetry in the on-going discourses of multiculturalism, ethnography, and literary theory and practice. While recent years have seen a debate in "how culture is written (about)" and most of these debates make extensive use of the term "poetics," poetic discourse itself has not been foregrounded as a significant measure and critique-mechanism in the matrix of cultural writings. Construing the term "poetry" fairly broadly, we invite poets and scholars working in a broad range of fields -- anthropology, urban studies, ethnic studies, folklore, literature and literary theory, sociology, history, publishing, film, American studies, performance studies, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, etc. -- to propose readings, papers or panels that address one or more of the following areas: - Comparative Poetries &/or Poetic Traditions - Oral/Literate Interfaces or Standoffs - Anthropological Methodologies Applied to Poetic Texts, Communities, Events, or Individual Poems or Poets - Ethnography as Poetry/Poetry as Ethnography - Ethnic, Folkloric & Vernacular Poetries - Poetry as Cultural & Social Praxis - Poetry as Cultural & Social Critique - Constituting Communities through Poetic Activity - Poetry as Mass Culture - Poetry & the Public Sphere - The Anthropology of Writing & the Writing of Anthropology - Representing Self/Other: poetic "Auto-ethnographies"? - Issues in Cultural Translation - "Ethnopoetics": Reappraisals? - Poetry & Other Media (Song Lyrics, Music, Film, Movement, Visual Arts, etc.) - Close Readings of &/or Listenings to Ethnographic Documents - The Poetics of Thick Description - Ritual, Play, etc. as Elements in Poetic Composition - The Act of Inscription: Fieldnotes, Notebooks, etc. - The Cultural Migration of Texts - Hybridization of Genres & Traditions PAPERS, WRITING SAMPLES (FOR POETS WANTING TO READ) AND PANEL PROPOSALS (a 1-2-page abstract) should be sent by March 15, 1997 to Maria Damon, English Dept., 207 Lind Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN 55455. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 20:54:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla great ethiopian food too i hear. why not make a moveable feast of it. md In message <2.2.32.19961026014032.009e8778@pop.acsu.buffalo.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > >where shd we plan to gather this time? since i may be on a search > >committee, i may be spending all my non-talk time in a small room > fulminating at > >the small handful of colleagues whom i adore and making life hell for some > >brilliant dissertation-finisher, but i can dash out for a coffee with a > poetixer > --- > Or what about one of the evenings? Can we set up something like that? Is > there any good lobster in DC. > PS. I once went to the most fabulous Salvadorian restaurant on earth there! > I could phone and find out... Vamos a comer! > > ------------------------------------------------------ > | Loss Glazier | > ------------------------------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 21:53:54 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matt Kirschenbaum Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla In-Reply-To: <2.2.32.19961026013624.009fb714@pop.acsu.buffalo.edu> from "Loss Glazier" at Oct 25, 96 09:36:24 pm Loss and others, I notice that the Digital Poetics panel, of which we're both a part, is scheduled at the same time as Lisa's L(R)J session. So much for the amount of MLA bandwith allotted to "alternatives." (Actually, I know that the timing wasn't deliberate, but it's still frustrating since I suspect the two panels will have audiences in common.) --Matt > >I and other gfolks will be involved in a couple of interesting panels at MLA > >and I invite you to check out details on an interesting page John Lavagnino > >has set up. Set your Netscape browser to > > http://www.ach.org/mla96 > >and have a look! > --- > I forgot to mention. The two panels are "Digital Poetics" and "Hypertext and > Poetry" - both under the rubric of POETRY AND COMPUTERS. > > Congratulations to John for bringing some alternatives to MLA! ================================================================= Matthew G. Kirschenbaum University of Virginia mgk3k@virginia.edu Department of English http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/~mgk3k/ Electronic Text Center ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 22:03:55 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla Drat! Just terrible!!!! >I notice that the Digital Poetics panel, of which we're both a >part, is scheduled at the same time as Lisa's L(R)J session. So >much for the amount of MLA bandwith allotted to "alternatives." ------------------------------------------------------ | Loss Glazier | ------------------------------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 22:27:53 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: EPC in Public ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://writing.upenn.edu/epc ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Some recent good press re the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) So look at: -- PMLA p. 988 (Sept. 1996) -- current issue of Poets & Writers (Nov./Dec. 1996) -- Yahoo: Internet Life (Dec. 1996 issue I believe - a review - let me know if you see this) -- Chronicle of Higher Ed. (we're supposed to be featured Internet resource next week I think) + an article on Creeleyfest in that issue > ------------------------------------------------------ < > | Loss Glazier | < > | Electronic Poetry Center | < > | http://writing.upenn.edu/epc | < > ------------------------------------------------------ < ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 22:58:27 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Loss Glazier Subject: Re: Mountain Goats >Oh, I did remember one Darnielle quote. Because his albums are recorded on >four-track machines and such, he's often labelled as part of the >"lo-fi"movement, and the implied reduction of music to its recording medium >irritates him, because after all, he says, "you wouldn't ask a writer if >he's part of a 20-pound bond movement." This is just the movement I'd be interested in! Think of the small press - that 'lo-fi' was part of the project ... ------------------------------------------------------ | Loss Glazier | ------------------------------------------------------ ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 20:45:51 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla In-Reply-To: <327167c56a32038@mhub0.tc.umn.edu> Haven't seen the MLA program yet out here in the mountains -- trust it's on the way -- Going to be in DC ahead of the conference, to do some research at Howard -- if anybody else is going ahead of the starting time, let me know -- ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 20:53:01 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Called Fur papers In-Reply-To: <199610260153.VAA178880@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU> Maria -- Thanks for thinking to post a call well in advance of the conference -- Those of us who are at instutions that do not pay for our conference travel need lots of time to write proposals for $$$, or to save up same -- I want to be there in October, so will whip up a proposal for y'all we aren't even an "institution," just a lowly "instution" ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 03:18:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jennifer-Alan Subject: Re: Kathy Change In-Reply-To: It's also incoherent and ugly; it would not be difficult to deconstruct "man," "action," "perfect," "type," here. I only wonder what the context is, and whether it's redemptive. Alan feeling oddly religious towards no end On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, henry gould wrote: > > > >"The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide." > > > > --WCW, "The Descent of Winter" > > This seems to me the perfect type of the pretentious, brahminical, > superficial formulation of the "writer trying to be clever". > - Henry Gould > _______________________________________________________________ http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ 718-857-3671 CuSeeMe 166.84.250.149 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 09:39:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Kathy Change interesting point, these are all words nietzsche used to great sardonic, self-imploding, deconstructive effect. can we trust williams to be so knowingly ironic? md sondheim writes: > It's also incoherent and ugly; it would not be difficult to deconstruct > "man," "action," "perfect," "type," here. I only wonder what the context > is, and whether it's redemptive. > > Alan feeling oddly religious towards no end > > On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, henry gould wrote: > > > > > > >"The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide." > > > > > > --WCW, "The Descent of Winter" > > > > This seems to me the perfect type of the pretentious, brahminical, > > superficial formulation of the "writer trying to be clever". > > - Henry Gould > > > > _______________________________________________________________ > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html > images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ > 718-857-3671 CuSeeMe 166.84.250.149 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 09:53:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: scary message hey guyzies, did anyone else get a message from "tissc@flash.net." or something like that? it brought my system to its knees and i had to throw it out w/out ever knowing what it was (couldn't open it) or who it was from, whether it was a goodfaith-but-too-long message my machine couldn't handle, or a malevolent blitz from somewhere mysterious. any light that can be thrown on this matter wd be appreciated, esp if someone --on this list, for example-- WAS trying to send me a longish paper or something. md ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 10:07:51 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Called Fur papers hope you can make it; the funding folks want to be real generous so the conference registration fee, at least, will be low; we're trying to get brathwaite, ted joans, leslie marmon silko, d tedlock etc, shd be a poetic orgy... do you know about mark nowak's new journal cross-cultural poetics? you might think of submitting something on diasporic avantgards or some thing...your kaufman talk? md In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Maria -- Thanks for thinking to post a call well in advance of the > conference -- Those of us who are at instutions that do not pay for our > conference travel need lots of time to write proposals for $$$, or to > save up same -- I want to be there in October, so will whip up a proposal > for y'all > > we aren't even an "institution," just a lowly "instution" ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 11:49:23 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Shoemaker Subject: Re: Kathy Change In-Reply-To: This raises good questions. I posted the WCW quote not as an oracular statement from on high, but because i had just read it right before i read Patrick Pritchett's post on the Change incident, and because it seemed to belong in dialogue with Pritchett's comments (i wasn't trying to get a touche(') or "ouch" response). The context in DW is not immediately clear, and since i was only skimming thru i'm not prepared to make a holistic reading. I'm not really sure how WCW wanted it to be read. Quite possible, for ex., that it *cld* be meant as a critique of the "man of action." Don't know right now what a more thorough reading of DW wld yield. I'm not sure either what i ultimately think about the dynamics of martyrdom, but i will say i think "narcissism" is too reductive a label. This is all provisional and wishy-washy as hell, i know, but that's what i use this medium for. steve On Sat, 26 Oct 1996, Jennifer-Alan wrote: > It's also incoherent and ugly; it would not be difficult to deconstruct > "man," "action," "perfect," "type," here. I only wonder what the context > is, and whether it's redemptive. > > Alan feeling oddly religious towards no end > > On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, henry gould wrote: > > > > > > >"The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide." > > > > > > --WCW, "The Descent of Winter" > > > > This seems to me the perfect type of the pretentious, brahminical, > > superficial formulation of the "writer trying to be clever". > > - Henry Gould > > > > _______________________________________________________________ > http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html > images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ > 718-857-3671 CuSeeMe 166.84.250.149 > Steve Shoemaker ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 09:04:48 -0700 Reply-To: jbrook@ix.netcom.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: James Brook Subject: situationist archives on line You may be interested--who knows?--in discovering that there's a "Situationist International Archive" at http://www.nothingness.org/SI Many situationist and pre-situationist texts can be found there in English and in French. There are also some press clippings, notably those relating to Guy Debord's death. Also related to Guy Debord's death--and life--is a poem of mine, "Stanzas on the Death of Guy Debord," which the curious can dig out with a click on http://www.nothingness.org/SI/simisc/stanzas.html --James Brook jbrook@ix.netcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 12:50:57 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Colby 20, Zedd 3 (65) Colby 20, Zedd 3 (65) at Poetry City, 7 p.m. 10/24. Time: C (25 mins), Z (33 mins) Attendance: 25 Spoken-word diva Todd Colby and sardonic red-head Nick Zedd read work at Poetry City last Thursday. Colby, a part-time rock star whose animated delivery included waving his hands and his head from side to side, kept a consistent one laugh-to-poem ratio over a set of twenty poems, garnering four rounds of applause for what he referred to as 'my crazy poems' ("Twins", "Big Boy", "Hot Pig" and "Bull By the Horns"). New Yorkers fondly remember Colby as the fair-haired one who got Books and Co to stock contemporary poetry down among the fiction, and there were references to a certain landscape of poetry throughout his work, which tends toward the user-hostile surreal ("angels driving forklifts across meats", "where angels have migraines", "the tiger who became butter", "meat is glamorous", "Metal Sweats Mahogany Dogs"). Colby removed his sweater early on, performing in a light blue short sleeve shirt, silver watch, blue jeans, and brown shoes. There was a brief intermission, and then Anna Malmude introduced Nick Zedd. Filmmaker Zedd, author of _Bleed Part One_ (Hanuman, come back!), read three chapters of a new prose work, apparently an autobiographical novel. The narrative as it stood consisted of episodes in bars, cabs, beds and grocery stores. Zedd clocked an amazing 65 laughs. Much of the Zedd-effect comes from the apparent contradictions -- dyed-red hair, surly expression, brusque affect, clear prose, and a nasty-but-sweet sense of humor. Like a punk version of Saturday Night Live's Norm MacDonald, or an unsaleable Sandra Bernhard, Zedd records the total obvious stupidity of one kind of everyday life in New York. Some lines: "I've tried screwing girls in toilets before and it always feels desperate", "Isabel insisted on laughing at me at precise intervals", "Harrisburg, PA, where he'd been publishing a fanzine called NO FUTURE for the last five years", "'This is an Olympic Condom,' I announced", and "'It's turkey bacon, you fucked up!' 'If you want, I can go back and get bacon with fat on it.'" Zedd performed in a dark blue paramilitary jacket, black jeans, and pointy black boots. He delivered his prose looking down at the lectern, occasionally pausing (at odd moments) to look up at the audience. The reading concluded shortly after Zedd recounted walking out on a recent poetry reading. In the audience were regulars Dug Rothschild, Karl Parker, Steve Malmude and Anselm Berrigan, and visiting poets Seph Rodney and Brenda Coultas. --Jordan Davis ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 18:04:37 +0000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: cris cheek Subject: Re: Marginalized? Hi here, I've been muddling my way towards this post on sensitivities for a couple of days now - (feeling it coming on from some way out). Something difficult to disentangle happened on Friday night at a Literature Live event I was curating, had announced on this list in fact, that has some bearing on both the discussions of 'so-called experimental' and 'so-called mainstream' (i like those inflections Keith) writing practices, as well as on the lines about ecleticism in musical appreciations, especially re 'pop'. (I also enjoyed Rob Hardin and Steve Carl's rangey admonishments to listen beyond or in spite of, or wilful disregard for, category). I bore such recent discussion in mind, during the events unravelling here and in their gradual settlements into the continuities of these past days. The word 'sensitive' cuts unto almost every aspect of this post. There were 350 young, for the most part drunk and / or pilled- up (not absolutely all), people at Colchester Arts Centre (sacked by Boudicca's Iceni and Britain's oldest, and oldest garrison, town) last Friday night for The Night of The Living Tongues. A capacity audience was in before 10.30 and many others were locked out. (no major statement intended) They had already experienced a nest (nay, almost a thicket) of car speakers (wired onto a sawn-off hatstand free-standing in a white marble font) whispering rhythmic wickedly mis-treated language fragments, interfacing with a video of rushes (from the Halvergate Marshes on the Broads) going in and out of focus, projected onto a giant screen forming this 'horizontal rushes' gateway into the deconsecrated church. A foyer installation intended as an exquisite interference in the entrance to a space through which a steady passage of audience (all being thoroughly searched due to a drugs bust at the same venue in the summer - once the police get their teeth into it's a little like being hounded for years by the tax department) passed. Slowed bird-song and voices, dreaming "it's a kind of memory - i car-ry with me". (installation by Sianed Jones and Martin Sercombe) I'm seeing a tall bearded young man, in a dark overcoat, with long frizzy hair (very retro hippy with tendencies towards convoy - you know, the battered steel cap partly laced boots) dancing into and onto the open floor, staring down into the drum n bass spinning lights on the parquet, sniffing out the vibe. Josefina Cupido played a twnety minute set, under a quiet siege of 'get-offs' from a 'party' group close by her stage. There were two stages. A lot of people present however listened respectfully and yet quietly chatted - about the space (which Orphan Drift, check their fine first novel, had spent the whole day carefully transforming), about her presence as a woman-percussionist / vocalist. Singing out: Of my potentiality Hay hay hay hay Our scentences deconstruct form Scaffolding and hair upon rocks The words never quite leaving me And in the ring of love We fight with falling in love With love being in love With love falling in love with love Is an addiction (from her debut CD launched by us last night in The Vortex, north London, to a packed house - very much hometown crowd - alongside Annie Whitehead's 'Rude' w/ the incomparable Harry Beckett, the CD released on Sound & Language as 'One Woman One Drum' - orders taken - that's the only add here) One of the DJs from Asian Dub Foundation drifted onto a drum and bass groove (jungle, pop pickers, or bungle as the Asian wags have it). Very jazzy programming. Ronnie Fraser-Monro did some laconic readings of re-written Oasis lyrics, deliberately twisted before introducing Aaron Williamson (one of the most dynamic performance poets on these islands, profoundly deaf and utterly articulated in every syllable and gesture). "Go on my son!" yelled out one Essex man as Aaron launched on: "I don't eat meat I AM meat" - my own carcass "you mean sarcophagus" ... contracting, colliding ... "and the division between flesh and celestial" we term 'thinking' is confessed down intentions in fact run down or thisappeared in inking (from Cathedral Lung) - his mike stand toppling onto a young woman perched almost at his feet, she's yelling "come outside now you, let's sort this out!" - of course he's deaf and is close to lost in his performance (another guy stood right next to him and spoke directly to him before wandering off bemused as Aaron continued regardless). This was an extraordinarily engaging scene all in all. A carnival of sensitivities. Some people were genuinely shocked or downright disturbed by Aaron's intensity, others ravished by his compassionate engagement with the dark ironic humour that he rings from his hearing impairment. But nothing 'heroic' was going on other than him working to keep his work out there, alive in a brutalising world of near indifference. The edgiest context for 'poetics' that I can remember having experienced for a long time. During the transitions from Aaron (leaving the stage drenched in sweat and exhausted) into the first part of a blistering live set from Asian Dub Foundation, a wave of awkwardness resolved itself into joyful dancing engagements throughout the crowd as what the here ? erupted into a sonic architecture of my own three stooges, namely melody, rhythm and noise. That passage of time was, for me, poetry. The sensitivities it examined offered both dystopian and utopian visions of accessibility. ADF were pursued by Ronnie, doing a scurrilous impression of the hunching, aged Dame Barbara Tartland reading selections from her own work against odd disco muzak. I had to break up a fight at the bar, a punter tried to nut Martin Sercombe, the police were called to prevent a late-comer (already bleeding at the mouth from bashing nimself against the doors) from assaulting those who began to leave about 1am. One further aspect is worth mentioning, that being Orpan Drift's performance being spoilt by a tech nerd (sound familiar?). Said nerd in question refused to work with what them because they were using an 'unprofessional' piece of equipment. By the time we could deal with him the moment had passed and a baying crowd needed appeasement for their rushing energies. Be curious to hear stories of performances (readings even) becoming victim to techno nightmares in this space. love and love cris ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 13:25:50 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest Subject: Re: scary message maria i looked through my archives (read and unread) and didn't see anything from tissc@flash.net. WAS a "tinac" (chirot) which is sort of close but which doesn't originate at "flash.net" -- there is a command yu can do in unix/vax environment to trace net listing. you type whois -h rs.internic.net [part of name, in this case, "flash.net"] i'll do it and send you info back e ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 13:28:08 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eliza McGrand- CVA Guest Subject: Re: scary message here is what i got on flash.net Flashnet Communications (FLASH3-DOM) 2805 W 7th St Fort Worth, TX 76107 US Domain Name: FLASH.NET Administrative Contact: Thurburn, Lee (LT193) leethur@FLASH.NET (817)332-8883 Technical Contact, Zone Contact: FlashNet Domain Account Services (FDA-ORG) hostmaster@FLASH.NET 817-332-8883 Fax: 817-332-9594 Billing Contact: Leslie, Scott (SL696) scott@FLASH.NET 817-332-8863 Record last updated on 28-Sep-96. Record created on 03-Oct-95. Domain servers in listed order: NS1.FLASH.NET 206.149.24.9 STARGAZER.FLASH.NET 206.149.24.100 NS1.AGIS.NET 205.137.48.5 ------------ also there is a command "finger" finger tinass@flash.net if you type that in, it might give you info on that person/mail id. often, systems are closed to "finger" inquiries, though, so it is no guarantee. universities are the most likely to support finger directories. e ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 13:40:49 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Shapiro 15, Coultas 11, Godfrey 10 @ Ichor/Clementine David Shapiro 15, Brenda Coultas 11, John Godfrey 10 at the Ichor Reading Series at Clementine Gallery, 526 E 26th St, NYC Friday, October 25, 8:30 p.m. Attendance: 65 Sam Truitt's Ichor Reading Series opened its second season Friday night at the brand-new Clementine Gallery. Reading first was David Shapiro. Shapiro read the following poems: Light Bulb, 1960 The Poem with a Footnote Voiceless For Mikhail Govrin Song of the Eiffel Tower The Lost Golf Ball A Found Golf Ball Bambino e Deo (?) Old Poems The Boss Poem (w/ Daniel Shapiro) Black Silk (by Daniel Shapiro) Poem that Doesn't Belong (by Daniel Shapiro) The Snow Is Alive (w/ Daniel Shapiro) Falling Upwards To the Earth It was a strong set for Shapiro, whose interpoem comments were at a pretty high level, and whose poems were as beautiful as ever. New motifs in Shapiro's work (or new manifestations of old motifs) seem to have much to do with his intense and continual invocation of the late poet Joseph Ceravolo -- the Ceravolesque influence found not just in lines like "I was scared/into/again" but in "an ordinary goose goes squawking across the parking lot" and "there is no day off for a bug in a forest". Shapiro read uncharacteristically slowly, adjusting for the so-so acoustics in the space, which is a fairly typical Chelsea gallery with tall walls and a shoebox shape. Shapiro apologized for his poems about physics (the golf ball poems), noting that he did not do well in physics in high school, and that he used to torment his teachers by asking them 'What is light?' Shapiro read in a black shirt and a black jacket. Brenda Coultas read eleven pieces (I think) without an intermission. Coultas, author of _Early Films_ (Rodent), read the following pieces quietly: The Rise of Sex Towards God Dream Life and the Kiss of Transvestitism Blue Line Now or If You Were a Person Preamble Preamble Salt God (or Salt Block?) ?? My Manifesto Capitalist Projections Oya Some lines from Brenda's work: "I trusted you of catness", "It's no femur, just a vertebrae", "'I could make a great movie' 'So take off your clothes'", "I'm in America wearing a boutonniere of gigantic proportions", "I'm God's spokesmodel let me in", "There are sixteen types of hymens and I have thirteen of them", "This is a love story between fingers", "He has danced for subway tokens, meatballs and joy but he has never worn a g-string", and "All of us were very very late". Brenda Coultas will be reading at Poetry City on December 5 with Ange Mlinko. There was an intermission before John Godfrey began. In the audience were: Eleni Sikelianos, Laird Hunt, Anselm Berrigan, Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Simon Pettet, Steve Malmude, Drew Gardner, Anna Malmude, Bill Kushner, Barbara Henning, Carol Malmude Szamatowicz, Lisa Jarnot, Lewis Warsh, Heather Ramsdell, Garrett Kalleberg, Sean Killian, Chris Stroffolino, Bill Luoma, Marcella Harb, Prageeta Sharma, Star Black, Gregory Botts, and I think Steve Katz. Lee Ann Brown was videotaping. John Godfrey closed the evening by reading the following poems: Evil Tunnels Gray Pants Feminine Stamp Who Walk Kinds of Smoke The Slightest Foam The History of Blows To Keep Saliva Warm Day Goo The Ticket Godfrey, who is a nurse for pediatric AIDS patients, read uncharacteristcally slowly to adjust to the space. Slowed down, his prose poems revealed narratives in among the accumulated details, observations and instructions, which were pretty concise. "Do not saddle up the hound", "Flesh is so organized it takes this mess to heart and relaxes", "Pleasure ... to sacrifice the present for the present", "Teeth turning red by the light of cartoons", "All it takes is the crepuscule for me to drown in longing", "My law is, exceptions never cease", "A fabulous white rat behind every wall", "Land has no purpose but to support us to walk", "Well I am male after all", "The fundamental unit of her kind is the jiffy", "Frowzy shroud". Hearing Godfrey read slowly, I remembered how much of a help it was to my silent reading of David Shapiro to hear Shapiro perform his poems. One adjusts one's expectations for meaning. With these three readers, the adjustments were sexy, calming and clarifying. --Jordan Davis ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 13:36:32 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: scary message i think the sender was tissc@flash.net, or something like that. i was wondering if it was our friend filch, but someone told me it was a 94K msg, so who knows. md In message <199610261725.NAA02965@toast.ai.mit.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > maria > i looked through my archives (read and unread) and didn't see anything > from tissc@flash.net. WAS a "tinac" (chirot) which is sort of close > but which doesn't originate at "flash.net" -- there is a command yu > can do in unix/vax environment to trace net listing. you type > > whois -h rs.internic.net [part of name, in this case, "flash.net"] > > i'll do it and send you info back > e ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 13:42:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: scary message oops, i meant that backchannel, sorry to anyone i have offended.--md In message <32725a300131012@mhub2.tc.umn.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > i think the sender was tissc@flash.net, or something like that. i was > wondering > if it was our friend filch, but someone told me it was a 94K msg, so who > knows. > md > > In message <199610261725.NAA02965@toast.ai.mit.edu> UB Poetics discussion > > group > writes: > > maria > > i looked through my archives (read and unread) and didn't see anything > > from tissc@flash.net. WAS a "tinac" (chirot) which is sort of close > > but which doesn't originate at "flash.net" -- there is a command yu > > can do in unix/vax environment to trace net listing. you type > > > > whois -h rs.internic.net [part of name, in this case, "flash.net"] > > > > i'll do it and send you info back > > e ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 19:58:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Re: Kathy Change In-Reply-To: A friend years ago told me, "there's the spontaneous suicide--and the suicide who studies up for it". An example of the latter may be found in Mayakovsky's How Are Verses Made--in Mayakovsky's extended commentary on a poem by and the suicide of Esenin. Mayakovsky preparing for his own suicide in the refutation of another poet's . . . --dave baptiste chirot ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 21:42:21 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rick Bursky Subject: "help" does anyone know how i can get off this bulletin board ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 21:54:04 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jennifer-Alan Subject: Re: "help" In-Reply-To: <961026214220_1247497026@emout10.mail.aol.com> Take out the pin. On Sat, 26 Oct 1996, Rick Bursky wrote: > does anyone know how i can get off this bulletin board > _______________________________________________________________ http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ 718-857-3671 CuSeeMe 166.84.250.149 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 22:00:57 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: There was a reading in Providence? What about Brown? So Henry: If Providence has become such a poetic hotbedlambadactylic zone, then what's your take on Brown U's literary activities? I participated in the Unspeakable Practices Festival in 92 and was very pleased with Robert Coover, Eurydice et al. Coover actually taught my essay, Definitions for the Dungeon, as well as my short story, When Sleep Comes Down, to his graduate class--and this was when my writing was *completely* unknown. He also brought Samuel Delaney there--a neglected great writer, in my opinion. C. visited our guest rooms in the morning. He and Eurydice actually threw a party in my bedroom, which was thoughtful (or amusingly thoughtless), to say the least. I was also glad that Coover cared so much about creating a place where peers could meet and interact--an opportunity, Coover remarked, that he himself never had. When I heard they were going to the UP Festival this year, I told my friends--known writers who shall remain nameless--that they'd have a blast. Apparently, I was as wrong as the Belgian accountant who insisted he could subsist on his own urine. (He died after less than a week.) This year, my NYC mates went to Brown and came back disgusted with the event and with the new writing faculty (whoever they are: don't know them). I was shocked to hear about this--particularly since Hawkes was the Dean of Lit before Coover, and both Hawkes and Coover are brilliant stylists and excellent teachers. There was talk of a wretched instructor: I'm told she railed at anyone who had ever been published in the New Yorker (as if an academic position is somehow less status quo than a magazine gig) and generally made everyone feel unlistened to and unwelcome. Does anyone know anything about this? How could one of the most interesting and progressive writing programs in the country have purportedly gone sour so rapidly? Or did the place really change that much at all? The instructor my friends are dissing was doubtless chosen by Coover--could she really be so bad? I liked Coover's writing and enthusiasm a lot. I liked the climate he created at Brown as well. I have good friends who come from that version of Brown. I like lots of things about their lib arts background, including their politics. Are my NYC writer-friends mistaken? Tell me this isn't true. All the best, Rob Hardin "a deposit of air, make it stop retching its bloodless deposit on my last seconds of recollection" http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 03:13:54 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Jen Sondheim Subject: lulled bye (fwd) lulled bye now i lay my head to rest to get out i think upon the perfect breast to get out of this life i have not seen nor found nor kept get out of this life what might have seemed unsound; i wept get out foundation, i wept disease, to please recriminations; release me please please to get out of this life o please without substance, head, or strife to get out which is why i lay a head to rest to get out of this life to drink the perfect liquid get out of this life and from the perfect breast get out urinary basin ________________________________________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 05:34:06 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ward Tietz <100723.3166@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: Alire: French Review of Electronic Writing Comments: cc: Hypertext List Sorry for cross-posting. I picked up a few copies of the French electronic literature journal ALIRE in Geneva yesterday that I thought might be of interest to list. Each edition includes work in both PC and Mac format. ALIRE no 7 (April 1994) includes work by Philippe Bootz, Jean-Marie Dutey, Disztichon Alfa and Philippe Castellin. ALIRE no 8 (November 1994) includes work by Patrick Burgaud, Jean-Marie Lafaille, Pedro Barbosa, Albilio Cavalheiro, Jacques Donguy, Guillaume Loizillon, Jean-Pierre Balpe and Eduardo Kac. ALIRE no 9 (June 1995) includes work by Jean-Marie Dutey, Phillipe Bootz, Claude Maillard and Tibor Papp. Their address is: Mots-Voir 27, allee des Coquelicots F-59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq France They also published essays in French and English in 1994 from the colloquium "A:\LITERATURE; colloque Nord Poesie et Ordinateur" held at the Universite de Lille 3. Ward Tietz ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 10:12:02 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 25 Oct 1996 to 26 Oct 1996 About performance(s): Way out here we dont get all that much (although there will be what's shaping up to be a fascinating conference on words and images, EyeRhymes, next June), so I was thinking about some of the remarks on poetries & performances when I went to hear Oliver Lake's 'The Matador of 1st and 1st' at the local jazz club last night. Lake describes the 70 minute performance as 'a poetic monologue, incorporating jazz, rap, improvised live and prerecorded musical accents' & as 'a piece of performance art.' Well, it is all of that, but how 'hear' a lot of what he said, chanted, sang, as poetry? The 'rap' piece was funny, at least semi-satirizing of commercial rap, also very pointedly an attack on consumerism (there were others). Lake continually changed costumes, as he took on different personae. The title piece was in heavily metric rhyming verse. Other parts were more straight spoken riffs, there were also moments of high lyric intensity, chants of fairly straightforward calls to love, be equal, etc. At one point he talked about all the different kinds of music, how certain players were all good, & insisted, 'labels separate.' Kept coming back to what he seemed to be 'arguing' was a false opposition between oral/literary. Had a funny rap on 'organic lady', light, funny, but not making fun (a delicate balance that). A lot of what he was presenting was meant, I think, to be heard as poetry, & it was essentially traditionally lyric, but with intereting narrative breaks (out). In between all of these he played, alto, soprano, flute. Ranging from the furthest out howls & hoots to the deepest in melodies of claritas. Toward the end, mentioning some soft r & b of the 70s, he then did choose jazz in a way: thank god for duke ellington music was is/his (our) mistress or at least that was how I heard it. The audience, most of whom I'd bet dont read poetry, loved it, loved him. Laughed in the right places, applauded both phrases that caught their attention & solos that tore the place up. So: what was it? I cant say but can say that if Oliver Lake brings this solo piece to your neighbourhood, I highly recommend it, as such. All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'The universe opens. I close. And open, just to surprise you.' - Phyllis Webb ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 11:23:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla Thanks for the updates, Maria and Loss. I will check out yr web page. Speaking of MLA, I will be chairing/moderating a panel I put together on the later work of the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. I think the papers will be pretty good, and Kinsella doesn't get much attention, tho he's the older Irish poet who has learned the most from modernism. Inexplicably, the panel is in a huge room. So come on down; there's room for everybody. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ There is no mantle and it does not descend. -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 14:55:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathleen Crown Subject: more info on Poetry & the Public Sphere Hello everyone-- Here is the most up-to-date Call for Papers for "Poetry and the Public Sphere," w/ details about registration, lodging, and other things. The website, which should be up sometime this week, will be updated as we confirm additional participants and events. Please note that the deadline for paper proposals has been extended to December 1st. --Kathy Crown CALL FOR PAPERS Please post hardcopies in addition to posting and forwarding electronically to interested parties. The Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick announces POETRY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A CONFERENCE ON CONTEMPORARY POETRY, APRIL 24-27, 1997 Scheduled to participate: ADRIENNE RICH, ROBERT HASS, SONIA SANCHEZ, MIGUEL ALGARIN, POETS FROM THE NUYORICAN POETS' CAFE, CHARLES BERNSTEIN, TRICIA ROSE, CHARLES ALTIERI, MARIA DAMON, ALICIA OSTRIKER, CHERYL CLARKE, CORA KAPLAN, RACHEL HADAS, MICHAEL MCKEON, ELIN DIAMOND, ABENA BUSIA, SUSAN STANFORD FRIEDMAN and many others. This interdisciplinary conference is open to the public and aims to provide new understandings of poetry's participation in the public sphere. The last two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in public poetry--readings, festivals, performances, films, television series, and poetry slams. In examining the way poetry affects and is affected by social context, we will consider a range of contemporary poetries in their public settings, including performance-oriented, community-based, socially engaged, and formally experimental work. Questions of audience and aesthetics will be central to our discussion of poetry's active role in building, defining, questioning, and motivating social and political communities. Designed to bring a broad range of people from inside and outside the academy into conversation, the conference will feature roundtable discussions, poetry readings and performances, keynote lectures, and panel presentations by a wide range of poets, scholars, and activists. We welcome submissions from anyone with an interest in poetry. We are currently accepting: 1. Detailed two-page proposals for 15-minute papers, not limited to the topics listed here. (Feel free to suggest panel topics; however, we are not accepting group panel proposals.) 2. Detailed proposals for roundtable discussions (no more than four people), to consist of five-minute remarks and a moderated discussion. You may provide participant names and brief profiles of chair and three to four panelists, plus a two-page proposal describing the topic, approach, and intended contribution of each discussant. You may propose an entire roundtable or may outline your contribution and suggest roundtables for which it might be relevant. Here are some possible topics for discussion: poetry and social movements poetics of performance poetry politics of form poetry and public sphere theory poetry as witness poetry and community activism African American poetry poetry slams poetry and popular culture global poetry Latino/a poetry poetry and identity politics poetry and/as history ethnography of poetry Native American poetry gay/ lesbian poetry spoken-word events feminist poetry poetry and AIDS rap-meets-poetry politics of publishing Asian American poetry contemporary poetry cultures SEND PROPOSALS BY DECEMBER 1 (previous deadline has been extended) TO HARRIET DAVIDSON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR ENGLISH AND DIRECTOR OF WOMEN'S STUDIES, P.O. Box 5054, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ 08903-5054. More information is available at our website (http://www.english.rutgers.edu); information about a pre-conference discussion forum online will also be available at that address. Email inquiries to Kathy Crown (kcrown@rci.rutgers.edu) or Nick Yasinski (yasinski@rci.rutgers.edu); no proposals via email. Thank you. ACCEPTANCE NOTIFICATION If a paper or panel discussion is accepted for presentation at the conference, the person submitting will be notified in February or earlier. MAILING LIST If you would like to be on our mailing list, please send an email message to Kathy Crown (kcrown@rci.rutgers.edu) or Nick Yasinski (yasinski@rci.rutgers.edu), or write Harriet Davidson at the address above. Indicate whether you have a place to put a conference poster or need only a registration form (saving us a little money). Registration forms will be sent by snail mail early next year, so please include your snail address as well as your email address. LOCATION The conference will take place on the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, which is an easy 50-minute train or car ride from New York City (1 1/2 hr from Philadelphia by car, 2 hr by local trains; 25-min by car from Newark Int'l Airport; 30-min by train or car from Princeton). SCHEDULE OF EVENTS (to be confirmed in early 1997) The conference will begin mid-afternoon on Thursday, April 24 with some of its most exciting and importance featured events, including panels and roundtables with important poets and scholars, as well as an evening reading by nationally known poets from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, organized by Miguel Algarin (names available soon, upon final agreement). We strongly encourage people to come for the Thursday afternoon and evening events. Friday and Saturday, April 25 & 26, will include a variety of panels, roundtables, mid-day readings, and evening readings by Adrienne Rich (and others) on Friday and Robert Hass and probably Sonia Sanchez (and others) on Saturday. The conference will conclude on Sunday, April 27, with panels and a featured roundtable and discussion summing up the conference, ending by early afternoon. REGISTRATION The conference is open to the public. However, people should be advised that we may be obliged to give priority seating at some events such as the featured evening readings to people who have registered. Registration fees have yet to be set but will probably rely on a sliding scale. Registration announcements/forms will go out in early Spring, 1997. Anyone submitting a proposal for the conference will automatically be sent a registration form (accepted proposals do not exempt one from registration fees). Anyone who does not submit a proposal can be sure to receive a registration form by writing to Harriet Davidson, Associate Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies, P.O. Box 5054, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903-5054, or by sending an email request for a registration form to Kathy Crown (kcrown@rci.rutgers.edu) or Nick Yasinski (yasinski@rci.rutgers.edu). Include your snail address; forms will be sent out early next year. ACCOMMODATIONS A special rate of $59/night for conference-goers has been arranged for a limited number of rooms at the very nice, full-service Holiday Inn in nearby Somerset (a 12-min car ride from Rutgers) near Rte 287. Please call (908) 356-1700 and make sure to mention the conference name and Rutgers. We are hoping to arrange at least one reception at the Holiday Inn, as well as daily shuttles to and from the conference; for these reasons, we encourage anyone staying overnight to use the Holiday Inn if possible. The only hotel within walking distance of the conference is the Hyatt Hotel (908) 873-1234 in downtown New Brunswick; it is significantly more expensive than the Holiday Inn. The Holiday Inn deal provides nicer accommodations (and most likely at a lower cost) than the "moderately priced" options below; the "more expensive" options are sometimes double the Holiday Inn price and usually do not have much more to recommend them. Options include the Quality Inn (908-469-5050) in Somerset, 10 min away, moderately priced; the Ramada Inn (908-828-6900) in East Brunswick near NJ Turnpike Exit 9, 8 min from Rutgers, moderately priced; the Marriot Hotel (908-560-0500) in Somerset, 12 min away, more expensive (within walking distance of the Holiday Inn); the Windham Gardens (908-980-0400) in Piscataway, 8 min away, more expensive; the Hilton (908-828-2000) in East Brunswick near NJ Turnpike Exit 9, 8 min from Rutgers, much more expensive (JFK airport shuttle stop). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This conference is generously supported by the Rutgers Student Centers and Student Activities, Rutgers College Programming Council, Office of the Dean of Students at Rutgers College, Office of the Dean at Douglass College, Douglass Activities Board, Douglass College Center, Rutgers Department of English, New Jersey Council for the Humanities, Writers at Rutgers, Paul Robeson Cultural Center, Center for Latino Art and Culture, Women's Studies, Latin American Studies, Institute for Research on Women, and the Office of Diverse Community Affairs. END -- ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 08:34:22 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 23 Oct 1996 to 24 Oct 1996 Re: david kellogg's & michael coffey's discussion of heaney (gosh: what just giving the title of a poem can generate): I'm glad to see it, & the rest. I have not seen that booklet, & believe the library here doesnt have it. can you give us publication data? I tend to agree that, like content (as bpNichol used to say), it's there, some unavoidable aspect of 'speaking,' or 'using language.' So it's what seems to come through as present that becomes interesting. I think I would agree with coffey that 'being political' is not heaney's forte, but I suspect a lot of his readers appreciate precisely that aspect of his work. I am intrigued about the 'whole series of agonized letters in the IRISH TIMES defending Heaney.' That seems to speak, at least, to a readership, & an engaged one, even if the terms of the engagement may not be those that tend to be agreed upon in this list. A queer theorist & medievalist in our department told me at a reading yesterday that he is a great heaney fan, although he allowed that it's partly because his supervisor was one & introduced him to the poet & the poetry (he added that he thinks heaney is just a terrific performer). I mention this only to add that I dont know exactly what it points to, This is a man who directs 'perverse' productions of medieval drama, presents himself, in a province whose government remains stolidly homophobic, as 'queer,' & whose general interest in contemporary writing would tend to be in gay/lesbian/queer writing. What does _his_ love of heaney mean? I dont know; but does anyone have any ideas? I must add that I would rather read Muldoon, but even more, Boland, & if given the further choice of just what I want, would be into North American writers, including a lot of Canadians many here wont know (& I tend to read fairly widely there, which is perhaps another thread: how, in smaller countries with more recent literatures like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the absolute conflict between various kinds of poetics doesnt happen quite so obviously, & cross-overs work). All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'The universe opens. I close. And open, just to surprise you.' - Phyllis Webb ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 15:06:17 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Julie Marie Schmid Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla In-Reply-To: <199610271623.LAA10978@argus.acpub.duke.edu> There will be a panel on public poetries--slams, cafe poetry, inaugaral poetry--on Sunday at noon. It's chaired by Susan Gilmore from Ithaca College and should be a lot of fun. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 08:08:05 +1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pam Brown Subject: Re: Mountain Goats Hello Poetics List - Can anyone tell me the name of the independent label that records these "Mountain Goats" - so I can get their cd's imported to Australia.... Thanks Pam Brown P.Brown@library.usyd.edu.au http://postbox.library.usyd.edu.au/~pbrown/ At 06:39 PM 24/10/96 -0700, you wrote: >At 12:01 AM 10/23/96 -0400, Keith Tuma wrote: > >>Hey all you listers out there with detailed and arcane knowledges of musics >>pop and otherwise, what can you tell me about The Mountain Goats? > >I had an article on John Darnielle (who pretty much IS The Mountain Goats) >from a recent s.f. free alternative weekly lying around somewhere, but I >must have already mailed it to someone, 'cause I can't find it. And >unfortunately I have no memory of much that it said about him. > >When I saw him play an in-store show at the new location of Aquarius Records >recently, his throat was sort of scratchy but it didn't detract from his >charm. He definitely IS literary (he introduced one song by saying, "This >next one wins the award for Most Pretentious Song Title of the Year: it's >called "Song for the Julian Calendar") but his singing and playing are, to >me anyway, dead earnest which (again, to me) blows any possible pretention >out of consideration. He was accompanied on a few songs by Australian >violinist (also guitarist) Alistair Galbraith. Their collaborations were >ragged but delicate and haunting. > >Oh, I did remember one Darnielle quote. Because his albums are recorded on >four-track machines and such, he's often labelled as part of the >"lo-fi"movement, and the implied reduction of music to its recording medium >irritates him, because after all, he says, "you wouldn't ask a writer if >he's part of a 20-pound bond movement." > >{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ >}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} >}}}}waves woven on the loom of the sea{{{ >{Steve Carll sjcarll@slip.net} >}http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym{ >{http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym} >}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} >{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ > > ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 18:46:39 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Louis Cabri Subject: Politics; Change; Fabulous poetry; Close reading Once upon a time there's this orator who discovers that his fellow Athenians are in imminent, mortal danger. He harangues the citizens like a tyrant, commanding them to act on his news -- but they ignore his fanatic outburst. Then the orator tries a different tac. He invokes the honourable dead, the war heroes etc, with a violent, impassioned rhetoric of unity -- but to no avail. The idle itizens prefer to watch a couple of kids scuffling in the dust. The orator tries one final time. He tells a fable. Once upon a time, Ceres ('the earth fertility goddess') went strolling with her good friends eel and swallow. They came to a river and could walk no further. But the eel swam across, and the swallow flew.... "And what did Ceres do?" the citizens cried as one. "I'll tell you," said the orator. "She transported herself...into a rage against all of you, for listening to kids' fairy tales instead of to the news of imminent danger to our fair city." From that point on the citizens were all ears for the orator's news. Thus the power of fables. From La Fontaine's "Le Pouvoir des fables." (in my hasty, crude, essentializing paraphrase) ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 19:49:31 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Beth Simon Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla I'll be chairing the American Dialect Society session, if anyone intends to hit the m/mla on the first day. beth simon ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 19:29:40 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Kathy Change >> >>"The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide." >> >> --WCW, "The Descent of Winter" > >This seems to me the perfect type of the pretentious, brahminical, >superficial formulation of the "writer trying to be clever". >- Henry Gould Well, Henry, I guess you and i will have to disagree on whether Williams had Hemingway pegged.... George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 23:21:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Evans Subject: New Publication New from Tender Buttons Books: Imagination Verses by Jennifer Moxley An offset & smyth-sewn paperback of 90pp+ for $8.95 With a Preface by the Author, ISBN 0-927920-07-7 This, my first full length publication, is a collection of lyrics written over the past five years or so. Some of the work included has appeared in such venues as Object, The Baffler, The Exact Change Yearbook#1, Dark Ages Clasp the Daisy Root and my own magazine, The Impercipient. If you would like a copy, they are available from Small Press Distribution (1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley,CA 94702 USA 1-800-869-7553) or you can e-mail me at the above address (not Poetics) or write me at 61 East Manning St. Providence RI 02906-4008. Still available on the Tender Buttons Backlist: Harryette Mullen's Trimmings Anne Waldman's Not a Male Pseudonym Hannah Weiner's silent teacher remembered sequel (all available at SPD) Thanks! Jennifer Moxley _________________________________________________________________________ r i a t n m u a t s u o o o s ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 21:00:22 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Jump Up In-Reply-To: As one of the very few owners of a copy of Oliver Lake's book of poetry, I've always thought he was a great saxophone player and composer -- but that performance piece sounds delicious -- was anything said about a recording becoming available??? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 07:31:07 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathleen Crown Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla In-Reply-To: Julie Marie Schmid "Re: wotz.good@mla" (Oct 27, 3:06pm) I'm glad to hear about all the MLA panels on electronic & public poetry. There will be another panel, Monday at noon, on History, Ecstasy, and Lyric Subjectivity---how ecstasy interferes w/ lyric ego, to rephrase Olson-- with papers on Hannah Weiner (Maria Damon's), Charles Olson, H.D., Bishop. --Kathy Crown -- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 08:14:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kathleen Crown Subject: Re: CALL FOR PAPERS Comments: To: maria damon In-Reply-To: "maria damon" "Re:CALL FOR PAPERS" (Oct 25, 8:42pm) Maria, Thanks for the announcement of your Cross-Cultural Poetics conference in Minneapolis next October, which sounds like a much-needed conversation and also lots of fun--I will plan to be there. Nice to see a conference about "poetics" that actually includes poets and talk about poetry... --Kathy -- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 08:35:09 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: Kathy Change In-Reply-To: Message of Sun, 27 Oct 1996 19:29:40 -0700 from On Sun, 27 Oct 1996 19:29:40 -0700 George Bowering said: >>> >>>"The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide." >>> >>> --WCW, "The Descent of Winter" >> >>This seems to me the perfect type of the pretentious, brahminical, >>superficial formulation of the "writer trying to be clever". >>- Henry Gould > >Well, Henry, I guess you and i will have to disagree on whether Williams >had Hemingway pegged.... > Touche, George. Your context is sabre-sharp this morning. - HG ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 08:24:51 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeff Hansen Organization: The Blake School Subject: politics & poetry I hope this isn't a dead horse, and I'm sure that threads of this sort have appeared before. But I feel like spouting. If you don't feel like reading this, then please delete it. I've been reading through Talisman 15, at the end of which is an exchange between Perloff and Warsh on Oppen, politics, et. al. In addition, Leonard Schwartz rehashes, in a gentle manner, Eliot Weinberger's claim that Language poets are Reagen-era capitalist dupes because they unhinge words from history, just as Reagan did. Perloff makes such statements as "The personal is the political." Warsh agrees with both Perloff and Schwartz that poetry and politics are somehow linked. I assert: 1) POETRY IS NOT POLITICAL IN THE CURRENT U.S. CONTEXT -- Let's take our heads out of the sand. Any non-poetry reader with any intelligence who read the above exchanges would be amused and horrified at how out of touch we are. Bowling has more political impact than poetry. I know some on the list will claim that everything has a political dimension. True enough. But having a political dimension is not the same as having a RELEVANT political dimension. I define "relevant" as the ability to alter public policy. Poetry cannot do this in the current climate because, except for the NEW CRITERION crowd, we are all part of the same voting block. All of our differences are mute from a political perspective Those who argue that the personal are the poltical are deluded. While this was a liberating slogan in about 1970, it has dated about as well as Nehru jackets. My decision to sit in my basement office --which I built myself, no political relevancy -- write a poem, edit it, send it to out and get it published is personal. It's not in the least political. It has no impact on how we as a nation or how my local community chooses to organize itself in terms of the production and allocation of wealth and in terms of how we protect personal liberty. Wake up. What does such poetic activity do? It helps me to be more aware of the language around me so I can take pleaseure in it, be outraged by its poor uses, make new things, be a better conversationalist, think more complex thoughts, etc. All of which have a political dimension. None of which has a RELEVANT political dimension. It alters voting blocks not a bit. Poetry is too important to confuse it with politics. Politics are too important to be confused with poetry. The most effective "political poems" of the past thirty years have been awful as literature --Vietnam war protest poems. I'm glad that they were written. I in a heartbeat would write doggerel for a political rally if I felt it would help rediistrubute the wealth. But I wouldn't claim that it was good poetry. 2. I CHOSE POETRY AS A VOCATION RATHER THAN POLITICS FOR A REASON -- Some relatives of mine had a hand in forming the modern U.S. welfare state when they worked for the Nixon and Johnson administrations. We agree that I couldn't stand political work. It is rarely creative. Day in and day out they attended meetings where they said the same thing, made the same arguments, tried to convince people of the same thing. They then tried to convince others with the same arguments, by saying the same thing, etc. Politics takes doggedness, determination, and single-mindedness. I'm determined, but my creative bent does not lend itself to doggedness nor to single-mindedness. I chose poetry, or rather poetry chose me, because I like to find ways to articulate experience. Saying the same thing over and over bores me. We are poets because we are not fit for politics. Let's be proud of it. We'd probably be lousy politicians anyway. 3. I AM POLTICALLY ACTIVE-- Indeed, a year ago I used this list to instigate a letter writing campaign protesting the hanging of Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. That was an attempt to be political. It wasn't my first. I'm fairly active. But doing that stuff day in and day out would drive me crazy. I grew up in Green Bay, WI, not far from where a statue of Joseph McCarthy stands in Appleton's city hall. As a teenager, I accompanied my father in door-to-door canvassing on behalf of Leftist politicians. I was afraid. So was he. In many countries, writing poetry can get you in trouble. Not in the U.S. In those countries, perhaps poetry can be politically relevant. 4. WHY DO WE WANT TO CLAIM POETRY IS POLITICALLY RELEVANT--At least since Milton, poetry in the English language has made various attempts to influence politics. None more extreme than Ezra Pound's. While I abhor Pound's politics, he has been the most successful Modern poet in terms of catching the ear of power. I believe that we are still living in the shadow of his ambition: We still believe that, if poetry is to matter, it must have a political impact. This is dangerous. Politics by its nature is compromise. Poetry by its nature is not. Politics in the democratic sense is formed by groups of people haranguing, compromising, grandstanding, and fudging. Poetry by its nature is more dogmatic. Poetry is radically creativity. From the ground up. This sort of creativity can only happen when a few are in charge and the rest are forced to shut up. (Revolutions I don't believe have accomplished anything in terms of redistributing wealth,power, and liberty to the disenfranchised. Day in day out political work has.) Poets who enter politics in their capacity as poets run the risk of falling to the temptation of totalitarianism. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 10:55:46 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: politics & poetry Jeff - I'm crazy about the tone of your post. But I have a question about this paragraph: >This is dangerous. Politics by its nature is compromise. Poetry by its >nature is not. Politics in the democratic sense is formed by groups of >people haranguing, compromising, grandstanding, and fudging. Poetry by >its nature is more dogmatic. And then this one: >Poets who enter politics in their capacity as poets run the risk of >falling to the temptation of totalitarianism. My question is this: isn't totalitarianism often described as the aestheticization of politics? the attempt to remove the 'fudging' of argument and compromise? A related question might be: is poetry well-served by the idea 'No Compromise'? I know that the poems I like best were twitted, revised, and rebutted by other poets than their authors, and that the authors took some of the suggestions floated to them. Anyway, right on, Jordan ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 10:10:30 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: CALL FOR PAPERS hi kathy it'd be great if you cd forward the msg to your extensive network...bests, maria In message <9610280814.ZM10269@niflheim.rutgers.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > > Maria, Thanks for the announcement of your Cross-Cultural Poetics > conference in Minneapolis next October, which sounds like a much-needed > conversation and also lots of fun--I will plan to be there. Nice to see a > conference about "poetics" that actually includes poets and talk about > poetry... --Kathy > -- ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 12:20:12 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Yunte Huang Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: "Poetry is not political in the current U.S. context" --Jeff Hansen What poetry? Whose poetry? Whose U.S.???????????????? All like these ??????????? ? ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 13:04:04 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Evans Subject: There was a reading in Providence? What about Brown? Because Gale Nelson is temporarily off-list, I am forwarding on his behalf the following response to Rob Hardin's recent post (future participants in this discussion may wish to "cc" their messages to Gale directly at the address given at the close of his post): Steve, Thank you for forwarding to me the message from the UB Poetics discussion group, where reference to the night of Unspeakable Practices III that I had the pleasure of hosting is examined by Mr. Hardin. If you would be willing to convey to Mr. Hardin and to the Poetics group in general my apologies of replying through you, I would be deeply grateful -- as a variant reading of the night described in passing may be useful. As noted, this is not the first installment of Unspeakable Practices at Brown, named for Donald Barthelme's collection of stories. The first installment took place in the spring of 1988, and was a celebration of the retirement of John Hawkes. Many of the post-mod crowd were there, with, most memorably to my young, spinning head, a beautifully sinister reading by William Gass taking place in Manning Chapel. His reading from The Tunnel left me shaking with belief in the ability of language well-crafted to move a person to emotional states. Ah, to be young, and to be hearing Gass or Mei-mei Berssenbrugge for first time! The second installment of Unspeakable Practices came in 1993, I believe, with a big line-up of younger writers, where a confrontation between print and electronic venues became the core discussion. A celebration of Fiction Collective was included as one of many centerpiece events. The third installment of Unspeakable Practices took place earlier this month. Again, a few dozen writers descended upon Brown, to discuss, argue and play out what narrative literature might be. Among the focus points was a night to celebrate the Dalkey Archive. As editor of a small press, and not being a writer of fiction, I was asked by Bob Coover to host that night, as he figured that I could put Dalkey's successes into perspective, and give the cursory introductions necessary to keep an eight-or-nine (or more?) reader night moving along with something akin to speed. So, following my words of praise for the Dalkey mission, I introduced Carole Maso, who has recently been hired as Director of the Program. She referenced how important small presses have been to her growth as a writer, first via North Point and then through the tireless support of Dalkey. She noted that the night before the spotlight had been on writers whose work had found a home in places like the New Yorker, and that this would be a different kind of night -- a night dedicated to the small press author. Then, Carole went on to read from her latest book, Aureole, just out from Ecco. Later in the evening, another reader referenced the comments Carole had made, and noted that she would be happy enough to be published by the New Yorker. I was given to understand that these comments were meant to "counter" those made by Carole, because the feelings of three writers had been hurt -- three Brown grads who had read the night before, and had seen their work published in the New Yorker. The offended gentlemen took umbrage from Carole's praise of the small presses, in large part, I assume, because she made reference to the fact that the night before, many of the readers had had access to larger publishing venues. It was not, to my mind, a cutting remark made by Carole, intended to diminish the other writers' participation in the event, rather, it was made to underline the multiplicity of venues available for various types of writing. Comments once made, are always open to interpretation. It is unfortunate that those made by Carole were received in the most negative light possible by three writers of talent and charm -- fancying myself as writer, I understand exactly how easy it is to take any comment in the least pleasant manner possible, then to hold onto that in anger. I do it all too often myself. I hope that Brown's reputation for being a center for eclectic tastes in fiction, poetry and playwriting will not be too seriously undermined because Carole's desire to celebrate the small press was taken as a denigration of the large (her next book, after all, is due out from Dutton!) within the context of her making a few passing remarks before embarking on a lovely reading. As many of you may know, Brown has hosted major conferences over the past few years, many of them coordinated by Professor Robert Coover -- he, along with visiting professor Nuruddin Farah, put together the 1991 Festival of African Writing, which brought two-dozen writers and filmmakers to campus; in addition, Bob Coover worked with students and visiting writers to host the Original Voices festival of Innovative Women Narrative writers. Bob Coover & I co-coordinated the Freedom to Write Festival this past spring, bringing attention to the plight of writers who have been or are under the threat of persecution and prosecution, exile and death. Peter Gizzi, Marjorie Welish and I put together a festschrift for Barbara Guest. Peter Gizzi, a visiting faculty member, also put together a mini-festival called the Canadian Emergency, focused on Canadian poetry. Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop and I put together, in concert with SUNY Buffalo & Barnard College, a French Poetry Festival last year. Queer Tales, a festival of gay and lesbian literature, was coordinated by Eurudice (Kamvisseli), who was visiting faculty member. And, of course, each year the Program sponsors a festival of New Plays, featuring new dramatic texts by members of the Creative Writing Program. The Program features events aplenty, such as upcoming readings by Ann Lauterbach (6 Nov) and Brown graduates Martine Bellen & Edwidge Danticat (7 Nov). We just featured two nights of readings by four New England authors: Lori Baker, Michael Gizzi, Ray Ragosta & Craig Watson. Our interests are wide, and our desire to enjoy is nearly unlimited. We hope to make people welcome during their visits, and hope that the unpleasant experiences of three writers will not overshadow the extraordinary quality of experience had by the vast majority of those who come to our festivals, conferences, readings series, plays and other programming. People may also be interested to know that distinguished poet and professor, Michael Harper, was just celebrated in Brunswick, Maine. "Celebrating Harper" took place this past weekend at Bowdoin College, w/ readings and talks. Thanks for your electronic hospitality, Gale Nelson, Assistant Director, Creative Writing at Brown University E-mail: EL500005@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 13:17:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Edward Foster Subject: Re: politics & poetry in addition to these pieces in talisman #15 re: poetry and politics, see those in #16 (which gets to your mailbox or newsstand this week or next), especially the exchange between james sherry and leonard schwartz, richard kostelanetz on brodsky, stephen paul miller on the multicultural critics/ anthologists, george kalamaras on "mysticism as a social act," and much much more, 256 pages worth in fact. -ed ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 13:12:36 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: <01IB6EJ1175091WNRN@VAXC.STEVENS-TECH.EDU> Re poliics & poetry, see statement by Joe Napora in the latest issue of BULLHEAD (#5). BULLHEAD is available from Joe at: 2205 Moore Street Ashland, Kentucky 41101 (cost is five dollars US) Highly recommend this journal! --dave baptiste chirot ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 14:29:21 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: politics & poetry Comments: To: Yunte Huang In-Reply-To: On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Yunte Huang wrote: > "Poetry is not political in the current U.S. context" --Jeff Hansen > > What poetry? Whose poetry? Whose U.S.???????????????? All like these > ??????????? ? > This is a huge question. Obviously crucial to all. Should be addressed on the list. One question for the list is can there be a political dialogue (dialogue) as opposed to cacophony. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 16:03:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "k.a. hehir" Subject: Re: Marginalized? In-Reply-To: <846348877.26914.0@slang.demon.co.uk> to cris creek, the night of the living tongues sounds/looks/tastes wild. i think bumblimg around a busy trainyard with the walkyman up too loud couldn't give me the sensation you post did.thanks. kevin ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 16:07:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "j.l. wiens" Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: Like to perhaps build upon Yunte Huang's critique of Jeff Hansen's arguments re poetry and politics. Whose U.S. indeed: just as poetry seems to have greater political effect outside of a liberal-democratic context (does this suggest that perhaps a certain level of oppression and torture is needed to make poetry relevant??), within that context the experience of certain communities seems to suggest that poetry can have relevant and immediate effect. Because of my (shameful!) ignorance of contemporary U.S. writing, I can only offer comments on developments within a Canadian context. Here, any notions of a homogeneous "national" literary community have been for the most part replaced with a recognition that this field of cultural production is fragmented into various constituencies defined under gender, regional, "ethnic," or sexual signs. Hansen seems to equate political relevance with struggles to reduce income disparities. What about the role of poetry in identity politics? Poetry in those instances can serve not only to construct and define community identity but also to establish the strategies under which "real" political action would be undertaken. Given these criteria poetry produced by Quebecois writers, Caribbean-Canadian writers in Toronto, and in particular native Canadian writers would most certainly become "relevant" given yr definition of "changing public policy." The question which might undermine my argument would be: does poetry affect political change, or does political change affect poetry? Returning to the Canadian context, we might wonder whether this framentation of a "national" literary community (did one ever really exist?) is a cause or a consequence of a broader decentralization at the political and economic levels. I suspect it's a bit of both. Sorry to bring up a context with which many of you may be unfamiliar (though I do recognize a couple of names out there), but I suspect similar arguments might be made regarding the relevance of poetry within a U.S. context. jason ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 16:09:22 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 28 Oct 1996 08:24:51 -0600 from Seems like a good schoolteacher or carpenter or truck driver understands the usefulness of their work. They also understand that things don't happen in a vacuum, that in the course of doing their work they're going to get involved in human & community problems, & if they are lucky enough to have some confidence & sense of direction they tend to infuse their work with a personal stamp & a sense of connection with larger or other issues. Most of us had schoolteachers like that (maybe a few anyway). Poets & artists, despite the fact that most of what they do goes on in the playpen of society, have the strange sense that what they do is necessary for a real apprehension of nature & reality. It's the adequate response. So it's also a kind of work, which it's possible to infuse with common things like any other work. If I were to choose another bigshot writer to exemplify the political possibilities, it would be Shakespeare rather than Pound. One thing I've learned from the interaction on this list is that general statements are usually one-sided & the opposite is almost always just as true. Jefferson's right, I think, to point up some differences between poetry & politics, in a contemporary arena in which EVERYTHING is theatricalized. But by the same token, Shakespeare among many others always holds out the example of a possibility: in which poetry & art remain themselves while examining in subtle detail very topical political questions. & we live in a time (some of us) & a place (some of us) which allows for more freedom of expression than the Bard had. So there's always the possibility of the play that changes the conscience of a culture (or helps in that direction). Playwrights aim for this all the time. But then, maybe poetry & theatre, too, have very distinct aims... blah blah goodnight all (you too Hamlet) - Henry G ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 17:04:30 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Keith Tuma Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: Message of Mon, 28 Oct 1996 08:24:51 -0600 from It's William Walsh, not "Warsh," and the point of his exchange with Marjorie Perloff re Oppen and other matters is to distinguish between "political identity" and "political efficacy." But the exchange is about readings of Oppen, not about politics and poetry in the abstract, which is (for me anyway) nearly always a bankrupt subject. No one is surprised that (much) poetry has little IMPACT politically speaking, not directly anyway; it DOES have more impact than bowling because of its situation--spaces--in mediating institutions such as pedagogy, cris cheek's rock 'n thump 'em in the head we come to you live with bad tech post-punk show, etc. Have to consider those institutions/ sites/cultural forms if you wanna talk poetries and politics. Sorry, can't go on. Just wanted to get the names and issues straight. As for politics(with apologies to those in the UK,Canada, Australia, etc.) I'd think we'd do better--say--to discuss the arguments of Michael Lind's _The Next American Nation_ or the reading of those same arguments (and others) by Walter Benn Michaels in _Transition_ 70. Or some such arguments which have a SPECIFIC focus. keith tuma ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 16:56:06 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: main Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: jeff-- you raise many important distinctions between politics and poetry that are often glossed over in discussing the two. but if you shrink the politically relevant sphere to those acts that have "the ability to alter public policy," then it gets tricky: who's to say that poetry doesn't, in some remote _but relevant_ way, influence public policy? true, few will ever write a poem that will have more political relevance than casting a ballot, but i'd argue that every act of writing is a sort of ballot-casting in that writing is, at base, a social act. for example, you mentioned yr own writing as a process of developing "more complex thoughts": don't these thoughts, in turn, inform yr political ideologies and social actions? can a poem be an act of political persuasion like knocking on those doors in green bay? isn't a poem involved with "arguing and convincing"? you mentioned the political efficacy of vietnam protest poetry. what makes these works politically relevant: their direct references to the war? their being read within a larger social context (political demonstrations, rallies, etc.)? what you said about poetry being more dogmatic than politics is interesting. i'd say it depends on the politics. back to the poet as "unaknowledged legislator": why are laws written? why are poems written? is politics an act of conservation (laws) and poetics an act of liberation? is their some sort of antiphonal exchange between these domains? what, if anything, does a poet "legislate"? in perelman's _marginalization_, talking about language, politics and power, he mentions that "Shelley can only promise power that is total but undeliverable." conversely, politicians (the veritable legislators) can only promise power that is deliverable but not total. when i try to conceive of a poetics or politic that's both deliverable and total, i don't envision pound's paradise, but mussolini's horror. df ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 09:06:27 JST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: John Geraets Subject: postcolonial? other conference ? I saw somewhere (all this: I think I remember) a reference to a conference to be held in hawaii next year--literary postcolonialism? I've searched to see where I put the info but cant find it. Can you help me at all? I mentally amrked 10/31 as close date for proposals, not certain .. Any (quick) advice backchannel most welcome. John Geraets Aichi-Gakuin University ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 09:23:30 +0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Simon Schuchat Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: I am somewhat baffled by the idea that poetry doesn't effect "practical politics." Seems to me that Allen Ginsberg and Gary Synder have had a greater political impact on the United States than all but a handful of members of the Senate in the past 50 years. Not every poet has a political impact in this narrow practical political sense (not every poet wants to, and not every poet that wants to succeeds), but the impact is there. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 15:28:14 -1000 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gabrielle Welford Subject: Re: wotz.good@mla In-Reply-To: <009AA7C8.6F8317A4.4@CVAX.IPFW.INDIANA.EDU> Hi all. I'll be giving a paper on Athabaskan poet Mary TallMountain, not sure what day what hour but almost surely this year... gab. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 20:28:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: SPITTING IMAGE Reading on No. 2nd: Forward In-Reply-To: <199610280503.AAA20439@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> To All: The following announcement is from Julia Solis. For more info, contact Julia at: seatopia@bway.net. >THE SPITTING IMAGE is celebrating the release of its new issue with a night >of readings by Raymond Federman, Rob Hardin, Lance Olsen, Peter Wortsman, >Alex Cigale, Colin Raff and Christopher Sorrentino. The readings will be >framed by "pyrotic" performances from Fireplay. Saturday, November 2 at >7:30 PM at La Mama Experimental Theater, 74 E. 4th Street at 2nd Avenue. The reading should be smart, fun and informal. Both SPITTING IMAGE and my forthcoming collection, Distorture, feature Julia--in two mock-forensic shots by German photographer, Claudia Reinholdt, of Neid--on the cover. Julia is a writer and translator as well as an editor; both she and Colin Raff have recently translated Hans Bellmer, my bald muse, into English. Julia has also translated Nietzsche (his last book) and Unica Zurn. All the best, Rob Hardin http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 20:36:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: SPITTING IMAGE Reading on No. 2nd: Forward To All: Correction: >Julia has also translated Nietzsche (his last book) This is incorrect. What Julia actually translated were Nietzsche's last letters, which were published as _My Sister and I_ by Amok Press. There is some controversy as to the true authorship of the letters; Julia reports that the letters were extremely difficult to translate because they were written in the language "of someone who was ragingly insane." All the best, Rob Hardin http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 20:56:25 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: postcolonial? other conference ? speaking of post colonial, here's a post colonial posting; please distribute it as widely as possible, as the deadline's dec 3 and the ad missed the october job list. gabrielle w., i know yr on the postcolonial list and i'd be most grateful if you'd forward this ad to that list. best wishes, md University of Minnesota Department of English The Department of English at the University of Minnesota invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in postcolonial literatures in English and postcolonial theories, to begin 9/15/97. This position is a full-time, nine-month appointment. Salary will be competitive. Ph.D. or equivalent in English or a related field by 9/16/97 is required. Duties will be to teach postcolonial as well as other courses in the general curriculum at all levels. POST COLONIAL LITERATURES IN ENGLISH: The Department of English is committed to developing the area of postcolonial literatures and theories as one of its areas of emphasis in teaching and research; and candidates for this position should share that commitment. Candidates should have demonstrated promise of excellence in teaching and research and should have expertise in a specific area of postcolonial literature in English as well as broad familiarity with postcolonial literatures and theories. Candidates should demonstrate expertise not only in western postcolonial theories, but also in the literary traditions, reception histories, and theoretical controversies arising in postcolonial regions themselves. Candidates should send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, at least three letters of reference, and a writing sample (no longer than 25 pages) to: Postcolonial Search Committee Department of English University of Minnesota 207 Lind Hall 207 Church Street SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 Applications must be postmarked NO LATER THAN DECEMBER 3, 1996. Those postmarked after that date will not be accepted. The University of Minneosta is committed toa policy that all persons shall have equal access to its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color,creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status or sexual orientation. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 22:18:19 -0800 Reply-To: creiner@crl.com Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christopher Reiner Subject: WITZ note A Personal Note to WITZ subscribers: Just wanted to let you know that the fall issue of WITZ will be delayed a few weeks on account of the fact that the editor ran off a week or so ago and married Cheryl Bascom in Carmel, California. This happy event has pushed the WITZ production schedule back a little. But...mid November, I promise. Best, Chris Reiner Editor and Groom ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 21:48:59 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Stephen Cope Subject: Re: politics & poetry I think Kieth Tuma's right to point out poetry's role in pedagogical instituions as one primary way in which its politics is marked. It would be hard to argue, for instance, that the reproduction of certain idoelogical orientations hasn't been central to the project of New Crticism (particularly as it survives in the majority of college- level writing workshops). See Jed Rasula's _The American Poetry Wax Museum_ for more on this... Of course, this isn't an argument for the political "efficacy" of poetics, only for poetry's role as a carrier of various assumptions, and thus as a site for the unsettling of such assumptions... -Stephen Cope ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 02:28:19 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: Re: There was a reading in Providence? What about Brown? In-Reply-To: <199610290504.AAA16816@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> >Thank you for forwarding to me the message from the UB Poetics discussion >group, where reference to the night of Unspeakable Practices III that I >had the pleasure of hosting is examined by Mr. Hardin. If you would be >willing to convey to Mr. Hardin and to the Poetics group in general my >apologies of replying through you, I would be deeply grateful -- as a >*variant reading of the night described in passing* may be useful. Gale: Are you under the impression that a negative reading of the '96 UP readings was the substance of my post? If so, your impression was not what I intended. In my post, I stated that I wished to hear from people like yourself, who might explain how the very festival that I myself enjoyed--the festival that I mention proudly in every bio and press kit, whether it be PR for music or for writing--could have become an event that infuriated my friends. My post was not a "reading": I wasn't there. Rather, it was a plea for more positive "readings" and explanations. >The second installment of Unspeakable Practices came in 1993, I believe, 93 is correct. To be exact, the Unspeakable Practices II Vanguard Narrative Festival at Brown University took place between February 24-27, 1993. >with a big line-up of younger writers, where a confrontation between print >and electronic venues became the core discussion. A celebration of Fiction >Collective was included as one of many centerpiece events. True enough. This description doesn't differ markedly from my own--which is not negative, but rather affectionate and impressed. >Again, a few dozen writers descended upon Brown, Again, a few dozen writers were *invited* by Brown... >I introduced Carole Maso, who has recently >been hired as Director of the Program. She referenced how important small >presses have been to her growth as a writer, first via North Point and then >through the tireless support of Dalkey. She noted that the night before the >spotlight had been on writers whose work had found a home in places like the >New Yorker, and that this would be a different kind of night -- a night >dedicated to the small press author. Later in the evening, another reader >>referenced the comments Carole had made, and noted that she would be >happy >enough to be published by the New Yorker. I was given to understand >that these >comments were meant to "counter" those made by Carole, because >the feelings of >three writers had been hurt -- three Brown grads who had >read the night before, >and had seen their work published in the New >Yorker. The offended gentlemen >took umbrage from Carole's praise of the >small presses, >in large part, I assume, because she made reference to the fact that the night >before, many of the readers had had access to larger publishing venues. It was >not, to my mind, a cutting remark made by Carole, intended to diminish the >other writers' participation in the event, rather, it was made to underline >the multiplicity of venues available for various types of writing. Comments >once made, are always open to interpretation. Here's the problem for me, Gale--the very problem that prompted my post. By nature, writers are a paranoid lot: they work in isolate rooms, occluded from contact with their audience, and temporarily banished from gratifying collaborations. It is easy enough for them to feel insulted and undervalued, and to become solipsistic. Thus, even when I was told of various perceived slights by my friends, I could have easily dismissed said slights, had they not come from *three different writers*, only one of whom *might* have been the "offended gentleman" you mention. (Though these writers don't hang out together, I happen to know them all.) I'm loyal to my memory of Brown, but I'm also loyal to my friends. If the New Yorker comments were so utterly inoffensive, then why were three New York writers so deeply offended? >I hope that >Brown's reputation for being a center for eclectic tastes in fiction, poetry >and playwriting will not be too seriously undermined because Carole's >desire to celebrate the small press was taken as a denigration of the large >(her next book, after all, is due out from Dutton!) within the context of >her making a few passing remarks before embarking on a lovely reading. Unfortunately, the New Yorker comment was not the only complaint I heard. I'm also told that Carole read classic texts beside those of guest authors, and that the effect was unflattering to her guests. Generally, the sense I had was that these writers felt *neglected*--a perception that runs contrary to my personal experience of Brown. >As many of you may know, Brown has hosted major conferences over the past >few years, many of them coordinated by Professor Robert Coover -- he, along >with visiting professor Nuruddin Farah, put together the 1991 Festival of As many of you may have guessed, the intention of my missive was not to compare the literary faculty of Brown U. to the occupants of the House of Usher, nor was it to confine and circumscribe Brown's literary activities to the Unspeakable Practices Festival series. It was precisely because my personal experience of Brown was so positive that the reactions of my friends upset me. If my post somehow offended you, Gale, or the writer who allegedly offended these other writers, then the god of irony will be well pleased. But *I* won't be pleased--not at all. I was quite aware that my post might stir up controversy which could somehow impact negatively on me. Nevertheless, I posted anyway, because: 1. I couldn't bear to hear dismissive comments about UP without knowing the other side. 2. These NY writers talk to other writers in my community. Their views are received a la carte (without conflicting argument or evidence). If there is a case to be made in UP's favor, I'd like to be able to present it. 3. The milieu I visited in 1993 would never excommunicate me from its graces simply because I asked a few difficult questions in public. The main thing I wish to make clear is this: I did not intend any slight to Brown and *particularly* not to Robert Coover, who is brilliant and who went out of his way to make myself and others feel welcome. The defining act of mediocrity is to refuse to acknowledge good work. By inviting me to Brown, Coover helped me immeasurably: Once there, I made contacts that have helped me to this day. I'm meeting Eurydice later this evening, for example. If it were not for Coover, I would probably not know her at all. To acknowledge the good work at Brown: that is the main thing. The rest--all slights, complaints and controversy--is gossip, however deeply felt and earnestly reported. All the best, Rob Hardin http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 08:12:38 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Henry Gould Subject: politics & poetry Agreeing w/ Keith on the dryness of more abstract chat about this subject, NEVERTHELESS I can't help adding something more. There has always been, now & then, very topical political poetry which is also real poetry. Whether it finds an audience which is also in a position to affect government policy or social structures depends on circumstances. But the intellectual & moral commitment can result in an accurate witness to a politically-manipulated reality. There is an act of faith involved in the effort to create such work, which in a literary culture of authentic vitality, might actually lead to "political efficacy". On the other hand, I wouldn't want to create an idol out of this aspect of poetry. Poetry has its own raison d'etre & doesn't need a political imprimature. It's we ourselves, people, who are called to account in a political sense. - Henry gould ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 09:10:39 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: politics & poetry just couldn't let this thread slip by w/o comment... jeff---thanx for stating some assumptions that are, i think, generally & tacitly felt & operated on within specific poetry communities (if not this one)... i don't find mself agreeing with you, in part for the reasons stated in others' posts, but i think i understand where you're coming from... i believe it probably is futile, if not dangerous, to attempt to distinguish between politics & politics in foundational terms... but there is, at the level of political action, all sorts of room for such distinguishing features... & if there's not, we're all in a heck of a lot more trouble than we think, b/c we ourselves won't be able to distinguish between political acts that result in something better & political acts that result in something worse... that is, our capacity for distinguishing so requires, at the very least, that we can recognize those acts that have little or no effective political import... perhaps the good (better?) way to situate this discussion is not in terms of poetry per se, but in terms of---surprise surprise---the academic discipline of political science (& jeff, please forgive me for pushing this discussion in a non-poetic & academic direction) ... b/c polisci presumes to speak of politics in ways that presumbably political... by which i mean, addressed to the public sphere of politics per se... which---yes---*is* a reduction of the broader category, but one which i'm willing to treat in such terms simply b/c, as jeff suggests, there is a widespread public conception that this is what constitutes politics (which latter observation speaks to the question of what constitutes politics, whether one agrees or no)... one of the best (academic) books i know to deal with this problem is john g. gunnell's _between philosophy and politics: the alienation of political theory_ (u of mass p, 1986)... when i first picked i up, seven-eight years ago, it stopped me dead in my tracks... gunnell's work deserves broader reading, not least b/c he's attuned to the way academic discourse communities reproduce what (in his & often in my view are) academic (i.e., moot) political arguments... i mean, i take gunnell's critique to be a substantive critique of my motivations as an academic, albeit i think his critique generally operates (curiously) at a philosophical remove from the direct political context i find mself in day after day (i.e., the classroom)... & i don't necessarily agree with gunnell either, non-committal as i am this morn, though again find his provocations useful... here's an excerpt, to give some idea of why gunnell is such a challenge... he's arguing for what he calls his (very wittgensteinian) 'theory of conventional objects': "The theory of conventional objects does not yield the kind of revealed truth and therapeutic authority that political theory has sought, but it has critical implications---not the least of which is the denial not only of the transcendental character of any political configuration but of the political form itself. If the history of political theory, the classic texts, can offer us any wisdom, it is surely the knowledge that by its very nature politics is a form of life grounded in varying degress of lie and illusion. Thus an exploration of the world of political meaning and its 'ontology' and 'epistemology' is potentially, and maybe almost automatically, a critical activity. It is almost by necessity a claim to understand politics better than it understands itself. But neither the truth of that claim nor its practical consequences are self-validating." (221) anyway... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 10:16:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Elda Rotor Subject: New Digressions magazine New Digressions art and literary magazine has just published its fourth issue, Fall 1996 (Vol. 4, No.1). Contributors include Michael Ackerman, Alice Blanchard, Tina Chang, Vince Cousino, Julie Cox, Peter Desy, Zoe Francesca, Linda Sue Grimes, Michael L. Johnson, Alan Kaufman, Regina La Barre, Alison McGhee, Angela Mendez, Damian Powers and Dan Schneider. Send $3.50 (checks payable to Elda Rotor) to the New Digressions address: P.O. Box 2640, Stuyvesant Station, New York, NY 10009. The new issue is now available at Biblio's bookstore in New York, and is soon to appear at Gotham Book Mart and other venues in the city. New Digressions is a semi-annual art and literary magazine publishing poetry, short stories, black and white graphic art and photography. New Digressions encourages, but is not exclusive to, emerging authors and artists ages 18-29 and welcomes all submissions from diverse cultural, social and creative bents. Submissions are accepted year-round. Simultaneous submissions are also accepted. For guidelines for poetry, fiction, black and white photography and art and for more information about the magazine, please write to: Elda1@aol.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 08:21:08 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Douglas Barbour Subject: Re: POETICS Digest - 27 Oct 1996 to 28 Oct 1996 In response to Aldon J Nielsen: Date: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 21:00:22 -0800 From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Jump Up As one of the very few owners of a copy of Oliver Lake's book of poetry, I've always thought he was a great saxophone player and composer -- but that performance piece sounds delicious -- was anything said about a recording becoming available??? I didnt know about a book! There is a CD, from a small producer, & the title is _The Matador of 1st and 1st_ All the best Doug Douglas Barbour Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 (403) 492 2181 FAX: (403) 492 8142 H: 436 3320 'The universe opens. I close. And open, just to surprise you.' - Phyllis Webb ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 11:53:22 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: "Politics"? "Poetry"? To me, Jeff Hansen's recent post seems most useful in reminding us that it's very easy to use the phrase "political" in an unconsidered manner, and that uses of the word "political" need to pay close attention to what it means to call something "political" at all. The word clearly has a complicated history, and has been used in a variety of contexts for a variety of reasons. I think what Jeff suggests is that use of the word "political" ought to commit us to a careful elucidation of what the term can mean. In Jeff's post, he wants to refer the term "political" solely to electoral politics as a way of not engaging in fuzzy sloganeering. That seems useful as a corrrective, but what it then makes me want to explore is various TYPES of politics, whether those different types share things in common and effect each other, and perhaps also to question whether speaking of them as "political" is the most useful way to think of them. Tentatively, here, I can think of several areas of American life to which the term "political" might be applied. 1) Electoral politics on national, state, and local levels. What things are actually in real question in these politics is to me crucial--one might argue, for instance, that most issues of huge significance to the lives of people in the U.S. never enter the political arena at all. 2) The politics of information. What ideas on what subjects are presented to whom, in what contexts, and with what kinds of limitations. Relevant formations here at the very least include publishing companies, academic institutions, newspapers and perhaps much else. 3) The "politics" of daily interraction. To what extent is it useful, or not, to think of our daily encounters with others as forming a politics? Relevant issues here would include group and identity politics, work issues, many others. Obviously, I'm doing this very sketchily (and on a bad moden too), but questions that the above groupings would suggest to me include what the interactions between these groups are (obviously, #2 and #3 are often so close as to be indistuinguishable) and how they all relate to the central problems of another term that needs careful clarification: POWER. I really wish I could say more, but the modem I'm on is barely functioning. /----------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | | | 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, 29 Oct 1996 12:41:39 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Daniel Bouchard Subject: politics, poetry, etc etc To my reading of Jefferson's post, "politics" referred to US government policy. His point, again from my perspective, was that poetry being written today (and the poetry of the last 30 years) is politically irrelevant because it comes nowhere close to affecting government policy (policies), the policy makers or their constituents on any significant level, DESPITE the opposite claims of many poets writing today. The obvious Poetics list reaction is to break down the term "politics" (the politics of saying howdy, the politics of this-n-that, etc). Can anyone refute Jeff's statements? I cannot. Someone mentioned Ginsberg and Snyder, but failed to offer exactly HOW their wonderfully political poetry has been effective. daniel_bouchard@hmco.com ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 12:43:38 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth W Sherwood Subject: Re: JH and Political poetry In-Reply-To: <199610290504.AAA16816@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> Jeff: Surely you're right on to say that mottos/mantras like "the personal is political" may serve to get poets off the hook, so to speak. And I think Oppen clearly had a sense that writing poems could/should not substitute for direct political action; this was, I submit, his 'choice' and not an infinitely extendable theorem. Oppen's decision is rather carefully framed (in the poems, _Meaning A Life_, and scattered essays) as a response to a particular then-present moment and an assessment of his own 'style' (poor word) of poetry. In fact, Oppen almost goes so far as to say that some 'polemical' poetries are (in your terms) politically relevant--though he couldn't/wouldn't write them. Poetry is political but not relevantly so? You get tangled on this word, as if it makes sense to use 'relevant' without hinging it to some context: eg. 'poetry is not relevant to a present political situation in which only direct action has force'etc. But I don't think you can lay out that context without great difficulty. Sure Ron Silliman's poetry doesn't have the save 'effect' (if that's now a synonym for relevance) as Black Panther's activism; but it is relevant to my politics and to a political world. Frankly Jeff, we could use a yes-and logic here, rather than either-or. And the idea that the 'relevant political' action must get you in trouble, that being 'acknowledged' by the state/powers etc. determines relevance mistakes surface effect for deep politics. Charmed as I was to see protestors smashing the windows in downtown Buffalo outside a Bob Dole rally early in the campaign, I'm pretty certain that the simple political conversations which take place in my English 201 will having longer lasting and deeper implications. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 13:48:55 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: Inasmuch as anything on the subject of poetry and politics can ever be factually correct this point is factually correct: however and this is a big however Charles Bernstein is also one hundred percent accurate in applying a critiqe of the American ideology of individualism and liberal democracy to American verse culture Joseph On Tue, 29 Oct 1996, Simon Schuchat wrote: > I am somewhat baffled by the idea that poetry doesn't effect "practical > politics." Seems to me that Allen Ginsberg and Gary Synder have had a > greater political impact on the United States than all but a handful of > members of the Senate in the past 50 years. Not every poet has a > political impact in this narrow practical political sense (not every poet > wants to, and not every poet that wants to succeeds), but the impact is > there. > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 13:49:52 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: <199610290548.VAA16155@sdcc3.ucsd.edu> What about poets and readers: isn't that how poetry's role in pedagogical institutions gets changed Joseph On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Stephen Cope wrote: > I think Kieth Tuma's right to point out poetry's role in pedagogical > instituions as one primary way in which its politics is marked. It > would be hard to argue, for instance, that the reproduction of certain > idoelogical orientations hasn't been central to the project of New > Crticism (particularly as it survives in the majority of college- > level writing workshops). See Jed Rasula's _The American Poetry > Wax Museum_ for more on this... > > Of course, this isn't an argument for the political "efficacy" of > poetics, only for poetry's role as a carrier of various assumptions, > and thus as a site for the unsettling of such assumptions... > > > -Stephen Cope > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 13:56:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: Well, political is one of those ultraproblematic words but in a post-Frankfurt School culture it has to have meanings that adhere to spheres of culture and can be read alongside praxis, I think. Joseph Lease ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 13:58:34 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: PS By culture I mean everything, the not me as Emerson put it, everything from a Sesame Street to a factory to Eros and everything else when we talk about politics and poetry we are talking about Vico, right: poets were the first lawgivers historians theologians philosophers of language and cosmology: Vico's materialist critique anticipates much early Marxism ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 14:00:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc In-Reply-To: <199610291741.MAA26542@krypton.hmco.com> I suggest that Ginsberg and Snyder have been effective inasmuch as they have changed the dialogue: imagine America without Allen Ginsberg for a second: it would be even worse than it is and we wouldn't have his example to argue about and be inspired by On Tue, 29 Oct 1996, Daniel Bouchard wrote: > To my reading of Jefferson's post, "politics" referred to US government policy. > His point, again from my perspective, was that poetry being written today (and > the poetry of the last 30 years) is politically irrelevant because it comes > nowhere close to affecting government policy (policies), the policy makers or > their constituents on any significant level, DESPITE the opposite claims of > many poets writing today. > > The obvious Poetics list reaction is to break down the term "politics" (the > politics of saying howdy, the politics of this-n-that, etc). Can anyone refute > Jeff's statements? I cannot. Someone mentioned Ginsberg and Snyder, but > failed to offer exactly HOW their wonderfully political poetry has been > effective. > > > daniel_bouchard@hmco.com > ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 14:00:37 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: JH and Political poetry In-Reply-To: I agree that we need a yes and logic not either or ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 13:53:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: <199610291510.JAA15836@charlie.cns.iit.edu> Forgive my ignorance, but who is Walter Kalajian (this spelling a phonetic guess) and what has he written on Language poetry? Thank you to all. Joseph ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 14:04:35 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 29 Oct 1996 12:41:39 EST from On Tue, 29 Oct 1996 12:41:39 EST Daniel Bouchard said: >His point, again from my perspective, was that poetry being written today (and >the poetry of the last 30 years) is politically irrelevant because it comes >nowhere close to affecting government policy (policies), the policy makers or >their constituents on any significant level, DESPITE the opposite claims of >many poets writing today. > >The obvious Poetics list reaction is to break down the term "politics" (the >politics of saying howdy, the politics of this-n-that, etc). Can anyone refute >Jeff's statements? I cannot. Someone mentioned Ginsberg and Snyder, but >failed to offer exactly HOW their wonderfully political poetry has been >effective. > Let's assume Jeff is right (though maybe many aren't ready to do so). The interesting question then, is why has the poetry of the last 30 years been politically irrelevant? Good question. I don't have a clue! But here are some possibilities: 1. Poetry in general is irrelevant in U.S. People don't read books or listen to such things before deciding what to think or do. "Literature" is immersed in & superceded by pop culture. Bob Dylan, at least in the early 60s, was most effective political poet (c.f. "Masters of War" etc.) Jefferson Airplane a close 2nd. 2. Poetry in US is too busy being at war with itself, since New Critics dehydrated it & Beats soaked it in "tea" etc. Style politics are poetry's version of "identity politics". 3. US, as hegemonic democracy/empire, is in curious position of having freedom to continually argue about & redefine itself. There is no clear benchmark or ground-bass upon which a penetrating political poetry can assume a common audience. & freedom of speech brightens the background, against which poetry, rather than standing out, is camouflaged. 4. The poets who can really MAKE good political poetry have yet to appear. etc. but I'm going to shut up for a few seconds. this is getting interesting, I don't want to put myself to sleep (wake up, America!!!zzz) - Henry G ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 14:24:33 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: new Moxley, Niedecker, Rothenberg, Satie, at Bridge Street so so many many books books 1. _Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-1995)_ by Amiri Baraka, Littoral Books, $11.95. "All that is is funky" 2. _Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconsicous_ by Jacques Bouveresse, Princeton, $11.95. "We understand, then, that psychological, psychophysiological, linguistic, psycholinguistic factors and the like will be relegated to the background in all cases that might come up." 3. _Powerless: Selected Poems 1973-1990_ by Tim Dlugos, edited by David Trinidad, with an introduction by Dennis Cooper, Serpent's Tail, $12.99. "I didn't mean to put this down so soon, I wanted to lead up to it. . ." 4. _Quill, Solitary Apparition_ by Barbara Guest, Post-Apollo, $12.95. "marked: the logic (of no other place); if // in the game --------- (a wild king is drawn)". This may be my favorite Guest book. 5. _Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses)_ by Jack Kerouac, read by Allen Ginsberg, 2 cassettes (3 hours), Shambabla, $18. "DEPEND ON VAST MOTIONLESS THOUGHT" 6. _Julia Kristeva Interviews_ ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman, Columbia, $15.50. "Primarily, it is cathartic and extremely reconstitutional for the writer." 7. _Basic Philosophical Writings_ by Emmanuel Levinas, ed Peperzak, Critchley, and Bernasconi, Indiana, $14.95. "How is a response made?" Five of the ten essays included here appear in English for the first time. 8. _Collected Poems_ by Stephane Mallarme, translated and with commentary by Henry Weinfield, California, $18.95. Simply to have "Un Coup de Des" typeset so beautifully is worth the price of this book. (& yes, I realize I'm eliding the diacritical marks.) 9. _Aesthetic Ideology_ by Paul de Man, Minnesota, $19.95. "But things are not quite so simple." 10. _The Prospect of Release_ by Tom Mandel, Chax, $12.95. "I am he who said to the world '_Stop!_'" 11. _Imagination Verses_ by Jennifer Moxley (with a preface by the author), Tender Buttons, $8.95. Moxley manages a genuinely public poetry without sacrificing the cognitive and emotional dissonance that is our tired lot here, in monogomy capitalism. Includes the hits "Not on My Seashore," "Fin de Siecle Go-Betweens," "The Bad Choices Spy on Us Girls," and "Ten Prolegomena to Heartbreak." You should not only have this book, you should read it. 12. _Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet_ edited by Jenny Penberthy, National Poetry Foundation, $22.50. Contributors include Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jan Augustine, Marjorie Perloff, Peter Quartermain, Michael Heller, Kenneth Cox, Joseph Conte, many others. A number of Niedecker's letters are included. "I think they know they have a cleaning woman who is a little different from the usual, but it wouldn't do the slightest good to show them how different." 13. _Seedings & Other Poems_ by Jerome Rothenberg, New Directions, $10.95. "_The Funeral of Love_ // is followed by / a gang of poets." 14. _Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude_ by Ray Monk, Free Press, $35. Those that have read Monk's _Wittgenstein_ know the quality of this writer. "Spiritually we starve and die and pretend to make up for it by duties." --Russell 15. _Pound/Williams: The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams_ edited by Hugh Witemeyer, New Directions, $39.95. "Glad to hear from you." 16. _Gaze and Voice as Love Objects_ edited by Renata Saleci and Slavoj Zizek, Duke, $16.95. ". . . Marx is rendered motionless and can only watch these scenes from his childhood." 17. _A Mammal's Notebook_ by Erik Satie, ed. Ornella Volta, Atlas, $24.99. Beautiful oversize production. Includes Satie's writings for a variety of contexts-- Texts not to be Read Aloud, Texts to be Danced, to be Sung, to be Staged, Epistles, Memoirs of an Amnesic (Fragments), Articles, Talks, Public Advertisements, Private Advertisements, etc. This book o really it's quite fabulous. & we still have copies of Out of Everywhere, Some Other Kind of Mission, and Sonnets of a Penny-a-Liner, that yous were so hungry for. 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 # (including expiration date) & we will send a receipt with the books. We have to charge some postage on orders out of the US. Bridge Street Books, 2814 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Wahsington, DC 20007. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 14:45:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: JH and Political poetry >Poetry is political but not relevantly so? or, for largely corporate reasons-- The populace is political but not relevantly so. Chomsky talks of disagreement with those that argue the importance of "speaking truth to power" because those with power will not/cannot hear. Poetry is one aspect of keeping our humanity intact, it's a real & reasonable resistance/enabler. But it does not stand in for organizing, neither can organizing stand in for poetry. Jeff's point about politics being "compromise" unfortunately seems less & less the case. Them with all the money's doing what they want more than ever, very little compromise. One feels reduced to nipping at their heels. Take a bite outta crime, --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 12:07:40 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc At 12:41 PM 10/29/96 -0500, Daniel Bouchard wrote: >To my reading of Jefferson's post, "politics" referred to US government pol= icy. >His point, again from my perspective, was that poetry being written today (= and >the poetry of the last 30 years) is politically irrelevant because it comes >nowhere close to affecting government policy (policies), the policy makers = or >their constituents on any significant level, DESPITE the opposite claims of >many poets writing today. This is Dodie. Even though I've been doubtful of "political" poetry having any effectiveness whatsoever (enjoy Spicer's slamming of political poetry in his Berkeley lecture), I think that we have to be leery of setting up any sorts of dualisms like this, i.e. poetry vs. politics. Doing so, we're falling into the very mindset that made the world as f*cked up as it is today. This thread arose not long after I'd been rereading David Wojanarowicz's "Postcards from America." Wojanarowicz makes a strong case for the necessity of *public* gestures. A couple of excerpts concerning AIDS memorial services: "I realized halfway through the event that I had witnessed a good number of the same people participating in other previous memorials. What made me angy was realizing that the memorial had little reverberation outside the room it was held in. A tv commericial for handiwipes had a higher impact on the society at large. =8A I imagine what it would be like if friends had = a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to wasington d.c. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way." Yesterday I was reading an excerpt from Audre Lorde's _Cancer Journals_ in which she denounced the "travesty of prosthesis" in regards to the immense social pressure placed on women who've had mastectomies to wear breast protheses. Now, I had never thought about this issue before, but Lorde's argument certainly had an impact on me. Lorde's essay isn't "poetry" and it's not likely to change any govenment policies. But if it affects the opinions of random (wo)men like myself over time, of course it's having a political impact. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 15:50:53 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 29 Oct 1996 13:56:48 -0500 from On Tue, 29 Oct 1996 13:56:48 -0500 Joseph Lease said: >Well, political is one of those ultraproblematic words but in a >post-Frankfurt School culture it has to have meanings that adhere to >spheres of culture and can be read alongside praxis, I think. POLITICS IN A POST HOTDOG CULTURE (Village Explanation #112 & a half) He he he was talking I I I think about politics proper, that is "the art of governance", the realm of force (force of law or force of arms) whereby a social order is adhered to & maintained. In a legislative democracy the force of law is ultimate authority, where social order is submitted to the rule of what mankind at present time considers justice. Granted such authority then, government, of course, becomes a nexus of power. This sense of politics proper, then, the nexus of power & authority, is grafted into multifarious social controversies over how to live & who is what & what is good & so we have a "politics" of this and that & the word gets ULTRAPROBLEMATIC (i.e. who decides what gets submitted to legislative adjudication & how). & the ship sailed on. Pray heaven wisdom guides the navigators through the alligators. (You can always walk down to the State House & talk to your legislators.) (at least in sleepy, sleazy little Rhody) - HG ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 16:24:12 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: politics post hotdog w/mustard P.S. You can always talk to your legislators whence the dogged grassroots determination referred to by our beloved Jefferson & what goads & leads them on is an "idea" & this maybe is where political poetry has a role in the general circular file of conversation let's go ask Milton, huh? The foundling fathers read him like a Bible. - HG ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 14:35:10 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jeffrey W. Timmons" Subject: Re: "help" In-Reply-To: <961026214220_1247497026@emout10.mail.aol.com> On Sat, 26 Oct 1996, Rick Bursky wrote: > does anyone know how i can get off this bulletin board jump. kidding. jeffrey timmons ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 18:03:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Matt Kirschenbaum Subject: poetry/media/politics Saw Craig Baldwin's film _Sonic Outlaws_ today, which is a documentary montage of the Negativeland/U2/Island Records debacle, media pranking, unlicensed sampling, culture jamming by media/arts/activist groups like the Emergency Broadcast Network or the Barbie Liberation Organization, billboard detourning, and a great deal more. Left convinced that if nothing else, "politically" effective poetry, in order to be so, must be responsive to the media ecology. That's when (where) art finds its interface with public policy, and things like copyright and intellectual property laws, FCC regulations, and yelling fire in a crowded movie theater become *relevant*. (I don't want to homogenize the word "media", by the way; Martin Spinelli's recent _Postmodern Culture_ piece on the Internet and broadcast radio is compelling in this regard . . .) --Matt ==================================================================== Matthew G. Kirschenbaum University of Virginia mgk3k@virginia.edu Department of English http://faraday.clas.virginia.edu/~mgk3k Electronic Text Center ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 20:24:42 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Andrew D Epstein Subject: Gary Snyder Reading (NYC) In-Reply-To: Hi list! This message is meant to announce and invite anyone in the area to a poetry reading presented by the F. W. Dupee Poetry Reading Series at Columbia University (this series, put together by Kenneth Koch, has featured in the last two years, among others, John Ashbery & Michel Deguy, Mark Halliday and Jill Rosser, Ron Padgett and Anne Porter, Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian, Allen Ginsberg and David Shapiro, David Lehman and Charles North, and later this year will feature Alice Notley and Vincent Katz). POETRY READING Gary Snyder Introduced by Kenneth Koch Wednesday, November 6 8 PM Maison Francaise Columbia University (116th & Broadway -- take the 1 or 9 subway) Admission is Free Reception will follow the reading Gary Snyder is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including the Pulitzer-Prize winning _Turtle Island_ (1974), _No Nature: New & Selected Poems_ (1992), and most recently, _Mountains and Rivers without End_ (1996). Please come to the reading if you can make it! Thanks -- Andrew Epstein Columbia University ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 23:47:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc Surely if the conversation concerns current American national politics the focus would be on the fiction of politics rather than the poetry? I would think the poetics of the media merit evaluation? Are Dole's handlers new formalist, Clinton a free spirit, and Perot experimental? tom bell ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 13:18:56 +0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Simon Schuchat Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc In-Reply-To: <199610300447.XAA19362@smtest.usit.net> I submit: Clinton = Vachel Lindsay Dole = John Crowe Ransom On Tue, 29 Oct 1996, Thomas Bell wrote: > Surely if the conversation concerns current American national politics the > focus would be on the fiction of politics rather than the poetry? I would > think the poetics of the media merit evaluation? > > Are Dole's handlers new formalist, > Clinton a free spirit, > and Perot experimental? > > tom bell > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 00:41:16 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark W Scroggins Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc In-Reply-To: One defends Ransom (at least in this venue) with some discomfiture. How about Dole = Howard Nemerov? On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Simon Schuchat wrote: > I submit: Clinton = Vachel Lindsay > Dole = John Crowe Ransom > > > On Tue, 29 Oct 1996, Thomas Bell wrote: > > > Surely if the conversation concerns current American national politics the > > focus would be on the fiction of politics rather than the poetry? I would > > think the poetics of the media merit evaluation? > > > > Are Dole's handlers new formalist, > > Clinton a free spirit, > > and Perot experimental? > > > > tom bell > > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 01:24:14 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joshua N Schuster Subject: poetry & politics Bill Clinton spoke today at Upenn to a precisely blocked throng. The Secret Service took my wrench at the frisk-zone. Bill showed up late, no surprise, and gave a decent speech (mix of plaisanterie and niaiserie). Somehow he managed to applaud the Greek education system as model, then later did his obligatory techno-celebration by proudly proclaiming even Socks the cat has a homepage. A friend said to me, "This is the most political thing I've done all year." The "Rocky Theme Song" was playing in the background. Is that relevant so? Well, I'll definitely say it was the largest gathering of students I have ever seen (about about 10,000). Out of the many, many more. We were being-political perhaps when we raised our "Clinton/Gore" placards but were we being-political when we left the cardboard for litter on the grass? I was involved, I sweated and swatted other students, applied tip-toes to see president, sneaking glances at someone's beautifully dark green eyes next to me, ditching classes. Is that relevant so? We are losing our ability to experience the world, I think, as I'm stuck behind a very tall person. Politics perhaps, but obviously nothing happened here. --js ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 01:35:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc Simon said: >I submit: Clinton = Vachel Lindsay Dole = John Crowe Ransom Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking Lysol. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 08:45:30 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Yunte Huang Subject: Re: politics & poetry Comments: To: Joseph Lease In-Reply-To: Forgive my somewhat blunt critique of that blunt statement. But growing up in a Communist country, it's mighty-rangerly hard for me not to see everything "red." Not an excuse like "my parents kicked my ass hard when I was a kid." But it's something personal, but also political. I can't see the separation of the two. Maintaining a political edge on a personal level could be utopia, but refusing to see or make it have varying degrees of political effects is self-defeating "no can't do." It does not take a Mao to be political, who, by the way, was a great poet. Ah, what about poetry? I would say it depends on who writes, in what way, and for what. That's why I can't accept the notion that "POETRY" is not political. I don't wanna force y'all to accept Steve MacCaffrey's "poetry is politics that stays politics (?)". I would say many poetries and poets do consciously maintain their political edges in their writings. It doesn't influence the outcome of electorial votes? You mean to say that poets or teachers teach students and readers nothing but neutral texts? I know the frustration over the "futility"(?) when you try to stir up something among 1.2 billion people, but as C Bernstein quotes somebody else: "It's impossible, but it's exactly why it's taking place." Serve the people --Mao Tse-Tung. Yunte Huang On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Joseph Lease wrote: > > > On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Yunte Huang wrote: > > > "Poetry is not political in the current U.S. context" --Jeff Hansen > > > > What poetry? Whose poetry? Whose U.S.???????????????? All like these > > ??????????? ? > > > > This is a huge question. Obviously crucial to all. Should be addressed > on the list. One question for the list is can there be a political > dialogue (dialogue) as opposed to cacophony. > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 08:56:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Yunte Huang Subject: This Place To take the occasion of the current "cacophony" over poetry and politics, I send out this call for submissions to a new magazine, _Displace_. _Displace_ (i.e. This Place, or Dis-place, etc.) focuses on new writings and translations from literary traditions other than _______ (you fill in the blank and define "this place," your place). Poetry, prose, journal entries, translations and commentaries, short essays and reviews, will all be considered. Works-in-progress which mean (or even if you don't mean it, as they say) to reconsider or challenge ole perspectives and notions of other literary traditions are especially welcome. Recent submissions under considerations include: --Radical new translations from Chinese poetry; --transcriptions of and commentaries on Greek mountain "theft" songs; --readings and commentaries of Zen-Buddist texts; --travel poems from Tibet; --poetic journal entries; --poems. [Editorial] Dis place is de space were yuh bow an' tah yo' shoe lace Please send your work by snail-mail or e-mail before December 31, 1996 to: Yunte Huang 193 Pepper Tree Drive Apt. 8 Amherst, NY 14228 E-mail: yh8@acsu.cc.buffalo.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 09:04:25 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mark Wallace Subject: what's relevant to politics While I find Jeff Hansen's recent post, again, as a convincing corrective to overly vague uses of the word "political," I think I find myself also agreeing with Rod Smith when he starts talking about how many of the central concerns of most people in the U.S. are not relevant to politics "here" (my apologies to those on the list who aren't "here"). I'm going to begin a list of things that have no effect on American electoral politics--please feel free to add to it. Things Not Relevant To American Politics --The wages of Chief Executive Officers --What it feels like to be out of work --Visual Art, Literature, Music --Widespread Enforced Illiteracy --Anything which can't be reduced to an economic basis --The increasing elimination of stable jobs, reasonable wages, health insurance and other necessary benefits --Critiques of the macho competitors who run U.S. corporations --Any political alternatives to capitalism, and anyone who objects to making themselves into a saleable product I could think of more, but I've got to go back to producing. 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: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 08:52:19 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeff Hansen Organization: The Blake School Unfortunately, my server was down for a while and I did not receive all of the responses to the Poetry and Politics post. Things are winding down, but here's my final thought: If we claim political efficacy as the justification for our poetry, then we are in trouble. Few people other than academic hair splitters will buy it. Jeff ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 09:30:31 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: new awp... i wonder if any of you have had a chance to check out the lead article in the new awp chronicle?... under the deceptively simple title "the shape of poetry," paul lake discusses free verse and formalism in the context of chaos theory and the like... regrettably, i found that the article constitutes yet another in a recent and lengthening line of mixing metaphors on chaos (e.g., poems become 'strange attractors' w/o any discussion of how to conceive of a poem in terms of equilibrium conditions and the like (the slip here, he sez, having to do with situating motivated processes and products, like writing and poetry, in terms similar to natural processes)) and surprisingly (perhaps i shouldn't be so shocked, but i was), it would seem that lake's ultimate aim [and paul---if you're out there someplace, please feel free to respond] is to argue for the superior recursiveness of FORMAL VERSE (!---anybody familar with the sciences of complexity should raise an eyebrow or two here)... here's an excerpt: "Through parallelisms of syntax and similarities of metaphors and sounds, free verse can sometimes attain isolated expressions of self-similarity in its parts and approximations of order in its overall design; but with fewer rules and less feedback to amplify and vary its constituent elements, it generally fails to achieve the same degree of self-similarity and scaling we find in the best formal verse." and following g.m.hopkins' lead, lake suggests that "free verse [is] merely *technical* in nature"... key word here, for me, being *nature*... anyway... along the way, lake provides us with a longish reading of pound & ammons, a quick & dirty reading of olson (who "composed on a typewriter and thought in spatial terms"---which latter prevented him, presumably, from grasping the temporal dimension proper!) and an insight or two from frederick turner, who, we are informed, "has found what might be the most remarkable use of self-similarity in all of literature in Dante's _Divine Comedy_"---namely, the division of same into threes, to match the trinity, the three line stanza, etc. (and i can only wonder what medieval scholars would say to this)... if i sound a bit irritated, this is b/c i am!... i wouldn't have minded these and other (somewhat misguided) claims so much if they had not been put in the service of arguing formal hierarchies... but as it stands, lake's piece reads like a quasi-scientific polemic, along the lines of that item i mentioned here some time ago, david whyte's work on poetry and the corporation... anyway... apologies to gwyn and others who are more directly involved in awp (i'm a member mself), but i thought it worth my time to render some critique here... best, joe ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 10:19:46 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 30 Oct 1996 08:52:19 -0600 from On Wed, 30 Oct 1996 08:52:19 -0600 Jeff Hansen said: >Things are winding down, but here's my final thought: If we claim >political efficacy as the justification for our poetry, then we are in >trouble. Few people other than academic hair splitters will buy it. Yunte Huang, in a fresh air way, & yours truly, in a stuffy fuzzy old wasp yankee way, were saying the same thing, I think: that poetry & politics can be & are integrated in practice (whether it's poetry theater addressed to issues or "political edge" throughout). But politics is power yes, & POLITICAL justification for poetry is another form of the corrupting influence of power. Poetry's cachet is in the poet's independent sense of rightness, with "independent" underlined. Mao was a great poet? I'm not in a position to judge, but his power makes me doubt it. Julius Caesar, though, was a great prose writer. Then again, I'd have to agree with C. Bernstein "it's impossible, that's why it's happening" (inexact quote) The poem falls like a stone from heaven. No one will judge it. - Osip Mandelstam - H Gould p.s. Mark Wallace's excellent list would be good to talk to yr legislators about down at the State House or put into a play (piece of legislation). ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 09:47:42 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc ginsberg i can see somewhat, but snyder?? explain.--md In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > I suggest that Ginsberg and Snyder have been effective inasmuch as they > have changed the dialogue: imagine America without Allen Ginsberg for a > second: it would be even worse than it is and we wouldn't have his example > to argue about and be inspired by > > On Tue, 29 Oct 1996, Daniel Bouchard wrote: > > > To my reading of Jefferson's post, "politics" referred to US government > > policy. > > His point, again from my perspective, was that poetry being written today > > (and > > the poetry of the last 30 years) is politically irrelevant because it comes > > nowhere close to affecting government policy (policies), the policy makers > > or > > their constituents on any significant level, DESPITE the opposite claims of > > many poets writing today. > > > > The obvious Poetics list reaction is to break down the term "politics" (the > > politics of saying howdy, the politics of this-n-that, etc). Can anyone > > refute > > Jeff's statements? I cannot. Someone mentioned Ginsberg and Snyder, but > > failed to offer exactly HOW their wonderfully political poetry has been > > effective. > > > > > > daniel_bouchard@hmco.com > > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 09:50:08 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: politics & poetry walter kalaidjian teaches at emory and has written a chapter on langpo in his most recent book called something like, American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (columbia u press). i forget what he sez, tho i read everyword, as i reviewed the book for the journal of english and germanic philology, a journal i've never actually read. xo, md In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Forgive my ignorance, but who is Walter Kalajian (this spelling a phonetic > guess) and what has he written on Language poetry? > > Thank you to all. > > Joseph ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 09:59:40 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: new awp... joe a excerpts someone: > "Through parallelisms of syntax and similarities of metaphors and sounds, > free verse can sometimes attain isolated expressions of self-similarity in > its parts and approximations of order in its overall design; but with fewer > rules and less feedback to amplify and vary its constituent elements, it > generally fails to achieve the same degree of self-similarity and scaling > we find in the best formal verse." > how does anyone have the patience to read this kind of tedious stuff. you guyzies must really luvvvv poetry to slog thru these kinds of articles ("essay" is too kind a word). how do y'all do it.--md ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 10:56:26 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 30 Oct 1996 09:50:08 -0600 from Speaking of poetry with clout, has anybody other than me read the obscure book by Eugenio Zolli in which he argues that Jesus's appellation "the Nazarene" does not refer to his place of birth but to his affiliation (or alleged affiliation) with a spiritual group called the Nazarenes, or "singers", known for chanting proverbs & songs in public poetry recitals? Zolli says that material like the Sermon on the Mount was probably sung or chanted. Now there's a poet-organizer for you. Eugenio Zolli, _The Nazarene_. - H. Gould ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 11:18:28 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Susan Schultz Subject: melus conference Anyone interested in information about the MELUS conference in Hawai'i next April should write to Ruth Hsu (rhsu@hawaii.edu); she's the conference director. It promises to be a great event for reasons post-colonial and otherwise... Susan ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 08:19:39 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kevin Killian Subject: Re: New Publication This is Kevin Killian. A few dys ago Jennifer Moxley wrote in about her book >Imagination Verses by Jennifer Moxley > >An offset & smyth-sewn paperback of 90pp+ for $8.95 >With a Preface by the Author, ISBN 0-927920-07-7 > >This, my first full length publication, is a collection of lyrics written >over the past five years or so. Some of the work included has appeared in >such venues as Object, The Baffler, The Exact Change Yearbook#1, Dark Ages >Clasp the Daisy Root and my own magazine, The Impercipient. > >If you would like a copy, they are available from Small Press Distribution >(1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley,CA 94702 USA 1-800-869-7553) or you can >e-mail me at the above address (not Poetics) or write me at 61 East Manning >St. Providence RI 02906-4008. Later Rod alluded to this book and said, "Moxley manages a genuinely public poetry without sacrificing the cognitive and emotional dissonance that is our tired lot here, in monogomy capitalism." I don't know if I agree with this way of describing "Imagination Verses" but I second him in urging people to get a copy of this book, it is quite interesting and often very intensely beautiful. Half the time I was reading it I was thinking, "I wish I were Jennifer Moxley," and the other half thinking, I'm glad I'm not," (maybe that's RS's emotional dissonance") but I've decided to change my life since reading it. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 12:09:48 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? >the word gets ULTRAPROBLEMATIC (i.e. who decides what gets >submitted to legislative adjudication & how) this is where it gets very clear I think. it is entirely clear who has significant input on what gets "submitted." This is why I think it more to the point to say that the population doesn't matter, rather than poetry. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 13:15:37 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 30 Oct 1996 12:09:48 -0500 from On Wed, 30 Oct 1996 12:09:48 -0500 Rod Smith said: >>the word >gets ULTRAPROBLEMATIC (i.e. who decides what gets >submitted >to legislative adjudication & how) > >this is where it gets very clear I think. it is entirely clear who has >significant input on what gets "submitted." This is why I think it more to >the point to say that the population doesn't matter, rather than poetry. In other words, you're saying American democracy doesn't work. Just curious - have you ever actually worked on passing state or federal legislation, Rod? I wonder what Jefferson thinks of this (I mean our Jefferson). I hear the barricades pronunciamentos flying toward "poetics" even now. - Henry G ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 12:32:52 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: poelitics Re politics & poetry--isn't one of the contexts for this discussion to be found in Plato? As I recall, the Philospher is on the side of the State, from which poets must be banished . . . The turn of the discussion here seems to be following a similar course--immediately equating politics with the State and swiftly moving to the level of abstraction and generalization. Keith Tuma had pointed out the need for specifics in this discussion . . . here are a few that may be of use: for Poetry/the State/pedgagogy/suicide/economics . . . : How Are Verses Made by Vladimir Mayakovsky. (cd. be basis of quite a discussion . . . ) Remember Tip O'Neil's "all politics is local"? Whatever you think of Tip, it's a good tip-- the local is a specific place with a specific history, ecology, and inhabitants. And the inhabitants have bodies. One way of thinking of the interelationship of poetry and politics at a local level is to examine the interrelationship of bodies to and with and in their environment. (For example: toxic waste dumps in poor and minority neighborhoods.Spread of Hepatitus C among areas/populations with poor medical service access .. . ) (For "literary example" of poetry/prose & local & body, turn to WCW's work from Kora in Hell to The Descent of Winter, often written during periods of influenza and other epidemics . . .) The interrelationship of poetry, politics and the local in action may be found in Maximus to Gloucester--Charles Olson's Letters to the Gloucester paper. For an excellent intro to the book and information on it--you cd, check out Karl Young's review/essay at Light and Dust page, Grist On-Line http://www.thing.net/~grist or at the Olson "authors pages" at the SUNY-Buffalo "Electronic Poetry Center". Working with specific people and sites at a local level, for me a poet who continually opens things up as they say in terms of the body in relation to language is bpNichol. (in relation to the local--Mike Boughn has pointed out to me the role Toronto street signs play in the Martyrology Book 5). bpNichol worked in visual poetry, sound poetry, performance, recording, tv, prose, xerox (see TTA 26), editing, collaborations--his work presents a multilplicity of directions, suggestions, situations, notations, examples with which to work-- from Line #6, Fall 1985, "A Conversation: 'Syntax Equals the Body Structure': bpNichol, with Daphne Marlatt and George Bowering": (bpNichol, on page 25) So what I was trying to find, becuse that is part of a larger thing that I've been working towards, is a way to increase my own formal range (something I'm still trying to do), and therefore not merely be stuck, shall we say, by the physical limitation of my body at that point, i.e. just because I'm walking around with my shoulders up like this, if I can learn to relax I can see the world in a slightly different way and so on. If i can keep moving the structure of the poem around, hopefully I can encompass different realities and different ways of looking at things. In that sense I've always seen a connection between the breathing I do and what comes out of me, the words I do, so syntax/body structure, sequence/body structure, but also the body of the poem. from the Martyrlogy Book Six (np): i's a lie dispenses illusions of plot biography when geography's the clue locale & history of the clear you Larry Eigner wrote poetry for a specific local project--a food drive in Chicago used an Eigner work. And Eigner's sense of the act of attention, combined with his sense of history and interest in the local--did lead to the writing of poems concerned with the environment, the homeless . . . Eigner's work exemplifies an attention developed in relation to the body,to the local within which he moved, wrote, looked out the window--listened to the news . . .music, baseball games-- Poetry works with specifics, particulars, particles--a relation there to "all politics is local"-- not abstractions--but things you can hear and see and move among and do something with--(hiphop and rap for example . . .tagging-the body, site specificity, cite specificity in sampling, sight specificity in recognizing relation of tag to "where you are this instant"-to paraphrase WCW and Olson)-- "How are verses made? Work begins long before one receives or is aware of a social command. Work goes on incessantly . . . A poet regards every meeting, ever signpost, every event in whatever circumstances simply as material to be shaped into words words." --V.Mayakovsky, "How Are Verses Made" Not "impossibilities" "taking place", but possibilities being made actual. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 10:34:43 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: splitting my very last hair In-Reply-To: There is a world enough of difference between claiming political efficacy as a justification for poetry and claiming that poetry may/can/does have political efficacy -- I happen to be of the opinion that seeking a justification for poetry is a bit like seeking a justification for my heartbeat -- but I DO know that poets are often place in a position of wanting to justify what they do -- Still, as no doubt others in posts I have not yet read will point out -- This has been a giant case of shifting the question -- There is indeed a politics of poetry, and another politics of poetry publishing -- Some poetry has in fact had observable political effect, and some will again -- There is nothing to condemn in a poet's attempting to examine the politics of his or her own writing, nor is there anything wrong in poets arguing about the politics of their writing practice -- There may be much to question about attempts to divide poetry from politics -- Poets who expect their poetry to have observable political effects outside the realm of readers of poetry may be deceiving themselves, but then again, they may be pleasantly surprised -- Advertisers certainly seem to believe that verse has demonstrable affect -- notice those Norwegian cruise line ads on TV that cop the words on the screen approach of Voices & Visions? against an MTV type video maybe more to come after I read what all the rest of you are saying ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 10:45:49 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: "How do y'all do it?" In-Reply-To: <32777b63139f393@mhub0.tc.umn.edu> Maria -- it's a strange attractor (sorry) ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 13:45:39 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: poelitics In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 30 Oct 1996 12:32:52 -0600 from "all politics is local" but... nations are for real the UN is for real human rights are for real & I would even say... abstractions are real - & can be useful (& not only to the state). there are real ideas. poets aren't banished from them either. - HG ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 10:49:58 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Steve Carll Subject: new book Just wanted to forward this notice about John High's latest... >>From sjcarll Tue Oct 29 08:54:26 1996 >Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 09:45:56 -0700 (PPET) >From: Katherine Olmsted >To: Steve Carll >Subject: new book > >The Sasha book > > >I'm really excited about this one! It's >got a beautiful, full-color child's drawing >for wrap around cover. > >Help me generate some orders: jacobus@hooked.net ($5.00) > >____ >"the sun going to bed," #3 > --for forrest gander > > > > > One squirrel turned to the south, where he could see the >child waiting. He knew this was his child. She was tan & bright, >sun-savored hair. Even the stride determined, luxurious, yellow. Her >life had beckoned him toward the stark pecan leaves & rolling voices of >God. She loved the insects, the buzz of the wasps & humming birds. An >orange cloud flickered off above the thin moon. She was thinking that >finally the sun was going to bed. Wave >good-bye, Ezekiel! So much of rain, of the pebbles & ants singing along >the highway in their beautifully muted tongues. This is why the angel, >too, had departed the house. To discover the moon again, the church >where the nomadic monks gathered with these squirrels. The chipped beige >bricks, lightning bugs, all of these abandoned shoes walking about the >windmills to the south. O Quixote! One part wind, one part sun, one >part rain--& someday we'll even spot the trains. Ok. Cock a doodle >doo. My dame has lost her shoe. A squirrel leading the way today! >Where is she going? And a storage of wind in the mill they say, but as >of yet, she cannot smell it. So he walks behind her in a slight haze the >girl cannot see as she calls >out--papa, papa! > > > > > ********************************** sjcarll@slip.net Steve Carll http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mags/antenym http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/ezines/antenym In seed- sense the sea stars you out, innermost, forever. --Paul Celan ********************************** ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 14:08:06 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gwyn McVay Subject: Re: new awp... Comments: To: Joe Amato In-Reply-To: <199610301530.JAA05861@charlie.cns.iit.edu> Joe, I'm not too sure about some of Lake's points myself. I liked the part about Hopkins. But when yez goes all de way back and starts pickin' on ole Ez, you better have some good backup arguments... and I think that's where he falls short. Now that we've got all the damn new formalism articles out of the bag, (my boss managed to lose yours--can you resend???!!! wotta nightmare) I would love to print some articles that actually take account of what's been happening in the last century... Gwyn ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 13:25:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: splitting my very last hair Comments: To: "Aldon L. Nielsen" I thought this thread began with a remark about the politics of politics... I wholly agree with Aldon: poetry needs no justification. Any other attitude toward it is bureaucratic, to put it politely. To regard a poem, though, as effecting change in the same way as a piece of legislation is tricky, if not misleading. How do we reduce the container of psychic energy to mere quanta? And in what way does a bill or law function as a similar container? I've never believed poetry merely to surive in the valley of its own saying or whatever that line from Auden is, but at the same time pointing to cause/effect type changes from poems vis-a-vis public perception of "issues" is slippery business. Duncan & Levertov wrote some trenchant anti-war poems in the 60's, and for me they have not really dated, but how far did they affect a change in perception when they first appeared? I don't think Aldon, that those Norweigan ads are quite the same thing as "poems;" they ape the shape of poems and are flashy and all - also a way to defeat the mute button on the remote and so are purely practical. More than that, though, they are an acknowledgement that the field of visual perception these days is running on overload. Verse and ads do go together though, mnemonically speaking: there's an ad for Ford Escort right now that rhymes. But that is only doggerel. Patrick Pritchett ---------- From: Aldon L. Nielsen To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: splitting my very last hair Date: Wednesday, October 30, 1996 12:48PM There is a world enough of difference between claiming political efficacy as a justification for poetry and claiming that poetry may/can/does have political efficacy -- I happen to be of the opinion that seeking a justification for poetry is a bit like seeking a justification for my heartbeat -- but I DO know that poets are often place in a position of wanting to justify what they do -- Still, as no doubt others in posts I have not yet read will point out -- This has been a giant case of shifting the question -- There is indeed a politics of poetry, and another politics of poetry publishing -- Some poetry has in fact had observable political effect, and some will again -- There is nothing to condemn in a poet's attempting to examine the politics of his or her own writing, nor is there anything wrong in poets arguing about the politics of their writing practice -- There may be much to question about attempts to divide poetry from politics -- Poets who expect their poetry to have observable political effects outside the realm of readers of poetry may be deceiving themselves, but then again, they may be pleasantly surprised -- Advertisers certainly seem to believe that verse has demonstrable affect -- notice those Norwegian cruise line ads on TV that cop the words on the screen approach of Voices & Visions? against an MTV type video maybe more to come after I read what all the rest of you are saying ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 14:29:50 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc ginsberg i can see somewhat, but snyder?? explain.--md M-- Snyder has, by any post-WWII standards re poetry, a huge audience-- particularly on the West Coast, but elsewhere too. He's very involved in environmental issues. He's definitely a "leader" of some sort for many. It's there in his essays & elsewhere. "elsewhere" is the key word here, --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 14:53:41 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? H-- I've done some political hackwork which is unfortunately not demystifying of the process. There once was a vigorous labor press-- THAT was demystifying. Buy things like Z magazine & the Nation (not at B&N)-- they're needed. I know Ron Silliman was quite involved for a while with governmental politics in the bay area. He worked against, yes, "the indeterminate sentence," among other things. They were locking people up & not telling them for how long. The hope, I think, now rests in a bridge between the idea of all politics being local & the reality that an incredible amount of power is in international corporate hands. The barriers are huge but so are the possibilities. a recent poem by my daughter Alexandra, she's 5: all of it's gone to moneyland which is where I live & there you say go away & you don't even have to pay you just say thank you & walk away --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:01:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Brian McHale Subject: Re: politics & poetry In-Reply-To: Message of 10/30/96 at 09:50:08 from damon001@MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU For what it's worth, I have a review of Kalaidjian's book, together with Alan Filreis' recent one on Wallace Steven in the Thirties, entitled "The Red De- cade & the Blue Guitar" (clever, huh?), in an upcoming issue of my "own" jour- nal, "Poetics Today" (not the next number, I don't think, but the one after?) Kalaidjian is pretty good on Perelman, but better on Thirties poets, Fearing & Rukeyser. Filreis' prose is VERY reader-unfriendly, but he has found some ex- cellent material contextualizing Stevens' poetry in the '30s -- more political than you might guess from the versions that come down to us in his later "Col- lected" -- so it's worth gritting one's teeth & soldiering on. Brian ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:16:12 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? beautiful poem that Alexandra wrote, Rod, and forgive me for being sick of 'bridge' metaphors I know you work at Bridge St [and somebody has been posting magic-marker notes back to Orion (whom this new person refers to as "Cyanide") signing them "Spermicide". Orion, meanwhile, continues to write about nasal crutches -- Kenny, are you the Goldsmith he's been describing lately?] but why not cut a hole in capital's hull? instead of building a bridge to it -- looking into having 4' business cards made, J ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 14:41:09 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Announcement: New Poet Entered into this world 29 October 1996, 4:39 PM EDT, weighing 6 lbs. 1 oz., measuring 20 inches, one Thomas Royal Kellogg, born to David and Leigh Robinson Kellogg. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ There is no mantle and it does not descend. -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:21:21 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Gwyn McVay Subject: /Paradise & Method/ In-Reply-To: anyone yet read Bruce Andrews' /Paradise & Method/ and have comments, opinions? Gwyn ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:23:03 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eryque Gleason Subject: Re: JH and Political poetry ken sherwood wrote: >And the idea that the 'relevant political' action must get you in >trouble, that being 'acknowledged' by the state/powers etc. determines >relevance mistakes surface effect for deep politics. Charmed as >I was to see protestors smashing the windows in downtown Buffalo outside >a Bob Dole rally early in the campaign, I'm pretty certain that the >simple political conversations which take place in my English 201 >will having longer lasting and deeper implications. sorry to take a bit of a tangent here, but why do you think that such political conversations in your classroom have deeper implications? having recently been a student in english 2xx classes, i'm finding that a HUGE percentage (probably greater than half. particularly now that i'm at a state school rather than private u.) of students will take certain political stances mainly out of pressure from the instructor to actually have an opinion, and immediately outside of the classroom doors will turn to their friends and say "it's all bullshit anyway." for a while i thought this tendancy might be part of some peer pressure not to think too hard,not to be too serious, and it may be, though i'm not convinced. don't get me wrong, there are many, many sincere students out/in there, but i know that many of them/us are frustrated by those that are just there for the grade. for me, the main frustration is that i know i'm in the minority (of even having any concrete opinions about which i've gathered information and thought about, nevermind what those thoughts might be), and it seems that the majority of students are not influenced much at all by classroom conversations. they're still going to go home and believe what they always have (whether it's because ma or pa or the kooky neighbor or bob dole told them they should). such "political" beliefs strike me much more as religious beliefs, something that must be taken on faith. so that when the campaign office windows get smashed out, it's a sign from Bob that armegeddon is near. eryque ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 12:33:31 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: MAXINE CHERNOFF Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: The only time I got a standing ovation for "reading" my work aloud was when I was a leader (and Text Meister) for an uprising in the City Colleges of Chicago against the new chairman of the board of trustees, a Republican (in Chicago!) hair goods mogul who had inherited the business but little sense from his dad (although he had gone to Brown--sorry those of you at Brown). Anyway, this man of the people wanted to cut 526 classes systemwide in a system serving Chicago's poor, minorities, adult learners, and immigrants. He wanted to cut ESL offerings in half. There was rumor he wanted to close one of the campuses in one of t he poorest neighborhoods in the city. He and friends said, "Students at the U of Chicago" can't always get the classes they want, and they pay good $$. Why should our students?" Anyway, I wrote a speech and read it at the City Council hearing on his reappointment. When I stood up to return to my chair, everyone was standing and applauding. I looked behind me to see who might have entered the room. (I don't think one of my poems or a piece of "creative" prose would have received the same response.) (Our side lost. I left Chicago. The hair magnate still heads the board of the much trimmed City Colleges of Chicago, where $96 million happened to disappear in a cronie/junk bond deal that nobody locally seemed to care much about. The End.) Maxine Chernoff MAXPAUL @ SFSU. edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 14:48:21 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: JH and Political poetry eryque rites: > > having recently been a student in english 2xx classes, i'm finding that a > HUGE percentage (probably greater than half. particularly now that i'm at a > state school rather than private u.) of students will take certain > political stances mainly out of pressure from the instructor to actually > have an opinion, and immediately outside of the classroom doors will turn > to their friends and say "it's all bullshit anyway." for a while i thought > this tendancy might be part of some peer pressure not to think too hard,not > to be too serious, and it may be, though i'm not convinced. > > don't get me wrong, there are many, many sincere students out/in there, but > i know that many of them/us are frustrated by those that are just there for > the grade. for me, the main frustration is that i know i'm in the minority > (of even having any concrete opinions about which i've gathered information > and thought about, nevermind what those thoughts might be), and it seems > that the majority of students are not influenced much at all by classroom > conversations. they're still going to go home and believe what they always > have (whether it's because ma or pa or the kooky neighbor or bob dole told > them they should). such "political" beliefs strike me much more as > religious beliefs, something that must be taken on faith. well in mn most undergrads have been conditioned ("minnesota nice") to believe that it is impolite to have opinions, let alone express them. md ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:50:43 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Jen Sondheim Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: Wouldn't a reasonable way to approach this be to consider, first of all, what constitutes politics and a political statement? Is a political state- ment a _calling_ - either for change or stasis - within a circumscribed domain - for example saving an endangered species, upholding affirmative action? Is this calling inextricably linked to protocol statements, performatives, such that the statement has an intimate and necessary ass- ociation with legislative language? This would extend to a politics of _exposure_ - of conditions, wrong-do= ing, right-doing. Or is politics "simply" the placement of personal desire and behavior at the core of modeling / teleology of the world? This is the "personal is political" position - what I _do_ is always political; there's no need to vote for example (although voting could be arguably an "intensifica- tion" of the political). In terms of the former, there are political poems and non-political poems. A political poem would be a call to action (Paul Chamberland) or an expo- sure (Ginsberg) - in this sense, by the way, there's a relationship be- tween political and narrative poems. Both operate with trajectories and embedded descriptions/actions. Both participate in narratological devices. In terms of the latter, every poem is a politics - just as every poem is a delineation or fissure of desire, of language, of energy, of body. In this sense, however, the _poem_ loses a bit of epistemological status, since every biulding, for example, could be characterized similarly - or every _political rally._ Personally, I find the latter also an excuse or deflection, an abjuring of purely political behavior within or without the cultural sphere, since anything can give one the old pat on the back, you good citizen you. Alan _______________________________________________________________ http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ 718-857-3671 CuSeeMe 166.84.250.149 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:49:19 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 30 Oct 1996 14:53:41 -0500 from On Wed, 30 Oct 1996 14:53:41 -0500 Rod Smith said: > >I know Ron Silliman was quite involved for a while with governmental politics >in the bay area. He worked against, yes, "the indeterminate sentence," among >other things. They were locking people up & not telling them for how long. That is great!!! > >a recent poem by my daughter Alexandra, she's 5: > >all of it's gone to moneyland > >which is where I live > >& there >you say >go away >& you don't even have to pay >you just say >thank you >& walk away > & so is that! ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 14:52:41 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Announcement: New Poet congrats very very much, david and leigh and thomas royal. how thrilling. md In message <199610301941.OAA26302@argus.acpub.duke.edu> UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Entered into this world 29 October 1996, 4:39 PM EDT, weighing 6 lbs. 1 oz., > measuring 20 inches, one Thomas Royal Kellogg, born to David and Leigh > Robinson Kellogg. > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu > Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 > Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 > http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ > > There is no mantle > and it does not descend. > -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 16:05:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: poelitics In-Reply-To: In Boston Tip O'Neil is sometimes mistaken for Gramsci ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 16:06:46 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joseph Lease Subject: Re: politics, poetry, etc etc In-Reply-To: <961030142949_1315046264@emout08.mail.aol.com> that elsewhere is a key word in all discussions of poetry and politics, I think On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Rod Smith wrote: > ginsberg i can see somewhat, but snyder?? explain.--md > > M-- > Snyder has, by any post-WWII standards re poetry, a huge audience-- > particularly on the West Coast, but elsewhere too. He's very involved in > environmental issues. He's definitely a "leader" of some sort for many. It's > there in his essays & elsewhere. > > "elsewhere" is the key word here, > > --Rod > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 16:06:50 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:50:43 -0500 from On Wed, 30 Oct 1996 15:50:43 -0500 Alan Jen Sondheim said: >Wouldn't a reasonable way to approach this be to consider, first of all, >what constitutes politics and a political statement? Is a political state- >ment a _calling_ - either for change or stasis - within a circumscribed >domain - for example saving an endangered species, upholding affirmative >action? Is this calling inextricably linked to protocol statements, >performatives, such that the statement has an intimate and necessary ass- >ociation with legislative language? This brings to mind another old chestnut, "politics is the art of compromise". Compromise of one's own autonomy "within a circumscribed domain", in the alligator-infested waters of power. This is a remarkable post, I think, but one might ask again, is it a question of either/or or both/and. Maybe the politics of the personal & politics proper are on a continuum. Though I think you raise a good question: is a universal "politics of the personal" actually an invitation to remain on-the-fence, neutral, detached, or, as the Greeks would say, an [political] "idiot." - Henry Gould ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 18:11:47 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Walter K. Lew" Subject: Re: Announcement: New Poet Congratulations! I was foreseen by my father to be a physician, which I'm not, but "Royal" is a good middle name for a poet. I expect early sonnets (Poetish for grandsons?). Cheers, Walter K. Lew c/o Prof. Juliana Chang English Dept. Boston College ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 17:15:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? Comments: To: Alan Jen Sondheim I like the way you frame this Alan. I would argue that legislative language does indeed take its cue from "callings" whether from the left or the right and that most of these callings are shaped by and through appeals to mythic constructs (e.g. the "myth of the frontier") and mythic rhetoric. The latest avatar of the frontier of course is the 21st Century: the coordinates have shifted from spatial to temporal, but it's still the same bill of goods. I just listened to a Clinton spot on NPR in which he describes it as a kind of promised land (talk about yr teleology). At the risk of sounding otiose, the flow of power is adjudicated by those who control the language, the terms of, the dialogue. So in this context, poetry is the means by which one can, in Pound's translation of Kung-fu-tse, "bring the sun's lance to rest on the precise spot verbally," that is, to combat obscuratinism (sic), disinformation, corporate interest and the rest. Or am I being naive? Patrick Pritchett ---------- From: Alan Jen Sondheim To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? Date: Wednesday, October 30, 1996 3:23PM Wouldn't a reasonable way to approach this be to consider, first of all, what constitutes politics and a political statement? Is a political state- ment a _calling_ - either for change or stasis - within a circumscribed domain - for example saving an endangered species, upholding affirmative action? Is this calling inextricably linked to protocol statements, performatives, such that the statement has an intimate and necessary ass- ociation with legislative language? This would extend to a politics of _exposure_ - of conditions, wrong-do= ing, right-doing. Or is politics "simply" the placement of personal desire and behavior at the core of modeling / teleology of the world? This is the "personal is political" position - what I _do_ is always political; there's no need to vote for example (although voting could be arguably an "intensifica- tion" of the political). In terms of the former, there are political poems and non-political poems. A political poem would be a call to action (Paul Chamberland) or an expo- sure (Ginsberg) - in this sense, by the way, there's a relationship be- tween political and narrative poems. Both operate with trajectories and embedded descriptions/actions. Both participate in narratological devices. In terms of the latter, every poem is a politics - just as every poem is a delineation or fissure of desire, of language, of energy, of body. In this sense, however, the _poem_ loses a bit of epistemological status, since every biulding, for example, could be characterized similarly - or every _political rally._ Personally, I find the latter also an excuse or deflection, an abjuring of purely political behavior within or without the cultural sphere, since anything can give one the old pat on the back, you good citizen you. Alan _______________________________________________________________ http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html images: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ 718-857-3671 CuSeeMe 166.84.250.149 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 18:26:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: David Kellogg Subject: Re: Announcement: New Poet >Congratulations! I was foreseen by my father to be a physician, which I'm >not, but "Royal" is a good middle name for a poet. I expect early sonnets >(Poetish for grandsons?). Thanks Walter. Royal is actually a family name -- my middle name, the first name of my father and great-grandfather (Roy, the only one who went by the name). A little of the old patriarchal something-or-other. Shit I'm tired. Cheers, David ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Kellogg kellogg@acpub.duke.edu Box 90023, Duke University (919) 660-4357 Durham, NC 27708 FAX (919) 660-4381 http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/ There is no mantle and it does not descend. -- Thomas Kinsella ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 18:06:46 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: main Subject: Re: JH and Political poetry In-Reply-To: <199610302031.PAA16013@shell.acmenet.net> is it ever possible to _not_ take a political stance? i don't see disagreeing w political beliefs (an individual's or an institution's) as apolitical. individual epiphanies and overnight revolutions are historical anomalies in the landscape of politics. if "influence" is defined more broadly, then every act has some degree of "political" impact. how do we define a border between what's political and what isn't? i think jeff hansen made some good points, but to distinguish between "relevant" and "nonrelevant" political acts is still evaluating actions with the assumption that some actions have no political relevance. sure, there are those who will "go home and believe what they always have," but what's the alternative? On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Eryque Gleason wrote: > having recently been a student in english 2xx classes, i'm finding that a > HUGE percentage (probably greater than half. particularly now that i'm at a > state school rather than private u.) of students will take certain > political stances mainly out of pressure from the instructor to actually > have an opinion, and immediately outside of the classroom doors will turn > to their friends and say "it's all bullshit anyway." for a while i thought > this tendancy might be part of some peer pressure not to think too hard,not > to be too serious, and it may be, though i'm not convinced. > > don't get me wrong, there are many, many sincere students out/in there, but > i know that many of them/us are frustrated by those that are just there for > the grade. for me, the main frustration is that i know i'm in the minority > (of even having any concrete opinions about which i've gathered information > and thought about, nevermind what those thoughts might be), and it seems > that the majority of students are not influenced much at all by classroom > conversations. they're still going to go home and believe what they always > have (whether it's because ma or pa or the kooky neighbor or bob dole told > them they should). such "political" beliefs strike me much more as > religious beliefs, something that must be taken on faith. > > so that when the campaign office windows get smashed out, it's a sign from > Bob that armegeddon is near. > > eryque > ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 20:18:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jena Osman Subject: New issue of Chain is out CHAIN #3, volume 2 on the special topic of Hybrid Genres/Mixed Media is now out. Contributors and subscribers should be receiving their copies soon. Copies of CHAIN #3, volume 1 are also still available: order one for $10 (indicate which volume you'd like) or both for $18. Send checks to Chain at 215 Ashland Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222, or send a message to josman@acsu.buffalo.edu and we'll send an invoice with the issue. Contents below: Hybrid Genres/Mixed Media volume 1 includes work by Mac Adams, Will Alexander, Dennis Barone, Martine Bellen, Charles Bernstein, Sherry Brennan, Patti Capaldi, Norma Cole & Michael Palmer, Elizabeth Cross, Maria Damon, Tim Davis, Marta Dieke & Spencer Selby & Gary Sullivan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Geraldine Erman, William Fox, Janie Geiser, Susan Gevirtz, David Golumbia, Jenny Gough, Carla Harryman & Travis Ortiz, Fanny Howe, Lisa Jarnot, Tom Johnson, Alystyre Julian, Karen Kelley, Bruce McIntosh, E.A. Miller, Aife Murray, Sianne Ngai, Hoa Nguyen, Nick Piombino, Mark Robbins, Christy Sheffield-Sanford, Gail Sher, Brian Kim Stefans, Cassandra Terman & Katie Yates, Nico Vassilakis, Mac Wellman, C.D. Wright, Paul Zelvansky. Hybrid Genres/Mixed Media volume 2 includes work by Polly Apfelbaum, Lutz Bacher, Perry Bard, Jim Brashear, Lee Ann Brown & Susan Meyer Fenton, Brad Buckley, Mary Burger, Stacy Doris, Johanna Drucker & Brad Freeman, Thalia Field, Heather Fuller, Loss Pequeno Glazier, Barbara Henning & Miranda Maher, Kathy High, Adeena Karasick, Cynthia Kimball, Heidi Kumao, Eve Andree Laramee, Walter Lew, Pamela Lu, Steve McCaffery, Marlene McCarty, Jerome McGann, Kevin Magee, Gerard Malanga, Denise Newman, M. Nourbese Philip, Kristin Prevallet, Joan Retallack & Rod Smith & Melanie Neilson, Lisa Robertson, James Sherry, Ken Sherwood, Sally Silvers, Carolyn Steinhoff Smith, Fiona Templeton, Ward Tietz, Anne Waldman, Mark Wallace, Janet Zweig. Jena Osman josman@acsu.buffalo.edu ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 20:42:13 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: Correction: SPITTING IMAGE Reading In-Reply-To: <199610300508.AAA03154@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> To All: The location for the SPITTING IMAGE reading at 7:30 on November 2 has been changed from La Mama Experimental Theater to La Mama La Galleria at 6 East 1st Street near 2nd Avenue. =46ull announcement (in case you missed it): =A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7= =A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7= =A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7=A7 The following announcement is from Julia Solis. For more info, contact Julia at: seatopia@bway.net. THE SPITTING IMAGE is celebrating the release of its new issue with a night of readings by Raymond Federman, Rob Hardin, Lance Olsen, Peter Wortsman, Alex Cigale, Colin Raff and Christopher Sorrentino. The readings will be framed by "pyrotic" performances from Fireplay. Saturday, November 2 at 7:30 PM at La Mama La Galleria at 6 East 1st Street near 2nd Avenue. The reading should be smart, fun and informal. Both SPITTING IMAGE and my forthcoming collection, Distorture, feature Julia--in two mock-forensic shots by German photographer, Claudia Reinholdt, of Neid--on the cover. Julia is a writer and translator as well as an editor; both she and Colin Raff have recently translated Hans Bellmer, my bald muse, into English. Julia has also translated Nietzsche's last letters, which were published in _My Sister and I_ by Amok Press. There is some controversy as to the true authorship of the book (but not the letters); Julia reports that Nietzsche's letters were extremely difficult to translate because they were written in the language "of someone who was ragingly insane." http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 19:11:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Dan Raphael Dlugonski Subject: "Aldon L. Nielsen" >Subject: Re: Jump Up >Saw Lake here in Portland OR monday (10/28) night. the poetry simple but effective. the playing (alto, soprano, flute) was incredible. all energized by the man, joyous and insightful. an hour and a half of visceral magic. and only about 70 people in the audience. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 20:13:38 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: VPI R TremblayMcGaw Subject: Re: New Publication INTERNET 2K Oct-30-96 Sorry to post this to the whole list. Jennifer my e-mail program doesn't show me your address but rather the owner-poetics list, so could you post your e-mail address or send it to me directly. I'd like to find out how to get a hold of your mag--The Impercipient--about which I've heard good things from Kathy Lou Schultz and others here in SF. Also, looking forward to reading your book. Sounds like a must read. Robin Tremblay-McGaw hn4208@handsnet.org or robintm@traumafdn.org Thanks. ---------------------------------------- >Date: October 30, 1996 3:17 pm PST Item: R00at6G > >From: INTERNET @CONNECT-INTERNET-GATEWAY > >To: HN4208 VPI, R. Tremblay-McGaw > >Subj: Re: New Publication > >----- ORIGINAL INTERNET MAIL FOLLOWS ----- >From: owner-poetics@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu >To: hn4208 > > >This is Kevin Killian. A few dys ago Jennifer Moxley wrote in about her book > >>Imagination Verses by Jennifer Moxley >> >>An offset & smyth-sewn paperback of 90pp+ for $8.95 >>With a Preface by the Author, ISBN 0-927920-07-7 >> >>This, my first full length publication, is a collection of lyrics written >>over the past five years or so. Some of the work included has appeared in >>such venues as Object, The Baffler, The Exact Change Yearbook#1, Dark Ages >>Clasp the Daisy Root and my own magazine, The Impercipient. >> >>If you would like a copy, they are available from Small Press Distribution >>(1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley,CA 94702 USA 1-800-869-7553) or you can >>e-mail me at the above address (not Poetics) or write me at 61 East Manning >>St. Providence RI 02906-4008. > >Later Rod alluded to this book and said, "Moxley manages a genuinely public >poetry without sacrificing the cognitive and emotional dissonance that is >our tired lot >here, in monogomy capitalism." I don't know if I agree with this way of >describing "Imagination Verses" but I second him in urging people to get a >copy of this book, it is quite interesting and often very intensely >beautiful. Half the time I was reading it I was thinking, "I wish I were >Jennifer Moxley," and the other half thinking, I'm glad I'm not," (maybe >that's RS's emotional dissonance") but I've decided to change my life since >reading it. > ---------------------------------------- Robin Tremblay-McGaw Information Services Director Trauma Foundation/ Pacific Center for Violence Prevention HN4208@handsnet.org Connect Mail Sent: October 30, 1996 8:09 pm PST Item: R00ato5 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 23:12:59 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Alan Jen Sondheim Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? Comments: To: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" In-Reply-To: <01IB9FDG8LCU8ZG1TQ@iix.com> On Wed, 30 Oct 1996, Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume wrote: > So in this context, poetry is the means by which one can, in Pound's > translation of Kung-fu-tse, "bring the sun's lance to rest on the precise > spot verbally," that is, to combat obscuratinism (sic), disinformation, > corporate interest and the rest. Or am I being naive? > > Patrick Pritchett > ---------- I don't think naive, but poetry has added its share of imprecision, obscurity, etc. I think the combat has to be fought in the press, lawcourt, classroom; I wonder if Richard Dawkins didn't affect the Pope's rethinking evolution, for example. I think poetry provides a space to tremble the world and its expression. (At the risk of being naive.) The consequences are _there,_ but fragile themselves. Alan ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 01:19:56 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Eryque Gleason Subject: Re: JH and Political poetry >is it ever possible to _not_ take a political stance? see, here's where we get caught up in political trickery. i'd say yes, it *is* possible not to take a political stance as long as one chooses not to engage the context of politics. i.e., simply not thinking about it (as opposed to proactively not thinking about it, anyone ever tell you not to think of a pink elephant?) however, once a person admits that there are political plays going down there may be not apolitical position, ignoring them clearly being political (consent by default) and attacking them being equally political. i don't >see disagreeing w political beliefs (an individual's or an institution's) >as apolitical. >individual epiphanies and overnight revolutions are >historical anomalies in the landscape of politics. if "influence" >is defined more broadly, then every act has some degree of "political" >impact. i'd say that those epiphanies and revolutions are the driving forces behind politics. if there weren't such ups and downs politics would become boring, fizzle out. >how do we define a border between what's political and what isn't? >i think jeff hansen made some good points, but to distinguish between >"relevant" and "nonrelevant" political acts is still evaluating actions >with the assumption that some actions have no political relevance. sure, >there are those who will "go home and believe what they always have," but >what's the alternative? yes, there will probably *always* be those that no amount of argument can influence, who simply won't engage in a discussion, but i think what's important is *why* they won't engage. as for alternatives, there's all sorts of utopia.... eryque ps utopiae? utopiases? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 21:01:20 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jeffrey W. Timmons" Subject: 12.31.95 Comments: To: Dan Raphael Dlugonski In-Reply-To: <199610310311.TAA11310@trapdoor.aracnet.com> excuse the hubris but i thought id post a "construction"--if anyone has any suggestions the can back paddle. i mean channel. jeffrey timmons 12.31.95 deuterium leaves so perfect this instinct i would sow these letters like a father power of the mind let me violate you will our capacity starch awoke blind hoary blue berries coeval with the sky motion plugged-in house courtesy whirlwind swept away all possibilities symbol . character . alphabet . word tendency blank white screen desires black-spruce tree butterflies intense trigonometric functions packed with cedar wood quagmire resistance stand out in the cold make room for the others telegraphic circut connotations all inaccurate i dont know use me for pleasure all possibilities without fulfillment embodied as imagined tempted by nameless wild fruits too fair for mortal taste bodily repercussion toad-stools universal fractures reflect the woods open serene eye space creates wisdom clarified by experience their notes in harmony with the flowers dogwoods grow jacksnipe imaginations speech sound beauty without fear dazzled oral transmission joy a short novel padlock other people redeem themselves in the purity of infancy code letter harmonized hymn: another third life vision of transcendence mariposa lily deviant housed herein suggestive unreal birds wavy boughs rippling with light wheal tetrao umbellus in dream-thought lost a soft yielding surface pine groves standing like temples gladsome heavy hydrogen sauropod butterfly mary perching vacuum packed novelette i sow desire like rain certitude by opposition a robin soft and green and shady shells the dried leaves subulate terror surface: red alder-berries glow like eyes of imps a longbilled old world wading bird covers the ground innocent monolith powder phonogram remains restless indefinite time tapering the cold security of words a phoebe congo red chorale finely dispersed vahalla particles ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 05:50:58 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Carnography Subject: A late response to prop/Carll thread 1. Response to Steve Carll: >I just want to go on record agreeing vociferously with Rob Hardin... >agreeing that eclecticism is not snobbery and, therefore, we should stop >worrying about the categories and discuss the work on its own merit, >regardless of what part of the musical spectrum it comes from or who its >intended or actual audience is. "I just want to go on record as saying that this was a commendable thing to go on record as saying," Hardin ululated. >...agreeing that Oasis are derivative of 60's British pop and complete >morons to boot, making them and their music indefensible and uninteresting >on critical grounds You might not have felt Oasis were insipid before, but hasn't the coverage in the mainstream press made it obvious? >(however I must add that they're derivative of a musical >style I'm personally not yet sick of hearing variations on, and I think >they're quite good at pastiching aspects of that style. Why do I think >this? Maybe a real musician could tell us...) If you love a particular style of music--any kind of music--I don't think it is necessary to justify your aesthetic pleasure to other people. Many people here have commented on their love/lust for Scott Walker-- some of the youngest and brightest writers I know are into _Scott Walker IV_. But personally, I just don't get it. I can see that he was quite handsome, but I don't see what's unusually good about his voice, his lyrics or his arrangements: It all sounds pedestrian to me. But this probably has to do with Pavlovian professonal bias. For me, crooning 60's and 70's guys in sharp duds fronting Mantovani orchestras translate to nightmarish insincerity and triteness. On the other hand, I play and love keyboards, including synthesizers, which sometimes seem the epitome of nightmarish insincerity and triteness to others--some of whom happen to love Scott Walker. In musical terms, there is nothing wrong with being attached to George Martin/Beatles-style production. I myself could tell you a number of reasons why that stuff works: the Lewis Carroll pungency of the string-vocal-piano arrangement in I Am The Walrus, for example. There is also a kind of impatient intelligence in George Martin's keyboard work (on In My Life, for rexample). That, combined with Lennon's dissonant thinking and tuneful musicianship, can give the Beatles a kind of cutting quality: the pop equivalent of an oboe-heavy woodwind quintet. I could go on to tell you many intimate things I know from composing, and from having to reproduce every note of every part in songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever," including the backwards percussion. You have every reason to like that style (though merely loving the sound of it is the very best reason). It is true that I've heard enough of that style to last me a lifetime; it is true that I wince whenever a new band or scene copies the Beatles. But that doesn't mean you're wrong to trust your ear. >On another interface, I'd like to just clarify something that Tom Mandel >responded to: I am aware that what's now called "classical" music >(particularly opera) once had a wide enough audience to merit the term >"popular". However, when I used the term popular, I didn't mean popular, I >meant popular. I mean the category popular music doesn't necessarily align >itself with what's popular in the sense that a lot of people like it. >Separated by a common language. It sounds as if popular music might not be the best word for us to use. "Contemporary pop music" is the wrong term as well, but at least when you say it no one thinks of Verdi. There should be a categorical term that encompasses modern folk music, fugitive music, swinging bachelor pad music, lo-fi networked anything, meringue, so-called alternative, so-called trip-hop, dark ambient, polkas, etc etc. But when I try to think of one, I turn into an obsessive-compulsive surrealist--rearranging fixed and disparate terms on a hazy lathe. (Examples: pop apex, tune continuum, panstream, wallpaper madrigals, skid drift, jackboot swing, automat hyms, prole homophony. No term seems inclusive enough to mean all that it should.) Here is the real question: what quality distinguishes what you call pop music from what we both call classical? What qualities are present in one kind of music and absent in the other? ----------------------------------- 2. To Dodie: Re Cemetery Man: What do you think ofArgento's films, or of movies like Diabolique, by Mario Bava? At times, Argento seems far more interested in texture than plot; at times, plot disappears completely, leaving another unifying principle in its place, reminding me (for some strange reason) of Mayhem by Abigail Child. ------------------------------------- 3. To Thomas Oraange: >A certain amount of the moronic is a staple for much of rock music's >poetics: The "moronic" words you're talking about are present in *most* poetry. They are what Yeats called "numb words" must be there to some degree to foil what passes as meaning. They seem to stand in paradoxical contrast to Keats's "load every rift with ore." Yet, strangely, they are present in the poetry of Keats himself. Oddly, your example-- > Well last year I was twenty-one, > Didn't have a lot of fun; > Now I'm gonna be twenty-two, > I say oh my and a boo-hoo > [Iggy Pop] --seems to use numb words in almost the same way (functionally) as the ballads of Houseman ("When I Was One-and-Twenty") and Yeats. Even so, numb words can serve several functions, four of which follow: 1. to foreground sound itself, as in Klebnikov's laughter poem; in Shelley's early drafts of O World, O Life, O Time; or even in the poetry of Ernest Dowson (the impotence of being Ernest!), in which static allusions attain a kind of numb allegory to match the numbing melancholy of the language and the tone. 2. To foreground an anarchic disdain for meaning itself, as in Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. 3. To satirize pompous, worn ruts of conventional thought 4. To force the mind to fill in lacunae with something more vivid. >I would argue that lyrics become poetic primarily in their delivery, which >is why Dylan is poetic and Jim Morrison is not, why Iggy Pop is poetic and By delivery, I think you might mean what you refer to as tone. I agree with you in part, but I don't agree with your conclusions about Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, etc. Each case is different; it isn't a matter of one arbitrary distinction (What do you *mean* Morrison's "delivery" isn't "poetic?" > Sad preacher nailed upon the colour door of time, > Insane teacher be there reminded of the rhyme, > There'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify > Political ends as sad remains will die. > Reach out as forward tastes begin to enter you. > [Jon Anderson] > >is not. This is "poetic," of course, but it also sucks fetid Doberman wangs-- chiefly because of the wretched cliches, vague writing, vacant imagery and naive inversions Scan these two excerpts, go ahead. Iggy gives us a little iambic >tetrameter, Actually, Iggy's lines which, conciously or unconsciously, are playing with the conventional expectations of the popular ballad both metrically and semiotically, happen to fall into meter far better than Anderson's alexandrines (except for the fisrt and last lines). When Iggy drops a beat, he's playing with the listener: -*|-*|-*|-* --*|-*|-*| *-|*-|-*|-*| -*|-*|-* [forced meter against nonsense words]|-*| When Anderson's cliched use of alexandrines breaks meter, the effect seems pointless and arbitrary. The only expectation destroyed is one's hope that he will get a prosodic clue. >Anderson pens an almost perfect string of alexandrines. As >far as content, the latter is perhaps more poetic, though far less >intelligible and almost opaque in its aspirations for literariness. But >Iggy means what he says and you know it in his delivery, especially when >he proceeds in the song to let out a series of whoops! and yelps! and >yrrrowps! that only he can do. (Nick Cave comes awfully close, as does >Cobain in his own way.) In short, as much as I like Yes, Iggy has more >poetry in his thumbnail than Anderson does. I don't agree with you at all. If Anderson were perfect, he'd be far less painful to read or listen to. Also, his tone is as dead as Kant Generator's ravings. Iggy Pop understands the conventions he frustrates, and his tone conveys a rich ambivalence. >Cobain's "a mosquito/my libido" has something Iggy-esquely moronic about >it, but does it fail as a poetic image? (Libido is small, pesky, >displaces blood-as-food with toxin-as-irritant, etc.) If Cobain's image fails, then so do those of the metaphysical poets. Cobain is using a wittily far-fetched metaphor (See Donne's "A Flea") that suggests smallness, ineffectuality, parasitism. Here again is a rich subversion of various conventions: of the rock star's gigantic and self-righteous cock-ego, for instance, which is traditionally rammed into the listener's face. In Cobain's hands (sorry, I couldn't resist), the phallocentric becomes tiny, insignificant, vernal. >Cobain pushes "teen angst" (another rock staple) into a kind >of unparalleled confessionalism (given what we know about the lengths he >went to to seek relief for his chronic stomach trouble): > > I'm on warm milk and laxatives, > Cherry-flavored antacid. In a way, this statement is so bland that it subverts the confessional, he personal, in ways that remind me of Kathy Acker: *You want autobio- graphical? Here's the dildo I used, here's the Coke can that I smashed.* Such writers/poets present autobiography in a manner that is so numbing that the effect is finally to undermine the location of the personal. > Hamlets fishin in the grave x2 > thru the custard bones and stuff > he aint got no friend in there x2 > I believe our man's in love > Hamlet's got a gun--now > he wears a crucifix x2 > pow pow pow pow/pow pow pow pow > Hamlet moves so beautiful x2 > walking thru the flowers > who are hiding 'round the corners > He's moving down the street--now > he likes the look of that cadillac > and now he wants that cadillac > pow pow pow pow/pow pow pow pow > IS THIS LOVE some kinda love x2 > Now he's movin' down my street > and he's coming to my house > crawling up my stairs > WHERE FOR ART THOU BABY-FACE > Where-for-art-thou > pow pow pow pow/pow pow pow pow >Whatever the merits of imagining Hamlet on a psychotic killing spree, What do you mean? Imagining Hamlet on a psychotic killing spree is *highly* rewarding! For me, this is the best example of poetry you've given: for its absurd antihero, it has a subverted cultural icon; its style is lucid (sorry, Charles) and original, it plays with the ballad ironically (in a way that almost reminds me of Stevie Smith). It even subverts the narrative itself--not only in microstructural terms, but even the ending, where the protagonist blows the author's brains out. Anyhow, thanks for giving us close readings of lyrics. On the subject of numb words in a pop context: I'm surprised no one has mentioned the poetry of Dennis Cooper. 5.Response to Gwyn McVay: >In a recent book called /'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy,/ compiled by >Gavin Harris (is that right?) of /Details/ magazine, it's revealed that >someone went around thinking "a mosquito: my libido" was "I'm a scarecrow >and a Beatle." I kind of like that variant reading. When he first heard a bad cassette copy at Karoake, an assistant engineer from Tokyo slated "My Green Tambourine" as "My Grecian Latrine." Further fun mistakes I recall from Daiichi Kosho Studios, where much of the staff spoke English as a second language: Sit On Dog of Bay Billie's Jeans Nights In White Semen Grolia (G-R-O! L-I-A!) Because Your Cyst Is On Your Lip King of Lock, by Lung DMC On the inversions of the letters L and R, studio owner Chis Hanley said: "I can understand *saying* it, but to *write* it seems inexcusable!" All the best, Rob Hardin http://www.interport.net/~scrypt ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 03:57:10 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Ron Silliman Subject: Tiger chasing its tail (or tale) David, Congratulations and thanks for the explication of that middle name. The committee had been thinking about asking you about its class stance... -------------------------------------------- Maria, why are you publishing in magazines that you admit you've never read? Isn't academic life alienating enough already? -------------------------------------------- The question of politics and poetry seems to endlessly cycle into certain patterns (hence the title of this post) but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pursue it. In fact, I take it as a healthy sign that so many people here are so willing to do so (vast cry from when I was in college). I'm sympathetic to Jeff's original blast in that I do think that too many poets (and others...this is not particularly a poet's problem) imagine that their "work" (in this instance words) is sufficient as a political activity. As I once noted in a discussion with Jackson Mac Low at the old Intersection in North Beach, there is great value in licking a stamp, walking a precinct, etc. The problem with a statement such as "poetry is politics that stays politics" is that it's palpably false. Pound's poetry has proven "radical" in ways that his politics did not (and in contrast with some of the Republican right these days, Pound's not off the spectrum, sadly). Nothing is improved by reifying poetry. The great difficulty of political action in our time is its disconnectedness from any sense of effect or power. Reaching people one person at a time seems like trying to fill the sea with teaspoons of sand, particularly when you hear that Best (low end discount department store chain) has decided to go chapter 7 (they've been in chapt. 11 for years), meaning that next spring another 5,000 people will be jobless. I've worked within the constraints of the Democratic Party for a long time because it was evident that 3rd party efforts, noble as they might be, invariably are self-cancelling. There's a structural bias built into the US framework that has thus far prevented them from ever stabilizing. On the other hand, the Democratic Party I envision is Bill Clinton's worst nightmare (as, in some sense, he is ours). The very same dynamics that have taken the Dems away from their base in the working men and women in this country, capital and technology, may now actually be changing conditions. I do think it is possible (i.e., a long way short of "probable" but no longer literally impossible) that 3rd party movements could begin and take hold in the vacuum that has grown. By jettisoning its base, the door-to-door Union volunteer (capital U), the Democratic party has largely opened up this space. In focusing in on its base in the fundamentalist right, the Republicans have done likewise. (As Clinton himself notes, the Eisenhower Republicans now control the Democratic Party, but many of them have also just opted out.) But the problem is this: without a broadly based democratic movement, too many 3rd party efforts will in fact tap into certain fascist/populist tendencies. Perot's Reform Party, the Natural Law Party (which at least wins points for open oxymorons). At the base of far too many libertarian impulses one finds xeno- and other phobias just waiting to pounce. I think Jeff's blast may have been driven by the very same sense of urgency I have, that without such a movement we are on the cusp (or well down the slope) into some frightening times. But ultimately, I think the discussions here, endless and undecidable as they may be, are part of the solution, not the problem. Ron Silliman ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 08:29:43 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry gould Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 30 Oct 1996 17:15:00 -0500 from Patrick - I guess I would disagree that legislation takes its cue from "callings" made of mythic constructs. I think it's often the other way around, and in fact both are different ways of dealing with real issues of power & justice. The "callings" are just a kind of rhetorical, persuasive shorthand. To say that legislation follows them is parallel to over-emphasizing the "legislative" refinement of language enacted by poetry (Pound's or others). Alan's point (I believe) was that new ideas come from all points on the spectrum. - Henry G ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 10:03:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Mary Hilton Subject: Politics, Poetry and "Political Diction" At the risk of extending this thread and nullifying my lurking status, and without seeming too self-serving, I wanted to mention "Political Diction," a mag which I edited and released a few weeks ago. Many of the thread participants -- Mark Wallace, Joe Amato, Jefferson Hansen, Rod Smith -- contributed challenging and at times humorous political commentary. What I was hoping to address with this issue is the prevailing idea that politics and poetry don't mix, or rather that poets wish not to mix them, by offering evidence to the contrary. I think too often writers "let themselves off the hook" not in the way mentioned earlier with sayings like "the personal is political" but by denying that we are striving for any effect at all. But back to plugging my mag. The authors include, along with the ones mentioned above, Charles Bernstein, Elizabeth Burns, Craig Czury, Buck Downs, H. Kassia Fleisher, and Andrew Levy. There's good stuff in here folks, all in one form or another political commentary, and refutes the comment that there is no good political writing being done these days. E-mail me at my home if you are interested in a copy at 74463.1505@compuserve.com Thanks for the wonderful discussion and allowing me to advertise. -- Mary Hilton in an election year, the country shifts its boundaries... ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 09:57:05 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Tiger chasing its tail (or tale) ron s writes: > > -------------------------------------------- > > Maria, > > why are you publishing in magazines that you admit you've never read? > Isn't academic life alienating enough already? > > -------------------------------------------- ron: i admire very much the insights in your posts, esp the part i deleted here in the interest of only responding to to part addressed to me. it's a very good question, and the answer is, that i usually say yes when i'm asked to do something (a condition that will have to change) and i was asked by the editor of jegp --a journal that i had never heard of at the time, but which turns out to be something my senior colleagues were familiar with --to review first cary nelson's book and then walter kalaidjian's. i think they reviewed the books cuz they come out of u of IL at urbana, where cary teaches and where walt got his doctorate. i'm not sure how they got my name but the editor, dale kramer, has always been very courteous and nice to work with.--md ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 10:43:23 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Sylvester Pollet Subject: NATIONAL POETRY FOUNDATION WEBSITE OPEN ! Please try it--let me know what needs improvement. There's a way to send me a message directly from the site. I'm working on a new order form, expanded descriptions of books, many things at once. I've incorporated a Bulletin Board to announce conferences , etc., but don't want to (and couldn't) duplicate everything announced on the Poetics List. http://www.ume.maine.edu/~npf/ Loss: Link me, Baby, Eight to the Bar! and Welcome to the Poetics List Thomas R. Kellogg! Now I'll have to child- proof that descending mantle/mantel. For the moment, just move the cleat higher on the wall, and get some rest. Sylvester Pollet, NPF Assoc.Ed/Acting Director/WEBMASTER ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 08:06:37 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: This is Tosh Subject: Re: A late response to prop/Carll thread Is anyone on this list into Scott Walkers' latest album TILT. I think it's great. For those who are not into Scott music,there is at least two different styles: The sixties Scott which is orchestrated,dark, and borders on middle of the road, and the current Scott which is slightly experimental, with traces of Bowie's Low, with fragmented 'poetic' lyrics. Keep in mind this is early in the morning for me, and the above description should not be the only description of his music. But it is possible not liking his early music and yet loving his new music. Two different styles. SO in the long run, give his new stuff a listen,and don't judge him by his early work. >some of the youngest and brightest writers I know are into _Scott Walker IV_. >But personally, I just don't get it. I can see that he was quite handsome, >but I don't see what's unusually good about his voice, his lyrics or >his arrangements: It all sounds pedestrian to me. But this probably has >to do with Pavlovian professonal bias. For me, crooning 60's and 70's guys >in sharp duds fronting Mantovani orchestras translate to nightmarish >insincerity and triteness. On the other hand, I play and love keyboards, >including synthesizers, which sometimes seem the epitome of nightmarish >insincerity and triteness to others--some of whom happen to love Scott >Walker. > > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 11:08:02 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Lisa Samuels Subject: New WebLit Journal "POEPHYSICS" (fwd) perhaps mr. duplij i sending this to others on the list -- i can't track why i am one of the recipients -- but in case not, here is something that looks worthy of attention. -lisa s. According to Steven Duplij: > From root Thu Oct 31 11:00:05 1996 > Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 16:26:38 +0100 (MET) > From: Steven Duplij > To: Steven Duplij > Subject: New WebLit Journal "POEPHYSICS" > > > Dear Colleague, > > I am glad to announce a new Poetry, Prose and Art > Web Journal POEPHYSICS, Interdisciplinary, > Multilingual, Multicultural, Web Edition. > > The address is: > > http://gluon.physik.uni-kl.de/~duplij/litsite.htm > > It consists of POEflyPHYSICS and POElinkPHYSICS > (for people who already have WWW pages). > Submissions in English, German, French, Spanish, Polish > and Russian (satisfying the rules) are welcome. > > I would also be grateful, if you forward this mail > to poets, writers and people who are interested > in modern East European writing, art and music, > and in interation with the western ones. > > You are welcome to make a link to the site, > if it is necessary. > > I hope for our fruitful mutual literary collaboration. > > Your remarks, critics and thoughts are welcome at any time. > > Wishing you the best of success and creativity, > > Steven Duplij. > > > > XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX > > Steven Duplij telephones: > Theory Group +49-(0)-631-205-3205 (work) > Department of Physics 205-2272 (secr.) > University of Kaiserslautern 205-3907 (fax) > D-67653 KAISERSLAUTERN 43278 (home) > Germany e-mail: duplij@physik.uni-kl.de > WWW: http://gluon.physik.uni-kl.de/~duplij/ > > XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX > > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 11:30:16 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: the time is at hand POETRY CITY ///// READING ///// FREE (fade in "Rain" from Sincerity Loops) STEVE CARLL (echo) in His first New York City reading!! (Ron Delsener presents:) Poet and editor of Antenym, Steve Carll brings his golden turntables to the airy spaces of Poetry City ("spooky laugh" cart) on H=A=L=L=O=W=E=E=N Steve's poems have appeared in Mass Ave, the Impercipient . . . and in his new book _trace a moment's closure for clues_ Carol Szamatowicz: BEADS The children have been everything that moves: cows, engines, cars, trees; they have been the whole without many parts, now they become the parts. The railing moves the silence, the air waves the car on, sunny needles in a sheet of ice start an artery. A bee on another shoulder; ants, the moving men kind, converge on the verandah. A child says "the fire" in her sleep. "No, no, wait for my bigger brother, wait for my dad, don't eat my tits." As for regret, it's a marketer's tool. A diver touches the wall and rips her goggles off. One large turn arrives before all the smaller ones, a near miss lessens pain. It's easy to imagine the course that takes years to run, reminding you of a hundred others and your mouth pushes open a moan. That's STEVE CARLL and CAROL SZAMATOWICZ at POETRY CITY! Tonight at 7 p.m. in the offices of Teachers & Writers Collaborative 5 Union Square West, NY NY 10003 (call 212 691 6590 for more info) conveniently adjacent to (but not embedded in) the Halloween you never had ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 11:34:35 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Rod Smith Subject: Re: Tiger chasing its tail (or tale) Ron, Thanks for the great post. What third party movement are you more impressed by? New Party? Nader? I've been supporting the New Party which seems a genuine attempt to get a labor party going, not based around any one persona-- but long long way to go. >By jettisoning its base, the door-to-door Union volunteer >(capital U), the Democratic party has largely opened up this space. It seems fairly clear that the disappearance of social democratic politics from the public sphere is strongly related to the rise of television as a source of "information." What response do you, others, see to this. --Rod ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 11:10:56 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Joe Amato Subject: Re: Tiger chasing its tail (or tale) rod, i'd say it's strongly *correlated* with the rise of tv (and yeah, thanx ron s. for that great post)... i mean, i don't see this as speaking to any intrinsic tv quality, rather to the way the various (and potentially conflicting) qualities of the tv medium lend themselves (or don't) to electioneering tactics and strategies... there's a book on same, right?---advertised on c-span all the time... haven't had the time to check it out... but i think the apparent collapse of left and right (into something ostensibly left-right, unfortunately NOT right-left) IS something to fret over... hearing dole rant on and on about how he's out to protect 'our money' aggravates me to no end... it's entirely upsetting and disorienting---one can't help but turn to the republican candidate (or to perot) for a more realistic appraisal of our economic times---albeit put to the wrong ends---b/c one senses that our times are indeed dire... in the meantime, our democratic prez, in order to get reelected, justifies---albeit i would argue to better apparent ends---still, justifies the current economic situation largely through economic balderdash... so i vote for clinton, will vote for him again... so in effect, i vote for lies and damned lies in preference to a marginally more truthful appraisal that itself will be put, as i see it, to the ends of falsehood and *truly* prevaricating ends... and i'm left hoping that more truth---in the form of politically desirable public policy that addresses our very real problems---will somehow thereby result... one almost needs a conception of 'truth and falsehood in their ultramoral sense' to negotiate this stuff (and i say this with due regard for plato's conception of politics as one of the 'true arts,' with rhetoric relegated to flattery ('of the soul'))... SHEESH/// joe ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 09:19:55 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: Always a Bridesmaid State University In-Reply-To: <3278cc510d91013@mhub1.tc.umn.edu> Maria's response to Ron raises another set of politics -- closely related to the first -- There is an academic politics of "where one must be in order to be so asked" not all that different from some of the poetry mag. biz politics oft discussed on this list -- My colleagues at Howard University, though endlessly the recipients of recruiting fliers from colleges they've never heard of, never get asked to review anything by any of the journals we've here mentioned in the couple years I've been on the list -=- Nor do many of my friends at Fill in the Blank State U., no matter what publishing credits they may have accumulated -- which really just means that we have to be party crashers, always asking somebody to let us go to the dance with them -- For example -- unlike the poetry reviewing I do -- My last four reviews of critical books were each the result of the person at the major research university who didn't want to do it suggesting that the person doing the asking call me instead -- And not all of my friends have friends like that who are willing to pass a job along once in a while -- all of which is leading up to my suggestion that as we all age and get into positions where we might occasionally influence such things, we cast our nets more widely?!?!? ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 11:46:10 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jeff Hansen Organization: The Blake School A.L. Nielson wondered why it is necessary to justify poetry, since it seems to need as much justification as a heartbeat. Here's the answer: in order to argue for the continued existence of the NEA and its continuing support of poetry. Organizing to save the NEA is politics. Jeff ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 12:47:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: from pol to pal This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------307E58501441 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hi gang, three or four quick points: 1) re the pol discussion: thanks jeff, good blast, thanks everybody for taking on that most rebarbative of topics. As Ron sez, it is essential to keep thinking that relationship. & to keep acting on it. I believe it's a both and situation: the poems & the action in & off the street -- alone, neither is enough; which takes an onus off the poem to be _necessarily, visibly, overtly, contently (contentedly?)_ " political." Which however does not mean that a poem can be totaslly apolitical anyway. I just can't. Just as we need air to breath we need the social to live, & the social is political, through & through, from the micro-fascisms of daily life (Guattari) to global issues, and that includes what circulates through the social, i.e. language.=20 Wierdly this line running through my head sicne the thread started, & dont ask me what it means: "Poetry is politics continued by other means." 2) here's a www adress to a pretty vast list of poetry ,mags in Frogland. Some of you may be interested -- Spencer, maybe cld use it to flesh out his oh so valuable list: http://www.ambafrance.org/ADPF/POESIE/revu-po.html 3) Let me chime in with praise for Kristin Prevallet's _Lead, Glass and Poppy_. An absolute pleasure -- an uncanny pleasure; & not irrelevant to the pol discussion; permit to quote: =09 In the clearing we are all variously forged with official words not quite innocent of all that has been broken 4)happy halloween, but rememeber, the yellow m&m's are spiked with politics, the read with mescaline. Pierre --=20 =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=3D=3D Pierre Joris | I still know little about poems, but I do know Dept. of English | that suspicion is important. Be sufficiently SUNY Albany | suspicious, suspect the words, the language, Albany NY 12222 | I have often told myself, heighten this=20 tel&fax: (518) 426 043 | suspicion =97 so that someday, soemthing Ne= w email: | can come into being...=20 joris@cnsunix.albany.edu | =20 Ingeborg Bachmann =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=3D=3D --------------307E58501441 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii; name="revu-po.html" Content-Disposition: inline; filename="revu-po.html" Content-Base: "http://www.ambafrance.org/ADPF/POESIE/ revu-po.html" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit L'annuaire des Revues Poétiques [AIDE] [RETOUR] [MENU] [AVANT]

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Revues de poésie

Action Poétique
Henri Deluy
Rue Jean-Mermoz,
Rés. La Fontaine-au-Bois ndeg.2 77210 Avon

AEncrages & Co
Roland Chopard
Pré de la scierie
88400 Xonrupt-Longemer

Aires
Christiane Chevigny et Dominique Bazet-Simon
Le Mas
42013 Saint-Etienne
cedex 2

Albatroz
Manuel Vaz
BP 404
75969 Paris cedex 20

Aléa
Jean-Christophe Bailly
12, avenue d'Italie
75013 Paris

Aphélie
Charles Greiveldinger
20, rue de la République 66400 Ceret

Arc en seine
Pascal Boulanger
64, rue Edouard Vaillant 95870 Bezons

Archipel
Renaud Bouvier, Alexandre Dauge et Jérôme Ducret
BP 56
1000 Lausanne 12 (Suisse)

Arpa
Gérard Bocholier
94, boulevard La Fayette 63000 Clermont-Ferrand


L'Autre
Michel Camus,
François Xavier Jaujard et Gérard Pfister
2, rue d'Alger
75001 Paris

La Barbacane
Stéphane Pons, Hughes Labrusse et Nathalie Nabert
Château de Bonaguil 47500 Fumel

La Bartavelle
Eric Ballandras
Les Grands Bois
Les Bouleaux ndeg. 53
05000 Gap

Blockhaus
Ghemma Quiroga-G,
Jean-Pierre Espil et
José Galdo
40, rue Durantin
75018 Paris

Cahiers Bleus
Dominique Daguet
2, rue Michelet
10000 Troyes

Les Cahiers d'Arte (revue de la fondation Maeght)
Alain Veinstein
12, rue Saint-Merri
75004 Paris

Caractères
Bruno Durocher
7, rue de l'Arbalète
75005 Paris

Caravanes
Jean-Pierre Sicre et
André Velter
12, rue Grégoire-de-Tours 75006 Paris


Cargo
Michel Lubin
BP 239
75424 Paris cedex 09

Chemin de Ronde
Christian Tarding
27, rue de Lodi
13006 Marseille

Le Cheval de Troie
Maurice Darmon
21, cours Victor-Hugo 33000 Bordeaux

Le Courrier
Fernand Verhesen et
Frans De Haes
4, boulevard de l'Empereur 1000 Bruxelles (Belgique)

Décharges
Jacques Morin
11 bis, rue Milliaux
89000 Auxerre

La Délirante
Fouard El Etr
112, rue Rambuteau
75001 Paris

Delta, Station Blanche
de la Nuit
Patrick Beray
3, rue de Puymaurin
31400 Toulouse

Détail
Pierre Alféri
41, rue des Francs-Bourgeois
75004 Paris

Détours d'écriture
Patrick Hutchinson
11, rue Germain-Pilon 75018 Paris


Digraphe
Jean Ristat
26, rue Jean-Condé
75006 Paris

Doc(k)s
Philippe Castellin
Akenaton
20, rue Bonaparte
20000 Ajaccio

Drailles
Monique de Gounevain
25, rue du Pillat-Saint-Gely 34000 Montpellier

Elan
Louis Lippens
31, rue Foch
59126 Linselles

Encres vives
Michel Cosem
Engomer
09800 Castillon

Europe
Pierre Gamarra
146, rue du Faubourg-poissonnière
75010 Paris

Fig.
Jean Daive
BP 925
75535 Paris cedex 11

Fond(s) de tiroir
Xavier Tournet
Maison de la poésie
de Nantes
35, rue de l'Héronnière 44000 Nantes

Friches
Jean-Pierre Thuillat
Le Gravier de Glandon 87500 Saint Yrieix

GLM
Madeleine Pissaro
6, rue Huygens
75014 Paris
Le Guépard
Christian Arjonilla
BP 5822
37058 Tours cedex

Hors Jeu
Jean-Michel Fossey
13, quai Contades
88000 Epinal

L'infini
Philippe Sollers
5, rue Sébastien-Bottin 75007 Paris

In'hui
Jacques Darras
Maison de la culture d'Amiens
BP 0631
80006 Amiens cedex

Java
Jean-Michel Espitallier
82 bis, boulevard Diderot 75012 Paris

Jungle
Jean-Yves Reuzeau
52, rue des Grilles
93500 Pantin

Laudes
Jean Vuaillat
76, rue François-Genin 69005 Lyon

Lettre Suit
Jean-Gabriel Cosculluela et Anick Vinay
Editions Jacques Brémond 93210 Remoulins-
sur-Gardons

La Limace Bleue
Jean-Pierre Thomas
8, rue d'Estienne-d'Orves, 92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux


Limon
Gil Jouanard, Jacques Jouet et Patrick Frechet
17, rue Dessalle-Possel 34000 Montpellier

Lithiques
Pierre Gaudin et
Claire Reverchon
79, rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin
75010 Paris

Mai hors saison
Guy Benoît et
Michelle Benoît
1, place de la Résistance
Logement 1122
93170 Bagnolet

Le Manège du Cochon Seul
Pierre Bastide
18, rue Alfred-Brisset
58000 Nevers

M25 - Atelier de l'Agneau
Françoise Favretto
36, rue des Ramons
4102 Ougree (Belgique)

Nahuja
Philippe Blanc
37, rue Rempart-la-Real 66000 Perpignan

Nioques
Jean-Marie Gleize
éditions La Sétéré
Rue de Cromer
26400 Crest

Nota Bene
Alain Bosquet
La Différence
103, rue La Fayette
75010 Paris

NRF
Jacques Réda
5, rue Sébastien-Bottin, 75007 Paris

Nyx
Antoine Chalvin
4, square Saint-Irénée 75011 Paris

Phréatique
Gérard Murail
40, rue de Bretagne
75003 Paris

Poésie
Colette Seghers
228, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris

Poésie présente
René et Olivier Rougerie
C/o Rougerie Editeur 87330 Mortemart

Poétique
Michel Charles
Ecole Normale Supérieure 45, rue d'Ulm
75230 Paris cedex 05

Po&sie
Michel Deguy
8, rue Férou
75278 Paris

Recueil
Patrick Beaune
C/o Richard Millet
20, avenue de la Belle-Gabrielle
94130 Nogent

La Revue
André Desforges
5, impasse Bardos
33800 Bordeaux

Revue des Belles Lettres
Olivier Beetschen
36, avenue Roseraie
1205 Genève (Suisse)

Les Saisons
Michel Larrieu
6, rue Scarron
92260 Fontenay-aux-Roses

Sapriphage
Gilbert Desmée
118, avenue Pablo-Picasso 92000 Nanterre

Le Serpent à Plumes
Pierre Astier
78, rue du Bac
75007 Paris

Sotto Voce
Muriel Sandrelli
C/o Achour
Res. Le Mail
42, avenue Saint-Lazare 34000 Montpellier

Sud
Yves Broussard
62, rue Sainte
13001 Marseille

Textuerre
Anne-Marie Jeanjean et
Jean-Claude Hauc
1, impasse du Merle-Blanc 34000 Montpellier

Théodore Balmoral
Thierry Bouchard
5, rue Neuve-Tudelle
45100 Orléans

Travers
10, rue des Jardins
70220 Fougerolles

T.X.T.
Christian Prigent
5, esc. de la Grande-Poterne
72000 Le Mans

Ubacs
Yves Landrein
13, boulevard Franklin-Roosevelt
BP 741
35010 Rennes cedex

Ulysse, Fin de Siècle
François Dominique
74, rue de Velars
21370 Plombières-les-Dijon
La Vague à l'Ame
Georges Elisée
BP 22
38701 La Tronche

Vivre en Poésie
Marcelle Rosnay
30, rue de Bourgogne 75007 Paris

VWA
Pascal Antonietti,
Philippe Marthier et Marcelino Palomo
8, rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville 2300 La Chaux-de-Fonds (Suisse)


Editeurs de poésie

Arfuyen
35, rue Le Marois
75016 Paris

Bedou (Ed. Dominique)
1, rue Andrivet
46300 Gourdon
Tél. 65 41 13 18

Belfond (Ed. Pierre)
216, boulevard Saint-Germain
75007 Paris
Tél. 45 44 38 22

Bourgois (Christian)
12, avenue d'Italie
75013 Paris

Castor astral (Le)
52, rue des Grilles
93500 Pantin
Tél. 48 40 14 90

Champ Vallon (Ed.)
Vieux Couvent
01420 Seyssel
Tél. 50 56 15 51

Cherche-Midi (Ed. Le)
23, rue du Cherche-Midi
75006 Paris
Tél. 42 22 71 20

Clivages (Ed.)
5, rue Saint-Anastase
75003 Paris
Tél. 42 72 40 02

Corti (Librairie José)
11, rue de Médicis
75006 Paris
Tél. 43 26 63 00

Délirante (La)
112, rue Rambuteau
75001 Paris
Tél. 45 08 86 65


Différence (Ed. de La)
103, rue Lafayette
75010 Paris
Tél. 42 85 43 11

Dimanche (André)
10, cours Jean-Ballard
13001 Marseille
Tél. 91 33 20 48

Fanlac (Ed. Pierre)
12, rue du Professeur Peyrot
24000 Périgueux
Tél. 53 53 41 90

Fata Morgana
Fontfroide-le-Haut
34980 Saint-Clément-
la Rivière
Tél. 67 54 40 40

Femmes (Ed. Des)
6, rue de Mézières
75006 Paris
Tél. 42 22 62 73

Flammarion
26, rue Racine
75278 Paris cedex 06
Tél. 40 51 31 00

Galilée (Ed.)
9, rue de Linné
75005 Paris
Tél. 43 36 37 47

Gallimard
5, rue Sébastien-Bottin
75007 Paris
Tél. 45 44 39 19

Granit (Ed.)
24, rue de Varize
75017 Paris
Tél. 40 71 98 75


L'harmattan
7, rue de l'Ecole-Polytechnique
75005 Paris
Tél. 43 54 79 10

Maule (Ed. Michel de)
3, rue Honoré-Chevalier
75006 Paris
Tél. 45 44 17 65

Mercure de France
26, rue de Condé
75006 Paris
Tél. 43 29 21 13

Messidor
146, rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière
75010 Paris
Tél. 42 81 91 03

Nouveau Commerce (Le)
Librairie Anima
3, rue de Ravignan
75018 Paris
Tél. 42 64 05 25

Obsidiane (Ed.)
25, rue Houdon
75018 Paris
Tél. 46 06 38 47

POL
8, villa d'Alésia
75014 Paris
Tél. 45 42 77 21

Rougerie (Ed.)
Mortemart
87330 Mézières-sur-Issoire
Tél. 55 68 00 93

Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Ed.)
17, rue des Grands-Augustins
75006 Paris
Tél. 43 26 82 72

Seghers (Ed.)
31, rue Falguière
75015 Paris
Tél. 43 20 14 21

Seuil (Ed. du)
27, rue Jacob
75261 Paris cedex 06
Tél. 40 46 50 50

Sindbad (Ed.)
1 et 3, rue Feutrier
75018 Paris
Tél. 42 55 35 23

Sud (Ed.)
62, rue Sainte
13001 Marseille
Tél. 91 68 14 26
91 33 60 68

Temps qu'il fait (Le)
31, rue de Segonzac
16001 Cognac

Ubacs
15, boulevard Franklin Roosevelt
BP 741
35000 Rennes cedex
Tél. 99 53 83 26

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--------------307E58501441-- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 12:51:15 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: apos re pol to hal apologies, averyone, believe my machine halloweened me into a triple sending of huge proportions -- the full mag list wa snot supposed to be attached, only the URL -- apologies __ will not touch those m&m's again. --=20 =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=3D=3D Pierre Joris | I still know little about poems, but I do know Dept. of English | that suspicion is important. Be sufficiently SUNY Albany | suspicious, suspect the words, the language, Albany NY 12222 | I have often told myself, heighten this=20 tel&fax: (518) 426 043 | suspicion =97 so that someday, soemthing Ne= w email: | can come into being...=20 joris@cnsunix.albany.edu | =20 Ingeborg Bachmann =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=3D=3D ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 13:16:36 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Pierre Joris Subject: Re: apos re pol to hal Pierre Joris wrote: >=20 > apologies, averyone, believe my machine halloweened me into a triple > sending of huge proportions -- the full mag list wa snot supposed to be > attached, only the URL -- apologies __ will not touch those m&m's again. > -- hmmm, apologies for my apologies, the gremlins were in my machine & happily only one copy of message went to the list. however, apologies for what the online layout did to the quote from kristin's poem; the line should be justified right. I bow in apologetic confusion & hit my head on the keyboard... --=20 =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=3D=3D Pierre Joris | I still know little about poems, but I do know Dept. of English | that suspicion is important. Be sufficiently SUNY Albany | suspicious, suspect the words, the language, Albany NY 12222 | I have often told myself, heighten this=20 tel&fax: (518) 426 043 | suspicion =97 so that someday, soemthing Ne= w email: | can come into being...=20 joris@cnsunix.albany.edu | =20 Ingeborg Bachmann =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=3D=3D ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 12:14:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: from pol to pal Comments: To: Pierre Joris Pierre, Viva Clausewitz redux! Patrick Pritchett ---------- =46rom: Pierre Joris To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: from pol to pal Date: Thursday, October 31, 1996 12:08PM <> Hi gang, three or four quick points: 1) re the pol discussion: thanks jeff, good blast, thanks everybody f= or taking on that most rebarbative of topics. As Ron sez, it is essentia= l to keep thinking that relationship. & to keep acting on it. I believe it's a both and situation: the poems & the action in & off the stree= t -- alone, neither is enough; which takes an onus off the poem to be _necessarily, visibly, overtly, contently (contentedly?)_ " political= ." Which however does not mean that a poem can be totaslly apolitical anyway. I just can't. Just as we need air to breath we need the socia= l to live, & the social is political, through & through, from the micro-fascisms of daily life (Guattari) to global issues, and that includes what circulates through the social, i.e. language. Wierdly this line running through my head sicne the thread started, & dont ask me what it means: "Poetry is politics continued by other means." 2) here's a www adress to a pretty vast list of poetry ,mags in Frogland. Some of you may be interested -- Spencer, maybe cld use it = to flesh out his oh so valuable list: http://www.ambafrance.org/ADPF/POESIE/revu-po.html 3) Let me chime in with praise for Kristin Prevallet's _Lead, Glass a= nd Poppy_. An absolute pleasure -- an uncanny pleasure; & not irrelevant= to the pol discussion; permit to quote: In the clearing we are all variously = forged = with official words not q= uite innocent of all = that has been broken 4)happy halloween, but rememeber, the yellow m&m's are spiked with politics, the read with mescaline. Pierre -- =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=3D=3D Pierre Joris | I still know little about poems= , but I do know Dept. of English | that suspicion is important. Be sufficiently SUNY Albany | suspicious, suspect the words, the language, Albany NY 12222 | I have often told myself, heighten thi= s tel&fax: (518) 426 043 | suspicion =97 so that someday, soemthin= g New email: | can come into being... joris@cnsunix.albany.edu | Ingeborg Bachmann =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=3D=3D ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 13:16:07 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry g Subject: Re: Tiger chasing its tail (or tale) In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 31 Oct 1996 11:34:35 -0500 from On Thu, 31 Oct 1996 11:34:35 -0500 Rod Smith said: > >It seems fairly clear that the disappearance of social democratic politics >from the public sphere is strongly related to the rise of television as a >source of "information." What response do you, others, see to this. I guess I would relate the (temporary) decline of such politics more directly to historical changes, I don't see TV as having that much to do with it. The aging of the Depression/WW II generation, the gentrification of the Vietnam generation, the triumph of Reaganism as a historic counter to FDR & that legacy at the very moment when the economy began to outsource industrial labor, the continuing race divisions & inequality which grew worse in the 80s on many (not all) fronts... - H. Gould ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 12:27:24 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: maria damon Subject: Re: Always a Bridesmaid State University this is a good idea. i've done that a coupla times and had it done for me a lot, i.e. i think often the way i end up doing things is that some hotter shot sed no but why don't you ask this new person (a woman, too!), maria damon. i think coming out of stanford allowed me some opportunities; as that connection faded, it wasn't till just in the last few years, after my book came out and my tenure file was reviewed by folks in the poetry network, that there's been a second wave of opportunity. now that i'm teaching at a state university i see the enormous difference in opportunity between what i had and what our students have; some of them manage to rise above the hardships of teaching overloads, financial stress and a not-centrally networked institution; i don't know that i could have. --md In message UB Poetics discussion group writes: > Maria's response to Ron raises another set of politics -- closely related > to the first -- > > There is an academic politics of "where one must be in order to be so > asked" not all that different from some of the poetry mag. biz politics > oft discussed on this list -- My colleagues at Howard University, though > endlessly the recipients of recruiting fliers from colleges they've never > heard of, never get asked to review anything by any of the journals we've > here mentioned in the couple years I've been on the list -=- Nor do many > of my friends at Fill in the Blank State U., no matter what publishing > credits they may have accumulated -- > > which really just means that we have to be party crashers, always asking > somebody to let us go to the dance with them -- > > For example -- unlike the poetry reviewing I do -- My last four reviews > of critical books were each the result of the person at the major > research university who didn't want to do it suggesting that the person > doing the asking call me instead -- And not all of my friends have > friends like that who are willing to pass a job along once in a while -- > > all of which is leading up to my suggestion that as we all age and get > into positions where we might occasionally influence such things, we cast > our nets more widely?!?!? ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 13:47:01 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Object / Poet's Corner / Berkson - Koch Benefit for Object Magazine, 10/27, 3 p.m., Segue Space 303 E 8th NYC 10009 Attendance: 50 Chris Stroffolino My daughter would be a novelist Fragile Blonde Flattened Until Dishevelled, 2 Flattened Until Dishevelled, 3 from "In Memory of Rod's Boy Poems", "Sirhan Sirhan" "I'm nothing without my coffee and with it I'm too much." Rod Smith (wearing a Nixon in 96 button) excerpts from a longer work "Right wingers because they are dumb tend to be moody and violent." "If it all went up in smoke all perception would be by smell." Sally Silvers Preliminary Greeting (poem found in a guide to magnetism) Wall of Ownbrain "I feel like I could clean up the whole hospital." Kim Rosenfield The Millionaire's Club "On behalf of the bell curve" "A probable ham sandwich" The Debonaire's Club El Dorado "rhinestone bees seating" The Egg Basket "the kajillion was beginning" Sianne Ngai The Title of With Melanie Neilson Death Penalty Norman Rockwell Eleven Lines for Dustin 200 Years in Tennessee one page from Vertigo Jackson Mac Low Accusation Falakash, for Annie "leave-taking drama" "track team doxology" "munchkin-deep tension" then there was an intermission. I took off. Up to St. John the Divine where they were inducting John Greenleaf Whittier and Ernest Hemingway into the Poet's Corner. Other members of the Poets Corner: William Carlos Williams Hart Crane Ralph Waldo Emerson Stephen Crane Mark Twain Anne Bradstreet Edith Wharton Herman Melville Emily Dickinson Edgar Allan Poe Henry David Thoreau Robert Frost Henry W Longfellow Nathaniel Hawthorne Henry James Langston Hughes Walt Whitman Elizabeth Bishop William Cullen Bryant Washington Irving Wallace Stevens Marianne Moore Edgar Arlington Robinson William Faulkner T. S. Eliot Willa Cather Inducting Whittier were Daniel Hoffman and John Hollander. Inducting Hemingway were John Updike and George Plimpton. Attendance: 200. ____ Bill Berkson and Kenneth Koch, Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, 10/30, 8 p.m. 131 E 10, NYC 10003. Attendance: 110 Bill Berkson A Finial Ahead at the Covers Melting Milk Halls of Fame M. M. October Statues "moving southward" Booster "You go down to go up. In theory this is fine." Baby's Awake Now After You ????? Dream with Fred Astaire ????? The Obvious Tradition "some Shreveport-like expanse" Fugue State Clerical Words Shelter, to Jim Brodey Blue Is the Hero Kenneth Koch from Edward and Christine Songs From the Plays Straits In the audience: Tim Griffin, Anna Malmude, Steve Levine, Tony Towle, Ted Greenwald, Charles North, Josh Galef, Cliff Fyman, Lee Ann Brown, David Cameron, Elio Schneeman, Chris Stroffolino, Anselm Berrigan, Simon Pettet, Peggy de Coursey, Bernadette Mayer, Phil Good, Tom Savage, Arnold Weinstein, Harris Schiff, Steven Hall, Lisa Jarnot, Joan Fagin, Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Elinor Nauen, Todd Colby, Joel Lewis, Katie Lederer, Andrew Epstein, Eric Brown, Morris Golde, Jane Freilicher, Rackstraw Downes. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 12:23:55 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: T-Bone Prone Subject: Re: Tiger chasing its tail (or tale) In-Reply-To: <961031113435_1582884555@emout17.mail.aol.com> Any interesting if perhaps reductionistic point. What do you imagine disappearing with the emergence of online 'information' delivery and access? On Thu, 31 Oct 1996, Rod Smith wrote: > Ron, > > Thanks for the great post. What third party movement are you more impressed > by? New Party? Nader? I've been supporting the New Party which seems a > genuine attempt to get a labor party going, not based around any one > persona-- but long long way to go. > > >By jettisoning its base, the door-to-door Union volunteer > >(capital U), the Democratic party has largely opened up this space. > > It seems fairly clear that the disappearance of social democratic politics > from the public sphere is strongly related to the rise of television as a > source of "information." What response do you, others, see to this. > > --Rod > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:21:18 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Larry Price Subject: Re: Tiger chasing its tail (or tale) "It seems fairly clear that the disappearance of social democratic politics from the public sphere is strongly related to the rise of television as a source of "information." What response do you, others, see to this." Yes, it seems probable that the old precinct system specifically oriented toward walking the beat was given the ole belly-up by television, largely because incumbents (house or senate) no longer needed to leave the dome's backyard either 1. to send the message "back home," or 2. to gauge the messages' specific effects "back home." Party power was consequently shifted from cell and precinct captains (points define a periphery) to National Committees. With a consequent result being of course the devaluation of constituency as any thing other than the final roll call. In total dollars, graft and corruption may not have increased. It's just that it's much more effectively "leveraged." And of course it now takes much bigger players to join the action. L ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:22:06 -0600 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Christina Fairbank Chirot Subject: GISCOMBE READING C.S. GISCOMBE will be reading Saturday, 2 November 1996 at 8 pm at: Woodland Pattern Book Center 2301 E. Locust Street Milwaukee, WI. 53212 Admission $5.00, $4.00 for members. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:45:00 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Pritchett,Pat @Silverplume" Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? Comments: To: henry gould Henry, I can dig it. The one-way street notion doesn't begin to cover the multi-valent contingencies of the process. However, having just studied the Trail of Tears, or the Removal, as it was (and is) clinically referred to, I was interested to learn how a shift in rhetoric/perception made the whole debacle possible, i.e. justifiable to its instigators. One minute the Cherokee et al are being encouraged to intermarry with whites; the next, they're being demonized and death marched off to Oklahoma. This kind of "transaction" characterizes for me most of what passes for political "action" i.e business as usual, as opposed to the activism that Ron and others have been talking about. Patrick ---------- From: henry gould To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? Date: Thursday, October 31, 1996 8:03AM Patrick - I guess I would disagree that legislation takes its cue from "callings" made of mythic constructs. I think it's often the other way around, and in fact both are different ways of dealing with real issues of power & justice. The "callings" are just a kind of rhetorical, persuasive shorthand. To say that legislation follows them is parallel to over-emphasizing the "legislative" refinement of language enacted by poetry (Pound's or others). Alan's point (I believe) was that new ideas come from all points on the spectrum. - Henry G ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 15:57:54 EST Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: henry Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:45:00 -0500 from I see what you're saying. Plato's cave, run by a power-hungry projectionist. - HG ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:32:25 -0700 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Jeffrey W. Timmons" Subject: Re: "Politics"? "Poetry"? Comments: To: henry gould In-Reply-To: A Memorable Fancy (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answer'd: 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in finite organical perception; but my sense discover'd the infinite in everything, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.' Then I asked: 'does a firm perswasion that a thing is so make it so?' He replied: 'All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.' Then Ezekiel said: 'The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception: some nations held one principle for the origin, and some another: we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius . . . was the first principle and all the others merel derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all Gods woudl at last be proved to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius; it was this that our great poet King David, desired so fervently & invokes so pathetic'ly, saying by this he conquers enemies & governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God, that we cursed inhis name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled: from these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the jews.' 'This,' said he 'like all firm perswasions, is come to pass; for all nations believe the jews' code and worship the jews' god, and what greater subjection can be?' ...... ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 14:45:17 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: "Aldon L. Nielsen" Subject: Re: from a justified sinner In-Reply-To: Well, now that really is a different question -- rather more like the arguments I have to get up from time to time to "justify" -- not the continued existence of humanities scholarship -- but the continued state-supported existence of humanities education -- and the requirement that all students have some of it -- I do not believe that I have to justify my being alive -- I do not believe that I have to justify my writing of poetry -- I may very well have to justify the claims my writing might make upon a public -- And I might very well, as I have often in the past, have to justify my belief that public monies should in some small way support the public life of poetry in these United States -- which continues to be a harder case to make than the giving away of huge tax subsidies to people who get rich from sports arenas -- It would be nice, for a change, to be able to mount a convincing and effective threat to move my poetry to another city if the one I now do business in doesn't re-seduce me with millions in write-offs and other inducements -- A defense of poetry may be included in a defense of the NEA subsidy of poetry, but it is not the same defense -- ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 19:44:53 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Charles Smith Subject: Oliver Lake Oliver Lake performing "The Matador of 1st and 1st" Monday, Nov. 4 Kuumbwa Jazz Center 320-2 Cedar Street, Santa Cruz CA (408) 427-2227 7:30 pm Does anyone know if he is performing soon in the Bay Area? charles ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 20:05:26 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Kenneth W Sherwood Subject: Poetry politics and classrooms In-Reply-To: <199610310506.AAA15635@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu> As indirect response to Eryque, I'd suggest that classroom discussion like the reading of a poem 'might' have subtle but deep implications. These might include beginning to think politics not as religion (in the sense of unwavering faith) .... The shattering of windows works now only as a poetic image; and, it should be noted, at the time the image was not picked up by network TV or NPR in its coverage. Ken Sherwood ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 21:18:12 -0400 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Jordan Davis Subject: Re: Poetry politics and classrooms The shattering of windows does not work as a poetic image (bonus points -- take this line and make it into a villanelle and post it to any other poetry list) J ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 22:13:01 -0500 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: Thomas Bell Subject: Poepolitics? Adrift in Posttraumatic Space 3 "309.81 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Ahh at last at last at the at the last at the last of long travails I can rest. Tonight Tonight I can write I can write of wide-spread license the silent tonight I can drink waters of memory Tonight I can feel bitterness, tears, rumors whitewash ing fences. Cover thickened spaces we cannot we cannot traverse alone. "...or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or..." Tonight I can see Waco, that dry pristine air surrounding the cabin enclave, TX in a lone truck moving on to unabomb OK City and here I sit watching hoping awaiting channeling TV Tonight I can hope. Peoria. Black churches in flames and that truck moved moved on moved on by the moved on by the traffic cop held the answer. "...threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others (2) the person's... Tonight I can pretend or we again could play cowboys and Indians cops and Robbers citizens and Tanks star wars defense and The Other or I could end or I could make it hyme or relate or make sense or this it is not. "...this may be expressed instead by disorganized or agitated behavior... Tonight I can grieve at last at the end at the end of my at the end of my days. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 20:03:26 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Tiger chasing its tail (or tale) >It seems fairly clear that the disappearance of social democratic politics >from the public sphere is strongly related to the rise of television as a >source of "information." What response do you, others, see to this. > >--Rod Has there been social democratic politics in the U.S.? Harold Stassen. But since then? I heard Dole on TV a few weeks ago; he was using the word "liberal" as if that were a comminly-understood pejorative. Has it really come to that in the U.S.? I mean he was saying liberal the way that US politicians used to say "communist." I am not a USAmerican (though I was, when a lad, planning to become one), and there are many things I dont understand. But here's a tough one. What about (the public) Jefferson? Was he a liberal? What about the U.S. Constitution? Was it not seen as fairly liberal in its time? Are people like this Dole against the U.S. Constitution? Do they say so? George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 20:39:20 -0800 Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group Sender: UB Poetics discussion group From: George Bowering Subject: Hmm >> i usually say yes when i'm asked to do something > >--Maria Damon >..... > > >Hey, Maria, come here! > > > > >George Bowering. > , >2499 West 37th Ave., >Vancouver, B.C., >Canada V6M 1P4 > >fax: 1-604-266-9000 >e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca > George Bowering. , 2499 West 37th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6M 1P4 fax: 1-604-266-9000 e-mail: bowering@sfu.ca